It's All I Can Think About: An Interview with Nancy Buchanan

Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles-based visual and performance artist whose work has pointedly examined social and political issues such as the status of women, the Cold War, U.S. policies toward the Third World, and the war in Nicaragua. In January 1984 she visited Nicaragua with a group of artists from the San Francisco Bay area called Artists Tour Nicaragua. The tour was guided in Nicaragua by a Sandinista artists' union. In this interview excerpt we asked her to relate this intense experience to the art she makes every day. —Eds.

Linda Frye Burnham: The last few years most of the work you've done has dealt with political issues—the CIA and so forth. How do you think this trip [to Nicaragua] is going to affect your work? Have you felt a real impact?

Nancy Buchanan: One of the things I've been interested in is trying to fit myself in as a social being somehow. And that was the exciting thing about Nicaragua. You had this sense that people felt they actually had a place, that they actually belonged, and all the aspects of their life sort of made sense. I think in our society that's not the norm. You have one role here, and one role there, and you juggle your life, your beliefs and your work. I don't want to do that. I also think that my personal feelings are very intimately tied up with where I am as a member of society; that there's a level of personal concern about political issues. That's a personal choice. I've never felt that everybody should make political work. I think we need the full spectrum of things that are very beautiful, things that are very intimate or spiritual...and what I do is simply a result of who I am. For a long time I separated the information about issues that I cared about from my work, until I finally figured out that I didn't have to do that, and it was a real delight.

Steven Durland: What would you say your first piece was after that realization?

NB: Some of the earlier, more feminist pieces. Please Sing Along [in which men danced nude and women wrestled] was a reversal of male-female roles. I didn't really expect that anyone would tolerate that. One of the ways I've always worked is to move along some kind of an edge and see what I could get away with. I couldn't think of anything more appropriate to have in the Woman's Building than beautiful men, naked and dancing. I didn't know how people would take it. I was real surprised; I got a positive response and realized I didn't have to be afraid of pushing boundaries, that just to be clever was perhaps not interesting enough. I think I'm moving back toward that. The piece I'm working on now is real personal, and right on the edge of being in totally bad taste. What I want to deal with is the idea that runs through a lot of work, which is the manipulation of consciousness by the government or the ruling class—down to a real personal level. A lot of my recent videotapes have been about that too. The new piece is called Sex and Freedom, Who Can Ask For More?

SD: But I assume that the references won't be just to your personal life?

NB: No, in fact, I think that only certain people will figure out the personal references.

SD: Do you think you'll use any of the information or attitudes you formed during this trip?

NB: I will be collaborating with Robbin Henderson, a Berkeley painter, to make some montages about our trip for a show of the group with whom we traveled. I'm also collaborating with Doug Wichert on a little book. I want to put information in a form that parodies media news and advertising—humor plus nonmainstream information.

SD: What do you think that does?

NB: I hope that it might make people interested in things that they might otherwise overlook or not face. I think it's unpleasant to face the fact that your government is participating in massacres or manipulation of the politics of entire nations around the world. I find that a very staggering fact. I find it very hard to take, because—the Nicaraguans are right—the people of this country are not callous or bloodthirsty; they're simply not informed. Oftentimes we're not used to participating fully in the political process. I hope that I might encourage people to become more involved, at least to educate themselves, to become interested enough to want to find out more and maybe be active.

LFB: Do you think Americans are reluctant to get involved because they feel helpless to change things?

NB: I think there's a lot people can do. This brings to mind the papers I went through of my father's. In 1945 they were studying the air defense of this country, and there were some people at that time who wanted to bomb the Soviet Union and get it over with. One of the findings of the study my father was involved with was that public opinion would never adjust to that kind of barbarism. Public opinion does count. I think you can find arguments on both sides, but the protest movements of the '60s and '70s really did influence what went on in this country. The Vietnam War might have been different if there hadn't been an incredible popular response. And look at Reagan. Now he's even starting to say that he would like to eliminate nuclear weapons. I think that's quite incredible, and it's only public pressure that brings that about. We're taught to believe that it's fruitless, but I don't think it is.

SD: To take that a step farther, in the '80s there's been a lot of reactionary audience response to political art, and it seems like one is frequently left preaching to the converted, so to speak. How do you go about getting past that?

NB: One of the ways is to make videotapes and try to disseminate them to a wider audience. That's why I'm interested in video. It's portable, it's easy to send or play or cablecast.

LFB: I imagine, from the way you talk about what you're trying to do with your work, that the more exposure you can get for your tapes—to any kind of audience—the happier you'll be.

NB: Yes, I really believe that one of the great things going on right now is the possibility for expansion of the number of channels that one can receive. As pitiful as it often has been, the public-access programs around the country are incredibly important, and also local cable, because it really is a voice of a community. And just the fact that it can exist and that people can be themselves, no matter how bad their camera work might be—it's exciting to me that the medium itself can be demystified by being used by your neighbors.

I have a great interview on my next tape with a Marxist computer expert. He feels that technology is no longer labor in any sense, it's strictly information. Control of information is really the important thing in terms of power and market and reorganization.

LFB: The new class system. There will be two classes: those with electronics and those without.

NB: This man has been involved with teaching grassroots organizations to employ computers. I think there is a second wave of the computer revolution that is humanizing computers more, and using them for things that perhaps they weren't intended to be used for. It's the same thing with—going back to Nicaragua, I guess—not being controlled by the technology. There's a group of people in Nicaragua called "The Innovators." They figure out how to make all the spare parts to keep everything going!

LFB: What kind of response are you getting from your students back in Madison [University of Wisconsin]?

NB: Very positive, particularly in a seminar that I did last fall about art and politics. It was very broad-based. I didn't allow anyone to talk about their own work. We only discussed the issue of whether art could be political or had to be "free of any pollution from the real world." It was exciting, the kinds of information the class came up with, the kinds of discussions we had...

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring 1984.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002