Beauty for Ashes (Ernie Sandidge), Video, 9:51m 2010

Beauty for Ashes is a project about the contemporary practitioners of realist/academic painting and their complex relationship with the contemporary art world. In 1863, the creation of the Salon des Refusés in Paris, which broke with the French Academy, led to the birth of the modern art movement, resulting in the eventual establishment of the avant-garde in galleries and museums worldwide. Almost 150 years after, many artists continue to work with the same shared aesthetic concerns of the classic Western canon, grounded mainly on traditional figurative representation and taking craftsmanship as the central value of their works. The use of irony versus sincerity emerges as a key philosophical divide between contemporary art and those in search for the restoration of traditional aesthetic values of beauty.

This project, which includes a small publication, a video documentary and an exhibition of works by the interviewed artists, examines their perspective and posits questions about the way in which contemporary art defines its historical present.

Beauty for Ashes is being presented in May 2010 as part of the exhibition Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art, curated by Anik Fournier, Michelle Lim, Amanda Parmer and Robert Wuilfe of the Whitney Independent Program.

The salon exhibition as part of this project includes the works of Katie Claiborne, Michael De Brito, Madora Frey, Anina Gerchick, Laura Gilbert, and Ernie Sandidge.

[Exhibition text]

BEAUTY FOR ASHES

Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

Isaiah 61:3

To Robert Rosenblum

(1927-2006)

Art history is kind to those who attempt to move its narrative forward, but is contemptuous to those who refuse to look for new forms and instead content themselves with ones from the past. These kinds of artists, unlike outsider artists, are well aware of art history, are generally trained and educated in it, but either for lack of desire or interest, remain distanced with the theoretical debates of the present, turning into outcasts, or rendering themselves invisible to the contemporary art system, resigned to their peripheral existence from the dominating art world.

The refusal to belong to one’s own time is not a new phenomenon. Every now and then, a handful of these “reactionary rebels” (like Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth) are admitted into the annals of art, albeit with a certain discomfort, coming to occupy prominent — if isolated— hallways of an art museum without quite fitting into the canonical narratives of Modernism. Over the course of time the anachronism of those artists, if still unforgiven by most art historians, is rarely a concern to the average museum visitor (Nighthawks or Christina’s World, while art-historically anachronistic, have found their places by force of their popularity and iconic timelessness). This is often the case with other art forms. Is it troubling to us today that Rachmaninoff was composing XIXth century music in the XXth century—well past the time of the emergence of the most dynamic work of the Russian Avant-Garde? From the standpoint of the average XXIst century classical music listener, it doesn’t matter much if his works were composed a few decades later.

Similarly, our obsessive fascination with timelines and evolutionary thinking makes us forget that generations of artists at any given period coexist at one particular time. A history of art of the early 1920s should equally document the rise of Surrealism and Dada as much as the fact that Monet was still alive and actively working on his Water Lilies. Yet, despite the proven impurity and porosity of our grand narratives, our record-keeping mechanisms of journalistic criticism, scholarship and museum collecting primarily document the present through the new forms, while secondary narratives, like old conversations, often recede and exile themselves into other realities.

The prevailing, if rarely explicitly spoken, view of those concerned with constructing, debating and chronicling the present —curators, artists, critics— is that those secondary conversations are at best of little, if any, interest. And yet, this vague desire to continue the semi-Hegelian impulse on the evolution or progress of art is unsatisfactory when art-making today resembles less of an advancement of new ideas than a hodgepodge of debates and references to previous ones, when one observes that artists continue to refer to all sorts of previous modern and post-modern narratives from hard abstraction to land art. Times change, indeed, but do our art forms? What if, God forbid, our cultural moment seen fifty years from now were to be regarded as a vast, reprise —imaginative perhaps, but ultimately a reprise— of Postmodernism? Writers like Nicolas Bourriaud have tried to solve this problem by introducing the —unfortunately also unsatisfactory— term “altermodern,” attempting to add a third chapter to the modern and post-modern narrative. The question is: what are the ultimate overriding values and ideas that we, as contemporary art producers today, subscribe to, and how do they differ, if at all, from those of the past? We may never know the answer until we truly understand those aesthetic ideas that we have broken with, and what that rejection says about us today.

Nowhere is this aesthetic break clearer, or the divorce greater, than between the contemporary art world and the art practices that can loosely be grouped as those of the art academies. Generally described as realist, academic or figurative, the artists who made this kind of work share the aesthetic principles of mid XIXth century art as the dominant tenets of their artistic discourse.

The implicit philosophical breakup with academic art goes back to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where he attacks an art that is only rooted in the appeal to the senses instead of a cognitive, collective discourse. In 1863, with the creation of the Salon des Refusés in Paris, an effective bifurcation in art making led to the birth of the modern art movement and the eventual establishment of the avant-garde in galleries and museums worldwide. Amidst the vertiginous changes that the avant-garde provoked throughout the XXth century, academically inspired art took a secondary and silent place to a reduced and conservative market.

In the XXth century, Clement Greenberg equated academic painting with kitsch. Academic art communities today have thus created their own ecosystem of validation and support, as well as their own market and context. Grounded mainly on traditional figurative representation and taking craftsmanship as the central value of their works, some of these artists, led by realists like Odd Nerdrum, have defiantly self-defined themselves as kitsch, openly breaking with the notion that they produce art of their own time. The use of irony versus sincerity emerges as a key philosophical divide between contemporary art and those in search for the restoration of traditional aesthetic values of beauty. Whether referred to as academicism, figurativism, realism, or kitsch, the world created by these artists is one permeated by a profound idealism and nostalgia, at times resentful and in its own way rebellious, resulting from a sharp rejection of the values held by today’s art. A text written by an “anonymous student” on Odd Nerdrum’s website is perhaps the best example of a rejection of the contemporary world:

A greeting to you, gifted one, you who want to attain sincerity in your work. You are a stranger to your time, but do not loose [sic] heart! I know Art feels unpleasant to you; you have become a slave beneath an aristocracy of incompetents. Art was never meant for people like you. Art has its justification – the untalented need comfort – but so do you. You have been ashamed of your ability too long. So long as the skillful craftsman can only aspire to defeat, a great injustice is done. Know this: without you as a subjugated guarantor, the incompetence of Art becomes worthless. The money and honor obtained by artists rightfully belong to you, so take them back! Put an end to the humiliation, withdraw from Art and let it complete its fall into worthlessness. The 19th century was the twilight of talent; take part in its dawn. Through Kitsch the talented one can save himself. It is a new discipline in which skill finds a superstructure. A superstructure serving the genius of ability. Do not allow Art to retain its moral authority over ability.

Today for an artist to discard the entire history of the avant-garde and pursue a private dialogue with Rembrandt or Vermeer would strike contemporary art adepts as an act of self-induced deception, and the ideas or works that emerge from this world hardly worth the time of those who have been following a century and a half of aesthetic debates. Yet why is it that we don’t hold the same standards to those artists who still are clearly engaging with modernist ideas that are also nearly a hundred years old?

Rather than vindicating or condemning either the contemporary or academic art worlds, it may be revealing to study the reason of the persistence of the academy almost 150 years after the challenge of modern art, at the current juncture of “art after the end of art”. At a time when contemporary art language grapples with replacing the remaining postmodernist legacy of rendering pure feeling or pure beauty as suspect, recurring to terms like “new sincerity”, and reinserting human dimensions into the frameworks of post-minimalism, the fate of the academy and its idealistic search for sincerity and sentiment may prove to be a fertile ground to initiate a reflection on contemporary art’s dependence on irony. This doesn’t mean that one should have to recur to representation or to the formats of the academy: Greenberg notwithstanding, Abstract Expressionists, in their earnestness, were closer to Manet than they are to Richter.

In his famous novel Of Human Bondage (1915), Somerset Maugham narrates the life of protagonist Philip Carey, a man in search for meaning in his life. In one episode of this search he decides to become an artist and stereotypically moves to Paris. In the contemporary time period of the novel, he enters the academy around that mythical time when Cubism and other avant-gardes are being born— although in the narrative we see an environment closer to La Bohème. His ordeal, as well as those of his peers, is dreadful, as he is an impoverished as well as a mediocre artist doing his best to achieve notoriety. His teachers, and we as readers, know that his project is futile. In the end he gives up art making, and moves on to other quests.

Somerset Maugham originally intended the title of the work to be Beauty for Ashes, but eventually abandoned it as it had been taken by another, now-forgotten novel. Yet it has struck me that the title is evocative of a belief in art-making as deliverance, an idea that once was fervently held and which we in the contemporary art system are so estranged from. Or are we? Do we secretly hope for it, but instead protect ourselves with cynicism? Do we still hope for art to generate emotional and intellectual kingships, but refute that we engage in such idealistic desires? As we ask ourselves these questions, we may realize that those who make contemporary art and those who see themselves in dialogue with the XIXth century are ultimately not that different in their way of understanding the problem of being an artist in the XXIst century. These are questions that we can’t formulate quite clearly at this time —at least I can’t— because they exist in our present moment. The discussion may revolve around the choice that we face: to either make art as a place to lose ourselves in it as ourselves—as the Romantics did— or in hoping that we can project ourselves as someone else—as the cynics do. Both choices, nonetheless, imply a desire to freedom from history.

Pablo Helguera

New York City

May 2010

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.

Paradise (2005-2009)
3-channel video installation, 8:30 min.
Black and White, silent

Paradise was commissioned by the Bronx Museum for the Grand Concourse exhibition. This work resulted from  researching the history of three buildings on the Grand Concourse that contain particularly unique stories. The first of them is the Paradise Theater, a grand palace cinema theater which opened in 1929, a few weeks before the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. The Paradise, which went through many periods and narrowly escaped demolition, remains as one of the sole survivors of the great “atmospheric” palace theater era, and retains a powerful symbolism for Bronx residents as a place of escape and leisure during hard times.  The second building addressed  is the Andrew Freedman Home, another palatial building of sorts, located just across the street from the Bronx Museum. The Freedman Home was a luxurious retirement place for people who had once been millionaires but had lost their fortunes, providing its residents with fully covered accommodations at no cost. The idea behind this residence was in the will of Andrew Freedman, a quiet and eccentric New York transportation mogul who believed that those who had once experienced wealth would need greater comfort than others who had always lived in poverty. Over the years, the home functioned as originally intended by its founder, although in later decades the endowment of the institution was reduced and eventually transformed it into a regular community center. Like the Paradise Theater, the Andrew Freedman home languished over the years and greatly deteriorated, going from being an impressive structure to a decayed and seemingly abandoned building.

The last building in the project is the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, a small 19th century house located at Kingsbridge Road and Grand Concourse where Poe spent the last years of his life and wrote some of his best known works such as “Eureka”, “Annabel Lee”, and “The Bells”.  Poe moved to this house in 1846,  a time when the Bronx was a bucolic area, with the intent of finding a restful haven for his young wife, Virginia, who has ill and he hoped would benefit from the country air. Virginia Clemm was Poe’s cousin and had married him still as a child, at age 14. Virginia’s health deteriorated and she died of Tuberculosis in January of 1847.
The texts that appear in the video relating to this house belong to Poe’s own writing around that time (“Landor’s Cottage” (1849) which is believed to be directly inspired in his Fordham cottage) as well as the only poem known to have been written by Virginia Poe— a Valentine poem written in the style of an acrostic (a poem that spells out the phrase “Edgar Allan Poe” if one reads the first letter of every line):

E ver with thee I wish to roam -
D earest my life is thine.
G ive me a cottage for my home
A nd a rich old cypress vine,
R emoved from the world with its sin and care
A nd the tattling of many tongues.
L ove alone shall guide us when we are there -
L ove shall heal my weakened lungs;
A nd Oh, the tranquil hours we’ll spend,
N ever wishing that others may see!
P erfect ease we’ll enjoy, without thinking to lend
O urselves to the world and its glee -
E ver peaceful and blissful we’ll be.

paradise-ii_freedman

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg was presented in October 2008 in downtown Manhattan as the inaugural exhibition of the alternative space Forever & Today. For a month, the gallery was turned into a card-reading parlor into which street visitors would enter and pay for a card reading.

Visitors were given a text that described the process of the reading of the cards and the history of the problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg.  (see below)

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg

(An Accompanying Text That Does Not Explain Anything)

NYC

2008

Throughout his eighty years of life, Immanuel Kant never traveled beyond the outskirts of his native Königsberg. His absence of travel experience, which even in his time and for a person of his stature were unusual, and yet for the philosopher this was most decidedly not a reflection of a sedentary spirit. It certainly was never apparent to his students, who usually were impressed by his detailed descriptions of European cities and his erudite knowledge of world affairs.  We are also told by De Quincey and Wasianski that Kant also was a constant stroller, and had such a rigorous and precise walking schedule after dinner that his neighbors would adjust their clocks when the philosopher passed by.

Kant placed great importance to periods of silence and reflection. During his entire adult life, and particularly during a period known as his “silent decade” when he wrote The Critique of Pure Reason, the philosopher would spend his evening strolls reflecting upon what he had read earlier in the day. When Kant would return home, he would sit in his study and spend some time reading, and continue his reflections while looking out the window looking at the old tower of Lobenicht.

Kant’s walking path is not described by his biographers, but in late XVIIIth Century Königsberg it would have been hard not to include its various bridges, which join two islands and each other with the mainland. It would also be hard not to imagine that Herr Kant, while crossing them, would not have thought more than once about the famous problem of The Seven Bridges of Königsberg. The problem was to prove on whether it is possible to follow a path that crosses each bridge exactly once and return to the starting point. The solution to the problem was provided during Kant’s youth by the Swiss scientist Leonhard Euler, the preeminent mathematician of the Eighteenth century. Euler, who introduced much of the terminology of modern Mathematics and Physics, proved in 1736 that it was impossible to cross the seven bridges of Königsberg in a continuous path only once. He reformulated the problem in abstract terms, creating a graph that eliminated all features of the problem except the list of landmasses and the bridges connecting them. Next he observed that during any walk in the graph, the number times one enters a non-terminal vertex (or bridge) equals the number of times one leaves it. Since (in this case) at most two landmasses can serve as the endpoints of a putative walk, the existence of a walk traversing each bridge once leads to a contradiction.

Euler’s solution to The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is generally considered as a foundational theorem that led to the birth of Topology and Graph Theory, which is in turn the guiding principle of modern computation. Euler’s thought, in a larger sense, was influential in Kant as he developed a philosophy that countered skeptical empiricism and used logic to arrive to an absolute moral and spiritual laws.

Königsberg suffered three stages of destruction. The first stage took place in 1944, when the British Royal Air Force raided the city. The second stage was an assault of the Soviet Army in April 1945.  In 1946 the city was ceded to the Soviet Union and its name was changed to Kaliningrad under the Postdam Agreement. The third period of destruction lasted from 1945 until the 1980s. The ideological task of that period, set by the Soviet government, was the construction of a new Russian city. This task presupposed the deliberate extermination of everything reminiscent of the German/Prussian past. Traits of the old Königsberg recognizable in its ruins ought to have been erased. Blocks of buildings as Kneiphof and Altstadt, the northern part of Vorstadt and southern Lobenicht were demolished almost completely.

The present card system functions around the principle of establishing a topology of the present by laying the foundations of the past, in the form of four figurative “landmasses” that become the primary set of four cards: The Present, the Final Outcome, The Past, and The Unresolved Past. Further, and establishing an Eulerian Circuit of sorts, seven cards are set, as bridges onto the primary cards to establish the interconnections between causes and effects.

THE LAYING OF THE CARDS

The cards are to be laid out following the original structure of the city of Konigsberg.

The first four cards are laid out in a cross format. Each corresponds to a landmass, or, in the symbolism of the cards, to yourself in the present situation faced with the past, the final outcome, and the unresolved past.

Each one of the seven cards that will bridge these four components will be laid down.

The first card to be laid is the one bridging Yourself to the Past.  This card helps establish the way in which the past influences your present situation, and the way in which it becomes a positive or detrimental factor in influencing the present situation.

The second card to be laid is the one bridging The Past with The Unresolved Past. This second card helps establish the way in which that which is unresolved came about, and what are the origins of this issue that has not yet been addressed.

The fourth card to be laid bridges The Past with the Third Bridge.  This is the second most significant card, as it connects the lower half of your life and your situation, summarizing the nature of the question, the issues of the past, and its relationship to the present.

The fifth card to be laid is the one bridging The Unresolved Past to Yourself. This card helps clarify the situation or reason by which that which remains unresolved may become or is currently an issue to be considered in the present situation. Often this card helps reveal the presence of a person who is important in this situation.

The third card to be laid is the one bridging The Unresolved Past with the Final Outcome. It is the first bridging card that connects to the future, and the one that may lay the foundation to understand in which sense the way in which previous events may link to what is to come.

The sixth card to be laid is the one bridging Yourself in the Present Situation with The Final Outcome.

The seventh and last card is the one bridging the third bridging card with the Final Outcome, providing the last statement of the system.

CARD NOMENCLATURE

1. The Lighthouse

This card relates to being a spectator or witness of an event. It connects with the ability to see from far away, perhaps see the future with clarity. The private becomes public. It is a card of revelation. Someone or something that is guiding us. Looking for the comfortable home, comfort food.

1. Cat’s Cradle

This is the card of childhood games. Old lessons that we learned in school. This card is often connected to family problems, and also to how we are attracted to those problems as adults. This card represents competitiveness, our place in the ambiguity of being dependent or being independent.

1. Pillory

A problem that we don’t seem to be able to solve by ourselves. An embarrassing situation that is made public in front of others. Issues that apparently are simple to others but not to ourselves. Lack of confidence, a labyrinth without a labyrinth, a complex situation that we are not even able to describe or articulate.

1. Temple

This card represents our inner sanctuary, our personal memory: the places (periods of time or physical spaces) that are important to us. Damage that has been done to us, to someone or to something that in a way has also been comforting or has brought positive things (the good that has been brought by something bad).

1. Consent

This is the connecting card of this deck. It stands for the outer layer of everything. It also stands for veiled vanity: our inability to see makes us very comfortable.

1. The Windmill

This is the card for the construction of imaginary places. It is the card of the idealists, and stands for the construction of dreams.

1. Marienbad

Déjà vu, that which is repeated. This card stands for the presence of something or someone in our lives but we are not certain that it is there. We think we are being observed, and we feel we are in an unfamiliar place, but at the same time the sense of unfamiliarity is oddly familiar.

1. Holiday.

Looking inside to what nourishes us. Those remote places of comfort, those places where we feel very comfortable, places of escape while we know there is war going on elsewhere cow’s milk and all those domestic commodities.  A possible danger that is hovering over ourselves. Oblivion. It is a card of denial.

1. Actor

There is something that we can’t detect. Don’t lose your face in spite your nose. Follow your instincts. There may be a storm coming up soon and you may not realize it at this moment.

1. Station

The light at the end of the tunnel. The end of a sickness. Exchange. Coming out from dark to light. This is a transitional card.

Generally, something very difficult or very bad is ending. But you could also be imagining that things are improving. Slow game.

1. Martir

We never know the mechanisms of history. Enigmas that are hard to decipher. There is a story behind of which we will never know the true details. This is the card for the conspiracy theorists. It is the card of the absurd decisions and the message that there are decisions that you can never back track from.

1. The Tomb of the Algonquians

Exploring an unknown place. This is the time to analyze your own past, to talk to the elders, or to whoever is the person that has the institutional memory, because there it is where you will find the clues. This is the place where some things are incredibly ephemeral and other stay forever, like death. This is the card of the in between place between the cradle and the mausoleum, between complete ignorance and total knowledge, the card that tells you that both are so close to each other that it is easy to miss them.

1. Nursery

A place where things originate. But it is an artificial place, and it is a card for those who feel vulnerable.  Things are growing but could die very easily. It is possible to make things flourish if one knows how to nurture them, but one has to be careful and caring. It means that one has the ability to make things work, but that this ability does not come in a spontaneous manner. It is the card of the good student, but not for the ones who are naturally talented.

1. Extinction.

Something that is quickly going away or has already left. This is the card that, more than the others, establishes the sense of passing of things. But like in sunsets or breaks of dawn, there is something revelatory in that moment, whether it is a good or bad moment. We will learn a lot of things about ourselves by fleeting things.

1. River-bed

This card stands for the denouement of events. Something is going to finish, and that which was not very clear will now be clear in all its mechanisms. It will not finish with a whimper, but with a bang. It is not a positive card, and may describe a situation that has reached a critical point.

1. Music Room

This is a card that stands for all that we were taught. It also stands for sensibility and the transformation of something into art. It connects to the memory that music provides, and how it transports us to another time. That which contains time and memory, could be an object or could be a person. Melodic geography, how a place is constructed individually. This is the card for the talented and for the studious. Something is boring, and there is arduous work behind what you are trying to do.

1. Cicada

A card relating to a scene or a place where something unresolved happened. The underground again, things we cannot see. A ritual, a periodic occurrence that we may or may not be aware about, but that is connected with our own rhythms. The card points to secret rituals and to the fact that nature is always wiser than us. Things continue whether we are here or not in the world. This is the card for those in need for structure in their lives, and for the selfish- things are larger than what you think they are.

1. Turnstile

A card about the notion of rebound and walking in circles. Other people are making you go where you don’t want to go or where you have been already. You are in a vicious cycle. You are in love, or playing a pointless or dangerous game, and in any case you are a little lost, so it is time to reassess your values and your objectives.

1. Battle Horse

A card that relates to the notion of figurative blindness.  This is the card for those who think are experts but have a hard time questioning themselves. You have a particular talent or knowledge that you know how to exploit, but that also makes you weak or limits you because you cannot look for any other areas of value in your life. It does become a shield, a protective cocoon.

1. Beehive

A card that points to being driven by something deceptive or something that may prove to be costly. This is also a card for mirages, for the sense of having been illuminated, but instead having been deceived.

1. Umbrella

This card often points to something has come up that in other circumstances would have been very useful, but not now. This is the card for those with bad timing and who feel to be in a lonely situation. However, it is a card that speaks to those in a challenging situation but that have the abilities and the energy to overcome it. It is a card for those undergoing a dry spell and feeling that there is no real escape for the ordeal they are going through.

1. Chameleon

Depending on the position of this card, it is about someone’s transformation or the transformation of a situation.  It is a card for those who are in flux, and who are highly adaptable to change. It indicates a situation that is highly volatile, where it is equally possible that you may win or lose to a great degree. Normally people cannot appreciate your great adaptability, but that is because you are able to become invisible. It is a card for those who are able to blend in and can respond to their surroundings without being emotionally affected, who stay above the fray but at the same time are able to fit in.

Never seen species.

1. Concorde

Something finally has worked out or will be working out, but also this card is about the deals that lead nowhere. You may have made a business decision that has not or will not work out. Be careful about where you go.

1. Dinosaur

The card signals the end of something. Something hasn’t been explained, and events have taken place quite quickly, but still the main reason is very evident. There is someone behind this, and likely someone you know.

1. Bell

An event or series of events that are coordinated. This is a card for harmony and for announcing positive events, such as a wedding. You may have something positive with you but perhaps you are not announcing it properly to the rest of the world.

1. Swimmer

The swimmer is a character that perfects his abilities, but only to do one single thing.

This is the card for expertise, and for experts. The swimmer knows his objective, but at the same time suffers from lack of perspective and has a hard time looking at the big picture. This is a card for independent people.

1. Pendulum

Something needs to be measured. You are the measurement of the situation. You are the person whom others depend for their help and expertise, but you feel lost, and sometimes you don’t know who to trust. First children and only children correspond to this card.  You are an empiricist, someone who will only try things for oneself.

1. Well

Something is hidden within you or within a place that matters to you, and it is your duty to look for it and take it out in order to solve your problems. This is the card that calls for introspection.

1. Balloon

“Happiness lies high for us- it is the ultimate goal for man according to Aristotle. It lies high but sometimes like a balloon it descends upon us and we can reach it.” This is the card of the eccentrics and the adventurers, who often engage in wild goose chases and are very self absorbed.

1. Home.

This is the card for returns, the card that indicates that it is time to go back to where we came from, for whatever reason. It also indicates the completion of a journey, which usually seems to be the longest section of any trip. At this point we are naked, fragile, and in need of our families and the others.

1. Witch-hunt

This is the card for stupidity and ignorance, for rumors and hearsays, of superstition and isolation. It stands for all the things that you were told were true and for all the defects of your education and the place that educated you.

1. The Man with the Iron Mask

This is the card for outer shells, for the protective layers that we wear in order to escape or deny a certain reality.  The layers give us confidence, but they may also turn us into a monster. It may relate to a condition that we simply can’t control and we have to learn to live with.

1. Explorer

An unexpected situation has brought new insights. We have been forced to see something, he value of something or the bad aspects of something.

1. The Twin Kings

This is an ambivalent card: it may stand for two simultaneous strengths but also for a dilemma that we are having in our life. We have to choose and we don’t know which one is going to prevail.

1. Threshold

This is the card for all those who want to be on the other side or who want to be someone else. There is always something inaccessible to us, and we define ourselves in terms of how much we want to obtain that which is inaccessible to us.

1. The Lover

This is the card for the Platonists, those who think that love and art can coexist, that it is possible to find pure goodness. It is also the card that indicates mortality and points to the end of times, or to the fact that something has or must come to an end.

1. The Electric Storm

This is the card of the external forces, which becomes particularly significant when it appears in the context of a bridge to the past. It signals those events or circumstances beyond our control that greatly influence our decisions and our current situation.

1. Dream Fairy

Depending on the context, this card points to escapism and contradiction on the one hand, or the ability to think large and retain a positive outlook of the situation on the other. It stands for the ideals that we seek to accomplish.

1. Lion in Winter

The end of the game, and the wisdom that comes with it, is often the significance of this card. It is a card that points to our inner strengths gained by experience, and our ability to see the world better thanks to it.

1. Deus Ex Machina

This card, like #37, often represents someone’s community —whether family, friends, nation, etc. — and the way its history is playing a part in the question being asked.

1. Squirrel

This card stands for an action that is currently being made, a project that is being followed-through. It often indicates the need to change the means to an end, and to indicate the importance of foresight.

1. Morning

This is a highly psychological card. It often points to the need of exploring one’s childhood obsessions, or revisiting the early circumstances of the issue at hand. On other contexts, the card is about comfort and leisure.

1. Martir

This card brings forth that which has been sacrificed in order to obtain a particular benefit, some of which may be of a personal nature. It also points to a misleading incentive, or a false purpose for something that is being made. However, this card also establishes fortitude and determination.

1. Keys

This is an important card of the deck. It points to a gravitating force of a particular situation and often reveals the point where the answer to a problem lies. It presents the notion that the answers to a problem lie in the very nature of a particular place or person.  It is a revelatory card of travel and new encounters.

1. Vulture

This is a powerful card of warning and insight. Paired with The Lover and The Lion in Winter, also points to the end of a situation, to infinite insight, but also to our need to seek protection from something that may threaten us— the loss of a job, the loss of a friend, and other circumstances that may not benefit us.

1. Experiment

This is a card that strongly relates us to our dependence to the others and the tension between the way in which we are being seen and the others see us. The questioner in this case should reflect about this tension and the conflicts within it.

1. Venus

This is the card of fulfillment and desire.  Depending on the context, it may be pointing to a need to acknowledge the way in which an unconscious desire we have may be driving our actions, or perhaps how a selfish act influenced a situation. In some instances the card is about an unresolved relationship.

1. Turtle

This card is about gaining perspective of a particularly confusing situation that is taking place at the time. Things may look extremely difficult or confusing at the time, and this card calls for taking the high road pointing that there is always a means to resolve a problem. It is a reassuring card.

1. Last Act

A particular situation has arrived to its ultimate consequences.  This card is often related to conversations, speeches, arguments and debates that may have influenced us in some way as well as the situation we are inquiring about. It warns us about the way in which what actually happened is not how it will be remembered and establishes the distance between an event and the memory of it.

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.

Installation view, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 2007

A Dictionary of Foreign Time is a project originally conceived for the windows of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York (www.tenement.org). Aside to the installation, other components include an edition of glass slides with images and texts. The quotes in the façade, written in international phonetic alphabet, belong to LP Hartley (”the past is a foreign country”) and Paul Valèry (”the future is not what it used to be”). An edition of this work was produced in collaboration with the Center of Book Arts in New York.

Está usted oyendo Radio Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 104.3 fm. Bienvenidos a esta edición especial del programa “Conservatorio de Lenguas Muertas”. Hoy es ocho de febrero del 2043.

Como parte de nuestra serie de historia de ciudades latinoamericanas, nuestro programa se centra hoy en la ciudad de Puerto Kissinger, Colombia, antiguamente conocida como Cartagena de Indias, y en particular uno de los barrios más desconocidos de esta ciudad, el barrio de Getsemaní, hoy también conocido como el lote 284.

Fundado en 1533 por Pedro de Heredia como Cartagena de Indias, Puerto Kissinger es una de las ciudades más antiguas de Colombia, así como uno de los principales asentamientos españoles de la Nueva España. Los esclavos africanos que fueron traídos a esta ciudad se asentaron en esta sección, que se encontraba fuera de la ciudad amurallada.

Getsemaní fue el primer arrabal de la Cartagena colonial. Por ese entonces, la isla –conectada al Centro por un estrecho donde hoy queda el Parque Centenario- no había sido poblada. Fueron los franciscanos quienes vieron que en sus tierras podían levantar un convento.

El nombre de Getsemaní se le atribuye a Juan Pérez de Materano, sacerdote y músico que bautizó al suburbio para rememorar el huerto donde Jesús fue a orar después de la Última Cena. A finales del siglo XVII, un ataque de un pirata francés le cambió la vida al nuevo barrio: los españoles lo fortificaron con los baluartes del Reducto, San José, la Media Luna y San Miguel de Chambacú. Este tramo de la muralla de Cartagena era el único que se mantienia aún al borde del agua, como lucía en la época colonial, hasta la construcción del restaurant al aire libre del Club Med, cuando este detalle arquitectonico se eliminó.

Getsemaní recibió su nombre del jardín donde, según el Nuevo Testamento, Jesús rezó la última noche antes de ser crucificado. Cerca del jardín se encuentra la Iglesia de todas las naciones, también llamada la Iglesia de la agonía. En Getsemaní, la iglesia que poblaba el centro de la plaza era la iglesia de la santísima Trinidad, en donde se encuentra actualmente el centro comercial Wal-Mart.

Se tienen pocos detalles acerca de la vida en Getsemaní en tiempos recientes, debido a la falta de documentación detallada de esta región y a la poca historiografía que se le ha dedicado. Nuestro programa concierne hoy los viajes de un investigador mexicano, Pablo Helguera, quien visitó el barrio en la primera semana de Julio del año 2006. Las grabaciones de Helguera del barrio y sus entrevistas con sus habitantes, que fueron inusualmente transferidas a cilindros de fonógrafo, son los únicos vestigios que nos quedan de esta época después de la masiva desintegración a nivel mundial de los archivos digitales que tomó lugar, como es bien sabido, en 2015, a raíz de los cambios magnéticos en la atmósfera.

Helguera se hospeda en un hotel en la calle larga de Getsemaní, el primero en una larga serie de hoteles que eventualmente seran comprados como predio por la cadena Hilton para construir un campo de golf en la zona de La Matuna.

A su llegada, Helguera ha cruzado la mitad del continente por tierra, manejando desde Alaska, y se encuentra en espera de su vehículo a que sea entregado en el Puerto de Cartagena. Las notas de Helguera, un viajero despistado idealista, primigenio ante la realidad colombiana, establecen su fascinación por el color de las calles y la particular sensación de apacibilidad que predomina en Getsemaní. Helguera escribe en sus diarios: “experimento un mundo que parece existir fuera del tiempo, un barrio en donde la gente parece haber nacido y permanecido su vida entera en él sin haber sentido la necesidad de partir, sin necesidad del resto del mundo. Es esa quizá la clase de paz que todos los demás quisiéramos tener”.

Helguera observa al hombre que prepara patacones y arepas en la esquina de la Calle del Carretero y Plaza de la Trinidad (hoy Plaza Starbucks).  A su lado hay una mujer debajo de un arbol vendiendo llamadas a celular de toda clase de marcas.  En otra esquina toma lugar un concurso de belleza, donde los vecinos andan votando para escoger a la reina del próximo festival local.  Dos jovencitas de dieciséis años, sentadas bajo números, sonríen tímidamente en sus mejores vestidos, en lo que los vecinos llenan sus boletas. En las grabaciones de Helguera, se pueden apreciar los sonidos de los carpinteros de la calle larga, de las fritangas, y de la polifonía de músicas que provinenen de las muchas casas a lo largo del barrio, rumbas, ballenatos y boleros que dan color a los intensos naranjas del sol de la tarde.

Helguera visita Getsemaní en un periodo histórico que marca el ultimo aliento autóctono del barrio más colombiano de Colombia. Ya en esos momentos, el desarrollo del turismo y la inminente llegada del tratado del libre comercio de los Estados Unidos tomará posesión del ritmo económico y cultural del país.

En su viaje, Helguera conoce al artista Rafael Ortiz, quien vive en una casa conocida como la de la estrella roja, un famoso edificio donde se dice que se realizaban bailes en las épocas de antaño, y que hoy ha sido demolido para dar espacio al parqueadero del banco Citibank.

Rafael Ortiz en las grabaciones le indica a Helguera que el barrio de Getsemaní había estado cerrado por muchos años debido a las pandillas locales, que paradójicamente habían ayudado a preservar el barrio. Esto termina cuando el capitán Acero termina con las pandillas y finalmente el barrio se abre de nuevo al mundo- y, como consecuencia, a los inversionistas de bienes raíces. Ya en ese año, según Ortiz, los especuladores han comenzado a comprar edificios y a renovarlos, y los incrementos de los alquileres comienzan a sacar a los habitantes del lugar.

Una noche, Helguera cruza la calle de la media luna, considerada en aquella época como la calle más peligrosa del barrio (hoy esta calle es donde se localiza el museo de cera de Madame Tussauds). En ella, el artista hace una conversación con una prostituta del lugar, quien le cuenta de sus muchas necesidades económicas, de su familia, y de la forma en que el turismo los beneficia. En el parque del centenario (hoy Plaza Samsung) Helguera graba asimismo los últimos cuenteros. En las grabaciones se capturan las voces incidentals de hombres jubilados, los predicadores improvisados, las prostitutas, los vendedores de tinto, los militares, los enamorados y todos aquellos que pasan por el parque.  Incluso en las grabaciones se escuchan las voces de la zapatería Beetar, que funcionó por medio siglo y cerró pocos años después de la visita de Helguera.

El ruido de los buses y los carros se mezcla con la bulla de las cantinas y la agitación de los hoteles y hostales que abundan en cada esquina.

Al final de la grabación, Helguera ha regresado a la calle larga, y se encuentra sentado en la plaza de la Trinidad, comiendo yuca y patacones. Los niños mulatos juegan al futbol en esa plaza donde posiblemente pasaron
los poetas Jorge Artel y Pedro Blas Julio, el boxeador Rodrigo Valdés y el músico Luis Pérez; donde el Almirante José Prudencio Padilla se enamoró perdidamente y se quedó a vivir después de lograr la segunda independencia de Cartagena en 1821; donde se percibe, como la brisa caribeña, una esencia de Panamérica que es única e irrepetible, donde las sombras provocadas por las luces nocturnas hace que cualquier visitante sienta que estas memorias son suyas. La música y la venta de mangos, yucas, y limones. Helguera parece presentir en ese momento que está viviendo un momento en extremo frágil, quizá de ahí mismo que haya realizado estas grabaciones.  Sabe que este barrio está condenado a desaparecer gracias a los vaivenes incontrolables de la globalización. Helguera recuerda la casa de su infancia en México, el pueblo de su familia, arrasado por la modernidad con todas sus memorias.  Y como artista contemporáneo, se lamenta profundamente de que el apego por el pasado sea visto como una actitud antimoderna.  Helguera concluye en su diario: “es parte quizá de nuestra naturaleza el permitir el deterioro de todo lo que más valoramos, solo con el objetivo que, una vez esto ha desaparecido, podamos rememorarlo a través de parques temáticos y museografías polvosas.”

Preparatory Sketch for fist pilot school at Shedhalle, Zurich, 2003

At each one of its 25 stops, the project included a discussion with local artists, writers, activists or general public, workshops, films, the collective writing and reading of a speech, and the performance of a “Panamerican Anthem”. The project covered 25,000 ground miles, making it the most extensive public art project ever completed. A full traveling exhibition and documentary was presented in 2007-2009. Further information of this project is available at www.panamericanismo.org.

Mary Ellen Strom and other participants at First SPU workshop, Zurich, May 2003

Panamerican Address at the opening of the exhibition Escultura Social at the MCA Chicago, June 2007

first textbook for the SPU, Zurich, 2003

Endingness

Prolegomena  for a New Art of Memory

There may be a deep connection between that conceptual field [of perspective] and the way that perspective has continually presented itself to me in terms of the philosophic and historical concept of proof (the demonstration) , the unruly gestures of artistic application (the play) and the intricacies of perspectival methods themselves (the arcanum).

James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective

Sitiado en mi epidermis por un dios inasible que me ahoga

José Gorostiza, Muerte sin fin

For my father, Luis Ignacio Helguera Soiné

Introduction

On a daily basis, we are aware of things that come to an end, ranging from the holiday seasons to species in extinction, the lives of others around us, and our very own life. Yet, for all we understand and even praise the notion of change in the world we live in, we are generally reluctant to embrace the definite ending of things. We work hard to defy the aging process, we maintain written memories and historical documentation of every sort, and we create a rhythm and a routine in our lives that allow us to feel that we live in a continuum, and not in an ever-ending sequence of events.

This book deals with a phenomenon that, as I will put forth in the next few pages, results from an introspective state in our mind. It can be shared collectively and become the basis of a cultural language. And, its use and manipulation is usually a key basis for creativity.

A work that deals mostly with the notion of endings and conclusions would perhaps beg the question:  why not rather focus on the beginning of things? A focus on endings would appear to be unnecessarily bleak and pessimistic to most readers. My response would be that it is precisely the uneasiness that we have regarding endings that is worthy of a close examination. We are not ever as conflicted about the beginning of something as we are about its ending – most concretely, when we speak about things like human life: a birth is a cause for celebration, while death is a cause for mourning. Because of this very discomfort, and the complex array of reflections and feelings that accompany our experience of endings, it is important to understand just what is that causes those responses. As I will try to show on these pages, the answer is related to our sense of identity provided by our memory. Most importantly, it is this unusual compression of emotions that take place when we respond to the ending of something that feed our creativity and help us summarize and affirm our current relationship with our world,  because they let us, as we commonly say, “see things in perspective”. In a world where the excess of information and the relativization of every fact have made thinking with clarity ever more difficult, it is at least worth the effort to examine the cognitive process by which we assimilate and interpret that information that becomes most definitive and conclusive in our minds: the ending of things.

No theory on endings should start without addressing the very concept of the end of things, contained in the universal, unavoidable, and yet very problematic, term “death”. It is not possible, nor pertinent to the purpose of this book, to engage in a philosophical overview of the concept of death. It should suffice by establishing three aspects about our relationship with death that are relevant to the particular phenomenon we are analyzing.

The first one, which may be self-evident, is that death normally connotes the opposition of life. Yet, we can say that our prospect of death, not its actuality, is what dominates our lives. At a personal level, the actualization of death that we perceive on a daily basis in the world serves as a reminder that we, too, shall die sometime. This actualization, as some Existentialist philosophers would agree, is what defines our lives. The concept of death is thus contained not solely on the act of dying in it of itself but in all the processes that take us to it, including our witnessing of the deaths of others.

Secondly, the concept of death manifests itself in a myriad of metaphorical ways in our every day life. We usually speak of “the death of art” or “the death of utopias” in an abstract sense, denoting the extinction of concepts, or even things: “my computer died”.  Death is thus embedded in actual life as a common expression that references the ending of all kinds of circumstances and things.

The third idea is that death paradoxically affirms continuity. Because of its certainty, we are given a clear picture of the world- it is the only one thing that we can be absolutely certain will happen.  We don’t know if we will continue to live, but we can be certain that we will all continue to die. The notion of life as a succession of deaths was a constant metaphor in poetry every since the Renaissance. Francisco de Quevedo, the XVIIth Century Spanish poet, may have best put it in a famous poem:

Ayer se fue; mañana no ha llegado;
hoy se está yendo sin parar un punto:
soy un fue, y un será, y un es cansado.

En el hoy y mañana y ayer, junto
pañales y mortaja, y he quedado

Presentes sucesiones de difunto.

Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is not here yet

Today is fading away, unstoppable:

I am a “was”, and a “will be”, and a tired “ is”.

Between the today and the tomorrow

Diapers and mortuary cloth, I am left

As present successions of a dead man.

This sense of continuity that death provides, as well as the heightened awareness that it provokes about reality when it happens is what concerns us here.

This work borrows ideas from perspectivism, cognitive psychology, phenomenology, evolutionist theory, neuroscience, art history, religion, and cultural studies to propose the use of a consciousness level in the mind that, with the aid of the ancient art of memory, can be systematized for the purpose of artistic practice- one that constitutes an integrated practice of philosophical and artistic responses to the world we experience.

To construct my argument, I have adopted James Elkins’ three-way division on the idea of perspectivist practices: demonstration, play, and arcanum, as explained on chapter 2. Entering into the theoretical realm of a perspectival art of perspective is like entering into a hall of mirrors, where by definition the explanation is the artwork and the artwork is the reflection of that explanation. This book is thus necessarily treated like an art work within the presentation of an exhibition on the subject of endingness, entitled Swan Song- which also included the presentation of a musical piece, a documentary on memory, and other self-reflective and self-referential works on finitude.

The reader may now be forewarned that this doesn’t aspire to be, nor should try to ever be, an academic essay on psychology, philosophy, or even art criticism. Instead, it hopes to bring to light ideas that are usually not addressed by other conventional academic formats. Through rather unorthodox associations and arbitrary methods that honor the Arcana component of the perspectivist tradition, I have attempted to articulate a suspicion that I have had since I can remember: the connection that I believe to exist between that feeling described by those who see their lives going by before their minds when they have the certainty of death, and the emotional response that we have when we see the ending of a moving film.  Ultimately, this book is not about death, but about birth- the mystery of regeneration of emotions that are inspired by the encounter with something that departs.

I. Demonstration

1. On Swan Songs

“When feeling life departing, the swan lifts high its head, and breaking into a long, melodious chant–a heart-rending song of death–the noble bird sends heavenward a melodious protest, a plaint that moves to tears man and beast, and thrills through the hearts of those who hear it.” [i]

The belief that swans sing an achingly beautiful song before they die goes back to ancient times.

Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Philostratus, Cicero, Seneca, and Martial believed in this as a fact,

while Pliny, Aelian, and Athenaeus, among the ancients, and Sir Thomas More among the moderns, treated this opinion as a

vulgar error. The reference can even be found in Shakespeare:

If you do love me, you will find me out.

Let music sound, while he doth make his choice:

Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,

Fading in music.[ii]

It is not clear when the idea of the singing swan originates. One Greek legend has it that the soul of Apollo, the god of music passed into a swan, hence a Pythagorean fable that the souls of all good poets passed into swans.[iii] The Aberdeen manuscript, a medieval bestiary from the XIIth Century, says the following about the swan: “The swan is called Cygnus, from its singing; it pours forth the sweetness of song in a melodious voice. They say that the swan sings so sweetly because it has a long, curved neck; inevitably, a voice forcing its way through a long, flexible passage produces a variety of tones. They say, moreover, that in the far north, when bards are singing to their lyres, large numbers of swans are summoned by the sound and sing in harmony with them.”[iv] Despite the fact that, in contrast to other impossible to prove myths, there have always been plenty of swans around to test to refute this belief, and yet the conviction of the singing swan managed to survive well into the Nineteenth Century.

For some mythologists, the story of the swan may not qualify exactly as a myth: in general terms, myths are supposed to explain natural phenomena or relate to the creation.   But if we were favor Levi-Strauss’ interpretation, who thought that a myth is a way for societies to explain an otherwise irresolvable contradiction, the swan song could be then interpreted as a myth that stands as the metaphor of something more complex.

The power of the swan song legend lies, I believe, in two things: one is the powerful contrast of a beautiful and pure being touched by death – an idea that is prevalent in a wide variety of Western stories and poems using similar characters (dead princesses, children, etc.).  So, In Levi-Strauss terms, the contradiction that this story may be reinforcing would be the one of untimely or unfair death, or perhaps, the early corruption of that which is yet uncorrupted and innocent. The second aspect of this belief is that the drama of the being’s death is further heightened by its ability to sing a beautiful song before it departs forever. This second aspect of the belief is far more complex an open to interpretation than the first one. Why would a beautiful song may arise from the facing of death? According to one of Aesop’s fables, the unfairly caught swan sings a farewell to life:

A Swan Sings To Save Her Life

A wealthy man once kept a goose
And swan together at his house,
The goose to be a feast some day,
The swan, to sing songs for his spouse.

One moonless night he sent the cook
To catch the goose and dinner make,
But in the dark the cook misjudged,

And brought the swan in by mistake.

That swan soon realized her fate
And let her broken heart be known

“Goodbye, sweet earth! Goodbye, sweet friends!”
She sang: one long despairing tone.

Stop! cried the cook, My heart is broke!

This poor swan’s song my soul doth wring!
I’ll get that other bird for food,

And let this swan live on to sing!

So swan lived on for years and years
Enjoying tasty meals and snacks,
And sang her sad and lovely song –
Whenever they brought out the ax.

In Aesop’s fable, the music sung by the swan before it dies symbolically saves it from vanishing definitely. Although the moral of the story falls more within the area of “sharing your feelings may save you”, the idea of singing as a defense to dying goes in accord to the old convention of what great art does: it becomes a symbolic antidote to mortality. According to this idea, we will all vanish at some point, but those artistic creations that we make may ultimately save us from oblivion. (ars longa, vita brevis).

I would thus like to propose that the swan song symbol is not the casual result of an old legend, or just another commonplace phrase that is used in many aspects of contemporary lexicon, but rather a revealing metaphor that we all relate to but that we don’t know how to fully explain. It describes our attitude about one of the most mysterious intersections: creativity and death.  And it is this very intersection that concerns us here.

2. With the End in Sight

Death is naturally one of the most ubiquitous subjects in art; it is present in every period and in every genre. Given that such a vast territory would be practically impossible to address in a single essay, what I will focus on in this text will not be on those countless visual representations of death itself but rather in one of the basic metaphorical representations of finitude, or, in other words, integrated philosophical and visual representation of “that which ends”. Within the context of the modern Western tradition, this logical departure point to me and what historically could be argued as the basic metaphorical visual representation of the end is the vanishing point in Renaissance perspective.

We well know that the notion of perspective in the visual arts, which was arguably the greatest contribution of the Renaissance, was originally conceived by Brunnelleschi and other Italian artists as an aiding tool to create a more correct-looking visual representation, generating in a variety of forms and methods. Nevertheless, from its very inception, the use of perspective in the Renaissance also came to symbolize a variety of subjects, such as infinity, death, corruption and melancholy. [v] Soon the idea of perspective, as well as its actual application, become two separate, or maybe correlated, things that have been analyzed by art historians, philosophers, and cultural theorists.

Hubert Damisch, in his book L’origine de la Perspective, provides the most comprehensive argument about the inextricable relation between the visual representation of perspective in the Renaissance and Western thought. He relates perspective to the theories of thinkers of the likes of Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Claude Levi-Strauss and Lacan.

The relationship between visual perspective and philosophy is a complex subject that gets particularly difficult as the literal and metaphorical use of perspective vary widely in interpretation and across the ages.  In this area I found great guidance in James Elkins’ The Poetics of Perspective, perhaps the most thorough study on the history of perspectival theory and the metaphorical dimensions of perspective. In this work, Elkins studies the relationship between the techné of perspective and its metaphorical uses in philosophy.  The obscure theorizing of this art is referenced by Elkins as the arcanum while its application is known as the play. The philosophical use of it, on the other hand, (the demonstration), is generally used as a metaphor (like in Heidegger and the existentialists) or as a symbol of a cultural worldview (Panofsky).

These models of perspectivism usually depart form existing visual applications of perspectival methods, and the subsequent metaphorization of those methods into the fields of philosophy, cultural theory, psychology, etc.  We all are familiar with perspectival metaphors as indicators of thinking, and use them on an everyday basis: “in my view”; “now that we have some perspective on the facts”, etc.

It is not surprising that perspective would become a way for us to map ideas. In the same way that perspective became a way to “rationalize sight” (as termed by William Ivins in an influential 1939 essay), we needed to find a way to “rationalize the sight” of our own mind as we entered into highly abstract territories.  And, in a similar way to the uses of early perspective in the Renaissance and beyond, perspectival visualization of ideas can be helpful to render thought with greater clarity, but it can also distort it.

These two parallel evolutions of the practice of perspective –philosophically as a model to map ideas, and artistically as a method to represent space – really become separate matters practically from the invention of perspective. In painting, perspective continued to be used as a spatial drawing method, but its use as a metaphor could only be found perhaps in rarified works with allegorical meanings. In the XXth Century, the use of perspective in the visual arts constitutes just one more standard strategy of representation, -or distortion of reality- but hardly anything that goes beyond themes of visual perception. As they broke with the conventional notions of the picture-plane, the artists of modernity couldn’t see any place for Renaissance perspective in the work- with the exception of those who remained true to figurativism. But even then, perspective had long stopped being a source for metaphorical representation.

The development of the second practice, which is the idea of perspective as an intellectual metaphor- perhaps we can call it conceptual perspective- has a longer story and practice in contemporary thinking, including the everyday usage that we give to it.  It could be argued that, beginning with Duchamp, visual arts abandon the traditional notions of perspective in order to rather employ a sort of conceptual perspective- the artwork looking at itself, and affirming its own reality, instead of simply creating a visual approximation in the two-dimensional surface of how we see the world. Most of the art originated after conceptualism is art that acquires a certain self-awareness of its condition of artwork.

Whenever we talk about “the end of art” today, we could say that have arrived at a point of exhaustion with “conceptual” perspective- a point that seems very similar to the way in which the interest in visual perspective also arrived to at the end of the XIXth Century.  This exhaustion would follow the reasoning that if we have exhausted the visual representations of art and then exhausted the ideas around it, we have little left to explore.

A way to address this problem may lie, I believe, in a thorough review on the interrelation of conceptual and visual perspectivist theories.  Elkins’ essay, toward the end, lists the ways in which we himself divides the perspectival practices: “some thoughts (the demonstrations) appear logical, scientific, or historical, and others (the play) seem to pertain to rhetoric or poetry, or else (the arcanum) to the obscurities to what I called the intellectual backwaters”.

If, as Elkins implies in the quote at the beginning of his book, the three aspects of perspective are related, a unified application whose practice is rooted on a philosophical and practical grounds would constitute, if not a more complete representation of our reality, certainly a new way to integrate ideas and images together. Conceptual art proposed a framework in which an idea would precede, and sometimes override, the visual representation of an object.

Elkins states in his book the conflicts that arise by creating a theory of perspective:

When Panofsky writes about Greek perspective as if it were the expression of the subjective world and Renaissance perspective as if it were the record of an objective world, he is recalling the inherent paradox of philosophic perspectivism (that it cannot choose between the world as an objective whole and views as subjective fragments) and reapplying it to its original source, artistic perspective. It is that cycling involvement that should warn us that perspective cannot even see itself: it is blind- that is, no perspective from which we can see perspective.

The paragraph well illustrates the ongoing frustration with theory by constructing an accurate, scientific representation of reality.  But what happens when art making, by virtue of becoming both the theory itself as the artwork as well as the byproduct of its theory? Since art is not ruled by scientific method, can it be more successful at providing a more accurate representation of experience?  Furthermore, what process would allow us to encounter a full integration of ideas and images?

What we will consider here is the possibility of thinking just in that way, in an artistic sense, thinking about artworks that are, at the same time, a visual and conceptual metaphor of perspective, a perspectival method for self-representation in time both conceptually and visually, and a philosophical meditation on our existential location in the world – a perspectivizational vehicle- for any viewer.

In other words, an art of memory that is able to provide, in their own introspection, a perspective of perspective itself.

3. The Art of Memory and the Dream of Total Vision

We often think about the production of images and the production of ideas as two separate things. This has been so prevalent in contemporary thought that, during the rise of Conceptual art, the dominance of the idea consumed the value of the image to an extent that more often than not it made the latter dependent, if not secondary, on the idea behind it – or, rather, the ideas that we could take from it.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the disjunction between philosophical and artistic perspectivism.  While one collapses in the construction of an objective basis for truth, the other recedes as an obsolete method to portray the world. Both suffer from what has been described as the rigidity of perspectivism- the fact that perspectives necessarily impose one single point of view, and have a hard time adapting to an ever-evolving process of constant reinterpretation, recreation and readaptation.  Additionally to this rigidity, there is the problem of how ideas can bring us to sensible pictures of the world, and vice versa- which is the ever-present divide between theory and practice.

There is, however, an ancient technique based on natural cognitive processes that naturally brought together ideas and images. It originated around 500 B.C. with Simonides of Ceos, a Greek poet. According to the legend, Simonides was one day attending a party with many guests. At some point he stepped out of the house, and it so happened that the ceiling of the room fell at that moment, crushing all the guests under it. All the guests were defaced beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to identify each and every one of them by virtue of knowing where each one of them was sitting. It thus occurred to him that his ability to remember lied on being able to visualize the placement of the person in his mind.  Based on this realization, Simonides founded the art of memory upon a premise that became the core principle of every memory method down the ages: “constat igitur artificiosa memoria ex locis et imaginibus” (artificial memory is established by the conjunction of places and images). This phrase, first found in the earliest surviving memory treatise Ad Herennium, was later developed by Cicero and Quintillian in Roman times, with the purpose of memorizing long texts and developing oratorial skills.

The basis for the art of memory would consist in that the speaker would imagine an architectural space with several rooms where he would place different associative images related to the different parts of the text that he had to memorize.

Ad Herennium’s characterization of the process of imagination and retrieval and the language of symbols to be used – some based on visual systems like the zodiac – became the basis for further Western models of mnemonic systems.

The art of memory was indeed a learning method, but one that was directly related to natural processes that we all employ to remember. However, while it was in vogue, this system was not only limited to recalling information. It was used also by mystics, philosophers and Hermetists to construct complex systems of knowledge that would be condusive to revealing divine truths. Hermetic practitioners of the art of memory like Giulio Cammillo, Raymundo Lull, and later on Robert Fludd, and most importantly Giordano Bruno, shared the cabalistic view that creation is a combinatory act (ars combinatoria), a process of multiplication by endless permutation of the revealed, divine attributes of the Sephiroth. In this view the universe is nothing but a construction of structural analogies and correspondences that follows the laws of logic and harmonic proportions. Combinatory charts and diagrams included universal subjects,  absolute principles, and various sort of pointers that were direct conduits to God. Geometric relationships were central in the diagrams of the mnemonists, and the kind of imagery that emerged from memory systems, treatises, and spiritual texts tended to be highly extravagant and imaginative in construction.

The art of memory, along with the Hermetic tradition, would not fare very well after the Reinassance. Cartesianism, as well as other philosophical trends that praised objective observation and logical thinking, soon dismissed these ways of thinking about the world as obscure and outmoded, and belonging to a medieval mentality. Whenever referenced in scholarly texts, the art of memory would be generally regarded with condescendence.

The art of memory did continue its existence, however, as part of the Hermetic tradition, mostly through individual practitioners well into the end of the XVIIth century. Hermetism gathered force again towards the middle of the XIXth Century in the works of artist like William Blake and later in other occult  practices like Theosophy. Hermetism is amongst the foundational roots of our modern philosophies of living that we usually term as New Age, trying to find secret correlations between the mind, the body and the spirit.

Perhaps because of this eccentric genealogy, it has been traditionally hard to regard the art of memory as a serious practice. And indeed as one reviews the history of the art of memory, it becomes clear why its original purposes of memorization and knowledge of the occult are certainly not of much interest to us today as scientific practices, other than as curiosity items. Nevertheless, when the art of memory receded into obscurity at the dawn of the modern age, we lost sight of a key tradition of image fabrication that only intuitively was recovered by contemporary art and that,  has hardly been recognized again as a fertile artistic ground.

While the occult became disconnected from science many centuries ago, art making never lost that link, nor have we been able to fully discredit the notion that art has the cabbalistic- like qualities to communicate hidden things. Despite the conceptualist revolution, and the very demystification, dematerialization, and deconstruction of the object, art remains mysterious to us as we were never able to eliminate the unquantifiable value of subjectivity.  As much as we will always know the value of 5, art will never retain the same value or definition, because that is dependent on personal interpretation.

Alchemical relationships had always been a fascination to XXth Century artists, including the Surrealists, Duchamp, and even Joseph Beuys[vi]. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is another example of artwork that replicates similar systems of hidden relationships between themes and elements that is so common of Hermetic thought.

In what directly concerns the art of memory, certainly lots of art have been made about remembrance, memory, and commemoration. Nevertheless, it is only now when the relevance of this practice as a method of visualization is being rediscovered.

Fluxus artist Dick Higgins made significant inroads when he edited Giordano Bruno’s On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas[vii]. Higgins, a true multi-disciplinary artist and art theorist, was fascinated by Bruno’s all-encompassing thought, as noted in his introduction to this book: “Bruno argues for the unity of all the arts in a way that suggests 19th Century ideas about synesthesia or 20th Century ones about intermedia. . . the convergence of poetry, prose and visual art, is of interest today also, and it is noteworthy that Bruno provides a historic paradigm for this.”[viii] Bruno was also rediscovered as a predecessor to modern semiotics, by writing phrases such as  “images do not receive their names from the explanations of the things they signify, but rather from the condition of those things that do the signifying”

Bruno’s thoughts which have been studied for semiotics and for inter-disciplinarity, have nevertheless their greater root in his memory systems- a result perhaps of his training as a Renaissance rhetorician, of which he said: “In them finally are all that can be said, known, imagined; here are all arts, languages, works, and signs”.

An example of the relevance of the art of memory in our contemporary way of visualizing lies in the work of Giulio Camillo Delminio. Camillo, known during his lifetime as one of the most important thinkers, had devised a memory theater where all the human and divine knowledge could be attained by an average human being, including the various revelations of the kabala, Jewish mysticism, the Bible and the classical world. The secret of how it worked would be revealed only to the king of France. Camillo had based his utopian structure of knowledge on a memory system, by which 49 main images would contain the totality of knowledge.  Camillo’s theater was never built due to lack of funding, but the idea of his project survived with a text written by him, L’idea del Teatro.  The remarkable aspect of Camillo’s theater were not the intricacies of his incredibly complicated and esoteric  mnemonic system, but his attempt to construct what we could term today as a virtual interface for all the databases of knowledge available – a problem that only became relevant again in the information age[ix].  After many centuries of remaining in the obscurity, Camillo has reemerged in the contemporary era and is today hailed by many as the first person to conceive the internet.

By this point, one could rightly ask: do these Renaissance ideas only happen to resonate with the zeitgeist of contemporary life, or do they reveal more profound affinities between the intellectual crisis of our age and the dawn of modern thought?  On another essay one could perhaps argue that the state of confusion created by the information age, and the relativism caused by our inability to grasp the complexities of our contemporary era, and our consumption of personality cult of celebrities and relate to others through reality shows and the lives of movie stars bring us back to a similar moment to the one of the mid 1500s, where the human being became a microcosm of the world.

The great scholar Frances Yates summarized the way in which Giordano Bruno and Giulio Camillo reflected the mind of the Renaissance: “the memory systems of Camillo and Bruno […] exhibit a profound conviction that man, the image of the greater world, can grasp, hold and understand the greater world through the power of his imagination”[x].  Yates also adds: “From a lower power which may be used in memory as a concession to weak man who may use corporeal similitudes because only so he can retain his spiritual intentions towards the intelligible world beyond appearances through laying hold of significant images”[xi].

Whether or not there may be a parallelism between us and Bruno and Camillo’s time, I believe there is much to recover from the artistic arena from Hermetic thought. And, although we would not necessarily have to condone the obscure -and perhaps naïve- practices of occult philosophy that once fueled the art of memory, there is one fundamental principle in its foundation that still rings true today: the potential power of the human imagination. Like Bruno wrote in his Corpus Hermeticum:

“Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all the time, become eternity […] believe that nothing is impossible to you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every being […] if you embrace in your thought all things at once, times place substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God”.[xii]

Bruno was certainly ambitious in his desire to know it all- although this was a common trait at the time. Today, we may not aspire to obtain the entire knowledge of the universe- we have enough by trying to understand ourselves, and yet while this still seems to prove to be extremely difficult, few could deny that the overwhelming nature of the modern world drives most of us today to hold on to the immediate- the most immediate being the personal, the most personal being our memories, and the most intense of those experiences, those connected to death.

4. The Heideggerian Consciousness

Martin Heidegger thought that civilization had suffered a gradual “forgetting of being”.[xiii] Remembering this relationship for Heidegger meant to rediscover the true nature of who we were (our “beingness”), and the only way to do this would be to face the one unavoidable factor in our existence, which is the prospect of death.  Heidegger’s efforts were based on Edmund Husserl’s project of finding a “philosophy of absolute being”, one that would be able to find a universal human consciousness.

Throughout the XXth Century, the idea of a universal human consciousness (in Jung’s terms, the “collective unconscious”) has been largely discredited, and existentialist thought was highly criticized by post-structuralism as too vague to construct solid understandings of reality.  Certainly, for the purposes of understanding the world- a quest of an absolute consciousness- would be a challenging task.  Yet, the implications of Heidegger’s ideas as we reflect about how we make and experience art, are very useful.

When we are moved by a film, and cry, we don’t fully rationalize the reasons why the film does that to us- and sometimes we even never reflect why it does. Soap operas, a basic commercial genre, profit from the knowledge that basic dramatic patterns will generate an emotional response from the viewers as long as they stick to uncomplicated common denominators in the plots and in the characters.

This is because something happens in our mind that we recognize at an intuitional level. We can be told how to best appreciate a work of art, and the more we know about it can generate a certain emotional attachment to it; yet, our emotional responses to an artwork exist largely outside of any cold rationalizations, and what is more, emotive reactions come to us much faster and naturally than our thinking (we see a work and almost immediately can say whether we like it or not; and then our rationalization takes over as to explain why we like it or dislike it).  In contemporary art practice today, however, we have trained ourselves to largely distrust our instinctive emotional responses and usually give way to the rational- usually authoritative- interpretation of it. But in a world where the authoritative interpretation of a work of art overrides any sort of personal response to it, we usually fall into the assumption that it is better to defer to the collective rationalization of a given interpretation of an artwork than to the personal response to it.  This results in a philosophical position that favors analysis over experience and deconstruction over dialogue (a debate that, in the realm of philosophy, could be regarded as the battle between deconstruction and hermeneutics, best exemplified in the Derrida-Gadamer debate). In museum practice, it tends to become the gap that exists between the curator (the deconstructor) and the educator (the hermeneutic).

The viewer response in art, for the most part in recent years, has been hijacked by post-structuralism, which mostly tell us what we should think about the art we see by “what it is”, instead of trying to understand our internal process for connecting- or not- to a work of art at an emotional level.  Feelings in contemporary art making are mostly acceptable as premeditated or pre-established forms of communication, but to be entirely driven by instinct is a highly risky endeavor for an artist in the contemporary art world. In those instances, even the most “unconscious” (e.g. self-taught, naïve, young) artists soon are appropriated by knowledgeable curators who are able to contextualize their work properly.

This overemphasis in deconstruction and interpretation, while it may serve well the field of art criticism, does not serve well the realm of art making or personal experiencing of art.  It is necessary both in the artistic process, and in the personal process of experience of art, to strongly reaffirm the intuitive responses to reality instead of quickly giving way to the interpretive rationalizations of it. It is a process of reaffirmation of the individual.

It is thus necessary to find strong basis for this individual grounding on experience- which was a deep concern, again, to Heidegger. The greatest -and perhaps utopian- aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy, I believe, is his conviction that we can arrive to a sense of wholeness by understanding what “being” is.  Heidegger brings to our attention the ultimate perspective we can have on our life- our own death- and the world of references that we construct around it, built by our memory.  It is a world that can be suggested, but not administered by the outside, it is our own personal, intimate world, and while it may be founded on an entirely false basis, it still constitutes our personal reality, the one we recognize and live from. We can only hope that we will be the best persons as we follow our personal ideal of what good is, instead of the values imposed by others. After all, it may be bad to live and act by our imperfect vision of reality, but isn’t it worse to live and act by the distorted vision of others? In a world where there are few certainties left, this is the one that we have to hold on to when everything else is drifting away in confusion.

II. Arcanum

5. Endingness

The term “Endingness” does not refer to endings per se. It is what is triggered in the mind by the ending of something, or more precisely, the level of consciousness that we acquire of a certain reality just in the moment when this reality is about to extinguish. It would be, as it were, the instinctual perspectivization of a phenomenon that our mind enacts.

Endingness serves as a constant link between the past and the present. It is another temporal mode, similar to the after-image that we see after we are blinded by a powerful light. It is the past in the present, still both in the past and in the present. Endingness for the mind is similar to the horizon line that we see in the landscape, which does not exist in the physical but in an optical sense.

Following are a number of premises that attempt to provide an approximation of the role of Endingness in memory and creativity.

a. Memory is a biological process by which we recall previous incidents or events. Memory is by nature selective; it can never be the exact replica of an event.

Memory follows a selective process determined by the personality of the individual, his/her convictions, obsessions, favorable or negative associations and past experiences. In its very onset on storing an experience as a memory, the individual is placing specific importance to a whole group of factors associated with an object, event, or series of events.

We know that the human mind is a highly inaccurate process.  According to contemporary psychological theory, this is because human recall was not originally designed for verbatim reproduction, bur rather to facilitate action.

According to Art Glenberg, professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, memory exists to help us walk, talk, run, drive a car, answer the phone, and all of the myriad tasks of getting along in the world. Glenberg’s theory would be consistent with one of the basis of education: that hands-on and interactive activities are the most effective learning method, as they reaffirm knowledge in the mind. [xiv]

What would be an exception of this rule would be Eidetic memory, commonly known as “photographic memory”. Eidetic memory has been defined as "the ability to retain an accurate, detailed visual image of a complex scene or pattern... or see an image that is an exact copy of the original sensory experience" [xv]  However, while many individuals clearly have an exceptional ability to recall things and experiences accurately, Scientists who study memory phenomena generally believe that eidetic memory does not exist. Early experiments on eidetic memory were intriguing, but could not be replicated.[xvi]

b. Memory’s selective process is a creative one.

Elizabeth Loftus, author of the 1980 seminal book Memory, and an authority on the subject, writes: “A flimsy curtain separates memory from imagination. Suggestions, strong and subtle, can make people believe that they had experiences in childhood that they almost certainly did not have […] Memory is creative. There, I’ve said it all.”[xvii]

The root of creativity lies in the interpretation and articulation of reality in a new form. Creative individuals establish unusual connections between different aspects of reality that normally would not be established in a conventional way. Memory naturally functions creatively. When we recall a particular experience, our mind “fills in the blanks” of specific experiences sometimes adding information (visual, contextual, etc.) about anecdotes that perhaps is a bit different from the actual facts that took place. Sometimes we merge a number of incidents together in one single memory, and sometimes we change the characters that partake on that one memory.  Furthermore, the information that our memory accumulates stays stored in our mind for it so subconsciously establish relationships, such as when we dream.  Whether we consciously use this characteristic of memory toward a creative endeavor or not, all human beings are born with the subconscious quality of their “defective” memory.

c. Memory is a force in constant evolution, departing from the conjunction of a consciousness or a set of consciousness and an event or series of events, in the world.

The event, from the moment when it happens, triggers a cognitive response from the one or various consciousness that experience it. Thus memory evolves in a cumulative, yet fading manner. It generally follows a line towards a certain climax that normally we recognize as nostalgia, which is parallel to what we consider a scientific, factual interpretation of that event. Thus the birth date of a well known person is a scientific factual data in the sense that it can be corroborated factually. But it is a nostalgic fact when we dramatize it in film, literature or other creative way.  Memory is more than the simple series of synapses that take place in our individual brain. It constitutes all the articulations of those synapses that we create when we communicate those memories and it is in that process of articulation when we fall into the ambiguous identity of memory as a general idea. Yet we know that our experiences of those events are real, and our responses to those events- whether they are simple reminiscences of the past or whether they turn into an actual scientific historical work, or a documentary or an artwork- are concrete, real expressions of those ambiguous sets of experiences and feelings. These concrete expressions, when referencing an event that many of us may be familiar with, trigger new memories, revisions of existing memories, and creation of new memories amongst those who didn’t live the original experiences.

d. A response to reality can never be articulated without memory.

As understood by the empiricists like Berkeley, reality is the actual world, the actual things in the world – but the actual things and actual events cannot say anything about themselves. They need a consciousness next to them to acknowledge their existence and furthermore, say something about them. Even if the object is still there, we are still expanding its reality from the memory of the object or event we have experienced.

f. The end of our memory constitutes the end our consciousness.

For Husserl and Heidegger, memory would come to be as one of the many acts of consciousness. The reality that we are in touch with is constituted by the representations in our mind of that consciousness-  i. e. the mental images of it.  Thus, reality becomes present in us through perception and memory. It is then in the activity of these two fundamental actions in our mind where our understanding of reality resides, and finally where the crisis of reality takes place.

g. When memory is missing details, myth comes to aide as a replacement process.

Myth comes into play when memories have vanished, when there are no records and when that original reality has faded away.

h. The endingness of memory is the link between the ambiguous, biological memory and the articulation of it, because it is the very impulse to articulate that memory that is fed by our recognition of that endingness and our impulse to bring it “back into the world”.

We normally don’t state the obvious. When I am sitting on a chair I normally don’t say “I am sitting on a chair” to others, unless if they do not see us sitting on a chair. We only state those things that we feel need to be stated because they would not be perceived otherwise, and because we consider important at that moment to state them to give them reality. We say “we have a problem” when we feel that the fact that there is a problem has not yet been acknowledged in the world. Similarly, we generally recall a memory once we acquire consciousness of it being one, and when we feel it is important to recall it into our conscious realm. Our very act of recalling that event is the very first step to introduce a memory item into the world. For example: “yesterday was a wonderful day in my life.”

This begins the endingness process, which is the process of mythologizing reality via memory and imagination.

i. Endingness is a state of consciousness composed by both artificial and natural  memory.

Artificial memory generally is understood as the conscious process by which we store information. Natural memory is the process by which the mind retains and invents, distorts, or embellishes original information resulting in thoughts or memories that do not relate to the original or actual events. It may be impossible to systematic establish a clear division between artificial and natural memory, because personal memories can hardly be evaluated on scientific terms. At a theater performance, a group of people quizzed afterward to recall the aspects of it would never arrive to the same description of what happened: some would recall details that others wouldn’t and vice versa. Memory functions on a selective basis.  Memory thus establishes its own definition of reality, whether individual or collective, as a result of the integration of artificial and natural modes of remembering.

j. Endingness takes place in a metatemporal space.

j.1 Endingness does not need of actual events to exist.

The consciousness of Endingness can take place even before the actual event can take place: “I think today will be an unforgettable day”, we say. We precondition ourselves to regard certain moments, either personal or collective, of our lives as certainly relevant even before they happen. Weddings, Birthdays, holiday celebrations, national holidays, new year’s day, centennials,  memorial celebrations- all those are pre-arranged moments that by virtue of the collective importance that we ascribe to them they automatically are conceived to become memory markers of our lives. We know that we may never forget the day of our wedding, our first date, or our last day at work.  This is because Endingness does not take place necessarily after the event but also afterward.  Similarly, Endingness can be enacted after the event, – for example, when we acquire awareness that a certain past moment was of significance, but at the time it was not acknowledged as such. Endingness can be activated even during the event that is referencing, for example when we announce that we are commemorating that very moment (“I know that I will never forget this moment for as long as I live”). So, while our sets of experiences necessarily exist within the confines of a particular time and place, the perspective of Endingness is ever-changing and is not confined to any particular time or place. It is possible for Endingness even to exist in a fictional set of events that may have never taken place. Endingness can be composed, for example of nostalgia (longing for something that may have never have happened) or for artistic fiction (the catharsis provoked in film, for example).

k. Endingness is the primal response that we have when an event or experience triggers a memory or set of memories. It is the intermediary motivation between our memory of the world and our creative act.

l. Because applications of perspectivism in science are always limited, it is art where the intuitional and rational (natural and artificial) relationship between perspective and memory can be best enacted. Endingness is the ultimate perspective of a set of individual or collective experiences, as recalled by memory.

The systematization of memory, like the systematization of perspective, assumes specific parameters that tend to also be rigid readings of reality. An encyclopedic museum provides an artificial historical perspective, as comprehensive as it may be. In the same way, Piero Della Francesca’s perspective methods are mathematical measurements of the two-dimensional space. In the end, systematization of perspective and of memory can never be entirely accurate because the mere act of transposing the information from the mind or the eye into another realm – be it the two-dimensional surface or language- is already and alteration of the original material, a traduttore/tradittore type of problem in representation.

In this way, memory operates in the same way than perspective, both in a metaphorical, mathematical, and architectural sense.

m. Endingness embodies the cathartic qualities of drama. Endingness brings psychological and emotional catharsis, followed by relief.

Endingness is the ultimate element of drama. Its power is distinct because it is able to contain the totality of experiences (or at least, the semblance of such totality). It is often the climax and the resolution of a given issue in film, in novels, in music, and in any sequential work. In Hollywood films, the ending is generally the great test on whether a film can be valued upon, as well as the key to its resolution- we usually hate it when someone in describing the story of a film tells us “how it ends”, because that information usually takes away our experiential journey toward the climax of resolution of the story.

It is well known that people with near-death or death and back-to-life experiences often remark on how their entire life passes through their eyes. Endingness is the energy that consolidates the totality of our life- a proustian trigger that contains all the feelings, all the moments, and all the emotions, and it is the one thing that makes us feel most alive, more than love, more than sex, more than anything that we can possibly feel. It is an illusion, – it would be impossible to remember at any given time our entire set of memories, experiences and feelings. Nevertheless, Endingness provides us with an illusion that we are seeing it all- while at least what we are seeing or remembering are a selective set of relevant experiences that are most present in our minds.

It has always been interesting for me to see how when a prominent person dies, immediately there is a wave of press, commentary, and nostalgic remembrance-  pure endingness- a desire to recover that person, a collective review of this persons’ life and reality.  Endingness operates collectively as a cathartic experience. It brings to aide the process of mourning and loss.  Once again, Endingness is not a momentary thing- it is something that can exist before, during, and after the event.

Endingness is to memory what orgasm is to sex. It is the climax of experiences; it is the ultimate, unquestionable summary of it all. It is an ecstasy of cognitive elements put together, and in the best of cases, it helps us to gain greater understanding of their significance. In the worst of cases, it pushes us to live in the past, feeding our mind with ghosts. Like sex, or like a drug, it provides an experience that can be so intense that could be painful, as well as an ecstatic moment that we know is precious because we know it is so ephemeral.

There has always been a critical view on the primal impulse to commemorate death and regard ending as the reflective microcosm of the totality of life. The Greek philosopher Teognis de Megara wrote: “foolish men who cry on the sight of death, and not to the flower of youth that slowly fades away”.

“Don’t ask how he died, but how he lived” is a more modern moralist expression that arguably was articulated precisely because of the extreme importance that we give to how things end, and not how they were in a more panoramic perspective. And, similarly, as dramatism is almost an inextricable aspect of endings, so much so that we can’t conceive a quiet ending to something vast. T.S. Eliot reflects on this when he writes in The Waste Land:

This is how the world ends,

This is how the world ends,

This is how the world ends,

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

This brings us to a central question on the nature of Endingness. If Endingness is defined by the accumulation of emotion and memory of experiences, can there be a non-dramatic form of Endingness? The answer would be no, because there is an intricate connection between emotional response and memory. A basic tenet of memorization is that memories are significant inasmuch as there is a deep connection between us and them, and the deepest connections are emotional. Thus this is how when we recall the most important moments of our lives we usually think about the ones that are linked to the most powerful emotions- happiest moments, moments of greatest sadness, fear, passion, etc.

6. Endingness and the Architectural Space

In order for Endingness to take place, it requires a particular location in the mind to exist and be recalled at any given moment.  I have previously mentioned that Endingness necessarily takes place in a meta-temporal space (j). The next question would be on whether it is possible to physically construct an endingnessial space as it would play out in an artistic practice, and what kinds of attributes it would have.

n. The endingnessial architectural space should not be limited by an unmovable perspective be it visual or conceptual.

Modernism was largely ruled by the notion that a particular set of ideas or credos would be imperative in the creation of a new artistic language. In contemporary art today, no dominating language exists. Individual artists have been freed from the monolingual tendencies of artistic vocabularies and it is necessary to be open to the fact that we experience today not one, but an indefinite number of perspectives. Thus an ideal experiential space needs to be open to that multiplicity of different and complementary perspectives.

o. The ideal endingnessial architectural space should be an ever-changing integration of all collective, yet singular, perspectives in a dialogic environment. It should also never intend to be read in any explicit way.

When I mean a full integration of perspectives it may sound the same than saying that we need to create all-inclusive democratic spaces. It is important here to make a distinction between a homogenized space and a space that allows contradictions and discrepancies. A homogenized space, such as the American suburbs, is not a dialogic reunion of perspectives, but instead the equalization of a set of values that are agreed upon a priori and that forcefully coexist, if usually going against each other, and specially contradicting each other.

Much of late XXth century architecture –particularly memorials- try to use perspective as a metaphor of death. Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin is a good example of a building structure physically seeking to replicate the magnitude of a collective experience– the Holocaust. Yet, the building functions by pre-ordained symbolic routes that are not based on other than the architect’s interpretation of what should communicate things like death, confusion, and finitude. We walk through the “axis of memory”, and while we are invited to reflect on the horror of the tragedies of others, the implicit hope of the architectural structure is that the physical space will somehow communicate to us, in an abstract or metaphysical sense, the magnitude of the event it remembers. The problem with such a model is the presumption that the physical/allegorical/architectural representation of an event (whose form is decided upon by the artist himself) will necessarily take us the closest to experience it. In reality- and this is perhaps the unsolvable problem with public art, museums, and architecture- original experience can only be approximated, but never recreated. Art will always generate deep responses and experiences, but it can almost never succeed in pre-establishing what kind of experience we should have towards it. The ideal endingnessial space is the one that gives room for those self-reflective experiences without ascribing a definite physical shape to them- a reason for which it should be ever-changing. Therefore, the endingnessial space should not only be ever-changing, but also it should never aspire to convey any definite reading.

p. A space that transmits the full experience of reality has to be constituted by the rational and the intuitional interpretation of memory.

By rational interpretation I mean the philosophical and textual tradition, and by the intuitional interpretation I mean the one transmitted by the non-verbal arts. Endingness is an instance where both intuition and rationalization come together. In the implementation of a new art of memory using this logic, the interpretation about the artwork and the art work itself are one and the same thing at all times. Thus instead of becoming the dialogic result of the idea/image relationship, art instead will become the perspective of its own perspective.

q. The architectural Endingnessial space, constituted both by artificial and natural memory, has to be built out of the foundational structure of a “perspectivist memory brick”.

A “memory brick” is the equivalent to the behavior of a string of neurological synapses. But as it happens in the mind, these trends are never exactly the same: memories are ever-evolving and ever changing.  Thus the memory brick, while it should be consistent in its form from other bricks, has to have a fungible quality- i. e. it should stay firm, but at the same time it must be modifiable. Similarly, the “memory brick” has to be infinitely exchangeable by others. The interchangeability of the “memory brick” is a natural phenomenon in human memory.

r. The architectural Endingnessial space should be an ever-changing, and most importantly, a contradictory space.

This is a necessity due to the need of a multi-perspectival, experiential space. In order to really respond to our current reality, art can no longer be a creation derived from a single perspective. Art has to provide all the perspectives simultaneously, be self-referential and external, and be both affirmative and negative.

Endingness and the Musical Space

Music is the one art form where endingness can find the best conjunction of intuitive and logical realities. In contrast to architecture and literature, music originates a space that is the most open to our personal insertion of imagery and experience- and, due to its emotional connection; it is a natural site for us to place our most significant memories. Music is often the trigger of memories, triggering not only concrete scenes in our life but also entire periods of our lives. We can be conditioned by music to laugh, cry, or reflect, based on the cognitive associations that we have developed with it, and we can see images in melodies. More than architecture, music has that natural ability to reconform and regroup. Different musical interpretations of the same context become new containers for experiences.

s. Musical space, like Endingness, obeys a multi-layered structure.

Musical compositions, on the other hand, are the best example of the way in which Endingnessial consciousness does not function in one single line, but often in a combination of juxtaposed experiences.

This characteristic is best exemplified by the form of the fugue, which is considered the most sophisticated expression of Western polyphony, and which was brought it to its highest development by Bach. A fugue is a polyphonic procedure in which a motive (subject) is exposed in an initial tonic/dominant relationship, and then developed by contrapuntal means. (Counterpoint being the art of combining melodies each of which is independent through forming part of a homogeneous texture).

Originally of a choral nature, Fugues generally consist of a series of expositions and developments of melodies or “voices” with no fixed number of either. At its simplest, a fugue might consist of one exposition followed by optional development. A more complex fugue might follow the exposition with a series of developments, or another exposition followed by one or more developments.

The main elements of the fugue are: a theme or subject, stated first in one and then in all voices; continuation of a voice after the subject, accompanying the subject statements in other voices and passages built upon a motif, a short phrase derived from the subject or countersubject.

In memory, like in the fugue, there are a variety of multiple voices, instead of a single melodic line. Like memory, there is a natural rewriting of versions of a single theme in a variety of forms – which we can call “memory voices”, that can be considered polyphonic when they become fabricated memories (adulterated or embellished memories) and cacophonic when they become mixed in the subconscious in an illogical manner (dreaming).[xviii] The memories in the mind are like melodic lines that repeat themselves and connect next to each other in a coherent whole. It could be said that our memories are the musical repertoires that we unconsciously play in our dreams.

This notion of multiple voices is not far from what physiologically occurs in our brain. In electroencephalograms, the visual record is a picture of brain waves made by the process of electroencephalography. The electrical activity or each brain cell or neuron is recorded by placing small electrodes on the scalp; activity is magnified 1 million times and recorded as brain waves. There are generally four main kinds of waves in the brain. What electroencephalograms prove is that brain activity is composed of a multiplicity of electronic signals, and not in a single, continuous flow of information.

III. Play

[music score]

IV. Finis

7. Endingness and Amnesia

This work, inevitably a self-reflection of itself, would not have been written without my belief that not only we experience Endingness on an everyday basis, but in that I believe we live in a time of Endingness as well, where self-referentiality (often referenced as ‘meta’), as well as a number of strange collective obsessions with reality and fiction reveal a particularly important state in our minds that should be explored inside and outside the realm of art.

Reality is quickly disappearing from our every day life.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that objects are vanishing before our eyes- on the contrary, one could argue that nowadays we see more than ever before. It is rather precisely due to the overload of information that those things which we see come to mean less and less, as a result of our crisis of consciousness.

In places where there is little self-consciousness, no memory, or weakness of perception, there is a weak relationship to reality. When it comes to talking about contemporary urban centers detached from reality, we can find places that are entire simulations of perception (Las Vegas), archaeological simulations of their own past (Detroit), and illustrations of themselves as touristy havens (Miami).  The corporate world, which is based in the clonation of identical forms of business, architecture, and experience, is the fastest propagator of unreality in the world. Paradoxically, third-world countries have higher levels of reality than developed countries.  Reality in places like these becomes not the physical immediacy of something, but the concretion of “somethingness” that is contained in certain things or circumstances.  If what we see and feel is derived from things or ideas that already exist or existed elsewhere, this environment looses reality inasmuch as it reproduces that original something.

In a constructed environment where everything is a simulation of something else, all that is left is what Baudrillard understood as nostalgia- wanting to be something that you can never be. And the unattainability of that something, the very impossibility to have something that we have conditioned ourselves to want- makes us unhappy individuals.

Following this reasoning, pragmatic thought is based on existing things, on immediacy- but it is not able to distinguish derived realities from original realities. Utopian thinking, on the other hand, rests on imagining impossibilities- things that we know for certain that they don’t exist, but we want them to exist sometime in the future. Paradoxically, this utopian awareness brings us closer to reality than our purported pragmatism, because we know that we try to construct something unattainable- as opposed, like the pragmatists, that we are already constructing on something solid when we may be constructing over thin air.

Endingness, as I tried to articulate in this text as an initial approximation, is perhaps an utopian nostalgia for the reality that we are missing in our life. It manifests itself in a spontaneous level in our consumerist behavior, in our collective obsessions and cathartic reactions in talk shows and reality TV, in what we like and don’t like in our most primary level. It is similar to the Platonic idea of learning- recognition of something that we already knew from the moment we were born, but that we had forgotten.

Endingness makes us, at the most basic level, to consume in order to find a sense of completion. In its most sophisticated level, it becomes a condition of the mind that naturally brings both rational and intuitional aspects in the viewer – something that Panofsky, while referring to perspective, divided between the mathematical aspect of perspective and the psycho physiological aspects of it. We put things in perspective in a logical sense, and we see them in perspective as we review our memories. Like the story of the singing swan, myth sometimes takes the form of a collective endingness, and endingness mythologizes the real through art.

One can think of Endingness as only a personal process, but one which is also is enacted whenever we sense extinction, whether of social values, of cultural legacy, or intellectual curiosity.  Being aware of these aspects of “social endingness” is important, and although I am not able to discuss it in this essay, I believe it is the foundation of the control of our memory loss by others, and –taking here the risk to sound like a self-help manual- the beginning of self-empowerment. Those who remember are in a better position to challenge those who are in power, and it is the power of remembrance that can allow us not to go back to the undesirable historical moments where we once were.

In religion, the notion of the apocalypse and the last judgment is a form to implement the power of endingness at the service of a moral purpose- a rather manipulative strategy. The notion of the “last judgment” is the ultimate endingness situation for all souls, where all is put into perspective and a final resolution is made on our eternal fate. It is a dramatic ending, and we need to be prepared for it.

But as the feeling of endingness is awaken in us to look back and reflect upon the good or bad we had done in life, the manipulative strategy of endingness is not only utilized by organized religion. Endingness is a powerful social tool that also translates into fear and intimidation.  In a conservative society where change means not the improvement of life but rather the end of a comfortable stage, the feeling of endingness can easily be evoked. We fear the loss of our security, our jobs, our standard of living, and ultimately, our lives and the ones around us. If there were no sense of endingness, there would be no fear.

Thus understanding the process by which endingness dominates our fears thus can be a liberating process. It frees the mind to understand that the end exists regardless of what we think of it, and will happen also regardless.

Endingness is a creative force. Like abstract energy, it can be manipulated, it can be channeled, and it also can be used in harmful ways. It should logically follow then that understanding its characteristics and the ways by which we are influenced by it can make us free.

[ii] William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act III

[iii] Brewers Book of Myth and Legend

[iv] The Aberdeen Bestiary, Aberdeen University (f58v) see http://www.clues.abdn.ac.uk8080/bestiary_old

[v] James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective, p.

[vi] See Alexander Roob, Alchemy and Mysticism, Taschen, 1997 pp 701- 2

[vii] Giordano Bruno, On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas, translated by Charles Doria, edited and annotated by Dick Higgins  (New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1991),

[viii] Bruno, Op. cit., introduction

[ix] For a more detailed analysis of Camillo’s Theater and its relationship to virtual interface see Pablo Helguera, Artificiosa Memoria: Mnemonic Utopia and Museums, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen, 2002.

[x] Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 230

[xi] Yates, ibid, p.230

[xii] Giordano Bruno, Corpus Hermeticum XI, Ch. II

[xiii] Paul Strathern, Heidegger, p.30

[xiv] See Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (2003).  The body’s contribution to language.  In B. Ross (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, V43 (pp. 93-126).  New York: Academic Press; and Borghi, A. M., Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (in press). Putting words in perspective. Memory & Cognition.

[xv] For a study of eidetic imagery see Gray, C.R., and Gummerman, K.  (1975).  The enigmatic eidetic image: A critical examination of methods, data, and theories. Psychological Bulletin 82, 383-407. 

[xvi] What is the basis behind a photographic memory? Article by Michael Freed, Aerospace Human Factors, NASA Ames Research Center,  www.massci.org; MadSci Network, Washington University Medical School, 1997

[xvii] Elizabeth F. Loftus & William H. Calvin, “Memory’s Future,” in Psychology Today 34(2):55ff (March-April, 2001).

[xviii] For an example of a visual/conceptual literalization of the polyphonic form of the fugue see Pablo Helguera, Parallel Lives, 2003.

Swan Song consisted in a group of works on the subject of memory. The main work, entitled Endingness, had three components: one, a manifesto-like essay on the sujbject of mortality, memory and artmaking; a multi-panel series of wax tablets onto which the essay was written, and an orchestral composition that was performed on the night of the opening. As a complement on that evening, the orchestra performed Haydn’s “Farewell” symphony, on which the performers are gradually asked to leave the stage until only one violin remains.

Interview- “A brief history of Finitude”

http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?Itemid=701&id=3417&option=com_content&task=view