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

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

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

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

D. Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan

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

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

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

Excerpt from the beginning of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

[Exhibition text]

BEAUTY FOR ASHES

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

Isaiah 61:3

To Robert Rosenblum

(1927-2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pablo Helguera

New York City

May 2010

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

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

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

Figure from the Julsrud collection, Acámbaro

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

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

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

For more information:

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

http://www.philagrafika2010.org

WHAT IN THE WORLD / BOOK EXCERPTS

FRONTISPIECE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. THROUGH THE DRY ICE CURTAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

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

paradise-ii_freedman

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

Un muro de Berlín americano – 1

(diario de Manhattan)

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

le silence eternel de ses espaces infinis me effraie

Pascal, Pensées

11 de septiembre, 2001

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

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

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

12 de septiembre

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

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

13 de septiembre

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

15 de septiembre

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

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

3 de septiembre, 2001

(anotación efectivamente escrita antes de las anteriores)

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

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

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

Restauraciones Nostálgicas

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

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

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

Des-virtualizar

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

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

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

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

Despertares

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

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

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

Haciendo Himnos entre Ruinas

(Un muro de Berlín americano – 2)

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

dónde desenterrar la palabra,

la proporción que rige al himno y al discurso,

al baile, a la ciudad y a la balanza?

Octavio Paz, »Himno entre Ruinas«

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Installation view, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 2007

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

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

1. Foyer: Contemporary Art and Historic Sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Downstairs: Facts and Lyrics of History

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Upstairs: Foreign Pasts and Familiar Futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

first textbook for the SPU, Zurich, 2003