THE SYMPOSIUM was  a special hybrid project presented in conjunction with the international exhibition project PR04 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. PR04, a bi-annual contemporary art event in Puerto Rico, includes installations, interactive projects, and is an important forum of exchange and dialogue of conteporary art. This year the subject of PR04 is the Olympiad, and projects developed as part of it address, to some extent, the Greek tradition of the Olympics.

SYMPOSIUM  was a hybrid product between  a traditional symposium and an actual performance of Plato’s symposium, as an updated reenactment by various prominent writers, artists, and critics. The objective was to utilize both the more relaxed discussion format of the symposium in the tropical setting of the Caribbean, and to transpose the philosophical debates about love, passion and desire to current issues in contemporary art. Participants were asked to present the points of views of their “characters” following the format of this famous dialogue, and to enter into a debate with participation from the attending public.

The project followed the general spirit of PR04 in that it reclaimed the classical cultural tradition of Greece as in the Olympics, and seek to also revive the nourishing nature of the public dialogue, making it more a matter of both spiritual and physical enjoyment than a dry academic affair.

The Symposium is one of the foundational documents of Western culture and arguably the most profound analysis and celebration of love in the history of philosophy. It is also the most lavishly literary of Plato’s dialogues–a virtuoso prose performance in which the author, like a playful maestro, shows off an entire repertoire of characters, ideas, contrasting viewpoints, and iridescent styles. A symposium is literally a “drinking together”–in other words a drinking party. In Athens, in Plato’s day, symposia were strictly stag affairs. As a rule, they consisted of a fairly lavish, semi-formal banquet followed by ceremonial toasts and bouts of drinking.

Symposia were usually held in private homes in specially designed dining and party areas. The guests (from as few as 3 or 4 to as many as 12 or 20) reclined on couches arranged in a circle. An entire service of ornamental cups, bowls, plates, and vases were set out for the occasion. After dinner, amid hearty servings of wine, the guests would converse, engage in song contests, enjoy the professional entertainment, or, as in the case of The Symposium, compose speeches or deliver mock orations.

A preliminary rehearsal was conducted on June 4^th, 2004 at the University of Camaguez, and the  public final performance was presented at the Olympic village of Rincón the following day, with food and drink being served throughout the entire duration of the event.

T H E    S Y M P O S I U M

By Plato

Written 360 B.C.

Reinterpreted by Pablo Helguera
Persons in the dialogue:

Xandra Eden as ARISTOPHANES

Nelson Rivera as PHAEDRUS

Ryan Hill as PAUSANIAS

Hamza Walker as ERYXIMACHUS
Pablo Helguera as AGATHON

Christine Hill as ALCIBIADES
James Elkins as SOCRATES

–

PABLO HELGUERA (Agathon) (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist living and working in New York.

HAMZA WALKER (Eryximachus) is the director of Education of the Renaissance Society in Chicago.
NELSON RIVERA (Phaedrus) is an artist, theater director, writer and composer living in San Juan, Puerto Rico
RYAN HILL(Pausanias) is a visual and performance artist living in New York.

XANDRA EDEN (Pausanias) is associate curator of the Power Plant in Toronto.
JAMES ELKINS (Socrates) is an art historian and critic based in Dublin. He is the author of many works, including “The Object Strikes Back” and “What Painting Is”
CHRISTINE HILL (Alcibiades) is an artist based in Brooklyn. Her ongoing project, Volksboutique, was featured in Documenta IX and many other international exhibitions.

SYMPOSIUM

Symposium

First part

PR04 Olympic Village, Rincón, Puerto Rico

June 5, 2004

Pablo Helguera

Ladies and gentlemen:  two thousand, two hundred and thirty four years ago, a certain banquet amongst notable Greeks took place, and that’s what became known as the Symposium. I am here to present to you the Symposium by Plato. My name is Agathon in the Symposium. In the symposium Agathon gathers a group, and as in any symposium people drink, sing, dance, do speeches. In Plato’s Symposium, the guests decide to do speeches about love, and thus here, we will talk about love.

But one thing I would like that you do with me first is to have a toast.

(the audience toasts)

What each one of us here will do is to take a role front the original characters of the Symposium. As we go into the discussion, we would like you to be part of it, asking questions or interrupting.

In the symposium the discussion starts with Phaedrus, who tells us his theory of love.

Phaedrus

In my speech I thought about using Phaedrus’ own words, but at the same time bring in the words of a lot of poets, not from Greece but from later years – including my own. So I included these and brought them together with whatever Phaedrus is talking about.

My text is Spanish and English, some of it is translated.

Gran dios es el amor

Love is a great god

Todos mis pensamientos hablan de amor

No tiene el amor genealogia conocida ni se la invento por nadie pueblo o poeta

Su origen no lo se pues no lo tiene, mas se que todo origen de ella viene aunque es de noche

O soleil c’est le temps de la raison ardente

Amor fin doble corazon son la misma cosa tal como dice el sabio en su cancion

Y asi no puede ser uno sin el otro como el alma sin la razon

You must sit down, says love and taste my milk

So I did sit

How fair you are, how all rapturous love

Here is your figure stately as a palm tree and your breasts are like clusters of fruit

I say let me climb the palm tree and take hold of your branches

Qué lindos se ven tus pies con sandalias

tus caderas torneadas son collares obra artesana de orfebre

tu ombligo una copa redonda que rebosa vino aromado

tu vientre montoncito de trigo adornado de azucenas

tus pechos igual que dos crías mellizas de gacela

quedeme y olvideme del rostro recliné sobre el amado

ceso todo y quedeme dejando un cuidado entre las azucenas olvidado

de vos será.

Her image had passed to his soul forever.

And no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy

Her eyes had coal and her soul had —

To live to her to hold, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

To rage, to lust, to write, to commit, all these were product of the god of love

If you were to drop dead i would never stop loving you

Even though we could no longer screw

Solo a los amantes les viene de voluntar morir por otros

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence,

The most sublime act is to set another before you,

Solo el amor puede poner verguenza por lo feo

Respetuoso amor por lo bello, que sin amor y verguenza no hay manera

De que ni particular ni ciudad alguna lleven a cabo obras grandes y buenas

No picture is made to endure or to live with, but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura sin against nature

Todo cuanto existe digno es de entrar en la obra de arte, porque goza de la inmanente dignidad de la existencia

El arte no distingue cosas sucia o inferior, la distincion de la cosa sucia podra venir del estómago, la cosa inferior del cerebro, el corazon no tiene nada que ver en estas diferenciaciones. Un gran dolor, un inmenso placer hacen olvidar lo sucio y lo inferior, liberando todo en emocion.

Love is worth it

Tal vez nos casemos este anio, amor mio,

Y tengamos una casita,

Y tal vez se publique mi libro

O nos vayamos los dos al extranjero

Tal vez caiga Somoza, amor mio

and yet you know, hatred, even of meanness, contorts the features,

Anger, even against injustice, makes the voice hoarse

Oh we who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness

Could not be ourselves friendly

Y sin embargo sabiamos tambien que el odio contra la abadesa desfigura la cara

Tambien la ira contra la injusticia pone ronca la voz

Desgraciadamente nosotros que queríamos preparar el camino para la amabilidad

No pudimos ser amables.

Perdoname amor, si no te nombro,

Fuera de tu canción soy el asceta,

La muerte y yo dormimos conjuntamente

Cantarte a tí tan solo me despierta

Incapaz de acción politica, no denuncio a mi solitaria vocación de cultura

A mi empecinada busqueda ontológica

A los juegos de la imaginación en sus planos más vertiginosos

Pero todo esto  no mira ya en sí mismo y por sí mismo

No tienen ya nada que ver con el cómodo humanismo de los mandarines de occidente

Que lo mas gratuito que pueda yo escribir asomara siempre una voluntad de contacto con el presente histórico del hombre

Una participacion en su larga marcha a sí mismo como colectividad y humanidad

What thou lovest well is a true heritage

What thout lovest well shall not be taken from thee

Entonces todos los hombre de la tierra lo rodearon

Desvío el cadaver triste, emocionado, incorporose lentamente

Abrazó al primer hombre, y hechose a andar

Y en resumen tales son mis palabras

Que el amor es entre los dioses el más antiguo, el más venerable

El senor de los senores

Que en cuyas manos se encierra para los hombres vivos

Para los hombres toda posesión de virtud y bienaventuranza.

Pablo

As you have seen, Phaedrus has a very ideal notion of love- a poetic interpretation of love.  We can start to reflect what kinds of love we have.

Pausanias

One of the things that makes love ideal is to say that it is only one thing, and everything that isn’t that ideal is dishonorable. So what I am proposing is that there are two ideals of love: there is the older god of love, and there is one love whose nature is absorbed in ethereal desires: the common and the heavenly.

What is interesting in Pausanias is that he talks about the purpose of love.  What is animating this love?  Is it to not discriminate, to engage one’s lusts, one’s appetite, or is it more heavenly?  Is it more about the soul than the body?

The other idea is that love is goal oriented, [it has to have a noble goal] so for example the love would be not noble if you are only thinking about the orgasm, and not the spiritual side.

As I go through these ideas, what’s interesting to me is my reaction to them, because I wonder what’s going to make them relevant to my life, or what’s going to make it relevant to the time I am speaking in. I think it is interesting and sad that we don’t have a definition of what a soul is.

Pausanias also talks about rules for love, that there are rules for love, that there is good and bad love.

Agathon

What is bad love?

Pausanias

I don’t know…[however]  I’ve had a lot of bad love…

Alcibiades

Bad love could be publicly acknowledged [negative] sexual things like pedophilia. We [maybe also] are talking about masochistic love.

Pausanias

In psychology there is an idea that there is an unhealthy love for you.

Alcibiades

It could be a much more subtle evil, doesn’t have to be about drug abuse.

Pausanias

My experience is that even bad love brings wisdom. If I am going out with someone who is insane, then maybe it will make me a little less insane…

Eriximachus

I think the problem has to bring together bad and love. Part of the problem is that you can’t translate the term in a more subtle way, the way that  they are referring to love, as it refers to the state and citizens and being a good person so that “bad love” is still “love” all the same but its not in the sense of pederasty, bestiality, those things mentioned as value judgments as we do today,  such as adultery. Maybe [bad love] is more like ‘love that has to be conducted in secrecy”.

Pausanias

There are a lot of ideas here such as that love is more than about the body and beauty, and that once beauty its gone, the love is gone, and that a good love can endure the loss of beauty. What’s moving to me is this split that I see happens in contempoary culture, and that’s what makes more sense for me.

These speeches are not about love in how we relate [to each other], but on the idea of love and how we celebrate the spiritual love and how it is beneficial to society- because if one falls in love with someone who is good and you are trying to be good, there’s two people trying to be good, and this can only benefit society.

Alcibiades

This issue of honor and dishonor in the text speaks about on whether its honorable for you individually or whether if it is for the greater good. It talks about some sort of workmanship to love rather of love for its own sake, which is also interesting to go over the art context about whether we are actually contributing something in the greater sense.

Pausanias

I think this talks about the idea of working out love, this idea that love should be this manageable thing… What means to work on your love? It means to make your love an ideal that you can work towards. After that notion of the ideal becomes institutionalized, you’ve got a lot of underpaid workers there!  In art, seems to be same kind of thing, instead reverse: you can’t just love your art, you have to work at it

Agathon

So what does Pausanias says about relationships today?

Pausanias

That’s where [Pausanias’ speech] doesn’t work for me, because I think it is a mixture for me of both-  although I have to say in terms of , that the idea of healthy and unhealthy love seems to be something you see in a lot of talk shows, like Jerry Springer.  Is that about bad love or is it about good love? I can’t answer if it is good or bad, but what is interesting to me is that a good love is something that lasts over time, that once the beauty has faded, there is a deeper love that goes beyond the body.  That’s something that we talk about when we transfer it over to the state. Which is: Bill Clinton was the Daddy of America and suddenly became a national interest because how can he be a great leader of state if he can’t control his lower common self? This made American people very upset because they didn’t want to think about how perhaps this idea of a long term relationship would not work for everybody. So in this sense Lewinsky is perhaps an example of bad love, because of her interest in power, etc.

The other idea [ that I like] is that when you are truly in love you are of service to your partner. It could also be that because there is an understanding that their well-being is your well-being.

Erixymachus

I want to go back to the issues of ethics , good vs. bad love. I am deeply troubled by it, and in thinking of a structure of discussion, only once before have I been at a dinner when the topic of love came up in an informal setting and the idea of raising the dinner conversation to the level of theater. The conversation stopper of that evening, [which I will bring up] in the spirit of this of this symposium, was: could you sleep with an artist whose work you didn’t like?

At some point we had to agree whether we would have to say yes or no.  I would like to know by a show of hands, who would sleep with an artist whose work you didn’t like?

(some in the audience raise their hands)

Audience member:

How about sleeping with a curator whose work you didn’t like?

Socrates

Socrates’ favorite thing is to take notes on what everyone is saying that check off contradictions and things like that… but in relationship to this, I wonder the kind of thing Socrates might say is that you have to define “like”, because by definition you don’t like anyone’s work more than you like yours, because otherwise you would be doing that work.

Erixymachus

I would object to that idea, because if you were to reverse that question… I mean to say…if it is an artist whose work I like and I slept with him, then it’s the word “like” problematized?

Socrates

Socrates doesn’t know what the word “problematized” is.

(laughs)

Erixymachus

If you saw it and you like the work, the idea of a virtuous person who you admire and you like the work and turns you on?

Pausanias

A great artist is not necessarily a virtuous person. I think there are certain kinds of artists out there who don’t think of themselves first, but there are great artists whose social, human part is not working that well…

Aristophanes

Also I want to say that in relation to the idea of sleeping with someone whose work you don’t like-  you can see it in two ways: first as taking advantage of them by having a love of the flesh while you have a distaste for whatever they are trying to express through their work; or you can look at it as being very generous because maybe there are other things about their personality – the way they look, etc-  that actually you  are willing to overlook, and are willing to love somebody despite their imperfections.

Pausanias

This brings interesting questions, because if art is the only thing that is important to you, then what is your artwork about? Then, concerning this idea of tying philosophy to judgement,  on whether something is good or bad… I am not the kind of person that believes in that kind of philosophy.  I like to be confused, because when I am confused I am free, and there are not these kinds of categories, there are no categories that have to be broken all the time. There are a lot of things that I am thinking in terms of that duality.

Agathon

Perhaps what you mean is that you don’t want to be ruled by permanent paradigms, but you don’t want either to be confused all the time?

Socrates

Nobody in this dialogue says that they are confused, but in any case if anyone would say that, it would be Socrates himself…

Pausanias

The arguments presented in this Platonic dialogue are made in a way to support Socrates’ final comment, who solves the “problem” by breaking it down by categories. And [back to the realm of art] when you look at the art of the 60s and 70s, you can see that there are these artists who are trying to do that [deconstructing the essence of art]. Then look at the marketplace, where [art is objectified and] objects are bought and sold. Because there is money there, perhaps that’s bad love. And good love is when art can be experienced with no way to be bought and sold. So, what is the role of the market in this discussion? Maybe you should tell everyone about Andrea Fraser.

Agathon

Andrea Fraser is an artist who is very involved with institutional critique. Most recently she did a piece that consisted in having sex with the collector- as part of the piece.

Alcibiades

A word that we haven’t used in discussed honorable and dishonorable is ‘whoring” its not only marketplace, it’s about dirtiness… Andrea Fraser is asking “who owns who” in this experiment. Are they in power? Is someone more or less dignified for taking money for their work?

Audience member:

There is a difference between selling and selling out. She’s doing what she is doing in her own terms and she has created a context in which to do it; what she’s done is to maintain control of the context.

Socrates

A lot of this is apart from the dialogue, but I am thinking what Socrates would say about this whole discussion about corruption…and he might say that money is not good nor bad- that stuff we are talking about in here is not in the dialogue, but one of the reasons it is not, aside from that its not related to art, is that it would be considered utilitarian, completely detachable, so it wouldn’t even matter what ends you were looking with your art.

(…)

For the sake of this conversation you can say that [the relationship between art and money] there is hypocrisy here, but is this hypocrisy relevant?

(…)

I don’t think Socrates would have been interested in any of this, so the question is what has happened in the 2000 years prior to this dialogue? Somehow we have figured that there is some sort of connection between these things, and we all sort of believe it but can’t really say how, and especially not in terms of this dialogue.

[We turn into ERYXIMACHUS speech]

Eryximachus

[quoting from Eryximachus’ speech from the Symposium]:

…but one has to deal with the effect upon human beings of rhythm and harmony by a process  known as composition or the right use of melodies and verse forms in what is called education difficult as it occur,  which demand skillful artists we come back to the old notion that is the love felt by virtuous men which should be gratified and preserved, with the objective of making those virtuous who are as yet less so. This is the noble, the heavenly love, which is associated with the heavenly muse, Urania; but there is also a vulgar or common love associated with Polyhimnia, and anyone who employs this must exercise great caution in its choice of people upon whom to employ.

Love is in the air.

[Eryximachus puts on the radio and starts changing stations. The audience listens to various songs of love in different styles: salsa, bolero, religious songs, rap, Paulina Rubio, etc]

Its such a dirty old shame when you gotta take the blame for a love song, because the best love song is written with a broken heart. Now the tears in my eyes are ever blinding;  the future that lies before me I cannot see.  Although tomorrow I know the sun is rising lighting up the world but not for me.

Example B (little Kim)

I know a dude, his name is Jimmy

Used to run up imme

Night time, pissy drunk, off the hainy grainy

I didn’t mind it when he fucked me from behind

It felt fine

Specially we used to grind it

He was a trip when I sucked his dick

He used to pass me brick, credit cards and shit

Something to sleep, I took the keys to the jeep

Tell em I’ll be back

Don’t fuck some other cats

Flirting, getting numbers, in the Summer

Ho hop raw top you know mans drop

Then theres homy Jimmy hes screamy gimme

Lean in my back busting nuts in all in me

After 10 times we fucked

I think I bust twice

It was nice

Kept my neck full of ice

Put me in chanels, kept me on ice

Cold sucking his dick rocking the mike

There was something about this dude I couldn’t stand

Something that could have made his ass, really

Something I want, but I never was pushy

The motherfucker just never ate my pussy.

I don’t want dick tonight. Eat my pussy, right?

Oh oh oh

Li’l Kim  L’il Kim

Bring it to me now

I know it dude

Push a cue

On Flatbush and Avenue U

Had a weak spot

Used to pump african black

Used to seal his bags

So his work was woodn cap

I used to see him in the tunnel

With fuckers at dawn

Whispered in my ear

You wanna get this fuck on

I dug him

So I fucked ‘im

He wasn’t nut

He wanted me to suck im

But I didn’t

I aint from

Sex was Wack

I jumped on his dick

Brought his ass to sleep

He called next week

Asking why I didn’t meet him

I thought your ass was still sleeping

He laughed

Told me he bought it pack

Could he come over right could he come over right fast

And fuck my pretty ass

I’ll pass nigger

I think we’re stretched

If sex was record sales

You would be double plat

The only way you are seein’ me

Is if you are eating me

Downtown taste my love

Like forest brown

Try to impress me

With your five g-stones

I can be ten g’s nigger

If you leave me alone,

Screaming

The moral of the story is this,

You ain’t licking this

You ain’t sticking this

And I’ve got witnesses

Ask any nigger I’ve been with

They ain’t eat shit

Til they stick their toungue in this.

I aint with that front shit

I got my own bends

I got my own ends

Immediate friends

Me and my girls rock worlds

Some big niggers fuck for car keys

And double digit figures

Good dick I cherish

I could be blunt

I treat it like its precious

I ain t gonna front

For lectic niggers that front that they really

Suck my pussy

Till they kill me.

You feel me?

Example C: James Brown

Ha! I don’t care

About your past

I just want a love to last deep

I don’t care darlin about your faults

I just want to satisfy your pulse.

[inhales helium]

When you kiss me

When you miss me

Hold my hand

Make you understand

…

In a cold sweat

Ho ho ho

I don’t care about the wants

I just want HA to tell you about the do’s and don’ts

I don’t care about the way you treat me darling

I just want you to understand me, darlin’

[inhales helium]

When you kiss me

And you miss me

Hold me tight

Makes everything all right

Put it put it

Where is at now

Miss io miss io

Let me have it.

That owes its thanks to Eryximachus, Little Kim, James Brown, John Corbett, Terry Kapsalis, John Cage’s speech. Thank you.

Symposium- Second part

Aristophanes

I will present something related to Aristophanes’s myth- the classic story that usually starts like a tagline of a film, something along the lines of “they were all alone in the world until they found each other” this is and old story, and everybody knows it, it’s the one about the search for the soul mate – so-called your other half but the belief that the romantic relationship between two people form some type of fullness is suspect these days. In the age of internet dating the intellectual part, the very basis of romantic love, concept that the personal fulfillment, the love for another, is often considered to be an embarrassing illusion, and the illusion that two form one is started by Aristophanes in Plato’s symposium. He proposes the idea that originally there were three sexes: a man, a woman, and a man-woman, and these humans had four arms and four legs; they had two legs looking the opposite ways, they walked upward but they often rolled over and over again on their hands and feet very very quickly, that way over large territories, and they were very powerful and strong, and actually threatened the gods. So Zeus decided to cut them into two, and when he divided they were very much saddened and clung to each other, so Apollo decided that he would rearrange their sexual parts in the direction of their faces so that when they embraced each other they would be able to have sex with each other and get some satisfaction from their embrace, and that would be true also of all the female and male humans. So that is how the idea of “looking for the other half”, and it has survived for thousands of years, and also has rationalized the idea of family and other needs in one person. So our notion of love, I think partially the idea of financial independence of women, along with advances in science, that make it possible for women to be artificially inseminated and have a child of their own, and even the idea that we can clone ourselves, and make another human out of one, so we are creating independence in countries that are technologically advanced and affluent. But love is still such an intense fascination … we seem inundated with the topic. I can’t think of any other topic, there are so many ruminations on the idea of love and manifestations and symbols of love in mass media, on the internet sites like love live, friendster and other offer many opportunities to hook up with individuals and the reality shows where people try to get the perfect match, and even the music industry, which since its earliest beginnings has been relying on the love song, sexual lyrics, of such explicitness that they verge on the comical- so we all seem desperate for a little amore but all these forms (television, internet, music industry) are really commodifying the idea of love, its not really about love at all, but about selling the idea of love. Were are in a society that emphasizes the self, and self preservation, and internet relationships tend to tell great risk- I think there is a certain disillusionment with love as this perfect oneness, that has to do with the internet – the idea of socializing from the isolation of the computer screen also we are living in a time when its increasingly open culture and part of this isolation could be that people are confused about what people’s sexual preferences are, and it is hard where to stand, or how to go about courtship, and there is still a very high divorce rate, that shows us how fragile relationship are, and  that relationships cause a lot of emotional stress. I got a very sad talk! So this is the side that is shown in mass culture, mass media, but at the same time there is another thing going on- last summer I did studio visits with many studio artist and many were doing work that dealt with the subject of intimacy and desire, and love- although they would never say that this was what the work was dealing with. Also I think that some people, at least in Toronto,  sort of expressed it through a camaraderie and openness that was very inspiring and there is this day, August 14^th, the great blackout, when the whole city of Toronto, and new York, and many cities we experienced this very peaceful night that brought strangers together, this wonderful feeling in the air that you know its there, but you just need the time to experience it an enjoy it. And so I organized this exhibition showing this young artists entitled “the republic of love”  and I  basically wanted to give the audience an opportunity not only to see the work but also to reflect upon what the conceptions of love were in that context versus popular media. I won’t describe what was in the show, but I think it is something that is important, this idea of self-realization through love is perhaps not seen as something as a possiblity and I think love — where I grew up most people were encouraged, said you have to happen this yourself before you can see it happen it to someone else. Anyway that’s my stance on the subject of love and want to propose that if they misbehaved  and perhaps that’s whats happened to us now instead of looking for another half we could be looking for three other quarters– that’s why there is interest in non-monogamous relationships and also growing population of people that define themselves as bi-sexual, searching experiences in more than one person.

Pausanias

Brings the idea of gender and asexual gender, and trasgender. This idea of self-definition instead of being defined by gender they are defined by themselves. Its almost a way to take these two halves and making them whole again but in a new way, people reinventing categories in order to have a greater sense of themselves. Maybe it is three fourths that are together. How can a marriage survive that?

Eryximachus

I think what makes it sound fresh from the gender perspective contemporary parlance of contemporary gender politics that gender has this essentialist notion relates to identity is gender is something like means to an end I think. Wholeness is the issue, not gender.  When you think about gender it’s a charged issue, but I think the issue of love in a broader, holistic sense, love and socialization, love and its relationship to medicine, as the foundation of other things, as opposed to “now we can’t talk about love unless we talk about the institution of marriage”, the issue of marriage does not even come into this conversation.

Aristophanes

The idea of romantic love and marriage is very new- with the rise of the bourgeoisie, that is something that we are supposed to seek out, a mate that you are in love with and get married to, instead of an arranged marriage or marry for money or for family reasons.

Eryximachus

But when we use the idea of modern love, what time does that entail? Renaissance or..?

Socrates

There is a book by Dennis Cuchebrand [ sp?] called “love in the Western world” its all about the origins of modern romantic love that is rooted in the Trobadours in the XIIth century, and so brings up things like Tristan and Isolde and other romantic periods, that would like be an anti-Platonic reading: marriage, love, fall, separation…

Pausanias

One of the things that interests me about Aristophanes story is that it’s not a Hollywood plot, – a man and a woman getting together- it’s about all these different kinds of ways that these relationships can happen. But aside from that, I think its not about finding wholeness, but about getting rid of loneliness. I mean, when I read that all I thought was the desire to completely not feel alone in the world, and the desire to unify with someone else was didn’t matter who it was, just finding that other half

Socrates

This question would be an out of character in the dialogue, but why would you say that none of the characters in the dialogue talk about loneliness?

Eryximachus

I think that the tone Aristophanes’ story, which is quite fantastic and somehow has a sort of “are you serious” quality, eliminates a certain human set of motivations- such as loneliness. The tale has something of an Eastern influence…

Aristophanes

I just want to mention that homosexuality in Plato’s time is very common and accepted, and also that Aristophanes claims that the union between the male beast divided into two is the purest type of love, which I think is largely due to the fact that is a very male-dominated society, and also that the perfect union man-man, they are longing to be with each other but they cannot say why is it that they need to be with each other and that is why Aristophanes makes this story up.

Socrates

Just want to mention that in the literature on the Symposium people make a lot of that,  and they make it into this whole story of the enigma of the story of love, that one passage, which is a very brief passage- becomes the whole —– that Aristophanes is really aiming at, that he loves to talk about but you don’t know why, that’s another kind of romantic projection, of romantic love back into the past .

Agathon

Here is where Agathon has to weigh in- as he comes after Aristophanes in this speech- and he is into is to understand what this whole idea of wholeness is about, and he questions Aristophanes in what the is forgetting about this kind of higher power which is God, and the love to God is what is truly important.

So what I thought would do would be to first explain what Agathon says, and then how this translates into the notion of how art, which is a product of love, (according to Agathon) how art makes us whole.

He says first: love is blessedest of gods, he also is the youngest, because he did not exist in the early years, when the gods were at war.

The things that were done before love were done out of necessity only unlike other things in humankind. So love is young and dwells in soft places, in hearts and souls.

Love is all flexibility and grace, and like any natural thing, it cannot do or suffer wrong.

Men and women serve the god of love out of their own free will, and where there is love there is obedience, and where there is love there is justice. However, love is the ruler of desires, and love can conquer war… etc.” and he goes on and on. But I will try to break it down a little bit and tell you what he would actually say about art:

Love is the fairest and blessedest and the best of gods, it is also the youngest, because the love was not invented out of not necessity, like other things in humankind.

Art is also invented out love, not out of necessity; There is something youthful about making art; Art does not become important for being useful

Love is always young and dwells in soft places, like the hearts and souls of people.

Art that only exists in people’s brains is not real art; art that you don’t feel something for is not real art.

Love is all flexibility and grace, and like any natural thing, it cannot do or suffer wrong.

If art is the product of love, and if love is all flexibility and grace, then there is nothing such as bad art. Meaning, Art is only what it is,  because it could not be either good or bard, so it should not be treated as something wrong.

Men and women serve the god of love out of their own free will, and where there is love there is obedience, and where there is love there is justice.

Art is a disinterested activity- which makes me think that political art or commercial art don’t really exist or are not real art.

However, love is the ruler of desires, and love can conquer war.

Art can help us do things that can help us would improve the world. And Art can defeat politicians

Love is the author of poetry and generates poetry in others

Art generates art in others

Love is the core of creation, as we are all the product of an act of love,

Art is the core of its own creation, because we create art once we see art and learn the language of art;

Love makes humans to be of one mind at a banquet

Art is a language that we all share and make us a universal community;

Love fills us with affection and empties us out of disaffection

We recognize each other through this language, and can fall in love with each other;

The pilot, helper, defender, saviour of men, in whose footsteps every man follows is love.

Which I think in equal portion it can be that

Art can take us to safe places where we can better deal with this world,

Art is a savior of our tormented minds,

Art, as a product of love, can make us grow,

Making Art is a different way of making love,

The best art we have made in our lives contains all our love,

We love art because it makes us strong,

Because it makes us richer, because if makes us better than who we are,

Even if everything ends, if the world disappears, if we have to live in wholes

We can thing about things and think about them as art,

The limits of art is only the limit of our imagination and it does keep us, if not necessarily young, it does keep me alive.

I want to make a toast to our love, for art.

Socrates

That was really interesting, because I did something very similar to that, but also different, because what you did was to take the word “love” and substituted it with “art”; what I did was to go through the dialogue and substituted the word “love” with “love of art”; its an important kind of difference, because what you were doing was changing the subject, in a sense  – which is not to say you didn’t get truths out of that- whereas my notion was if every time they say “love” they “say love of art” then you know they are taking the subset as an example, seeing if the doctrine applies, so this is what I was toying with. And I got this idea from that book on painting by Derrida, in which he says at the beginning that the subject is the shape of the desire for truth, in what it pertains to painting; and so there would be other shapes for the desire of truth. So in this case there would be love and there would be shapes of love when it pertains of art- it would be like a special case.  But, while this has been going on, Socrates has been making a list of all the things that would have baffled him, and then things that he would have disagreed with.

Among the things that would have baffled him would have been what Ryan (Pausanias) said about the embrace of ambiguity- because the shape of his dialogues for the classicists that study that- is that they (called aporiatic dialogues) lead to a state where the person arguing with Socrates is reduced to a baffling idiot, the aporia is the person who has no idea what they are claiming anymore and this happens a couple of times in this dialogue, like in this bit where Socrates questions Agathon. Then there is a thing called “elenchus, or elenctic dialogues” when you demonstrate, through this immeasurable series of horrifying annoying questions, that the person actually holds the opposite to what they were claiming minutes before. So the reason why I think what we have been doing would have baffled Socrates,  is that I think we don’t have anything against that, if any of us could actually sum up that kind of rhetoric we would be happy to have someone say “okay, I have no idea what I am saying”, but then we would enjoy that, so that ambiguity is, as the art historian  —- would say, a use of power for us- a lot of contemporary art is based on trying to find ambiguity- we love the kind of darkness and obscurity and the difficulty- but in these dialogues that would truly baffle Socrates, because if we ever reach the point in our conversations where we would know what to do, Socrates would say: “okay, now what? Let’s not be there anymore”.

Pausanias

I think that these dialogues are about trying to created order. But I would say now that people are more interested in embracing chaos. That may be the difference – now what is interesting to me is to look back and see how order was important to these people, and now I start to see how there may be a need in our culture for search for some kind of a balance…

Agathon

Well, in a way that was the origin of this whole discussion. Usually the discussions that take place nowadays feel so unstructured that I really wanted to know what would happen if you really try to follow some sort of structure.

Socrates

There are a couple of books that have come out on beauty and the search for clarity and balance, so this is in the air…

Pausanias

Just to add, in our political time, which is so conservative, this interest in balance is in fashion. As soon as you got this isolated point of view, and you are out doing stuff in the world… you have to allow chaos…

Socrates

I think that is completely true and some of these people who are writing stuff about beauty and truth, they are seriously conservative and old-fashioned.

You would ask yourself on whether there is any artist who wants to make something that is not ambiguous. At the Art Institute in Chicago we have these Koreans who are educated in a very conservative art setting, and they really don’t like ambiguity. One of my students brought a picture of a fish, a happy fish with smiley face and eyelashes, and said that it was a self-portrait. I said that couldn’t be because no one is that happy, and she said ‘I am’.

The next thing that would have baffled Socrates, was [the notion] that values are essential. This comes up a number of times. Communities believe that an artwork of like Rembrandt is good because many believe so- this would be what we would call “re-response criticism” in other words, that Moby Dick can mean anything if your class decides what it means.  That is really different from these dialogues, where goodness is beauty, inherently, is not because the majority voted for it, but because these are eternal facts.

The third thing I think that would baffle Socrates would be called “pscyhologisms”, which is is values or judgements of psychological origin or best explained through psychology, for example self-esteem, destructive relationships, relating, and loneliness particularly.

Then in terms of “love of art”, that it has a moral character or a virtue, like a moral purpose. Second that “love of art” entails moderation or temperance, which is an idea that is completely out since the Renaissance, basically- noboby is trying to moderate anything- nobody is trying to de decorous and balanced. Also, love for art is “tough, and shriveled, and homeless,” which sounds too much like the [romantic struggling] artist idea. There is also this thing about immortality, that “love of art” “wants reproduction, or immortality in birth and beauty”, “love of art neither comes to be nor passes away”, “love of art is not anywhere in any other thing, but itself, by itself, with itself”- that is the moment in which Plato supposedly enters the dialogue. I think there is a huge gulf there between our attitudes and Socrates’ attitudes. First of all, we don’t believe in that we are making stuff for the ages in the sense that Michaelangelo was, and then there’s this whole thing about creativity here, which is close to old clichés of creativity and depends on the equation of art and beauty so it’s a real pre-modernist idea- you could hold to it, but you would have to be someone like Odd Nerdrum in order to believe anything like that. Then there’s this question that love of art that love of art could really be known through the kind of discussions that we are holding, and here I think the misunderstanding would be mutual: because to Plato, there would be way too many digressions, we are not sticking to the point, we just like to chat – “chat” is not a Greek word, I guess-  and the incomprehension would be mutual- there is a lot of great literature about how awful person Socrates was, there’s great stuff that Nietzsche’s written about how he was the “disease” that was produced by the decadence of the Greek society, that he was the gadfly, famously, but mostly, that he was this annoying person, which was a source of truth but also of breaking the illusion- so there would be  a mutual mistrust: Plato would mistrust our dialogue as much as we distrust his. There is a fair amount of scholarship about how this is not really philosophy, and not really a dialogue, and not really a narrative, but a mixture of all rest of them,  the way that it comes on the fourth, fifth, sixth hand, that someone remembers that he told someone else then told it wrong so he retells to him again, and this exercise makes a lot of people these days ask why it had this form, why there are speeches that didn’t have the final truth- so that problems we have with that would be reciprocated- there would be problems if we tried to insert this conversation there.

Erixymachus

Would it be perhaps that the theatrical form helped to make a clearer story and really convey the point more strongly?

Socrates

One kind of answer is that back then they only had a limited set of categories for the kinds of dialogues, and all that was in what we now call poetry, but they conceptualized them in different ways,  but the other kind of answer is that the truths that happen in the dialogue are the kind of truths that pertain to concepts that are so widely held in life that they are entangled with many other concepts- that is why its so easy for Socrates to set these trip wires for everybody, because you can’t have consistent set of beliefs unless they are fenced off, so the point therefore of having a dialogue like the Symposium, which is not just a doctrine, but which actually takes the people through the steps of humiliation, by Socrates’ hand- the point is that because these things have so far-reaching connections, therefore every reader has to rediscover in the answers of the hapless people what their answers would be, so it has to be enacted.  But then there’s still an enigma which I still don’t see anyone giving an answer to- which is when Plato starts speaking in his voice, which is what happens when the simply writes his doctrine- then how does Plato want people to think about that in relation to what he wrote before, because how come there is other kind of truth that doesn’t require that kind of dialogue?

In terms of what we would agree on, is that the love of art has to do with seduction. This whole rhetorical business of the dialogue is about seduction, and that becomes obvious at the end, when Alcibiades comes to Socrates and says “all what you say has no truth or content, all you wanted to do is to seduce me”. That is a way of twisting the whole thing, so I thought point of contact is that artworks are about seduction. There’s all kinds of parallels between the language of talking about liking art and the language of love, and the rhetoric of seduction and the way of speaking in studios. Sometimes when students are fiddling in their studios, getting them ready for the critique, it’s a lot like being in front of the mirror, with makeup and things like that, although its not you who wants to do the seducing but it’s the work. This infamous word, “interesting” , its like a post-modern stand-in for whatever statements that are not being made; but for this context it’s also infuriating because it shows that the seduction is not going well!

The second one has to do with Aristophanes’ doctrine of doubles and all that. But the idea of ‘complement’ is similar to a word used by Derrida uses, which is “simplelong” which is the thing that matches you from you which you were divided before history began, which you don’t necessarily recognize but which you need,  so I am not continuing your critique but I think you can really use this, because if for love you substitute “love of art” then the doctrine is really nice, because then it would mean that art is the simplelong, it is the thing that complements you, but you can’t ever reattach yourself to it, ever.

Aristophanes

There is also this nonverbal way, where it gives but it remains a mystery.

Agathon

In fact art is in a better position, as it can always remain mysterious, whereas love normally fails to be mysterious forever.

Socrates

There is a passage from Daniel Halpern, who teaches at MIT, who says about this idea that Eros (love) “springs from a sense of lack or limitation, it pursues a fullness of being that forever moves in and in the course of that continuous struggle establishes a tenuous whole on existence or presence”.  Which is something that sounds reasonable to me?

Then there is this thing where, in this infamous passage, there is a lot written about how this dialogue anticipates Judeo-Christian, Christian love (agape) but apparently both Saint Agustine and Jerome both say that the Symposium contains a lot of Judeo-Christian values, and apparently there was a lot of backlash against that, and now people are returning to this idea that there is genuinely an expansion of the idea of love past the limits of the Greek language, and this special kind of love, which is similar to the Christian idea of love. One example is Kierkegaard, who asks “what is “love thy neighbor?”” and the answer is “he who I love as my neighbor is not the object defining love but the nature of love that defines the object”. And St. Augustine in the “City of God” there is a passage where he is talking about different kinds of love and says “there is a love which is itself to be loved, there is a love which is not to be loved, and there is the “agape”, the human virtue which is the right order, free… unimposed of human love by human love itself”. That’s the expand of Christian “agape”. So in a sense this love for art would be this whole consuming kind of thing; we wouldn’t be able to theorize it in the rest of the dialogue.

Then there is this notion that you could use the Symposium to prove that art is interpretation, and it would go this way: Diotima treats “interpretation” itself as an erotic enterprise; Diotima tells Socrates that Eros serves as “an interpreter between gods and men, filling and bridging the gap between beings who otherwise would never meet”, and so the whole art of love and also the prophetic interpretation depends on Eros, so interpretation itself (or, in this case, the love of art itself) would be  a form of interpretation.

Another that love of art could be understood as an obligation. That would be from a notion that Derrida has that art is an unasked-for gift, that when you walk into a gallery and you see something it’s a gift to see it but you didn’t ask for it; the gift is on a form that you didn’t quite anticipate, as the experience is unique and surprising, so it instills in you this sense of obligation that you have to return, but because it is an artwork, you can’t return it, there is nothing to give back. Then Derrida goes into all different kinds of ways in which people try to return it: by becoming curators, or becoming art historians and try to tell the “truth” of it, or becoming conservators and trying to physically change it…

Agathon

Why would that be seen as a return of a gift, as opposed to the claiming of ownership of it?

Socrates

Because it can’t; because it is a gift of truth, because you return the truth; but in the wider sense of “gift” there is no really giving back.

So what strikes me about that is that after a lifetime of looking at art you’ve got a very complex sense of unfulfilled obligations…

And the last thing: it struck me that talking about how we love art as we are doing here, has maybe in a way of hiding from actually loving art; this occurred to me because I am reading this book by George Perec, his biography entitled “W”, where every other chapter is about this childhood, and there is a chapter of a story that he wrote when he was thirteen or fourteen about a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego, where everybody plays a sport, and then what happens as you read about the island in excruciating detail, things start go to terribly wrong, judgment is arbitrary, and women are kept sequestered until the age of fourteen, so it is a story of a place that tried to keep the world at bay but that fantasy keeps getting more and more horrific; so it occurs to me that there’s a way of arguing that the whole dialogue – and our discussion- is a way to keep at bay what is going on in art, and there are ways to support this by looking at the text. Halpern says “to fix one’s case on a literary object (and I would substitute here with “art”) which is to say in the prospect of someone else’s neurotic activity is a perversion of direct desire”; which is to say that the Symposium is fundamentally perverse, because it is about someone else’s desire, and what you should do is to stop the conversation and just love the art.

Alcibiades

Alcibiades comes all the way in the end, drunk. I am not drunk, but I will summarize a bit about Alcibiades’ position that I align myself with… he is overwhelmed and obsessively in love with Socrates, and is completely unafraid to embarrass himself,  ready to speak the truth. And Socrates has basically summed up Symposium. From the position of Alcibiades, we talk about replacing love with art, and the question of sleeping with someone whose work you didn’t like, from his perspective the point is the experience, that its all about the position- Alcibiades has this interesting, introverted perception created by being inebriated and open, in a way he is talking about it all is an issue of perception. And I think that in that case, being able to grasp what the real situation is depends on how one sees it. And definitely within my own practice, once we are acting one role out, I don’t want to be pretending to be something, but I want to be “something”. I think Alcibiades’ idolatry of Socrates is mythological. The position that I identify with is having a completely uncynical, possibly naïve, yet completely genuine belief that one is doing is large and effectual and that is the core of  what one wants. There is a book entitled “Against Love” by Laura Kipnis, and it is polemic because she speaks intentionally against love, it’s about being confronted against love. Her ostensible argument is that Western American, monogamous love, is a completely archaic form- in other words, what she is arguing, is that monogamy is dead, and we should accept it, and society will favor a long-term monogamous relationship over a happy one. But what her argument ends ups being – and she goes into a really long list  and diatribe of things you can’t do with monogamy-  its actually creating your own circumstances. And this is what Alcibiades does- he decides what he wants and goes for it. And in art too, there is so much art history that asks are you a techno artist, a conceptualists, neo conceptualists, all these fake point of application – and I think the underlying thing that you have to be cognescent of is that it is “my life” and that you have to construct it yourself. And love, like art, is one’s own construct. I am talking about a  life-long investment that becomes one’s own legacy that we leave behind.

*****

El proyecto de la conferencia combinatoria consistió en la presentación de 16 ponencias que conceptualmente y formalmente se integran gradualmente dentro de una sola, a manera de una fuga a 16 voces en cuatro tiempos. El evento duró aproximadamente media hora con cuatro breves pausas.  La jornada comenzó con 16 conferencistas haciendo presentaciones simultáneas en secciones distintas del museo de una duración de 8 minutos.  En la segunda ronda, los conferencistas se unen en pares, realizando 16 ponencias que integraron los temas que trataron en la primera ronda, pero manteniendo la misma duración de 8 minutos. En la tercera ronda los ponentes se unieron en grupos de cuatro, realizando una ponencia de la misma extensión que integró los cuatro temas anteriores, resultando en una ronda de ocho ponencias. En la cuarta ronda el grupos de dieciseis ponentes realizaron una ponencia colectiva, uniendo como antes todos los temas tratados. En cada fase, la integración de conceptos fue total.

The Combinatory Conference consisted in the presentation of 16 lectures that both formally and conceptually start to merge with each other, forming a fugue of 16 voices in four movements. The project started with 16 lecturers making simultaneous presentations in different sections of the museum, each lecture lasting 8 minutes. In the second round, the lecturers gathered in pairs with the goal to merge the content of their original corresponding lectures, but maintaining their merged lecture at 8 minutes (the topic of the resulting, “merged” lecture would need to be different from the original two, but would also need to incorporate them both). In the third round the presenters gathered in groups of four, presenting a lecture of the same extension that merged the four preivous topics, resulting in a round of eight simultaneous lectures. In the fourth round, the 16 lecturers made a collective lecture, unifiying as before all the previous topics. in each of the phases the integration of ideas and subjects was total.

Este proyecto surge la necesidad de cuestionar los modos en que la información the transmite como conocimiento en la era digital.  Hoy en día, gracias al internet, la información nos es accesible libremente de forma casi infinita, generando el problema de la carencia de filtros o métodos organizativos para resignificar esta información a manera de conocimiento o reflexión.  De la misma manera, los procesos cognitivos de hoy en día funcionan a nivel de multi-canal, como resultado del deficit de atención que se genera por estar bombardeado constantemente por información de todo tipo. Como resultado de estos fenómenos, estamos acostumbrados a vivenciar el mundo como una yuxtaposición de incongruencias y aún así darle sentido a nuestra realidad. Este proyecto busca reestructurar el formato pedagógico de la conferencia utilizando los principios combinatorios de las fugas barrocas de Johann Sebastián Bach, transponiendo el lenguaje musical a un lenguaje verbal y realizando una estructuras compositiva equivalente a las obras escritas para múltiples voces.

The project emerges from the need to question the forms in which information is transmitted as knowledge in today’s digital age. Today, thanks to the web, information is freely accessible, creating the problem of lack of filters or organizational principles to resignify this information into useful knowledge or reflecting. At the same time, our cognitive rewiring has made us used to work in multi-channel formats, thus giving meaning to our reality this way. This project seeks to restructure the pedagogical format of the lecture using the combinatory preinciples of Bach’s fugues, trasposing the musical language to  verbal communication and seeking an equivalent compositional structure for multiple voices.

La conferencia se presentó en el Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) el 11 de abril del 2010, como parte de la exposición Jardín de Academus.Los participantes de la conferencia combinatoria fueron Pedro  Castillo, Dante  Barrios Avila, Pamela Zúñiga, Bernardo Sánchez, Emiliano Ortega, Marisol Maza, Elizabeth Frisas, Miriam Rodríguez, Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, Gustavo Hernández, Maribel Escobar, Mercedes hinojosa, Violeta Solís Horcasitas y Andrea Santiago.

The lecture was presented at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) on April 11,  2010, as part of the exhibition Jardín de Academus. The participating lecturers were  Pedro  Castillo, Dante  Barrios Avila, Pamela Zúñiga, Bernardo Sánchez, Emiliano Ortega, Marisol Maza, Elizabeth Frisas, Miriam Rodríguez, Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, Gustavo Hernández, Maribel Escobar, Mercedes hinojosa, Violeta Solís Horcasitas and  Andrea Santiago.

Formato de las conferencias / Lecture format:

1.1.

Lo importante es tambien lo de afuera (o sobre las envolturas de regalos)

Violeta Solís Horcasitas

1.2

Encuentros: Fuerzas y Cuerpos

Andrea Santiago Páramo

1.3 El Hombre como animal simbólico

Mercedes Hinojosa

1.4 Cuando las imágenes se multiplican: el arte en la era digital

Elizabet G. Frias

1.5 La natación como posibilidad para la expansion del cuerpo humano

Marisol Maza

1.6 El perfil del Asesino Serial: el arte de matar

Pamela Zúñiga

1.7 Aspectos importantes en la nutricion de la vida diaria

Dante Barrios Ávila

1.8 La ciudad perfecta

Gustavo E. Hernandez

1.9 Inventar el espacio del agradecimiento: los ex-votos en México

Maribel Escobar

1.10 Curaduría y gestión cultural (o las artes visuales en búsqueda de su libertad condicional)

Santiago espinosa de los monteros

1.11 Ciencia ficcion y conflicto: frontera y colonialismo

Emiliano Ortega

1.12 Au’jourd hui: el París de hoy y siempre

Pedro Castillo

1.13 El baño: obsolescencia planificada y la estetica del desperdicio

Yaoci pardo

1.14 Sinsentidos de una prohibicion arbitraria: legalizacion de la marihuana

Bernardo sanchez

1.15 El por qué somos pura memoria

Miriam Rodriguez

SEGUNDA RONDA

2.1

El asesino como devorador de nutrientes ajenos

Pamela Zúñiga

Dante Barrios

2.2

Paris Oculto:

Capital de la gran caca

Pedro Castillo

Yaoci Pardo

2.3

La memoria de la prohibicion

Bernardo Sanchez /Miriam Rodriguez

2.4

Gestión y Conflicto

Emiliano Ortega Rousset

Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros

2.5

Navegar el oceano digital:

La publicidad del cuerpo y la imagen

Elizabeth Frisas y

Marisol Maza

2.6

El cuerpo como envoltura

Violeta Solís Horcasitas

Andrea Santiago

2.7

La apropiacion simbólica del espacio

Mercedes Hinojosa

Maribel Escobar Varillas

Gustavo Emmanuel Hernández Peña

TERCERA RONDA

3.1

El asesino es la idea

Yaoci Pardo

Pedro  Castillo

Dante  Barrios Avila

Pamela Zúñiga

3.2

Gestión de la memoria múltiple:

Iconografía navegable

Bernardo Sánchez

Emiliano Ortega

Marisol Maza

Elizabeth Frisas

Miriam Rodríguez

Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros

3.3

El cuerpo como espacio simbólico

Gustavo Hernández

Maribel Escobar

Mercedes hinojosa

Violeta Solís Horcasitas

Andrea Santiago

4.1

Ficcionator: La multiple ficcionalizacion de la individualidad y sus consecuencias

(una conferencia combinatoria)

[Variations on an Audience was a work designed to be performed only once, in the context of the launch of the book Theatrum Anatomicum (and Other Performance Lectures) at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University on October 22, 2009, inaugurating the performance lecture series Edifying, curated by Beatrice Gross. The work is an experiment on what in sociolinguistic theory has been described as Audience Design and Style-Shifting, which involves the way in which speakers adjust their modes of speaking in relation to their audience.]

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Audiences are endangered species.

They are slowly vanishing in this world showered with limelight, where 15 minutes of fame has now a cacophony of 24/7 programming.

We all speak at the same time, and no one listens. When everyone is an artist, no one can be in the audience. We only sit offstage because we are waiting for our turn in the lectern.

What we call audiences today, like the one here tonight, is nothing more than a collection of highly individualized minds. You all are authors, we all produce things: you take pictures, you write blogs, you all own creative real-state. You all here tonight are so different. How can me, or anyone, talk to you in a comprehensive manner so that you all can feel engaged?

Unfortunately, most people who lecture have failed to recognize this simple fact. They still speak to audiences as if they existed as one whole, as if this hypothetical and amorphous mass was a homogenous group of listeners, nor a heterogenous entity of speakers. They talk to this hypothetical audience as if they thought and felt exactly like them.

Let’s take, for instance, Slavoj Zizek.

Slavoj Zizek talks to everyone as if we all were Slavoj Zizek. A scholar assumes we all are scholars interested in long bibliographies and in the reference to that 1974 book where the footnote of the footnote clarifies what the footnote of the footnote of the 1973 version didn’t clarify.

Artists, when they are invited to speak, usually think that their audience wants the artist to act as if they didn’t care about them, but of course artists care, and their audiences- well, their audiences as usually are other artists who are respectful enough but what they really want is not to be an audience but to be the artist who is speaking.

So it is very painful for me to say this, but the truth is that in this post-post-modern world we all are confused about when to speak and when to listen. As a result of this, we are both unprofessional speakers and unprofessional audiences.

This spells slight doom, the temporary boredom we all have to live through every time we attend a lecture. We don’t even know why we do it. But it shouldn’t be that way.

Lectures could be like sex. They could be like the seduction of love, like the erotic dance or the magic act or the psychic séance or the hypnotic session. All it takes is for the speaker to find a way to talk to each one of the persons in the room as if it were a one-to-one conversation, an audience whisperer.

So by all means then let’s then do variations on an audience, or rather, on this non-audience. I will talk not to all of you, but to each of you. For this exercise I will assume that, amongst the group here there is at least one person of the following sort:

1. Theorists. That is public intellectuals, post-structuralist scholars, downtown east village, readers of October magazine.

2. Chelseaspeakers. Uber-professional art speakers, curators, consultants, critics.

3. Grant-writers and administrators working for non-profit organizations and the U.S. government and the Department of Education or School Board.

4. ‘Show-me-the-money’ speakers, no-nonsense, uncomplicated, like when we talk about art late at an afterparty after a few drinks.

Now that we have established the four audiences that I will be addressing, I will now repeat my introduction in audience 1 style:

The construct of the spectator as redefined today by

post-technological networks reunites a number of given implications that, upon close examination,

reveal society

– and its involutionary transformation-

as a product of a demystified late capitalist model without centers and reformulated contents.

The involution of cultural communication into a system of seemingly

original producers of knowledge as opposed to receivers creates a different

activity universe that contrasts with the deflection of speech, a seemingly anti-political task of horizontal results.

Where one searches for the hidden receiver finds itself the manifested materialization of parallel mimetic producers. It is the fabrication of the plot of the content,

the substance of normative principles of inclusion of concepts, that varies only in stylistic practices of scientific postmodernity,

usually not self-identified as such but actively embracing a regiment of exclusionary concept definitions

within a well-founded domain of references visible only to a reduced agents of the operation.

Audience 2 form:

The notion of audience has been redefined today by post-technological networks.

Cultural producers today produce works that critique western notions of collective spectatorship and propose new critical models.

Notions of performance are incorporated in this new critique, resulting in innovative explorations that operate in the realm of conceptual art in various formats.

The viewer becomes an active participant in the work, which explores notions of viewers becoming active participants.

The work becomes an active participant in the viewer, which is an exploration of notions of viewers.

These works are conceptual narratives that question a variety of concepts, including the way in which spectators receive information in a post-modern world. These practices thus become explorations of conceptual information of notions of participants that participate in notions of information of conceptual explorations.

In other words, in audience 3 form:

Audiences in our global world today face the challenges and the opportunities that come along with the emerging forms of expression.

In this multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary society there are multiple voices which reflect our diverse culture and that are important to support. In some cases, these voices will challenge the viewer to reflect on important issues we all face, but they all reflect the feelings and thoughts of others and are representative of the diversity of original community voices that we all should strive to support. We only face as a society the challenge to expand our long-term partnerships and advisory support to those who have an important message to convey to their constituents, building enduring foundations for community partnerships with real solutions. By acting together, we can overcome the obstacles that for too long have prevented real change on the critical issues that audiences face in art and life, fulfilling the long objective of change , creativity and achievement for the generations to come.

Audience 4 form

I mean its like sometimes because you are online so much and you get to like get to do all this like blogs and photoshop and movies and stuff its like today everything is so easy to do so why do we need anyone else doing it but us, like today things maybe have become decadent or something when you really think about it its really amazing like everything can mean anything because anyone can do whatever. I mean like today the world and like, culture has become a place where we all talk about ourselves and then it like makes everything look the same because no one seems to be listening or something. I mean that’s cool, but it’s like if I am talking and you are talking and he is talking and then if we just talk in different ways that doesn’t mean we are saying different things if you know what I am saying. Its like that is how its done today when we just say what we have to say and we know why we say it and we know what you or are going to say so what’s the point of even saying it, but the point that there is no point is maybe the point.

And now, to merge these styles, we will arrive to patch together the choir of art world voices. You can call it an audience fugue.

The construct of the spectator as redefined today by post-technological networks reunites a number of given implications that, upon close examination, I mean its like sometimes because you are online so much and you get to like get to do all this like, audiences in our global world today face the challenges and the opportunities that come along with the emerging forms of expression. The notion of audience has been redefined today by post-technological networks – and its involutionary transformation- as a product of a demystified late capitalist model without centers and reformulated contents. The involution of cultural communication into a system of seemingly original producers of knowledge its like today everything is so easy to do so why do we need anyone else doing it but us, In this multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary society Cultural producers today produce works that critique western notions of collective spectatorship as opposed to receivers creates a different activity universe that contrasts with the deflection of speech, blogs and photoshop and movies and stuff, like there are multiple voices which reflect our diverse culture and that are important to support, today things maybe have become decadent or something when you really think about it its really amazing like a seemingly anti-political task of horizontal results. In some cases, these voices will challenge the viewer to reflect on important issues we all face, where one searches for the hidden receiver finds itself the manifested materialization of parallel mimetic producers but they all reflect the feelings and thoughts of others and are representative of the diversity of original community voices that we all should strive to support, I mean everything can mean anything because anyone can do whatever. It is the fabrication of the plot of the content, I mean like today the world and like, the substance of normative principles of inclusion of concepts, that we only face as a society the challenge to expand our long-term partnerships and advisory support to those who have an important message to convey to their constituents, These works are conceptual narratives that question a variety of concepts, where we all talk about ourselves and then it like makes everything look the same because no one seems to be listening or something. By acting together, we can overcome the obstacles that for too long have prevented real change on the critical issues that audiences face in art and life, only in stylistic practices of scientific postmodernity, I mean that’s cool, but it’s like if I am talking and you are talking and he is talking and then if we just talk in different ways that doesn’t mean we are saying different things, like These practices thus become explorations of conceptual information of notions of participants, building enduring foundations for community partnerships with real solutions, usually not self-identified as such but actively embracing a regiment of exclusionary definitions that participate in notions of information of conceptual explorations, if you know what I am saying, including the way in which spectators receive information in a post-modern world, and we know why we say it and we know what you or are going to say so what’s the point of even saying it, within a well-founded domain of references visible only to a reduced agents of the operation, fulfilling the long objective of change , creativity and achievement for the generations to come, an exploration of notions of viewers, Its like that is how its done today when we just say what we have to say but the point that there is no point is maybe, like, the point.

book cover

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

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

Published by Jorge Pinto Books, New York

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

Launch date: September 2009

Available at Amazon

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

BOOK EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION 

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

Included texts in this anthology:

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

First Mexico City Congress of Urban Purification (2003)

Parallel Lives (2003)

First Imaginary Forum of Mental Sculpture (2004)

The Foreign Legion (2005)

We All Are Streeter (2006)

Manifest Destiny (2008-09)

THE ENNEATYPE CONFERENCE

The Enneatype Conference was a performance presented on May 9, 2009, at Lisa Ruyter’s studio in  Vienna, Austria, per invitation of Parabol Magazine and  curators Jasper Sharp and Elsy Lahner. The days of May 8th and May 9th I spent the time in Café Sperl, conducting “art personality assessment tests” using a system of my own making although inspired in the Enneagram Personality theory.  Participants would respond to a questionnaire about their personal relationship to art, after which I would provide a diagnosis of their artistic personality type using enneagram categories.

While the enneagram test in fact turned out very accurate assessments of each individual’s attitude towards art, I wanted to stress the  fallibility of any system that claims to provide “answers” about an individual’s personal situation. Thus the system, which at first was presented to all participants as an authentic scientific method developed in Vienna, was later unveiled as a complete fabrication.

PH conducting art personality tests at Cafe Sperl, Vienna, May 8, 2009

Sample of one of the art enneatype tests

The culminating event of the project was the performance, in the form of an academic lecture, that explained the various componens of the Art Personality Enneagram. What follows is the abbreviated text from that presentation.

Characters:

Rupert Steiner

Pablo Helguera

Steiner

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Welcome to the closing event of The Enneatype Conference, a unique occasion to celebrate the launch of The Enneagram of Vienna and celebrate the new issue of Parabol Magazine. My name is Rupert Steiner and I am the director of the Psychological Association of Art Therapists here in Vienna. Our mission is to study the ways in which art can reveal the potentiality of the individual. And, as such, it is an immense honor to me to present to you the work of Pablo Helguera, a Mexican artist and educator whose work has centered for many years on the very subject of the artistic personality. Helguera is the director of the Helguera Center for Artworld Studies, which has as its mission to understand the sociology of art and to propose the emergence of a new field of study, which he has described as artworld studies, using elements from social anthropology, biometrics, personology, economics, culinary theory, and of course psychology.

First we should explain what is an enneagram. The Enneagram is a nine-pointed figure inscribed in a circle. The meaning of the symbol itself, together with the personality types organized around the nine points, shows a system of knowledge about nine distinct but interrelated personality types, or nine ways of seeing and experiencing the world. The Enneagram of Personality is generally presented as a psychospiritual system for mapping and understanding nine possible personality types. Each personality type associated with the Enneagram represents a map of traits that highlights patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

The notion of the artistic personality enneagram emerges from the work of Dr. Ingrid Lipsky. Dr. Lipsky was a student of Theodor Meynert at the psychiatric clinic of the university of Vienna, alongside with Sigmund Freud and other eminent psychiatrists and neuropathologists. She was also involved in hypnotism and spirituality, which led her to research the enneagram.

Dr Lipsky died at age 52 in 1910, in a safari accident in Africa, just before she got to publish her research. It was shortly after that one of her students, Eberhard Klopstock, who inherited her research papers, took her theories and attempted to develop them.

He tragically burned her original works in order to claim them as his own, then publishing a book in 1935 inspired on her ideas, titled “The Enneagram and the Artist’s Mind”.

Unfortunately, the book did not do well, and it was never reprinted. There are no known surviving copies.

It was thanks to Pablo Helguera, who while doing research in the museum of Modern Art in New York, found a letter from Klopstock to the then director, Alfred Barr, mentioning his research on this subject. Helguera has researched this information to update the original ideas of Ingrid Lipsky and thus bring the Enneagram of Vienna back to life.

He is here to tell us about the various categories of the Enneagram and share with us a system that studies and analyses the artistic personality of the contemporary art world. Please help me in welcoming Pablo Helguera.

[PH arrives onstage]

Pablo, we are enormously grateful to have you amongst us tonight.

PH

Thank you, so am I. I am delighted that we can share the knowledge of the enneagram tonight.

Steiner

Can you please tell us how you developed the enneagram?

PH

Well, I had to work from very initial information that was left from the notes of notable enneagramists, including Dr. Lipsky, as well as other psychologists and psychiatrists that have focused on the typology of the artist, not excluding Carl Jung and Hermann Rorscharch, who was very much interested in art as revealing issues of consciousness.

Steiner

So what is the difference between the personality enneagram and the artistic enneagram?

PH

The personality enneagram is something that was developed by many new age psychologists to explain the kinds of personalities in the world. The artistic enneagram focuses on figuring out specifically the kind of artistic sensibility that one has, and it is a very helpful way to understand one’s own relationship with art, your potential, and also to address your shortcomings as an arts professional. I believe that once you go through the process of learning your enneatype you will be able to become a much more successful individual in the art world.

Steiner

And I understand that you will now do a demonstration?

PH

Indeed. I now illustrate the way in which the enneagram works.

First I will conduct an act of group hypnotism which is desired to attain collective attention to a given subject, particularly when one is giving a boring lecture.

You all will look at my hand, moving like a pendulum. You all will fall in a state of deep sleep and peace, of full attention of everything I will say from now on.

Good, we are ready to go now.

I first would like you to consider a question, and choose the  answer that most accurately reflect your way of feeling about art. After you have made your choices, you should remember the letter and we shall find out what each of your art personality types are.

When you see an artwork at a contemporary art gallery, list the impulse that is most likely to come to you first:

a) Thinking about how this artwork makes you feel

b) Asking to yourself what is right or wrong with this artwork

c) Trying to evaluate the artwork as good or bad

d) Wanting to know who the artist is

e) Wanting to know how this artwork was made

f) Wanting to know the back story of that art work

g) Wanting to know what the idea behind the work is

h) Remembering other pieces similar to that one

i) Non thinking, simply experiencing the work.

When you see a contemporary artist or arts professional of your same age and background receive a certain recognition that you could technically be in the same position to receive, your most likely reaction is:

a) Happiness for this person

b) Envy, wondering why you did not receive such recognition yourself

c) Thinking on what kind of friendships and professional contacts you need to make in the future to receive that same recognition yourself

d) Indifference

e) Thinking of what kind of work you need to make to receive such recognition in the future

f) Wanting to know the reasons for such recognition

g) Figuring out an innovative way to attain similar attention

h) Depression

i) Simple admiration for this person

Following you will hear about the different kinds of art personality types. If you chose, for instance, “h”,

you are

TYPE 1: THE NOSTALGIST

Nostalgists are in touch with their feelings, are sensitive, and highly perceptive of their environment. The nostalgist is inquisitive and likes to attain a lot of knowledge about an artwork. They can become very erudite and knowledgeable about a subject.

On average, they tend to emphasize too much the notion of biography, the context in which something was made, they draw lots of historical connections.

When they are unhealthy they can be depressive, self-destructive, obsessed with being up to date with the latest news of the art world, overromanticize everything, they can become delusive.

Examples: Many famous art historians are nostalgists. Janet Cardiff (on the photo), Matthew Buckingham, Mark Dion, Janet Cardiff, Sophie Calle, Christian Boltanski, Yinka Shonibare

if you chose “g” you are,

TYPE 2: THE CONCEPTUALIST

As its name indicates, conceptualists are abstract thinkers, capable of powerful synthesis, focused, and able to quickly grasp and advance the art discourse.

On average, they overemphasize theory, cause and effect, and argumentation in a work. They cannot fully enjoy a work unless they have clarified in their mind the main issues that the work addresses.

Bad conceptualists become out of touch with their feelings and have a difficulty sharing their emotions, are introverted, are desensitized toward art which arises emotions, can become aggressive and pretentious.

Examples: Joseph Kosuth, Allan Kaprow, Jacques Rancière, Daniel Birnbaum, Rosalind Krauss, Luis Camnitzer, Roberta Smith, Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner, Martin Creed

TYPE 3: THE TALKER

At their best, Talkers are able to translate the visual into words, becoming eloquent and able to put things in perspective. Gregarious and friendly, talkers have an ability to bring people together and become important spokespersons for large interest groups and gain access to important positions in the art world. Many performers and architects are talkers.

On average, Talkers can come off as superficial, saying a lot but without great substance, emphasizing hyperbole and syntax instead of content, can draw exaggerated relationships, and feel that they always have to say something even if it is unnecessary.

When they are unhealthy, they have a burning desire to protagonize everywhere, taking other ideas as one’s own, gossip too much, exaggerate reality to the point of becoming a storyteller, becoming a bit of a clown.

Examples: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jerry Saltz, Marina Abramovic, William Kentridge, Robert Hughes, Maurizio Cattelan, Kirk Varnedoe

(e) is

TYPE 4: THE FORMALIST

Formalists are highly visual people, design-oriented, perfection-driven, with a great appreciation for craftsmanship and neatness. Organized, they are punctual, keep their word, and generally maintain a good balance of art and life.

On average, Formalists can be anal retentive, extremely demanding to others and to themselves, to the point of paralysis, it can take them time to make decisions and have anxiety in unresolved situations; they have no tolerance for ambiguity.

When they are unhealthy, they can be manipulative, easily irritated, dismissive of anything which may not be clear-cut, conservative, and materialistic.

Examples: Rachel Whiteread, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Hannah Darboven, Michael Snow, Walead Beshty, John Cage, Gabriel Orozco

TYPE 5: THE BOHEMIAN

Bohemians are those capable to enjoy the art experience to its fullest degree; they are relaxed, open individuals who are highly receptive to other’s art and ideas and are contagious in their pleasure and enthusiasm, sharing their innovative thinking. They are friendly and accessible and can be very inspiring.

On average, They are abstract thinkers who can sometimes get too ambiguous and contradictory in their actions; they may lack personal drive to do things; can take them a long time to do a project, can be noncommittal.

However, if they are unhealthy, they Can be lazy, or falsely modest, boring, inattentive to detail and poor executors of projects.

Examples: Rirkit Tiravanija, Basquiat, Pippilotti Rist, Vito Acconci, Helio Oiticica, and others.

TYPE 6: THE SHAKER

Now, Shakers are very perceptive of social contexts and can influence social structures to their advantage. They are brilliant, highly diplomatic, alert, shrewd, and reliable. They excel in organizing and administration, as well as in making interesting connections and bringing people together. They can orchestrate large projects and usually are good with money. Many museum directors are shakers.

On average, Shakers can be social climbers and careerists; they can put the carriage before their horse and do things entirely out of self-interest. They can be a powerful ally and supporter but can also be a dangerous enemy.

At their worst, they can be Egotistical, with a problem with authority, extremely proud and manipulative, delusional and self-aggrandizing.

Examples: Thomas Krens, Olafur Eliasson, Christo, Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, Okwui Enwenzor, Francesco Bonami, Mary Boone

TYPE 7: THE CONTRARIAN

Contrarians are the ones who usually open a debate. They have an innate ability to detect and question the status quo, and activating spaces of discussion and experience for others. They have sharp minds with complex perspectives and inspiring thoughts.

Generally, contrarians can be dogmatic, self-centered, and have a difficulty to relate to others who don’t share their views. Narcissistic, they are well-grounded, independent, and strong, although they resent not being given their due credit and always act as if they have a chip on their shoulder.

When unhealthy, beware: they can be extremely aggressive, dismissive of others, overly negative, insensitive to others, power-hungry, and snob.

Examples: Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, Martin Kippenberger, Terence Koh, Jens Hoffmann, The Guerrilla Girls, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Donald Kuspit.

TYPE 8: THE SPIRITUALIST

Spiritualists are self-fulfilled people who can extract the best of every art experience and bring it to a higher realm. They are people in peace with themselves, who think with clarity and lucidity, and for whom art is a vehicle to attain illumination.

Spiritualists usually see beyond what the normal viewer seees, thus can be treated as delusional (and may actually be); can be sentimental and new-agey. They can act as shamans or evangelists.

If they are unhealthy, however, they can be naïve, delusional in believing that they are the new Buddha, condescending, passive-aggressive, resentful and insecure.

Examples: Bill Viola, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Dan Flavin, Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, James Turrell

TYPE 9: THE ADMIRER

Admirers are centered individuals who can look at art in a balanced way and appreciate its strengths and weaknesses without falling prey to their emotions. At their best they are intelligent, self-effacing, extremely reliable as supporters, collaborators or allies.

Admirers can be calculating, materialistic, acquisitive, constantly amusing themselves with new things and experiences. They have a need to be loved.

When unhealthy, they are Impulsive and infantile in what they want. Can become offensive and abusive. They act on impulses rather than dealing with their own anxieties or depressions, so they can end up spent and despondent.

Examples: Charles Saatchi, Peter Norton, the Rubells

To finalize, I will show a few graphs that exemplify demographic research of the artworld using enneagramatic types.

Here is a sample of an unhealthy enneagramic art community, with an excess of Bohemians and talkers, and yet few admirers (which translates on scant collecting) and too few conceptualists.

In this other sample, one can appreciate the behavioral trends amongst art types who are inclined to switch galleries after being selected into the Venice Biennial. Shakers and Formalists are more likely to switch galleries given their acute sense of opportunity and order, respectively; contrarians will switch only because they like to switch, nostalgists are too attached to the past, and bohemians are not able to switch because they don’t have galleries in the first place.

so as you can see, there is a lot to be learned from this system, which can be mastered with enough study and analysis.

Any questions?

Steiner

Pablo, I  do have a few comments.

PH

Go ahead.

Steiner

I have been listening to your presentation, and I am realizing that none of these statements have any scientific basis. Looks like you made them up.

PH

I think you are confused.

Steiner

I am starting to suspect that you fooled me and that actually Dr. Lipsky never existed. If you look closely at that photo of Dr. Lipsky that you gave me to show for the presentation, that looks like an old photo that you found in a thrift shop. And the guy that you showed in that picture is not Eberhard Klopstock. He looked too familiar to me. He actually is the singer Richard Tauber.

PH

You are wrong, Rupert.

Steiner

I think that your whole theory is bullshit. It is like all that new age philosophy that gives you a false sense of worth, that gives you false hopes, making you believe that there are powerful spiritual forces that will make you succeed. But the truth is that when we try to hard to search for that success we loose the sense of who we are and what we believe in. You have played with our feelings. Shame on you.

PH

I am sorry you feel this way. OK, something has gone wrong here. Maybe it is time to end this demonstration.

You may remember that you all are under hypnotic trance. So when I snap my fingers, you will not remember any of this conversation. The Enneagram of Vienna will completely vanish from your memory, the same way it came, it will vanish from everyone’s memory the same way it was gone before— it will never have existed. We will not think of who we are but only go about our lives, and our art, withholding judgment. We will simply try to survive, and be at times tortured and at times happy, not entirely sure why, and let our identities, and our relationship with art, remain a mystery, where it belongs.

[making another hypnotic gesture]

Nine, Eight, seven, six, four, three… two… one… welcome back. And thank you.

[they exit]

Vigilia en Union Square, 14 de septiembre, 2001 (foto P.H.)

Un muro de Berlín americano – 1

(diario de Manhattan)

(publicado en la revista paréntesis, diciembre 2001, y universes-in-universe, sept. 2001)

le silence eternel de ses espaces infinis me effraie

Pascal, Pensées

11 de septiembre, 2001

Despierto abruptamente. Miro por la ventana de mi departamento en el lado este de Manhattan, donde se observa una enorme nube de humo marrón. Sin saber bien qué hacer, salgo a la calle. Pasan corriendo hombres de negocios desaforados que tratan inútilmente de marcar sus celulares mientras gritan buscando taxis. Mientras me dirijo a un monitor de televisión para ver la tragedia que se desenvuelve a unas cuadras de donde estoy, veo las torres del World Trade Center derrumbarse junto con las vidas de miles de personas.

Me siento paralizado por sentimientos encontrados: incredulidad, confusión, shock. Revive un antiguo miedo de mi adolescencia, de cuando en 1985 un temblor cimbró la ciudad de México e incontables personas murieron bajo los escombros. Cualquiera que haya vivido un desastre natural sabe lo que significa el peligro cuando éste se presenta. Me mudé entonces a un país en el que pensé que nada de esto podría pasar, porque yo había crecido con la imagen de un Estados Unidos impenetrable, invencible. Esta vez mi antiguo miedo regresó con más fuerza que nunca, y con un significado mucho más cruel: no sólo lo volví a vivir, sino que esta vez había sido ocasionado no por la naturaleza sino por seres humanos.

Regreso a mi departamento sin mucha claridad y sin saber bien qué hacer. Solo mantengo un ojo vagamente atento a la vida de mi calle. Los oficinistas, que han sido enviados de vuelta a sus casas desde temprano, se cambian a su ropa del domingo. Poco después, hacia la una de la tarde, todos los bares y restaurantes están inusualmente llenos. La gente pasea sus perros como si nada pasara. Yo me quedo dormido en mi sofá. Cuando despierto, son las ocho de la noche. No hay nadie en las calles. Todos los comercios están cerrados. La ciudad que nunca duerme está sumergida en un silencio total, sólo quebrantado por las sirenas de las ambulancias.

12 de septiembre

Me despierto a las seis de la mañana. Me he quedado dormido de nuevo en mi sofá y he dejado todas las luces prendidas. El tiempo parece correr angustiosamente rápido. Por mi ventana entra un misterioso olor como de hule quemado que está por toda la ciudad. Salgo a la tienda a comprar algo, pero encuentro poco: la gente de mi barrio ha vaciado los anaqueles. La ciudad está clausurada al exterior, y no han dejado entrar a los camiones con mercancías.

Sintonizo las noticias, que me dejan un mal sabor en la boca. CNN ha creado un titulo para sus reportajes, »Ataque en América«. El título, hecho en diseños dinámicos, viene con una música sensacionalista que combina un tono nacional con uno dramático. Estamos, pienso, en medio del set de la película Independence Day de la vida real.

13 de septiembre

Trato de seguir mi rutina diaria. Llego a la oficina a las nueve de la mañana. Pero los acontecimientos de los días anteriores me han dejado desarmado. He hablado con gente que vivió la destrucción, cuyas oficinas estaban en las torres. Todos están en un profundo estado de shock. Yo no soy sino un artista visual que trabaja en un museo. Qué pretencioso se siente pensar sobre arte en estos momentos. Qué insignificante es lo que hago en comparación con la magnitud de lo que acaba de pasar. Qué importa si el mundo del arte existe o no con sus políticas, sus inauguraciones de museos, su diálogo interno y obsesivo, en comparación con la lucha de vida o muerte entre culturas que se está gestando en el mundo y que hasta ahora estamos forzados a reconocer que existe. Ahora, más que nunca, el mundo del arte neoyorquino me parece un concurso bizantino para demostrar cuántos ángeles caben en la punta de una aguja.

15 de septiembre

Mientras paso por la calle Canal, encuentro a una masa de personas que rodean la avenida West Broadway, acordonada por la policía. Al final de la avenida se puede divisar una columna de humo donde estuvo alguna vez el World Trade Center. La gente en la calle (americanos, europeos, japoneses) está armada con cámaras digitales, videocámaras y binoculares. Tratan incansablemente de fotografiar lo mas cerca posible el sitio de la tragedia, preguntando por todas partes cuál es el mejor punto para ver la zona de desastre. Llevan bajo los brazos todo tipo de souvenirs con la imagen de las torres gemelas: postales, globos de nieve, ceniceros, carteles y réplicas de plástico. Cualquier imagen de Nueva York en la que aparezcan las torres se ha convertido en una rareza arqueológica.

Los vendedores ambulantes no han perdido un minuto para la ocasión. Como por arte de magia, sus puestos están llenos con mercancía recién hecha: banderas americanas con la fecha del 11 de septiembre, con los lemas tradicionales: »God bless America«, »United we stand«. Luego veo a un vendedor (irónicamente, parece de ascendencia árabe) de camisetas con el titulo de los reportajes de CNN, »Attack on America«, sobreimpuesto a la bandera americana y la imagen de las torres gemelas. La gente se abalanza a comprar las camisetas. Quizá se conviertan en objetos de coleccionista, como la edición del 12 de septiembre del New York Post, que ahora está en subasta en E-bay.

3 de septiembre, 2001

(anotación efectivamente escrita antes de las anteriores)

Estoy en un café Internet en el centro de Zagreb, en Croacia, una triste noche de domingo lluvioso. Mañana debo tomar un avión a Londres y de ahí otro a Nueva York. He estado en Europa del este por unos cuantos días y ahora trato de articular los sentimientos encontrados que me incomodan. De alguna manera he estado reprimiendo el impulso de percibir esta ciudad como un enorme cuadro de Edward Hopper. En este café Internet me siento como uno de los personajes de »Nighthawks«, gente que busca una pequeña conversación en una ciudad que parece vacía y fantasmal.

Regreso a la casa a través de la plaza Jelacic y del bello parque frente a la estación de trenes, pensando que Zagreb es en realidad un gran escenario para la nostalgia. Grandes edificios de la época del imperio austro-húngaro son testimonio de un pasado vigoroso, y sin embargo nada en la ciudad actual parece tener vitalidad alguna. Croacia ha emergido victoriosa de una de las guerras civiles más sangrientas del siglo veinte, que sigue de hecho desarrollándose en Macedonia. Los costos de esta guerra no sólo han sido económicos, sino sociales y culturales. El país, pequeño que es, lucha dolorosamente por recobrarse y establecer su identidad nacional, rescribir su historia y encontrar su lugar en el mundo.

Veo a la gente paralizada por los fantasmas del pasado. Prolifera aquí el chat digital a través de teléfonos celulares, que la gente practica sentada en los cientos de cafés de la ciudad. El mundo cibernético y las telenovelas son aparentemente la única vía de alivio para la mayoría de la gente. Creo ver en esto los principios de una sociedad que depende de la industria del entretenimiento, como es abrumadoramente el caso en Estados Unidos. Me digo a mí mismo que afortunadamente el arte no es víctima del mercado como en América. Pero a la vez la creatividad de la ciudad parece estar en un estado de depresión, de nostalgia paralizante, donde hacer arte no parece tener sentido. No hay crítica, ni instituciones que promuevan un diálogo animado y actual sobre el arte. ¿A quién le puede interesar crear así, en el vacío? Y sin embargo, ¿no es este el momento en que es más necesario crear, precisamente cuando una ciudad necesita más energías? Qué desafío más grande hay aquí. Creo que nunca seré capaz de entenderlo, a menos que algún día experimente mismamente una tragedia como la que la gente aquí ha vivido. Quizá.

Restauraciones Nostálgicas

En el vuelo de regreso a Nueva York leí un libro reciente de Svetlana Boym, El futuro de la nostalgia. Es un estudio brillante de la relación conflictiva de los rusos con su pasado soviético. Particularmente, hace un análisis del virtual »Palacio de los Soviets« en Moscú: un gran proyecto estalinista que buscaba simbolizar la ambición soviética. El palacio jamás se materializó, aunque la ciudad moderna se diseñó alrededor del sitio en que iba a construirse, y éste siempre estaría presente en la vida de los rusos. Antiguamente, el espacio correspondía a la iglesia de Cristo el Salvador, erigida por el zar Alejandro I y demolida por Stalin para construir su gran palacio, que buscaba ser una respuesta al Empire State Building y a la estatua de la libertad. Con el advenimiento de la segunda guerra mundial y luego la muerte de Stalin, la construcción del palacio se pospuso. En los años cincuenta, el espacio se usó para una alberca climatizada gigante. Finalmente, en los años noventa, se hizo una recreación de la catedral original, erigida por el alcalde en conmemoración del 850 aniversario de Moscú. La reconstrucción de la catedral generó un gran debate sobre si tenía sentido reconstruir lo que una vez había estado ahí. Incluso hoy, con la nueva catedral en el lugar, el sitio sigue teniendo un significado particular para los habitantes de la ciudad, y la ausencia del palacio de los Soviets sigue ejerciendo el poder de la nostalgia de aquello que nunca existió.

Como dice Baudrillard en su libro Simulaciones, cuando una realidad cesa de existir es reemplazada por una proliferación obsesiva de mitos de origen, un proceso de idealización de lo que se ha desvanecido: la nostalgia. Las miles de reproducciones de las torres gemelas en los medios, en los souvenirs comerciales, en las fotos y videos de los turistas, representan nuestro intento de sublimar el pánico de la ausencia. Para la mayoría de los americanos -particularmente las generaciones jóvenes de clase media y alta- la violencia ha sido siempre una abstracción, relegada a los barrios y ghettos. La muerte aquí ha existido sólo en medios nacionales, con el rostro de asesino psicótico, y ha sido idealizada por Hollywood, nunca vivida de la manera en que aconteció ahora en el World Trade Center. La ausencia de las torres es, en realidad, evidencia del enorme vacío existencial que la sociedad americana tiene que llenar. Sin gran convicción, la gente trata de exigir al gobierno americano que encuentre a los culpables. Pero la estrategia tradicional del Big Brother para encontrar al culpable no será satisfactoria esta vez, porque el autor del crimen es un grupo intangible de terroristas y ajusticiarlos contribuirá muy poco a cerrar la herida.

Los inversionistas originales de las torres gemelas han anunciado que quieren reconstruir los edificios. Como en el caso de la catedral moscovita, la reconstrucción tendrá significado simbólico. Sin embargo, su naturaleza artificial no podrá restaurar la grieta psicológica en los ciudadanos de este país.

Des-virtualizar

Ante nuestro miedo a la verdadera nada, en los Estados Unidos regresamos a lo que mejor sabemos hacer: comprar. »Attack on America« es el encabezado del espectáculo que vivimos ahora y que se desarrolla – o más bien, se mueve en círculo vicioso – frente al televisor. Consumimos ávidamente todo tipo de imágenes e información. So pretexto de conocer los últimos desarrollos de los acontecimientos, nos sentamos futilmente frente al monitor, viendo una y otra vez las mismas imágenes trágicas del avión estrellándose contra la torre, las torres derrumbándose, los bomberos corriendo a salvar gente, el alcalde Giuliani dirigiéndose gravemente a la ciudad. Poco importa que estas imágenes sean prácticamente las mismas y se repitan ad nauseam; después de todo, su repetición infinita nos ayuda a superar nuestra nostalgia de lo real, a insensibilizarnos hasta llegar al nivel cómodo de percibirlo como »irrealidad virtual«. Durante la década de los noventa, construimos cuidadosamente un mundo en el que borramos los límites entre lo virtual y lo real, al grado de no ver la diferencia. Ha sido necesario un acontecimiento como éste para recordarnos la distinción entre ambos.

Este fin de la inocencia ha golpeado particularmente a un sector de la sociedad americana que creía fervientemente en la invulnerabilidad de sus instituciones: los profesionales jóvenes. Han creído ingenuamente de que todo es bueno en el mundo, que los relatos históricos terminan bien, y que nada trascendental ocurre fuera de la burbuja de clases. La diferencia social, la miseria y la existencia del resto del mundo nunca han importado realmente ni marcado una diferencia en sus vidas.

Después de un plácido letargo de indiferencia a la realidad, nuestra interpretación de lo que es la guerra (más parecida a la guerra de las galaxias) y nuestra ingenua percepción del mal deben finalmente reconocer que la comunidad global de veras existe. Como en otras partes del mundo, como la guerra civil en los Balcanes, o el terrorismo en Europa y Latinoamérica, hemos recibido finalmente nuestra porción de realidad.

El 11 de septiembre, el muro de Berlín americano finalmente se derrumbó, y lo que se encuentra del otro lado es el resto del mundo.

Despertares

Como alguien que se mueve en el mundo del arte, en el que en teoría creamos para criticar y enriquecer la cultura y ayudar a entender nuestra realidad, veo ésta como una oportunidad para despertar de una vez por todas. En una época en la que el quehacer artístico está prácticamente regido por nuestro deseo de status y éxito político y económico, un acontecimiento como éste nos urgentemente a darle finalmente le un nuevo sentido de propósito al arte. Tenemos la opción de hacer un tipo de arte que sirva sólo como continuación al escapismo remunerable, o uno que sea realmente significativo y relacionado con la realidad.

Su nuevo propósito, creo, es humanista, pero debe estar arraigado en un reconocimiento personal interno. Recuerdo al personaje de la película American Beauty, uno de los más estremecedores de los últimos años en Hollywood, porque encarna las fantasías americanas de rebelión personal. Pero la razón por la que se convierte en una figura tan importante no es que rompa los patrones de comportamiento de la nación suburbana, o que vuelva a adoptar sus instintos más primarios. La parte más importante -y creo yo, la verdadera fantasía americana- es que al final llega un punto de paz consigo mismo ante la muerte. Un paz de índole exclusivamente personal y no arraigada en la pertenencia a una religión o un grupo. El personaje muere solo y muere feliz.

Esta es la paz que realmente hemos perdido. Quienes pertenecemos a una generación que nunca ha creído realmente en nada sustancial, encontramos ese lote baldío más doloroso que nunca. Pero tenemos la oportunidad de entender y confrontar por fin ese miedo. La siguiente guerra en los Estados Unidos no debe librarse contra un enemigo externo, sino contra nuestras propias mentes y contra nuestro peor enemigo, que ejerce en nosotros la tiranía del solipsismo. El cráter vacío donde estaban las torres gemelas, en vez de ser nostálgicamente reconstruido como la catedral rusa, debe dejarse vacío, en conmemoración del momento en que realmente despertamos. Si somos capaces de adoptar este desafío en nuestra manera de pensar, ninguna torre ausente puede resultar amenazadora, ni ningún miedo por la nostalgia, ni la necesidad de algún bien material que nos conforte. Quizá podamos vivir en paz con nosotros mismos y con los otros.

Haciendo Himnos entre Ruinas

(Un muro de Berlín americano – 2)

¿qué yerba, que agua de vida ha de darnos la vida,

dónde desenterrar la palabra,

la proporción que rige al himno y al discurso,

al baile, a la ciudad y a la balanza?

Octavio Paz, »Himno entre Ruinas«

Días después del atentado contra el World Trade Center recibí la llamada de un conocido, típico artista del medio social neoyorquino. Me preguntó la frase de cajón entre artistas neoyorquinos: »¿en qué proyectos andas trabajando ahora?« Respondí que en ninguno, porque los acontecimientos de la semana pasada me habían dejado devastado, y no veía sentido alguno en producir arte en ese momento. Me preguntó entonces si había leído un artículo de Carol Vogel en el New York Times sobre el arte producido durante la guerra. »Ha habido grandes obras producidas en tiempos de guerra. Podrías basarte en esa tradición«.

Sin duda, quienes trabajamos en la producción de arte nos convertimos, de la noche a la mañana, en »artistas trabajando en periodo de guerra«, aunque sea sólo nominalmente. Pero no podía creer el oportunismo inherente al comentario de mi amigo, y que a él mismo le pasó inadvertido. De inmediato imaginé con fastidio anticipado lo que se vendría en los próximos meses en nuestro medio: muchas exposiciones sobre guerra y política, imágenes de torres destruidas, testimonios de víctimas, comentarios profundos sobre la tragedia de la humanidad, escapismo idílico.

Nada de malo hay en que una experiencia tan traumática desemboque naturalmente en todo tipo de respuestas artísticas. Después de todo, el arte es una forma de exorcizar las obsesiones colectivas. Es también normal que todo el arte político que está por aparecer sea en unos casos inteligente, en otros trivial y hasta meramemente oportunista. Por desgracia, y dejando de lado de sus méritos estéticos, apostaría a que la producción de gran parte de estas obras responderá no a una auténtica preocupación social sino a la perspectiva de conseguir reconocimiento por abordar un tema de relevancia. Tal es el ejemplo de mi amigo, para quien no se trataba -como revelaba con toda naturalidad- de cambiar actitudes sino simplemente de cambiar el tema de las obras.

Desde ese momento he dudado si el medio artístico realmente comprenderá el significado de los incidentes del 11 de septiembre, y si los artistas seremos capaces de adoptar un nuevo papel en los cambios que esto ha producido. Porque el arte contemporáneo nunca se sintió más irrelevante que inmediatamente después de este incidente.

Es importante recordar que este acto terrorista no es la mayor tragedia que ha visto el mundo: basta con recordar los genocidios en Ruanda, la limpieza étnica de los kurdos, la guerra civil de la Ex-Yugoslavia o, especialmente, la bomba atómica sobre Hiroshima. Pero aunque muchos artistas han procurado que sus obras sean respuestas a situaciones sociales reales, el mundo internacional del arte ha tendido a distanciarse de estos incidentes y ha mantenido su sistema de vida fuera de estos hechos, como en un suburbio cultural. Pero el 11 de septiembre será otra historia. Cuando un terremoto sacudió a Turquía el año pasado, se decidió seguir adelante con el proyecto de la bienal de Estambul, puesto que se consideró negativo privar al público de un acontecimiento que podría al menos hacerlos olvidar la crisis. Se trataba de un desastre natural, algo que estamos mucho más preparados para aceptar como parte de la vida, y el arte cumple una misión fundamental como paliativo al sufrimiento. Sin embargo, cuando ocurre un acontecimiento como el del 11 de septiembre, la misión del arte es mucho mayor que el de simplemente proveer una ventana para el escapismo.

El acontecimiento tiene una relevancia particular para la producción artística porque ocurrió en Nueva York, el principal centro de exhibición del arte contemporáneo. Aquí se encuentran las mejores y peores exageraciones del arte, ha sido también el lugar de choque entre realidades brutales y la obstinación por no querer reconocerlas.

En una cita que causó una controversia internacional, Karlheinz Stockhausen dijo que el incidente del World Trade Center había sido la mayor obra de arte jamás hecha. Cualquiera que haya sido el contexto del comentario del compositor alemán (y que le ha causado muchos problemas), seguramente se refería a que el impacto de este acto terrorista sobrepasó la magnitud de cualquier otra experiencia, artística o no. De cualquier manera, este terrible atentado hizo evidente como nunca antes el papel marginal del quehacer artístico en nuestra sociedad. Después de casi una década de virtualidad, un golpe de realidad nos obligó a reconocer la caída de nuestra torre virtual de idilios con experiencias imaginarias.

O al menos eso parecía. Desafortunadamente, y después de tal visión mundial de la realidad más horrible, el gobierno de Estados Unidos respondió histéricamente, volviendo de inmediato a la virtualidad con el fin de lograr el control del público, fácilmente manipulado por los medios. No es ningún secreto que el publico norteamericano en general se encuentra seguro en la irrealidad. Así, fuimos testigos de un desfile inverosímil de comentarios santurrones sobre la determinación y el poder de los Estados Unidos, la garantía de que todo estaba en orden y los culpables serían castigados. La falta casi completa de autocrítica de los medios, la ausencia casi absoluta de introspección nacional, fue escandalosa en casi todos los medios de noticias norteamericanos. En ningún lugar se discutió si el atentado era la respuesta natural a una serie de acciones arbitrarias de los gobiernos de Estados Unidos, específicamente dirigidas al medio este.

El medio del arte, por su cuenta, siguió las líneas de este comportamiento general y acrítico de manera confusa, lenta y desorientada. La reacción de los museos, las galerías y los artistas de Nueva York fue, en el mejor de los casos, homogénea y predecible. Aunque muchos lugares cerraron o hicieron gestos simbólicos para reconocer la tragedia (en muchos casos similares a los del »día sin arte« por el sida), la mayoría de las inauguraciones previstas se realizaron, y después de una semana era ya evidente el esfuerzo por volver a hacer las cosas como siempre se habían hecho. El mensaje implícito del mundo artístico resultó ser algo así como »sí, esto ha sido una tragedia, y estamos conmovidos por ella, pero la vida debe continuar y debemos confiar en el poder curativo del arte para seguir adelante«. Mientras tanto, las verdaderas expresiones culturales a flor de piel ocurren en plazas públicas: Times Square, Union Square, Washington Square, y en las estaciones de bomberos. La ciudad entera se convirtió en un camposanto, una ofrenda en memoria a los muertos. ¿A quién podía interesarle ver una instalación de video en un museo?

Para los que sí pusieron atención, los dos fundamentos principales del mundo del arte -el individualismo y el comercio- han sido en cierto modo atacados también por los aviones terroristas. En el intento de preservar nuestro mundo artístico post-histórico, decidimos no adoptar la concepción artística de Beuys, con su misión social y su deseo de cambio, sino más bien el cinismo warholiano, donde el dinero y la fama son sin duda la base de todo. Ningún otro valor ha sobrevivido tan poderosamente, y cuando alguno más se hace presente, los otros dos ocupan indefectiblemente un lugar prioritario. Con pocas excepciones, la conciencia social se ha vuelto ilustrativa, a manera de conceptualismo ornamental. Las verdaderas misiones sociales en el arte dejan de ser moda, o dejan de ser económicamente viables, cuando su enfoque no es el motivo ulterior: transformarlo, a fin de cuentas, en producto.

Nos planteamos el objetivo urgente de redefinir la producción artística de hoy en un momento en que ya veníamos experimentando un agotamiento de creencias y un manierismo formal sostenido en parte por el mito de lo virtual. Para las generaciones de artistas jóvenes, el término »virtual« cobró una importancia esotérica equivalente al término »conceptual« de hace una década: el término de »apellation controlee« de cualquier buen arte. Fue la reflexión natural en un clima generacional donde la distinción entre lo real y lo imaginario desapareció casi por completo. Los reality shows y películas como The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, y The Matrix fueron la culminación de este fenómeno.

Nuestra falta de contacto con la realidad se muestra inmejorablemente en la respuesta de los campus universitarios, que en décadas pasadas fueron los mayores epicentros del movimiento antimilitarista y esta vez han reaccionado en forma poco informada, desordenada, desigual y a veces hasta indiferente. Mientras algunos estudiantes claman por la paz, otros apoyan la intervención americana, y gran parte se desentiende. Este distanciamiento no es tan diferente al del artista promedio de hoy: estamos dispuestos a tratar temas difíciles y de peso, no a arriesgar nuestra posición jerárquica en el mercado competitivo del mundo del arte. La preocupación por subir en la escala jerárquica supera en mucho a los credos liberales que nos jactamos de tener.

La vida debe continuar, y el arte debe seguir produciéndose. Pero las cosas ya no pueden ser iguales. Más claramente que nunca vemos como el mundo del arte se ha convertido en una fortaleza medieval dentro de la cual invocamos los grandes conceptos e ideas de la creación. Hoy, una situación drástica requiere medidas drásticas. Si hemos de reconocerlas, habrá que hacer muchos cambios significativos y desarmar muchas estructuras convencionales. De no hacerlo, y si solo continuamos nuestra displicente fiesta privada, nuestro futuro es volvernos irrelevantes ante la historia, de la misma manera en que la historia nos ha parecido irrelevante a nosotros.

El 11 de septiembre ha sido posiblemente el día de la defunción efectiva de la noción ingenua de la aldea global, y del redescubrimiento del mundo actual. Irónicamente, la precariedad del viaje por avión nos ayudó a darnos cuenta de que, después de todo, el mundo es de veras muy grande y estamos separados en vastas regiones culturales. Y es a través del diálogo artístico como cierta comunicación cultural podría ocurrir. Pero para que el mundo del arte logre reinventarse y convertirse en un área de actividad que realmente marque una diferencia en el sistema de la producción cultural, debe haber una revisión de valores. Hay que buscar la manera de separar los intereses humanos de los económicos. Debe abandonarse la dependencia del protagonismo. Deben abandonarse la retórica interna y la falta de compromiso externo con el publico en general. Finalmente, el arte quizá deba redefinirse dentro de otra área de actividad, y posiblemente liberarse del lastre de algunas de sus acepciones históricas. Pero ante todo, debe ser el resultado necesario de experiencias vitales, en vez de estas ser un pretexto para hacer arte.

Los incidentes de estos días deberían guiar nuestros esfuerzos para comprometernos a desarrollar un nuevo humanismo. Octavio Paz, uno de los pocos poetas modernos que intentó armar un puente entre Oriente y Occidente, creía en el poder transformador y revolucionario de la poesía y su habilidad de iluminar complejidades culturales que ninguna otra área era capaz de hacer. Parafraseando a Paz en su poema, debemos de encontrar esa fuente de agua que nos ayude a infundir vida al arte de nuevo, para que cobre sentido de nuevo para nosotros. Y qué mejor manera que dirigiendo nuestra mirada al mundo de verdad?

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.

Text for Vice magazine about the Instituto de la Telenovela, also published in the Utne Reader in the fall of 2008 

Pablo Helguera

El Instituto de la Telenovela: en pos del melodrama global

En el verano de 1992, después de la caída de la Unión Soviética, la televisión estatal se encontraba en profunda transición; era necesario encontrar una manera eficiente y económica de llenar los espacios televisivos que antes habían sido ocupados por programación oficial. Fue así como un productor del canal ruso Commonwealth Channel Ostankino decidió contratar los derechos de transmisión de Los Ricos También Lloran, una telenovela realizada a finales de los años setenta en México. La telenovela, en la que estelarizaban Verónica Castro y Rogelio Guerra, sigue el estereotipo narrativo clásico de los melodramas mexicanos de esa década: la protagonista es una mujer de clase baja enamorada del hijo de un millonario. Es un romance imposible dadas las distancias sociales – y raciales— que los separan. Y sin embargo, después de 249 episodios, los personajes sobrellevan esta y otras vicisitudes para finalmente unirse en matrimonio.

La telenovela fue lanzada al aire con el título de Bogaty Toszhe Plachut,  con un doblaje de bajo costo, en el que las voces originales de los actores se escuchan aún yuxtapuestas con las voces de los traductores rusos. Los productores de Ostakino imaginaron que la telenovela podría resultar popular; pero nunca habrían podido anticipar el grado de obsesión e histeria masiva que llegaría a suscitar. Los países ex-soviéticos pronto se volvieron adictos a la telenovela. Los peinados anticuados no parecían importar: los ojos verdes sumergidos en lágrimas de Verónica Castro se convirtieron en los ojos más famosos de Rusia.  Todas las ciudades se paralizaban al llegar la hora de la transmisión de la novela. El día de la transmisión del ultimo episodio de Los Ricos también Lloran fue día de luto general. Se estima que ese día aproximadamente 200 millones de rusos vieron la transmisión, convirtiendo al episodio en el programa más visto en un país en la historia de la televisión.

*

Mi relación con las telenovelas, como la mayoría de los mexicanos, es compleja y contradictoria: por un lado las miramos con desprecio, como producto basura, y por otro secretamente las hemos visto de reojo y nos hemos dejado entretener por ellas, ya sea por un episodio o dos o como entrega absoluta por una narrativa particular o simplemente como parte de un aspecto cultural nuestro que ha entrado en nuestro subconsciente de una forma aún difícil de explicar. En mi caso, hay también una conexión familiar que no suelo confesar. El hermano de mi madre, Enrique Lizalde,  es actor de telenovela, y de hecho uno de los primeros protagonistas de las primeras producciones que realizó Televisa ( El Derecho de Nacer de 1966, por ejemplo). Mi Mamá decía en las tardes: “voy a ir a ver a tu tío”, y se ponía a planchar enfrente de la televisión hacia las cinco de la tarde—el “prime time” de las telenovelas. El pretexto de “ver a Enrique” era de hecho perfecto para justificar ver el programa cada tarde. Recuerdo haber visto “Chispita” en su totalidad, así como la primera edición de “Corazón Salvaje” y “Mundo de Juguete”. Enrique, quien aún trabaja en telenovelas (ahora por lo general como el padre del protagonista), aparecía con su clásica voz grave y actitud en extremo seria y un tanto amenazadora, prácticamente idéntica en todas las telenovelas.

Muchos años después, en el verano del 2001, me encontraba viajando por la costa de Dalmacia cuando, en el tren, entablé una conversación con una niña bosnia de quince años.  “De donde eres?” me preguntó. Al enterarse que yo era de México, su rostro se iluminó: “mi actriz favorita es Jacqueline Andere!”. La niña procedió a recitar una serie de actores mexicanos de telenovela y de series a un nivel de detalle que me dejó atónito, desplegando un conocimiento que sería más apropiado de una vendedora de tortillas de la colonia Doctores. “¿Cómo es posible que sepas tanto de telenovelas mexicanas?”, le dije. “Todas las tardes las veo con mis amigas. Nos encantan y estamos aprendiendo español. ¿Cómo es Coyoacán? En una serie se ve muy agradable.”

 Después de hablar un rato más y despedirse, me dijo:  “Eres muy afortunado de provenir de un país donde hay tan grandes artistas”. 

No mucho tiempo después, al llegar a Zagreb y quedarme en casa de unos amigos, noté que la tía de uno de ellos estaba viendo “Esmeralda”. En la pantalla estaba el tío Enrique, traducido al Croata.

*

El éxito rotundo de Los Ricos También Lloran a principio de los noventa marcó el principio de una década de globalización de la telenovela. Este éxito comercial fue de enorme beneficio para los gigantes televisivos de Mexico, Venezuela y Brasil, como Televisa y TVGlobo. En el caso de Televisa, las ventas de derechos de telenovelas se dispararon, llegando a países tan disímiles como Israel y Filipinas y produciendo cientos de miles de dólares en esa década. Estos eventos transformaron a la industria de la telenovela, que pronto asumió un nuevo papel global al comenzar a generar tramas e historias en contextos cada vez más exóticos ( de ahí que surgiera una preferencia por dramas en haciendas del siglo diecinueve). 

Fue en ese viaje cuando decidí que sería necesario comenzar un proyecto que investigara el origen de esta obsesión global y las razones por las que un producto comercial de esta naturaleza , aparentemente arraigado en dramas tan locales, había alcanzado tales dimensiones de fanatismo internacional.  Sin saber que justo en esos momentos Nicolás Bourriaud estaba comenzando a promover su teoría del arte relacional, nació el Instituto de la Telenovela, un proyecto artístico que era parte instituto de investigación, parte instalación nomádica, y parte una telenovela por entregas. El objetivo sería establecer oficinas de tal instituto en diferentes países donde las telenovelas latinoamericanas han tenido un impacto particular, y a través de programas y otros proyectos, generar debates críticos acerca de las razones por la que esto se estaba dando.

La fundación Televisa en México me permitió acceso a su archivo en avenida Chapultepec, donde había evidencia de algunos, escasos, programas que investigaban su propia autoconciencia histórica de la telenovela. En México, se podría decir que los tres nombres claves de la fundación de la telenovela fueron Emililo Azcárraga,  Ernesto Alonso y Valentín Pimstein. “El Tigre” Azcárraga, el dueño de Televisa,  marcó el plan comercial de las telenovelas en Latinoamérica y a través de ellas logró expander el alcance global de la televisión mexicana. Su decisión de defender el idioma español y no entrar en cuestiones de traducción fue en particular significativa. Alonso y Pimstein, por su parte, contribuyeon a armar la estructura dramática moderna de la telenovela. Pimstein, un imigrante chileno que se estableció en México, fue de las primeras personas que comenzó a implementar encuestas de audiencia para determinar los desenlaces de las historias, según se narra, yendo a mercados y otros lugares públicos para recoger opiniones. Una de sus frases más famosas de aquellos tiempos era: “si no lo hacemos así, mi sirvienta no lo entenderá.”

La primera ciudad donde establecí el instituto fue en Ljubljana, Eslovenia, en 2002, con ayuda del artista Tadej Pogacar que tenía un espacio llamado Galerija P74. Ljubljana, como la mayoría de las capitales de Europa del Este, tiene una arquitectura urbana del siglo diecinueve combinada con edificios desabridos de la era del comunismo, por lo general en una paleta de ocres y grises. La idea fue contrastar esos colores con un interior telenovelesco que utilizara la tradición del modernismo mexicano de Luis Barragán, con rosas mexicanos, azules y amarillos al estilo del hotel Camino Real. El resultado fue en extremo memorable para los eslovenos, uno de los cuales acabó pintando su casa de los mismos colores posteriormente.  Las telenovelas no eran en absoluto ajenas en Ljubljana; justo unos días antes la actriz principal de la telenovela “Esmeralda”, Leticia Calderón, visitó Ljubljana y fue recibida por aproximadamente mil personas en el aeropuerto ( dado el minusculo tamaño del país, mil personas es una cifra exorbitante).

Un caso similar se dio en Zagreb, Croacia, donde el instituto abrió sus puertas en la forma de un Tequila Bar, bajo el título de “Telenovela Bar”.  Las mesas del bar eran a la vez vitrinas donde se mostraban objetos que de hecho constituían la exposición.  De inmediato, el bar se convirtió en un centro importante de sociabilidad. En Croacia se publica una revista, Gloria, que prácticamente está dedicada a las telenovelas latinoamericanas: los actores mexicanos son entrevistados en sus casas en las Lomas o San Angel, de la misma manera en que la revista Vanity Fair entrevistaría a Scarlett Johannson o Angelina Jolie. Un artista local propuso que organizáramos un taller sobre la telenovela. Al anunciarlo, pensé que recibiríamos un grupo de 10 personas cuando mucho. Pero el día del taller llegaron cerca de 100 personas, así como las cámaras de televisión local. El público extrañamente mezclado venía constituído de amas de casa de edad madura, así como de artistas conceptuales locales— una de las mezclas más extrañas de públicos que he presenciado— y sin embargo las discusiones fueron en extremo reveladoras: las amas de casa eran especialistas en el tema, y estaban en extremo familiarizadas con la noción de debatir los aspectos sociológicos de las telenovelas: en todo país, las telenovelas ofrecen material de discusión.

Desde los primeros días de investigaciones del instituto comencé a notar patrones comunes en la manera en que cada país se relacionaba con las telenovelas, y a la vez, la manera en que la relación con las telenovelas revelaba algo acerca de cada país. Una investigadora canadiense, Dense Bombardier, lo describió perfectamente con su frase “Dame una telenovela y te daré una nación.”  En términos generales, sin embargo, las telenovelas implementan lo que el crítico Tomás Lopez-Pumarejo (mi teórico principal del instituto) describió como “el drama de la autoconciencia”: son historias que giran en torno a pregunas ontológicas de tipo “¿donde está mi hijo?” “¿dónde está mi amor?”

Hay una clara relación en la manera en que los melodramas telenovelescos exploran las tensiones sociales de un país y las convierten en terapia colectiva. Este proceso funcionó muy bien entre países que recién emergían del legado comunista, en busca de una especie de búsqueda psicológica donde se trataba de encontrar claridad en relación a los tabús de clase que habían dominado durante esa era — de manera que un drama centrado en la imposiblidad de un amor por razones sociales o económicas era en extremo poderoso.  Varios estudios de la época en que Los Ricos fueron transmitidos en Rusia indica que las series norteamericanas que también se transmitieron en esa época— como por ejemplo Dallas o Dynasty— si bien eran populares, nunca generaron el mismo nivel de interés debido a que los rusos no se identificaban con los problemas familiares de un millonario petrolero de Dallas. Los niveles altos de producción de esos programas tampoco parecieron importar; de ahí que productoras como Televisa no se preocuparan demasiado por invertir demasiado en la calidad de producción de cada episodio. Era el dramatismo, las emociones a flor de piel, y en parte el contexto exótico lo que le daba un atractivo especial a las telenovelas.

La estructura dramática de la telenovela opera de maneras misteriosas, aludiendo a nuestros deseos o temores reprimidos, y en ocasiones generándolos.  El poder de persuasión de las telenovelas es precisamente su principio fundador. Todo comenzó en la década de los 30 en Chicago, cuado una compañía de detergentes decidió lanzar un comercial en el radio en el que aparecían una madre e hija discurriendo diferentes cosas, con la conversación siempre resultando en la compra o el uso del detergente. Con el tiempo, los diálogos entre estos personajes comenzaron a ser más elaborados, hasta el punto en que el comercial adquirió las proporciones de un programa en sí, pero siempre manteniendo al producto como el leit motiv de la acción. De ahí que surgiera el término soap opera,  pues se refería por un lado al anunciante original así como al melodrama desbordado del programa.

El grado de persuasión psicológica de las telenovelas está bien documentado: la telenovela Simplemente María, que trataba de la manera en que una sirvienta lograba triunfar en la vida a través de comprar una máquina de coser y tomar clases nocturnas, generó la compra masiva de máquinas de coser en Perú;  en  Cáceres, España, se le hizo un monumento al personaje de la telenovela. La venta de tinte rubio para pelo se incrementa en países donde la actriz principal de una telenovela es rubia; un porcentaje importante de los nombres de niños rusos está basado en actores o personajes de telenovelas.  En Hungría se inició un fondo contra la ceguera como resultado de “Esmeralda”, que trata de la historia de una hermosa mujer ciega.

El efecto educativo de las telenovelas ha generado iniciativas positivas, tales como campañas en Africa en forma de telenovelas para conscientizar al público en cuanto a problemas como el sida y la drogadicción. Sin embargo, la telenovela no es sino un producto comercial, y como tal, solo obedece intereses comerciales y no necesariamente altruistas. En la década de los noventa, está bien documentado que la alianza de Televisa con el partido revolucionario institucional resultó en una bonanza comercial para la televisora a cambio de generar programación telenovelesca sin contenido político y más profuso en las épocas en que había mayores tensiones en el pais. Como el vehículo comercial más efectivo jamás creado, la telenovela puede ser un gran instrumento demagógico.

*

Una de las últimas paradas del instituto fue Cuba, el lugar que vio el nacimiento de la telenovela latinoamericana. Fue en Cuba donde, en los años cuarenta la tradición narrativa a nivel radial era la más rica, y el formato de la telenovela fue rápidamente adoptado. Asimismo, a principios de los años cincuenta Cuba contaba con la mayor cantidad de televisores per cápita que la mayoría de otros países, incluyendo Estados Unidos. En 1958 fue lanzada al aire la primera telenovela latinoamericana: El derecho de nacer, que trataba de un hombre blanco criado por una mujer negra, y la búsqueda de éste por su madre biológica. El tema de tensiones raciales que era lógico para la multi-racial sociedad cubana tuvo inmediata acogida en el resto de Latinoamérica.  El derecho es la telenovela que más se ha vuelto a producir a lo largo de las décadas.

Cuando establecimos las oficinas del instituto en Cuba, el impacto fue automático. La televisión misma nos vino a entrevistar, y al día siguiente éramos famosos en Havana vieja. En Cuba la telenovela sigue siendo el medio de entretenimiento por autonomasia, dada la poca variedad de programación que provee la televisión estatal ( el canal gubernamental pasaba eternamente un documental de varias horas de duración, “Fidel en el Congo”.) La ausencia de crítica política era evidente, aunque de vez en cuando se permitía la transmisión de telenovelas de otros países que contenían crítica local, como es el caso de la telenovela colombiana “Betty la fea”, que causó sensación mundial y hoy se ha rehecho en Estados Unidos como “Ugly Betty”.  En un episodio de la novela, Betty, quien trabaja en una oficina, hace un comentario en relación a la economía del país, criticando al ministro de finanzas. Al día siguiente, los diarios colombianos iniciaron una seria arremetida al ministro, analizando las críticas de Betty. El personaje había adquirido el nivel de una figura política a nivel nacional.

El Instituto organizó mesas redondas con especialistas, productores y actores, performances, publicaciones, lecturas dramáticas y exposiciones dentro de exposiciones, como fue el caso de las fotos de Stefan Ruiz quien documentó la extraña realidad fabricada de los estudios de las telenovelas de Televisa.  Paradójicamente, el instituto nunca llegó a abrirse en México, a pesar de ser el lugar donde todo el material se había originado. Yo mismo desistí de continuar el periplo del instituto, virando a otros temas y consciente que sería  una tarea de toda la vida el continuar viajando a países cada vez más remotos para analizar sus complejas relaciones con los melodramas televisivos. La telenovela también ha evolucionado, adquiriendo nuevos formatos dramáticos y actualizándose en los temas que incluyen la clonación y el 11 de septiembre. Enrique hace cada vez menos apariciones en la tele, y, quizá como él, yo también me he semi-jubilado del tema.

Pero, como sucede en el mundo de las telenovelas, siempre existe la posiblidad de una secuela, o un remake. ****

Poster for The Feast of the Ass, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, July 2008

The Feast of the Ass was a Transpedagogical event inspired in the medieval feast of the same name where all social roles were reversed as a donkey was brought into the church presiding as the pope. In a special event at the museum, an actual donkey was brought into the space and an evening ensued where non-curators presented curatorial projects, non-educators gave tours, non-critics provided criticism, and non-artists performed.  The presentations were the result of a week of workshops where these roles were discussed with more than 40 participants.

el asno en el carrillo / the Ass at the Carrillo

criticism panel with non-critics

[Comentario de Mauricio Marcín sobre la Fiesta del Asno en el museo Carrillo Gil]

¿Por dónde empezar? ¿Cuál es la orilla de una memoria? Ya sé. Unas orejas largas, puntiagudas y erectas. Un disidente se atreve a sostener que dos más dos es tres. Y entonces ¡a mirar la esquina! por burro. Pero luego los burros sirven, casi en el mismo sentido que los locos. Nos muestran las fronteras de la ética y de la moral. Nos muestran también las de la razón. Podríamos ver en un vagabundo de discurso repetitivo nuestro reflejo de elocuencia. Yo estoy bien, porque no soy como él.
A mi todo esto me parece muy frágil. Las fronteras y los centros.
En la Fiesta del Burro, todos éramos otros. Todos fuimos otros. Está bien dejarse ser otro. Pensemos por un segundo que estos cuerpos nuestros que miramos como unidad, de un momento a otro pueden mutar; drásticamente a cucaracha como Gregorio. Pero esa es sólo una de las posibilidades. Somos en potencia miles, cientos de miles, al mismo tiempo. El burro y el sabio, el elocuente y el mutismo. El amo y el siervo.

Mauricio Marcín, 2009

Works available are non-editioned, one-of-a-kind pieces and are completely free of charge without any other sort of strings attached. Because of the high volume of requests, interested viewers are only asked to fill out a simple form requesting a particular work or works, explaining the reasons for their interest. When more than one viewer is interested in a work, one request will be favored over the other based on an asessment of the viewer’s degree of sincere interest in the work. TFAG does not discriminate in terms of social hierarchy or influence.

The project was first presented at the Armory Art fair in New York in March 2008, and later at Mexico City’s art fair FEMACO in that same year.  In addition, certan works were given to specific individuals from the art world, including artists, critics, curators, and others, with a letter stipulating that they were free to do as they pleased with the free work,  and should they return it back to the gallery it would be immediately destroyed.

Olivier Debroise with one of the Free Art Gallery works, FEMACO, 2008

sample request