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

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

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

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

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

[Exhibition text]

BEAUTY FOR ASHES

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

Isaiah 61:3

To Robert Rosenblum

(1927-2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pablo Helguera

New York City

May 2010

book cover

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

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

Published by Jorge Pinto Books, New York

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

Launch date: September 2009

Available at Amazon

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

BOOK EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION 

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

Included texts in this anthology:

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

First Mexico City Congress of Urban Purification (2003)

Parallel Lives (2003)

First Imaginary Forum of Mental Sculpture (2004)

The Foreign Legion (2005)

We All Are Streeter (2006)

Manifest Destiny (2008-09)

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

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

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

(fragmento del libro a continuación):

INTRODUCCION

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

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

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

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

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

EN BUSCA DE NUESTRO BUROCRATA INTERNO

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

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

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

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

BREVISIMA HISTORIA DE LA BUROCRACIA EN LATINOAMERICA

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

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

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?

(video, black and white, 15 min., 2008)

Chipilo is a documentary based on the story of a town of the same name, located in the vicinity of the city of Puebla, Mexico. Toward the last quarter of the XIXth century, the government of Porfirio Díaz sought to populate some areas of Mexican land with European immigrants, with the hopes that these groups would enrich the culture and the economy of the region. Amongst these groups were a community of northern italians that spoke Veneto and agreed to settle in these new lands. The unusual geographic, social and political circumstances of this arrangement resulted in the italian settlers to remain in isolation without much other choice. To this day, most of the population of Chipilo speak the original Véneto dialect. Chipilo documents, in the original language, the story of this community that resulted from a utopian social experiment in XIXth Century Mexico.

This text was written as an introduction to an exhibition at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York entitled “A Dictionary of Foreign Time”, which opened in January 2007.

1. Foyer: Contemporary Art and Historic Sites

A few years ago, I visited the House of the Seven Gables, the XVIIIth Century building in Salem that Nathaniel Hawthorne used as his inspiration to write his legendary novel. I had been looking forward for that moment for some time, eagerly expecting to be transported into the strange and fascinating past of New England.

Unfortunately, though, as it is the case of many historic buildings, the only way to visit the site is by following a tour guide, and the woman who became our Virgil in this enterprise looked pretty unexcited about her job. She had evidently done the tour a thousand times, and we clearly were just one more tired round (and the last one for the day, which clearly made the matters worse). I felt bad for her, and also for myself, since we both had to go through something we didn’t want to do to get what we wanted (me, to see the site, she, to get paid). She ran through dates, names and people one after another, explaining terms and preempting question and comments that surely have been asked in the past by previous visitors— and which we would perhaps have asked had we be given a minute to reflect on the dozens of facts and figures she was throwing at us. With her glassy eyes and monotone voice, she was pretty much a living and moving museum label.

Then there is the opposite kind of historic tour, which I have often seen in Mexico and, most delightfully, at archaeological sites offered by unofficial local tour guides to unsuspecting tourists. In this tour variety, historic truth is usually taken liberally and often completely thrown out the window, as we hear guides to tell incredible stories about jaguar priests and moon goddesses and their improbable relationship to the temples or grounds where one is standing. This kind of tour is like storytelling in-progress, as you can often detect that the tour guide has been refining and inserting new details into his story based not on historic accuracy but on what elements of the story would be most impressive to a Swedish teenage bag-packer. Did the Aztecs eat the hearts after the sacrifice? Did they play ball with them? The Pre-Columbian world is a perfect scenario for these kind of tours, because we know so little about so much of it that it would be impossible to ascertain the truth or fantasy of whatever a tour guide is telling us. And, while this is certainly on the other end of the spectrum of historic accuracy, one would have to agree that these sort of tours are, at the very least, entertaining.

Museum interpretation, in an ideal scenario, should be a fair balance between the two extremes- providing necessary information about a site and at the same time encouraging the ability to visualize what could have been there. What matters is the place where one inserts the creative interpretation and where one communicates the factual information.

This is the point where art and historic sites can enter into a productive interpretive relationship. The inherent interpretive openness of art can serve as an antidote to the staleness of historic interpretation, and make a historic artifact become, momentarily, a found object that can acquire new meanings.

But how can we best handle this relationship without turning art into amateur history, or historical narratives into bad novels?

2. Downstairs: Facts and Lyrics of History

Elsa Lizalde, my aunt and my closest living relative in Mexico City, unexpectedly passed away this past summer. She was an opera lover, an authority in numismatics, a gourmet cook and an unparalleled hostess. Always single, she spent her life traveling around Europe and spending her money on the best opera balconies and the best restaurant tables. Her overcrowded apartment was a perfect reflection of her personality: over the top, generous, crowded with souvenirs from her travels and cultural life experiences.

It came upon me, my mother and my sister, to travel from the US to empty out her apartment, which had been in the family home for four generations. Being the last in line of a long genealogy that broke when we emigrated to the U.S., my aunt left behind a true museum of family memorabilia that needed to be dealt with, as well as an overwhelming amount of things that she had accumulated throughout her life as part of her travels, her work, and her compulsive shopping. I thus went through the sad and somber task of selecting and eliminating an overwhelming amount of objects, books and photographs. In general, however, most objects (old train tickets, ashtrays, European souvenirs, empty perfume bottles, concert program notes) had only a symbolic or sentimental value that we could only imagine. And while we were often torn by the idea of disposing of those things that obviously had meant so much to her, we eventually had no option but to get rid of them.

When a person disappears, they take with them a whole world of meaning projected onto every object they once owned, and even if you are fastidious about memorializing, retaining these objects does little to recover the anecdotal stories that lie behind them.

While my aunt was alive, all these objects contained a private, albeit knowable, story, ranging from the silly and trivial to the truly commemorative and meaningful. Once she died, all those objects immediately became plain objects again (with the exception, of course, of those of which we happened to know their meaning and had our own personal attachment). Certainly for a stranger who walked into her apartment at that point the place looked like a museum somehow typical upper middle class apartment of the late Twentieth Century urban Mexico. By studying the objects she owned, a researcher (or a detective-historian) could put together a somehow descriptive history of her taste, travels profession and hobbies. But, with the exception for the stories that those close to her could tell, the specific “lyrics” of her life are now out of reach.

***

At the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side, most of the objects and people who lived there are gone, and what we have is a historic building that functions within the fabric of New York City in the same way than a romantic medieval ruin would function in England or Germany in the XIXth Century, or the way in which most Pre-Columbian ruins function in contemporary Latin America. It bears the marks of hundreds of stories and experiences, but paradoxically, we practically know nothing of them (other than the general facts of the period and parallel individual histories), and we have not many options but to let the imagination run wild. With the exception of the few remaining anecdotes salvaged through the contact with past living residents there (such as the Italian woman from the Confino family apartment), who do give us a general sense of the life in those rooms, for the most part we can only rely on the general historical data and research about life in those neighborhoods. Most of the objects at the museum are not the original ones, but rather, historical props that help support our narrative interpretations about what happened there.

Carlyle famously wrote that history should be composed of the biographies of the great men— which is another way of saying that regular people aren’t even worth considering. History as often been preoccupied with writing the “great” narratives, and not so much with the personal stories of the average people who lived during those times. In the case of a place like the Tenement Museum, whose protagonists were not famous people but average immigrants, there is a “lyrical vacuum” that we need to fill out through interpretation and imagination.

But aside from the absence of stories, we need to find a significant contextual background against which these stories may come to life and become meaningful to others. Museums that contain the perfectly documented life of historic figures can provide remarkably dull experiences, such as House of the Seven Gables was to me.

Even in today’s information age, where thanks to Myspace and Youtube we may now witness the first generation in the world that may be able to publicly document their own life by the minute, all these infinite stories become a wash, canceling each other in the tumult of commonplace descriptions and situations. The only ones that emerge may have less to do with the content than with the way in which they have been told.

And it is against this paradox of history where art has stepped in providing that interpretive appreciation. History may have given us the facts and the accurate theoretical evaluation about why certain things were the way they were, but the emotional character of a certain historical age have largely been artistic creations, such as the characters of Balzac and Dickens in the XIXth Century and Hollywood’s characters in the XXth.

There is certainly something mischievous about the way in which art co-opts the historic narrative and turns it into a human story, because
historic accuracy usually gives way to its dramatization, creating distorted perceptions of what may actually have happened, for the sake of art. From the tour guide in Teotihuacán making fabulous histories of moon goddesses and jaguars to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, history becomes a medium for art with varying degrees of historical credibility and too often the ability to influence our collective perception of historical episodes or events that may be complete fabrications (How can any historian may be able to correct now the perception that Mozart was the adolescent prankster as portrayed in “Amadeus”, or that most people in turn-of-the-century Paris weren’t dancing rap-like rhythms as suggested in “Moulin Rouge”?) It is a particularly irritating process when a complex historical narrative is turned into cheap or oversimplified bestselling story. In this scenario, history tends to become something of an endorser for movies that make the vague claim of “based on a true story”, as if for that reason the story being told necessarily had a greater charge of reality than one story that was purely inspired in imaginary events.

But this characteristic of art that plays the role of history may just underline the fact that academic historical narratives usually fail at connecting with the viewer at a personal level. What art really does, more than transporting us to another time and place, is to transport that time and place to our own time, translating it into our contemporary visual and narrative codes. And, in the case of absent historical data, art becomes a filler for those gaps. In the best cases, art doesn’t function like a replacement of history, but rather in its soul. It enacts a relationship that has existed from the earliest times: mythology is nothing but an artistic attempt to fill in an incomplete history.
In the end, we can’t understand without interpretation, and we can’t interpret without creativity.

The best metaphor that I can think of to describe the way in which art plays the role of history, is the one of a tendentious dictionary: one that provides entirely subjective, and yet fairly concrete, responses to complex puzzles of time.

3. Upstairs: Foreign Pasts and Familiar Futures

LP Hartley’s famous phrase “The past is like a foreign country: they do things differently there” adequately describes the feeling of familiarity and yet displacement that most people feel when they enter into a space like the Tenement Museum. We are twice removed from the reality we visit, both because it is distant in time and because it tells the stories of immigrants coming from distant places.

However, this phrase is also significant in the context of the historical site because it helps dispel the assumption that is communicated by the traditional interpretation such as the one I saw at the House of the Seven Gables: history is never a set narrative, but one in constant reinterpretation. Rather it is a set of markers with a multiplicity of meanings. While historic facts and figures may be unchangeable, our view about those facts is never the same, not to mention that facts alone can never transmit the essence of a place (like Elsa Lizalde’s apartment).

“The future is not what it used to be” is a phrase written by one of the most influential poets of the XIXth Century, Paul Valery. At a first glance, it is intended to be humorous (by definition, the future can’t stop being “what it was”, because it can never occur before it happens). What Valery is really talking about is that our own collective outlook of the future, or rather, the cultural role that the notion of the future plays in our present time, is not anymore regarded in the same way than in the past. The meaning of this phrase can be interesting to think about when we compare the attitudes towards the future that we’ve had over the generations. Can we claim to have the same degree of optimism that existed, say, in the U.S. after World War II, or have we grown more cynical about what is to come?

In the context of today’s America and the current political situation in which our national outlook feels bleaker than ever before and there is a sense that we keep making the same mistakes of the past, we may want to ask on whether we are more detached from the past than we should be, or the reasons for which the old proverbial, post-war American optimism of the future has today turned into delusion in some and pessimism in others. The answer to those questions may vary widely, but most would agree that they lie in how we adequately manage to learn from the past and plan for the future.

While either of them may not have had politics in mind, the one thing that both Valery and Hartley may have agreed on is that our relationship with time is ever-shifting, and that things look different, and sometimes to the point of seeming incomprehensible, as we move forward in time. And, in the same way that we may judge those who lived before us, so we will be judged by those who come after us. We happen to be the future of the people who lived at what is now a museum, and we also are the past of those who may one day live in our own homes—which, who knows, may one day be turned into museums. •••

Open House, Closed House:
Contemporary Art before its Communities

As a kid, in Mexico, I used to attend a community center run by my aunt named Casa Abierta (Open House). I remember making collages out of dry pasta, a yarn painting (this was in the 70s), and a hand puppet; I watched films by Marcel Pagnol and the Marx Brothers and performed in a staging of Snow White, where I was the hunter in charge of killing the heroine amid the forest but instead would give up and set her free. Maybe my experiences there did not lead me directly to choose the visual artist profession, but they did generate an enthusiastic predisposition towards art making that I believe lasts until this day.

For the majority of those who make or teach art, the time in which we were initiated in art and obediently —or disobediently— were made to join art education activities is fairly remote and hard to remember. Maybe this is why after so many years of training and theory, it is hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of the average viewer when we ask them to be part of an art experience, whether this is of an educational or conceptual nature, either interactive or passive. Three decades later, as a visual artist, I find myself like many others trying to understand what it means to make art in conjunction, dialogue, or collaboration with communities.

The distance that separate us from the uninitiated art viewer became once again evident to me during a project in which I recently participated as a guest artist by a Mexican curatorial collective, Laboratorio 060, in the indigenous community of Frontera Corozal in Chiapas. The young curatorial group set upon themselves the ambitious task of making a public art project in this remote Chol community located in the edge of the Usumacinta river and the border of Guatemala. The place, amidst the innermost Lacandon Jungle, feels, and literally is, the last edge of Mexico, and tipifies the marginality of many towns of the Americas. After many visits and exchanges, the group established a strong relationship between the town council, which accepted the idea of having the artists do site specific interventions in the town with a very Mexican-indigenous mixture of enthusiasm, politeness, and shyness.

To this point, it is a mystery to me what in Frontera Corozal is understood by the word “curator” or “artist” —needless to say, the word “curator” does not exist in the local Chol language. It is also hard to assess the kind of meaning that the project, which is still being developed, will have in this place. It is for sure an earnest and valuable attempt from the organizers to make something productive at a place that is practically forgotten by the government and the world in general. In this regard, the town welcomes the very gesture of engagement and attention. In many instances, the kind of works that could be seen in Frontera appeared fairly entertaining to the locals, sometimes extravagant, and sometimes outright strange —as they seemed that way even to myself. Other times, the work was so hardcore conceptual that it was clear that not only did they not see the boundaries of the ‘work’ but that they would not realize that in many instances they themselves were the very subjects of it. My general sense was that amongst the participating artists —ranging from anywhere in Europe and the U.S. to Mexico and Guatemala— there was a lot of haste in getting to make the art, and little reflection or concern regarding the implications of showing a work in that particular context, as it usually is the case of projects that involve bringing contemporary artists to remote communities. The projects varied from urban renovation and community activism —the Puerto Rican artist Jesús “Bubu” Negrón opted for the construction of a street intersection in the yet unpaved town, at a huge personal and financial cost—to outright hermetic action, like the artist Miguel Ventura who wanted his work to directly embrace its disruptive nature. One artist stapled posters in people’s houses with multilingual texts announcing a conceptual art project, another did a semi-fictional census of the town and invited townsfolk to act, another tried to make the women make souvenirs in the shape of the artworks that were being made in the town.

It dawned on me how in these circumstances we overwhelmingly favor the idea of creating new works instead of bringing existing ones, under the assumption perhaps that a site specific work would better fit or dialogue with that reality. And yet, many of the projects, conceived in advance and not as a result of a local exchange, often revealed a misguided (and often arrogant or patronizing) conception of what that community was about, as well as a series of naive expectations about what would happen during their implementation. This fact sometimes forced some artists to eventually modify or change their projects altogether, but others simply went ahead with their agenda without major concern on whether their project indeed would make any sense in that context. There were too many questions: up to what point should an artist become an ‘expert’ of the social fabric of a community in order to intervene in it? To whom were these works directed to, and what were their real ambitions or objectives? What was the best way to evaluate and talk about the value of what we were doing there? If we build a road, we are doing a good social action, but is it interesting at all as an artwork? If we do an enigmatic action at a community and later document it and present it to the art world as a meaningful one, is this a satisfactory way to work?

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In the art world, there is a marked contrast of attitudes around the art termed as collaborative, community-oriented, collective, etc. The art market and exhibition-oriented art criticism generally show little interest, and occasionally, disdain, for community art, maybe because they consider that it is not a kind of art that pays too much attention to the product or to the aesthetic rigor that they so much value. On the other hand, those who practice community and activist-oriented art, along with many curators and theorists, criticize the art world for their indifference, and see other kinds of art as too egocentric or insensitive to their social surroundings. It is a kind of confrontation that some see as capitalist realism vs. left-wing idealism.

It is useful to see the whole scope of public and community art as a wide range of combinations where the control of the creative process varies gradually from the entire decision-making being allowed to the group, to the complete control of the project by the artist alone. Each extreme meets different goals and faces different challenges.

The collective community experience tends to affirm local values, tradition, strengthening bonds and opening up expressive channels, while the public art that mainly reflects the individual vision of a single artist tends to provide a sort of public experience that is not necessarily the one of reflecting or reinforcing local values; rather, it usually tries to expand upon them, question and/or confront them in a new and experimental way, sometimes critical and, why not, with a certain expectation of professional rigor in form and aesthetic content. Due to the nature of each strategy, it is not surprising that community-produced art would be usually seen as something affirmative, good, or based on agreement, while the individual action is more associated with criticism, disruption, antagonism or negativism.

The problematic instances of community art take place, I believe, when we use social parameters to evaluate the artistic aspects of a work— that is, in many cases if a given activity is deemed positive or constructive as a social experiment, then it should follow that it is also “good art”. But the justifications of its purported social contribution, instead of helping their supporters, rather isolates them in a sort of positivist solipsism that lacks any significant self-criticism or evaluation. Claire Bishop, in her recent essay entitled “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” (Artforum, February 2006) argues —and I agree— that it is vital for art with a strong social content to be regarded and discussed not only as a social action but also as art.

Another false assumption that I believe to exist within community art is that the artist can act as a neutral entity, or as an invisible “catalyst” of experiences. In my experience, when a professional artist or arts educator interacts or collaborates with a given community with small or no previous involvement with art, there is from the onset an undeniable disadvantage of experience and knowledge (but only as long as this relationship will unfold primarily in the art terrain, as I shall later explain). In reality, it is a power relationship. The artist becomes a teacher, leader, artistic director, boss, instigator, or benefactor. There are artists who try to become situation facilitators to the point of denying that what they are doing is an individual initiative at all. Bishop characterizes this tendency as an attempt of “elimination of authorship” which is grounded in anticapitalist premises and in a sort of catholic altruism, a way to redeem the guilt of social privilege— something that is worth reflecting upon particularly in what it applies to Latin American art.

I for one believe that artists can never disappear altogether, nor can they turn in to an “invisible” agent that would ostensibly help to “make grow that which is already there” —a common view amongst arts educators.  But whether it is a collaborative or an education project, it would be hard to deny that to generate productive results one requires a great knowledge of methodologies and creative strategies, as well as an experience to generate dialogue and transmit information that hardly constituted the invisibility that is aspired by a simple catalyst of experiences.

THE other side of the spectrum of public art, when artists are the implementers of their individual vision, whether alone or with the support of others, has of course its own complexities. Tensions start when the artist starts to make work in spaces outside the studio and engages with audiences that many times have no idea that they are being the subjects of an art experiment —like in the hidden camera program. Needless to say, it is critical to always encourage the individual practice in any form, since any environment can benefit from a rebellious, irrational, or simply hedonist art, free from any theory. In its best instances, public interventions by artists can acquire relevant and significant dimensions both for the contemporary art discourse and for the social environment where it is enacted.

Nevertheless, in recent years there has been a growing disgust for the manipulative nature of art that purportedly “interrogates” or “critiques” specific social spaces, when the supposed interest by the artist in that reality rather looks like strategic, born out of convenience, and sometimes even downright exploitive, instead of being a sincere attempt of understanding, dialogue, or artistic response.

Santiago Sierra, whose work is inevitable to mention in this context, is actually one of the few artists that admits this kind of convenience offered to him by the social environment: even if we may be disturbed by the apparent cynicism with which he openly accepts the paradoxes of his practice, I am even more disturbed by the attitude of other artists who, while working in a similar way, expect that their work will be valued as a artistic and/or social contribution when the work reveals a simplistic, misinformed or condescending view of the social context where it takes place. In some instances, when the artist does work in good faith, they themselves do not realize the many coercive or colonialist implications of their action. The case of certain works in Frontera Corozal illustrated this fact in my mind, such as the case of the artist who wanted to convince local women to make small replicas of our artworks and turn them into indigenous souvenirs. Another artist, making a work that was decidedly incomprehensible to the locals, openly claimed that his work was not directed to them but to the art world, in the form of documentation. This affirmation conveniently omitted the consideration that this future, converted, art audience may actually want to value the work in relationship to the kind of real impact that it had in the original context, and not in the fantasy of its documentation. This attitude does not seem to distant to me from the practice of large American museums, that in the 80s and 90s —and sometimes still today— made minimal educational efforts, but yet would photograph black schoolchildren wearing the museum’s t-shirts to “prove” their commitment to underserved communities to their funders.

The documentation of the work is thus the real gray area. Documentation is a central aspect in the process of embellishment and spinning of the experience that took place in the public space. Even though it is a common practice to consider documentation as the work in itself, there is an enormous difference for a viewer’s experience to know whether the work had a tangible impact in the ‘real’ world or if it only operated at a symbolic or imaginary level. Due to that fact, many artists are careful to keep the ambiguity between the work and the document, taking advantage of the distance of space and time, and of course, of their artistic license, in order to omit details, add others, improve the anecdote, and in some cases, outright lie regarding what happened or didn’t happen in a given place. Nowadays, at a time when the perception of a work circulates according to the form in which the anecdote circulates in the virtual world and the media, this strategy is central to a lot of art making. Many times these strategies are immediately visible as failed attempts to improve what evidently was an unsuccessful public artwork. But even if we were unable to discern the boundary between reality and fiction, this does not alter the fact that in the art world we are increasingly less interested in what actually happens in the real world as long as we are able to engage the critics, and sometimes even deluding ourselves, about the public relevance of what we are doing. For an artist who has often worked in the crevices of reality and fiction, I believe that generating myths and fictions is a completely permissible, and intrinsic, aspect of art making. But there is a serious problem when we ourselves have lost the ability to discern, or care about, the difference between documentation and self-aggrandizement. And due to the lack of critical filters to prevent this, and the way in which we have to rely often on the artist’s word, it may be impossible to know up to what point we have built a history of public art that has been written out of press releases and imaginary tales.

One could say that Latin America has been the ideal cradle for this type of artistic-social experiments, since our cultural, economic and social situation is perfect to enact such formulas: visual artists often come from middle or upper class upbringing, many times being foreigners; art is produced mainly for an audience who lives in the U.S. or Europe, and who easily fall for Latin American exoticism; there is great richness and cultural complexity in some of the poorest parts of the continent where these projects take place, labor is cheap, and the racial and social contrasts are so strong that a work of these attributes has much more dramatic results than if it were to be made at a city like Amsterdam or New York.

Paradoxically, the same ethical obstacles that prevent us from critiquing any boring or mediocre community art (which may find justification in being a positive or altruistic recreation) also prevents us from keeping an artist away from taking advantage of the good will of a given community and use conceptual art premises to make, also, mediocre art.  Due to these reasons, there is a lot of frustration in the art world, as well as an insoluble dilemma between defending the artists’ rights to express themselves and “protecting” communities from art that may be way too manipulative, misinformed, and stubborn.

This dilemma appears to be at the core of the identity crisis that is lived by contemporary art today. Amidst this crisis, the debate lies in trying to define the new parameters that should evaluate and discuss this artistic practice and the extent to which we need to adjust or expand our ethical and aesthetic expectations in regards to it.

IT seems to me that the greatest confusion originates when the artist himself is not clear about his/her role in the particular social context where the work takes place. The reflection, ideally, should start with the artist, but to even conceive enforcing a “rules of social engagement” in the artistic practice would be an impossible, apart from repressive, task. The task to effectively question this kind of art corresponds rather to the field of art criticism and the curatorial practice, which would need to learn how to better analyze and deal with the challenges that this type of art poses.

What really matters in my mind is to reflect about the ways in which the artist who is sincerely interested in understanding a certain reality and interacting with it in the public realm, could do so without having to adopt the role of savior, missionary, messiah, or field manager.

I think that one of the main problems posed by public art that interacts with communities, in all the facets that I have described, is precisely the disadvantage and power relationship between the artist and the participating audience. In order to level this disadvantage and ensure a non-hierarchical exchange, it is necessary to find common grounds that would lie outside the artistic discourse —without that implying that the artist would have to renounce to his identity or profession. If one expects this dialogue and interaction to take place in “real life” and not in the ‘fictionalized’ exhibition catalogue, the artist has then to create a infrastructure that instead of working as a “mouse trap” to the audience would work as a semi-open space that is seductive, confrontational, or both. And in the same way that the artist must assume his role, it is also important that the public should assume theirs and be in the disposition to engage with the work —something that must be facilitated by the organizers of a public art project.

The audience does not have to be infantilized or treated in a patronizing way, and the options of interaction do not have to be limited to making them co-authors nor studio assistants. The true challenge of the artist, in my mind, is to be able to find a true meeting point where both sides can enrich with the exchange. Artists do not need to, or have to, renounce to their identity, nor hide the evidence of their intrusion in the new public environment, nor condition their presence to ask permission or apologize. But if the work lacks any entry points and areas of common dialogue, and if it imposes rigid rules of engagement upon which the success of the project will depend, it will be hard to expect an effective outcome.

Public art should never be put through a quantitative process of evaluation. Yet, it is vital to confront the artistic-social equation that is proposed by an artist, and when an artist offers claims of social impact, it is valid to demand evidence to substantiate such claims and view the work with a critical eye.  This is, at the very least, a responsibility that the critic and the curator should have towards the public that would benefit an adequate contextual description of a given work.

Ultimately, art can never give us any warranties. Its value lies not in what it pretends to offer, but in what is obtained by each individual viewer. Perhaps art may or may not be just about asking questions, but neither does it function through any promises of social, educational or artistic transformation — that is the reason why so much impeccable theory engenders so much boring or mediocre art. In the public art realm, this detail becomes even more important given that there is a distance between the concept and the implementation. Even though it is important to have great aspirations for a kind of art, we can’t nor should we ever hope, to control its outcome, which is already unpredictable in the volatile public arena.

If we had to elaborate a metaphor to explain the world of public art and the artist’s interactions with a community, we could say that each artist builds a house, and that it is the audience’s choice to walk in and visit. We can choose our guests, be it a few friends or a whole village. How long we want to retain them may depend on our wishes and our talent as a host. We can ask them to help us build the house, perhaps with uneven results, or we can ask them to tell us how to do it, but maybe the house may turn out badly planned and fall over our heads. We can redecorate the house with all of our guests, but we shall watch out for the chaos of so many opinions and eventually we may have to figure out a way to put order in it. We can bore them to death with bad music and make them run away. We can inspire them to build their own houses. Or we can entice them to enter under false pretenses and lock them in, for our personal entertainment. If we are experienced, we may be able to leave a lasting memory in them. Or we can lock them outside, close the door of our house, close our eyes, and imagine ourselves amidst a great party, being praised as the greatest host who ever lived. ≠≠≠

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

Interview- “A brief history of Finitude”

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

La entrañable transparencia

(Extravíos artísticos por La Habana)

Aquí todo parecía otra cosa, creándose un mundo de apariencias
que ocultaba la realidad, poniendo muchas verdades en entredicho.

Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos

The past is like a foreign country: they do things differently there.

LP Hartley, The Go-Between

Para Marta

En “La invención de Morel” (1940) de Adolfo Bioy Casares —una de las grandes novelas latinoamericanas del siglo veinte — un prófugo llega nadando a una isla buscando refugio. En ella, descubre la presencia de un grupo de personas en una sección de la isla y, temeroso de ser descubierto, comienza a espiar de lejos sus actividades, sus fiestas, sus conversaciones y reuniones. Después de algunos días, sin embargo, comienza a observar que las acciones y diálogos de los personajes son los mismos y que de hecho, estos se repiten de forma idéntica cada semana. Finalmente, descubre que aquellas personas no estan ahí en realidad, sino que son proyecciones tridimensionales que toman lugar en los mismos lugares. La proyección eterna en “loop”, sale de un misterioso museo localizado en el centro de la isla. Todo resulta ser un sofisticado proyecto de un cierto doctor Morel, quien ha ideado el proyecto de retener para siempre en aquella isla un fragmento de la vida de un grupo de sus amigos, una repetición de sus actividades proyectado eternamente como un paraíso privado por las maquinarias cinematográficas que están diseñadas para operar por los siglos de los siglos. En una explicación de su proyecto a sus amigos, Morel habla de su selección de la isla como el lugar idóneo para la creación de esta utopía:

“he tomado algunas precauciones —físicas, morales— para su defensa: creo que la protegerán. Aquí estaremos eternamente (…) repitiendo consecutivamente los momentos de la semana y sin poder salir nunca de la consciencia que tuvimos en cada uno de ellos, porque así nos tomaron los aparatos; esto nos permitirá sentirnos siempre en una vida nueva, porque no habrá otros recuerdos en cada momento de la proyección que los habidos en el correspondiente de la grabación y porque el futuro, muchas veces dejado atrás, mantendrá siempre sus atributos”.

**

Llego por primera vez a La Habana en medio de la preparación de los eventos de su octava bienal de arte, el evento internacional que este año se realiza con muchos menos recursos que costumbre y con un boicot de parte del mundo del arte en respuesta a la encarcelación de los intelectuales disidentes ordenada por Castro a principios de este año. Aún así, llegan turistas de todas partes del mundo, caminando por las calles a ver arte y a gastar dólares —sin duda la motivación principal del estado para promover una bienal como ésta. El turista cultural es un animal raro, siempre ansioso de adquirir experiencias exóticas, pero generalmente con poca imaginación y sentido de aventura. Cuba es una destinación ideal, pues ofrece riqueza cultural, clima caribeño, y sobretodo un irresistible atractivo como fruta prohibida turística. La gran mayoría de los turistas se quedan en hoteles y se limitan a visitar las sedes establecidas de la bienal, las zonas restauradas del casco colonial, y otras atracciones como la casa donde Hemingway pasó sus últimos días, así como La Bodeguita del medio o el Floridita, los bares que el escritor frecuentaba ( Hemingway ya es desde hace tiempo una figura incorporada al folclor local, bien aprovechada por la industria turística cubana).
Ese tipo de itinerario turístico no es mi caso, pues me quedo con una familia y termino estableciendo lazos con cubanos cuyas vidas cotidianas por lo general están escondidas de los visitantes. La tía Hilda, por ejemplo, me da lecciones de economía doméstica. Me muestra, para que lo vea con mis propios, su libreta de racionamiento, y me dice: “vas a ver, voy y vengo a la tienda para que veas para lo que sirve”. Regresando de la tienda, efectivamente me muestra, quejumbrosa, su ración mensual: cinco libras de arroz, una libra de frijol, una pequeña botella de aceite, azúcar, café, y seis huevos. La tía Hilda recibe 90 pesos cubanos como pensión, que equivale a cuatro dólares. Los productos que se venden en las tiendas de divisa (en dólares) tienen prácticamente el mismo costo que en los Estados Unidos. Los cubanos que no reciben remesas de Miami o no tienen otra entrada fuera de la de sus trabajos oficiales, tienen que ahorrar años de sus vidas para poder comprar algo así como una televisión: Los costos de las cosas, y el bajo nivel de adquisición de la moneda, es un tema constante en la vida de los cubanos. Los restaurantes cobran cantidades que son relativamente comparables a un restaurant en otras partes de latinoamérica, pero que para un cubano son exorbitantes — una comida en un restaurant turístico para un cubano cuesta aproximadamente lo que para un turista equivaldría a $1500 dólares. No es de sorprenderse por ello que los cubanos busquen maneras clandestinas de obtener dólares. Ese es el caso del cubano que me lleva al aeropuerto, a quien contrato en la calle tiene un Buick amarillo 1955, prestado, que “renta” por $150 dólares al mes (nominalmente, él gana $10 dólares al mes). En lo que me lleva al aeropuerto, se asegura que recuerde que su esposa se llama Vivian, que nos conocimos en Houston por cuestiones de trabajo, que soy amigo de ellos. Tenemos que repasar la historia por si la policía nos detiene y nos interroga para averiguar si efectivamente lo estoy contratando extraoficialmente.

Una noche, a las tres de la mañana, me encuentro caminando sólo por las calles de centro Habana, y después de un tiempo me doy cuenta que estoy extraviado. En mi errante recorrido, me llama la atención que las lámparas de los interiores casi siempre sean fluorescentes, dándole a la ciudad y a la gente una iluminación verduzca y mortecina. En eso, una mulata de nombre Maria Mercedes, se me acerca diciendo que es su cumpleaños y que sus amigos nunca la vinieron a encontrar para festejarla. “¿no me acompañas? Me siento sola”. He visto a estas alturas ya varias situaciones en que muchas mujeres cubanas están dispuestas a servir de “escorts” para los turistas americanos aunque sea por unos cuantos tragos. A punto de decir que no, reflexiono por un momento sobre mi condición de extravío y le propongo que la acompaño si me encamina a la dirección donde me estoy quedando. En lo que caminamos por las casas derruídas y paredes descarapeladas en medio de uno de los frecuentes apagones de la ciudad y prácticamente en total oscuridad, pasamos por el malecón y vemos a las parejas de enamorados sentados en las bardas de concreto, mirando al mar. El mar y el cielo, sin embargo, son casi completamente negros. Maria Mercedes mientras tanto me cuenta su vida, y yo le cuento la mía. Con los cubanos siempre se puede hablar de amor, de relaciones, de la vida en general, como si la apertura emocional fuera una válvula de escape para contrarrestar todo aquello sobre lo que no está permitido hablar con libertad.
Me despido de Maria Mercedes dándole una cantidad de dinero como regalo, para que se compre lo que quiera. “¿No quieres que nos tomemos un mojito?”, me pregunta. “No, gracias, -contesto yo- tengo que ir a dormir”. Entrando a mi casa, no puedo dejar de pensar en los enamorados. ¿Qué miraban? ¿Un horizonte que no se ve? Miraban, acaso, su deseo de ver un horizonte.

*

La Habana es quizá el lugar más distante del siglo veintiuno. Es la capital del pasado, pero no en términos de atraso o progreso, sino en términos de inercia temporal. La Habana desafía, rotundamente, la noción de que el tiempo global es colectivo; propone, más que ningún otro lugar, la idea bergsoniana que el tiempo es una dimensión vivencial. De forma casi estereotípicamente latinoamericana, esta ciudad cuestiona la noción lineal del tiempo: ¿estamos hablando de un pasado sin evolución, de un presente congelado pero presente al fin , de una extensión del pasado hacia el futuro? Nada es claro, como nada parece ser claro en La Habana en términos de realidad. Después de todo, ¿De cuántas realidades estamos hablando? La ciudad rinde cuenta de la mezcla de los tiempos, pero en su caso lo hace de una forma explícita que no se puede experimentar en ningún otro lugar. Hay definitivamente un elemento onírico en La Habana; para algunos puede ser un sueño, para otros una pesadilla. La extrañeza de la situación política, histórica, cultural, de Cuba inevitablemente genera situaciones igual de anómalas y diversas que me generan la sensación de existir dentro de una novela en constante autoescritura: cada incidente es material literario (¿Proust o Kafka?), así como cada imagen espontánea es una imagen fotográfica.

En la calle Obispo hay un hotel llamado “Ambos Mundos”. El nombre, me pareció, es la perfecta metáfora del hecho de que por lo menos, existen dos Habanas: una, la de los turistas, la construída cuidadosamente como un Matrix virtual que cumple el fin de satisfacer sus fantasías de exotismo y culpabilidad imperialista, y que para el estado funge como entrada principal de recursos económicos. Luego está la Habana real, que nutre su economía ficticia a través de la presencia del dólar. Sobrevivir en Cuba es un milagro, y de formas inexplicables esta sobrevivencia se consigue gracias a la prodigiosa creatividad de sus habitantes por una forma de vida que, legal o no ante los ojos del estado, los mantenga a flote. Las dos realidades coexisten de formas profundamente contradictorias y a veces incoherentes, generando una lógica local que parece ser una combinación de las leyes que el estado hace y deshace cuando le conviene, y la forma en que los cubanos se van acomodando en relación a ellas. Como en The Matrix, la vida de Cuba gira en torno al hecho de que hay una realidad convencional y otra, la verdadera, que no conocemos, pero que esta presente y se va manifestando en lo que se desquebraja la ficción del sistema. La realidad “oficial” del turista es la Cuba exótica y pintoresca, donde el pueblo se convierte en un elemento más de la vitrina museográfica de la Habana vieja. La realidad “oficial” del cubano es la igualdad social otorgada por la revolución, y la noción, prácticamente inadmisible ya, que es posible subsistir con el sistema económico del país.

Las dos frases citadas al principio de este artículo fueron escritas el mismo año, 1952. Fue en ese año cuando Fulgencio Batista realizó su segundo —y definitivo— golpe de estado en Cuba, y cuando un joven abogado llamado Fidel Castro presentó una denuncia ante el Alto Tribunal de Cuba por violación de la Constitución, exigiendo el restablecimiento de las garantías constitucionales. En 1952 también comienza la planeación del frustrado asalto al cuartel Moncada, que da inicio a la revolución cubana, y el eventual ascenso de Fidel al poder. La obtusa relación con el tiempo y la realidad a la que aluden tanto Carpentier como Hartley en sus respectivas frases —refiriéndose a otras cosas, por supuesto— no dejan de hacerme reflexionar que en Cuba comenzó a operarse desde esa época una relación con el tiempo y el espacio social que hoy en día es tan entreverada que para el visitante externo es casi incomprensible. Cuba es un lugar donde siempre parecen haber ambivalencias temporales, económicas, de veracidad, de interpretación.

Si bien Cuba es en muchos aspectos un enigma, lo que es indudable es que el destino de la isla —como lo es en el caso de la isla imaginaria del doctor Morel, o si se quiere, en la del Doctor Moreau de H.G. Wells— sigue determinado por la figura definitoria de Fidel. La presencia de Fidel en la vida del país se incrementa con el hecho de que en Cuba prácticamente no hay anuncios comerciales, sino en cambio vallas y letreros que contienen frases del comandante en jefe y lemas de la revolución. La televisión, fuente inagotable de propaganda revolucionaria, muestra cosas antes el discurso de Fidel en Jamaica, o un documental infinito sobre el viaje de Fidel al Congo, que los eventos primordiales a nivel internacional. Esto, añadido a la ausencia de cualquier tipo de periódicos o revistas internacionales, y con el uso restringido del internet, fácilmente hace que cualquiera pierda contacto con el mundo exterior, y que la voz de Fidel se imponga como la última palabra en prácticamente cualquier tema de relevancia internacional.

En contraste con su cierre casi total a la comunicación con el exterior, el gobierno hace toda clase de gestos para demostrar hay una voluntad de armonía y apertura internacional, y la bienal se convierte en un foro para demostrarlo. El “concierto de la bienal por la paz”, que está anunciado en el parque John Lennon, y se nos invita como artistas, es el evento oficial principal de la bienal. A la entrada del parque, vemos los mercedes negros que supuestamente Honecker le regaló a Fidel en los ochenta. La seguridad es por lo general más estricta que en otros eventos oficiales, y sin embargo nos sorprende encontrarnos a unos metros de Fidel, quien está sentado en primera fila, sin demasiada protección, entre el público, escuchando a Silvio Rodríguez cantar. Las cámaras —que parecen ser cámaras de televisión rusa de los sesenta—muestran constantemente la enorme imagen aprobatoria de Fidel, quien a sus setenta y siete años y su eterno traje militar, proyecta una solidez envidiable.

Muchos cubanos lo defienden incondicionalmente. Estando de visita en una casa familiar en Alamar, un suburbio proletario de La Habana, donde viven dos amigos, José y Ana, vemos en la televisión un documental aparentemente eterno con imágenes incansables de la sierra maestra, el Ché con Fidel, Camilo Cienfuegos, la voz del Ché dando un discurso (las únicas dos ocasiones que ví la televisión apareció en la pantalla el mismo documental). Viendo las imágenes, José me cuenta acerca del período especial (después de la caída de la Unión Soviética) cuando la comida era tan escasa que conseguir carne era un lujo, miles de cubanos fueron enviados a los campos a sembrar, y dada la carencia de jabón la ropa se lavaba con sebo y potasio. Y sin embargo, para José estos son limitantes necesarios para justificar un país igualitario donde todos reciben educación y atención médica gratuita. Es claro, en este contexto, que el embargo estadounidense, que afecta cruelmente a la población, no hace sino fortalecer al régimen de Castro y convertir a Estados Unidos en el chivo expiatorio de las penurias del país.

Le pregunto entonces a José, quien vive en ese departamento pequeño con su esposa y apenas gana lo suficiente para sobrevivir, acerca de lo que pasará cuando muera Fidel. “Nada, esto va a continuar, Pablo. El pueblo apoya el sistema. Yo luché por esta revolución, y yo te puedo decir que este es el mejor país del mundo.”

**

Fiel a la ambivalencia cubana, los artistas que estamos en Cuba para participar en la bienal de la Habana también parecemos insertados en una incómoda función dual: infiltrar nuevas ideas a la isla, pero también ayudar al estado a mostrar que en este país hay una apertura al arte internacional. ¿Somos instrumentos de un régimen, o podemos funcionar como catalizadores para la reflexión? Creo que estamos conscientes de nuestra doble función y dispuestos a desafiarla —ya sea con mayor o menor éxito. Hablar de la problemática política es el desafío que enfrentan también, y con mucho mayor riesgo, los artistas cubanos, que en general han desarrollado una sofisticada forma de sugerir las cosas sin tener que pronunciarlas — una habilidad artística caída en desuso en los lugares donde la libertad de expresión nos da tanto espacio para hablar que no sabemos usarlo. Un artista cubano, Wilfredo Prieto, creó una obra para la bienal titulada “apolítico”, consistente en una serie de banderas de los paises del mundo hechas en blancos, negros y grises. La primera impresión, que es la de estar viendo una película a blanco y negro (¿la documentacion de las olimpiadas de Berlín de Leni Riefenstal?), suele seguir de una reflexión acerca de el papel de las naciones y la política en un evento cultural de dimensiones internacionales. El arte cubano parece operar constantemente en un delicado balance entre la denuncia arriesgada y la lectura oficial. Ese es el caso de la obra de Tania Bruguera, quizá la artista más influyente actualmente en Cuba, cuya instalación en el museo de bellas artes trató de ser neutralizada por una lectura inocua por parte de la curaduría oficialista, pero cuyo efecto se mantiene intacto: un escenario vacío donde se oyen estruendosamente los gritos de las consignas revolucionarias. Como en las mejores obras de cualquier período, el poder de la obra radica no en lo que de dice sino en lo que se calla.

La mejor obra de la bienal de la Habana, a mi ver, no era precisamente una obra, sino una proyección que uno de los organizadores decidió colocar a la entrada del pabellón Cuba (uno de los sitios de la bienal). La película era una serie de ‘newsreels’ de propaganda cubanos de principios de los anos sesenta —poco después del triunfo de la revolución—, donde se anunciaban las nuevas escuelas de arte, la arquitectura moderna, el progreso inequívoco de la industria, la educación y el bienestar familiar en el entonces nuevo orden socialista. Tanto para los cubanos como para los extranjeros era suficiente ver el cortometraje para ver de inmediato los enormes contrastes entre lo que era la visión utópica de la renovación social que traería la revolución y lo en lo que esto vino eventualmente a ser.

El doble bloqueo cubano—económico por el exterior, de la información por parte del gobierno cubano— genera de nuevo la sensación que a los cubanos se les tiene sitiados constantemente con proyecciones de fantasmas, proyecciones del pasado encima del presente, lo que genera la a veces increíble incongruencia de aspectos de la vida cotidiana. Los eternos documentales televisados de la revolución cubana, la parálisis del país en un mundo con automóviles de los años cincuenta y edificios art deco que vieron su mejor época hace medio siglo, me hace pensar en la macabra idea utópica de Morel de retener un paraíso terrenal en una isla a fuerza de cerrarla al mundo y al tiempo. Las imágenes virtuales proyectadas y controladas por una maquinaria invisible para el visitante de la isla, equivalen al cierre de una sociedad al exterior como lo hizo Japón por siglos.

Pero el sistema de proyecciones no sólo transcurre en el interior, sino tambien ante los turistas culturales que visitan La Habana. La clase de proyecciones fabricadas, y sobretodo las que pude presenciar durante mi estancia en la bienal de la Habana- son de una Cuba pintoresca, con población en apariencia pobre pero felizmente solidaria, que muestran al turista su riqueza espiritual y cultural: el síndrome Buena Vista Social Club. Sabemos de dónde son los cantantes. ¿pero de dónde son los fantasmas? ¿Serán de la Habana?

===

En un restaurant semivacío de la Habana vieja, un guitarrista se nos acerca y comienza a tocar “dos gardenias para tí”. Después de varios otros números, y conforme su presentación va alcanzando su climax, finalmente comienza a cantar la canción del Ché. Es una canción que muchos padecen al oirla, pero que yo, turista primigenio, no he oído en años, y que súbitamente me recuerda a mi infancia en los setenta, en las épocas en que se la oíamos cantar a Oscar Chávez en México y a los cantantes de la nueva trova:

Aquí se queda la clara
La entrañable transparencia
De tu querida presencia,
Comandante Ché Guevara

Otro cubano, que he notado que nos ha estado mirando desde la barra, y por lo visto ha percibido mi conmoción, se acerca y me regala una moneda de tres pesos cubanos, que lleva la efigie del Ché, y su lema hasta la victoria siempre. En esos momentos, me vienen las lágrimas a los ojos, sin entender bien por qué. Comienzo a reflexionar que el dilema que tenemos la mayoría de los latinoamericanos con Cuba es que, aparte de las injusticias del régimen, el deterioro de este país es lo que nos queda del intento de independencia de la hegemonía norteamericana, el último residuo de lo que en algún momento fue el deseo de una América latina independiente y poderosa como la soñaron Martí y Bolívar y Vasconcelos, el vivo recordatorio del gran fracaso de nuestro proyecto independiente de modernidad panamericana. Estas calles derruídas, estas antiguas mansiones y vestigios coloniales representan en su parálisis histórica algo que después de todo nos identifica con los cubanos, y que quizá no queremos reconocer. Para muchos cubanos, a pesar de todos los sacrificios y la exasperación por un sistema imposible de vida, persiste el natural deseo fundamental de saber que aquellos sacrificios no fueron en vano, que a fin de cuentas la noción de la revolución cubana tuvo un significado y que sus sacrificios encuentran la redención en ese significado. Quizá por eso para algunos nos cuesta tanto trabajo descartar la tragedia cubana como el simple resultado de la dictadura de Castro. Cuba ha simbolizado para muchos como el gran experimento de independencia y autonomía, aquello que latinoamérica algun día aspiró a ser, oponiéndose a las directivas económicas de norteamérica.

Cuba también es simbólico y significativo por el hecho que que su experimento, llevado a cabo a cuestas del sufrimiento del pueblo cubano, el cual es bombardeado diariamente por las proyecciones fantasmagóricas del régimen, no es tan distinto de cualquier otro sistema. Cuba nos ayuda a hacer, en distinta proporción, ciertas preguntas en relación a cualquier régimen político. Si bien en Cuba el sistema de propaganda manipula a la población, ¿no es acaso cierto de la propaganda del gobierno de Bush, su manipulación de la temática terrorista para beneficio de su agenda militar, corporativa y petrolera? Mientras que en Cuba la autocensura es el modus operandi principal de la población, en Estados Unidos es la promoción de la histeria colectiva, el temor de perder nuestro poder adquisitivo y nuestros privilegios de clase, y la capitalización sobre una indiferencia política a fuerza de nuestra adicción al mundo del entretenimiento y no al de las ideas.

Pero es difícil de mantener el romanticismo por la revolución cuando vemos como todo desenboca, tarde o temprano, en la vieja ambición capitalista. Esto lo veo en el hotel Cohiba, donde un amigo mío se está quedando. Encuentro un hotel de lujo kitsch, con pisos de mármol, mampostería con rojos y dorados, lámparas caras de mal gusto ( y donde a los cubanos les está prohibida la entrada, como en casi todos los hoteles en Cuba). En el restaurant hay un buffet con salmón, jamones, todo tipo de platillos y variedades de pan, algo inasequible en cualquier tienda de la Habana. Lo que me despierta de mi romanticismo es el oír de nuevo la canción del Ché, esta vez cantada por un trío romántico estilo Los Panchos, que se encuentra alrededor de la mesa de una señora americana que los oye con gusto (y seguramente, sin entender la letra). Pocas cosas me parecen más paradójicas que aquella escena. Me pregunto qué diría Carlos Puebla, el autor, de esta versión de su canción, siendo edulcorada y domesticada como un escenario turístico más. Pienso luego cómo incluso el mito de la revolución es un producto vendible en Cuba. La nostalgia por el mito del Ché, y la fantasía turística de vivir una simulación del inocuo sueño revolucionario, no le pasa desapercibida al estado, y esto se traduce en un sinfín de productos que se ofrecen para todos aquellos que tengan dólares (el artista americano Alejandro Díaz comprendió —y ejemplificó— perfectamente este hecho al realizar una obra para la bienal consistente en una bolsa que decía “I Love Cuba”). No es muy distinto de las ventas de gorras, broches, y otras reliquias comunistas que hoy proliferan en Berlín del este. Sin embargo, es particularmente irónico que el negocio de la nostalgia revolucionaria se erija encima de las ruinas de un país donde para muchos cubanos la idea de la revolución sigue siendo la base fundamental de sus creencias, sus aspiraciones, y sus esperanzas.

**
Hemingway —a quien convendría releer tanto dentro como fuera de Cuba— famosamente cita a John Donne al principio de “por quien doblan las campanas” en que “ningún hombre es una isla” (no man is an iland/intire of it itself/ every man is a peece of the continent…). Yo me pregunto qué tanto como individuos, ya sea fuera o dentro de Cuba, seguimos operando como Morel y su película eterna, o aquella película de propaganda revolucionaria de los sesenta: nuestras proyecciones aisladas de lo que queremos ver en cada cosa sin mayor autoconsciencia de lo que nos conecta con la realidad. A riesgo de caer en otra clase de romanticismo, pero por no caer en el nihilismo, creo que no queda sino pensar que aun debe de haber alguna forma —acaso el arte, u otra cosa— que nos pueda ayudar a reencontrar el valor original de aquellas transparencias entrañables de las utopías puras, y lo que las originó en su primer lugar, que si bien no me equivoco tenía que ver más con nuestro bienestar colectivo que con nuestra salvación personal. ***

Nueva York, noviembre, 2003

Luis Ignacio Helguera (1962-2003)

Pablo Helguera

When I die, I shall finally have both garden and basement
(L.I.H.)

The Colonia Condesa is perhaps the most extemporaneous and melancholic neighborhood in Mexico City. Despite the recent commercial metamorphosis that has devalued its character, its buildings continue acting as tableaux vivants or postcards from an old Mexico: the subtle provincial air composed by the texture of the trees and the 1930s avuncular houses, the parque España and the parque México, the now extinct Bella Epoca cinema, the Rosa and Basurto buildings.

It made sense for Luis Ignacio to live there: not only due to his fascination for that era, but also because his state of mind always required a certain inoculation against the present. He hated driving, or any other speed-based activity outside of soccer: his favorite thing to do was to walk down Veracruz street, where he lived, go into the tio Luis restaurant or any given Cuban joint, visit the street fair and check out the man shooting ducks at the shooting stand, examine the meat and poultry shops, or simply sitting at the park bench and watch children go by with their balloons, and think about Aristotle and man’s final goal:

BALLOON

Happiness lies high for us
man’s ultimate goal, according to Aristotle
it lies high
rarely do we ever reach it
but sometimes
in a burlesque balloon fashion
it comes down our poor heads
and we feel its softness
electrify our hair
and we hold its string
and we caress its oval weightlessness
and we stroll through the park of the world
with our balloon
and we laugh like idiots
drunken with joy,
until we find it ordinary, boring, dull
to stroll through the world with a balloon like idiots
and the hand loses the string
and the balloon flies away in our anguish
as if into a precipice
towards the infinite.

As with everything else that surrounded him, he had a contradictory passion with the place where he lived, which simultaneously captivated and exasperated him (a feeling not that uncommon amongst those who live in Mexico City). One of this favorite quotes was by the Latin poet Catulus: “I love and hate. Do not ask me why, but I feel it so. And I suffer.”

Be it houses, hotels, villages or neighborhoods, plazas or alleys or mask stores, places in general provoked in Luis Ignacio long, repeated and intense experiences. These would result in memories, which, in turn, after many meditations during naptime and insomniac exercises with the pen and the paper at night, turned into literature. His works usually were born at the table of our family dining room set, the one thing that was with him his entire life and which he himself commemorated in a poem:

Pain and pride of my movings
the ony imperial thing I’ve got
this dining room set of my grandfather
in which I portrayed him when I was four
while he was talking business
with my dad

This dining room
in which the family
passed around salty and sweet phrases
flying rug
changes with me of time and home

I fly with the dining set,
I touch its wood to land
while my daughter hides under the table
as if behind a tree
as I did as a kid
returning the legs to the woods
of diffused genealogies
We hit our heads with the table
we scratched it
we poured hot coffees onto it
and my grandmother, and my mother, and my wife
rubbed red oil on its wounds
When after all
I think
that’s all it ends up remaining
our pains,
our scars
on the table of the dining room.

Luis Ignacio was particularly sensitive to the personal anecdote and the place where it had transpired. My brother and I shared together, for more than a decade, a room in the old family house in Arizona 106, along with my parents and my two sisters. (Also with us there was a ghostly, 90-year old great aunt, Lolina, who I remember as an entirely white and almost ethereal being who would walk silently around the house. When she died, we continued suspecting her quiet steps around the stairs). Our room had very large windows, with beautiful dark wood French blinds, and it overlooked a garden with high walls covered with ivy.  It was in this room where Luis Ignacio one day was working at his desk and suddenly a bat appeared, hitting against the window, disappearing almost instantly. This incident resulted in a prose poem that gave the title of one of his books and which he dedicated to me (according to him, as a right for the co-ownership of the room):

Bat at Midday

To Pablo Helguera

A group of mockingbirds breaks loose into flight from the high ivy of the house in the garden. Fearful premonition of birds. Only one moment later, indeed, a brownish bat —slow, indifferent intrusion— arrives pushing itself in the air against midday, and passes through the abandoned home, clumsily hitting his wings against the windows, the ivy, the instants. Brief accidents of things, glitches of the itinerary. Lethargy, disorientation, untimeliness, flight in the desert of light. The inside surface of the dry leaves, the dark tree trunks, the hidden shadows. Soul in disarray. Sad comet of ash. Hairy and stupid flapping that crumbles in cave dust on the illuminated wall.
And the night still so absent in the plants.

–
Games

In the room where he was visited by the bat, Luis Ignacio discovered Chekhov, Ravel, Stravinsky, Tartini and Khachaturian, Capablanca, Zeno, Heraclitus and Heidegger, and Julio Torri —all of them fascinations that would become the basis of his aesthetic vocabulary. Each one of these discoveries took place at different times, but his loyalty toward them —which sometimes appeared to be simple partiality— always was eternal and unconditional, maybe because each one of these discoveries had marked a moment of profound personal identification. He treated his influences like his friends, as holding an unbreakable contract. His list of loyalties started with being a fan of the Mexican soccer team León, and particularly for his heroic goalkeeper Salomone, who once held him in his arms. Even though the León eventually went onto the minor leagues, and long after its heyday, Luis Ignacio continued watching its games till the end, from his frail black and white TV.

He always felt the urgency to communicate his fascination for things. It was vital to him to have some sort of interlocutor in order to share the way in which he felt about a poem, a philosophical phrase, a photograph, or a musical work. As a child, and being nine years younger than him, he made me his first fan and audience member, job that I took enthusiastically.  I would usually sit there, a bit perplexed, as I would hear his first drafts of poems or stories (many of which would go straight to the trash can later). Oftentimes, in order to entertain both of us, he would transform his interests in games: in the height of his passion for chess, we would organize fictional tournaments that would last days (“round robin” style) where we would place “real” players of international and historical fame (Spassky, Karpov, Korshnoii, Reti, Lasker, Capablanca), alongside Mexican ones (Kenneth Frey, Marcel Sisniega, Willy de Winter) and entirely fictitious ones (Tontocho Chávez). Notably, Nacho would adjust his playing style throughout the tournament according to the apertures and strategies of every player. Despite such educational displays, I didn’t become such a great apprentice, although I did win under his training a few children tournaments, while he was teaching chess at a cultural center near our house and at the Casa del lago in Chapultepec. Sometimes I would accompany him to his own class the Black Bishop at the Colonia Roma, a chess club where his teacher was Enrique Palos Báez, a timid and smiling man who mysteriously lived at the club in a tiny room and had the looks of a friar (was he the black bishop, perhaps?)

Then there was a turn of experiences that gave him a strong aesthetic focus. In 1981, my aunts Elsa and Elena took Luis Ignacio to Europe, for his first and only time. It was an experience that impacted him deeply. Upon his return, he brought back ashtrays from Milan and Rome, small bottles of Grand Marnier, a gray checkered hat from London that he kept for decades, a handful of cotton balls he picked up from a garden in Bruges. He also brought back a firm passion for French music and art in general, adding many names to his pantheon. I helped him put together a huge poster-like collage with postcards and magazine cutouts that reminded him of this trip. The impact of symbolism, impressionism, and the modernist movements of the beginning of the century became around that time, and from then on, the main basis of influence in his work.

Luis Ignacio’s passion for music, which had been greatly nourished by our parents, manifested itself first for the works of Ravel and Debussy, Milhaud and Ibert, and for the Russians like Mussorgsky, Borodin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. In childhood games we would put records on the dinosaur-like Philco player, and we would act out choreographies or invent stories around Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Pavanne for a Dead Maiden, Milhaud’s Beuf sur le Toit, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Petrouschka and The Firebird, Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances, or Respighi’s Pines of Rome. As he himself tells in his work “Atril del Melómano”, he tried to study music at the national conservatory, “in the bucolic gardens of the ruinous and for me attractive building of Pani”, another mysterious place which, with its huge windows and its burgundy concrete floors, would make him decide toward not making music, but writing about it.

It would be hard to find many people who enjoyed music with the intensity in which he did: he would spend hours next to the record player, looking toward the window or the ceiling, whistling, leaned over backwards, with the pen in the hand, closing his eyes, intensely savoring every note played by Heifetz, Gidon Kremer, Victoria de los Angeles or Tom Waits.

His literary interests, which would end up becoming his true profession, started with his attendance to literary workshops, chess games seasoned with literary conversations with Juan José Arreola, and with the guidance of Eduardo Lizalde, who was no doubt the greater inspiration of his youth.

However, when he was eighteen his passion suddenly veered toward philosophy, particularly existentialism. His studies at the faculty of philosophy and letters of the National University brought him eventually to phenomenology. He made his thesis on the notion of understanding in “Being and Time” by Heidegger, likely the most influential philosopher in his work. Heidegger’s and Husserl’s methodology and hermeneutics gave him a fundamental structure onto which exercise his critical and essayistic work, both musical and literary, whereas his interest in existential themes would constantly be expressed in his poetry and fiction. As editorial assistant of Octavio Paz’s magazine Vuelta at the end of the eighties, Luis Ignacio returned fully to literature and entered in touch with many leading Mexican writers, thus creating his most enduring artistic and personal friendships: Antonio Deltoro, Verónica Volkow, Aurelio Asiaín, Fabio Morábito, Gerardo Deniz, and many others.

His work on both music and literature never obeyed any sort of following of “current tendencies.” Instead, he almost automatically would lean toward any marginal or semi-obscure expressions that had captured little interest of other critics. This made him write about composers such as Conlon Nancarrow, Cri-Cri, or Candelario Huízar. In a similar way, his way of covering “current issues” was based mainly in commemorating death or birth centennials, or similar occasions, which were presented in the pages of Pauta, the magazine of which he was the editor for fifteen years under the approving oversight of Mario Lavista. Few music critics in Mexico have produced comparative music essays as useful and rigorous as the ones he made on the work of Silvestre Revueltas, Carlos Chávez, Rodolfo Halffter, and many others. He knew the work of Ravel and Stravinsky like no one else. One of the works that he never got to write could have well been a critical biography of either composer.

The “marginal” writers that occupied his interest, on the other hand, included
Pedro F. Miret – whose nightmarish and extravagant stories he loved—Uwe Frisch, Virgilio Piñera, Julio Torri and Dino Buzzatti. Toward the end, his interests darkened, ending with Charles Bukowski.  On the other hand, his emphasis on “impure” genres culminated perhaps on his work on prose poetry, a form that combined his inclination for elegance and brevity. This resulted eventually in his making the definitive anthology of prose poetry in Mexico.

Green Patios

Like every other family, our memories were marked by the places where we lived or visited. However, the circumstances around our leaving of these places —including the eventual departure of the core of the family to the U.S., which left Luis Ignacio as their sole interlocutor— made them acquire a more ghostlike quality. In his works, these places became part of a vocabulary of nostalgic mythology.

The first one of these places was our childhood home, located in the street of Orizaba 21 in the Colonia Roma, near the Insurgentes subway. When we left that house, an enormous mansion that housed the family for three generations, it was never inhabited again up till today, for reasons that to this date we ignore. Its continuous, empty presence, and the fact that it inexplicably appeared to resist being populated by new memories or people, gave it a certain air of enigmatic freezer of history, a sort of monument or memorial of a time that remains unburied. Luis Ignacio used to go visit it when he was in the area.  “I went by Orizaba the other day,” he would say, which would be just as saying “ I was thinking about those days.”

Another house that Luis Ignacio was prone to visit is located in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and it has belonged to the family since the eighteenth century.  This one also occupies a symbolic place as it retains the residues and personal objects of more than six generations. Full of paintings, objects and photographs (“of diffused genealogies”), it has a great open patio with a well and a doorway through which we would see people like Kika freely enter in an out. Kika was a feeble, deaf, hunched old lady and neighbor of the family for more than half a century. Luis Ignacio developed a certain fondness toward her, in the same way in which he would grow an affection for all things and people who were in appearance marginal, forgotten, or invisible.

It was in this house (as well as in brief stays in Patzcuaro) where Luis Ignacio wrote great part of the material of his first book, Traspatios. Traspatios contains a series of daguerreotype-like vignettes of the provincial family life with which he exerts a phenomenology of memory and of the past. The personal experience and the family space would inevitably transform in a new place, populated by the familiar but also by the philosophical reflection:

In middle voice, through the antique hallway, lonely, an insinuation in chiaroscuro, preterital song of a woman who washes clothes by ear, rake that returns every afternoon for the leaves of the album to the tree of memory, friend of the house with her own key of the doorway, silent deaf old woman, subtle murmur of light debating between shadows, silent melody that lulls years, centuries, in the well of the oranges and hours (…)

Another place of the mnemonic nomenclature of the family, where we spent most of our childhood vacations, was the Jacarandas hotel in Cuernavaca, which has a number of gardens in a large area, filled with bungalows, golf courses, and cozy pool sections in the American style of the fifties. Over the course of the years, the gardens have been preserved, and the hotel still exists although a bit decayed, rather as a memory of a better time. But for us who remembered it in its times of glory, walking through its gardens was a process of reliving a series of anecdotes and incidents of before. Also stuck in its own time, this hotel also was an obsession to Luis Ignacio, who used to go back to stay at the bungalows to write perhaps to recover certain moments that could only be retrieved right there and then:

Jacaranda

Here thirty years later. The gardens grow experiences; memories take part of the vegetation. Just like those who grow in these corners: spot of soul, elbow, knee, shadow plant, ivy in waiting of being gardened by memory (…) in the leaf of the jacaranda is the living ground of the voices, the detention, the immense instant. We are a speck, a speck of a speck of our remembrances; and through specks like that, eternity shows.

Although for Luis Ignacio these places were constant references, the resulting works were in general a distilled product, composed by a variety of situations that he wasn’t seeking to represent but rather to reflect upon, leading to metaphysical and metahistorical problems that consumed his mind. On the other hand, as he himself admitted, by force of repetition and revision of anecdotes in after-meal table conversations, these memories would be transformed in new fictions (“human memory ([is]…) full of whims and prone to falsify, free and creative”), to the point that in many cases he himself wasn’t sure about what was real and what had been a fabrication (in some cases he would even adopt our own personal anecdotes and place himself in them, although conveniently taking the most heroic role). On the other hand, his way of experiencing things was almost preceded by the very act of commemorating the transformation of the act of living into the act of remembering (“moments which since one lives them appear to be old memories”; “this perfume, which today only smells to itself, tomorrow will smell to these moments”). His work is thus an enactment of automatic historicity, commemorative and meditative, sometimes sad and nostalgic (“rain belongs to yesterday”) and sometimes ironic, critic, skeptical, and humoristic.

Masks

Luis Ignacio’s extraordinary attachment to things, to ideas, to places, people, music, and definitely to confrontations of every kind, was in general fairly selective, although implemented with formidable vigor. Sometimes he was extreme (“neither yes, neither no, neither neither”). Every person or thing that would capture his interest he would take over with absolute dedication and sense of ownership, as if he was afraid of loosing everything he would find along, and if it went away from him he would do enormous efforts to claim it back. His literary works, in a similar way, at times appear to reveal that enterprise of recovering things and commemorate them in a symbolical process that was at the same time an acknowledgement nothing truly can be retained.

His greater obsession lied in trying to understand things, for which he had an ongoing anguish; the greatest of them all, I think, was the very impossibility of understanding himself. His introspective writing could be excessively self-critical, and sometimes even ruthless: highly suspicious of his identity, which in fact is manifested already in his earliest published text (written in 1981):

Scrap of Film

…all seen from the eyes of a dog. Discolored images, rather in black and white, in slow motion. It looks like dawn in these fields, although it could well be a gray dusk. The immense field seen through the eyes of a dog, which could well be a cow. The wheat sprigs bow against the passing of the wind, but with the same sleepy rhythm. The images wag from the dog because he walks, because all this moves… And again they relatively fix as they stop in front of a milkmaid who carries two pails of water. She looks toward our canine visual field: she looks at us with surprise and horror. She slowly leaves the pails on the ground and with the perplexed expression she moves back, without looking at me. She touches her apron with her white hands and mumbles something that is not heard (nothing can be heard, actually).  She continues to walk back and I think that I am also walking, toward her, as she walks back. We arrive to a humble looking house, nearby the abandoned mill. She pulls the door, a bit faster, and now without looking at me, she gestures with despair as she locks the door behind her. I am left alone, immobile. I touch my face. I must be a monster.

This kind of writing, that sometimes adopts the tone of Kafka or Mary Shelley -although not without a touch of irony- appears repeatedly in various poems that revolve around the notion of self-recognition, such as in his text “mask store” (“almost without realizing, I bring my hand to my face and touch it”), Minotauro (“people, prey of fear, move out of his way”), in his short story “costume party”, where an unknown character crashes a party, and his well known text “The child face” (“and a radiant blow of light in the plain visage of the insect revealed to the executioner an unknown shot, in which he himself appeared as a child making a painful and whining gesture”).

As a great humorist, either by inventing bestiaries for his daughter Marina or ridiculing the music milieu in Mexico from the pages of his magazine Pauta, he practiced his humor toward himself over anyone else.  Toward the end of his life, as he himself wrote, his life turned into literature (“without realizing, he became all literature”), in a process that was known to his friends as the “Nachoaventuras”.

Our aesthetic arguments usually revolved around contemporary art, the area toward which I gravitated as a visual artist. We never were fully in agreement in terms of form, neither in regards to conceptualism and the social dimensions of art. Luis Ignacio could never get enthusiastic about the problems that he found too alien or that didn’t concern him at a very intimate level. This very condition made him become a writer distant from every kind of current fashion or tendency, as well as any kind of careerist style, which he reasonably despised. In my view, it also made him one of the most original literary voices of his generation.

***

In a most ironical fashion that he himself  would have approved, we gave burial to Luis Ignacio on a Tuesday the Thirteenth, finally enacting a series of scenes that he had obsessively envisioned throughout the years: the wake ( “the wake is a party without host”), the funerary arrangements ( “there is some kind of sweet innocence in dying and in taking care of the dead one”), the ritual of the burial (which he addressed in his short story “Milpa Alta”), and in the large family gatherings that precisely take place only in wakes and weddings, with which he claimed to dream regularly  and which had caused in him a mix of anguish and fascination.

Always prone to observing funerary coincidences, he would have been the first one to point out that, at his forty years of age, he punctually followed the steps of his most admired Mexican composer, Silvestre Revueltas, whose music, sensibility, and biography captivated him. In an article of his (“Revueltas between the music and the wall”) he quoted a phrase of Revueltas that he liked very much: “wherever I want to go, I always run into a wall”.

Today I realize that he must have identified himself with that bat in midday that hit against our window: an anachronistic being, whose erratic presence, disoriented, seemed to enter in constant conflict with with the practical world into which he had arrived, a darkness in the middle of the light.  Luis Ignacio constantly questioned his place in the world, with full conscience of his finitude, as a true subject of a heideggerian “dasein” (or “being toward’s death”) with full lack of synch with time but in active search of his own parameters of duration ( from there his admiration to Bergson).  The work of Luis Ignacio is an exercise in extemporaneity, a dialogue with a world full of objects and circumstances  that refer to a certain present, but that as they are integrated into the territory of his literature evolve into signifiers of a lucid metahistorical reflection about our relationship with memory and time. This is because, despite his permanent restlesness with the place and time where he was, he was profoundly in touch with the experiences of life in a way that many of us will never be able to be.

I will miss him unspeakably. His life, which involved all of us near him in an extraordinary way, was unfairly consumed by his own personality, which absorbed both good and bad things without distinction— which is impossible to sustain in a regular life.

In his flight through life, Luis Ignacio always hit his head against the transparent window of reality. But as a redemption to his enormous anguish, every little blow generated a work that help us understand from the most abstract to the most banal.  As a bat that emerged from Plato’s cave, his work comes from a world of shadows that at first may seem unfamiliar, but if seen carefully, bestow the most prodigious clarities.

Zurich, May 2003