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

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

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

Figure from the Julsrud collection, Acámbaro

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

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

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

For more information:

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

http://www.philagrafika2010.org

WHAT IN THE WORLD / BOOK EXCERPTS

FRONTISPIECE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. THROUGH THE DRY ICE CURTAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

CUATRO CANTOS

++

Óvalos

Eran los hermosos óvalos que flotaban

por los paisajes de todas las ferias mundiales

los que me seguían sin parar

cada vez que me trataba de bolear los zapatos.

Yo quería ser negro,

pero la tintorería de Transilvania nunca me llamaba,

creo que porque no les gusta la calvicie

y porque mis tacos con escabeche ahora huelen a talco.

Si tan solo los caballos de colores fueran antropólogos

interesados en sorber clips suecos,

si tan solo los mecánicos burocráticos vivieran en Nápoles

y entendieran que el pasto a veces puede ser rosado.

Ahí siguen los óvalos,

que odio que sean tan hermosos y tan grandes y veloces,

y que yo sea una tortuga medieval

solo con una bolsita de gomas de borrar

pero sin audífonos y con deudas de gimnasio.

Son así las olas de este barrio,

que llegan con Mafaldas abstrusas a veces,

donde todos saludan pero cierran temprano

y no queda mas que tirar los calcetines por la ventana

cuando termina el verano.

++

Aduana

Vendo pellejos diseñados,

hechos de dedos finos de venados rumanos,

los promuevo en bosques de farmacias lentas

de aquellas que surten frases suaves con íes y diptongos,

con avestruces de peluche cantando a la salida,

para aquellos como yo, con traje de húsar anticuado,

de esos que son imposibles de planchar.

Fuera de eso, mi tienda está vacía

como si esto fuera la posguerra de los moles,

ya quisieras, pues habria paraíso de boinas,

pero ni siquiera ese chicle pega,

ni Virilio me deja usar su carro de último modelo

ni me invitan a la capilla de los banquetes.

Plantado con mi duty-free bajo el brazo

trato de oler todos los colores

y acaricio las avenas de las mañanas

en busca de que algo, lo que sea, me dé besos.

++

Bidet

Según historiadores y egiptólogos

el sol se proyectaba al estilo de Sanborns

cuando uno pide huevos negativos con arroz;

todo era elegantísimo, con moños nupciales

y en los pasillos con cuadrados verdes aterciopelados

hasta los huesos funestos comían sombras de negocios.

Era sin duda una montaña semiótica para un niño como yo,

con mi canasta pirograbada con iguanas bajo el brazo

difícil de pesar apropiadamente sin inflar un globo,

pero así eran las enredaderas polacas cuando se dejaban tocar,

y si en París Londres se podía pedir emparedado de almejas con Pritt

no sabremos si los parques eran también así de disléxicos

a menos de que nos hubiesen dejado plantados

con una orquesta regional.

Yo, por mi parte,

colecciono espuma desde hace dos siglos

para peinar toboganes rusos como los de Pavlov,

y me lavo el pelo en el bidet como Supermán,

pero ni así logro taclear al camello que me ataca

por sorpresa cada miércoles a las quince

cuando me encuentro cargando las bolsas del super,

e inevitablemente me duele hasta el pelo,

y sueño la caravana pasar ante mis pecas

con todos los bisnietos de la historia,

y la crema dulce de los Cadillacs

y el inconsolable lavabo con su fuente

que nunca supimos reparar.

++

Distribuidora

Soy como un camarón diminuto

perdido en un mall fantasma

de esos que armaban los teóricos amnésicos

mientras los distraía un turbante sucio.

Hay algo que me recuerda a mi papá,

pero no sé si es ese teléfono para changos

o las algas electrónicas que salen sin avisar,

injustamente como lo tratan a uno en un hospital

cuando llegamos sin trofeos o faldas de terlenga.

Creo que extraño la época en que yo era perro

y a veces llegaban bolsas con estrellas y malvaviscos verdes,

o llovía jugo de fresa sobre nuestras zapatillas,

y todos éramos bailarines entrenados por Ravel,

y pensar que hasta ahora comprendo finalmente

considerando las varias manchas de salsa en mi chamarra,

ya nunca va a llegar el momento de las almohadas frescas

ni el de las playas violetas del sur

a pesar de que, como todos los brujos indicaban,

ahorita debería de estar cruzando Circunvalación.

No soy Polivoz, pero tampoco entiendo

estos caracoles infinitos en mi cara

que vinieron para quedarse en Indochina

o mas bien, para dejarme viendo telenovelas

en la ropería,

esperando, eternamente,

al camión.

Pablo Helguera

Otto’s Self Board Meeting

Otto:

Thank you all for coming. I had to call this emergency board meeting of all my top senior selves in order to address a matter of serious importance to the Otto Rumperstreiser Art Career Corporation. As you know, Us, Otto, have not received an invitation to do a solo exhibition for 2010. We are approaching the end of the year and so far My/Our exhibition schedule looks empty. This is an unacceptable situation that I/We all have to work quickly to correct. We just can’t allow this embarrassment. I look forward to your suggestions.

Otto, Senior Marketing Strategist:

To be honest, I have been saying all along that we don’t promote Us enough. People are not aware of our product. We have to be more aggressive. We are up against other artists who have huge galleries with promotional machinery behind them. We need to spend more money, like sending weekly emails about what we do to everyone Otto knows and maybe buy an ad on e-flux. And We have to get ourselves to more important openings. We keep going to the same stupid openings in Chelsea without collectors or decision-makers. We just need a dramatic change of tactic.

Otto, Social Etiquette Supervisor:

We have to be careful with the self-promotional thing. It looks inelegant and desperate. We don’t want to appear desperate. I agree that we need to attend higher-end openings and we need to be more on top of important people’s birthdays. But email doesn’t work anymore. People just delete whatever they get, everyone is saturated even with Facebook.

Otto, Chief Financial Officer:

I am sorry, but we can’t afford an ad campaign right now. Ads cost a fucking fortune. Otto hasn’t sold a work in months and the only money we are getting, from that lecture in that College in Ohio we are going to use it to pay for that stupid photo print job for that piece that Otto agreed to donate for the art auction, and then the rest of the money will have to be spent on that expensive dinner date this coming Friday with the French curator.

Otto, Manager of Getting Laid:

Excuse Us- the French curator actually is a promising relationship. Don’t forget that she said she is very interested in Otto’s work. And in the meantime, let’s face it, she is really hot and Otto is in dire need to get laid.

Otto, Deputy Director of Art Ideas:

Please, let’s focus on the content of Otto’s work. Without the content there is no work, without work there is no career. The other morning We were in the shower We had a really interesting idea for a video piece that would be about the slums of Morocco. It would be a multi-channel video piece and it would show these slums with a narrative of a blind Moroccan prostitute whose story Otto read the other day in Paris Match.

Otto, Coordinator of Reality Check:

That’s ludicrous. First of all, how the hell are we going to get to Morocco to do the video, and then find the prostitute? There is no fucking way we can pull that project together.

Otto, Deputy Director of Art Ideas:

You guys always have to ruin every great initiative. That is why Otto will never make it as an artist.

Otto, Chief Financial Officer:

I am sorry, but we don’t even have the money to buy that external hard drive Otto needs, let alone…

Otto:

Wait a minute. I thought we were talking about getting a show, not about coming up with a new piece!

Otto, Cheating Manager:

How about if we just steal footage from YouTube or something and get a female friend to do a prostitute voiceover?

Otto, Senior Marketing Strategist:

Wait a minute: what if we ask the French curator to do the voiceover, and then once the piece is made we ask for her help to get the piece shown? She may even have contacts in Morocco. Wasn’t it a French colony? Wasn’t she working on a show about post-colonialism? She is totally going to love this piece.

Otto, Deputy Director of Art Ideas:

I don’t know about that idea, it’s too opportunistic…

Otto, Coordinator of Reality Check:

At least sounds doable. We can pull it off.

Otto:

We are pathetic.

Otto, Manager of Getting Laid:

I think it’s a great idea. What do we have to loose? If anything, We will get laid.

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

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

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

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

paradise-ii_freedman

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

.

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

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

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

(excerpts of the book below)

Interview on the project

Information on Queens Museum Exhibition

 Title  at Jorge Pinto Books

Three excerpts from The Boy Inside the Letter

ORO NO SONORO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

(1992)

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

Video, 12 min, 2004

Alice Austen is one of the most overlooked American photographers. Originary from Staten Island, where she lived all her life, Austen depicted the transcendentalist philosophy of her time, as well as the life and times of late XIXth century New Yorkers. But it was her photographs depicting herself dressed as a man and in intimate relationships with her friends that caused controversy. She still remains largely, and unfairly, forgotten. Alice Austen: Into the Light is a documentary on her life and her visionary work.

Parallel Lives exhibition at Julia Friedman Gallery, 2003

Vidas Paralelas (Parallel Lives), was an attempt to reinvent the form of the biographical exhibition through uncommon associations between  parallel biographies and objects. The project consisted in a peformance piece and an exhibition.  In the exhibition, a collection of objects at a particular site is displayed, however, with the option of five alternative narratives in an acoustiguide (narrated by Fred Wilson) that describe the specifics of five completely different lives: (Giulio Camillo, Florence Foster Jenkins, the Shakers, Ward Jackson, Friedrich Froebel).  The project tried to prove how in the exhibition context objects tend to become receptors, not containers of meaning when they interact with a verbal interpretation, and also seeks to trace visual connections between the lives of five people who could have not been more different in life and events but whos sensibility somehow shared elements in common.

The performance version of this project was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in December of 2003.

Rehearsal of Parallel Lives, Sept. 2003

Fred Wilson recording the acoustiguide for Parallel Lives, San Francisco, 2003

]]> http://pablohelguera.net/2003/09/parallel-lives/feed/ 0 http://pablohelguera.net/2003/05/portrait-of-brother-with-bat-2003/ http://pablohelguera.net/2003/05/portrait-of-brother-with-bat-2003/#comments Mon, 26 May 2003 01:19:25 +0000 admin http://pablohelguera.net/?p=759 Portrait of Brother with Flying Bat

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

Memory Theater, Banff, 2004

The project was first exhibited at the University of Montana in 2001 and since has been traveling to various locations, including the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, for the exhibition Database Imaginary (2004). The story of Giulio Camillo was included in the performance Parallel Lives (2003).

see

Essay by Victoria Noorthoorn on Memory Theater (2001)