Pablo Helguera » Opera

The Metropolitan Opera Bathroom

admin — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:00:54 +0000

Poster for The Metropolitan Opera Bathroom

The Metropolitan Opera Bathroom consisted in a live recital -a capella, and au naturel- under the shower, on June 1, 2008, as part of the exhibition “Entree”, curated by Krista N. Saunders in a private apartment in New York’

s Upper West Side. More than 100 visitors had a chance to listen to arias from operas by Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Leoncavallo, Bizet, and others, while the more daring were able to peek in at the performance behind the shower curtain.

Video

The Witches of Tepoztlan

admin — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:07:27 +0000

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

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*Introduction to the book The Witches of Tepoztlán (and Other Unpublished Operas)

Title at Jorge Pinto Books

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.

Panamerican Anthem/ Himno Panamericano (2006)

admin — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 23:40:41 +0000

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

(click below for music)

panamerica-2

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

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

(english version below)

De los viejos Andes a los grandes lagos

Se inscribe la sombra de Panamérica,

Tierra de deseos y grandes percances

De grandes promesas y oscuros misterios

Hemisferio amante de ideales alados.

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

Pero en mí resonará

La voz hemisférica

Y aquellos fallidos sueños

Harán fortalecer

A mi paisaje interior

que es Panamérica.

De sus hondas minas a sus anchos ríos

Hemos extraviado a nuestra Panamérica

Veo su olvido entre sus emblemas

en sus monumentos públicos y anónimos

en su inconsciente, sangre en sus banderas

Y su historia errante veo pasar

siempre interrogante es mi Panamérica.

From the ancient Andes, to its glorious mountains

I will always praise the soul of Panamerica

From its fierce-some nature to its tragic power

I praise our great land of promise and deception

Mother of our nations and hopeful beginnings

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

pero en mí resonará

la voz hemisférica

Although we may loose our spirit

In finding our true self,

Always will remain in us

The name “Panamerica”

From its greater rivers, to its wondrous valleys

We shall not forget the name of Panamerica,

Greater than an a country, nation of all nations

In blood and in spirit part of all our people

Single voice of millions, single land of glory.

Through its breathing landscape I’ll go by

Always deep in secret is my Panamerica.

Parallel Lives

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2003 06:07:59 +0000

Parallel Lives exhibition at Julia Friedman Gallery, 2003

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

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

Rehearsal of Parallel Lives, Sept. 2003

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

The Singing Telegram Show

admin — Wed, 15 Aug 2001 22:46:46 +0000

The Pablo Helguera Singing Telegram Show was a project designed to engage the general passersby audiences from the town of Brewster, as part of a weekend series of art interventions entitled The Brewster Project, in 2001.

The project consisted in the presentation of a small stand outside of a local bar, in the form of an old-time Western Union telegram service center, where I stood with a speakerphone, a boom box, a guitar, a number of phone cards, and a menu of songs with message forms to be filled out by anyone- offering to deliver free sung telegrams over the phone, anywhere in the world. Visitors could choose a song and also request specific messages to be inserted into the song. This project became a major attraction to local residents, some of which sent telegrams to their next-door neighbor, and others requesting calls as far as Shanghai and Belgrade. Originally scheduled for only one or two hours, I kept fulfilling message requests for as long as seven hours. That Christmas I was invited by the town to present this performance again.

I regard this project as one of the few instances where I felt that my role as artist shifted from being the focus of the work to becoming a true instrument or bridge, helping people connect. Here, what became important was the dialogue that any two persons would have at either end of the line, reviving an old form of communication that the information age has largely extinguished, and in a way, rediscovering the human dimension that text-messaging has not quite yet replaced. (PH)

The Singing Telegram Show at the Brewster Project, NY, 2001

Unanswered: Guty Cárdenas (2001)

admin — Fri, 26 Jan 2001 01:26:55 +0000

Unanswered: Guty Cárdenas (2001)

This early CD-Rom/online project consisted of an interactive website and a physical installation.

Unanswered:Guty Cardenas tried to blend together the Mexican Maya revival design of the 1920s, digital technology, and the obscure story of Guty Cárdenas (1905- 1932) who is considered one of the most influential Mexican popular musicians of the XXth century.

Cardenas’ treatment of Huapangos, boleros, claves, and other styles of his time helped form popular music in Mexico and Latin America. He experienced a very early notoriety and became a super-star of his time —recording in New York, filming in Hollywood, and traveling around Mexico. He was tragically murdered at a ballroom in Mexico City, when he was only 27 years old, for reasons which are still unknown.

The project took the shape of a “poetic database”, created by the artist for interaction by the public either online or at the gallery at a special
Designed desk (a traveling component which can be disassembled) evocative of the Maya art deco revival movement. The desk, which contains the project in a CD-Rom format, is both a sculptural piece and a representation of a research database on the life of Guty Cárdenas.

Through the selection of a number of available keywords, which correspond to the titles of 22 songs famously recorded by Cárdenas, the participant can construct the narrative comprised of images, song bites, interviews and texts which on every diferent order projects different points of view on aspects of his life.

See

http://www.lukedohner.com/guty/guty.html

From The Vocal Archives of Florence Foster Jenkins (2000)

admin — Tue, 29 Feb 2000 01:07:26 +0000

From the Vocal Archives of Florence Foster Jenkins (2000)

Exhibition at Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo, Mexico City, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, and Matice Hrvatska Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia (2000)

From the Vocal Archives of Florence Foster Jenkins was a museum homage to the worst soprano in history (1868-1949). Following a traditional museum format but also interspersing other contrapuntal museum narratives about songbirds, castrati, and other topics, the main narrative of the project focused on the strange case of this eccentric diva whose singing was so appalling and yet her flair and dedication to interpretation were so complete that she became a performing celebrity in her lifetime. The exhibition focused on the subject of art criticism and the mythology surrounding virtuosism.

The story of Florence Foster Jenkins emerged again in the exhibition and performance project Parallel Lives, in 2003, and the relationship of opera, interpretation and cricitism also is continued in the 2007 book and exhibition project The Witches of Tepoztlan.

First performance video (1989)

admin — Tue, 10 Oct 1989 00:25:04 +0000

Vesti La Giubba (1989)