Anoche (2012) two-channel video, 7min.

Quodlibet (Bellas Artes)

Exhibition at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

April 21- June14, 2012

opening April 20th, 7pm

http://www.palacio.bellasartes.gob.mx/index.php/cartelera/mpba

Quodlibet (Bellas Artes) takes on the history of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico’s foremost exhibition and performing arts center. Opened in 1934 after decades of construction and reflecting a variety of styles as a result of the hiatus created by the Mexican Revolution, the Palacio is a site charged with a complex past, having serving as stage for the most prominent figures of Mexican art as well as internationally. Helguera’s exhibition, a result of extensive research of Bellas Artes archives, includes the incorporation of objects from the theater’s little known and yet vast warehouses of Opera, Dance and Theater, housing objects from decades of past productions.

Ida de forma ( 2012). From the series "Album Histórico". acrylic and digital printing on canvas, 36"x52"

Incorporating musical composition formats, scriptwriting, and narrative pedagogical approaches into the gallery space, the exhibition consists in  a deliberately tendentious selection of several known and obscure anecdotes of this site and has made a narrative patchwork of them through the works in the show.  The term quodlibet, which refers to a musical composition that takes form with various melodies, refers to the idea that the construction of a nation’s cultural identity is dependent of physical stages where to enact it, and this process, always complex and prone to accidents, is made as much through canonization of artists and  works as through misunderstandings, misenterpretations and omissions, thus building a selective history that before we know it, becomes official. Quodlibet functions as an exercise in composition, mixing elements from official and personal histories, as an interpretive project that uses this building not only as a container but as performer of its own history.

Video still from "Anoche" (2012), two channel video, 7min.

Desarrollado como proyecto específico para el Palacio de Bellas Artes, Quodlibet reflexiona sobre la forma en que la identidad artística de una nación se va proyectando en espacios físicos, eventos, y obras artísticas concretas.  El proyecto parte de la historia del Palacio de Bellas Artes y de su peculiar significado para la historia cultural de México. Este recinto ha sido, por espacio de ocho décadas, un contenedor y escenario monumental de un sinfín de eventos, exposiciones, espectáculos y episodios a veces exhaustivamente documentados y en otras ocasiones totalmente perdidos o solo existentes como breves  pies de nota o historia oral. La exposición hace una selección deliberadamente tendenciosa  tanto de los capítulos conocidos como de las anécdotas mínimas del Palacio para efectuar un engranaje narrativo a través de instalaciones, video, pintura y obra en papel.

still from "Anoche" (2012), two-channel video installation, 7min.

En su investigación, Helguera ha hecho uso de los archivos existentes del Palacio así como de los objetos procedentes de las bodegas de las compañías de danza, teatro y ópera, todos ellos cargados de la historia de los espectáculos de donde proceden.   Quodlibet (término que se refiere a una composición musical que se compone de muchas melodías conocidas) alude al hecho de que, en palabras del artista, “la identidad cultural de una nación requiere de  escenarios físicos para irse construyendo, y este proceso, siempre accidentado y complejo, está constituido tanto de canonizaciones de artistas y obras como de malentendidos de lectura de nuestra historia, que incluyen el rescatar y eliminar fragmentos, rehaciendo cada vez el pasado con nuestra memoria selectiva.”  La presente muestra funciona tanto como un ejercicio de composición que mezcla elementos provenientes de la historia oficial y personal, sino como proyecto interpretativo, utilizando a este edificio mismo no solo como contenedor de historia sino como instrumento narrativo.

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

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

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

Figure from the Julsrud collection, Acámbaro

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

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

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

For more information:

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

http://www.philagrafika2010.org

WHAT IN THE WORLD / BOOK EXCERPTS

FRONTISPIECE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. THROUGH THE DRY ICE CURTAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

Exégesis del Conferencista

Performance-conferencia leída en el Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico, DF, con motivo de la Fiesta del Asno, que tomó lugar el  25 de julio del 2008. El siguiente es el texto de la conferencia-performance junto con las imagenes, varias de las cuales provienen de obras de la colección del museo.

Performance-lecture presented at the Museum Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, as part of the project The Feast of the Ass, which took place on July 25, 2008. Following is the full text of the lecture along with the screened images, many of which are from works from the museum’s collection.

Damas y Caballeros,

Los antiguos griegos tenían nueve musas: Caliope, la musa de la poesía heroica; Clío, de la historia; Erato, la musa de la poesía erotica, Euterpe, de la poesía lírica; Melpomene, la musa de la tragedia; Polimnia, la de la canción sagrada. Pero los griegos olvidaron una décima musa, que no era Sor Juana, sino la musa de los conferencistas de arte. Hablaremos hoy de aquella musa, y de como ella debe de ser invocada.

Qué significa dar conferencias sobre artes visuales? Puesto que el arte, es visual, cual es el objetivo de ponerle palabras, e inclusive, pretender que esas palabras explican, describen, o peor aun traducen, lo que uno esta viendo? Lo primero que debe de saber el conferencista es que el dar una conferencia es una tarea utópica, platónica, donde trazamos sombras de lo que es imposible entender de lleno. Hoy veremos qué debe de hacer el conferencista experto, como él se convierte en musa.

El conferencista experto entra a la sala de forma ceremoniosa. Su público lo aguarda, ansioso por una experiencia transformadora, a veces aburridos, porque otros los trajeron, porque necesitan una calificación, porque solo vienen a la fiesta, o porque son exploradores espirituales en busca de iluminación y de guía, o porque son críticos en busca de algo qué criticar. El conferencista sabe todo esto, y cuidadosamente, lentamente, seguramente, toma el escenario.

El escenario. El escenario se puede comparar a un acantilado, donde uno se siente desnudo como un pollo desplumado, siendo observado minuciosamente por el público. Es deber del conferencista el vencer este miedo y esta percepción.

El público por naturaleza es rebelde, y lo cuestiona todo. Por eso el conferencista debe de poner el orden estético, histórico, racional, entre la confusion intellectual que predomina en la sala.

Si el conferencista cumple su objetivo, logrará la confianza y la absoluta sumisión de su público, al grado que cualquier frase que salga de su boca sera considerada como una profesía sagrada.

El conferencista es un compositor, en el sentido clásico, construyendo su conferencia a la manera de una sinfonía, o de un edificio de corte clásico. Si está bien construida, la conferencia se vuelve un edificio perenne de memoria. Pero sin una fundación temática convincente,

una conferencia de arte se puede colapsar como una caja sin fondo, y el conferencista experto lo sabe. Algunas pueden estar huecas en el medio y quizá no sean de interés a nadie.

De manera que hay que hacer como haría un conferencista experto, y usar imagenes para hablar en metáforas, con el fin de entender qué es lo que constituye una gran conferencia y como se invoca a la musa de los conferencistas.

¿Qué es lo que espera el público de una conferencia de historia del arte? La respuesta es que muy poco.

La mayoría vienen con pocas expectativas, con la misma energía con la que uno asistiría a un velorio. Esto no es de sorprender, dado que la mayoría de los conferencistas, después de todo, muestran la misma pasión por su discurso que la de un cadaver.

Se tiene la preocupación entre el público que el conferencista lo cargue de datos, dándole toda clase de fechas, nombres, y definiciones extrañas de periodos y estilos y filósofos post-estructuralistas franceses para que los llevemos a cuestas indefinidamente, y los cuales se nos preguntarán al final de la presentación. Pero el conferencista experto lo sabe, y en vez de esto, se asegurará que la conferencia se sienta como

un paseo agradable por la playa, un viaje leve y refrescante a través de los horizontes y las sensuales olas de la historia del arte.

Pero esto no quiere decir que el proceso será fácil para el público. El buen conferencista se asegurará que el público se vea a sí mismo en el espejo, contemplando nuestros deseos, nuestros intereses y nuestros miedos, como explicaré.

Pero primero tenemos que determinar qué es lo que un conferencista experto NO debe de ser, y cómo podemos identificarlo. He aquí a continuación algunas categorías que hay que eludir.

Hay que cuidarse del conferencista autoritario, aquel con la voz monótona y dictatorial, con la cual nos da los datos, los títulos, las fechas y los estilos, la mayoría de los cuales olvidaremos después de algunos segundos. Cuando habla el conferencista autoritario, sentimos la presión de aprender por miedo. Nada de lo que le digamos al conferencista autoritario puede ser correcto. Aquellos que buscan una experiencia sadomasoquista, y sufren de síndrome de Estocolmo, quizá disfruten a este conferencista.

Está el conferencista miope, el que describe las imágenes tal cuales.

El conferencista miope tiene la dificultad de encontrar sus propias ideas, de manera que se se especializa en llenar sus conferencias de citas, y frases tales como “como Kant, diría, el arte es importante para la sociedad”, o “como estipula Gombrich, hay que analizar la pintura de hoy.” Al mostrarnos una pintura de una mujer de vestido rojo, el conferencista miope nos dirá: “esta obra representa a una mujer de vestido rojo.”

El conferencista solipsista tiende a ser un gran actor, que, como un mago, logra convencer a su público que solo él es su propio público, y que el publico que lo rodea no existe. Como resultado, el conferencista solipsista se abandona en los placeres de la autoescucha, elaborando y amplificando sus teorías. Debido a que los conferencistas solipsistas no se tienen que preocuparse de que sus conferencias le sean inteligibles a nadie mas que a ellos mismos, sus presentaciones adquieren un matiz curioso de fluir de consciencia, una lógica de sueño, moviendose de un tema a otro sin problema.

El público que asiste a las conferencias solipsistas deben de apreciarlas por su calidad textural, y no preocuparse por sentirse expluidos, puesto que todos, de hecho, estan siendo excluidos.

El conferencista aprehensivo es aquel que ha aceptado dar una conferencia pero que tiene pánico escénico y animosidad ante el público, prefiriendo escapar de ellos. Tratarán de imaginar a su público desnudo, sin éxito. Buscarán protección con todo lo que tengan, escondiendose detras del podio, sus powerpoints y sus notas, donde esconderán su cara como protección.

El conferencista evasivo puede ser muchos a la vez, sin ser ninguno de ellos en algun momento en particular, sin comprometerse a idea alguna, usualmente bajo el argumento de que todo argumento es relativo. El conferencista evasivo por lo general viene de “buena familia” y por consiguiente tiene mala educación , por lo que suele ser desagradecido con sus anfitriones, diciendo por ejemplo que no sabe por qué ha sido invitado a hablar sobre este u otro tema, que su asistente o su galería se equivocó preparando el powerpoint, que la estática del microfono lo distrae, que el agua que le dieron para beber no es Evian, que la impresora imprimió las páginas de la presentación en el orden equivocado, o que su gato se paró en su computadora, escribiendo frases o afirmaciones que no está preparado a explicar.

El conferencista infantilista es bueno, pero quizá demasiado bueno, para su público, mostrando un tipo de condescendencia que es similar al de una madre amamantando a su hijo, dandonos a entender que quiza algun dia llegaremos a saber tanto como él. Si uno ha olvidado lo que representaba estar en primaria, o si alquien quisiera saber lo que es estudiar en un orfanato católico, esta experirencia la puede proveer el conferencista infantilista.

Esta el conferencista nihilista, que busca destruir las ideas de todos los demas, sin proponer ninguna nueva, dejando al publico en un estado de vacio existencial.

Y finalmente tenemos al conferencista fast food, o tambien conocido como el conferencista seductor, oradores talentosos que nos embelesan con sus complejas y hermosas frases que parecen tener sentido y perfecta claridad. Sus explicaciones parecen iluminarnos, pero como la comida rapida, el sabor inicial rapidamente se torna en grasa, y como ese beso furtivo pasa de darnos placer a darnos confusion. Hemos olvidado todo, y nos hemos quedado con la impresion de habernos perdido el platillo principal.

Pero el conferencista experto sabe esto, y por ello utilizará su conocimiento para prevenir estas fatales tendencias que hemos descrito. El deberá de luchar primero contra

los demonios del powerpoint. Una vez hecho esto,

El Habrá de utilizar sus habilidades para envolver a su publico gradualmente en un mundo de fantasia.

De manera que en vez del beso furtivo, el conferencista deberá de

coquetear con nosotros, aventándonos una sandalia de conocimiento para comenzar la seduccion.

Acto seguido, el conferencista nos hará sentir relajados, como si estuvieramos compartiendo la más casual de las intimidades.

Con el conferencista experto lograremos visitar los pasajes más recónditos de la historia del arte,

Su voz habrá de capturar completamente nuestra atención al grado de sumirnos en un estado totemico de total concentración espiritual,

El fluir de sus conceptos, cual prodigioso río que crece, nos ayudará a romper con nuestros prejuicios históricos,

Y el crescendo de su narrativa  habrá de culminar, como una sinfonia, llevandonos a un éxtasis extremo, una explosión de claridades de relaciones entre ideas.

Sus palabras nos ayudarán a sentirnos para siempre transfigurados, como si hubiésemos pasado por un filtro de geometrías insospechadas,

El abrazo intelectual del conferencista no es ya el furtivo, sino el sincero, el cálido abrazo del verdadero amor por la historia del arte y sus ideas,

y al final de la conferencia, cuando el conferencista yace exhausto, podremos reflexionar sobre nuestra experiencia,

y como si despertásemos de un sueño, comprenderemos que una conferencia no es sino eso, una conferencia, y que la complejidad del mundo aún está ahí para que nosotros la desmenuzemos en persona,

al final del dia estaremos todos en el escenario, nutridos de los otros, y sabremos guiarnos a traves de nuestras circunstancias historicas y personales, apropiándonos del drama del arte como el nuestro, sabiendo que un mundo sin arte es un mundo sin ambiguedad,

La conferencia se convierte no ya en una hora de aire vacío, o un montón de palabras en un auditorio, sino en un lugar de la mente y del tiempo, donde se facilita una comunion de grupo.

Donde aprenderemos a usar nuestros ojos intensamente, sedientamente, obsesivamente, hasta que nos duela mirar,

Que compartamos por el momento la impresion de que somos parte de un juego de salon, en una conversacion con personas que vivieron muchos años antes y que sin embargo hablan de las mismas cosas,

Lo que el conferencista nos esta pidiendo que hagamos es que veamos por nosotros mismos. Mientras vemos a la obra y nos vemos a nosotros mismos, nos volvemos los actores, los modelos, y los narradores de la obra. Si en el mundo los roles siempre se alteran, por qué no en el arte? si al alterarlos descubrimos un poco más acerca de quienes somos.

Wittgenstein dijo que de aquello de lo que no se puede hablar, mejor es callarse. Pero si solo sabemos que no sabemos nada, y si sabemos que en el arte la verdad pura no existe, entonces hablar entre nosotros sobre arte se vuelve un proceso liberador. Y seamos quien seamos, nuestras palabras nos ayudarán a invocar a la musa.

aquella figura rara que debe de combinar conocimiento, ignorancia, teatro, magia, y sobre todo, sinceridad. Y sabemos que la hemos encontrado cuando e han invocado la fusion de las otras musas: la poesia heroica, la historia, la tragedia erotica, y la cancion sagrada.

Cierto, rara vez esta musa aparece, cada vez parece más extinta, a veces nos sentimos abandonados por ella, pero de vez en cuando, cuando al ver una obra nos entra un mensaje a la mente, cuando oimos un comentario y nos estremecemos levemente y nos inpiramos por algo que vimos u oimos, es entonces cuando sabemos que está ahí.

Artoons is a series of books of cartoons about the artworld (Volume I – January 2009; Volume II- October 2009). The cartoons have been published in many art publications internationally from Ireland to Brazil and new ones continue to appear on a regular basis in a number of web and print publications.  They were first developed for Artworldsalon.com, where they continue to appear on a regular basis.

http://www.pintobooks.com/illustratedbooks10Helguera.html.

“An artist, museum educator, and man about town (specifically, New York City), Helguera is an amateur anthropologist of the art world. (…) [Helguera’s] cartoons really do capture the foibles, ironies, and occasional stupidity of the art world with a clarity and economy that only a simple pen drawing and a short piece of text can achieve. They fill an important gap. Cartooning is rarely done in the art world (…) Maybe the problem isn’t the humor, but the truth. It may take years of sleuthing for Helguera, the anthropologist, to figure out why this is so. In the meantime, Pablo’s Artoons can do the talking for us.”

—From the foreword by Adrás Szántó

Poster for The Feast of the Ass, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, July 2008

The Feast of the Ass was a Transpedagogical event inspired in the medieval feast of the same name where all social roles were reversed as a donkey was brought into the church presiding as the pope. In a special event at the museum, an actual donkey was brought into the space and an evening ensued where non-curators presented curatorial projects, non-educators gave tours, non-critics provided criticism, and non-artists performed.  The presentations were the result of a week of workshops where these roles were discussed with more than 40 participants.

el asno en el carrillo / the Ass at the Carrillo

criticism panel with non-critics

[Comentario de Mauricio Marcín sobre la Fiesta del Asno en el museo Carrillo Gil]

¿Por dónde empezar? ¿Cuál es la orilla de una memoria? Ya sé. Unas orejas largas, puntiagudas y erectas. Un disidente se atreve a sostener que dos más dos es tres. Y entonces ¡a mirar la esquina! por burro. Pero luego los burros sirven, casi en el mismo sentido que los locos. Nos muestran las fronteras de la ética y de la moral. Nos muestran también las de la razón. Podríamos ver en un vagabundo de discurso repetitivo nuestro reflejo de elocuencia. Yo estoy bien, porque no soy como él.
A mi todo esto me parece muy frágil. Las fronteras y los centros.
En la Fiesta del Burro, todos éramos otros. Todos fuimos otros. Está bien dejarse ser otro. Pensemos por un segundo que estos cuerpos nuestros que miramos como unidad, de un momento a otro pueden mutar; drásticamente a cucaracha como Gregorio. Pero esa es sólo una de las posibilidades. Somos en potencia miles, cientos de miles, al mismo tiempo. El burro y el sabio, el elocuente y el mutismo. El amo y el siervo.

Mauricio Marcín, 2009

Installation view, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 2007

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

Está usted oyendo Radio Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 104.3 fm. Bienvenidos a esta edición especial del programa “Conservatorio de Lenguas Muertas”. Hoy es ocho de febrero del 2043.

Como parte de nuestra serie de historia de ciudades latinoamericanas, nuestro programa se centra hoy en la ciudad de Puerto Kissinger, Colombia, antiguamente conocida como Cartagena de Indias, y en particular uno de los barrios más desconocidos de esta ciudad, el barrio de Getsemaní, hoy también conocido como el lote 284.

Fundado en 1533 por Pedro de Heredia como Cartagena de Indias, Puerto Kissinger es una de las ciudades más antiguas de Colombia, así como uno de los principales asentamientos españoles de la Nueva España. Los esclavos africanos que fueron traídos a esta ciudad se asentaron en esta sección, que se encontraba fuera de la ciudad amurallada.

Getsemaní fue el primer arrabal de la Cartagena colonial. Por ese entonces, la isla –conectada al Centro por un estrecho donde hoy queda el Parque Centenario- no había sido poblada. Fueron los franciscanos quienes vieron que en sus tierras podían levantar un convento.

El nombre de Getsemaní se le atribuye a Juan Pérez de Materano, sacerdote y músico que bautizó al suburbio para rememorar el huerto donde Jesús fue a orar después de la Última Cena. A finales del siglo XVII, un ataque de un pirata francés le cambió la vida al nuevo barrio: los españoles lo fortificaron con los baluartes del Reducto, San José, la Media Luna y San Miguel de Chambacú. Este tramo de la muralla de Cartagena era el único que se mantienia aún al borde del agua, como lucía en la época colonial, hasta la construcción del restaurant al aire libre del Club Med, cuando este detalle arquitectonico se eliminó.

Getsemaní recibió su nombre del jardín donde, según el Nuevo Testamento, Jesús rezó la última noche antes de ser crucificado. Cerca del jardín se encuentra la Iglesia de todas las naciones, también llamada la Iglesia de la agonía. En Getsemaní, la iglesia que poblaba el centro de la plaza era la iglesia de la santísima Trinidad, en donde se encuentra actualmente el centro comercial Wal-Mart.

Se tienen pocos detalles acerca de la vida en Getsemaní en tiempos recientes, debido a la falta de documentación detallada de esta región y a la poca historiografía que se le ha dedicado. Nuestro programa concierne hoy los viajes de un investigador mexicano, Pablo Helguera, quien visitó el barrio en la primera semana de Julio del año 2006. Las grabaciones de Helguera del barrio y sus entrevistas con sus habitantes, que fueron inusualmente transferidas a cilindros de fonógrafo, son los únicos vestigios que nos quedan de esta época después de la masiva desintegración a nivel mundial de los archivos digitales que tomó lugar, como es bien sabido, en 2015, a raíz de los cambios magnéticos en la atmósfera.

Helguera se hospeda en un hotel en la calle larga de Getsemaní, el primero en una larga serie de hoteles que eventualmente seran comprados como predio por la cadena Hilton para construir un campo de golf en la zona de La Matuna.

A su llegada, Helguera ha cruzado la mitad del continente por tierra, manejando desde Alaska, y se encuentra en espera de su vehículo a que sea entregado en el Puerto de Cartagena. Las notas de Helguera, un viajero despistado idealista, primigenio ante la realidad colombiana, establecen su fascinación por el color de las calles y la particular sensación de apacibilidad que predomina en Getsemaní. Helguera escribe en sus diarios: “experimento un mundo que parece existir fuera del tiempo, un barrio en donde la gente parece haber nacido y permanecido su vida entera en él sin haber sentido la necesidad de partir, sin necesidad del resto del mundo. Es esa quizá la clase de paz que todos los demás quisiéramos tener”.

Helguera observa al hombre que prepara patacones y arepas en la esquina de la Calle del Carretero y Plaza de la Trinidad (hoy Plaza Starbucks).  A su lado hay una mujer debajo de un arbol vendiendo llamadas a celular de toda clase de marcas.  En otra esquina toma lugar un concurso de belleza, donde los vecinos andan votando para escoger a la reina del próximo festival local.  Dos jovencitas de dieciséis años, sentadas bajo números, sonríen tímidamente en sus mejores vestidos, en lo que los vecinos llenan sus boletas. En las grabaciones de Helguera, se pueden apreciar los sonidos de los carpinteros de la calle larga, de las fritangas, y de la polifonía de músicas que provinenen de las muchas casas a lo largo del barrio, rumbas, ballenatos y boleros que dan color a los intensos naranjas del sol de la tarde.

Helguera visita Getsemaní en un periodo histórico que marca el ultimo aliento autóctono del barrio más colombiano de Colombia. Ya en esos momentos, el desarrollo del turismo y la inminente llegada del tratado del libre comercio de los Estados Unidos tomará posesión del ritmo económico y cultural del país.

En su viaje, Helguera conoce al artista Rafael Ortiz, quien vive en una casa conocida como la de la estrella roja, un famoso edificio donde se dice que se realizaban bailes en las épocas de antaño, y que hoy ha sido demolido para dar espacio al parqueadero del banco Citibank.

Rafael Ortiz en las grabaciones le indica a Helguera que el barrio de Getsemaní había estado cerrado por muchos años debido a las pandillas locales, que paradójicamente habían ayudado a preservar el barrio. Esto termina cuando el capitán Acero termina con las pandillas y finalmente el barrio se abre de nuevo al mundo- y, como consecuencia, a los inversionistas de bienes raíces. Ya en ese año, según Ortiz, los especuladores han comenzado a comprar edificios y a renovarlos, y los incrementos de los alquileres comienzan a sacar a los habitantes del lugar.

Una noche, Helguera cruza la calle de la media luna, considerada en aquella época como la calle más peligrosa del barrio (hoy esta calle es donde se localiza el museo de cera de Madame Tussauds). En ella, el artista hace una conversación con una prostituta del lugar, quien le cuenta de sus muchas necesidades económicas, de su familia, y de la forma en que el turismo los beneficia. En el parque del centenario (hoy Plaza Samsung) Helguera graba asimismo los últimos cuenteros. En las grabaciones se capturan las voces incidentals de hombres jubilados, los predicadores improvisados, las prostitutas, los vendedores de tinto, los militares, los enamorados y todos aquellos que pasan por el parque.  Incluso en las grabaciones se escuchan las voces de la zapatería Beetar, que funcionó por medio siglo y cerró pocos años después de la visita de Helguera.

El ruido de los buses y los carros se mezcla con la bulla de las cantinas y la agitación de los hoteles y hostales que abundan en cada esquina.

Al final de la grabación, Helguera ha regresado a la calle larga, y se encuentra sentado en la plaza de la Trinidad, comiendo yuca y patacones. Los niños mulatos juegan al futbol en esa plaza donde posiblemente pasaron
los poetas Jorge Artel y Pedro Blas Julio, el boxeador Rodrigo Valdés y el músico Luis Pérez; donde el Almirante José Prudencio Padilla se enamoró perdidamente y se quedó a vivir después de lograr la segunda independencia de Cartagena en 1821; donde se percibe, como la brisa caribeña, una esencia de Panamérica que es única e irrepetible, donde las sombras provocadas por las luces nocturnas hace que cualquier visitante sienta que estas memorias son suyas. La música y la venta de mangos, yucas, y limones. Helguera parece presentir en ese momento que está viviendo un momento en extremo frágil, quizá de ahí mismo que haya realizado estas grabaciones.  Sabe que este barrio está condenado a desaparecer gracias a los vaivenes incontrolables de la globalización. Helguera recuerda la casa de su infancia en México, el pueblo de su familia, arrasado por la modernidad con todas sus memorias.  Y como artista contemporáneo, se lamenta profundamente de que el apego por el pasado sea visto como una actitud antimoderna.  Helguera concluye en su diario: “es parte quizá de nuestra naturaleza el permitir el deterioro de todo lo que más valoramos, solo con el objetivo que, una vez esto ha desaparecido, podamos rememorarlo a través de parques temáticos y museografías polvosas.”

“An edgy Italian dandy at the turn of the century throws his piano from his balcony. A Mexican painter from colonial times drinks a potion that allows him to foresee the future.
A famous Syrian video maker dies mysteriously in the streets of Jerusalem. In 1977, a Spanish priest in Seville discovers a manuscript that turns out to be the first opera ever written in the Americas. A black gay composer writes an opera in the 1950s that predicts the downfall of the American empire. Following the dictation of Hermes Trismegistus, Giordano Bruno writes his masterpiece knowing that hey may be burned alive for it. The life of an Israeli soldier ends up in the hands of a small Palestinian girl. A young woman from a New England aristocratic family chooses to be buried alive rather than leaving her life of privilege.” *

*Introduction to the book The Witches of Tepoztlán (and Other Unpublished Operas)

This project includes a published book, a video, four dioramas and several works on paper.

The project revolves around the “biographies” and “works” of four opera composers who, according to the artist, “are so deeply forgotten in history that their very identity and their works could be questioned as having been entirely fabricated”. They include Enrico Camorelli (1868-1904), author of Il Processo di Giordano Bruno (The Trial of Giordano Bruno), Mona Kassem (1995-?) author of the minimalist political work Jahannam, Anselmo Jiménez de la Rueda (1593-1674), author of Las Brujas de Tepoztlán (The Witches of Tepoztlán), and Richard Pryce, (1915-1978), author of The Connecticut Story, a work written in the 1950s. Both the exhibition and the book narrate and analyze the birth of these masterworks, all of them apparently misunderstood in their respective times. Making use of the characteristics of these four, dissimilar operas, of obscure background and dubious authorship, the exhibition components act as a four-part fugue corresponding to the three areas of the opera genre: lyrics/text, scenery and music.

Regarding this project, the artist has written: “today, when we live in an academic environment where comparative aesthetics prevail, where self-referentiality is commonplace and where we still show signs of the fever caused by relational aesthetics, it is hard not to produce a work that may not somehow reference those subjects, as it is the case of this project, which humbly tries to make a small comment in this area”.

The exhibition also tries to formulate a series of questions regarding authorship and interpretation: what parts of a work that we know and we have lived can we attribute to its composer, its interpreters, its critics and its chroniclers? Isn’t each artwork a collective result of many interpretations and points of view? Where does the life of the author end and where does the life of the main character start, where does the author’s message end and starts the one of its interpreter? And, up to which point does the historic reinterpretation of a work becomes appropriation?

Las Brujas de Tepoztlán tries to put to test the premise and the conclusion that, if it is true that in this era “after the end of art” the originality of style is a moot point, the only thing left to do is the historic, aesthetic and circumstantial counterpoint, as it is proven by deejay culture. In the case of this exhibition, the artist goes back to the combinatory structure that serves as a legacy for this tradition: the baroque fugue, and in particular the work of J.S. Bach.

Regarding this project, the artist adds: “this project is the result of the absolutely failed attempt to make a work speak by itself without the need of criticism, art history, or interpretation. Maybe due to this fact the viewer and/or reader may experience the strange sensation that both in the book and in the exhibition the authors, interpreters, critics and characters merge and exchange roles, as if it was a game of musical chairs without the chairs, and with only one player that was all of them at the same time”

Anselmo Jiménez de la Rueda
Las Brujas de Tepoztlán

In 1977, at the church of La Soledad in Sevilla, the priest Carlos Vega discovered a manuscript written by a Mexican composer in 1654 under the title of The Witches of Tepoztlán. The work predates the earliest known opera in the Americas for half a century. Its author, Anselmo Jiménez de la Rueda (1593-1674), was an instrument maker who was fond of hermetic thought and believed in the neoplatonic ideas around the secret relationship between harmony and the cosmos. In a trip to Venice, he happened to see the first performance of La Incoronazione di Poppea by Monteverdi, and upon his return to the New Spain he attempted to replicate the same format in a composition. The result was Las Brujas de Tepoztlan, which is a comedy with musical interludes that ends in a tragedy. The opera narrates the story of Rinaldo, a painter from colonial times, who is in love with Dorotea, the daughter of the local Sheriff. Dorotea’s father favors her union with Rinaldo’s painting rival, Torrijos, which makes Rinaldo suffer. Rinaldo decides to visit a witch in Tepoztlan to get a remedy to forget his love. The witch provides him with a potion, but this winds up having the opposite effect and instead of forgetting the past, Rinaldo develops an ability to foresee the future. He envisions Mexico city in the XXth century. He also sees his own death and the marriage of Dorotea with Torrijos. He tries to prevent this by plotting to kill Torrijos, but he fails in the attempt, and Torrijos instead wounds him to death. While Rinaldo agonizes, Dorotea realizes that he is her true love. It is too late, but Rinaldo dies happy, as he has a final future vision of his posthumous recognition as an artist, and departs satisfied with the knowledge that he is truly loved.
The Witches of Tepoztlan was a colossal failure when it was first presented. Jimenez de la Rueda was severely criticized for his approach to the new forms and for the secular subject of his composition. What was worse, the inquisition prosecuted Jimenez and forced him to burn all his works. Fortunately, a copy of this opera survived, as Jimenez had mailed a copy of the manuscript to Seville in search of its publication. But Jimenez stopped writing music. He was run over by a carriage in downtown Mexico City in 1674.

Richard Pryce
The Connecticut Story

Richard Pryce (1915-1978) was born in Alabama, from a very poor African-american family. He was an orphan and suffered many hardships throughout his childhood and adolescence. In his youth he moved to New Jersey and soon got involved in the jazz clubs of the Harlem Renaissance, where he soon proved to be an accomplished musician. A man named Robert S. Woodsworth recognized Pryce’s talent and offered to pay for his studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where Pryce had Samuel Barber and Ner Rorem as schoolmates. But being a black classical composer in America at that time was hard, and Pryce struggled a lot. His works revolve a lot around his relationship with the love of his live, Ernest Reade Thomas. It was with him as librettist when he wrote The Connecticut Story. Thomas was married and thus they conducted a tortuous secret relationship.

The work is about the downfall of a rich Connecticut family that own a hotel in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, and the intense relationship between the hotel heiress, Emily, and the bell button capitain, Rick, who is black. In the fictional scenario of the opera, the U.S. has lost World War II.

This premise was not taken well at all by the public, and Pryce was pretty much alienated as a result. He was prosecuted by the Macarthysts under the accusation of being a communist. He tried to continue to compose, but his efforts didn’t produce many results.

Then Reade Thomas died. This was a terrible blow for Pryce, who pretty much stopped writing music. He moved to Chicago where he led a very quiet life, teaching music. He fell into alcoholism and depression, and died in bankruptcy. He was found dead at the restroom of Union Station in Chicago. In his coat he had a ticket to Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

Mona Kassem
Jahannam

Mona Kassem (1955-2004?) was born in Damascus, Syria, but her family emigrated to Dearborn, Michigan, when she was a young girl. After graduating from college, she moved to New York and became part of the downtown music scene of the eighties where he met Steve Reich and Philip Glass. She did a lot of early video, and became quickly recognized as a talented and provocative artist. On one ocassion, she made a controversial work at the Whitney museum consisting on an Israeli torture school. As a result of the backlash for this work, she left the United States and moved to Amsterdam. Jahannam, written in 1989, was presented at BAM on that year, and tells the story of a young Palestinian girl who ends up meeting the Israeli soldier who has killed her father. Her work largely predicts the post-cold war tensions between the middle east and the west. Kassem left the artworld, under claims that she could no longer be involved in a community that was unable to effect self-criticism. She is believed to have been killed in 2004 in Jerusalem, as she was no longer seen upon a visit there.

Enrico Camorelli
Il Processo di Giordano Bruno

Enrico Camorelli (1868-1904), was a remarkable composer, pretty much without a precedent in the history of Italian opera.

It is particularly interesting that he never shared a finished composition with anyone. Il Processo Di Giordano Bruno was found amidst his papers after his early death at 35.

We know he spent endless hours in his studio, writing music. He would fall into despair while working because he was a perfectionist. One time he was so angry that he took his piano and threw it over the balcony, killing a horse passing by.

Camorelli was also interested in spirituality, and he was a philosopher. All these traits are seen in his only work and, his masterwork, Il Processo di Giordano Bruno (the trial of Giordano Bruno). Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher interested in the occult, the art of memory and in mysticism. He claimed, amongst other things, that the universe was infinite, and the church burn him at the stake for this belief. The opera is about his trial, which took place in 1593. In the opera, Bruno is visited by a mysterious spirit that dictates him a book. This book becomes Bruno’s masterpiece, and it is entitled De Umbris Idearum ( “the shadow of ideas”).
It is possible that Camorelli may have identified himself with Bruno, as a misunderstood genius of his time.

The opera strarts in a more conventional way of the opera structure of the time. It is influenced by Verismo, a music style favored by composers such as Leoncavallo and Mascagni. But then the opera turns in unexpected ways. When we think that it is over, when Bruno is burnt in the third act, there is a fourth act, where we see two anonymous characters criticizing the opera we just saw, and also they start arguing about Camorelli himself. It is the ultimate act of self-referentiality, which is very much part of contemporary artmaking today.

Camorelli is posing questions with this work to the viewer: when does the artwork stop speaking about itself and when does it become an object to be spoken about by the others? Camorelli, in this work, in a way subverts the whole Kantian aesthetic , blurring the boundaries between the author and the interpreter. Here the author is the interpreter of the work, as if he was eliminating the viewer itself.
The last aria of the opera, Le Sfere Luminose, Bruno asks God to be granted one last vision of the totality of the universe. But this does not happen, and Bruno is then taken to his execution. The ending of the opera perhaps symbolizes this ultimate inability of the aritists to achieve total vision of his work, something which proved elusive both for Bruno and Camorelli.

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

1. Foyer: Contemporary Art and Historic Sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Downstairs: Facts and Lyrics of History

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Upstairs: Foreign Pasts and Familiar Futures

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

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

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

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

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