CUATRO CANTOS

++

Óvalos

Eran los hermosos óvalos que flotaban

por los paisajes de todas las ferias mundiales

los que me seguían sin parar

cada vez que me trataba de bolear los zapatos.

Yo quería ser negro,

pero la tintorería de Transilvania nunca me llamaba,

creo que porque no les gusta la calvicie

y porque mis tacos con escabeche ahora huelen a talco.

Si tan solo los caballos de colores fueran antropólogos

interesados en sorber clips suecos,

si tan solo los mecánicos burocráticos vivieran en Nápoles

y entendieran que el pasto a veces puede ser rosado.

Ahí siguen los óvalos,

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

y que yo sea una tortuga medieval

solo con una bolsita de gomas de borrar

pero sin audífonos y con deudas de gimnasio.

Son así las olas de este barrio,

que llegan con Mafaldas abstrusas a veces,

donde todos saludan pero cierran temprano

y no queda mas que tirar los calcetines por la ventana

cuando termina el verano.

++

Aduana

Vendo pellejos diseñados,

hechos de dedos finos de venados rumanos,

los promuevo en bosques de farmacias lentas

de aquellas que surten frases suaves con íes y diptongos,

con avestruces de peluche cantando a la salida,

para aquellos como yo, con traje de húsar anticuado,

de esos que son imposibles de planchar.

Fuera de eso, mi tienda está vacía

como si esto fuera la posguerra de los moles,

ya quisieras, pues habria paraíso de boinas,

pero ni siquiera ese chicle pega,

ni Virilio me deja usar su carro de último modelo

ni me invitan a la capilla de los banquetes.

Plantado con mi duty-free bajo el brazo

trato de oler todos los colores

y acaricio las avenas de las mañanas

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

++

Bidet

Según historiadores y egiptólogos

el sol se proyectaba al estilo de Sanborns

cuando uno pide huevos negativos con arroz;

todo era elegantísimo, con moños nupciales

y en los pasillos con cuadrados verdes aterciopelados

hasta los huesos funestos comían sombras de negocios.

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

con mi canasta pirograbada con iguanas bajo el brazo

difícil de pesar apropiadamente sin inflar un globo,

pero así eran las enredaderas polacas cuando se dejaban tocar,

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

no sabremos si los parques eran también así de disléxicos

a menos de que nos hubiesen dejado plantados

con una orquesta regional.

Yo, por mi parte,

colecciono espuma desde hace dos siglos

para peinar toboganes rusos como los de Pavlov,

y me lavo el pelo en el bidet como Supermán,

pero ni así logro taclear al camello que me ataca

por sorpresa cada miércoles a las quince

cuando me encuentro cargando las bolsas del super,

e inevitablemente me duele hasta el pelo,

y sueño la caravana pasar ante mis pecas

con todos los bisnietos de la historia,

y la crema dulce de los Cadillacs

y el inconsolable lavabo con su fuente

que nunca supimos reparar.

++

Distribuidora

Soy como un camarón diminuto

perdido en un mall fantasma

de esos que armaban los teóricos amnésicos

mientras los distraía un turbante sucio.

Hay algo que me recuerda a mi papá,

pero no sé si es ese teléfono para changos

o las algas electrónicas que salen sin avisar,

injustamente como lo tratan a uno en un hospital

cuando llegamos sin trofeos o faldas de terlenga.

Creo que extraño la época en que yo era perro

y a veces llegaban bolsas con estrellas y malvaviscos verdes,

o llovía jugo de fresa sobre nuestras zapatillas,

y todos éramos bailarines entrenados por Ravel,

y pensar que hasta ahora comprendo finalmente

considerando las varias manchas de salsa en mi chamarra,

ya nunca va a llegar el momento de las almohadas frescas

ni el de las playas violetas del sur

a pesar de que, como todos los brujos indicaban,

ahorita debería de estar cruzando Circunvalación.

No soy Polivoz, pero tampoco entiendo

estos caracoles infinitos en mi cara

que vinieron para quedarse en Indochina

o mas bien, para dejarme viendo telenovelas

en la ropería,

esperando, eternamente,

al camión.

Pablo Helguera

Otto’s Self Board Meeting

Otto:

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

Otto, Senior Marketing Strategist:

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

Otto, Social Etiquette Supervisor:

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

Otto, Chief Financial Officer:

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

Otto, Manager of Getting Laid:

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

Otto, Deputy Director of Art Ideas:

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

Otto, Coordinator of Reality Check:

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

Otto, Deputy Director of Art Ideas:

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

Otto, Chief Financial Officer:

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

Otto:

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

Otto, Cheating Manager:

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

Otto, Senior Marketing Strategist:

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

Otto, Deputy Director of Art Ideas:

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

Otto, Coordinator of Reality Check:

At least sounds doable. We can pull it off.

Otto:

We are pathetic.

Otto, Manager of Getting Laid:

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

A sketch in one act

Pablo Helguera

Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.
Nelson Algren

Characters:

Pablo Helguera, a lecturer
Encarnacion Teruel, the moderator
Scott Vehill, art critic from Peoria
Sharon Stein, a Peoria artist and arts administrator

We All are Streeter was first performed at the Hyde Park Art Center on April 2006, in celebration of the opening of the new facilities of this art center. The program was presented as a real panel discussion to the public.

Time: Chicago, Illinois, April 2006
(all panelists and lecturer arrive. Pablo will lecture from a podium, opposite from the panel table, and will be showing slides throughout. The panelists sit at a table. They will not acknowledge Pablo’s presence nor will they look at him throughout the piece)

Encarnación Teruel
Ladies and Gentlemen: Thank you for coming to this discussion, presented in celebration of the Hyde Park Art Center’s reopening. My name is Encarnacion Teruel and I am Director of Performing Arts at the Illinois Arts Council.

Pablo Helguera
Good evening, and thank you for coming to this program this evening. We will speak tonight about an obscure chapter about Chicago’s history that hopefully will shed some light about the link between the  geography of a place and the idiosyncrasies it inspires.

Encarnacion
For this particular event, and in order to illuminate the Chicago audience a bit on the arts in Illinois, we thought we would present a debate around the subject: “How Do You Define the Spirit of Peorian art?”

Pablo Helguera
Oprah said once: “When in 1983 I set foot in this city, and just walking down the street, it was like roots, like the motherland. I knew I belonged here.”

Encarnacion
Peoria is home to great and diverse creativity. Our objective here in this panel is to talk about their common links and what defines Peorian art.

Pablo Helguera
But I am not here to speak about Oprah. I am here to speak to you about a person who is almost forgotten in the city’s history, and yet, whose life would very much define Chicago’s urban landscape. He has been ridiculed and criticized as a plain eccentric, but he should be regarded as a visionary.

The history of Chicago changed forever on an unusually stormy day on July 10, 1886. An old boat crashed against the sandbar of the shores of Lake Michigan 450 feet from Superior Street. Little did people know that this incident would define the future of the city.

The man in charge of this boat was Captain George Wellington Streeter, born in Flint, Michigan, in 1837. Captain Streeter was quite an adventurer. He made the Great Lakes his working environment. He worked as a logger and trapper in Canada, as Ice-cutter in Saginaw Bay, and a iron and copper miner. He joined the civil war on the side of the Union Army, and was later discharged as a captain. When he retired from the army, his wife Minnie convinced him to start a circus, and he did so. However, Streeter was not such an accomplished showman, and his enterprise collapsed into bankruptcy in two years. His wife left him with all the remaining money, and Streeter had to start all over again. He remarried with Maria Mulholland. We don’t know how, but the endless enterprising Streeter managed eventually to buy and repair an old boat, which he named the Reutan, and which we presume it was used for logging and transportation.

After his accidental landing in Chicago’s shore, Captain Streeter didn’t have many options. He decided to stay there, however, since it was impossible to move the boat and he didn’t have any money to pay rent.

Streeter landed in Chicago at a momentous time of the city’s reconstruction after the great Chicago fire. He realized that building developers we looking for a place to dump debris, and he convinced them to do this near his boat for a fee.

In the meantime, the New York millionaire that owned the land where Streeter had landed started trying to get rid of him.  His name was Kellogg Fairbank. Fairbank had at the beginning left Streeter stay where he was, as he seemed a harmless presence, but then things started getting more complicated.

Encarnacion
With me is Sharon Stein, a Peoria artist who lives and works in Peoria. She is the director of We Are Peoria, an organization that promotes the arts in Peoria. We have also invited the international art critic Scott Vehill, also from Peoria, who is the editor of New Art Peoria. Scott has devoted many years to the study of artistic psychology and behavior, and who will hopefully shed some light on the idiosyncrasy of Peorian artists. Scott has contributed to Artforum and is very active in the curatorial circles in the U.S. and abroad.

Perhaps we can start by asking you Sharon about the work of your organization and what kinds of programs you do.

Sharon
Thanks Encarnacion. I am very happy to be here. We Are Peoria is a not-for profit organization that was founded in 1977, with the purpose to set the record straight regarding Peorian art and give it the importance it deserves. It supports Peorian artists and Peorian art institutions. We seek to prove that art made in Peoria is equal or superior to any art made in the US today.

Scott ( smiling, to Sharon)
You know I am planning to contest that statement.

Sharon
Oh, I bet you will…

Encarnacion
Well, we will discuss that later. So, how is Peorian art better? I mean, how do you quantify this?

Sharon
Well, it’s very simple. Peorian artists are not dominated by the pressures of the market like in Chicago, nor are they prone to careerism and fashion like Chicago artists, and they also are not overshadowed by politics or rivalries like in Chicago.  We focus on the work, not on the talk, or the glamour. We at Go Peoria seek to prove that the art of Peoria is actually the most balanced, original, and independent, at the level or greater to the art of any big city.

Encarnacion
What kind of programs do you do?

Sharon
We have a lot of programs. We have the Peoria Only Art initiative, which is an initiative that gives substantial grants to museums that collect only Peorian art. It is a very competitive grant.

Encarnacion
What do you need to do to apply?

Sharon
Basically the grant requires institutions to stop collecting art from other places than Peoria. We also have a grant for Peorian artists to make art about Peoria, titled About Peoria Grant Initiative.

Encarnacion
Do you fund anything outside of Peoria?

Sharon
Well, we do have a grant named Make Me Peorian, which is directed to non-Peorian artists who may consider moving to Peoria and make art there. The grant supports you for five years, during which you are not allowed to exhibit outside of Peoria.

Encarnacion
And do you really reinforce this rule?

Sharon
Oh yes, of course we do. Last year an artist that we had funded participated in a group show in the community library of Decatur. We took away the grant immediately. He claimed that he thought, “It was just a very informal show”. But for us this lies at the core of the mission of the organization. We are serious about this. We can’t allow artists to serve other publics than those that we intend to serve. We need to show the city and the state that we are serious about nurturing out arts community.

Encarnación
I saw in the news recently that there were some debates regarding how some people define South versus Northern Peorian art… could you talk a bit about that?

Sharon [reluctant]
Well… it is really not such an interesting issue, really.

Encarnacion:
Could you talk about them? I think it would be useful…

Scott
Basically, its that some committee members in their organization have been pushing for a South Peoria initiative, where South Peorian artists can be funded only to make artwork about South Peoria.

Sharon
Scott— it’s not like that, like you described it. It’s not a real initiative. They are in the minority and they are totally disorganized and under funded. It’s not even worth talking about.

Scott
But why not mentioning it? I think it’s a very telling fact.
Of course this has not sit well with the North Peoria artists, nor with the East Peoria artists, some of which have already proposed the East Peoria Artists Council. And now, a group of West Peoria artists have formed the West Peorian Association of Chicano-Asian –or is it the Latino-Asian?—the Chicano-Asian American Women Sculptors, that’s it—  and are searching funds from Springfield to build a museum by and for West Peorian, Latino-Asian American Women Sculptors.

Sharon
That’s not  a serious proposal in the least! I don’t know why you even bring it up.

Encarnación
Ok, going back to your grant initiatives: don’t you think that Peoria artists who exhibit internationally can give a good name to the city?

Sharon
It doesn’t work that way, you see. Artists who exhibit outside forget about Peoria the moment they leave. We experience a serious talent exodus problem, which originates when local artists start showing outside. This in turn, makes them want to move out.  Artists who are talented think that by leaving Peoria to places like Chicago they will have a better shot at success. The same goes for galleries. But that is not true. Peoria galleries who move out to Chicago inevitably fail.

Encarnación
What do you do when a Peorian artist leaves Peoria for good?

Sharon (showing it is a very painful subject)
Oh yes, them. To be honest, I don’t give much thought to them. It’s their loss, really. Simply, my thinking is— out of sight, out of mind. They don’t exist for me, really. (fake smile). Yeah, really, its’ their loss.

Pablo
As the shore grew from the debris and the natural erosion process, Captain Streeter declared that the land where his boat stood “’twas a separate commonwealth, under the direct jurisdiction of the United States government”.  He declared it “the independent district of Lake Michigan”. Streeter then started renting this land to whoever wanted to live there, which mostly were prostitutes and lowlifes. Soon it became a shantytown, and the rich people who lived around there started complaining about the smell and the fact that these shacks were lowering the value of the area.

Encarnacion
Well, I would like to focus now on the subject of our discussion. How would you characterize Peorian art? how do you define the sensibility that produces it? Scott, perhaps you can shed some light on the subject for us?

Scott
Hopefully. I have done some research on this subject in a lecture I recently gave in Austria,  and in fact published an article on the American Association of Art Critics journal this year that touches on the character of the Peorian artist, as part of a paper about artists who live in cultural regions that are similar to Peoria. There is not enough time to present all the ideas on that paper, but I will try to provide a summary.

It is very difficult to arrive to a unified theory of the Peorian artist mind. There has been a lot written about it. Psychologists have been interested in it since the times of Hermann Rorschach, who in his early studies did research on art and madness, and one of his subjects was a patient precisely from Peoria.

Freudian psychologists believe that the creativity of Peorian artists is fundamentally rooted on a sentiment of abandonment or lack of external attention, very similar, that is, to the psychology of an orphan, something like a sense of inferiority in regards to people in other urban areas.

Sharon (visibly insulted)
That is just so absurd…

Scott
I am sorry- we can discuss this idea later, but If you let me finish…

Encarnacion
I’m sorry Sharon, if you could…

Sharon
How can you possibly base a theory like that based only on an insane guy who lived in the 1920s!

Scott
I just need that you let me finish presenting this idea and we can talk about it.

Encarnacion
Ok.

Pablo
Streeter’s legal argument was that the state of Illinois had no jurisdiction in giving shore owners title to the land.  This was based on the 1821 survey of the Chicago area authorized by Congress as part of a treaty with the Indians.  Rather than giving “the shore of Lake Michigan” as a general eastern boundary, the surveyor John Wall minutely described the shoreline.  Thus, when Robert Kinzie acquired a 103.27-acre tract north of the Chicago River, it had definite eastern boundary.  Over the years, the courts had consistently ruled that the heirs of the Kinzie grant could never claim more than a total of 103.27 acres, and here lay the strength of Streeter’s case.

Regardless, however, a series of battles to evict Streeter followed. The first one was in 1889, when five police officers tried to evacuate Streeter. They, however, were faced by rifles and chased away. The second battle was until 1899, when five police officers again managed to grab the captain, but his wife Maria attacked them with boiling water; Streeter managed to get a hold of his rifle then and chased them away.  The Independent State of Lake Michigan was not going to give up its fight so easily.

Scott
As I am saying, we depart from a study of city rivalries. Chicago is to Peoria what New York is to Chicago, what Istanbul is to Ankara, Berlin is to Munich, Paris is to Lyon, and so on. So  if we study how an artist here develops professionally, according to this theory, we see artists exhibit a series of attitudes that people have come to associate largely with Peorian art.  One of them is known as “compensation for invisibility”. As the artist feels that he or she is not visible enough in the art world, he or she tries to compensate by making work that is quantifiably different, either by size, erudition, or extravagance- but these traits are clearly intentional and have the objective to make the work more visible and emphasize its different character from the centralized mainstream. Examples are Bill Johnson’s “million egg march” installation- he placed one million eggs on the floor, that is, and claimed it was a demonstration to defend the rights of caged chickens in an egg farm near Peoria. He thought if you place one million its has greater impact than if you place, say, a hundred- although someone told me the other day that they actually were like a nine hundred, but who would spend the time to count them, really. The other is the work of Archie Phillips, who is known for his famous performance referencing the fact that Caterpillar trucks are manufactured in Peoria. The piece was entitled “Explaining pictures to a dead Caterpillar”.

Sharon
I think it is a very poignant piece.

Pablo
In the meantime, Fairbanks had sued Streeter for illegal occupation in 1893 and had won, which meant that Streeter needed to get out legally. However, he decided to stay. Streeter continued creating schemes to prove that the land belonged to him. He even produced a document that he claimed that was signed by president Grover Cleveland. While he never managed to get legal acknowledgement that he owned any land, Streeter continued to sell plots to other people, and the community started to grow. It went from Oak Street to St. Clair.

Chicago was changing furiously at the time, the fastest growing city in America. Another Chicago millionaire, Potter Palmer, realized that if they built a road on the sides of this land, they could make a lot of money selling it back from the city. He started building this road, which would be later named Lake Shore Drive, but he encountered the infamous Captain Streeter on his way, who opposed the building of this road in “his” land. Palmer died in 1902, without finishing his project, and the legal battles continued between the Chicago millionaires and the poor captain.

Scott
Anyway, my point is that living in the cultural and economic periphery leads to make work that affirms peripheral sensibility, and thus the eccentricity that sometimes is talked about when one deals with Peorian art. This connects with something I call the “intense introspection” trait, rooted in romanticism, which seeks to dwell in the personal psychology and in the strangest obsessions. Another trait is known as the “negation of the outside” which is when one is self-convinced that nothing outside of one’s immediate surrounding really exists.

But my contention, actually, is that Peorian art doesn’t really exist. When it is self-proclaimed a regional movement, then it becomes a political strategy not an artistic one. Art is art, period. Regionalism is an expression of psychological weakness.

Sharon [visibly irritated]
Oh my god. O-kay, I really have to interject here. I had never heard so much baloney in a panel, really.  I don’t know how many more psychological definitions you have in there Scott,  but I find these incredibly offensive to Peorian art and artists. First of all, Peorian artists don’t suffer from those introspection sicknesses you describe. And it’s just not true that Peorian artists are obsessed with Chicago or any other city.  We simply don’t care about it. In fact, we at We Are Peoria have an initiative entitled Boycott Chicago. As part of it, we prevent Peoria artists to exhibit in Chicago or any other city, and do all we can to prevent non-Peorian artists to exhibit in Peoria, be as they may be from Chicago or Kazakstan.

Encarnacion
But don’t these policies seem a bit extreme?

Sharon
Not in the least, if you consider that Peorian art has been so misrepresented by important Chicago museums over the years, and that the Chicago Tribune had the nerve to write, when Richard Pryor, a Peoria native, recently died, that the best thing that ever happened to him was getting out of Peoria. How dare they?

Encarnación
Scott,  don’t you think that what is peripheral and what isn’t is a very subjective discussion?

Scott
Excuse me, Encarnacion— Sharon, if I may—and I am still not done- what you are saying all but proves my point in question,  since you are confirming to us that Chicago art is such a sore subject in the Peorian art scene.

Sharon
No—you are presenting this as an inferiority complex, which I find completely insulting to Peorian art. Why do we always have to make everything be about Chicago, why?

Scott
But if you have an initiative that is specifically about boycotting Chicago!

Sharon
Well we have no recourse, do we? Specially if there are people out there like you, saying that we feel inferior to Chicago or whatever. I think that your way of thinking just reveals your own personal inferiority complex. You of all people, Scott!

Scott
(sarcastically laughing at her)
What do you mean “I, of all people”?. I am sorry, but you are the one with the inferiority complex, not me. You are the one who doesn’t want to acknowledge the outside just because the outside doesn’t acknowledge you.

Sharon
Well, if that is true, how more pathetic is it to be like you, who is totally ignored by the outside and then disregards his own city as a revenge. Last time you contributed to Artforum was in 1981, and you pretend you have an international critic career? Give me a break!

Scott
You are just jealous…

Sharon
I don’t sit around pontificating about other people’s psychologies, pretending that I am above the rest. I only value what I have. You have a disregard for what is yours, and that is pitiful.

Scott
How do you know that I disregard what I have?

Sharon
When you are critical of everyone, when you think that everyone else is pathetic, when nothing is good enough for you, doesn’t that say something about the psychology of that person? I mean, ever since we co-curated the Peoria Invitational in 1987…

Scott
I can’t believe you are going to bring that up again…

Sharon
Scott: at that event you brought this awful German artist or whatever, who was the worst of the whole show, and you pushed and pushed to give him the first prize just because you wanted to look international and because no one understood the work. And the caterpillar piece by Archie Phillips did not even get an award because of you…

Scott
Well yes, I thought it was a very derivative piece! And I still do. Even if Archie won’t talk to me again since that day.

Encarnacion
I think we need to backtrack here…

Scott (to Sharon)
You know, I can’t believe you are telling me this. You know nothing about conceptual art! You can’t lock yourself in a room. There is a world out there. People were furious that he won just because he was not from Peoria.

Sharon
Well, you may know a lot, but are in total denial about yourself.
How many shows have you curated internationally in the last ten years?

Scott (who has no answer)
I think this is just ludicrous… that is no way to judge what I do…

Sharon
And yet, who is the person who bashes Peorian art more than anyone, and who at the same time, every time there is an opportunity for someone to talk about Peorian art, there you are, first in line. Look at yourself, you are sitting right here. The expert on Peorian art psychology telling us that Peorian art sucks, who hates Peorians and himself.

Pablo
But then, Streeter’s audacity reached a high point. He started claiming land that was already owned by the Palmers as his own, So things finally escalated to a point where it was critical to evict the Captain and his people. Streeter raised a small army to defend the Independent District of Lake Michigan.  500 policemen from the city of Chicago surrounded the district and attacked the army. And the great battle for the independence of the State of Lake Michigan took place.  15 people died in total. Streeter was captured and finally evicted.  But he would continue fighting for his land in the courts until the day of his death.

The opening of the Michigan Avenue Bridge in 1920 catapulted Streeterville into the most prime real estate in Chicago.  Having been kept relatively vacant for decades because of the constant litigation, the land was still under dispute when the construction boom began.

Sharon
(after a brief silence, in a more reflective and melancholic mood)
I have a dream of an artworld that truly belongs to Peoria and makes it special.  I feel that meaning is always stripped away from us, from what we actually own and are rightfully connected to. When I walk down the streets of downtown Peoria, I often think about this. Why do we have to exist in a world where someone else tells you how much what you have is worth? Peoria is our place, and even if it is not paradise, we need to make art about that place.

Scott
Just for the record Sharon, at that 1987 invitational— I know that German artist wasn’t necessarily that good. But I wanted to set an example, I wanted to show that we can be international too.  It has been frustrating to me that we always have to remain local. I am a Peorian too, and I also want to claim something of my own that I can be proud of. I also wanted Peoria to be the center of the world.

Sharon (Who did not even pay attention to Scott and is turning confessional, in tears almost)
I am from Ohio, actually. I went to art school in Cleveland. I always wanted to move to Chicago. And I did, when I was nineteen. It was an awful experience, living in a horrible neighborhood in a rickety apartment with mice. It was not welcoming at all. I hated Chicago ever since. Peoria was not in the plan, but one day I landed here, I got a job here after that and never left. Maybe there is something about this place that makes us never wanting to leave. If you excuse me.
(leaves)

Pablo
Streeter moved to a houseboat on the Calumet River in  East Chicago, Indiana with his third and last wife, Emma Lockwood.

Before he died, rumor has it that he wrote a cryptic letter to his “subjects of the Independent State of Lake Michigan”. According to some of these accounts, that must not be trusted, the letter said: “Fellow citizens of our State: I shall soon leave your company, as the infirmities of age catch up with me. I sorely regret not being able to return your land to your rightful hands. God knows that I fought to the best of my abilities for our land rights. But regardless how many people try to strip us away from our lawful possession, and how many buildings may be imposed, the spirit of that site will always be ours, and the land shall carry our name, and our mark, for the ages to come”.

George Wellington Streeter died on January 24, 1921.  His body was sent back to Chicago and hundreds of people went to pay his respects to him.

Streeter’s land ran from Oak Street to the Chicago River, and extends from Pine Street to Lake Michigan, and is the place where Navy Pier, the Hancock building, the Magnificent mile and the Drake Hotel now stand. Who would know that the heart of this city would have been founded by this eccentric man, that it was once claimed as a separate state, and that the name of this neighborhood would end up coming after the illegal squatterer and not after the legal owner?

You may think that Streeter was insane, but maybe he was vindicated by his claims of ownership, of place. The place that he once claimed as his own, is now named after him, –Streeterville—
and not after those who had purchased the land.

Identity lies in between where we happen to be and where we want to be in our minds. We create mental places out of the physical places.  We divide our territory in parts, we plant whatever we like in it. We also can put a fence around it and claim it as our own. Sometimes it doesn’t really belong to us, but we seek for ownership anyway, because ownership means identity. It is natural to claim something as your own. It helps you affirm who you are. But you need to remember that no piece of land is truly yours. And that legacy is entirely in your mind, and maybe carried along in the minds of others.

Encarnacion
Thank you so much for joining us. Next week we will address the subject of  “What is the spirit of Chicago art”.
(leaves)

Pablo
Which makes me think, it is our stubborn embracing of a reality as our own that eventually will make us transcend who we are.
We all are Streeter, because when we arrive to life we have no set place in it, and it is up for us to accept the place where we are, which is a combination perhaps of a place in the world, and a place in our minds. And like Streeter, like an artist, the place that once existed in his mind became the place that now exists in our lives.
(leaves)

Scott (last one sitting at the table, slowly picking up his papers, meditative. He stands up and prepares to leave. He stops mid-way, looking back at the room)
I really thought his work was good. You know, that German artist. I thought he was so much better than the caterpillar.
(pause)
I guess the caterpillar was OK too.
(exits)

Performance of Panamerican Anthem at Ellis Island, May 5, 2006

(click below for music)

panamerica-2

The Panamerican Anthem / Himno Panamericano is a composition written by Pablo Helguera for The School of Panamerican Unrest project.  It is an anthem written in the style of the XIXth century national anthems to invoke the notion of Panamerica as a country. The anthem was sung at a ceremony at every stop of the project (www.panamericanismo.org)

El himno panamericano es una composición escrita por Pablo Helguera para el proyecto La escuela panamericana del desasosiego. El himno fue escrito en el estilo orquestal del siglo XIX en la época en que se escribieron la mayoría de los himnos de las Américas, con el fin de reafirmar la noción de “Panamérica” como una entidad meta-nacional. El himno fue entonado en cada parada del proyecto (www.panamericanismo.org)

(english version below)

De los viejos Andes a los grandes lagos

Se inscribe la sombra de Panamérica,

Tierra de deseos y grandes percances

De grandes promesas y oscuros misterios

Hemisferio amante de ideales alados.

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

Pero en mí resonará

La voz hemisférica

Y aquellos fallidos sueños

Harán fortalecer

A mi paisaje interior

que es Panamérica.

De sus hondas minas a sus anchos ríos

Hemos extraviado a nuestra  Panamérica

Veo su olvido entre sus emblemas

en sus monumentos públicos y anónimos

en su inconsciente, sangre en sus banderas

Y su historia errante veo pasar

siempre interrogante es mi Panamérica.

 00

From the ancient Andes, to its glorious mountains

I will always praise the soul of Panamerica

From its fierce-some nature to its tragic power

I praise our great land of promise and deception

Mother of our nations and hopeful beginnings

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

pero en mí resonará

la voz hemisférica

Although we may loose our spirit

In finding our true self,

Always will remain in us

The name “Panamerica”

From its greater rivers, to its wondrous valleys

We shall not forget the name of Panamerica,

Greater than an a country, nation of all nations

In blood and in spirit part of all our people

Single voice of millions, single land of glory.

Through its breathing landscape I’ll go by

Always deep in secret is my Panamerica.

A (failed) project for Jamaica Flux,

Jamaica Arts Center, Jamaica Queens (2004)

promotional billboard of the project

This public art project attempted to introduce an urban myth into the social fabric of Jamaica Queens: a food product that was the mixture of a Chinese and Mexican tradition, invented by a supposed Mexican-Chinese immigrant: a tamal with a fortune inside. While the promotional campaign of the product did exist, the actual food product never materialized on the streets.

]]> http://pablohelguera.net/2004/07/fortune-tamales-2004/feed/ 0 http://pablohelguera.net/2003/11/la-entranable-transparencia-2003-ensayo-sobre-la-habana/ http://pablohelguera.net/2003/11/la-entranable-transparencia-2003-ensayo-sobre-la-habana/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2003 03:41:47 +0000 admin http://pablohelguera.net/?p=750 Pablo Helguera

La entrañable transparencia

(Extravíos artísticos por La Habana)

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

Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos

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

LP Hartley, The Go-Between

Para Marta

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

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

**

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nueva York, noviembre, 2003

Luis Ignacio Helguera (1962-2003)

Pablo Helguera

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

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

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

BALLOON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bat at Midday

To Pablo Helguera

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

–
Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green Patios

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacaranda

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

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

Masks

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

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

Scrap of Film

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Zurich, May 2003

Video made for the exhibition Estacionamientos (1998), a show that showed the works of 14 fictional artists, including Uta Glickman. The video, made in the form of a bad telenovela, has the characters quoting sections from the Mexican constitution.

Video hecho para la exposicion Estacionamientos (1998) un proyecto que consistió en la presentacion de la obra de 14 artistas ficticios, incluyendo la supuesta autora de este video, Uta Glickman. el video, hecho a manera de una mala telenovela, muestra a los actores recitando secciones de la consitución mexicana.

Estacionamientos / Parking Zones

Real Disquietude

James Elkins

(Essay written for Pablo Helguera’s exhibitions Estacionamientos/Parking Zones, presented at Tallería espacio cultural, Mexico City, 1998) 

Obra de Ramiro Yáñez Virgen, 1998

Artistic practice in the Duchampian tradition [has] come to provide the most important venue where demanding philosophical issues [can] be aired before a substantial lay public. –Thomas Crow

What the historian Thomas Crow has to say about the “Duchampian tradition” applies very exactly to Pablo Helguera’s recent work, where two different kinds of philosophic questions come together in a way that is only possible, so far, in visual art. On the one hand, Helguera is interested in questions of identity: specifically, how identity is wrested from a person, so that his own innermost self seems to belong to someone else, or even to a collective of people’ and how identities are built by collections of the most trite and conventional objects, like plastic, dirt, and childhood toys. On the other hand, he is concerned with the artistic tradition, and how it might be possible to balance the art world’s continuous demands for newness against its equally stringent requirement that an artist develop a recognizable and reliable signature style.

            These are complicated matters, and it may help to set out the essential questions as clearly as possible. There are two questions of identity, and two of artistic style.

1 When it comes to seem as if your own innermost self is alien, as if you don’t think your own thoughts, then how do you continue to think? When you begin to wonder if you are really comprised of several alternate identities (“heteronyms,” in Fernando Pessoa’s work, or even “multiple personalities”) then what does it mean to think or say anything, to claim any thought or emotion as your own?

2 Can this be solved by looking at trivial things, by concentrating on your appearance, or on the facts of your resume? What kinds of deliberate evasions are we involved in saying that we know someone by how he looks, or what he remembers from a certain British hospital, or what has happened to him on the number 7 metro line? How frightened are we, as Jacque Lacan would say, of the real disarray of our psyches? Frightened enough to think nly of clothes, and toys, and places, and names, and never really of what we are?

3 The second question, of artistic style, also has two aspects. Despite the fact that many contemporary artists disavow it, the artworld is still very much run by the demands of the avant-garde, and as Clement Greenberg insisted, the avant-garde is always moving. Though postmodernists and pluralists deny it, there is new work and old work, revolutionary work and bourgeois work, and the avant-garde exerts continuous pressure on artists to reinvent themselves. No one is free to do what he wants, unless he wants the art world to leave him behind; and for the same reason, no work can merely repeat what has gone before. Even Sherrie Levine’s sculptures, paintings, and photographs are new: incrementally but decisively different from what came before them.

4 Yet, it’s also necessary for an artist to have a recognizable style. An artist has to be consistent enough, to stay put just enough, so that people can see what concepts, influences, tendencies, strategies, and forms tend to characterize his work. Without that stability, an artist’s work won’t be perceived as such: it will be seen as a collection of different people’s work, and it will fail to find a place in conversations about important art. This is a high-stakes game: Nietsche once remarked that if he hadn’t signed Also sprach Zarathurstra, no one in a thousand years would have realized it was the product of the same author that had written books like the Gotzendmmerung. The same could be said, in the twentieth century, of the works of Duchamp, Yves Klein, or George Brecht.

            These four issues are tangled together in the best recent work on identity, such as Helguera’s Estacionamientos. I set them out this way, school-book fashion, so that it is possible to see how they work against one another. If you feel strongly dissociated from yourself in a single position–say, the front of the avant-garde (the third issue). If you don’t trust superficial things like appearance (the second issue) then personal style (the fourth issue) is a sham, a “desperate lie,” as Spinoza said of ordinary confident self-knowledge.

            Part of what Crow means by saying artists can be “public philosophers” is that a visual art can bridge, or at least juxtapose, concepts that don’t yet fit together in a philosophy. Of the four issues I have named here, the first two normally belong to philosophy and the last two to art theory or aesthetics. Yet Helguera’s work shows how they fit together. Although philosophy and art theory do not countenance the fact, identity (the first and second issues) is indissolubly wedded to artistic style (the third and fourth issues). In fact–I have argued this elsewhere–it is impossible to understand one without the other. In Estacionamientos, artistic style is personal identity, and when one is absent so is the other.

            Successful artworks can make unexpected connections between philosophic ideas, and they can also do more: they can break down the distinction between philosophy and non-philosophy, and they can refuse to see the differences between the two. Philosophers tend to divide the exposition if ideas from the display of ideas: Wittgenstein said a work either shows concepts or it tells them. But interesting visual art declines that opposition. We shouldn’t forget that the original act of self-alienation, Arthur Rimbaud’s “I am another,” was uttered by a poet. Philosophic texts like Who Comes After the Subject? Which has contributions by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, and monographs like Paul Ricoeur’s sober and thoughtful book Oneself as Another, are the products of lucidly reflexive writers, people who have been largely untouched by the schisms they describe. If there is a weakness in Crow’s approach, it is that the artwork might come perilously close to being identified with philosophy: interesting contemporary artists might become interesting by virtue of their position in relation of some avant-garde, or some philosophic problem.

            If there is a weakness in artistic production that leans toward philosophy, it is when the artist seems not to be creating or experiencing as much as philosophizing. There is a moment in Pessoa’s book of Disquietude – an odd moment, a moment that made me stop reading altogether and close the book. It’s an early fragment, dated 24 march 1930, but it comes after some amazing passages in which Pessoa – under the literary pseudonym of Bernardo Soares – reveals how little he knows, how little he knows, how little he feels, how little he wants to feel. Those passages are as honest ad open as in any literature – or so it seem. I believe Pessoa when he says things like “My soul is impatient with itself… its disquietude is always increasing and always the same.” But then there’s the entry for 24 March 1930, where Pessoa has Soares say “I passively re-read…those simple lines by Caeiro that naturally result from the smallness of the village… Lines like these, than seem to sprout of their own accord, cleanse me of the metaphysics that I automatically tack onto life.” When I first read this passage, I went cold. Here was an author exploring his inner life with astonishing precision, someone full of insights and unforgiving honesty; and then he claims to be re-reading lines by Caeiro, who is none other than himself! Suddenly, the entire Book of Disquietude becomes a lie: I can no longer trust a single insight, a single perception, a single confession. It doesn’t help that the book is supposedly by Bernardo Soares, because Soares is nearly forgotten after the first few pages: obviously this is a book by a man named Fernando Pessoa. And it won’t do to say that Pessoa knows that he cannot really get away with pretending to passively “re-read” lines he himself has written, or that he is using this entry in order to distance his Book of Disquietude from himself, because nothing in the passage, or in the many similar ones throughout the Book of Disquietude, ever hints that the book is anything but perfectly honest. The passage breaks the entire book, breaks it apart from all of its experiences and perceptions, and tears us from Pessoa in a way that Pessoa himself did not comprehend. Pessoa has fooled himself, deeply, and out of a deep need. Il est un autre, so much so that he does not see it clearly himself. This passage is also the saddest in the book, because it shows how desperately Pessoa needs his “heteronyms,” and how rooted his insecurities were: they reached even deeper than his most trenchant philosophic confessions about disquietude, pessimism, and meaninglessness. His needs went under his philosophy, beneath the metaphysics he “tacked on” to his life.

            This is a fragmentation of the self, a stylelessness, a lack of identity, that is profoundly at odds with simple consciousness and simple art. Pablo Helguera’s work raises the same troubling questions. Of course Helguera made this exhibit: if you’ve read this far you have seen that. But why? This is not an exercise in philosophy, like Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Ricoeur knew full well he was only finding words for experiences he had not had, experiences which were outside philosophy. With artworks, it is different. The questions do not exist as such, because the work is tangled in them. If Estacionamientos could be made into a series of questions, it would be philosophy: but it is Helguera’s life, and he is still in the middle of it. That is real disquietude.

James Elkins is Associate Professor, Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His books include The Poetics of Perspective (Cornell University Press); The Objects Stare Back: On the Nature of Seeing (Harcourt Brace); Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts: On Art History as Writing (Penn State Press), as well as many other essays and articles.

Bibliography:

Crow, Thomas, “Critical Reflections,” Artforum (9c.1997): 104–105.

Elkins, James, “Style,” article in Dictionary of Art (New York, Grove Dictionaries, 1996).

Elkins, James, Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997).

Ricouer, Paul, Oneself as Another.

Pessoa, Fernando, Book of Disquietude.

Who Comes After the Subject? Edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).