Eva Lootz (Vienna, 84 years old) is all energy. To access her house in the mountains of Madrid, which has been closed for weeks, you have to push metal doors that only slide with great effort and rusty moans, and she does it almost alone. Once inside, she runs to light the wood-burning fireplace: newspaper, pine cones, branches, a match, blows of the bellows.
“I’m very cold,” she says. “And this doesn’t pull!” And she hits the bellows.
He divides his days between this house and his attic on Piamonte Street, in the center of Madrid, where he has recently spent more time preparing for his exhibition. If you still want to see something, in Sala Alcalá 31 (until July 21), curated by Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga. The exhibition will coincide with the one that the Reina Sofía Museum will dedicate to him (from June 12), but also with another already inaugurated in the Kubo Kutxa room in San Sebastián, Weave, crease and follow the thread (until August 25), and then the C3A of Córdoba will take over (from October 17). These join other recent ones at the Patio Herreriano Museum and the National Museum of Sculpture, both in Valladolid, and at the Suñol Foundation in Barcelona. That this artist who has lived in Spain since 1967 – she stopped here with her husband, the sculptor Adolfo Schlosser, on the way to Lisbon – and winner of the National Fine Arts Prize in 1994, is receiving so much attention lately is good news for the circle of enthusiasts who have been working for decades. admiring his work.
To what do you attribute this sudden interest in your work?
They will think: “This one is going to die in two days, let’s take advantage first.”
Don’t you think there has been a change in perception about women artists?
Definitely. She has changed everything a lot.
He speaks loudly, tirelessly and with passion about what interests him. Whether it is the history of mining, the properties of mercury, the formation of language, ethnography, philosophy or ecology. His art encapsulates all of these themes as vigorously as he avoids autobiographical questions. “I have never wanted to talk about myself, that’s why I focused on the materials. At first I did painting on a frame. Then I left the colors and soon also the frames. And I used different liquids: paraffin, sealing wax, alkyls. In the early seventies I made a work with cotton seeds arranged as neutrally as possible on the ground, and I poured liquid paraffin on top. I let it cool and that was it.” Nothing industrial: “I did those works myself, with a stove. Just like lead or tin ones, which you can melt at home. I think I have unconsciously tended to use heat, because I am so cold.”
She studied to be a film director. When did she decide that she wanted to be an artist?
I drew all my life, since I was a child. We had an art library at home. I was also very interested in ethnology and anthropology.
Why didn’t you become an anthropologist?
Because I didn’t want to be an academic who studies the so-called savages. I wanted to be the wild one! And contemporary art has been that wild thought that science does not allow. The same thing happened to me with philosophy, which I realized I needed to do. I like to work with my hands, I am a doer.
He has on occasion criticized the separation of science and art, what he calls the “Cartesian gap.”
The dualisms. This separation between matter and spirit comes to us from the Greeks. And Christianity reinforces it. And even more Descartes, when he says that there are two realms, one is the res cogitans, the mind, and the other is the res extenso, matter. And hence all those dualisms of body and mind, art and craft, science and art… Now we are in the process of deconstructing them.
What was your life like in Austria?
I had a huge conflict with my father. From a certain point on, we finished our meals loudly. He was a very conservative man and the two world wars had devastated him, like his entire generation. He was an art historian and academic painter, and he did not accept what I did, because for him art reached as far as Cézanne. He told me: “What you do is shameful.”
Was that what you were fleeing from when you came to Spain with Adolfo Schlosser?
There were more reasons, but the conflict with my father played a role. I wanted to be in the latest, not in that society in which I had grown up.
It is surprising that he went to look for the latest in Francoist Spain.
They were the last death throes of Francoism, and I had had such an authoritarian father, so I identified with this country. I connected very quickly with the restless people of Madrid. I remade myself in a certain way in parallel to the country. Then came the disappointment. Because it was seen that 40 years are not eliminated in two kicks. It takes time.
Is there anything about your Austrian origin that stands out?
I am grateful for my education, because it was solid. When I taught at the University of Cuenca I realized that the kids had a worse education. I insist a lot on top-level public education. That makes countries. It is very sad that they do not agree on education.
His idea was to reach Lisbon.
I remember as a child going to a level crossing where the train passed at sunset, and I wanted to continue in that direction. Lévi-Strauss, in his book Tristes tropics, begins with that same idea that the direction that the sun travels daily from East to West is that of perfection and plenitude. I will not say about progress, because that is a term that is better deconstructed. The most elegant neighborhoods of all the European capitals – Rome, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin – stretch to the west. And, conversely, the most conflictive or cheapest in those same capitals tend to be in the southeast. Now we are fighting against that prejudice, but I believe that what operates there is the collective unconscious, which is very strong.
Have you seen much change in Spain?
A lot, and in a fascinating way. Before you went to the doctor and all you saw was mothers with their children. Now you see parents too. Women have been enormously important here, already in the Republic there were Clara Campoamor or Victoria Kent. But now they have a completely different role than when I arrived.
Was there more machismo than in Austria?
Machismo has existed everywhere, there too. But after the war they worked on the laws there. Other things caught my attention here: there was something very fascinating in the towns, at the end of the sixties, where you saw yourself transported to a world from 300 years ago. And I saw how the design thing began later, a rolling pin, which coexisted with pure craftsmanship in the towns where time had stopped.
Did two worlds coexist in one?
That. I remember one afternoon entering the Zaragoza museum, when the sacristans were taking a nap, and I was there among the wonderful paintings not yet restored and full of dust, but they were zurbaranes, masterpieces, and underneath the sacristan’s sandwich wrapped in newspaper. But then all that changed. For the better, obviously. Although there are still problems.
The fire languishes and he hastens to fan it. And he resumes the conversation:
Through my interest in mercury, I became interested in mining. Spain has the southeastern pyrite belt, where the Riotinto mines are located, a fascinating site where you can study the history of mining going back 3,000 years. When Europeans arrived in the New World, within 20 years they were exploiting silver mines. This tells us that in Hernán Cortés’ armies there were not only soldiers, but also experts that today we would call mining engineers.
Do you think that decolonization is still a pending issue?
Yes, all over the world. Since the project I did at the San Gregorio school in Valladolid, I was fascinated by this topic. I began to read South American anthropologists, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Bolívar Echeverría, who have worked a lot on this narrative, very different from the way it has been told to us.
Why did you decide to donate a substantial part of your work to the Reina Sofía Museum, which will be the basis of your exhibition there?
I have no descendants left, nor practically any family, except my friends. I am very grateful to this wonderful country full of talent and generous people, because I have been able to do what I wanted. And what’s better than making a donation to a public site here.
He did not want the Alcalá 31 exhibition to be a retrospective.
Retrospectives don’t interest me. I’m interested in continuing to do things. In Alcalá 31 there will be new work because the exhibition is about the feeling that we are in a moment in which an old world takes a long time to die and the new one has not just been born. You see how things disappear, not only animal species, but shops, eateries, places where I took things to be fixed, artisans. But more important are the changes in science. It is very striking that people have assumed things like the computer, or magnetic resonance imaging, but in their imagination they have a panorama of 300 years ago, when the vision of the world was mechanistic. We have to catch up with what the most recent great thinkers teach us, Schrödinger, Einstein or Boltzmann, poor man, who committed suicide.
Do you think we live with an excess of images that we are not prepared to digest?
Yes, a kind of anesthesia occurs that affects the images. In the past, images put us in contact with reality, they enlightened us about the world, and now what they do is take out our eyes. There is an overabundance of sensory stimuli. And with the manipulation of artificial intelligence, we will no longer be able to distinguish. Between the world and us now is the screen. But a certain type of art emphasizes that, that we are born and die as flesh. Women artists have been very important in this, for insisting on the literality of the body.
Ana Mendieta, for example?
Yes. It is a good example because your partner [el minimalista Carl Andre] It was quite the opposite.
Can your art be defined as warm minimalism?
It’s true. As she told him, as a child I was fascinated by ethnology. I didn’t miss a conference. I understood that societies can be in many ways. If you can be as different as we and the Eskimos are, then there is a lot of room for change, right?
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