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

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

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

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

D. Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan

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

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

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

Excerpt from the beginning of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

[Exhibition text]

BEAUTY FOR ASHES

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

Isaiah 61:3

To Robert Rosenblum

(1927-2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pablo Helguera

New York City

May 2010

Ninguno de nosotros queríamos ir a la posada de la casa del Simio

pero a todos nos obligaron, pues habían preparado según ellos una danza

lidereada por Rayek. Nadie nos había preparado para lo que pasaría esa

noche nefasta. Deberíamos haber sospechado cuando vimos que los vellos

púbicos del Simio servían de heno para el pesebre, y bajo las linternas

rojas nos esperaba en la puerta la china que se perdió. Las cobijas

eléctricas de la tienda de junto estaban de barata. Yo siempre había

querido una cobija eléctrica, pero me dió pena comprar una entonces y

entrar a la casa con la cobija bajo el brazo. Me dolía el estómago de

los nervios pero no hicimos caso y entramos (yo y el Bolillo), donde nos

recibió el ruido de las frituras y el rumor de todo el grupo de gente

que ya había llegado. Llegaron los borregos amaestrados que comenzaron a

cantar villancicos feos pero conocidos. Hacía un frío Finlandés, pero no

había samobares ni se iba a organizar una sesión de sauna obligatorio,

como lo había prometido el Simio; (yo sólo había ido para ver a las

chavas desnudarse) y yo me deprimí de inmediato. Siempre eran así estas

cosas, que se anunciaban como los grandes eventos y terminaban siendo

las fiestas más aburridas. Los mazapanes sabían a rayos pero nos tuvimos

que aguantar a que se presentara el programa, que comenzaría con la

danza de Rayek, seguiría por el show mediocre de la Suprema Filósofa (

que no sabía actuar pero que todos se lo perdonaban porque tenía buen

cuerpo, porque siempre llevaba ropa interior roja y porque sus

presentaciones siempre terminaban en strip tease) y la conferencia final

sobre las moscas por el profesor Heidegger con diagramas y todo. La

atracción adicional que había prometido el Simio era subirnos a ver a su

tía catalana, loca y anciana, que había sido diva en 1918 y que siempre

cantaba encerrada en su cuarto. Eran otros tiempos, esos. La leche ya no

se vendía en recipientes de plomo. El simio había hecho un bello pesebre

con patos de hule y esponjas rosas, pero algo le faltaba para acentuar

el espíritu navideño. En realidad algo muy importante faltaba, pero los

organizadores de la posada no parecían, o querían, advertirlo. Pronto

comenzó a prepararse todo para la danza de Rayek que se estaba alistando

en el baño. “Es que usa cinco capas de maquillaje y se viste como Walter

Mercado”, dijo el Simio. En ese momento comenzó a llegar el ponche, del

que todos nos comenzamos a servir. A mí no me gusta el ponche y no lo

probé (era obligatorio tomar, pero yo nada más hacía como que tomaba),

aunque el Bolillo dijo en ese momento que el ponche tenía un sabor

lejano a astringosol. Recuerdo que en ese momento le comenté al Bolillo

algo así como que este tipo de reuniones ya no tenían ningún sentido,

que hace diez años nos divertíamos un montón pero que ahora todo parecía

forzado y que el Simio era un pobre diablo. El Bolillo dijo algo así

como que valía la pena tan solo para ver a la Suprema Filósofa, que

todavía estaba muy bien y que no había engordado tanto como las otras

chavas, y que seguramente ella era la única razón por la que el Simio

organizaba estas cosas en su casa.

Pero en medio de uno de los villancicos, alguien lanzó un alarido, que

se combinó con los cantos de los borregos. Abriendo temerosamente la

puerta del baño, se vio a Rayek tirado en el suelo, vestido

efectivamente como Walter Mercado, pero muerto y con la cabeza metida en

el escusado, flotando. ¿Quién fue el maldito? Gritó furioso el Simio.

Todos corrieron a ver el nefasto crimen. ‘Nadie puede salir– dictaminó

la Suprema Filósofa, que no advertía que la temperatura estaba subiendo

desproporcionadamente en la casa, a pesar de que las gotas de sudor

corrían deslizándose por sus senos levantados por su pushabras rojo.

“Hace calor”, murmuró la china que se perdió, pero inmediatamente el

Simio le soltó una bofetada con una licuadora – la misma con la que

había hecho el ponche. “Aquí nadie se me alebresta”, dijo como caudillo,

mientras todos (incluyendo los becerros) guardaban silencio, con

excepción de la tia anciana que seguía cantando en catalán. Mientras,

el profesor Heidegger comenzaba a impacientarse por no poder dar su

conferencia sobre las moscas, y dijo: “no llamen a la policía: hay que

seguir con el programa”. Ante el azoro de todos, el Simio estuvo de

acuerdo y nos ordenó que tomáramos nuestros asientos, que el show debía

de continuar y que después de tanta planeación la muerte de Rayek no

podía venir a joderlo todo. El calor era ya insoportable, y no había más

que ponche agrio que todos seguían tomando nomás por no dejar. Se

decidió que el programa iba a cambiarse y que antes de la presentación

de la Suprema Filósofa se presentaría la conferencia del profesor

Heidegger (de haber sido de otra manera, todos nos habríamos ido antes).

Se apagaron las luces y Heidegger comenzó a mostrar transparencias de

moscas africanas y polacas. La Suprema Filósofa se sentó a mi lado, con

su coquetería de siempre, restregándose contra mi muslo y ante el seguro

enojo del Simio, que estoy seguro que me veía de lejos. Heidegger usaba

su tono de voz cansado y monótono para describir las relaciones sexuales

entre las moscas, lo cual daba paso a que todos perdiéramos la

concentración y nos pusiéramos a pensar en el siguiente acto,

imaginándonos repetidamente a la Suprema Filósofa quitándose su brasier

rojo. La conferencia llevaba unos cuarenta minutos, y entre la monotonía

de la voz de Heidegger y los borregos que ya se habían desbandado por

la casa, nadie había advertido que la china que se perdió, tirada en el

suelo, estaba tomando poco a poco el color de la cara de Rayek. De

hecho, y a pesar de la oscuridad, sentí que todos comenzaban a

empalidecer ante mis ojos, incluido el Bolillo, y yo comencé a presentir

que la gente a mi alrededor comenzaba a adquirir un adormecimiento que

iba más allá del aburrimiento normal de una conferencia sobre moscas. Al

tocar el brazo del Bolillo y sentirlo totalmente frío y duro, al igual

que el de la Suprema Filósofa que estaba sentada a mi izquierda,

comprendí lo que estaba pasando. Con mucho cuidado, comencé a calcular

mis opciones. El Simio estaba cruzado de brazos, parado al fondo del

cuarto, listo para forzar en su asiento a quien quisiera escapar. Por

fortuna, el cable del proyector pasaba por debajo de mi silla, que a la

vez estaba cerca de la ventana que daba al patio. Mientras Heidegger

comenzaba a hacer un paréntesis para hablar sobre los moscos, en espacio

de un segundo jalé con toda violencia el cable, que no sólo apagó el

proyector sino que lo hizo caer violentamente sobre el suelo y alebrestó

a los borregos – ya todos los demás estaban muertos – y el Simio exclamó

algo en el momento en el que me arrojé a la ventana hacia el patio.

Corrí con todas mis fuerzas mientras advertí que sangraba y que alguien

estaba persiguiéndome, pero libré la barda de la casa, pasé la tienda de

cobijas eléctricas y corrí hasta el metro más cercano, oyendo de lejos

la voz desquebrajada de la tía que cantaba una canción de amor de una

zarzuela catalana, temiendo por mi vida, pero más que nada entristecido

por la estupidez del Simio, que nunca supo expresar sus sentimientos por

la Suprema Filósofa y al que lo único que se le tenía que ocurrir fue

envenenar el ponche para tratar de recuperar inútilmente una época de

experiencias colectivas.

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.

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

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

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

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

paradise-ii_freedman

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg was presented in October 2008 in downtown Manhattan as the inaugural exhibition of the alternative space Forever & Today. For a month, the gallery was turned into a card-reading parlor into which street visitors would enter and pay for a card reading.

Visitors were given a text that described the process of the reading of the cards and the history of the problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg.  (see below)

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg

(An Accompanying Text That Does Not Explain Anything)

NYC

2008

Throughout his eighty years of life, Immanuel Kant never traveled beyond the outskirts of his native Königsberg. His absence of travel experience, which even in his time and for a person of his stature were unusual, and yet for the philosopher this was most decidedly not a reflection of a sedentary spirit. It certainly was never apparent to his students, who usually were impressed by his detailed descriptions of European cities and his erudite knowledge of world affairs.  We are also told by De Quincey and Wasianski that Kant also was a constant stroller, and had such a rigorous and precise walking schedule after dinner that his neighbors would adjust their clocks when the philosopher passed by.

Kant placed great importance to periods of silence and reflection. During his entire adult life, and particularly during a period known as his “silent decade” when he wrote The Critique of Pure Reason, the philosopher would spend his evening strolls reflecting upon what he had read earlier in the day. When Kant would return home, he would sit in his study and spend some time reading, and continue his reflections while looking out the window looking at the old tower of Lobenicht.

Kant’s walking path is not described by his biographers, but in late XVIIIth Century Königsberg it would have been hard not to include its various bridges, which join two islands and each other with the mainland. It would also be hard not to imagine that Herr Kant, while crossing them, would not have thought more than once about the famous problem of The Seven Bridges of Königsberg. The problem was to prove on whether it is possible to follow a path that crosses each bridge exactly once and return to the starting point. The solution to the problem was provided during Kant’s youth by the Swiss scientist Leonhard Euler, the preeminent mathematician of the Eighteenth century. Euler, who introduced much of the terminology of modern Mathematics and Physics, proved in 1736 that it was impossible to cross the seven bridges of Königsberg in a continuous path only once. He reformulated the problem in abstract terms, creating a graph that eliminated all features of the problem except the list of landmasses and the bridges connecting them. Next he observed that during any walk in the graph, the number times one enters a non-terminal vertex (or bridge) equals the number of times one leaves it. Since (in this case) at most two landmasses can serve as the endpoints of a putative walk, the existence of a walk traversing each bridge once leads to a contradiction.

Euler’s solution to The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is generally considered as a foundational theorem that led to the birth of Topology and Graph Theory, which is in turn the guiding principle of modern computation. Euler’s thought, in a larger sense, was influential in Kant as he developed a philosophy that countered skeptical empiricism and used logic to arrive to an absolute moral and spiritual laws.

Königsberg suffered three stages of destruction. The first stage took place in 1944, when the British Royal Air Force raided the city. The second stage was an assault of the Soviet Army in April 1945.  In 1946 the city was ceded to the Soviet Union and its name was changed to Kaliningrad under the Postdam Agreement. The third period of destruction lasted from 1945 until the 1980s. The ideological task of that period, set by the Soviet government, was the construction of a new Russian city. This task presupposed the deliberate extermination of everything reminiscent of the German/Prussian past. Traits of the old Königsberg recognizable in its ruins ought to have been erased. Blocks of buildings as Kneiphof and Altstadt, the northern part of Vorstadt and southern Lobenicht were demolished almost completely.

The present card system functions around the principle of establishing a topology of the present by laying the foundations of the past, in the form of four figurative “landmasses” that become the primary set of four cards: The Present, the Final Outcome, The Past, and The Unresolved Past. Further, and establishing an Eulerian Circuit of sorts, seven cards are set, as bridges onto the primary cards to establish the interconnections between causes and effects.

THE LAYING OF THE CARDS

The cards are to be laid out following the original structure of the city of Konigsberg.

The first four cards are laid out in a cross format. Each corresponds to a landmass, or, in the symbolism of the cards, to yourself in the present situation faced with the past, the final outcome, and the unresolved past.

Each one of the seven cards that will bridge these four components will be laid down.

The first card to be laid is the one bridging Yourself to the Past.  This card helps establish the way in which the past influences your present situation, and the way in which it becomes a positive or detrimental factor in influencing the present situation.

The second card to be laid is the one bridging The Past with The Unresolved Past. This second card helps establish the way in which that which is unresolved came about, and what are the origins of this issue that has not yet been addressed.

The fourth card to be laid bridges The Past with the Third Bridge.  This is the second most significant card, as it connects the lower half of your life and your situation, summarizing the nature of the question, the issues of the past, and its relationship to the present.

The fifth card to be laid is the one bridging The Unresolved Past to Yourself. This card helps clarify the situation or reason by which that which remains unresolved may become or is currently an issue to be considered in the present situation. Often this card helps reveal the presence of a person who is important in this situation.

The third card to be laid is the one bridging The Unresolved Past with the Final Outcome. It is the first bridging card that connects to the future, and the one that may lay the foundation to understand in which sense the way in which previous events may link to what is to come.

The sixth card to be laid is the one bridging Yourself in the Present Situation with The Final Outcome.

The seventh and last card is the one bridging the third bridging card with the Final Outcome, providing the last statement of the system.

CARD NOMENCLATURE

1. The Lighthouse

This card relates to being a spectator or witness of an event. It connects with the ability to see from far away, perhaps see the future with clarity. The private becomes public. It is a card of revelation. Someone or something that is guiding us. Looking for the comfortable home, comfort food.

1. Cat’s Cradle

This is the card of childhood games. Old lessons that we learned in school. This card is often connected to family problems, and also to how we are attracted to those problems as adults. This card represents competitiveness, our place in the ambiguity of being dependent or being independent.

1. Pillory

A problem that we don’t seem to be able to solve by ourselves. An embarrassing situation that is made public in front of others. Issues that apparently are simple to others but not to ourselves. Lack of confidence, a labyrinth without a labyrinth, a complex situation that we are not even able to describe or articulate.

1. Temple

This card represents our inner sanctuary, our personal memory: the places (periods of time or physical spaces) that are important to us. Damage that has been done to us, to someone or to something that in a way has also been comforting or has brought positive things (the good that has been brought by something bad).

1. Consent

This is the connecting card of this deck. It stands for the outer layer of everything. It also stands for veiled vanity: our inability to see makes us very comfortable.

1. The Windmill

This is the card for the construction of imaginary places. It is the card of the idealists, and stands for the construction of dreams.

1. Marienbad

Déjà vu, that which is repeated. This card stands for the presence of something or someone in our lives but we are not certain that it is there. We think we are being observed, and we feel we are in an unfamiliar place, but at the same time the sense of unfamiliarity is oddly familiar.

1. Holiday.

Looking inside to what nourishes us. Those remote places of comfort, those places where we feel very comfortable, places of escape while we know there is war going on elsewhere cow’s milk and all those domestic commodities.  A possible danger that is hovering over ourselves. Oblivion. It is a card of denial.

1. Actor

There is something that we can’t detect. Don’t lose your face in spite your nose. Follow your instincts. There may be a storm coming up soon and you may not realize it at this moment.

1. Station

The light at the end of the tunnel. The end of a sickness. Exchange. Coming out from dark to light. This is a transitional card.

Generally, something very difficult or very bad is ending. But you could also be imagining that things are improving. Slow game.

1. Martir

We never know the mechanisms of history. Enigmas that are hard to decipher. There is a story behind of which we will never know the true details. This is the card for the conspiracy theorists. It is the card of the absurd decisions and the message that there are decisions that you can never back track from.

1. The Tomb of the Algonquians

Exploring an unknown place. This is the time to analyze your own past, to talk to the elders, or to whoever is the person that has the institutional memory, because there it is where you will find the clues. This is the place where some things are incredibly ephemeral and other stay forever, like death. This is the card of the in between place between the cradle and the mausoleum, between complete ignorance and total knowledge, the card that tells you that both are so close to each other that it is easy to miss them.

1. Nursery

A place where things originate. But it is an artificial place, and it is a card for those who feel vulnerable.  Things are growing but could die very easily. It is possible to make things flourish if one knows how to nurture them, but one has to be careful and caring. It means that one has the ability to make things work, but that this ability does not come in a spontaneous manner. It is the card of the good student, but not for the ones who are naturally talented.

1. Extinction.

Something that is quickly going away or has already left. This is the card that, more than the others, establishes the sense of passing of things. But like in sunsets or breaks of dawn, there is something revelatory in that moment, whether it is a good or bad moment. We will learn a lot of things about ourselves by fleeting things.

1. River-bed

This card stands for the denouement of events. Something is going to finish, and that which was not very clear will now be clear in all its mechanisms. It will not finish with a whimper, but with a bang. It is not a positive card, and may describe a situation that has reached a critical point.

1. Music Room

This is a card that stands for all that we were taught. It also stands for sensibility and the transformation of something into art. It connects to the memory that music provides, and how it transports us to another time. That which contains time and memory, could be an object or could be a person. Melodic geography, how a place is constructed individually. This is the card for the talented and for the studious. Something is boring, and there is arduous work behind what you are trying to do.

1. Cicada

A card relating to a scene or a place where something unresolved happened. The underground again, things we cannot see. A ritual, a periodic occurrence that we may or may not be aware about, but that is connected with our own rhythms. The card points to secret rituals and to the fact that nature is always wiser than us. Things continue whether we are here or not in the world. This is the card for those in need for structure in their lives, and for the selfish- things are larger than what you think they are.

1. Turnstile

A card about the notion of rebound and walking in circles. Other people are making you go where you don’t want to go or where you have been already. You are in a vicious cycle. You are in love, or playing a pointless or dangerous game, and in any case you are a little lost, so it is time to reassess your values and your objectives.

1. Battle Horse

A card that relates to the notion of figurative blindness.  This is the card for those who think are experts but have a hard time questioning themselves. You have a particular talent or knowledge that you know how to exploit, but that also makes you weak or limits you because you cannot look for any other areas of value in your life. It does become a shield, a protective cocoon.

1. Beehive

A card that points to being driven by something deceptive or something that may prove to be costly. This is also a card for mirages, for the sense of having been illuminated, but instead having been deceived.

1. Umbrella

This card often points to something has come up that in other circumstances would have been very useful, but not now. This is the card for those with bad timing and who feel to be in a lonely situation. However, it is a card that speaks to those in a challenging situation but that have the abilities and the energy to overcome it. It is a card for those undergoing a dry spell and feeling that there is no real escape for the ordeal they are going through.

1. Chameleon

Depending on the position of this card, it is about someone’s transformation or the transformation of a situation.  It is a card for those who are in flux, and who are highly adaptable to change. It indicates a situation that is highly volatile, where it is equally possible that you may win or lose to a great degree. Normally people cannot appreciate your great adaptability, but that is because you are able to become invisible. It is a card for those who are able to blend in and can respond to their surroundings without being emotionally affected, who stay above the fray but at the same time are able to fit in.

Never seen species.

1. Concorde

Something finally has worked out or will be working out, but also this card is about the deals that lead nowhere. You may have made a business decision that has not or will not work out. Be careful about where you go.

1. Dinosaur

The card signals the end of something. Something hasn’t been explained, and events have taken place quite quickly, but still the main reason is very evident. There is someone behind this, and likely someone you know.

1. Bell

An event or series of events that are coordinated. This is a card for harmony and for announcing positive events, such as a wedding. You may have something positive with you but perhaps you are not announcing it properly to the rest of the world.

1. Swimmer

The swimmer is a character that perfects his abilities, but only to do one single thing.

This is the card for expertise, and for experts. The swimmer knows his objective, but at the same time suffers from lack of perspective and has a hard time looking at the big picture. This is a card for independent people.

1. Pendulum

Something needs to be measured. You are the measurement of the situation. You are the person whom others depend for their help and expertise, but you feel lost, and sometimes you don’t know who to trust. First children and only children correspond to this card.  You are an empiricist, someone who will only try things for oneself.

1. Well

Something is hidden within you or within a place that matters to you, and it is your duty to look for it and take it out in order to solve your problems. This is the card that calls for introspection.

1. Balloon

“Happiness lies high for us- it is the ultimate goal for man according to Aristotle. It lies high but sometimes like a balloon it descends upon us and we can reach it.” This is the card of the eccentrics and the adventurers, who often engage in wild goose chases and are very self absorbed.

1. Home.

This is the card for returns, the card that indicates that it is time to go back to where we came from, for whatever reason. It also indicates the completion of a journey, which usually seems to be the longest section of any trip. At this point we are naked, fragile, and in need of our families and the others.

1. Witch-hunt

This is the card for stupidity and ignorance, for rumors and hearsays, of superstition and isolation. It stands for all the things that you were told were true and for all the defects of your education and the place that educated you.

1. The Man with the Iron Mask

This is the card for outer shells, for the protective layers that we wear in order to escape or deny a certain reality.  The layers give us confidence, but they may also turn us into a monster. It may relate to a condition that we simply can’t control and we have to learn to live with.

1. Explorer

An unexpected situation has brought new insights. We have been forced to see something, he value of something or the bad aspects of something.

1. The Twin Kings

This is an ambivalent card: it may stand for two simultaneous strengths but also for a dilemma that we are having in our life. We have to choose and we don’t know which one is going to prevail.

1. Threshold

This is the card for all those who want to be on the other side or who want to be someone else. There is always something inaccessible to us, and we define ourselves in terms of how much we want to obtain that which is inaccessible to us.

1. The Lover

This is the card for the Platonists, those who think that love and art can coexist, that it is possible to find pure goodness. It is also the card that indicates mortality and points to the end of times, or to the fact that something has or must come to an end.

1. The Electric Storm

This is the card of the external forces, which becomes particularly significant when it appears in the context of a bridge to the past. It signals those events or circumstances beyond our control that greatly influence our decisions and our current situation.

1. Dream Fairy

Depending on the context, this card points to escapism and contradiction on the one hand, or the ability to think large and retain a positive outlook of the situation on the other. It stands for the ideals that we seek to accomplish.

1. Lion in Winter

The end of the game, and the wisdom that comes with it, is often the significance of this card. It is a card that points to our inner strengths gained by experience, and our ability to see the world better thanks to it.

1. Deus Ex Machina

This card, like #37, often represents someone’s community —whether family, friends, nation, etc. — and the way its history is playing a part in the question being asked.

1. Squirrel

This card stands for an action that is currently being made, a project that is being followed-through. It often indicates the need to change the means to an end, and to indicate the importance of foresight.

1. Morning

This is a highly psychological card. It often points to the need of exploring one’s childhood obsessions, or revisiting the early circumstances of the issue at hand. On other contexts, the card is about comfort and leisure.

1. Martir

This card brings forth that which has been sacrificed in order to obtain a particular benefit, some of which may be of a personal nature. It also points to a misleading incentive, or a false purpose for something that is being made. However, this card also establishes fortitude and determination.

1. Keys

This is an important card of the deck. It points to a gravitating force of a particular situation and often reveals the point where the answer to a problem lies. It presents the notion that the answers to a problem lie in the very nature of a particular place or person.  It is a revelatory card of travel and new encounters.

1. Vulture

This is a powerful card of warning and insight. Paired with The Lover and The Lion in Winter, also points to the end of a situation, to infinite insight, but also to our need to seek protection from something that may threaten us— the loss of a job, the loss of a friend, and other circumstances that may not benefit us.

1. Experiment

This is a card that strongly relates us to our dependence to the others and the tension between the way in which we are being seen and the others see us. The questioner in this case should reflect about this tension and the conflicts within it.

1. Venus

This is the card of fulfillment and desire.  Depending on the context, it may be pointing to a need to acknowledge the way in which an unconscious desire we have may be driving our actions, or perhaps how a selfish act influenced a situation. In some instances the card is about an unresolved relationship.

1. Turtle

This card is about gaining perspective of a particularly confusing situation that is taking place at the time. Things may look extremely difficult or confusing at the time, and this card calls for taking the high road pointing that there is always a means to resolve a problem. It is a reassuring card.

1. Last Act

A particular situation has arrived to its ultimate consequences.  This card is often related to conversations, speeches, arguments and debates that may have influenced us in some way as well as the situation we are inquiring about. It warns us about the way in which what actually happened is not how it will be remembered and establishes the distance between an event and the memory of it.

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

.

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

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

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

(excerpts of the book below)

Interview on the project

Information on Queens Museum Exhibition

 Title  at Jorge Pinto Books

Three excerpts from The Boy Inside the Letter

ORO NO SONORO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

(1992)

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

Pablo Helguera, Orizaba, 2008 Performance Still

Ignacio Helguera / Pablo Helguera - Village of Helguera, Cantabria, 1951 ektachrom slide/video still, 2008

Works premiered at the exhibition
The Lining of Forgetting
Weatherspoon Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina
February 10-May 25, 2008

http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu

Orizaba (2008) is a performance work that utilizes the traditional image visualization processes of the art of memory as a compositional technique to reconstruct the rooms of a house in Mexico City, where I spent the first four years of my childhood and of which I only retain fragmentary and suggested memories. The narrative, constructed as a poem with seven sections, establishes in the first section the images of twelve areas of the house with a number of corresponding images to each, and later developing in the subsequent sections with a visual and verbal variations of those images and spaces, in a similar way to the musical format of the fugue.

Twilight (2008) is a video that presents the ektachrome slides taken by my grandfather, Iganacio Helguera, in a trip he made to Europe shortly after World War II. With images of depopulated city views, sunsets and landscapes. The video contains four alternative narratives which can be heard together or separately, which include memory images from the memory systems of Giordano Bruno, an essay on the role of collective memory in Europe after the war, and the actual description of Ignacio Helguera’s tourist journey to Europe when he took these images. The fourth sequence integrates the previous three narratives, also again in the format of the fugue.

- P. H. 2008