JULIÃO SARMENTO

Best known for his paintings, Julião Sarmento recreated the intimacy and sexual tension of that body of work in Cometa, a piece first performed in 2009. He designed the performance, which takes place in a seedy hotel room, for one person to witness at a time. Set to original music specially composed by Portuguese musician Paulo Furtado, also known as The Legendary Tigerman, it is a study of the longing, desire, and discomfort that attend the close encounter of strangers.

neville wakefield: When most artists think about the desert, they think about it in terms of scale and boundless space. You took the opposite approach and sought a social intimacy within that landscape.

julião sarmento: One cannot exist without the other. It’s maybe a reaction to the first one. I mean, it’s because of the vastness and the emptiness and the infinite horizon in front of you that you kind of try to find a way to be in order not to feel totally lost. My work has always been about human relationships. In order to be able to interact with someone, you need a confined space where you can speak, that you can control, or where you can live or create.

There are several types of desert. Most of them I really don’t know. The work I did for Desert X is about the Palm Springs desert. For me, it’s about loneliness. It’s about heat, and it’s about despair. These three things each lead one to suicide.

Loneliness, heat, and despair: They’re not an encouraging trio.

No, but it’s very interesting for me. They’re three things I’m very interested in. To fight them, rather than to embrace them. Or, by embracing them, to win against them.

Those threads run through your paintings.

Absolutely. Everywhere. My work is very lonely work. I’ve been asked several times by producers in Portugal to make films. I’ve never wanted to do it, because it’s teamwork to make a film. I need to work as one person in my own loneliness. So my work is about that. It’s about being lonely and trying to figure things out by myself, within my own private sphere.

Does that tie in with the desert mythology of going there and being cast into the wilderness to have this existential experience?

Absolutely. I’m a casualty of the ’60s. I’d never been to the desert in the ’60s, but that’s what I think people did at the time, and it’s what people sought at the time. You have this desert, and you have

Tell me about the architecture that frames the performance, which was staged at the Desert Lodge motel.

I looked for the seediest place I could find. I didn’t want a fancy hotel; I wanted something that had to do with the people who live there. When you drive down this empty route for kilometers and kilometers. Never ending. Suddenly you find one place by the road. It’s not going to be a Hilton. It’s going to be one of these places, and that’s exactly what I wanted: one of these places where you’re actually afraid to go in. I would have preferred if that lodge had been more isolated. But having said that, I think it was perfect for what I wanted.

Is there something nostalgic about these last vestiges of motel culture, as everything is becoming sort of uniform?

It’s despairing, because every city everyplace is losing its personality. Everything is the same. You have the same Starbucks, the same what have you. So it’s important to look for the specific places that only exist there and nowhere else. I like to preserve that, if possible. If it’s not going to be possible, then at least I have a record. That’s important to me.

The performance was framed within this bit of architecture, but it also had a particular choreography. Only one person at a time could see it. You prohibited all photography. And even the way you entered the space was choreographed. Talk about the creation of this experience.

I think this is a performance where it’s an attack on the viewer. Every spectator is a coward and a traitor. I wanted to use that in a very obvious way. The spectator of the performance becomes an intruder on the innocent scene of the people out there. I want the spectator to feel that in his own skin, and I don’t want it to be a nice or agreeable experience. I want it to be a violent experience for the spectator. I want the spectator to feel awkward and uneasy. That’s why it’s one at a time. If you allow two at a time, immediately you create an empathy with the other person, and the fear divides by two.

What is the fear of?

The fear of ridicule, the fear of interfering. Nobody is looking at you, and you’re looking at something else. Then you’re looking at someone, you have that connection, but those people look at you as well,

and they know that you were there looking at them. It becomes awkward. What are you going to do? Are you going to interact, or are you going to just stand there looking like an idiot and feeling awkward, not being able to go back?

Did anyone try to leave?

A couple of people left. At least two that I recall. Of course, I was not there all the time. You know, some weird things happened, like there was a guy who started to dance with them. All this was allowed as long as the performers allowed it. The performers were in charge.

What were the instructions that you gave them?

I gave them very open instructions. One of them was sitting down and the other was standing. Maybe twenty seconds after the spectator enters the room, the person who’s standing goes to the machine and puts the music on and starts dancing by himself, or herself. After another twenty seconds or so, the other one stands up and dances with her or with him. That’s it.

It’s an embrace.

It’s an embraced dance. Being in an embraced dance, you do whatever you want. I never told them to do that. I kind of like that freedom of the performer, and also, as you know, the gender element. I had boy and boy, girl and girl, girl and boy. So all possibilities. It was just by sheer chance. I didn’t say, It has to be a boy and a girl, or a girl and a girl.

Was the chemistry between the dancers, or the more awkward chemistry between the spectator and the performance, important to your casting?

You could see the intimacies between the dancers, but I don’t know about the intimacy between the spectator and the dancers because I was never there. What is funny about this is, I’ve never seen a performance. I’m not a witness to it. So for me it’s always a mystery.

Each experience is unique.

Each experience was unique, and I don’t know them.

Was that an important factor?

Absolutely: to create a unique experience for each one of the performances in my not knowing about it. When I was thinking about this performance, I needed a very specific song for it. You know, I don’t write songs, but I have this cool old friend, the Legendary Tigerman. I told him what I wanted to do, and I asked him, “Will you write music for this?” He was very excited. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it.” So the music was actually created for this. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, he’s kind of a rock ’n’ roll bluesy musician who spends most of his time in America.

I told him what the performance was about, what I was expecting of the performance. I wanted the music to create a certain kind of sleazy, sexual atmosphere, because it was important. That’s about it. He did the music, and I was very excited about it.

One of the interesting things to me was that it felt familiar, like films where the intimacy of strangers is enacted within these anonymous desert motel environments. Even though you were very conscious about not having it filmed, about it not being recorded, it seemed to draw on a filmic space, even as it refused to entirely embrace it.

I wanted it to be a unique experience with no memory. There’s no memory of it except the memory of you as a spectator, if you were there, and if you viewed it. Otherwise, there’s no way of doing it, because it becomes a different thing. I do have a film for my archives, which will never be seen; it’s just to keep documentation. You see, this is the type of experience in this performance; it’s felt by the spectator, the viewer.

It’s different every time. Then it’s a voyeuristic experience. You’re watching what the other guy’s watching, but for me this voyeuristic experience, in this case, is not interesting. What I really wanted was the experience of the viewer there at the moment, and that happens once. There’s a memory of it, the memory that he has of it and the dancers have of it.

Did the experience of staging this piece change your attitude toward the desert?

Oh, probably, because I know the desert better. By driving around and trying to discover things, you discover a lot of things in fact. It really did, because it made me look at the desert in a different way.