Education for Socially Engaged Art is the first “Materials and Techniques” book for the emerging field of social practice. Written with a pragmatic, hands-on approach for university-level readers and those interested in real-life application of the theories and ideas around socially engaged art. The book, emphasizing the use of pedagogical strategies to address issues around social practice, addresses topics such as documentation, community engagement, dialogue and conversation, amongst many others.

The book was published by Jorge Pinto Books in 2011 and can be acquired online.

An interview on the subject can be found here:

http://www.artpractical.com/feature/interview_with_pablo_helguera/

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“For too long Social Practice has been the notoriously flimsy flipside of market-based contemporary art: a world of hand-wringing practitioners easily satisfied with the feeling of ‘doing good’ in a community, and unaware that their quasi-activist, anti-formalist positions in fact have a long artistic heritage and can be critically dissected using the tools of art and theatre history. Helguera’s spunky primer promises to offer a much-needed critical compass for those adrift in the expanded social field.” -

—Claire Bishop, Professor of Contemporary Art and Exhibition History, CUNY, and author of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

“This is an extremely timely and thoughtful reference book. Drawn from empirical and extensive experience and research, it provides a curriculum and framework for thinking about the complexity of socially engaged practices. Locating the methodologies of this work in between disciplines, Helguera draws on histories of performance, pedagogy, sociology, ethnography, linguistics, community and public practices. Rather than propose a system he exposes the temporalities necessary to make these situations possible and resonant. This is a tool that will allow us to consider the difficulties of making socially engaged art and move closer to finding a language through which we can represent and discuss its impact.”

—Sally Tallant, Artistic Director, Liverpool Biennial

“Helguera has produced a highly readable book that absolutely needs to be in the back pocket of anyone interested in teaching or learning about socially engaged art”

—Tom Finkelpearl, Director of the Queens Museum, New York, and author of Dialogues in Public Art

Excerpt

[From the chapter 1., DEFINITIONS]

BETWEEN DISCIPLINES

The term “social practice” obscures the discipline from which socially engaged art has emerged (i.e., art). In this way it denotes the critical detachment from other forms of art-making (primarily centered and built on the personality of the artist) that is inherent to socially engaged art, which, almost by definition, is dependent of the involvement of others besides the instigator of the artwork. It also thus raises the question of whether such activity belongs to the field of art at all. This is an important query; art students attracted to this form of art-making often find themselves wondering whether it would be more useful to abandon art altogether and instead become professional community organizers, activists, politicians, ethnographers, or sociologists. Indeed, in addition to sitting uncomfortably between and across these disciplines and downplaying the role of the individual artist, socially engaged art is specifically at odds with the capitalist market infrastructure of the art world: it does not fit well in the traditional collecting practices of contemporary art, and the prevailing cult of the individual artist is problematic for those whose goal is to work with others, generally in collaborative projects with democratic ideals. Many artists look for ways to renounce not only object-making but authorship altogether, in the kind of “stealth” art practice that philosopher Stephen Wright argues for, in which the artist is a secret agent in the real world, with an artistic agenda.[2]

Yet the uncomfortable position of socially engaged art, identified as art yet located between more conventional art forms and the related disciplines of sociology, politics, and the like, is exactly the position it should inhabit. The practice’s direct links to and conflicts with both art and sociology must be overtly declared and the tension addressed, but not resolved. Socially engaged artists can and should challenge the art market in attempts to redefine the notion of authorship, but to do so they must accept and affirm their existence in the realm of art, as artists.  And the artist as social practitioner must also make peace with the common accusation that he or she is not an artist but an “amateur” anthropologist, sociologist, etc. Socially engaged art functions by attaching itself to subjects and problems that normally belong to other disciplines, moving them temporarily into a space of ambiguity. It is this temporary snatching away of subjects into the realm of art-making that brings new insights to a particular problem or condition and in turn makes it visible to other disciplines. For this reason, I believe that the best term for this kind of practice is what I have thus far been using as a generic descriptor —that is, “socially engaged art” (or SEA), a term that emerged in the mid-1970s, as it unambiguously acknowledges a connection to the practice of art.[3]

SYMBOLIC AND ACTUAL PRACTICE

To understand SEA, an important distinction must be made between two types of art practice: symbolic and actual. As I will show, SEA is an actual, not symbolic, practice.

A few examples:

Let’s say an artist or group of artists creates an “artist-run school,” proposing a radical new approach to teaching. The project is presented as an art project but also as a functioning school (a relevant example, given the recent emergence of similar projects). The “school,” however, in its course offerings, resembles a regular, if slightly unorthodox, city college. In content and format, the courses are not different in structure from most continuing education courses. Furthermore, the readings and course load encourage self-selectivity by virtue of the avenues through which it is promoted and by offering a sampling that is typical of a specific art world readership, to the point that the students taking the courses are not average adults but rather art students or art-world insiders. It is arguable, therefore, whether the project constitutes a radical approach to education; nor does it risk opening itself up to a public beyond the small sphere of the converted.

An artist organizes a political rally about a local issue. The project, which is supported by a local arts center in a medium-size city, fails to attract many local residents; only a couple dozen people show up, most of whom work at the arts center. The event is documented on video and presented as part of an exhibition. In truth, the artist can claim to have organized a rally?

These are two examples of works that are politically or socially motivated but act through the representation of ideas or issues. These are works that are designed to address social or political issues only in an allegorical, metaphorical, or symbolic level (for example, a painting about social issues is not very different than a public art project that claims to offer a social experience but only does so in a symbolic way such as the ones just described above). The work does not control a social situation in an instrumental and strategic way in order to achieve a specific end.

This distinction is partially based on Jurgen Habermas’s work The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In it Habermas argues that social action (an act constructed by the relations between individuals) is more than a mere manipulation of circumstances by an individual to obtain a desired goal (that is, more than just the use of strategic and instrumental reason. He instead favors what he describes as communicative action, a type of social action geared to communication and understanding between individuals that can have a lasting effect on the spheres of politics and culture as a true emancipatory force.

Most artists who produce socially engaged works are interested in creating a kind of collective art that impacts the public sphere in a deep and  meaningful way, not in creating a representation—like a theatrical play—of a social issue. Certainly many SEA projects are in tune with the goals of deliberative democracy and discourse ethics, and most believe that art of any kind can’t avoid taking a position in current political and social affairs. (The counter-argument is that art is largely a symbolic practice, and as such the impact it has on a society can’t be measured directly; but then again, such hypothetical art, as symbolic, would not be considered socially engaged but rather would fall into the other familiar categories, such as installation, video, etc.) It is true that much SEA is composed of simple gestures and actions that may be perceived as symbolic. For example, Paul Ramirez-Jonas’s work Key to the City (2010) revolved around a symbolic act—giving a person a key as a symbol of the city. Yet although Ramirez-Jonas’s contains a symbolic act, it is not symbolic practice but rather communicative action (or “actual” practice)—that is, the symbolic act is part of a meaningful conceptual gesture. [4]

The difference between symbolic and actual practice is not hierarchical; rather, its importance lies in allowing a certain distinction to be made: it would be important, for example, to understand and identify the difference between a project in which I establish a health campaign for children in a war-torn country and a project in which I imagine a health campaign and fabricate documentation of it in Photoshop. Such a fabrication might result in a fascinating work, but it would be a symbolic action, relying on literary and public relations mechanisms to attain verisimilitude and credibility.

To summarize: social interaction occupies a central and inextricable part of any socially engaged artwork. SEA is a hybrid, multi-disciplinary activity that exists somewhere between art and non-art, and its state may be permanently unresolved. SEA depends on actual—not imagined or hypothetical—social action.

[2]. See “Por un arte clandestino,” the author’s conversation with Stephen Wright in 2006,  http://pablohelguera.net/2006/04/por-un-arte-clandestino-conversacion-con-stephen-wright-2006/. Wright later wrote a text based on this exchange, http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/153624936_2.html.

[3]. From this point forward I will use this term to refer to the type of artwork that is the subject of this book.

[4] Paul Ramirez Jonas’ project, produced by Creative Time, took place in New York City in the Summer of 2010.

In 1660, a mysterious sect of Dutch mystics arrived to an island in the New World with the objective to create a new society. Their governing principle revolved around the uninterrupted performance of a single dramatic work in seven tableaux vivants. Invoking alchemical imagery and hermetic thought, their goal was to arrive to a higher state of being by collectively embodying the symbolic representation of all of human and divine knowledge. Their experiment, which would last a century, would test the human boundaries of time, physical endurance, and the commitment of a society toward an idea.

Uryonstelaii is a project consisting of two complementary components: a book published by Jorge Pinto Books, New York,  and a one-time only series of performed prologue tours delivered by historical reenactors. The contents of the performed prologue are not included in the publication and are not meant to be reproduced beyond their single performance.

The project was presented as part of The Sixth Borough, an exhibition at Governors Island in the summer of 2010 curated by Manon Slome and Julian Navarro for No Longer Empty.

“All history threads between what was and what could have been; all art threads between what is and what could be. In Urÿonstelaii, Pablo Helguera tugs at these threads, unraveling, reweaving, embroidering. The result is a strange and at times poignant tapestry of the possible, the dreamt, the present, and the lost.”

D. Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan

“Like a ‘lamb in wolf’s clothing,’ Pablo Helguera uses the exoteric mechanisms of historical erudition to lure us to his magical island of the Ourobourians. But right about the time we lose our footing on the land’s slippery shores—when we begin to wonder if the artist has gleaned an esoteric tradition for more than just source material for his island’s symbols and nomenclature, when we start to navigate his land with the non-verbal hunches of the alchemists’ score, and call into question the artifices we employ to gather the world around us—we realize Helguera has really taken us on a journey to another land altogether, the most forbidden of places–the self.”

—Lise Patt, founder  and director of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles

Images from the “Prologue Tours” at Governors Island’s Fort Jay on October 2, 2010:

Excerpt from the beginning of the book:

In spring 1671, in Amsterdam, a mysterious book began to circulate among a small circle of intellectuals. Written in Latin and entitled Principia of the Live Image Method of the Ourobuorians, it provided a painstaking description of a single dramatic work consisting of seven elaborate tableaux vivants, one for each day of the week, to be performed in perpetuity on a remote island in the Americas. The instructional text, accompanied by obscure references and symbols, appeared to have been written for those already initiated into a society dedicated to the performance. It claimed that the continuous, collective presentation of the work would help participants attain transcendental knowledge that would lead “to the universal unveiling of the invisible threads that connect all the essences underneath every object.” The text’s millennial language and apparent fanaticism suggested that the author was a member of a northern European sect of Menonites or Pietists that, persecuted in its home country, had made its way to the Americas. And yet there was little, if any, mention of Christian rituals or beliefs.

Tableaux vivants had existed since the Middle Ages in presentations of liturgical dramas. In the Netherlands these were normally performed by groups specifically dedicated to this purpose, known as rederijkerskamers (“chambers of rhetoric”). These groups had emerged in the fifteenth century out of secular and spiritual brotherhoods in Flanders whose original mission had been to aid the clergy in the creation of religious processions and dramas.  Rederijkerskamers had a strict order of membership and a very specific hierarchy (with titles such as Prince, Emperor, Dean, and Fool) and developed their repertoire mostly to participate in contests known as landjuwelen (“country jewels”), where they would showcase their dramatic achievements. They were experts at creating “wagon plays” with biblical or historical subjects and elaborate triumphal arches, which often served as theatrical sets with a variety of entrances and performing spaces.

Principia of the Live Image Method of the Ourobuorians appeared to be the product of a rather esoteric rederijkerskamer, one that had moved from the Netherlands to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam or had recently formed there. It was not unusual for members of rederijkerskamers to form societies there—such was the case of the famous Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel, who fled religious persecution in Germany; they were merchants (such as Hendrik Laurenz Spieghel) and marine underwriters (Roemer Visscher). Some readers suggested that Principia was the product of a splinter group of Labadists, a protestant religious community founded by Pietist Jean de Labadie. De Labadie’s ideas had gained support in the Netherlands, and some groups emigrated to the New World in the 1670s to escape persecution.

The questions Principia introduced were deepened by the emergence of a second anonymous text a few years later, in 1673, titled Annals of the Chambers and Fortress of Urÿonstelaii (today usually referred to as Annals).  Annals appeared to have been written by the same hand as Principia, but it was a more detailed work and even more puzzling to scholars. At face value it was a compendium of the architectural structures on the island described in Principia, all apparently guarded behind a fort,  but it was soon determined that the descriptions might also function as metaphorical narrations of the ideology and history of the society that created them. Annals also provides clues to the text and name of the sacred performance introduced in Principia.

None of this brought anyone much closer to solving the enigma of Principia. It was by no means a traditional text even within rederijkerskamer literature. Rederijkerskamers generally presented religious and morality plays, usually dramatizations of stories from the Bible. In contrast, the elaborate descriptions of  tableaux in Principia had no recognizable connection to any religious writing; they were more closely connected with hermetic writing and the Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century, although the images in Principia were unorthodox interpretations of the alchemical and hermetic symbols of that tradition. The term “Ourobourian,” from the Greek noun ourobouros, refers to a circular symbol of a snake swallowing its own tail, in a representation of infinity that was very prominent among alchemists throughout Europe. But in Principia, although ourobouros retained that original meaning, its conjunction with the concept of the island made it a more expansive symbol.

So who were the Ourobourians? What had brought them to America with the singular mission of dedicating the life of their community to the representation of a single performance? And what was the purpose of the fort and the structures in that island, and those carefully constructed tableaux?

—

The Estheticist is a free ongoing service of art consultation around practical, philosophical and ethical issues around the visual arts profession. To ask a question, email estheticist [ at ] aol.com. Participants accept that their questions may be used for a printed publication that will serve as a professional development tool for emerging professionals in the arts. Your question will be confidentially and the question will appear as anonymous unless you specify otherwise.

Dear Estheticist,

Recently I wrote a critical review about an artist. Just three days before this review was published, the dealer who represents this artist had invited me to submit an exhibition proposal for his gallery. I was very happy. However after the review went online, the artist told me that he and his dealer were very upset. I wrote to the dealer, but I never hear back from him. What should I do?

Multitasking Curator

Dear Multitasking Curator,

You are experiencing the inconvenient world of trying to be both a critic and a curator (That’s your first mistake).  There is a reason why critics usually don’t curate exhibitions and why curators shouldn’t spend their free time writing criticism— both things are not very compatible and I have yet to see someone who can pull both of them off spectacularly well.  Now, assuming that your review was negative (since otherwise I doubt both dealer and artist would have been upset), it does appear  hypocritical to dis a gallery in public while at the same time expecting them to open their space to you (second mistake). If they would indeed give you the opportunity and you did curate a show there, one couldn’t help but wonder how come you are willing to work with a gallery that you publicly hold in such low regard.  Furthermore, it is quite understandable that if the dealer doesn’t feel supported from you he would not feel precisely compelled to support you in return. Not all of us are good Samaritans. I am afraid that there is not much you can do about this situation but to try to mend fences over time with the gallery. For starters, writing a positive review wouldn’t hurt.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

***

Estheticist -

I need time to make art. I need money to make art. I need time to make money.

When I take time to make money, I dont have time to make art. But I have money

to make art. But with only money to make art and no time to make art, then I can

not make art. How does this vicious cycle end?

Cheers,

David

Dear David,

Thank you for your question. You are right: art takes time and money, but so does eating. Do you stop eating when you don’t have time and money?

People who want to be artists but aren’t really serious about making art, use the money/time excuse as a cop-out for giving up on making art. The reality is that when art is absolutely vital for your life, you will find the time to make it.   And while money certainly helps, it is not an absolute requirement, e.g. conceptual art.

I understand, however, that your question points out to how to achieve a satisfying amount of time and money to make art. The reality is that most of us will never arrive to that point, but there are three things we can do to get there. One is to take the structures within the art world that allow artists with this problem to have enough time and sustenance to make their art. That is what residencies are for, and to an extent, graduate school (in some situations).

Another thing you should do is to learn resourcefulness from people that are more disadvantaged than you.  Most handicapped people don’t give up living because they have a handicap; they instead learn how to live with their handicap and sometimes even turn it into their advantage. You should take the potential of every limiting situation. If you run out of paper, can you find another surface to make art on? if you only have one hour each day, can you dedicate it to build a long term project? You are an artist: what artists do is to be creative and thrive the more things get tough.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist.

***

Dear Estheticist,

As an artist who does performance and interactive work, most of the stuff I make becomes known through documentation, and I am very good at that. The thing is that I can easily make documentation look like the original performance or collaboration was spectacular, when in fact it may have barely happened or not been successful. A friend of mine criticizes me for doing this, but I way that as an artist the concept is what matters and its my right as an artist to present whatever I want whether its fact or fiction. Am I correct?

Public Artist

Dear Public Artist,

You certainly have the right to do and say whatever you like as an artist, in the same way that I have the right to say that I built a palace in the middle of the Amazon or that I fought in Vietnam. Your problem is that you are like a fiction writer whose audience thinks that he/she is a non-fiction writer. As such, you are just as good as your lies are. And while lying is key to art-making, if these lies don’t do much more other than conceal the defects of your interactive processes, then you better make sure that no one gets to see the actual events—ever (which I guess may be tough since theoretically I think you will need people to at least pretend they are interacting). Otherwise, the day they realize that what you do mainly exists in Photoshop you may find yourself that your career was also a fiction.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

***

Dear Estheticist,

Is it ok to make financial  profit from art that is about social injustice?

—Socialist

Dear Socialist,

It is not ok for anyone to benefit from social injustice in any way. This is why there are laws that prevent criminals from seeking financial profit to, say, write books about their crimes.  But to forbid an artist to sell a work about a particular social issue would then penalize those who are genuinely concerned on what’s happening in the outside world and instead reward those whose work avoids controversy. Furthermore, despite what you may hear,  social causes can benefit from the work of those who call attention to it. In such situation the motivation behind each art project about a delicate subject  must be interrogated, and until the full context of the work is understood it should not be necessarily condemned as a cinical strategy or  praised as a heroic act.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

***

Dear Estheticist,

I’m 35, I have a solid resume, and for the most part I’ve been able to maintain full-time artist status (largely due to artist residency programs/fellowships) since getting my MFA seven years ago.  My work is contemporary and conceptual, though not very marketable.  I have been fairly successful with promoting visibility of my work, but I need more.  How can I get a solo museum show instead of all these University galleries and non-profit spaces?

How can I get nominated for grants like Louis Comfort Tiffany award, Artists Legacy Foundation, Nancy Graves Foundation?  I realize the answer lies in needing my work seen by leading curators in the big cities- how can I do that?

Hunger Artist

[the inquirer enclosed a webpage listing extensive residencies, resume, etc.]

Dear Hunger Artist,

You certainly have lots of experience and developed a substantial body of work. And that, interestingly enough, is a problem in your case. Why? Because the way you brought yourself there was through residencies and the university gallery circuit. Which is great, but you must break that pattern if you want to move on. To use a very pedestrian, but accurate, metaphor, think about people who want to lose weight: no diet will ever work if it doesn’t involve a substantial change of lifestyle. In your case, my suspicion is that because you are so good at getting residencies and shows at smaller university and non-profit spaces you continue doing that with the fear that if you don’t do it then your career will end.  It won’t. But it certainly is taking a great deal of time to you to attend all these residencies and producing the kind of work that one produces in a residency. I suggest that you become more selective as to the residencies you attend: only go to the best ones. Same goes for the small university shows, which at this stage in your career will do little, if anything, to boost your reputation. Plan a solo museum exhibition, even if there is no museum yet to take it: it is important that you start visualizing your work in that way.  Then if your goal is to  move to the next level, you need to set your views on the programming of the museums and institutions that produce them. That also means to become more familiar with the people around them and the things they debate and discuss. You may not have to move to New York or London to do this, but it would certainly help you more to make an effort to become more involved in New York than attending a few out of the way residencies. Make an effort to get out of there and build a resume of shows in Europe and other places. By showing an international profile will you  likely become more visible to the people at home who make the decisions about the grants that you seek. And also don’t convince yourself that your work is not marketable: the reputational economy is just as important in the art world, and it is not dependent on whether you make sellable work.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist.

***

Dear Estheticist,

Is it important for galleries to participate in art fairs (Scope, Red Dot, The Armory show, etc.)? It this the “gateway” into the active art market? Assuming that the role of the gallery is to promote and engage the public, if a gallery chooses not to partake in fairs, aren’t they doing their artists a great disservice? Is it extreme to say that a gallery that is not included in fairs, simply does not exist?

I represented by a gallery that does not participate in fairs, and has not sold any of my paintings. I barely receive correspondence from the owners. Am I wrong to feel under promoted? I do not mean to sound like a disgruntled art snob, but perhaps I am confused on the appropriate gallery/ artist relationship. Even having attended art school, I am still perplexed by the inner workings of the market place.

Regards, Andrea D.

Dear Andrea,

Regarding galleries participating in art fairs: yes, it is important for them to participate in these events.  There are a few galleries, however, who have a built clientele and reputation to an extent that they don’t have the need to be out there, but these tend to be very established galleries. For the most part, young galleries are expected to be active and maintain an international profile. Participating in international art fairs is the natural way to do it. Those galleries that don’t invest that way indeed end up going under the radar and remaining mostly local enterprises. So yes, it doesn’t help you as an artist if your gallery doesn’t take your work anywhere, but most importantly, if they don’t do anything to compensate that lack of support. It is telling when a small gallery doesn’t participate in any fairs: it means either that they have limited resources or ambition, or that they don’t have the cache to be accepted into the professional art fair circles. Either way, those are troubling signs.

Second: the reason an artist works with a gallery is to have an advocate for the work that will promote it and introduce it to the market. If neither of those things are happening at all, then you may be better off without representation. No gallery is better than being represented by a bad gallery. And by letting yourself being represented by a bad gallery, you are preventing the possibility of a better gallery that truly relates to what you do to come by and take you on.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

***

Hi Estheticist,

I am an artist who is looking for a place to live. I have lived the third world all my life city and obtained an MFA. Now, I have the chance to do another MFA which is waiting for me in a first world city (Oxford), but I have no money to move and live there. The government and the art institutions in my country do not think I am good enough to invest in me.

Should I go or should I stay in my current city even I have no friends, no fame (I don’t even want to be famous) not political affiliation, no institution that looks for me —so what would you recommend? ( the master program in this first world city is not even famous). What should I do? Go to this master in the first world, ask for a loan to the bank? work hard there? Please help!

Sincerely yours,

Veronica

Dear Veronica,

I believe your instinct to leave is correct, but you need to clarify to yourself what is it exactly that you are looking for. It also looks like you think that pursuing a second masters as your only escape route. Is it really another degree, is it to become a better artist, is it to get connected with the art world, or is it just to escape at any cost?

Change is always desirable, but moving to another country to study at a place that you don’t even consider that worthwhile, and without money, can be a recipe for disaster. Not only you risk attending an unimpressive school, but you will expose yourself to very harsh financial sacrifices that will leave you in deep debt or will force  you to work to an extent that your sustenance will take precedence over any learning experience. So, you need to leave, yes, but you’ve got to have a plan.

It is true that master degree programs provide you with a structure from which to develop. But before you ask for a giant bank loan, what I recommend is that you consider other options than an expensive first-world masters from an undistinguished university— especially because you already have a degree. You may benefit more from doing three short residencies in cities with rich art life. You can apply to a residency and have a chance to get it all covered. The rent in Berlin is cheap and you would be exposed to a lot of great art activity. Buenos Aires is also affordable and the art scene is growing there. And if you don’t want to go to an art world capital, then you should consider going to a culturally charged place that would be a great inspiration for your work. If you do those initial short-term excursions, you may be surprised with what you find. Most importantly, you will have a chance to develop relationships in those places and it may help you in the future to do a more determined, and informed, move back there, or elsewhere. And maybe even, even if you don’t want it, become famous.

sincerely,

The  Estheticist.

***

Dear Estheticist:

Your ad intrigued me. I’m actually curious about what answer you give to your sample question: How DOES one enter into the biennial circuit?

Many thanks!

Matilda

Dear Matilda,

The answer is simpler than what you may think.

People think that the genres of visual art are photography, sculpture, performance, etc. but that’s not true. That belongs to the XXth century.

The XXIst century genres of visual art are: museum art, biennial art, gallery art, academic art, and so forth.

Ok, I am exaggerating, but I hope you will get my point. To understand what I mean you simply need to go to museums, biennials, and galleries, and pay attention to the kind of work that is being shown in those places, and the way they speak to each other, and the way that curators build narratives with them (that is their own curatorial narratives). These works have certain characteristics. Works that enter museum collections are precisely, collectable. Works that exist in galleries are usually sufficiently self-contained that they can be easily collected. So-called “biennialist” artists, like gymnasts who go to the olympics, are those trained in the language of biennials, which tends to be more of the complement to what you see in museums: less collectible, more site-specific, more experimental, and yes, more spectacular. My point is that there is a sensibility in the exhibition conditions of the biennial that tend to be different from other places (that is, they usually happen in culturally-interesting cities that only on those occasions become the center of the art world like Venice, Istanbul, Sao Paulo,etc, they are visited by a sophisticated, usually more intellectual public than the one that goes to art fairs, they tend to be more about politics than about the market, etc), and artists who participate in these events are usually aware of these conditions, OR their work simply fits naturally within them and curators who select them recognize that.

This is not to say that an artist can’t exist in museums or biennials simultaneously, of course, but in those cases their work has shown enough range that it can exist and function in those various registers.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

***

Estheticist -

What is more important – To be a husband and a father and not a successful full-time artist, which means you may resent your children and wife. Or, to be a successful full-time artist with no love-of-your-life and no children?

Cheers,

DGH

Dear DGH,

Some people will tell you that one has to sacrifice everything for art. This comes from the romantic cliché statement that all art must come from suffering. This idea was critiqued as early as the late XIXth century by Nietszche in “The Birth of Tragedy”, where he argues that in order to transcend nihilism one needs to balance Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of life. (Dionysian being closer to irrational, chaos and feeling, and Apollonian being closer to rationality, order and control).

The problem that we usually face as artists, and as humans in general, is not understanding what fulfillment is all about. Yes, for an artist what appears the perfect picture of fulfillment is to have a successful career and have a family around who will care about you. But what is success to you, and is children and spouse the answer to happiness?  Part of the problem, according to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, is that we are too egocentric to understand what is good to us. Csikszentmihaly, who is a lead thinker in the field of positive psychology, did a thorough study of what makes people feel happy. He discovered that when we are the most happy is when we are in a state that he described as “Flow”, a kind of deep concentration where our ego goes away.  If you were to translate this idea into art making, you may recognize the feeling of “Flow” in the process of making an artwork. The key is how to be able to arrive to conditions in your life that will allow you to reach a level of flow on a regular on the most frequent basis. These conditions will vary with every person: for some the stability of a relationship actually is beneficial for a successful career; for others, the emotional investment of a relationship is too distracting for making art. You have to find the combination that may best suit you. What you can be certain, however, is that the answer does not lie on whether you acquire only one or the other or both: it is on whether you can find the right balance or work and life to feel fulfilled.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

***

Dear Estheticist,

Is it possible to sustain a successful career as an artist, curator, and arts administrator all at once? Or is it necessary to choose just one?

Sincerely,

Overextended in the Art World

Dear Overextended,

The answer is that while it is possible to joggle different functions in the art world, you have to eventually choose one.

There are first the issues of profession and then the issues of perception. Let’s start with the professional part. First of all, being an artist is completely different than being a curator, arts administrator, art historian, critic or collector, because art making is not a profession: it is a way of life, a calling, that if pursued seriously affects everything else.  Because of this reason it is possible to do side activities besides your art, but you have to never forget that your artwork is the central focus of your life.  As you may know, some artists do curatorial work, but that is ultimately an incompatible activity the more you progress in your profession— you would eventually have to make a choice. Being an administrator, or an educator, is far more compatible, as you don’t are less likely to enter into the binary situations of exhibitions- either you are the one who gets exhibited or the one who curates the exhibition.

Then we come to the issue of perception. Even when you are perfectly clear about the balance and focus in your career(s), the art world (and particularly the New York art world) has a hard time seeing individuals as fulfilling more than one function. In some small countries and cities, where there art scenes are smaller, it is more common to fulfill several roles, but ultimately again one thing has to give way to the others. You may undermine  yourself when people see you doing many things at once— they either will assume that you are hopelessly scattered or that you are not serious about either one of the things you do.

On the upside, because professional demarcations are somewhat artificial, it will serve you well to have experience in other areas, and more and more you can see individuals who are able to translate their expertise in one area successfully into another. But again, you will need to choose what is it that you really want to do and make sure people know that is your objective.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist.

***

***

please write to the estheticist!

“You may ask any questions. I may not know the answer but I can certainly respond to them.”

John Cage at a lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, March 1, 1992

The Estheticist is a free ongoing service of art consultation around practical, philosophical and ethical issues around the visual arts profession. To ask a question, email estheticist@aol.com. Participants accept that their questions may be used for a printed publication that will serve as a professional development tool for emerging professionals in the arts. Please specify if you want to remain anonymous in your request.

QUESTIONS TO THE ESTHETICIST

July 2010

Dear Estheticist,

As a an educator, should I be encouraging my students to make what I think is truly challenging work or work that will be easily consumed and integrated within a professional or academic market? Where does the greater responsibility lie, to each student and their livelihoods or to my future hopes for society?

please don’t answer “both”

Encouraging Educator,  San Juan, Puerto Rico

Dear Encouraging Educator,

You are making that assumption that by encouraging your students to make truly challenging work you will negatively impact your students livelihoods, which I am not certain is the case. But let’s set aside financial considerations for a minute and think about a few comparisons: Should a law professor teach his students to be efficient crooks so that they can quickly ascend to become the next corrupt government or should he teach them to fight to defend social and civil values? Should a medical student rather learn boy scout first aid techniques or how to do heart surgery?

As an arts professional, you are entrusted with the education of young people who are easily impressionable.

At a first glance, making commercial work may seem to them a more viable career opportunity; in reality, it only turns them into mediocre individuals who will never know any better. As their professor, it is your duty to show them that commercial success in art is a possible byproduct but by no means the sole goal, and that success in art lies beyond making money. You should teach them to be the best artists they can possibly be, as if you were teaching yourself. If that entails making challenging work, and questioning art to its roots, that’s then how it should be.  Teach them what you with you would  have been taught as a young student. Make them better artists than you. If they so choose, later on, to descend into commercial mediocrity, that will be their choice.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

I recently curated a group show at an alternative space and an important review was written for a major weekly publication. The critic missed a lot of key points about specific artworks, (i.e. omitting names of collaborators, misquoting artists) and also seemed to misunderstand the participating artists and my approach to the medium at hand. I’d like to set the record straight. Is there any way to try and correct the misconceptions or do I just let the critic lie?

Sincerely yours,

Curators Anonymous

Dear Curators Anonymous,

No one can do anything about a critic’s opinion, but if the critic misquoted, gave misinformation or mischaracterized any other factual aspects of the show, by all means you must respond to correct that situation. This should be done in the traditional way of writing a letter to the editor. You may also try to do it in other ways, clarifying those points in an open letter for instance. This second option has its consequences, as you risk indirectly drawing more attention to this critic’s opinion more than it should. At any rate, however, you should stick with debating the factual aspects of this critic’s review, and not on the more subjective take on, say, your curatorial angle.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

How do I ask for credit to an ex-boyfriend with which I have done long and intensive collaboration, which includes a video in which I perform and a costume if he uses the footage in all situations?  How do go about explaining that a collaboration in nature is with two and more people and that it is actually helpful to credit each other?  Since I am more involved in the art world it’s a little hard to explain these things to another person who has less experience but it’s very important to me that I have the credit for the work I did as I credit people I work with as an obvious automatic response.

Thank you,

Genevieve

Dear Genevieve,

Thank you for your interesting question.  Based on how you present the problem, you are right: you should receive some sort of credit for this piece. The way

you receive the credit would depend on how it was originated: if both of you came up with the idea, then it is a collaboration; if it was his idea and you helped, you should still receive some credit, eg. he should be credited with the concept and you with the costume, performance, execution, etc. In any case, yours is not a unique situation; many people who  work together (and sometimes ARE together) in what appears very spontaneous situations later on argue about issues of authorship such as this one.  It depends how far you want to take this, but one benevolent way to handle this is that you should share with your ex-boyfriend other examples of similar collaborations where both artists get credited (say, Christo and Jean-Claude, Claes and Kosje Oldenburg, Diller and Scoffidio, etc). Technically, you are legally entitled to sue your ex-boyfriend for using your image without authorization (assuming that no release form was signed). But you may not want to take your case that far, nor would it serve you much purpose. The best is to move on, let that be what it was, and learn from the example when you engage in future collaborations.

Sincerely

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

How many viewers are enough?

Paul Ramirez Jonas

Dear Paul,

They will never appear to be enough.  But you will know they are too many when you lose sight of yourself.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

Should I move to Detroit? It seems so…open. I like my fun part time adjunct jobs here in Chicago but feel like this could drag on forever (showing in friends apartments, teaching part time, renting.) Will things be different in the “D”?

Laura, Chicago, IL

Dear Laura,

Thank you so much for your question.

There are two main reasons why one moves to another city: because career opportunities are better, or because your personal situation will improve (quality of life, love interest, etc). You should ask yourself on whether either of those two areas will improve if you are to go to the big D. At a first glance, unemployment is really high in Detroit, so employment-wise it would be a challenge. It is true, however, that Detroit offers a very interesting and inspiring emerging art scene that, while smaller than Chicago, lies at the epicenter of social and cultural environment that is prone for the creation of very interesting art. But the main issue is, if you want change, why not real change? Move to Berlin? Los Angeles? New York? Buenos Aires?  They all have vibrant art scenes. The West Coast is very open (space-wise). Amsterdam is open too (mind -wise).  You are right: staying in Chicago will take you nowhere career-wise, but staying in the Midwest won’t change it either.

Best

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist:

Too often my viewers think my works of visual fiction are actually factual.

What is the most effective way to signal irony?

Beauvais, Knoxville, TN

Dear Beauvais,

Thank you for your question. The question for you is, why would you want your viewers to know the truth? Ignorance, in this case, is aesthetic bliss.  Think about the conundrum that every parent faces about when to tell their children that Santa Claus doesn’t exist- they eventually will come to the age to realize the truth, but  when parents break the news prematurely they cruelly and abruptly destroy a child’s world of magic and fantasy. As artist, you give your viewers the gift of a possible reality, and it is not your job to undo it for them. Let them figure it out on their own- most eventually will, and they will feel rewarded —even if they are infuriated by having been temporarily fooled, they will be delighted with themselves for having figured it out. And if for some reason they never do figure it out, they never deserved to know the truth in the first place.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

What should I wear for the opening of my solo show? Does the same dress code applies when I’m part of a group show?

Ramón

Dear Ramón,

Dress code at an opening is extremely important. What you are wearing often says more about your work than the work itself, because, let’s face it, no one looks at the work on the day of the opening, but everyone checks out what you are wearing.  For a solo show, it is common to overdo it (like wearing Prada), which would make you look like an amateur “solo show artist”. The best is to take your cue from the dealer, or curator- always dress a bit less flashy than them so they feel that they are the stars of the night (in the end, they don’t have the creative outlet of making art, so let them have their little moment of fame). But don’t overdo it: to dress too casually is very 90s and it is too used by middle-aged artists, which you don’t want to do.  For a group show, you need to take the cues from your fellow exhibiting artists: they will hate you if you try to outdo them in wardrobe, plus you will look like you are desperate for attention. For that, it is best to dress as if you were just attending the show as a guest.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

Halfway on the process of making an art piece I discover that another artist has already made a project so similar to mine that it will make my work seem like plagiarism.  Please consider that this is the only piece I’m producing specifically for a group show that opens in a few weeks.  There might not be enough time to abandon the idea and start something new.  My name is already printed in the invitations and catalogues.  What should I do?

Ramón

Panama City

Dear Ramón,

Thanks for your question. Here are a few considerations for you to ponder: 1. Would the trajectory of your work logically evolve into a piece such as the one you are producing?  If this is the case, you should not be afraid to make a piece that resembles another. Many works look alike, but the intentions, the context, and the reasons for which they are produced vary widely. Think about white on white paintings. It is more important that your piece has a natural connection with the work you have done in the past than whether it looks like someone else’s. One possibility would be to include a device (a handout, for example) that would help explain how you arrived to this particular solution.

2. Is the artist whose piece was made before of a previous generation? If so, you should dedicate the piece to that artist or make a Dan Flavin-esque reference to him/her (like “to Dan Graham, who is crazy but interesting”).  If the artist is a contemporary of yours, and furthermore, if his piece is in the same show, this would not be a good idea. At any rate, it is preferable to accept the coincidence frontally and honestly than pretending to be surprised about it.

If, on another hand, this work is not logically connected to what you have done in the past, and this other artist exists in competition with you, I suggest that you just pretend that you intentionally made this piece just to fuck around with him.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

Are artist residencies really the only answer?

If so, why did Smack Mellon reject me?

Jin

Dear Jin,

Artists residencies are no solution to having an art career, if that is what you mean. They are a bit like drugs- they are addictive, they make you feel good and productive, and on a limited dose they do help, but soon you can become a residency junkie, floating from one residency to another, like those people in universities who like the idea of being a student forever. As a result, those artists who are constantly in search of residencies to get a career forget to get a life. And the problem is, if you don’t have a life, you don’t have a subject to make art about, and your work will start looking like  bland, flavorless and generic residency art.  In this sense, it is healthy that we don’t get accepted into every single residency we apply to.

Sincerely

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

Here’s my question- what is a good way for a curator to sustain meaningful relationships with artists over time AFTER exhibiting their work? Sometimes it feels like the exhibition planning stage is an intense period of collaboration and then once it’s over we move on to the next project and part ways.

Best,

Julie, Chicago, IL

Dear Julie,

Thank you so much for your question.  The answer is simple: most artists want to stay in touch with curators after doing a project and most do. However, artists are strange specimens who can often display little generosity in their interactions with people who they don’t see as immediately being able to further their career, and this is why you may feel that after working with an artist this artist may feel that you are a “been there, done that.” The best thing is to be direct with them: tell them that you want to have an ongoing dialogue, that you are interested in their work, and that you hope that you two may share a career-long professional dialogue.  Most experienced artists understand this perfectly and will respond gratefully; the young ones who are getting started and still feel they are the hottest thing in the universe will eventually come around and understand the dynamic, but it is for the curator to set the ground rules, so that not every time that you ask information for a project it will mean that you will give them a show.

And in the case of those who may ignore your reaching out for a deeper dialogue or demand a completely utilitarian relationship, the question then for you would be: why bother?

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

How can a curator answer every single email to every single artist who drops an email to her/his inbox? Is it ok not to answer?

How can a curator raise money possibly for every artist that she/she wants to work with or in need?

How can a curator make sure that the money s/he raises in a museum that that money goes to for what it is raised for?

Can curators monopolize access to the part of the world that they are thoroughly informed about? Whose information is that anyway?

How can a curator get out of his/her “connector” mode and share his/her resources with other professionals locally and internationally without losing his/her “edge” and knowledge pool?

How can a curator deal with professionals in parts of the world that immediately steal/mimic his/her models, his/her “artists” or content or prior modes of knowledge production?

How can a curator rise professionally without aligning herself with power structures, power artists or author-ship driven curators?

How can a curator rise professionally without being power obsessed, being an ass whole, or being a bitch?

Can there be curator-angels? Are there prior examples?

How can a curator embrace both the Antiquity and Contemporary Art World?

Is it ok for a curator to be nice to her/his assistants interns yet appropriate their work?

Thank you very much.

Istanbul curator

Dear Istanbul curator,

Thanks for writing. You really had a lot of questions. Here are your answers.

How can a curator answer every single email to every single artist who drops an email to her/his inbox? Is it ok not to answer?

It is not ok to not answer. Ignoring an artist’s legitimate inquiry via email is a sign of arrogance and pretentiousness. Best practice, if unable to answer each email individually, is to have a series of readymade responses, such as, “thank you for making me aware of this material, I will take a look at it but as you may know I receive many requests every day and may not be able to give you a full response.” In the case however, of annoying artists who pester you every day, you are not obliged to answer every time, and it is perfectly fine to let them know that your inbox cannot sustain a thousand exhibition announcements from them. Goes without saying of spam- just block them on your email list.

How can a curator raise money possibly for every artist that she/she wants to work with or in need?

You can’t- you have to pick and choose your funding battles. As curator you should make a short list of those projects that you are willing to spend your political capital on. That said, you are not responsible to find funding for every artist- you are their supporter, not their mother.

How can a curator make sure that the money s/he raises in a museum that that money goes to for what it is raised for?

You can’t, unless if you are the director. In that case, you need to fundraise from the outside- that is, work with a foundation that will give the money directly to the artist instead of the institution (many private and government foundations work that way).

Can curators monopolize access to the part of the world that they are thoroughly informed about? Whose information is that anyway?

It is not cool, nor possible, for curators to colonize thematic or geographic areas of the world. To think you can do it is delusional. Information belongs to no one. Being territorial, furthermore, is a sign of insecurity, not only in curatorial but in every field, and it does not go unnoticed when a curator is protective of a particular area or subject.

How can a curator get out of his/her “connector” mode and share his/her resources with other professionals locally and internationally without losing his/her “edge” and knowledge pool?

You have no obligation to do your fellow curator’s homework. But you can always provide raw material to them, inasmuch as they will also reciprocate with you. In general, generosity breeds generosity.  It is also perfectly fine in some circumstances, when someone seems particularly needy, to suggest a consultant fee for your advise.

How can a curator deal with professionals in parts of the world that immediately steal/mimic his/her models, his/her “artists” or content or prior modes of knowledge production?

Documentation, documentation, documentation. There is nothing you can do if a curator replicates exactly the same show that you did a year ago. But you can let everyone know that you were there first. And then, if you did your job, everyone will know who is the plagiarist.

How can a curator rise professionally without aligning herself with power structures, power artists or author-ship driven curators?

If by “rising professionally” you mean becoming one of those on top of power structures, or an author-curator, you will have to engage with those structures. But you can create rules of engagement that will preserve your integrity and do not devolve into professional prostitution. To achieve that will prove your true talent as curator, and as social mediator.

How can a curator rise professionally without being power obsessed, being an ass whole, or being a bitch?

There is the misperception that all powerful curators are all those things, and it is not true. The truth is, many factors – such as luck, which you will need- are out of your control, and regardless of how hard you try most wont make it to the top. But if you make it to the top by being an asshole, you don’t deserve to be there anyway— you don’t even deserve to exist. This has again to do with what you mean by “rising professionally”. In my view, and I bet in the long view of history, the curators that will matter are not the ones on top of the most famous institutions, but the ones who curate the best exhibitions. So, please do not sell your soul to the devil.

Can there be curator-angels? Are there prior examples?

But of course there are. Paulo Herkenhoff in Brazil is a teddy bear, also perhaps the most influential curator right now in Latin America. Elizabeth Smith, now chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, is a wonderful person and great curator. Stacy Switzer, director of Grand Arts in Kansas City, is the sweetest person and incredibly talented, independent and intelligent.  They are around- don’t think that curators need to be bad people. Only mediocre ones are.

How can a curator embrace both the Antiquity and Contemporary Art World?

It can be done, but the art world is not ready for them, because most in the art world are culturally illiterate about anything that happened before Duchamp.

Is it ok for a curator to be nice to her/his assistants interns yet appropriate their work?

No.  There is no replacement for giving credit where credit is due. If the assistant did the research, that’s exactly how you credit them. If the assistant produced the installation, you say so. And if your assistant curated the show, he/she should be listed as the curator, and you as the assistant.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

What should my artist statement look like for grad school applications? Should it be limited to one page?

Rachael

Dear Rachael,

Keep it short and concise, one page.  Be honest, but please avoid commonplace statements. Do not copy fancy words that you don’t understand from books, nor do try to play the game of  ”I am going to write what I think they want me to tell them” because there is no way you will win it. Reviewers usually have read a million artists statements before yours and can detect a contrived statement from a mile away (I know I can).

Do the following exercise: write three art statements. One of them should be the one that truly describes who you are and what you believe in. The other two you should write it imagining that you were someone else (a friend, colleague, etc). As you write the three statements, think about what makes them different from each other. Then show the three statements to other people to look at and ask them which one best describes who you are. If they all point to the one that you wrote imagining yourself, then you are good to go. If not you have to go to the drawing board.

Sincerely

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

If an artwork is in a crate in a storage facility in Long Island City, is it

still an artwork?

Put away,

Paul

Dear Paul,

You ask very interesting but complex questions, so here we will have to get a

bit more philosophical. According to Bishop Berkeley, one of the great English

Empiricists, nothing exists unless it is being perceived by someone. Then,

Ortega y Gasset, on the other hand, said that  our behavior is constructed under

assumptions that we have regarding the existence of things. For example, when I

wake up in the morning and prepare myself to go out to start my day, it is

Because I am assuming that the world is still the same than when I went to bed

the day before, that when I open the door the street will be there, etc.  So: if

we follow these ideas, what matters is not on whether the work still exists

physically, because it does exist in our minds, and continues influencing our

behavior. Let’s say the caves of Altamira are an artwork. Most of us haven’t

been to Altamira to corroborate they exist or are still there, yet one can say

they continue exerting their influence.  And even when they vanish, due to

accident or duration, they are still artworks in people’s mind.  If a

performance piece is stored away in our memory, isn’t it the same than when a

physical art work is on a storage facility?

Sincerely

Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

Thanks, that was very helpful, but it leads me to the inevitable question:

If a tree falls in a Museum, is it an artwork?

Yours

Paul

Dear Paul,

Trees provoke two kinds of noises by falling. One, which is less important, is the actual noise of falling. Second, more important, is who yelled (if anything) “tree falling” before or after the fall. (“tree falling” meaning “this is art”). Then you have three possibilities:

1. When no one yells anything after the fall, then the fall is invisible and inaudible to everyone. The tree vanishes.

2. If the museum was the one who yelled “tree falling” (before or after, it doesn’t matter) many people will hear it. It will be an artwork (whether its good or not it doesn’t matter: the noise is there to stay and the reaction it will provoke is unavoidable). Yet, the next generation who wasn’t there to hear the first or second sounds may never know it happened in the first place unless the second part of #3 happens (see below).

3. If the one who yelled wasn’t sanctioned by the museum, the falling will be an artwork, but very few people may hear him/her, so few people will see. It will barely exist. But it may crawl here and there in someone’s memory. If lucky, the tree will take root and grow on enough people’s minds. If it cannot be uprooted from them, it is likely that one day it will be planted, as a monument, in the museum.

Sincerely

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

I often find it hard to write my own artist statement.  Could you advice on how to make this easier.  Is there some sort of template that I can follow?

Ramón

Dear Ramón,

Don’t follow templates- there is nothing more horrid than reading the typical statement using the same words and unpronounceable terms.

Here are a few ideas though:

- Ask three people who know your work best to describe your work in one paragraph. Use those paragraphs as a guide to discuss your work

- Write three statements- one of an artist you truly admire, one of an artist you truly abhor, then write yours. In writing your statement, think

about how your work differs from the other two.

-have a curator or artist friend interview you about your work. tape that interview. transcribe the parts that you liked onto the paper.

My favorite recommendation is , however: contest the notion of  artist statements. They are a terrible idea anyway. Do you think that Marina Abramovic or Gerhard Richter ever had to write artist statements? Come up with your own format: interview, short story, cooking recipes. Something that represents your work better

than the typical bureaucratic text, something that makes it more compelling to read. The whole reason why unimaginatively people request artist statements is because they need a way to know what the artist thinks of his/her work. If you do that without using that format, it shows you are a creative and thinking being.

sincerely

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

I want to be famous, and I am open about it. What do you think I should do:

Which of these is the best way  to get fast recognition, wealth, and fame? and

if possible, to feel good about myself and what I do.

a. contemporary art (Star)

b. pop singer

c. actor

d. (super)model

my skills are very limited but I have good ideas.

I have no previous experience in any of these fields

thanks,

Anonymous (I havent decided on my stage name yet)

Dear Anonymous,

You are amongst the minority. Who wants to be famous anymore? Be chased by paparazzi and tabloids, die of an overdose while still young,

be immersed in legal battles with the many ex-spouses who will fight to take over your estate, being debated publicly over the kind of

Liposuction or plastic surgery you have conducted on yourself.  In any case, your avenues depend, as you may have guessed, on your abilities:

if you have a great body, supermodel is the solution; if you know how to fake feelings, you are an actor, if you can sing and move at least decently onstage,

you are a pop singer. If you can’t do any of these things, – that is, if you are not that attractive, you can’t really act, sing or move- then you are stuck with trying to become a contemporary artist, as that is the field where all the fame-starved and slightly untalented people go. The bad news: fame in the art world is so easy to get that it hardly counts as true fame. Like Maurizio Cattelan said, being famous in the art world is too easy for everyone because the art world is like, 2000 people. The good part: because art stars are second-rate celebrities, they are not so famous that are pestered with paparazzi, tabloids, ex-spouses, etc.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist.

Dear Estheticist,

What happens to the contestants on work of art after they get voted off? Are they still allowed to produce art?

Sincerely,

A concerned pop culture addict

Dear  Concerned Pop culture Addict,

Regardless of being winners or losers, basically all contestants, critics, self-appointed experts,  and any other people who are associated with the TV program should not  be allowed to be part of the Art World anymore. As they have clearly displayed their transparent obsession with fame and power over their interest in art, the appropriate thing for them to do (and for any of us to do to them) is to move to Las Vegas and work at a third-rate casino variety show, which is where they belong.

sincerely,

The Estheticist

Dear Estheticist,

I am an artist who has recently graduated from an MFA program in a medium sized American city. My schooling has given me the impression that in order to be a real, viable artist I now need to spend years of my life jumping around from residency to residency, if I am lucky enough to be invited to do so, in a state of constant mobility. This global nomadic life style is not my dream. I believe in knowing people and places for a long, long time. I would like to maintain a sense of home. I accept that it is important to build a wide web of relationships within the art world if one wants to succeed as a professional artist. But how do I do that without sacrificing the depth of relationship I have been building with the people and place where I live?

Sincerely,

Ariana Jacob

Dear Ariana:

Thank you for your question. You are absolutely right in not wanting to sacrifice your immediate surroundings and the people who are closest to you in exchange of your career. And by no means you should or need to sacrifice them. However, the artist profession does imply certain negotiations with your immediate realm.

The globe-trotting phenomenon in contemporary art is fairly recent. Back in the 60s, artists didn’t transport themselves that much— they mainly stay put. Then in the 70s, 80s, and specially the 90s, artists became biennialists, cultural tourists. While this movement has been criticized in the sense that many artists make banal art about whichever locality they are in,  there are wonderful things about this unprecedented mobility: your work will be influenced by many and rich new ideas and cultures. To stay in the same place forever, unless you are Emily Dickinson (who rarely left her house), will likely isolate you and make your work self-absorbed. Today, it is important to get out of the house. Another thing you should be aware about is that the international network of the artworld is here to stay-  you will realize that wherever you go you will start finding familiar faces. So it is possible- and necessary, to find people of your generation (artists, curators) who live in different cities and maintain an artistic, and friendship, dialogue with them. Those relationships will also last forever.   And then, as an artist, you will become a citizen of the world. You will arrive to Venice and the Rialto Bridge and cafe Florian will feel like coming back home; you may go over the years to Mexico City and enjoy hanging out at the Covadonga where most artists meet. It will be a new kind of familiarity.

Furthermore, the years that follow your MFA are very important for you to be active. This is the time when you need to be out there exploring the world; that will change in 10 years. After that decade, artists usually become a bit more sedentary. So my recommendation is that you make yourself a clear plan of “travel action”. You don’t have to be a nomad- then you would become a residence addict, which is not productive or useful either. Pick and choose your residencies; if you go away, go far away, not to the next town.  Shoot for significant experiences that may help your development: go to the venice biennial, to sao paulo, new york. Go also to places that few in the art world go to: Zagreb,  Beirut, Bogota. You will find incredible artists communities there.

One last word: as long as you are aware what is your home base, you shouldn’t worry. But you should be prepared to leave it every now and again. Remember that the main reason we leave a place is to rediscover it.

sincerely,

The Estheticist.

Dear Estheticist,

Is it ethical for an artist either to offer a work of art as a gift to a curator (for example, after the decision for inclusion in a show, or after the show ends), or offer a reduced sale price for a work of art to a curator?

Artist donor,

Dear Artist donor,

While many do it, it is unethical to give any gift to any curator as a quid pro quo for any favor.  In the long run, an artist (and curators, for that matter) gain respect amongst their peers for their integrity not only as professionals but as individuals. To favor such practices only decreases the perception that others may have of you and will counterbalance any short-term benefits that you may derive from engaging in such sleazy arrangements. Similarly, you should also think twice about curators – or even dealers- who expect to get a work of yours in exchange of including you in a show. Not only is that completely unacceptable, but likely those are not very professional curators nor people one should aspire to work with.

There can be, however, instances where, if you have a sincere friendship or dialogue with a curator (or dealer, etc.) that has developed over time, that you may want to give a work of yours as a gift, and it may be entirely appropriate. But as with any gift, one should never give with the ulterior purpose to receive something in exchange.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist.

Dear Estheticist,

I’m a choreographer. Recently I’ve noticed that some artists who’s work is

basically choreography have had large scale shows and sold pieces to major

museums for a lot of money. How can I transition into this situation. Or is this

trend already over?

Thanks,

Melinda

Dear Melinda,

Thank you for your question. Your observation is correct: many choreographers indeed have made work that goes into the visual art world and thus is purchased and collected as if they were paintings.

Unfortunately, there is no set “strategy” to make a choreography work enter into the visual arts market. What you see happening is essentially that some artists are working in ways that speak to issues that are directly connected with the visual arts realm, through theoretical angles (eg. issues around sculpture for example) or political/gender issues. Because these particular works speak to other artists in that discourse, and /or because they have been influential to other artists and periods of visual art, ( and many of those artists have presented their work in the context of museums or galleries in the past) these pieces are deemed as belonging to the narratives in contemporary art museums. To simply plant a choreography in a museum wouldn’t do the trick, as you would need to first insert the piece in that dialogue, or, like Tino Sehgal, take elements of choreography and turn them into a conceptual art product.

sincerely,

The Estheticist.

Dear Estheticist,

I am writing with an ethical/aesthetic question about collaboration.  have collaborated for many years with a more famous artist than myself and I feel that I’m not being credited properly for my contributions to our shared work. Is it appropriate for me to ask that we get equal billing? How would you recommend I broach this issue?

Do you think it’s tacky to have to ask?

Signed,

Better half of a collaboration

Dear Better Half of a Collaboration,

You are right that these days the role of a curator falls into a gray area when the curator enters into production or collaborative roles with an artist. It is also true that in many collaborative situations the curator enters into this role in an unexpected way, sometimes having to do much more than what was originally expected. But by far the root of the problem lies in the little communication that exists between artists and curators regarding credit, and the shyness by many curators to always defer to the artist in these matters.  In these situations, it is absolutely correct to specify the kind of credit that you expect to receive from a collaborative project, but this should be stipulated before the project begins. If things change over the course of the project, then you should point to the artist how the project has evolved in a way in which you feel that now its a collaboration in which you are doing more than the usual curatorial duty. Also, regardless of how famous the artist is, you should not “ask”: you should hold your ground and stipulate how you expect to be credited before you proceed with the collaboration.

Sincerely,

The Estheticist

Original Text  (“Viveros”) by Luis Ignacio Helguera from the book   “El Cara de Niño y Otros Cuentos”

Trans. Pablo Helguera and Mónica de la Torre, 2004

Paths lined with poplars, paths and more paths lined with poplars, a single path with never-ending line of poplars, in order to arrive to the house of my old friend. The light of midday lingers, the solar image of the poplar-lined paths appears fixed as in a photograph.

The sun is so radiant that it is hard to see through the light, as if it were mist or a veil. Paths lined with poplars, meadows with poplars, puddles of light, water mirages on the paths. But the paths also appear to be mirages: I see them, I walk on them, and I don’t feel them, it’s as if they walked by themselves. And all of a sudden, finally the music of fountains heard but not seen, troughs, stables, the villa. More than a villa it seems to be a big workshop, a factory where strange things are made. There, inside a sort of greenhouse, is my friend, whistling quietly. He greets me from afar, waving his hand, without stopping to whistle. He looks so old. I want to read you a passage from a book, let me go to the library, I’ll be right back, he says. I tell him to do it later, not to bother now.  He replies: it’s the only exercise I do, and leaves. His wife arrives, kisses me and tells me that its time for lunch. She opens a few tin cans, like those from the ice-cream shop; she tastes the pork loin with potatoes from one of them.  It’s delicious, you’re going to love it, help yourself. She leaves. I realize there is a lot of food in those containers: apple purée, salads, chicken with mole… I can’t find the book, my friend says, while he is going somewhere else. I eat a radish. But I am thirsty, not hungry. My friend comes back whistling quietly, with a book in his hands, he looks for the passage, then puts down the book; it’s not here, he says, and then leaves again, whistling quietly. It seems he’s going to look for another one; it’s the only exercise I ever do, he says. He takes forever. I see a great variety of plants, some of them enormous, and next to them, a row of unbranded liquor bottles. Most of them are almost empty. What’s in them looks like brandy, homemade.  There are no glasses; no plates and cutlery either. I sip from one of the bottles. It is brandy, and it’s exquisite.

I drink the remainders of another bottle. And then another.

It occurs to me that perhaps my friend uses the bottles to play the marimba and thus lines them up, nearly empty, in a row. I drink another’s remainders bottom. And then another. There are stables everywhere. But no horses. In a small area there are a few rooms made of wood, their dimensions are very small. They are interconnected, open to the greenhouse and the gardens, and empty. One and then another and then another and another… all of them empty, without any furniture or pictures or people. They look more like they belong to a dollhouse or a playground. When I go out I see my friend in the greenhouse, whistling quietly and going through the pages of a book. I am thirsty, I say. Drink brandy, he replies without looking at me. Oh! Here it is! And he starts reading out loud. Every once in a while, in the middle of the reading, he stares at me from the top rim of his glasses. I drink the remainder of a brandy of bottle and then another and another and another and one more. I don’t understand anything that he is reading to me, in the same tone and rhythm that is lulling me to sleep. I hear his voice as if it were coming from a monotonous and exasperating snore or from under the water. He goes on reading without a pause, staring at me while continuing to read, now without looking at the book, as if he were reading my face, I can’t stand his voice anymore, it’s my naptime, I tell him.

The light is still radiant.

I need to go to the bathroom. My friend is not there anymore. I can’t find the bathroom. I walk into a stable and as I start urinating, I see my friend and his wife approaching from afar. It’s something that I already knew, she says to him, but I liked how he explained it to me. He’s very serious and doesn’t seem to be paying attention to her. I quickly come out of the stable. She kisses me and says that it’s lunchtime. He leaves, don’t tell me that you are looking for a book, she says, and he: it’s the only exercise I do. It’s delicious, she tells me as she opens a steamy container, you’re going to love it, help yourself. She leaves. Aren’t you going to eat too? I scream at her. I already ate, she responds, you’re going to love it, help yourself. Yes, thank you I really loved everything! I scream. She smiles, from afar, and then leaves. She is young and beautiful. I snatch a pear from a tree and devour it. I am so thirsty. Another pear. It’s not ripe, I toss it out. A long time passes. No one, I walk into a stable, piss, and come out. I decide to go to the troughs.  I hear the fountains, but cannot see them. Paths lined with poplars, many paths lined with many poplars from which I don’t know how to return. I am very thirsty. There is no night. I slowly drink from the trough.  I suddenly feel the earth shaking under my feet, hear furious galloping in the distance. I step aside and see the some wild horses cross the poplar-lined path, riderless but moving in a straight line, setting off a great cloud of dust. I feel the earth shaking under my feet, for a long while. And then again, the deafening sound of light. The radiant light that makes the dust dissipate. There is no night. I slowly drink from the trough; the water tastes like the furious gallop of the horses.

What in the World is a site-specific project  for the first edition of Philadelphia’s festival Philagrafika. The project is an “unauthorized biography” of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, an illustrious institution that has played a key role in the history of American Archaeology. The project consists in an installation at the Penn Museum recreating the TV set of What in the World, a series of documentaries, and a published book digging out little known stories around the museum’s remarkable curators and other unusual figures of its history, all of which played a key role in shaping the museum’s collections.

The project is inspired in a famous 1950s TV quiz show of the same title produced by the Penn Museum and conceived by its charismatic director Froelich Rainey. The program   would bring together a panel of experts to try to guess the origins of a series of mysterious artifacts in the museum’s collection. What in the World was a pioneering museum education project during the dawn of the telecommunications age. The current project includes the launching of a season’s worth of episodes, loosely formatted in the original television show’s structure.

The historical episodes examined as part of What in the World are the life stories of Maxwell Sommerville (1829-1924), professor at the University and collector of talismans and Buddhist items; Louis Shotridge (1882-1937), a Tlingit indian from Alaska who became a well known curator, ethnographer and controversial figure amongst his people;  John Henry Haynes (1849- 1910) a photographer turned archaeologist who became the unlikely leader of the first American expedition to the Middle East and  uncovered more than 20,000 cuneiform clay tablets in Nippur, loosing his mind in the process. Other stories include the mystery of the Julsrud collection, a group of clay figurines collected by the German businessman Waldemar Julsrud in Acámbaro, Guanajuato, Mexico during the 1940s and which include representations of dinosaurs, and the story behind the theft of a renowned crystal ball at the University Museum that once belonged to the Empress Dowager Cixi, the last female monarch of China.

Figure from the Julsrud collection, Acámbaro

By creating an “ anecdotal archaeology” of sorts on this archaeology museum, the project addresses the social role of curators in museums and the skewed narratives that curatorial voices often project onto objects.

Exhibition opening:Thursday, January 28, 2010, 5-7pm

An event on February 28th, with the participation of Mark Dion, will include a live recreation of a What in the World program as well as the launch of the What in the World book, publishe by Jorge Pinto Books.

For more information:

http://www.penn.museum/press-releases/694-multi-disciplinary-artist-pablo-helguera-creates-what-in-the-world.html

http://www.philagrafika2010.org

WHAT IN THE WORLD / BOOK EXCERPTS

FRONTISPIECE

Throughout the twenty or so years I have worked in the education departments of art museums, I have gradually become interested the biographical anecdotes, oral histories and archived or nearly forgotten stories—most of which are seldom visible or communicated to the public—about the generations of collectors, directors, curators and educators whose vision and interests have shaped the nature and tone of their institutions as well as their collections. This book contains a small group of biographical divertimentos connected to a museum with a particularly remarkable trove of such stories.

Most museums have a mission of educating through object-centered study, firm in the nineteenth-century belief that an object is a microcosm of a culture or an artwork a window to the world of an artist. What this focus often underplays is the fact that there are usually very subjective reasons—philosophical, personal, political—for the presence of an object or artwork at a particular museum, reasons why it was chosen by a particular person to represent a particular culture or art movement (or conversely, why certain objects or artworks are absent or not deemed important enough for inclusion).

In other words, what is often missing when the story of an artifact is told is the history not of its maker but of those who brought it to the museum—the objects’ “curatorial parents”— as well as of those who gave philosophical life to the museum by creating the interpretive frameworks that envelop these objects. The histories of museums are best revealed not through the objects they contain but through the histories of the individuals that brought them there. The Hermitage Museum’s collection can’t be explained without Peter the Great in the same way that the histories of the Guggenheim, The Frick Collection or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum owe the peculiarities of their collections to their founders. But while founders usually leave their names at the door of the institution, the hand of its curators is more invisible, and most of them are forgotten after a generation or two.

Sometimes this alternative history is unexceptional or irrelevant, sometimes it is unsavory or even embarrassing, but it often is useful and even illuminating, shedding light on the prevailing ideas and values of the time the collection was created. Of all American cities, Philadelphia has perhaps the most illustrious history in the early era of museum making. Pierre Eugene du Simitiere opened his coin collection to the public under the name American Museum in 1782 in Philadelphia, and a few years later Charles Willson Peale opened the first natural history museum (also the first major museum institution) in the United States there. As one of the historically key centers for science in America Philadelphia has a history of strange collections. In 1858 Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter donated his collection of medical oddities to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, thus creating the still existing Mütter Museum.

It is against this historical background that the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology emerged in the late nineteenth century. In the words of historian Steven Conn, the University Museum was “amongst the first institutions in this country—and probably the most ambitious—to create a separate space, both physically and intellectually, for the display of human artifacts apart from collections of natural history or specimens. Proposed by the University provost [William Pepper] as early as 1889, the University Museum, when it moved from temporary quarters to its new home in 1899, tried to do what the Peabody [Museum of Natural History, Yale University,] and the Field [Museum, Chicago,] had not yet done—occupy the space between science and art.” Aside from its central place in the history of American culture, the University Museum is a unique example of how individuals connected to a museum can leave a significant mark on the institution. The unusual cast of characters that formed the museum and helped give it shape during its first half-century of life run the gamut of eccentricity, ambition, idealism and even melodrama.

Thus the University Museum is, I thought, an ideal candidate for such an examination of its personalities through its collection. Its galleries and its objects are a collection of two tales: the one of the ancient culture that the curators sought to tell, and the unintended story of themselves and their vision. That is the story that I find the most attractive, perhaps because having worked in museums for so many years I am too used to hear the behind the scenes curatorial stories that don’t usually become common knowledge.

In the same way in which museums have two stories, this book also is a doubly subjective biography of the University Museum. On the one hand, it is an attempt to show how the personal interests and obsessions of certain individuals influenced the life of the museum; on the other hand it is my own subjective focus on a selected group of people that, to me, represent interesting aspects of curating, collecting, exhibiting and interpreting that are common to most museums. Seen through the prism of time, the subjects of these stories may appear naïve, egotistical and messianic. It is important to remember that the social and historical context in which they lived was drastically different from ours, and their efforts and accomplishments should be considered in relation to the realities they faced. The lives discussed here are remarkable, and they are worth remembering in connection to the objects they helped bring into public view.

I. THROUGH THE DRY ICE CURTAIN

FROELICH RAINEY, a dashing man in his early forties with dark hair and square jaw, is visibly nervous, sitting on a desk-like podium with a globe to his left. To his right is a small stage with three chairs in which three scholarly-looking men are sitting. Over them, white Styrofoam balls hang from the ceiling, which, lit from the bottom, have the appearance of a crude solar system. The lights darken. A large gray, tanklike television camera is before him. The cameraman zooms in on Rainey’s face. A voice comes from the cabin: “ready, action.” A red light goes on in the studio, an “On Air” sign lights up, and Rainey announces: “Welcome to What in the World.”

It is a Tuesday night in April 1950. Rainey has recently become director of one of Philadelphia’s most illustrious institutions—the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The museum is only fifty years old, but it is considered to have one of the most important collections of archeological artifacts in the world. As director Rainey, follows the many charismatic figures who brought that collection together. It is time to prove himself, to bring the museum into the modern age.

Froelich Gladstone Rainey was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, in 1907, and raised on a cattle ranch in Montana. He first thought he would be a cowboy but soon developed an interest in writing. In his memoirs he wrote, “The idea of becoming an anthropologist had not occurred to me. I had it all figured out that I was the writer the world had been waiting for. So off I sailed to get the background to fulfill my destiny.” The nation’s economy was crashing in 1929 as Rainey boarded a commercial steamer in San Francisco. In his travels he had many interesting experiences: selling ten-gallon tins of kerosene along roadsides in the Philippines, spending a night in a Cairo jail for carrying a gun, being stranded penniless in Shanghai and supporting himself for a while as a gambler in Monte Carlo. Upon his return, Rainey did a distinguished academic career, obtaining a bachelors degree from the University of Chicago and doctorates in English from the American School in France and in anthropology from Yale, where he had studied West Indian Archaeology and worked at the Yale Peabody Museum as assistant curator between 1935 and 1937. In addition, the hyperactive Rainey became the first professor of anthropology at the university of Alaska between 1935 and 1942.

In 1944 Rainey joined the American Foreign Service and was assigned to the staff of the planned Allied Control Commission for Occupied Germany under Robert Daniel Murphy. He survived a brutal winter crossing of the North Atlantic, during which his convoy was savaged by storms and U-boat attacks, only to arrive in London as the first V-2 rocket bombs fell. After the war, Rainey would continue his relationship with the US government, commuting to Washington and working on the establishment of a branch of what would become the Central Intelligence Agency. But he wanted to go back to work in an academic environment.

It was in 1947 that the opportunity of leading a museum in Philadelphia presented itself. The museum had experienced a hiatus during the war, and with many vacant positions, an operation deficit and an interim director it desperately needed new energy and vision. Rainey, then forty years old, was recommended from various sides. He had an impressive resume: on top of his international experience, he had the academic credentials. The museum’s board of trustees selected him enthusiastically.

Rainey remained director for almost thirty years, until 1976, a pivotal period for the institution. Over the years he introduced new technologies for dating artifacts (some of which, including thermoluminescence dating, later came under attack), new exhibition techniques and even a “Brazilian coffee room” (a cafeteria) at the museum. Percy Madeira, who was president of the board when Rainey was hired, wrote in 1964, “Rainey seldom lets his imagination be inhibited by the practical difficulties inherent in a new idea”, adding later, “consequently, the Museum of today is very different from that of 1947.”

Rainey was a populist—“I have never been a dedicated scholar and disliked the label ‘intellectual,’” he wrote—and he was part of the first postwar generation of museum directors, which shared the belief that the education of the public is the civic role of the American museum. This democratized vision, plus an explosion of market-driven mass media, necessitated a change in the tone of museum scholarship.

In 1948 the director of education of the University Museum, Eleanor Moore, had the idea to produce educational programs about the museum for television. She asked Rainey to participate in one of the programs, and he had an epiphany. Rainey had witnessed the emergence of television in his youth, and he understood its language. He thought, why not invest in a TV program with good production values and bring the venerable collection of the University Museum into people’s homes? No one before had exploited the visual capacity of television to describe and introduce museum objects. With a team of producers Rainey conceived of a loosely organized game show that would bring a panel of archaeology experts and other noted personalities together to examine a variety of ancient objects and determine their origins and the characteristics of the cultures that created them. Rainey would moderate the series. One can only imagine how such an idea must have been met by the conservative wing of the museum—the older, set-in-their-ways curators and keepers of the various collections. But Rainey was relentless, and in 1950 the first series of programs was created.

An off-stage voice, which the panelists couldn’t hear but the audience could, introduced each one of the objects as it emerged on the screen through a curtain of dry-ice fog, accompanied by mysterious, exotic flute music. The panelists included celebrities and artists, along with curators of the University Museum (who weren’t necessarily at an advantage as many items were chosen from very diverse cultures and obscure areas of the museum’s holdings.) Viewers watched as they (usually) failed to pinpoint the exact period or culture to which the object belonged. Guests’ willingness risk such embarrassments speaks highly of their bravery and of Rainey’s persuasive powers.

The program was a huge success. In 1951 What in the World won a Peabody Award, the most coveted prize in television, for its “superb blending of the academic and the entertaining.” Soon the program was broadcast to eighty-nine stations in the CBS network. Rainey received lots of fan mail, much of which is in the archives of the University Museum. It appears that, remarkably, he personally answered every letter. “We are happy to know that you enjoy the program as much as we have fun making it,” he wrote. What in the World continued to be popular, cycling on and off the air for almost two decades. Eventually, though, its basic production values were eclipsed by big-budget shows, and the series was brought to a close. But Rainey and the museum were remembered for the program for decades, and the museum continued to convene What in the World revivals every now and then, as part of benefits or special events, until 1975.

+++

Sixty or so years after the first broadcast of What in the World, it is a hot summer in Philadelphia, in 2009. I cross a plaza full of falafel carts at Thirty-fourth and Spruce Streets and arrive for the first time at the University Museum. I am here to develop an art project for the museum, and the goal of this visit is to find some direction for my research.

Through a large gate is an open courtyard with a fountain and an agreeable group of trees. The architecture recalls the generation of Washington Irving, and Frederic Church’s Olanna—a fantasy combining a Moorish garden, a Romanesque church and an Italian palazzo. The architect was Wilson Eyre, Jr., who had taken a northern Italian Renaissance style as a departure point but had internationalized it, in keeping with much of the Victorian architecture of the time. The original project was incredibly ambitious: a group of buildings set in a nine-acre landscape, but construction stopped after thirty years, during the Great Depression. The engraving on the stone slab at the main entrance reads “Free Museum of Science and Art,” the original name of the museum, and is decorated with gatepost figures by Alexander Stirling Calder, the father of the famous twentieth-century American artist.

I walk through the museum’s Kress entrance, part of a modern expansion in 1971. Styled like many other museum spaces of the 1970s, the space is flanked by two giant totem poles. A remarkably well-postured man with earrings and a silver bracelet comes to courteously welcome me. His name is Bill Wierzbowski, the keeper of the American collection. Bill takes me through the museum for the first time. We go up and down stairs and up again, opening and closing doors. The museum is a maze of corridors, and some hallways are partially lit. There are a number of closed galleries and a few exhibits in the middle of repair. We pass sphinxes, Babylonian artifacts, African costumes, Greek vases. There is no air conditioning in most of the galleries, and surrounded by the dimly lit Mayan stelae and other artifacts in the midsummer heat, I feel as if I am in a tomb. As in most archaeology museums, some of the cases appear to have been unaltered since the 1960s. Their light greens and blues, the fonts in which the texts are set and the style of the mountings are all reminiscent of another era of museology. The cases are time capsules, not of the cultures they ostensibly contain and depict but of the curatorial vision of those cultures at the time they were designed. In that sense, the museum is a dual encyclopedia, of both the cultures it studies and how those cultures were perceived by our curatorial ancestors. In modern and contemporary art museums, that phenomenon is almost impossible to find: it would be like walking into The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to find galleries as they were originally installed by Hilla Rebay, or finding galleries at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, that remain untouched since the times of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

We walk into the archives, where Alex Pezzati, the museum’s archivist for thirty years, is waiting. The archive room of the University Museum has the feel of a grand nineteenth-century university library. Two levels of dark oak shelves contain hundreds of gray archival boxes documenting the more than three hundred expeditions that have been financed by the museum as well as the papers of many generations of museum workers. Alex’s desk sits on top of a platform at the end of the room, supporting an old computer and piles of files. I have been told that Alex, who is in his late thirties, fulfills the role of institutional memory for the museum, bearing insider knowledge of the near infinitude of stories hidden in the archives as well as the oral history that has been transmitted by generations of museum staff, many of whom are deceased.

I tell him that I am interested in the lives of interesting people who have passed through the museum. “Oh we have plenty of characters, that we definitely do,” he says, pointing at some of the portrait paintings on the walls of the large room. I don’t transcribe his remarks, but they go something like this: “That one over there is Sarah Yorke Stevenson, who became director. She really was a remarkable woman, a liberated woman from the Victorian era. She was, like, the first woman museum director ever. Well, I am not sure if ever, but she was considered the first in everything. I think she created the first museum studies program. That one over there was the provost who created the museum, William Pepper; they say he had an affair with Stevenson. That one over there is Maxwell Somerville—he definitely was a character. He would dress as a Buddhist to give tours, and then he collected engraved gems, a kind that no one was interested in, and created a whole department for it. Then there was Louis Shotridge, the Alaskan Indian, who became a curator here. He died under mysterious circumstances; they say there was foul play. And of course Hermann Hilprecht, the curator of Assyriology, who got into a famous fight with John Peters over the first expedition of the museum to Nippur. He was well connected, and when he got into a fight with the museum he left with the keys to the collection and took a bunch of stuff with him. There was Byron Gordon; they say his personality was as sharp as his moustache . . . ”

Alex goes through the stories quickly, and they are so complex and intertwined that it is hard for me to get a handle on any of them. I leave the museum extremely stimulated but also intimidated.

I spend that night with Helen Cunningham and Ted Newbold, two key Philadelphia philanthropists who have been involved with arts and culture in the city for many decades. When, during dinner, I mention my museum visit to Ted, he says, unprompted, “Oh yes, the University Museum. They used to have a TV program called What in the World. It was so fun to watch. Sometimes they would have competitions, and once I called in the answer and won! But then they had real archaeologists competing, and it was no fun anymore. Anyway, I don’t know why they ended it. Those were good years.”

++

The New York Times dismissed What in the World as promoting a “stamp collector” mentality—equating knowledge to the ability to identify a given artifact. But others, like Dessart, defended Rainey’s project, saying that all education has to start somewhere, and that if the audience reached by this means was one that would have never been reached otherwise, that technique has a value.

The range of reactions about the show then is similar to today’s ongoing debate in museum education concerning “edutainment”—whether entertainment is a useful vehicle for an educational experience, or if attempts to entertain obscure or obliterate educational value. The answer, I think, depends on an institution’s educational goals and what one means by “entertainment.” Although it is true that some may be entertained by reading Shakespeare or Cervantes, the more common assumption is that entertainment means adopting a vegetative state in front of a TV screen. In this sense, when entertainment is paired with education, the implication that knowledge can be obtained with no effort is a proposition that, to most of us, may sound like the educational equivalent to diet pills for weight loss without exercising: intellectual growth is rarely a purely leisurely process.

But this doesn’t mean, conversely, that learning should be a dry and clinical process. Today, the term “engagement” is more favored in museums. The term describes an alert state of mind of someone who actively interacts with a particular reality in a way that is enticing as well as intellectually stimulating.

What in the World was a detective game in which the solution to the mystery is the true story of the object. In the surviving episodes, the simple but clever process through which Rainey involved his audience is evident. The game show was the format through which Rainey educated viewers in a key aspect of archaeology: that we often come to artifacts in darkness, with no knowledge of the story behind them. Through his quiz, he also reinforced a key idea in museology: that objects carry narratives. By many accounts What in the World introduced American audiences to archeology and to the main cultures of the world and even inspired some to study it formally.

++

In my subsequent visits to the museum’s archives, I continued thinking about Rainey and his program, about his quest for opening the door of civilizations using a group of mysterious objects. Sitting in the middle of that large room I thought that some of these artifacts, put on the examination pedestal, could also tell the stories of those larger-than-life individuals, like Rainey, who had given life and purpose to the institution. And us today who are not archaeology specialists like those TV viewers, may yet be able to recognize the humanity in them; each object emerging from within the curtain of smoke, revealing the visions of those who are gone, those whose portraits hang on the walls of this museum but whose life stories lie underground like the objects they once uncovered.

As a kid in Mexico, one of the first books that I ever knew that addressed ancient cultures was Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars. In this museum I instead saw curators behind altars —curatorial biographies waiting to reemerge from within the collections of artifacts they once assembled, and who needed to be given the chance to speak again.

book cover

“Helguera knows the lecture form inside-out, in all its frailties and anachronisms, and he cares for it. But expect the Professor-Doctor of its terminal condition to be doing stand-up at the funeral.”

Dominic Willsdon, The Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Published by Jorge Pinto Books, New York

Trade paperback: 6” x 9”; ISBN: 978-1-934978-16-0; $19.95

Launch date: September 2009

Available at Amazon

Theatrum Anatomicum (and Other Performance Lectures) brings together a number of  performance scripts that blend the dramatic elements of theater with the format of the academic presentation,  and bring into dialogue topics as disparate as the Latin American soap opera, the origins of the Kindergarten, the history of the Shakers, the US/Mexico war and the social dynamics of the art world.  In these series of experimental works, the voices of real and fictional characters come together in a critical exploration of history, politics, and art.

BOOK EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION 

[...]

Over the last few years, the performance lecture has become a rather ubiquitous genre on the stages of highbrow museums and Brooklyn stand-up bars. Yet, as I realized while putting this collection of texts together, there is not a great deal of writing that discusses the nature and structure of the genre. This absence of a theoretical framework is somewhat liberating, because once something is theorized, it starts to get trapped in philosophical premises. But for this book I feel I have to define for myself, even if tentatively, what a performance lecture is—a task that has not yet been imposed upon me, despite the fact that I have doing such lectures since that evening in Chicago in 1993.

The easy definition of a performance lecture is that it is a live presentation imparted by an artist who takes advantage of his or her artistic license and of the conventions of academic pedagogy to create a work that straddles fiction and reality. Irony and sometimes satire are central to the event: those who attend a performance lecture generally expect an irreverent take on academicism—a trait that explains this genre’s natural connection to institutional critique. Like other hybrid art genres, its very name illustrates the awkward juxtaposition of two modes of speaking that never entirely blend, much as prose poetry draws on the qualities of two different modes of writing without being entirely one or the other. Yet beyond these few points, performance lectures don’t follow many rules, and like performance, the genre is in a constant process of self-definition, sometimes delving into stand-up comedy, poetic presentations, recitals, speeches, etc.

My work in museum education, begun in 1992 and continuing to this day, has required me to reflect constantly on the relationship between performativity and pedagogy that is inherent to performance lectures. Because of my involvement with performance and theater, I gravitated toward the public-programs area of museums—an area that for many years has been in serious need of revitalization. The lecture format, a seemingly necessary medium of communication and a vital staple of academia, is constantly reviled and declared dead today, and for good reasons. Ever since the publication of Donald A. Bligh’s What’s The Use of Lectures? in 1971, there was been a general awareness of the limitations of this educational format and yet very little done to innovate on it. Through the work of Bligh and others, we have repeatedly received  prove that the lecture format is ineffective as a discussion method for promoting thought and that at best it is just as effective as other formats to transmit information, yet we continue to use this presentation formats that comes to us from the eighteenth century, a time when pedagogy consisted entirely of exposition and memorization.  The limitations of this method become clearest with the practice of a “read paper”—usually consisting of a poorly delivered, hard-to-assimilate piece of writing that is best read at home by oneself. Academics who attend art conferences deride even their own presentations as boring and excessively long but continue to perpetuate these archaic models. However, I believe that this  exasperation toward the traditional lecture format has finally reached the inner depths of the academic world, and in blogs and magazines, the lecture as we know it has been declared dead. A new type of lecture, the metalecture or lecture 2.0, must take its place.

In my role as programmer, I have frequently been frustrated by the low or nonexistent public-speaking skills of those who lecture and participate in academic discussions. While featured speakers usually have something relevant to say (which is what prompts an invitation to speak), very few of them are skilled public speakers or comfortable in a public forum, which translates into stiffness and social awkwardness, insincerity, and a general reluctance to open up toward an audience. Because most lectures are based on a written text, their unfolding is slow and their language excessively formal and heavy for a live reading. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if panels were like theater works, where drama has its hand in conveying the message? I thought, why aren’t there be dramaturges for art lecturers?—and I set out to become one.

Starting in about 1998 I started scripting stand-alone performance lectures. This eventually led to the incorporation of actors in symposia and panel discussions, which I first attempted in 2003 in collaboration with artist Ilana Boltvinik with The Congress of Urban Purification in Mexico City, and then again in 2004 at The First Imaginary Forum of Mental Sculpture at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens—both texts are included in this book. Not revealing the fact that actors were “interpreting” the papers and debates was key to maintaining the audience’s engagement without triggering the dismissal of the piece as yet another performance work. We All Are Streeter (2006), also included here, employed a similar theatrical strategy.

Another trait of the traditional lecture format that interests me is the narrowness of thematic focus that often results from the demands of scholarship. While extremely specialized topics are the logical result of academic-type research, their presentation in the shape of a lecture before a general audience can be alienating and, even if comprehensible, it leaves the general spectator questioning the larger relevance of the subject at hand. This issue becomes more and more aggravated because while the lecture remains set in its traditional presentation style, twenty-first-century auditoriums are filled with a new generation of viewers whose brains are wired for multichannel experiences and are capable of processing and making sense of the daily deluge of information that technology now provides. Symposia and panel discussions are better opportunities for comparing perspectives on a given subject, but the patience and focus needed to sit through, say, a six-hour symposium, can only be mastered by diehards, in the same way that only an opera aficionado would sit through the entire Götterdämmerung. The slowness of the traditional academic lecture became even more apparent as the Internet and the digital revolution took hold. In this era of pingbacks and multichannel viewing and processing, it is normal that the most animated discussions take place online instead of in actual physical spaces. This was the motivation for works like Theatrum Anatomicum (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2002) where I experimented with multichannel, “dueling” lectures about topics that were at first sight completely unrelated (such as twentieth-century Mexican telenovelas and seventeenth-century Dutch anatomical theaters) in order to shed light on both subjects and onto a larger umbrella topic.

[...]

Included texts in this anthology:

Theatrum Anatomicum (or How to Dissect a Melodrama) (2002)

First Mexico City Congress of Urban Purification (2003)

Parallel Lives (2003)

First Imaginary Forum of Mental Sculpture (2004)

The Foreign Legion (2005)

We All Are Streeter (2006)

Manifest Destiny (2008-09)

“Paralelamente al arte por el arte nacido del modernismo, la burocracia por la burocracia es la gran contribución humana a la hiper-modernidad. Sin embargo a diferencia del arte, que hoy se encuentra agotado, la burocracia continúa proli-ferando felizmente y expandiéndose en su paso inexorable. La burocracia es expresionista y abstracta a la vez de ser explícitamente social y política, características que difícilmente el arte más sofisticado de hoy es capaz de reunir.”

Hacia una estética de la burocracia es un libro de edición limitada creado para la trienal poligráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico, y escrito precisamente a raíz de la experiencia burocrática de ese evento. El libro es un breve ensayo que examina las varias vertientes creativas de la burocracia latinoamericana, y la manera en que estas superan en muchos aspectos al arte contemporáneo que se realiza en esas mismas regiones. El libro contiene una serie de diagramas que ilustran la forma en que la burocracia funciona como un medio performativo y creativo  y propone estrategias para maximizar la enajenación producida por los burócratas para así emanciparse en la historia del arte.

Toward an aesthetic theory of Bureaucracy is a limited edition book originally conceived for the San Juan poligraphic Triennial, specifically inspired from the bureucratic experiences  resulting from that event. The book is a small manifesto-like essay which examines the various aspects of bureaucratic procedures as a creative process in latin america, and the ways in which they supersede in many ways, creatively and imaginatively, to the contemporary art produced there. The book has a number of diagrams which show the way in which bureaucracy can function as a performative tool and further proposes ways by which bureaucrats can become emancipated to take over art history. (book currently in Spanish only).

(fragmento del libro a continuación):

INTRODUCCION

Paralelamente al arte por el arte nacido del modernismo, la burocracia por la burocracia es la gran contribución humana a la hipermodernidad. Sin embargo a di-ferencia del arte, que hoy se encuentra ago-tado, la burocracia continúa proliferando felizmente y expandiéndose en su paso inexorable. La burocracia es expresionista y abstracta a la vez de ser explícitamente so-cial y política, características que difícilmente el arte más sofisticado de hoy es capaz de reunir.

Y sin embargo, esta práctica esencial de carácterísticas globales ha sido menos-preciada por los críticos y filósofos, y par-ticularmente por los teóricos postcolo-nialistas. Erróneamente ellos han visto a la burocracia como un defecto corrigible ex-clusivo del tercer mundo, un doblez cultural que no tiene por qué existir y que no vale la pena siquiera analizar, como una enfer-medad de la cual ya conocemos los síntomas y el remedio. Nunca se habla de la burocracia como la gran tradición histórica que es, como la monumental expresión cultural que nos define como pueblos y que nos otorga una sofisticación creativa a nivel colectivo que compite con las construcciones artísticas más complejas de la humanidad. Esta omisión por parte de los teóricos, sin duda premeditada, ha contribuído a que las regiones donde estas expresiones se manifiestan de manera más original y creativa hayan quedado al margen de la historia del arte. Y finalmente sus practicantes —los burócratas— han quedado injustamente olvidados, a pesar de su prolífica labor que en una sola vida puede generar decenas de millones de páginas de archivo.

Los filósofos ultra-contemporáneos cuyas obras están en boga hoy en día en los cursos de curaduría —Agamben y Rancière— utilizan respectivamente la noción de potencialidad y emancipación como princi-pios clave para construír un arte que trans-forme a la sociedad. Si bien ambos filósofos nos dan una perspectiva certera y brillante acerca de la raison d’etre y evolución de estos procesos, aquí trataremos humilde-mente de demostrar que no son los artistas contemporáneos, sino los burócratas, los que son capaces de encabezar esta transfor-mación revolucionaria de nuestra cultura.

Además de tratar de iniciar un discurso para establecer y reivindicar los principios estéticos de la burocracia, este pequeño libro busca también  inspirar al burócrata a revalorar su oficio a través de contemplarlo no ya como una condena a vivir sentado(a) en un escritorio, sino como un ejercicio de creatividad en el que cada día y cada acto burocrático pueda ser ejercido y apreciado como el profundo gesto artístico que en realidad es. Pero antes de conseguir esa meta es preciso borrar algunas pre-concepciones claves acerca de la buro-cracia y también de ayudarle al lector a entrar en contacto con su gen burocrático.

Si bien la burocracia no es desafortu-nadamente la cualidad exclusiva de los países en vias de desarrollo —se podría afirmar que países como Estados Unidos tienen ya sectores enteros que simulan perfectamente al tercer mundo—  es un hecho que los países de la periferia tienen las condiciones idóneas para desarrollar este medio de una forma que los vuelva epicentros de la cultura mundial y que ayude a atraer la atención a ellos de forma que ni siquiera el turismo, la etnografía, las bienales internacionales o el arte folklórico han conseguido hacer.

EN BUSCA DE NUESTRO BUROCRATA INTERNO

Hay quienes al leer esto se digan a sí mismos: “pero yo no soy burócrata”. Esta es una reacción perfectamente natural. Pero la realidad es que todos tenemos un coe-ficiente burocrático en nuestros adentros, si bien más desarrollado en unos que en otros. Todo latinoamericano, por ejemplo, tiene un pro-fundo conocimento y ex-periencia en carne propia de lo que es la burocracia. Se estima, por ejemplo, que cada latinoamericano en promedio, a lo largo de su vida, dedicará el equivalente de 7,401 horas llenando solicitudes, 1,245 horas llenando las formas equi-vocadas, 789 horas firmando recibos y 793 horas firmando contrarrecibos, 1,444 horas frente a la fotocopiadora, dos años y medio en el teléfono haciendo trámites y siete años haciendo cola o sentado en una sala de espera.  Esta clase de experiencia en sí constituye el equivalente, como mínimo, a tener un doctorado en el tema —pero no solo eso:  está bien documentado que mientras más expuesto esté uno a la burocracia, más propenso es uno a practicarla uno mismo, es decir, a ejercerla sobre los otros.

Desafortunadamente el oficio burocrático está tan desprestigiado dentro de nuestra sociedad que la mayoría de nosotros lo practicamos con desgana o simplemente lo ejercemos inconscientemente sin reconocer nuestro verdadero potencial burocrático. El gran filósofo y padre de la hermenéutica Hans-Georg Gadamer dijo una vez: “todos somos los otros y todos somos nosotros mismos”, lo cual se puede parafrasear así: “todos somos la burocracia y todos somos nuestro propio burócrata.”

Con el fin de desarrollar este potencial interno, es fundamental aceptar de nuestra identidad burocrática y demostar las mane-ras en que se puede desarrollar, redirigir y enfocar nuestro talento burocrático de forma creativa y conceptual para lograr una vida espiritualmente rica y trascender la opacidad de una carrera estrictamente oficinesca.  Posteriormente se demostrará que el burocratismo, bien ejercido, funciona como un arma de defensa, con un grado de efectividad similar al Jiujitsu. Sobra decir que un burócrata talentoso que desarrolle sus dotes artísticas logrará generar el máximo nivel de burocracia posible, el cual a su vez generará la necesidad de contratar a más burócratas para sostener el sistema. Y es así,  como se verá, que la burocracia practicada como arte puede ser un acto de activismo social inusitado y transformativo, emancipando al arte del actual yugo de extrema eficencia, raciocinio e individua-lismo que le otorga el mercado.

Fig. II. Ejemplo de un laberinto burocratizado con seis círculos viciosos y ocho sesiones de trámites donde (a) es el individuo burocratizado, (b) es el actor burocratizador, (c) el supervisor del trámite, y (s) la salida. La línea divisoria entre (a) y (b) indica una exitosa división de impersonalidad para complejizar el proceso, y que hay una sano aislamiento de comunicación entre los tres individuos, para garantizar la mayor demora posible en la resolución del trámite.

BREVISIMA HISTORIA DE LA BUROCRACIA EN LATINOAMERICA

¿Cuál es el origen de la burocracia latinoamericana? Sería difícil probar que las sociedades precolombinas eran burocráti-cas. A juzgar a través de las relaciones históricas sobre la sociedad Azteca, por ejemplo, las estructuras legales encabe-zadas por el líder o Tlatoani muestran toda evidencia de haber sido bastante organi-zadas, y si bien sus sistemas de orden social y político eran algo sangrientos, no se puede decir que no fueran eficientes.   La burocracia latinoamericana se puede re-montar  más directamente a la jerarquía administrativa de la colonia, tanto del virreinato como de la iglesia, por el sencillo factor que las verdaderas decisiones no se podían tomar sino hasta del otro lado del océano y podían transcurrir meses o años antes de que una decisión fuera tomada o un permiso aprobado (tradición que gene-ralmente aún predomina en las mejores burocracias).

Cuando latinoamérica entra a la moderni-dad, si se sigue el razonamiento de Max Weber en torno a la ética de trabajo pro-testante, lo que se preservó en cambio fue la ética católica de la contrarreforma, que en vez que mirar al futuro miraba al pasado y a continuar las tradiciones burocráticas a como diera lugar, en particular aquellas que generaban más burocracia (en la filosofía burocrática, la noción de sim-plificación es considerada como un aten-tado a la tradición). En el siglo veinte, en latinoamérica al igual que en el resto del mundo se confrontan las virtudes y defectos de dos modelos socioeconómicos: socialismo y capitalismo. Mientras que en otras re-giones del mundo se buscó implementar una combinación de ambos modelos que funcione de manera más eficiente —por ejemplo, fusionar socia-lización de servicios en algunos sectores con el libre mercado en otros— en latinoamérica se busca en cambio fusionar los aspectos más imprácticos de ambos sistemas, como optar por el entero aparato socialista gubernamental pero establecido de manera antidemocrática, privatizar el mercado pero a través de monopolios, y promover la mayor desi-gualdad social posible— todos estos ingre-dientes fundamentales para generar la perfecta burocracia. Dicho de otra manera, la historia de latinoamérica nunca se ha definido por la democracia ni siquiera por la plutocracia, sino por la burocracia.

Everything in Between / The Boy Inside the Letter (2007) is a site-specific project made for the Queens Museum exhibition “Generation 1.5”

.

The project consists in two components: one, a multi-media installation showcasing diaries and artworks made between the ages of 17 to 21 (1988-1992), which cover a crucial transition from Mexico to the U.S. as well as art school years in Chicago and Barcelona. A recording narrates, in twenty sections, various of these entries.

The second component of the project is a short novel incorporating some of these diary entries, and written in the style of the Künstlerroman (or novel of artistic education). The book’s title is The Boy Inside the Letter and was published in 2008  by Jorge Pinto Books in New York.

The years documented in this project (1988-1992) were key to my development as an artist. My threefold quest for adulthood, national and artistic identity took place during those years, and much of my experiences then cemented a good part of my outlook on art and culture. I left Mexico City as a teenager wanting to be a muralist, and toward the end of this four-year period I was making conceptual art, questioning nationalism and most of the ideas about art that I had started with in the first place. The best way, in my mind, to present this complex period was to show some of the actual artworks and writings that I produced at that time. Artists often do not show their student or early work, due to understandable concerns as to its raw character and yet-to-be developed technique and ideas. But I felt it would be helpful to lift the curtain in this case, in order to showcase the complex web of ideals, infatuations, dilemmas and uncertainties that are somewhat true of every adolescence, and which perhaps acquire a heightened quality in the experiences of an immigrant teenager who is trying to become an artist.

(excerpts of the book below)

Interview on the project

Information on Queens Museum Exhibition

 Title  at Jorge Pinto Books

Three excerpts from The Boy Inside the Letter

ORO NO SONORO

Once again You are back, but this time in order to open that box down in the basement, sealed nearly twenty years ago, with Your name on it, waiting for this day.

The first thing is this sense of space, that open space that every springtime is spitefully cold but also enormously liberating, allowing one to deeply breathe the cold air from the bottom of one’s lungs, a total relief from the urban claustrophobia of where You are coming from. And yet, despite the Midwestern amplitude of this city everything nonetheless seems a little simpler and innocent, too naïvely clean, with carefully arranged flowerpots, like the setting for a children’s tale. Welcome to Chicago’s Midway Airport, Richard M. Daley, Mayor. On the moving walkway, You go past Harry Carray’s Seventh Inning airport Bar and think about that kind of local histories that never travel well. You still picture Your smiling dad at the passenger exit, next to the escalators with his puffy blue navy jacket and the car keys in his hand, still honoring the waning family tradition of awaiting each other at airports. That is just the introductory image of this city plagued by all the ghostly mirages and talking paintings that You know so well. The second thing is getting coffee at a Dunkin Donuts, because it reminds You that it was the only place open downtown during those student times of all-nighter performance rehearsals. And then it is essential to take this elevated train ride, so that You can slowly start acclimating to the city again and slowly take in again those years. Off You go on the car where everyone is asleep or bored, deeply imbedded in the blur of their daily office routine while You, in contrast, are highly aware of everything that is going on and look at the familiar gray and brown brick buildings go by along with the pre-recorded CTA announcements doors open on the left side at Ashland. Each subway stop is like a repository of anecdotes and sensations and feelings that are so rooted on such absurdly circumstantial events and moments that You wonder just how the most trivial experience can come to define our entire feeling about a whole era of our lives. At Halsted You think of the Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen and your many breakfasts at Cuernavaca restaurant with Encarnación, then Congress Avenue and the parties at the Hot House and Buddy Guy’s Legends. You see the old brownish brick Chicago buildings and think of Louis Sullivan around Adams and Wabash, where the true flooding of memories hit as if you were being chased the running of the Bulls: sitting with Bob Loescher at Miller’s Pub and looking at the jovial Greek mafia sitting at the bar, the luxurious lobby of the Palmer House where El Poeta once stayed and the echoey clanking of the dishes and the screeching of the wooden chairs against the floor of the now defunct Berghoff, which always felt like the counterpart of Prendes in downtown Mexico City; the Ryerson Library of the Art Institute, the humid summers and the varnish smell of the museum’s hallways, the Joseph Cornell boxes with their inner light and strange dolls and nostalgic views of imaginary hotels, a Chinese scroll in that museum that tells a story defying beginning, end or perspective, the years of office life and the turpentine smell of the painting classrooms, a first job at a sleepy student affairs office, the upper floor architecture studio and the memory of making out with Krystal amidst the drafting tables. Madison and Wabash is next. You see inside the offices of the buildings that pass by as if those were the ones in motion and not this elevated train, and remember when the faded 1980s blue and pink colors of the State of Illinois Building didn’t look like 80s colors but like a bold and dynamic architectural statement that could either become the epitome of style or a total blunder of taste, and now looks like the latter; at Merchandise Mart everything is really starting to come back and You pass the steel bridge and the river and the Al Capone touristy restaurants and start to imagine what if this were once again Your daily commute; and You remember those efforts that took a good chunk of Your life and yet appeared to be directed nowhere: a brief job at an arts campaign in an empty room answering a phone that never rang even once, writing articles in Spanish for a local newspaper that nobody read; producing art spots for a Spanish-language evangelical Moody Bible radio program that no one ever listened to, and of course, the first experience of nervously bringing slides to a River North gallery which were immediately rejected. At Belmont You can always spot the diner where the breakup with Krystal happened, even though it wasn’t even clear if there was anything to break up about in the first place, while on the other side sits the Vic theater, and the Red Sea Ethiopian restaurant and the Berlin, and then Southport where everyone used to get off to go to The Music Box movie theater and there is the ghost of that very long summer of 1992 and the various, failed attempts of writing a novel; but it is Damen which holds the image of smoking from that large Turkish pipe with Ginger and that levitating feeling while you two spoke about the compatibility of souls. As You are arriving where You used to live you see Lincoln Avenue, the very first stretch of Old Route 66, which now is truly in the middle of nowhere but still contains some of those all-American route 66 motels from the fifties like the Apache Motel, the Diplomat, the O-MI, all featuring “color TVs” and yet they always inexplicably full all the time (even if they were just for sex, why are the cars parked all day?), and there is the Daily Grill, and the image of being with Joe having chocolate martinis with the background of Benny Moré and Esquivel. Fred and The Jar Fly antiques bookstore are now gone, who knows since when, leaving just one more unanswered question. And finally Your stop, Western Station, and You recall that first winter and the feeling of always slipping on the ice out of weather inexperience, and the beat-up green 1981 Beetle your family drove from Mexico City to Chicago and which heroically survived all those years. Western station still looks exactly the same as it was nearly twenty years ago and even longer, like the Chicago Brauhaus, with its 1950s Bavarian orange interior, its perpetual Oktoberfest décor and its fading tourist pictures; the bar around the corner of the house that Nacho used to hit when he visited because it reminded him to Homer Simpson’s Moe’s. All the thrift stores and The Greek guys’ car repair shops and Delisi’s pizzeria and the pharmacies and Korean Karaoke joints around it look also identical, even though they try to disguise the passage of time with new signs and names and owners, but they don’t fool You because You know all too well that this is a city where change is permanent but it actually doesn’t change anything, and while all these places contain all these thoughts, they still feel as if they were nowhere places, places that always tried to become something but they never really became anything, the most irritatingly pointless locations where one would leave one’s most important pieces of one’

s life. When You see them you think about the naïve hopes one places in specific sites and the way we are sucked into them as black holes, and even when we extricate ourselves from them, the memories will stay there, stubbornly waiting for us for the day we come back, and so everything here in fact has remained somehow frozen in time since you left this city more than ten years ago, when You were still, perhaps, He.

But this one time is different. This is the last time that You will ever make this trip, because Your mother will finally move out of the apartment where You, your father and she lived together for all those years and now it is time to finally empty everything out, with all the things that you all once brought from Mexico and anachronistically placed here in West Rodgers Park, such as Your grandparents’ turn-of-the century living room set and the old books and the tapestries and the china, which always made the house look as a XIXth Century Euro-Mexican bazaar and the latter shipments of Your brother and Your aunt’s apartments, joining the collection of books and objects and endless items recently landed from Mexico and which serve as an intricate, baroque museum memorial collection to those who are gone. And your mother and your sisters and You agree that it is impossible to keep it all, but the family has always had the impulse of holding onto everything, maybe because of that too common immigrant feeling that history is always slipping away from one’s hands, and that if You trash things You may be dishonoring the one bridge that somehow still connects You to the dead. So they are all still there, in varying symbolic forms from the 1940s glass fruit bowls to your father’s metallic shoehorn inside the cabinet’s drawer with the inscribed legend “Zapaterías El Borceguí, Bolívar 5, Centro”

and you can see all of their faces in that room where your mother puts all the photos of the weddings of all generations, from the turn of the century to the present, silently smiling in black and white, inquisitively looking at You since You can remember.

And now it is Your turn to go to the basement and empty it out. It’s always dark in there, like a Midwestern catacomb. You pass through the giant fermented beer containers of Mr. Boehm, the German landlord, and the many piles of antlers from his hunting forays in Wyoming. There is always the pervasive smell of raw bratwurst. Miraculously, the old super-eight film projector is still there. You find the old easel, from the times of painting landscapes in Gompers Park. Way at the back of the humid basement, behind the wooden door in the corner, there they are, a number of boxes and one in particular that You are very familiar with, which has a faded name on it, FENIX ABRAXAS, and which later Your sister Maruca marked on top as PAPELES PABLO when she reorganized the basement a decade ago or so. You undergo indescribable feelings as You start digging through Your very own small biographical Tutankhamen tomb, unwrapping that bristly, moss-covered brown paper that envelops some of those remote artifacts that You both awaited and dreaded to open one day: diaries, letters, drawings and notes, postcards, tickets to the opera, rail maps, foreign currency coins, old erasers, a glue stick, all of which feel as if they had been made or owned by another person and yet who is way too familiar for You to set apart from Yourself. Most important are the diaries, which, even before You open them You already know that they are filled by that handwriting tilted to the right that is so precise that it makes You realize that you have been writing on a computer for so long that you aren’t capable to handwrite legibly anymore, and You know very well that those diaries are addressed specifically to You, to Yourself living in Your present, to Yourself who at the time when the diaries were written didn’t exist yet, another version of You who paradoxically was younger than You are now but at the same time was also older since He lived in earlier times than the ones You are living. He had the hope that You would open these diaries and read them, with the anxiety of that age that made Him feel in the deepest isolation and solitude, feeling misunderstood by everyone, and that strange decision of His that the only person who would understand Him, the only one who could possibly translate Him to others, who could be sympathetic to His ordeal without judging Him would be His own, supposedly mature self, when You could become the judge of His adolescent experiences. You admit that You are embarrassed about Him and had chosen to keep Him in the back of your mind, enclosed in that basement, like most people do with their younger selves, glad that He has almost vanished completely in the tunnel of oblivion. You always had nothing but derision toward those who try to relive their youthful moments through high school reunions, and to those who arrive at a mid-life crisis stereotypically searching on the internet for their old classmates at the wee hours of the night. You would like to be like any other of those artists who eventually destroy the creative attempts of their youth, as if they wanted to ensure that no one may know that they were once young and naïve and clueless about the world. But You could never do that—

who knows why; maybe due to sentimental attachment or to Your preternatural, congenital obsession with the past, or because You want to prove to Yourself that those years had some coherent meaning after all, or maybe because You know you would not be honest with Him nor with Yourself nor with all of Us, because some remnants of who We were at that point persist in Us, like stubborn traits that refuse to leave Us altogether. In looking at those drawings You think that adolescence may prepare us for adulthood, but nothing truly prepares us for adolescence because childhood is a playground of its own, and You admit that He deserves the benefit of the doubt and the second chance to speak that He requested You to facilitate, because at the end of the day You are indebted to the fact that He suffered so that You could go on to become whoever You became, for better or for worse. He never asked anything of You other than making sure He would be listened to one day, and there is no doubt that that day is now. As You are sitting at that dark basement in this West Rodgers Park house where He once lived, You start reading with skepticism, but gradually develop empathy, and this strange and somehow silly responsibility, but responsibility nonetheless, that starts becoming more and more tangible as You traverse through those hundreds of pages. You decide that You will write about what He lived, but also allow those diary entries to be read exactly as they were written, and You will only change a few names of some of the persons described in those pages so that they, wherever they may they be now in the world, may be spared from any embarrassment should they happen to read these pages. Predictably, the writing is clumsy and shamelessly romantic, but We all knew that, including Him, and You hope that those who read this may understand. Slowly, as in those family movie night sessions, when you would dim the lights and set the projector in motion, the clicking engine starts its evocative sound speeding up, the projected light falls onto the screen and the clock-like wipe of the decreasing numbers on the screen, the smells and the colors subtly turn back on in Your mind, the subtle internal circuits in Your brain are triggered by those small madeleine crumbles of thoughts and events that He described each day with great precision on thick humid summer days and bleak winter nights, obedient to the single rule that He had imposed to Himself, and never broke, that whatever the circumstances He would always write without scratching a single line and telling things exactly as they were happening and crossing in His head, without any embarrassment, sending fear, modesty and humility to hell, because only by writing truthfully could He aspire to be truthfully absolved:

–

Por el pasadizo del tiempo diré lo que soy y lo que he sido, dos contrarios, dos presencias de luces que no se van jamás, las luces del jardín que iluminaron las noches de la infancia, nuestras reuniones secretas: eran la reminiscencia de la fiesta, de la primera fiesta que quise hacer un día y cuando mi padre me llevó una tarde gris, sin luz pero hermosa por sus claroscuros a la ferretería para comprar los focos de colores que colgarían para siempre en la enredadera, como un enorme árbol de navidad, en los que yo me quería esconder en el rincón para perderme entre las ramas, el musgo y las esferas, en donde cada luz era la puerta de un nuevo mundo de rincones, destellos y secretos, y quería colgar de una rama, desaparecer, o vivir siempre como una luz, siempre presente, siempre como testimonio de algo que nunca supe lo que era pero que era importante que existiera; el final de una fiesta, cuando ya nadie salía del patio y todo había quedado allá afuera, iluminado sin que nadie lo viera y que por eso, al salir yo de niño, me parecía mágico y triste, porque de alguna manera intuía que estaba en un lugar que nadie veía y que era como si no existiera, y que estaba yo, pero a veces yo tampoco estaba, no me consideraba espectador ni testigo ni nada en especial, mientras que otras veces sí me daba cuenta que yo era el único que sí estaba ahí y que era el único que podia salvar esa visión al mundo y eso me hacía sentirme importante, y desde entonces el jardín fue un lugar a donde siempre iba en momentos especiales; varias noches sentía que debía de ir al jardín después de cenar y salía a la terraza donde estaba el enchufe oxidado y mohosos que Papá había instalado hacía varios años y siempre me sorprendía que sí servía y que las luces de colores del jardín aparecían de entre su escondite de la enredadera, como si hubieran estado esperando ese momendo desde antes, pero siempre escondidas para aparecer de nuevo la siguiente vez, y allí llevé a mis amigos y los hice sentarse en el jardín para hablar de lo que creíamos eran los temas más profundos de la vida, pero nunca les expliqué que había decidido hacer nuestras reuniones secretas en el jardín porque ahí estaban esas luces que habían presenciado las cosas de mi vida; luego fui adolescente y sufrí como un tonto, enamorándome decididamente de alguien que nunca me quiso ni escuchar, pero eso es otra historia—

sin embargo yo me afectaba a mí mismo, y en una mezcla de orgullo por mi creencia que el ser romático es una situación artística favorable y el dolor deseoso del mismo enamoramiento ávido, me consumía a mí mismo en pensamientos, sufría días enteros frente al teléfono, pero más que nada iba al jardín, y a pesar de ser tan cursi jamás hablé solo ni con las cosas, sino que mi conversación en el jardín era una caminata en círculos cuando regresaba de la escuela y aún había sol proyectado en el pasto; conforme avanzaba el día, la sombra del techo se iba comiendo al sol hasta que de pronto solo quedaban unas manchas en la enredadera y luego nada, pero después de comer corría al jardín porque tenía que llegar en el momento en el que aún había sol porque eso me recordaba al momento de la salida de la escuela , cuando el patio estaba bañado de sol y en los que yo desesperaba de nervios, proque todos los días sin excepción yo me juraba que finalmente le iba a hablar a la niña que me gustaba, pero nunca lo hacía y además del dolor de estómago causado por el nerviosismo sentía no frustración pero sí una especie de tristeza profunda por mí mismo, una autocompasión que a veces me irritaba pero que nunca pude abandonar del todo, y a la salida, cuando ella ya se había ido, y mis amigos también, y quedaban los patios vacíos, llenos de sol que yo también recorría, y que como el jardín me parecían como la página donde se había escrito una historia pero que de pronto se había borrado y había quedado luminosamente en blanco, solo con la reminiscencia de mi memoria y en las fotografías de los anuarios de la escuela, y luego, cuando regresaba en el coche que me recogía con el calor infernal de los tránsitos de México, pensaba cómo todo desaparecería, hasta mi compasión por esos momentos perdidos, que en realidad era lo único que era más o menos tangible, y al llegar a la casa el jardín era el único lugar a donde podía ir para sentirme más cercano a ella, y a veces buscaba en los anuarios de la escuela, los sábados por la mañana, para encontrar las fotos en las que ella estaba, y luego acababa viendo las fotos de mis hermanos de los años setenta y me daba cuenta de cómo en ellos estaban los mismos patios soleados, presentes sólo en esas fotografías que si yo hubiese sido pequeño me habría preguntado si no emanaban luz; pero lo veía todo perdido, y me asustaba cuando ellos decían que habían odiado la escuela y que estaban felices que todo eso hubiera acabado para siempre, y me preguntaba y me decía que yo no podia traicionar ese pasado, que se perdería para siempre si yo no hiciera algo por recuperarlo, porque no podia creer que esos patios soleados que el jardín soleado pudieran desaperecer con todo lo que había pasado en ellos, pero luego terminé la escuela, se vendió mi casa y nos mudamos a un departamento, y mi Mamá me convenció de dejar las luces oxidadas en la enredadera diciendo que ya no servían para nada y que me iba a electrocutar, sin comprender mi fijación por ellas, y yo tuve que ceder porque después de todo no sabía bien ni qué era lo que significaban para mí ni qué haría con ellas, de manera que el señor que compró la casa las ha de haber arrancado, porque aunque nunca regresé al jardín supe que habían pavimentado ahí y que todo había cambiado, y sentí como si se hubiera muerto un amigo lejano, y luego partí de México y pasaron muchos años sin que yo regresara, y es hasta posible que no regrese nunca; y ahora vivo en una ciudad donde los jardines son hermosos pero no son nada privados sino todos expuestos, sin chiste, detestables, y a veces veo una lámpara que ilumina los arbustos del jardín y pienso en las luces de la enredadera, y entonces me acerco a ese lugar y trato de esperar a que pase algo pero nunca pasa nada y pienso que no será mi luz de todos modos o que yo ya he olvidado cómo guardar secretos en los jardines

(1992)

—

“We’ll take him with Pancho”.
Pancho Eppens was a short, bald man, of Swiss and Potosino descent, with big ears and intense blue eyes behind thick glasses, extremely gentle, and shy. He was 73, but he looked twenty years older. He was one of the last surviving muralists from Siqueiros’ generation. Toward the fifties he had become an ‘official artist’

, making countless mural commissions for government buildings and many of the works that played on the revolutionary rhetoric, with bare-chested, muscular women carrying rifles and worker symbols.

My dad took me to see him with the hopes that the old muralist would take me, a 14 year-old kid, as his painting student. He had his studio in sunny Colonia del Valle, a place covered by his giant oil paintings. He smoked permanently. Every time he coughed it sounded like he was going to die. He told us that he didn’t teach—

nor had he never taught anyone. He recommended instead to a white-bearded friend of his, named Zapata, who had a small art school at home.

My classes with Zapata were short-lived. On the first class, there was live figure drawing, and we had to draw a spectacular-looking nude model. I was in heaven, but my father disapproved and went back to Pancho, begging him this time to take me. In the end, Pancho reluctantly agreed.

I would get there every Saturday. He would sit in his large armchair, right behind where I was working, which made me incredibly nervous as I felt he was inspecting every brushstroke I would make. On the first day, he said: “vamos a pintar unos magueyes”

. I obviously must not have known how to paint a maguey, because after my first attempt he took me across the street to look at some live specimens of this cactus plant.

I would paint all day, surrounded by his huge canvasses, which didn’

t take long to influence me. Apparently, he had not ever been too concerned with aesthetic questionings: he had happily embraced forever the nationalist Mexican imagery of the 1930s, painting Zapatistas, eagles, serpents, and other staples of the nationalist movement.

Pancho was a man of very few words, which made him a strange instructor. Nor did he have too much interest in artistic individuality: he basically taught me to draw like him. One time he tried to show me something about human anatomy. He pulled out an ancient, yellowish disintegrating anatomy book from the 1920s (which obviously he used himself as a student) to show me how to draw biceps.

Most of the times he would just sit there all day, silently, in his large armchair, smoking and coughing, shrouded by the cigarette smoke and the high sunlight beams coming from his studio windows, as if he was some sort of Pre-Columbian idol. But every now and then he would break the silence make a comment, startling me every time he started speaking. Most of them were like autobiographical footnotes, as if he had been reviewing his own life in silence and would only tell me the “by the way” sections. Almost always they were fascinating memories from his artistic youth. He had been very good friends with Enrique González Camarena, another major muralist. Both had gotten involved in the muralist movement in its heyday (Pancho’s first murals were made in the early 30s). He worked alongside Rivera and Siqueiros in creating murals for the University of Mexico in the 1950s, and he had redesigned the national coat of arms of the Mexican flag in the 60s, when president Diaz Ordaz had requested a more aggressive image of the eagle. He had incredible anecdotes about Diego Rivera and Dr. Atl. Mostly, he admired Diego’s working stamina. “he would sit there, painting the murals for days and days, and he would never take a break”. It was during those days of weekly eyewitness accounts of Mexican art history that I became curious about the own education of the muralist generation and I started reading Olivier Debroise’

s biography of Diego when he was a student in Paris, Diego de Montparnasse. The book was somewhat of a revelation to me. I knew that if I wanted to be an artist I would have to leave.

I went every Saturday to Pancho’s house for almost three years. One day, he told me: “I am going to give you a vacation”

.

I never returned from that vacation. A few months later Pancho passed away.