Texto palindrómico del performance presentado en el Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, el 18 de junio del 2009.

El performance incluyó la interpretación de obras para piano, tocadas al derecho y a la inversa, de Josef Matthias Hauer (1883-1959), Robert Starer (1924-2001), y Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994), interpretadas por Beatriz Helguera-Snow.

Palindromic Text from the performance “Revolver” performed at the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, on June 18, 2009. The performance included a selection of pieces, played normally as well as backwards, by Josef Matthias Hauer (1883-1959), Robert Starer (1924-2001), and Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994), played by Beatriz Helguera-Snow.

REVOLVER

Acuda caro: hallé hoyos. Ya hay nata, paré tesoro: mi visión, oh celoso, lo cortó. Eres oro, malcriada para mí, rala es la cosa. Oso, Roma, amé ópera, horror… ora, con él así, solos, yo soy ése loco. Podar tele sé; ese día me asomé. Va Lada, le habla, aséase. Poeta. Ah, cala, tala, rapo, no ceso. Ya, por oval, seno bajó— dale cetro. Ser odioso, idos acá. Sé amar dominó, pero lavadora, le sé arar aro. Haré una mora, dí a canal. ¿Yo leí “crac”? Esa oda rato lo coló. La oda basada crea, con ropa, loseta suave. Átame, mala. ¿Viola parir o morí? De podar no hora es. A papaya de ida, nana, loro ese oído, o lo yerro colado a la rapada y da timada casa. O lama la tipa casaca—red Nevada— y osó matar tío. Oré, ni da elogio, ni te lama. Oir a idea cayó, sé: vamos a avatar: rese cera, pala o Kaiser. El carro para. Hará cara, parece plato. Tocan. Ése adulas, sané. “Pásele.” Papá ata mesa y odas a pasado das, a pasado. La mata: cae la bolsa, sea, era dar o daré: La USA caer, ser ir o morir es. O dará  Tebas o cocaina y eso veo: capo agotado. Oir Aro: helada arte les erro: cartel asa, amo la ruda oda, era rato, sé: no son Sadam: a ese llanero allí toca para allá velo: sor toro da tamales. A esa otra hoy oro dí, vemos ayer. Ara, dan allá. Mirad: Europa colosal a alud a rosa muere, sé a vida, asaré somera, Hoy es ese dia para el arte, les oyó, arte  les (se) hará modernos. Da de desamar, ese sal Obama, ese país nadará a la deriva,  y…

A ir el agotar teratoma, sal, batalla anuda, le temo: Irak ario sé así: mar árabe bese a Cairo. Memoria caése beba, rara misa es o Irak a río mete la duna.  Allá tables a mota retrato, galeria. Ya viré. Dala, arad, ansia pese, ama bolas ese. Rama, sed, edad, son redomará Hesse letra oyó, se, letra lea, rapa a id ese sé yo, haremos eras a diva. Ese reuma sor, adula Alá solo capo rueda, rima llana dará. Rey, asomé  vid oro yo, harto aseas. El a matador otros olé, valla ara, pacotilla o renal le sé amadas, no sones o tarareado. A dura loma asa letra, corre, sé letra, dale horario o da toga, opaco Evo sé. Ya  ni a coco sabe, tarado. Ser ir o morir es, rea casual era dorada, rea es. As, loba, le acata mal. Odas a pasado das, a pasado.Ya se mata a papeles. Apenas saluda ese naco total. Pecera para cara. ¿Hará porra? Cleresía koala parece ser. Rata va, asoma, ¿ves? O ya cae diario, a maletín oígole. A dinero oí, tratamos. O ya da vender a casa, capital a malo. Asa cada mitad. Ya da para la oda, lo corre; yo lo odio. Ése oro, lana nadie da ya, Papá.  Sé aro honrado: pedir o morir a palo. IVA lame, mata. Eva usa té sola por no caer cada sábado a lo loco —lo tarado—a secar cielo y lana caída. Roma, nuera, hora rara es. El aro da valor epónimo, drama es acaso dios oído.  Resorte celado jabón es. Lavo ropa, yo seco, no para la talacha. Ateo pesa. Esa alba helada la vemos a Ema. Id. Ese, ése letrado poco le sé, yo soy solo si sale no caro. Rorro, haré poema amoroso. Aso cal, sea la rima rapada. Ir clamor o seré otro coloso lechón. Oí, sí ví moros, éter a patán ya hay. Soy, oh ella, hora caduca.

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

Un muro de Berlín americano – 1

(diario de Manhattan)

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

le silence eternel de ses espaces infinis me effraie

Pascal, Pensées

11 de septiembre, 2001

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

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

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

12 de septiembre

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

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

13 de septiembre

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

15 de septiembre

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

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

3 de septiembre, 2001

(anotación efectivamente escrita antes de las anteriores)

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

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

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

Restauraciones Nostálgicas

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

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

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

Des-virtualizar

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

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

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

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

Despertares

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

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

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

Haciendo Himnos entre Ruinas

(Un muro de Berlín americano – 2)

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

dónde desenterrar la palabra,

la proporción que rige al himno y al discurso,

al baile, a la ciudad y a la balanza?

Octavio Paz, »Himno entre Ruinas«

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

(excerpts of the book below)

Interview on the project

Information on Queens Museum Exhibition

 Title  at Jorge Pinto Books

Three excerpts from The Boy Inside the Letter

ORO NO SONORO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

(1992)

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

[texto perteneciente al foro virtual de la Escuela Panamericana del Desasosiego, abril del 2006. Stephen Wright es filósofo y escritor canadiense residente en París.]

Pablo Helguera:
Stephen, hace unos años escribiste sobre las complejidades que rodean a la noción del “uso-valor” del arte, planteando la pregunta de si el arte podría escapar a su paradigma de representación para ir más allá del “explorar”, o “analizar” una cuestión política o social. (http://www.apexart.org/images/wright/wright.pdf).
En otro ensayo afirmas que “la cuestion de uso-valor radica en identificar una funcion universalmente genuina y específicamente exclusiva al arte”. Para mí, la pregunta del papel del arte en la sociedad se ha convertido en un tema más importante que nunca en este mundo post-9/11, y creo que debe de ser tratado. ¿En donde te posicionas ahora en términos de la “utilidad” del arte? ¿Cuales crees que son los atributos o características que debe de tener un arte que se involucre con las comunidades en una variedad de niveles? ¿O crees que el arte puede encontrar su utilidad al simplemente aceptar su papel convencional en el ámbito simbólico?

Stephen Wright:
Con respecto al preámbulo de tu primera pregunta: escribes que “el papel del arte en la sociedad se ha vuelto aún más importante en el mundo posterior al 11 de septiembre” ¡Qué afirmación mas contraintuitiva! ¿Tienes alguna razón empírica para creer tal cosa? A mí me parecería, al menos en la apariencia de los hechos, que el arte en sí más o menos ha dejado de jugar cualquier papel en determinar el destino de la esfera pública en donde se despliega. Digo “arte en sí” porque por supuesto lo que llamo “habilidad artística” (habilidades de generación de imagen, y atributos artísticos como autonomía, creatividad, inventividad, y la aceptación de la no-remuneración monetaria, estrategias discrepantes de talento, etcétera) han sido presas rehén y apropiadas por la racionalidad estratégica del capitalismo contemporáneo.

De manera que el arte ha visto aquello que solía ser específico a sí mismo ser sublimado a modelos de negocios, relación individualizada de labor y estrategias de publicidad—y en ese sentido, sí, su papel es más importante que nunca. Incluso los artistas de video como Osama Bin Laden hacen un uso sutil de creación de imagen que se anclan en la historia del arte reciente (si yo fuera historiador de arte, estaría muy atento a las decisiones que “Big Bin” ha tomado en sus varios videos: encuadre, fondo, decorado, etc. debe de ser analizado con herramientas de crítica de arte y vocabulario conceptual. Pero, admitámoslo, estos videos no son obras de arte autónomas, a pesar de su valor considerable de entretenimento.)

No, en mi opinión, el arte ha sido sublimado o marginalizado por la producción simbólica dominante. Y desafortunadamente no ha mostrado demasiada resistencia ante esta coerción. Por un lado, esto es debido a que ha buscado proteger sus privilegios simbólicos en la sociedad. Y aún mas importante, porque ha tratado de proteger sus privilegios ontológicos en el orden simbólico: el arte hoy, en gran medida, es performativo; esto es, porque el mundo del arte lo proclama como tal, a pesar de ser idéntico a “la mera cosa verdadera” como dirían los filósofos analíticos. Esta es la encrucijada con la que carga el dilema de uso-valor: al proclamar “esto es arte” uno también está admitiendo “esto es SOLO arte”— Y no aquella cosa corrosiva y merecedora de censura.

Para tener uso-valor, entonces, el arte tiene que renunciar al arte, o al menos, sacrificar su visibilidad como arte. El arte tiene que rendirse ante sí mismo. 

De manera que cuando hablas de público, esto es lo más lejos de lo que uno puede distanciarse cuando me refiero al arte cargado de uso-valor. Porque me refiero a una clase de arte sin obra de arte, sin autoría (sin ser firmado por artista alguno) y sobretodo sin espectadores o públicos. Es visible, público, y por supuesto visto—pero no es arte. De esa manera no puede ser descartado como “solo arte”, es decir, una trasgresión simbólica, de las cuales hemos visto tantas veces y cuyo objetivo es promover la postura del artista dentro de la economía reivindicada. 

Afortunadamente, hay cada vez más de esta clase de arte cargado de uso-valor. Lo denomino arte clandestino. Arte debajo del radar. Es el trabajo de agentes secretos (trabajando bajo diferentes paisajes ontológicos) y entes furtivos, quienes por definición nunca firman su obra.

Pero, en este caso, firmaré este correo!
Stephen.


ENTREVISTA CON STEPHEN WRIGHT / Pablo Helguera (parte 2)

Pablo Helguera:
Stephen, en el último InSite (un proyecto de arte público fronterizo en Tijuana y San Diego), la artista Judi Werthein introdujo un tipo de zapato denominado Brinco, el cual fue ofrecido como regalo para indocumentados del lado mexicano y fue vendido en las boutiques exclusivas de San Diego. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4445342.stm).
El zapato fue anunciado como uno de los proyectos de InSite, o sea, un proyecto artístico. El proyecto funcionó a nivel práctico para los que cruzaban la frontera, y llamaba la atención al problema migratorio del otro lado. El hecho de que era “solo” un proyecto artístico no pareció disminuir el interés de la prensa, ni de los inmigrantes que obtuvieron los zapatos tennis. Posiblemente, el proyecto no prosperó como producto de mercado, pero argumentaría que el proyecto aún así tuvo bastante efecto sin abandonar su identidad como “arte”. Para los indocumentados que cruzaban la frontera, supongo que no importaba si el zapato era arte o no— lo único que les importaba seguramente era conseguir zapatos gratis. También se podría argumentar que el proyecto operó simbólicamente hasta cierto punto, ya que la empresa fue realizada a escala limitada. Pero la atención que recibió fue real, así como el intercambio social que realizó.

Mi pregunta a tí tiene que ver con tu afirmación de que el arte se desarma a sí mismo cuando se proclama a sí mismo como “arte” o (“sólo arte”). Mientras que creo que tienes razón que el arte tiende a aislarse a sí mismo, también tenemos la tendencia de menospreciar la respuesta del público, que muchas veces es sorprendente- y que, por lo general, no está bajo el control del artista. Considerando ejemplos como el que menciono, ¿no crees acaso que el uso-valor del arte radica no en el publicitar o esconder su identidad como arte sino en la respuesta efectiva del público?

De la misma manera en que las caricaturas danesas del profeta Muhammed han enfurecido a países enteros de musulmanes que no admiten la idea de que estos son “solo caricaturas”, ¿no crees que el arte tal y como lo entendemos hoy en día en el sentido convencional puede operar en el ámbito simbólico con efectos reales y sin necesidad de adoptar una identidad secreta? Y si no, ¿qué clase de cosas puede conseguir el “arte clandestino” que el arte como la obra de Werthein no puede conseguir?

Stephen Wright:
Estimado Pablo, puesto que trabajo como crítico de arte, no me es ajena la idea de que el arte puede tener “uso-valor” sin ocultar su estatus como arte o eliminando su visibilidad como arte. Y, para la gente que le gusta esa clase de cosas- es decir, los hermeneutas que van a museos y galerías- creo que se puede argumentar sólidamente que el arte altamente auto-reflexivo y cuidadosamente compuesto que se muestra puede realmente producir uso-valor a través de alterar las líneas divisorias de la cognición sensorial. 
Esta línea de pensamiento es seguida de la manera más persuasiva por alguien como Jaques Rancière, quien cree que la gente como yo estamos muy errados en tratar de darle eficacidad al arte (uso-valor) al intentar insertarlo en el mundo real como algo que no es. El arte no tiene por qué ser politizado, argumentaría él, de la misma manera en que la política no tiene por qué ser estetizada, porque tanto el arte como la política tienen líneas divisorias enmedio como lo tienen la música y el ruido.

Mi respuesta es que, mientras que sin duda esto es cierto para la élite, si el arte pudiera tener mucho efecto en el orden dominante de las cosas sin dejar sus espacios autónomos, ya lo sabríamos ahora. 

Fue una gran conquista para el arte el forjar, dentro de la esfera pública, espacios y tiempos autónomos (como los museos) para operar, pero hoy en día éstos se han vuelto más bien una manera de contenerlo, y al hacerlo, desarmarlo. Es sobre esta base que siento que el arte tiene que evadir los recursos de enmarcamiento del mundo del arte—y que muchos artistas hoy en día tienen esa intuición, aunque muchos tímidamente se alejan de tomar los pasos necesarios para conseguir una verdadera práctica de arte clandestino. A mi ver, esta práctica requiere el abandonar la obra, la autoría y el público.

Tu ejemplo me parece ser una especie de híbrido entre los dos, como si el arte tuviera el deber de retener su coeficiente de visibilidad artística, manteniendo un pie en el estribo del mundo del arte, mientras que a la vez dándole rienda suelta a sus aspiraciones de intervenir en el mundo real. Esta clase de acercamiento ofrece inevitablemente toda clase de trampas, y todas ellas tienen que ver con la dramática discrepancia del balance de poder entre la institución artística y la institución del estado de poder, entre el capital simbólico de los artistas y el de los inmigrantes. El proyecto que describes es un caso clásico de elevación de consciencia— utilizando al arte como recurso simbólico para llamar la atención a una situación injusta.

Realmente este proyecto tiene poco que ver con la propuesta que estoy argumentando aquí de que el arte alcance una identidad ontológica dual: tú mismo admites que el aspecto comercial no era tan real y podía solo ser sostenido por una inversión de capital proveniente del mundo del arte. Aunque la gente hablara del evento y de la problemática, su conclusión inevitablemente sería: esta artista y sin duda otros como ella están en contra de la política fronteriza de los Estados Unidos y simpatizan con los pobres inmigrantes. ¿Qué clase de orden semiótico va a alterar este proyecto? Pero es potencialmente peor que el verdadero ganador en este tipico embrollo de estética relacional sea inevitablemente el artista— ella es la única cuyo nombre mencionas (los inmigrantes son anónimos), ella es la única acumulando capital simbólico al hacer que el mundo del arte aclame su proyecto social o lo que sea. Los zapatos que ella les “dio” a los indocumentados no eran “regalo” alguno— eran una inversión de su parte, parte de una economía de intercambio simbólico y lucrativo que ella inició, administró, y en donde los que recibieron los zapatos simplemente jugaron un papel de participantes “invitados”.

Esta es una cuestión moral a la que la estética relacional raramente le presta atención— aunque por supuesto, no tiene mucho caso ponerse demasiado igualitario sobre estas cosas. Sin embargo, hay una gran ambiguedad en la comunidad de la estética relacional acerca de dónde radica el uso-valor del arte. El hablar de uso-valor es admitir que el criterio de eficiencia y efectividad ha sido tomado en consideración. Y es absurdamente ineficiente inventar tal proyecto si la finalidad es regalar zapatos. Similarmente, si la idea es atraer atención de la prensa hacia este proyecto, es ineficiente hacerlo en la forma de un proyecto artístico, puesto que puede ser descartado como sólo arte.

Siendo que el cruce de fronteras se basa en el control de identidad, me parece particularmente inapropiado que el arte proclame su verdadera identidad de una manera tan abierta en vez de buscar una relación mimética con la situación del indocumentado clandestino, y como ellos, disimular su propia identidad. El arte clandestino es como el indocumentado, como un agente secreto. De manera que ¿por qué el arte tan insistentemente rehúsa abandonar su visibilidad artística— aún siendo que al hacerlo tendría que la ventaja explícita de darle mayor uso-valor e incluso hacerlo mejor arte ( siempre y cuando hubiera adecuación de forma y contenido)? Sospecho que es debido a la constancia de la firma —es decir, la identidad ocupacional del artista—y por el tipo de reconocimiento que provee el mundo del arte, que siguen siendo la comodidad más valorada por la cultura empresarial.

A sketch in one act

Pablo Helguera

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

Characters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharon
Oh, I bet you will…

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

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

Encarnacion
What kind of programs do you do?

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

Encarnacion
What do you need to do to apply?

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

Encarnacion
Do you fund anything outside of Peoria?

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

Encarnacion
And do you really reinforce this rule?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharon (visibly insulted)
That is just so absurd…

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

Encarnacion
I’m sorry Sharon, if you could…

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

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

Encarnacion
Ok.

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

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

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

Sharon
I think it is a very poignant piece.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott
You are just jealous…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Encarnacion
I think we need to backtrack here…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(click below for music)

panamerica-2

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

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

(english version below)

De los viejos Andes a los grandes lagos

Se inscribe la sombra de Panamérica,

Tierra de deseos y grandes percances

De grandes promesas y oscuros misterios

Hemisferio amante de ideales alados.

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

Pero en mí resonará

La voz hemisférica

Y aquellos fallidos sueños

Harán fortalecer

A mi paisaje interior

que es Panamérica.

De sus hondas minas a sus anchos ríos

Hemos extraviado a nuestra  Panamérica

Veo su olvido entre sus emblemas

en sus monumentos públicos y anónimos

en su inconsciente, sangre en sus banderas

Y su historia errante veo pasar

siempre interrogante es mi Panamérica.

 00

From the ancient Andes, to its glorious mountains

I will always praise the soul of Panamerica

From its fierce-some nature to its tragic power

I praise our great land of promise and deception

Mother of our nations and hopeful beginnings

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

pero en mí resonará

la voz hemisférica

Although we may loose our spirit

In finding our true self,

Always will remain in us

The name “Panamerica”

From its greater rivers, to its wondrous valleys

We shall not forget the name of Panamerica,

Greater than an a country, nation of all nations

In blood and in spirit part of all our people

Single voice of millions, single land of glory.

Through its breathing landscape I’ll go by

Always deep in secret is my Panamerica.

Open House, Closed House:
Contemporary Art before its Communities

As a kid, in Mexico, I used to attend a community center run by my aunt named Casa Abierta (Open House). I remember making collages out of dry pasta, a yarn painting (this was in the 70s), and a hand puppet; I watched films by Marcel Pagnol and the Marx Brothers and performed in a staging of Snow White, where I was the hunter in charge of killing the heroine amid the forest but instead would give up and set her free. Maybe my experiences there did not lead me directly to choose the visual artist profession, but they did generate an enthusiastic predisposition towards art making that I believe lasts until this day.

For the majority of those who make or teach art, the time in which we were initiated in art and obediently —or disobediently— were made to join art education activities is fairly remote and hard to remember. Maybe this is why after so many years of training and theory, it is hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of the average viewer when we ask them to be part of an art experience, whether this is of an educational or conceptual nature, either interactive or passive. Three decades later, as a visual artist, I find myself like many others trying to understand what it means to make art in conjunction, dialogue, or collaboration with communities.

The distance that separate us from the uninitiated art viewer became once again evident to me during a project in which I recently participated as a guest artist by a Mexican curatorial collective, Laboratorio 060, in the indigenous community of Frontera Corozal in Chiapas. The young curatorial group set upon themselves the ambitious task of making a public art project in this remote Chol community located in the edge of the Usumacinta river and the border of Guatemala. The place, amidst the innermost Lacandon Jungle, feels, and literally is, the last edge of Mexico, and tipifies the marginality of many towns of the Americas. After many visits and exchanges, the group established a strong relationship between the town council, which accepted the idea of having the artists do site specific interventions in the town with a very Mexican-indigenous mixture of enthusiasm, politeness, and shyness.

To this point, it is a mystery to me what in Frontera Corozal is understood by the word “curator” or “artist” —needless to say, the word “curator” does not exist in the local Chol language. It is also hard to assess the kind of meaning that the project, which is still being developed, will have in this place. It is for sure an earnest and valuable attempt from the organizers to make something productive at a place that is practically forgotten by the government and the world in general. In this regard, the town welcomes the very gesture of engagement and attention. In many instances, the kind of works that could be seen in Frontera appeared fairly entertaining to the locals, sometimes extravagant, and sometimes outright strange —as they seemed that way even to myself. Other times, the work was so hardcore conceptual that it was clear that not only did they not see the boundaries of the ‘work’ but that they would not realize that in many instances they themselves were the very subjects of it. My general sense was that amongst the participating artists —ranging from anywhere in Europe and the U.S. to Mexico and Guatemala— there was a lot of haste in getting to make the art, and little reflection or concern regarding the implications of showing a work in that particular context, as it usually is the case of projects that involve bringing contemporary artists to remote communities. The projects varied from urban renovation and community activism —the Puerto Rican artist Jesús “Bubu” Negrón opted for the construction of a street intersection in the yet unpaved town, at a huge personal and financial cost—to outright hermetic action, like the artist Miguel Ventura who wanted his work to directly embrace its disruptive nature. One artist stapled posters in people’s houses with multilingual texts announcing a conceptual art project, another did a semi-fictional census of the town and invited townsfolk to act, another tried to make the women make souvenirs in the shape of the artworks that were being made in the town.

It dawned on me how in these circumstances we overwhelmingly favor the idea of creating new works instead of bringing existing ones, under the assumption perhaps that a site specific work would better fit or dialogue with that reality. And yet, many of the projects, conceived in advance and not as a result of a local exchange, often revealed a misguided (and often arrogant or patronizing) conception of what that community was about, as well as a series of naive expectations about what would happen during their implementation. This fact sometimes forced some artists to eventually modify or change their projects altogether, but others simply went ahead with their agenda without major concern on whether their project indeed would make any sense in that context. There were too many questions: up to what point should an artist become an ‘expert’ of the social fabric of a community in order to intervene in it? To whom were these works directed to, and what were their real ambitions or objectives? What was the best way to evaluate and talk about the value of what we were doing there? If we build a road, we are doing a good social action, but is it interesting at all as an artwork? If we do an enigmatic action at a community and later document it and present it to the art world as a meaningful one, is this a satisfactory way to work?

+++

In the art world, there is a marked contrast of attitudes around the art termed as collaborative, community-oriented, collective, etc. The art market and exhibition-oriented art criticism generally show little interest, and occasionally, disdain, for community art, maybe because they consider that it is not a kind of art that pays too much attention to the product or to the aesthetic rigor that they so much value. On the other hand, those who practice community and activist-oriented art, along with many curators and theorists, criticize the art world for their indifference, and see other kinds of art as too egocentric or insensitive to their social surroundings. It is a kind of confrontation that some see as capitalist realism vs. left-wing idealism.

It is useful to see the whole scope of public and community art as a wide range of combinations where the control of the creative process varies gradually from the entire decision-making being allowed to the group, to the complete control of the project by the artist alone. Each extreme meets different goals and faces different challenges.

The collective community experience tends to affirm local values, tradition, strengthening bonds and opening up expressive channels, while the public art that mainly reflects the individual vision of a single artist tends to provide a sort of public experience that is not necessarily the one of reflecting or reinforcing local values; rather, it usually tries to expand upon them, question and/or confront them in a new and experimental way, sometimes critical and, why not, with a certain expectation of professional rigor in form and aesthetic content. Due to the nature of each strategy, it is not surprising that community-produced art would be usually seen as something affirmative, good, or based on agreement, while the individual action is more associated with criticism, disruption, antagonism or negativism.

The problematic instances of community art take place, I believe, when we use social parameters to evaluate the artistic aspects of a work— that is, in many cases if a given activity is deemed positive or constructive as a social experiment, then it should follow that it is also “good art”. But the justifications of its purported social contribution, instead of helping their supporters, rather isolates them in a sort of positivist solipsism that lacks any significant self-criticism or evaluation. Claire Bishop, in her recent essay entitled “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” (Artforum, February 2006) argues —and I agree— that it is vital for art with a strong social content to be regarded and discussed not only as a social action but also as art.

Another false assumption that I believe to exist within community art is that the artist can act as a neutral entity, or as an invisible “catalyst” of experiences. In my experience, when a professional artist or arts educator interacts or collaborates with a given community with small or no previous involvement with art, there is from the onset an undeniable disadvantage of experience and knowledge (but only as long as this relationship will unfold primarily in the art terrain, as I shall later explain). In reality, it is a power relationship. The artist becomes a teacher, leader, artistic director, boss, instigator, or benefactor. There are artists who try to become situation facilitators to the point of denying that what they are doing is an individual initiative at all. Bishop characterizes this tendency as an attempt of “elimination of authorship” which is grounded in anticapitalist premises and in a sort of catholic altruism, a way to redeem the guilt of social privilege— something that is worth reflecting upon particularly in what it applies to Latin American art.

I for one believe that artists can never disappear altogether, nor can they turn in to an “invisible” agent that would ostensibly help to “make grow that which is already there” —a common view amongst arts educators.  But whether it is a collaborative or an education project, it would be hard to deny that to generate productive results one requires a great knowledge of methodologies and creative strategies, as well as an experience to generate dialogue and transmit information that hardly constituted the invisibility that is aspired by a simple catalyst of experiences.

THE other side of the spectrum of public art, when artists are the implementers of their individual vision, whether alone or with the support of others, has of course its own complexities. Tensions start when the artist starts to make work in spaces outside the studio and engages with audiences that many times have no idea that they are being the subjects of an art experiment —like in the hidden camera program. Needless to say, it is critical to always encourage the individual practice in any form, since any environment can benefit from a rebellious, irrational, or simply hedonist art, free from any theory. In its best instances, public interventions by artists can acquire relevant and significant dimensions both for the contemporary art discourse and for the social environment where it is enacted.

Nevertheless, in recent years there has been a growing disgust for the manipulative nature of art that purportedly “interrogates” or “critiques” specific social spaces, when the supposed interest by the artist in that reality rather looks like strategic, born out of convenience, and sometimes even downright exploitive, instead of being a sincere attempt of understanding, dialogue, or artistic response.

Santiago Sierra, whose work is inevitable to mention in this context, is actually one of the few artists that admits this kind of convenience offered to him by the social environment: even if we may be disturbed by the apparent cynicism with which he openly accepts the paradoxes of his practice, I am even more disturbed by the attitude of other artists who, while working in a similar way, expect that their work will be valued as a artistic and/or social contribution when the work reveals a simplistic, misinformed or condescending view of the social context where it takes place. In some instances, when the artist does work in good faith, they themselves do not realize the many coercive or colonialist implications of their action. The case of certain works in Frontera Corozal illustrated this fact in my mind, such as the case of the artist who wanted to convince local women to make small replicas of our artworks and turn them into indigenous souvenirs. Another artist, making a work that was decidedly incomprehensible to the locals, openly claimed that his work was not directed to them but to the art world, in the form of documentation. This affirmation conveniently omitted the consideration that this future, converted, art audience may actually want to value the work in relationship to the kind of real impact that it had in the original context, and not in the fantasy of its documentation. This attitude does not seem to distant to me from the practice of large American museums, that in the 80s and 90s —and sometimes still today— made minimal educational efforts, but yet would photograph black schoolchildren wearing the museum’s t-shirts to “prove” their commitment to underserved communities to their funders.

The documentation of the work is thus the real gray area. Documentation is a central aspect in the process of embellishment and spinning of the experience that took place in the public space. Even though it is a common practice to consider documentation as the work in itself, there is an enormous difference for a viewer’s experience to know whether the work had a tangible impact in the ‘real’ world or if it only operated at a symbolic or imaginary level. Due to that fact, many artists are careful to keep the ambiguity between the work and the document, taking advantage of the distance of space and time, and of course, of their artistic license, in order to omit details, add others, improve the anecdote, and in some cases, outright lie regarding what happened or didn’t happen in a given place. Nowadays, at a time when the perception of a work circulates according to the form in which the anecdote circulates in the virtual world and the media, this strategy is central to a lot of art making. Many times these strategies are immediately visible as failed attempts to improve what evidently was an unsuccessful public artwork. But even if we were unable to discern the boundary between reality and fiction, this does not alter the fact that in the art world we are increasingly less interested in what actually happens in the real world as long as we are able to engage the critics, and sometimes even deluding ourselves, about the public relevance of what we are doing. For an artist who has often worked in the crevices of reality and fiction, I believe that generating myths and fictions is a completely permissible, and intrinsic, aspect of art making. But there is a serious problem when we ourselves have lost the ability to discern, or care about, the difference between documentation and self-aggrandizement. And due to the lack of critical filters to prevent this, and the way in which we have to rely often on the artist’s word, it may be impossible to know up to what point we have built a history of public art that has been written out of press releases and imaginary tales.

One could say that Latin America has been the ideal cradle for this type of artistic-social experiments, since our cultural, economic and social situation is perfect to enact such formulas: visual artists often come from middle or upper class upbringing, many times being foreigners; art is produced mainly for an audience who lives in the U.S. or Europe, and who easily fall for Latin American exoticism; there is great richness and cultural complexity in some of the poorest parts of the continent where these projects take place, labor is cheap, and the racial and social contrasts are so strong that a work of these attributes has much more dramatic results than if it were to be made at a city like Amsterdam or New York.

Paradoxically, the same ethical obstacles that prevent us from critiquing any boring or mediocre community art (which may find justification in being a positive or altruistic recreation) also prevents us from keeping an artist away from taking advantage of the good will of a given community and use conceptual art premises to make, also, mediocre art.  Due to these reasons, there is a lot of frustration in the art world, as well as an insoluble dilemma between defending the artists’ rights to express themselves and “protecting” communities from art that may be way too manipulative, misinformed, and stubborn.

This dilemma appears to be at the core of the identity crisis that is lived by contemporary art today. Amidst this crisis, the debate lies in trying to define the new parameters that should evaluate and discuss this artistic practice and the extent to which we need to adjust or expand our ethical and aesthetic expectations in regards to it.

IT seems to me that the greatest confusion originates when the artist himself is not clear about his/her role in the particular social context where the work takes place. The reflection, ideally, should start with the artist, but to even conceive enforcing a “rules of social engagement” in the artistic practice would be an impossible, apart from repressive, task. The task to effectively question this kind of art corresponds rather to the field of art criticism and the curatorial practice, which would need to learn how to better analyze and deal with the challenges that this type of art poses.

What really matters in my mind is to reflect about the ways in which the artist who is sincerely interested in understanding a certain reality and interacting with it in the public realm, could do so without having to adopt the role of savior, missionary, messiah, or field manager.

I think that one of the main problems posed by public art that interacts with communities, in all the facets that I have described, is precisely the disadvantage and power relationship between the artist and the participating audience. In order to level this disadvantage and ensure a non-hierarchical exchange, it is necessary to find common grounds that would lie outside the artistic discourse —without that implying that the artist would have to renounce to his identity or profession. If one expects this dialogue and interaction to take place in “real life” and not in the ‘fictionalized’ exhibition catalogue, the artist has then to create a infrastructure that instead of working as a “mouse trap” to the audience would work as a semi-open space that is seductive, confrontational, or both. And in the same way that the artist must assume his role, it is also important that the public should assume theirs and be in the disposition to engage with the work —something that must be facilitated by the organizers of a public art project.

The audience does not have to be infantilized or treated in a patronizing way, and the options of interaction do not have to be limited to making them co-authors nor studio assistants. The true challenge of the artist, in my mind, is to be able to find a true meeting point where both sides can enrich with the exchange. Artists do not need to, or have to, renounce to their identity, nor hide the evidence of their intrusion in the new public environment, nor condition their presence to ask permission or apologize. But if the work lacks any entry points and areas of common dialogue, and if it imposes rigid rules of engagement upon which the success of the project will depend, it will be hard to expect an effective outcome.

Public art should never be put through a quantitative process of evaluation. Yet, it is vital to confront the artistic-social equation that is proposed by an artist, and when an artist offers claims of social impact, it is valid to demand evidence to substantiate such claims and view the work with a critical eye.  This is, at the very least, a responsibility that the critic and the curator should have towards the public that would benefit an adequate contextual description of a given work.

Ultimately, art can never give us any warranties. Its value lies not in what it pretends to offer, but in what is obtained by each individual viewer. Perhaps art may or may not be just about asking questions, but neither does it function through any promises of social, educational or artistic transformation — that is the reason why so much impeccable theory engenders so much boring or mediocre art. In the public art realm, this detail becomes even more important given that there is a distance between the concept and the implementation. Even though it is important to have great aspirations for a kind of art, we can’t nor should we ever hope, to control its outcome, which is already unpredictable in the volatile public arena.

If we had to elaborate a metaphor to explain the world of public art and the artist’s interactions with a community, we could say that each artist builds a house, and that it is the audience’s choice to walk in and visit. We can choose our guests, be it a few friends or a whole village. How long we want to retain them may depend on our wishes and our talent as a host. We can ask them to help us build the house, perhaps with uneven results, or we can ask them to tell us how to do it, but maybe the house may turn out badly planned and fall over our heads. We can redecorate the house with all of our guests, but we shall watch out for the chaos of so many opinions and eventually we may have to figure out a way to put order in it. We can bore them to death with bad music and make them run away. We can inspire them to build their own houses. Or we can entice them to enter under false pretenses and lock them in, for our personal entertainment. If we are experienced, we may be able to leave a lasting memory in them. Or we can lock them outside, close the door of our house, close our eyes, and imagine ourselves amidst a great party, being praised as the greatest host who ever lived. ≠≠≠

The Ballad of William Walker is a music video based on the story of American Filibuster William Walker, a soldier of fortune who in the XIXth Century unsuccessfully attempted to invade Central America and turn its land to the United States. The work is a comment on the ambivalent historic relationship with the U.S. that exists in the Central American region.

The work was exhibited as part of “Doubtful Strait”, organized by TeoRética in San José, Costa Rica.