CM: I would say that when you experience a work, the text itself is an intervention. They didn't come to make an easy slide show presentation. They came to do a particular site specific, time specific, and oral intervention.

JT: But, later the artists said, "We didn't want to come here." It became almost a mute point that they mentioned not wanting to come. The point is that they arrived.

CM: That is maybe a good articulation of a common experience in terms of cultural practices. When you say, "I didn't want to come" you are also suggesting the futility of refusal. At the same time, you are stating the stupidity of acceptance. This of course, should not be neutralized in terms of a Zen-like koan because it is a political problem: "You would rather not be here, but you are." The significance of your intervention depends on addressing that predicament.
For the Ordo Amoris Cabinet this is particularly relevant, because they are not trained or "born" artists. They are designers that found out that the practice of design was absurd in a particular context so, they shifted to the arts to explore the implications of that impossibility. Today it is very commn to find artists who are sophisticated "drop-outs" from different professions. Their argument was a precise dissertation on this issue: you cannot deny that art is a rather useless field, but you acknowledge that for the moment, it is the only field in which you can operate.

JT: Particularly more than ever, I find that more and more artists are "drop-outs" from other professions.

CM: It may be interesting to ask why. We could say that contemporary art is a place where abilities, ideas and forms of practice that do not work well in the world, tend to be located so as to be used and interrogated. I frequently joke that we should use a famous phrase by Nikita Khruschev in the early sixties when he said that capitalism was about to be disposed into "the dustbin of history." He was wrong, but art might be the actual "dustbin of history". So maybe, as work becomes more and more specialized, we also find out that there are no general ideological frameworks by means of which people could sincerely describe the proper function of their professional practices. As a consequence, the art world has become a space where our tension with established professions is played out. That is part of a general phenomenon.
I also found it interesting that the arguments of the section of The Manifesto that the Ordo Amoris Cabinet read was Marxist. I found many people asking themselves "what does it mean to re-read Marx today?" I also liked the relationship of their piece to some specific art works from the past, such as the performance by Robert Morris from 1964, where he simply read a fragment of a text by Erwin Panofsky as if he were giving an academic lecture. This may suggest the possibility of dealing with a conference situation with something not entirely unlike a ready-made. This also points to the structure we were just discussing: "I'm not going to read something here, but I'm reading it." This is not simply a denial, it is an intervention.

JT: I think we can end on that note...

CM: Let me say just one more thing. It's funny because the same attitude permeated amongst other participants. Both Ruben Gutierrez and Los Lichis refused to talk, but still intervened with videos. Let me talk about Los Lichis because they are very interesting in terms of what is involved in the predicament of dealing with the demands of the art world, and because they are also from Monterrey.

JT: Are you speaking about the video they presented?

CM: Yes, the video at the end of the confrence. If Los Lichis had decided to work throughout the years in a 'punkish' way, it was because the local art structures were not interesting enough to do it otherwise. So they systematically refused to accommodate to the demands placed on their generation. Logically, they also refused to talk at FITAC, but nevertheless they made a video especially for the event that presents a self-made history of the actions and antics. Not to mention, a particular way of wasting time as they indulged in operating away from the established artistic venues, without responding to any standard of "culture." I felt it really important to have them present their work because they were showing things and attitudes that normally lay out of any academic debate.
In a completely different way I would say that what Olivier Debroise read, was really a slap on the face. His argument posed serious questions about what are we doing as curators and critics in terms of our collaboration or compliance with the international market and curatorial circuit. He was also trying to describe the predicament of sustaining a certain kind of radicality while at the same time not pretending to refuse participation. Something similar was discussed by Susan Buck-Morss, when criticizing the implications of the conception of "the art world" as something different and opposed to other cultural and political "worlds." She was suggesting the need of understanding art as a more significant agency than we normally do. It is logical that all of the practitioners questioned themselves about the real limits of their actions.

Cildo Meireles described it really well when recalling the questions involved in his Insertions into ideological circuits from the early 70's. He explained that those works were not only attempts to occupy the means of circulations of commodities, advertisements and money, but also addressed the issue of "scale". They explored the disproportion involved in an individual trying to act politically in relation to social and economic structures well beyond his or her reach. It seemed to me that Cildo was describing the relationship between contemporary practices and something we may call "the political sublime". That is, the mathematical incommensurability between the uselessness of consciousness and the development of power. To that extent, I guess the symposium was exciting in terms of the range of different positions which where trying to insert themselves into that general predicament.