Pablo Helguera » Theater

Urÿonstelaii (2010)

admin — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 02:42:10 +0000

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

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

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

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

D. Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan

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

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

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

Excerpt from the beginning of the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

Lyra Kilston- This is Not a Panel Discussion (2009)

admin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:47:52 +0000

This is Not a Panel Discussion: Pablo Helguera’s Pedagogical Follies
Lyra Kilston

Afterall magazine
11th July 2009

I recently witnessed the following exchange at a panel discussion on the life and work of the artist Juvenal Merst. The dialogue was between two curators: Sonja Stillman, a discreetly dressed, intellectual woman in her late 40s, and the panel’s moderator, Clifford Barnes, a slick and fashionable man in his early 40s. After a long-winded disagreement about Merst, their dialogue devolved into this:

Barnes: I don’t define what art is, I just show it as it is.

Stillman: I won’t even bring up your current associations with commercial galleries, which I see as a huge conflict of interest as a curator. What good is professional honesty as a curator if your commitment has been to treat art as an unthreatening, uncritical product, as a happy and pleasurable and entertaining thing to the market?

Barnes: Why should I apologize if the artists I work with are successful? That’s ludicrous. You, in contrast, treat artists as game pieces of bogus curatorial hypotheses that try to be a soothing balm to our social problems. Not only does it not work as exhibition premise – it is also bad art.

Stillman: It’s bad art for those, like you, who do not wish to think of the world at large.

Barnes: It’s bad for everyone beyond your tiny circle of friends at Bard.

Stillman: I’m sorry – I can’t do this anymore. [She stands up and starts to walk away from the panel.][1]

While a tad more vicious than the subdued tones of most panel discussions, its contrapositions are timeless. Yet the whole thing is fiction, and in fact farce. The above lines were performed for a rehearsal I attended of The Juvenal Players, a new play by New York-based artist Pablo Helguera that premiered at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, on June 13, 2009. The play presents a public discussion between a cast of art world archetypes – curators, a collector, a thwarted artist and an arts administrator – as they meet to discuss the life and work of the artist Juvenal Merst, a character that Helguera named after the early second century Roman poet Juvenal, who is credited with developing the nascent genre of satire.

The play’s premise is that Merst’s last artwork before his untimely death was to request that these particular people gather to discuss his life and work seven years later. As Clifford Barnes relays, Merst had specified the following in writing: “I want you to be at that moment where the memory of me has started to vanish, but not too much, with the purpose that you may still retain the most important aspects of those memories and have eliminated by now the incidental and unimportant details. You all will be the players of my own life, the narrators of my story, and to you I trust and I wish I was there to see my life be told.”[2]

What ensues is a Rashomon-style comedy of errors, in which each character is at odds with the others about who Merst really was. This is further complicated by the fact that Helguera wrote Merst as a classic conceptual trickster, and during the discussion doubts are raised as to what Merst actually made and said versus what was secretly a spoof. We are even led to wonder if Merst was simply playing the role of the artist as orchestrated by someone else, calling to mind the hoaxes of Andy Warhol and Maurizio Cattelan, both of whom would occasionally send other people to impersonate them at lectures.[3] In Helguera’s play, it soon becomes clear that Merst’s mischievous projects employed art world players as pieces in a chess game, and their willingness to occupy those positions is underscored by their obedient presence, seven years later, at a public discussion about him.

The Juvenal Players is the second theatrical panel discussion that Helguera has written and produced, but only one of his many projects that mock pedagogical conventions and art world posturing. Over the past two decades of his artistic career, Helguera has made collages, drawings and videos; written books (fiction and nonfiction); created installations; conducted tarot readings (he revealed my past to be very solid, but predicted that my future held some disaster); and performed in a variety of guises, from opera singer to mustachioed art world gadfly. Concurrently, he has worked in the education departments of major museums in the United States and Mexico, and is presently Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Few artists have spent more time witnessing the performance of art historical expertise than Helguera. He has organized and attended over 1,000 lectures, panels and events, and must daily grapple with the vectors of communication and pedagogy between an authoritative institution and its thirsting public. His day jobs have become the material from which many of his artworks stem. As he notes in the introduction to his collection of published performance texts (Theatricum Anatomicum (and other performance lectures), 2009), “In my role as a programmer, I have frequently been frustrated by the low or nonexistent public-speaking skills of those who lecture and participate in academic discussions…. Wouldn’t it be great if panels were like theater works, where drama has its hand in conveying the message? I thought, why aren’t there dramaturges for art lecturers? And I set out to become one.”[4]

Translating stilted art discourse into theater opens a rich vein of satire that Helguera deftly exploits. There’s a scene in The Juvenal Players where the panel discusses Merst’s first work, a film titled both Work Number 1 and Artmaking. Each participant interprets the piece differently. Due to technical difficulties the film is unable to be screened (a detail of sharp veracity), so the panelists must describe the work, arguing for a range of references from Antonioni to 1960s social uprisings to Minimalism to Robert Irwin. One participant even claims that the piece operates to “foretell the realities of the post-9/11 world.” Yet, after the panel members finish arguing about what the film meant, some resign themselves to admitting that they never really understood or liked it anyway.

The enigma of Merst and his work is the perfect foil for revealing the power struggles at play in constructing the narrative of art, or any, history. With Merst, Helguera is able to set up the follies inherent in panel discussions with particular complexity, since Merst’s antics often ended up complicating or transgressing the hierarchies of the art world and thus the very roles played by the panelists. For example, for one project Merst allegedly hired a detective to shadow a prominent collector, and thereby publicly exposed the collector’s adultery. Great scandal, which the panelists continue to squabble about, ensued.

Several artists come to mind as possible source material for the character of Merst, who appears to be a clever mash-up of some of the more notorious cultural producers of our day. Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), for which she accepted money in exchange for having sex with a collector, is a close analog in its blunt distillation of the artist-collector relationship; her project ultimately investigates the control of power and privilege in the art world. Christoph Büchel’s recent hijinks at Mass MOCA could be seen as the blueprint of an artist’s insistence on biting the hand that feeds him – and receiving critical acclaim for it.[5] Damien Hirst offers more possible fodder for Merst’s genesis, as his career is yet another illustration of the art world’s adoration of bad boy tricksters. Some critics claim that Hirst’s overexposed oeuvre employs the art world’s permissiveness and excessesas material. Hirst has admitted: “I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. I’ve found out there aren’t any. I wanted to be stopped but no one will stop me.”[6] His well-circulated quote speaks less to the thrilling boundlessness of contemporary art production and far more ominously to the reality that there is simply no one around who dares protest. This condition implicates the brokers of discourse and commerce around Hirst (and similarly, Merst) far more than it implicates the artist himself, and as such offers the perfect catalyst for Helguera’s pointed critiques.

In the book Prospects of Power, literary critic John Snyder writes, “Satire, it would appear, thrives either when there is little credence in public standards of morality and taste … or when morality and taste attenuate to superficial, arbitrarily strict codes of decorum….”[7] The first clause corresponds neatly to Hirst’s lament that “no one will stop me,” and the second to Helguera’s manual of etiquette. An amusing corollary to his pedagogical performances, Helguera wrote and published The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style: The Essential Guide for Artists, Curators, and Critics in 2005, just as the seemingly endless proliferation of global art fairs and biennials had reached its apex. The book sought to offer art world players their own combination of Emily Post etiquette with Machiavellian strategy, replete with chess piece graphics (lest one forget that there are most definitely winners and losers). One memorable section offers a play-by-play guide for a gallery opening, capped by a breakdown of totem pole hierarchies to diagram who you should talk to first, who you should avoid or ignore, and what to say if you are trying to get a studio visit or remind a collector of your existence. Other chapters answer the big questions, including, “Should one sleep with an artist whose work one does not like?” and “What do you say to a good friend who is exhibiting horrid works at his opening?”

As Juvenal wrote circa the late first century/early second century AD, “It’s hardnot to write satire. For who could be so inured to the wicked city, so dead to feeling, as to keep his temper…?”[8] These words ring as true today, and his astute observations of class hierarchies in Rome (one section of his writings focuses on the inferior types of seafood served to members of the lower classes at a formal dinner) resonate keenly with Helguera’s observations of art world conventions. Today’s VIP rooms at art fairs or the sequenced opening nights of biennials (from most exclusive on Tuesday to mere hoi polloi by Friday) are two pertinent examples; the best people are still served the best alcohol. The panelists in The Juvenal Players may be actors, but ultimately Helguera’s latest effort pulls back the curtain with a theatrical flourish to reveal our own collusion – through vocabulary, sartorial choice, gesticulation or egotistical promotion of our hard-earned roles – with the chain of command.

Notes

1 From the script of The Juvenal Players by Pablo Helguera, 2009.
2 Ibid.
3 See George Pendle’s article “How Unlike You” in Modern Painters, January 2009, p. 69.
4 Pablo Helguera, Theatricum Anatomicum (and other performance lectures) . New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2009: p. xiii.
5 Büchel’s demands for an astronomical budget resulted in the museum halting his installation and opening it unfinished to the public against his will, which led to a legal battle. He later framed and exhibited the furious emails between himself and the director of Mass MOCA at Art Basel Miami in 2007, causing some to speculate that the entire undertaking was planned by the artist as a way to limn the boundaries and limits of exchange between artist and institution.
6 http://www.artquotes.net/masters/hirst/damien-hirst-quotes.htm (last accessed July 9, 2009).
7 John Snyder, Prospects of Power: Tragedy, Satire, the Essay, and the Theory of Genre. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991: p. 100.
8 Juvenal, The Satires. Translated by Niall Rudd. Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 4.

Images

1 Pablo Helguera, The Juvenal Players, Grand Arts, 2009. Pictured: Clifford Barnes and Sonja Stillman.
2 Pablo Helguera, The Juvenal Players, Grand Arts, 2009. Pictured: Elmer Schafroth, Rosaura Valparaiso, Clifford Barnes, Sonja Stillman and Miranda Sak.
3 Pablo Helguera, The Juvenal Players, Grand Arts, 2009. Pictured: Sonja Stillman and Miranda Sak.

The Enneatype Conference (Script) (2009)

admin — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:28:38 +0000

THE ENNEATYPE CONFERENCE

The Enneatype Conference was a performance presented on May 9, 2009, at Lisa Ruyter’s studio in Vienna, Austria, per invitation of Parabol Magazine and curators Jasper Sharp and Elsy Lahner. The days of May 8th and May 9th I spent the time in Café Sperl, conducting “art personality assessment tests” using a system of my own making although inspired in the Enneagram Personality theory. Participants would respond to a questionnaire about their personal relationship to art, after which I would provide a diagnosis of their artistic personality type using enneagram categories.

While the enneagram test in fact turned out very accurate assessments of each individual’s attitude towards art, I wanted to stress the fallibility of any system that claims to provide “answers” about an individual’s personal situation. Thus the system, which at first was presented to all participants as an authentic scientific method developed in Vienna, was later unveiled as a complete fabrication.

PH conducting art personality tests at Cafe Sperl, Vienna, May 8, 2009

Sample of one of the art enneatype tests

The culminating event of the project was the performance, in the form of an academic lecture, that explained the various componens of the Art Personality Enneagram. What follows is the abbreviated text from that presentation.

Characters:

Rupert Steiner

Pablo Helguera

Steiner

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Welcome to the closing event of The Enneatype Conference, a unique occasion to celebrate the launch of The Enneagram of Vienna and celebrate the new issue of Parabol Magazine. My name is Rupert Steiner and I am the director of the Psychological Association of Art Therapists here in Vienna. Our mission is to study the ways in which art can reveal the potentiality of the individual. And, as such, it is an immense honor to me to present to you the work of Pablo Helguera, a Mexican artist and educator whose work has centered for many years on the very subject of the artistic personality. Helguera is the director of the Helguera Center for Artworld Studies, which has as its mission to understand the sociology of art and to propose the emergence of a new field of study, which he has described as artworld studies, using elements from social anthropology, biometrics, personology, economics, culinary theory, and of course psychology.

First we should explain what is an enneagram. The Enneagram is a nine-pointed figure inscribed in a circle. The meaning of the symbol itself, together with the personality types organized around the nine points, shows a system of knowledge about nine distinct but interrelated personality types, or nine ways of seeing and experiencing the world. The Enneagram of Personality is generally presented as a psychospiritual system for mapping and understanding nine possible personality types. Each personality type associated with the Enneagram represents a map of traits that highlights patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

The notion of the artistic personality enneagram emerges from the work of Dr. Ingrid Lipsky. Dr. Lipsky was a student of Theodor Meynert at the psychiatric clinic of the university of Vienna, alongside with Sigmund Freud and other eminent psychiatrists and neuropathologists. She was also involved in hypnotism and spirituality, which led her to research the enneagram.

Dr Lipsky died at age 52 in 1910, in a safari accident in Africa, just before she got to publish her research. It was shortly after that one of her students, Eberhard Klopstock, who inherited her research papers, took her theories and attempted to develop them.

He tragically burned her original works in order to claim them as his own, then publishing a book in 1935 inspired on her ideas, titled “The Enneagram and the Artist’s Mind”.

Unfortunately, the book did not do well, and it was never reprinted. There are no known surviving copies.

It was thanks to Pablo Helguera, who while doing research in the museum of Modern Art in New York, found a letter from Klopstock to the then director, Alfred Barr, mentioning his research on this subject. Helguera has researched this information to update the original ideas of Ingrid Lipsky and thus bring the Enneagram of Vienna back to life.

He is here to tell us about the various categories of the Enneagram and share with us a system that studies and analyses the artistic personality of the contemporary art world. Please help me in welcoming Pablo Helguera.

[PH arrives onstage]

Pablo, we are enormously grateful to have you amongst us tonight.

Thank you, so am I. I am delighted that we can share the knowledge of the enneagram tonight.

Steiner

Can you please tell us how you developed the enneagram?

Well, I had to work from very initial information that was left from the notes of notable enneagramists, including Dr. Lipsky, as well as other psychologists and psychiatrists that have focused on the typology of the artist, not excluding Carl Jung and Hermann Rorscharch, who was very much interested in art as revealing issues of consciousness.

Steiner

So what is the difference between the personality enneagram and the artistic enneagram?

The personality enneagram is something that was developed by many new age psychologists to explain the kinds of personalities in the world. The artistic enneagram focuses on figuring out specifically the kind of artistic sensibility that one has, and it is a very helpful way to understand one’s own relationship with art, your potential, and also to address your shortcomings as an arts professional. I believe that once you go through the process of learning your enneatype you will be able to become a much more successful individual in the art world.

Steiner

And I understand that you will now do a demonstration?

Indeed. I now illustrate the way in which the enneagram works.

First I will conduct an act of group hypnotism which is desired to attain collective attention to a given subject, particularly when one is giving a boring lecture.

You all will look at my hand, moving like a pendulum. You all will fall in a state of deep sleep and peace, of full attention of everything I will say from now on.

Good, we are ready to go now.

I first would like you to consider a question, and choose the answer that most accurately reflect your way of feeling about art. After you have made your choices, you should remember the letter and we shall find out what each of your art personality types are.

When you see an artwork at a contemporary art gallery, list the impulse that is most likely to come to you first:

a) Thinking about how this artwork makes you feel

b) Asking to yourself what is right or wrong with this artwork

c) Trying to evaluate the artwork as good or bad

d) Wanting to know who the artist is

e) Wanting to know how this artwork was made

f) Wanting to know the back story of that art work

g) Wanting to know what the idea behind the work is

h) Remembering other pieces similar to that one

i) Non thinking, simply experiencing the work.

When you see a contemporary artist or arts professional of your same age and background receive a certain recognition that you could technically be in the same position to receive, your most likely reaction is:

a) Happiness for this person

b) Envy, wondering why you did not receive such recognition yourself

c) Thinking on what kind of friendships and professional contacts you need to make in the future to receive that same recognition yourself

d) Indifference

e) Thinking of what kind of work you need to make to receive such recognition in the future

f) Wanting to know the reasons for such recognition

g) Figuring out an innovative way to attain similar attention

h) Depression

i) Simple admiration for this person

Following you will hear about the different kinds of art personality types. If you chose, for instance, “h”,

you are

TYPE 1: THE NOSTALGIST

Nostalgists are in touch with their feelings, are sensitive, and highly perceptive of their environment. The nostalgist is inquisitive and likes to attain a lot of knowledge about an artwork. They can become very erudite and knowledgeable about a subject.

On average, they tend to emphasize too much the notion of biography, the context in which something was made, they draw lots of historical connections.

When they are unhealthy they can be depressive, self-destructive, obsessed with being up to date with the latest news of the art world, overromanticize everything, they can become delusive.

Examples: Many famous art historians are nostalgists. Janet Cardiff (on the photo), Matthew Buckingham, Mark Dion, Janet Cardiff, Sophie Calle, Christian Boltanski, Yinka Shonibare

if you chose “g” you are,

TYPE 2: THE CONCEPTUALIST

As its name indicates, conceptualists are abstract thinkers, capable of powerful synthesis, focused, and able to quickly grasp and advance the art discourse.

On average, they overemphasize theory, cause and effect, and argumentation in a work. They cannot fully enjoy a work unless they have clarified in their mind the main issues that the work addresses.

Bad conceptualists become out of touch with their feelings and have a difficulty sharing their emotions, are introverted, are desensitized toward art which arises emotions, can become aggressive and pretentious.

Examples: Joseph Kosuth, Allan Kaprow, Jacques Rancière, Daniel Birnbaum, Rosalind Krauss, Luis Camnitzer, Roberta Smith, Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner, Martin Creed

TYPE 3: THE TALKER

At their best, Talkers are able to translate the visual into words, becoming eloquent and able to put things in perspective. Gregarious and friendly, talkers have an ability to bring people together and become important spokespersons for large interest groups and gain access to important positions in the art world. Many performers and architects are talkers.

On average, Talkers can come off as superficial, saying a lot but without great substance, emphasizing hyperbole and syntax instead of content, can draw exaggerated relationships, and feel that they always have to say something even if it is unnecessary.

When they are unhealthy, they have a burning desire to protagonize everywhere, taking other ideas as one’s own, gossip too much, exaggerate reality to the point of becoming a storyteller, becoming a bit of a clown.

Examples: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jerry Saltz, Marina Abramovic, William Kentridge, Robert Hughes, Maurizio Cattelan, Kirk Varnedoe

(e) is

TYPE 4: THE FORMALIST

Formalists are highly visual people, design-oriented, perfection-driven, with a great appreciation for craftsmanship and neatness. Organized, they are punctual, keep their word, and generally maintain a good balance of art and life.

On average, Formalists can be anal retentive, extremely demanding to others and to themselves, to the point of paralysis, it can take them time to make decisions and have anxiety in unresolved situations; they have no tolerance for ambiguity.

When they are unhealthy, they can be manipulative, easily irritated, dismissive of anything which may not be clear-cut, conservative, and materialistic.

Examples: Rachel Whiteread, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Hannah Darboven, Michael Snow, Walead Beshty, John Cage, Gabriel Orozco

TYPE 5: THE BOHEMIAN

Bohemians are those capable to enjoy the art experience to its fullest degree; they are relaxed, open individuals who are highly receptive to other’s art and ideas and are contagious in their pleasure and enthusiasm, sharing their innovative thinking. They are friendly and accessible and can be very inspiring.

On average, They are abstract thinkers who can sometimes get too ambiguous and contradictory in their actions; they may lack personal drive to do things; can take them a long time to do a project, can be noncommittal.

However, if they are unhealthy, they Can be lazy, or falsely modest, boring, inattentive to detail and poor executors of projects.

Examples: Rirkit Tiravanija, Basquiat, Pippilotti Rist, Vito Acconci, Helio Oiticica, and others.

TYPE 6: THE SHAKER

Now, Shakers are very perceptive of social contexts and can influence social structures to their advantage. They are brilliant, highly diplomatic, alert, shrewd, and reliable. They excel in organizing and administration, as well as in making interesting connections and bringing people together. They can orchestrate large projects and usually are good with money. Many museum directors are shakers.

On average, Shakers can be social climbers and careerists; they can put the carriage before their horse and do things entirely out of self-interest. They can be a powerful ally and supporter but can also be a dangerous enemy.

At their worst, they can be Egotistical, with a problem with authority, extremely proud and manipulative, delusional and self-aggrandizing.

Examples: Thomas Krens, Olafur Eliasson, Christo, Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, Okwui Enwenzor, Francesco Bonami, Mary Boone

TYPE 7: THE CONTRARIAN

Contrarians are the ones who usually open a debate. They have an innate ability to detect and question the status quo, and activating spaces of discussion and experience for others. They have sharp minds with complex perspectives and inspiring thoughts.

Generally, contrarians can be dogmatic, self-centered, and have a difficulty to relate to others who don’t share their views. Narcissistic, they are well-grounded, independent, and strong, although they resent not being given their due credit and always act as if they have a chip on their shoulder.

When unhealthy, beware: they can be extremely aggressive, dismissive of others, overly negative, insensitive to others, power-hungry, and snob.

Examples: Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, Martin Kippenberger, Terence Koh, Jens Hoffmann, The Guerrilla Girls, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Donald Kuspit.

TYPE 8: THE SPIRITUALIST

Spiritualists are self-fulfilled people who can extract the best of every art experience and bring it to a higher realm. They are people in peace with themselves, who think with clarity and lucidity, and for whom art is a vehicle to attain illumination.

Spiritualists usually see beyond what the normal viewer seees, thus can be treated as delusional (and may actually be); can be sentimental and new-agey. They can act as shamans or evangelists.

If they are unhealthy, however, they can be naïve, delusional in believing that they are the new Buddha, condescending, passive-aggressive, resentful and insecure.

Examples: Bill Viola, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Dan Flavin, Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, James Turrell

TYPE 9: THE ADMIRER

Admirers are centered individuals who can look at art in a balanced way and appreciate its strengths and weaknesses without falling prey to their emotions. At their best they are intelligent, self-effacing, extremely reliable as supporters, collaborators or allies.

Admirers can be calculating, materialistic, acquisitive, constantly amusing themselves with new things and experiences. They have a need to be loved.

When unhealthy, they are Impulsive and infantile in what they want. Can become offensive and abusive. They act on impulses rather than dealing with their own anxieties or depressions, so they can end up spent and despondent.

Examples: Charles Saatchi, Peter Norton, the Rubells

To finalize, I will show a few graphs that exemplify demographic research of the artworld using enneagramatic types.

Here is a sample of an unhealthy enneagramic art community, with an excess of Bohemians and talkers, and yet few admirers (which translates on scant collecting) and too few conceptualists.

In this other sample, one can appreciate the behavioral trends amongst art types who are inclined to switch galleries after being selected into the Venice Biennial. Shakers and Formalists are more likely to switch galleries given their acute sense of opportunity and order, respectively; contrarians will switch only because they like to switch, nostalgists are too attached to the past, and bohemians are not able to switch because they don’t have galleries in the first place.

so as you can see, there is a lot to be learned from this system, which can be mastered with enough study and analysis.

Any questions?

Steiner

Pablo, I do have a few comments.

Go ahead.

Steiner

I have been listening to your presentation, and I am realizing that none of these statements have any scientific basis. Looks like you made them up.

I think you are confused.

Steiner

I am starting to suspect that you fooled me and that actually Dr. Lipsky never existed. If you look closely at that photo of Dr. Lipsky that you gave me to show for the presentation, that looks like an old photo that you found in a thrift shop. And the guy that you showed in that picture is not Eberhard Klopstock. He looked too familiar to me. He actually is the singer Richard Tauber.

You are wrong, Rupert.

Steiner

I think that your whole theory is bullshit. It is like all that new age philosophy that gives you a false sense of worth, that gives you false hopes, making you believe that there are powerful spiritual forces that will make you succeed. But the truth is that when we try to hard to search for that success we loose the sense of who we are and what we believe in. You have played with our feelings. Shame on you.

I am sorry you feel this way. OK, something has gone wrong here. Maybe it is time to end this demonstration.

You may remember that you all are under hypnotic trance. So when I snap my fingers, you will not remember any of this conversation. The Enneagram of Vienna will completely vanish from your memory, the same way it came, it will vanish from everyone’s memory the same way it was gone before— it will never have existed. We will not think of who we are but only go about our lives, and our art, withholding judgment. We will simply try to survive, and be at times tortured and at times happy, not entirely sure why, and let our identities, and our relationship with art, remain a mystery, where it belongs.

[making another hypnotic gesture]

Nine, Eight, seven, six, four, three… two… one… welcome back. And thank you.

[they exit]

The Metropolitan Opera Bathroom

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

Poster for The Metropolitan Opera Bathroom

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

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

Video

We All Are Streeter (2006)

admin — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 21:50:24 +0000

Scott Vehill in We All Are Streeter, Hyde Park Art Center, April 2007

We All Are Streeter is a scripted symposium (ubeknownst to the audience) about identity, locality, and the notion of second city complex, a subject very much implicit in the cultural dynamics in Chicago. The “panel” was composed of a critic and an artist from Peoria (a city in Illinois that regards itself as a “second city” to Chicago). The debate between the panelists was intertwined with a lecture about the real life of Captain George Wellington Streeter, an eccentric sailor whose boat crashed onto the shores of downtown Chicago and thus tried to claim the area as his own. He was eventually evicted, but the area where he once claimed as his own is now known as Streeterville.

read the full text:

Script of We All Are Streeter (2006)

Captain Streeter

Panamerican Anthem/ Himno Panamericano (2006)

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

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

(click below for music)

panamerica-2

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

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

(english version below)

De los viejos Andes a los grandes lagos

Se inscribe la sombra de Panamérica,

Tierra de deseos y grandes percances

De grandes promesas y oscuros misterios

Hemisferio amante de ideales alados.

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

Pero en mí resonará

La voz hemisférica

Y aquellos fallidos sueños

Harán fortalecer

A mi paisaje interior

que es Panamérica.

De sus hondas minas a sus anchos ríos

Hemos extraviado a nuestra Panamérica

Veo su olvido entre sus emblemas

en sus monumentos públicos y anónimos

en su inconsciente, sangre en sus banderas

Y su historia errante veo pasar

siempre interrogante es mi Panamérica.

From the ancient Andes, to its glorious mountains

I will always praise the soul of Panamerica

From its fierce-some nature to its tragic power

I praise our great land of promise and deception

Mother of our nations and hopeful beginnings

Entre sus pasos perdidos

No busco redención

pero en mí resonará

la voz hemisférica

Although we may loose our spirit

In finding our true self,

Always will remain in us

The name “Panamerica”

From its greater rivers, to its wondrous valleys

We shall not forget the name of Panamerica,

Greater than an a country, nation of all nations

In blood and in spirit part of all our people

Single voice of millions, single land of glory.

Through its breathing landscape I’ll go by

Always deep in secret is my Panamerica.

We all Need a Pygmalion (2005)

admin — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 21:41:35 +0000

We All Need a Pygmalion is a performance work that accompanies the presentation of the Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style. Presented in the form of a social etiquette workshop for the art world. the audience is led through a series of examples on how to best dress, speak and promote oneself discreetly within the art world.

We all Need a Pygmalion has been performed in London, Berlin, New York, Mexico City, and many other cities, including in institutions such as the ICA Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, and others.

We all Need a Pygmalion at Sara Meltzer Gallery, NYC, 2008

Primer Congreso de Purificación Cultural Urbana

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2003 05:37:50 +0000

La Jornada Newspaper, Mexico City, July 13, 2003

The Primer congreso de purificación cultural urbana de la ciudad de México (First Congress of Urban Purification of Mexico City) was a collaborative project by Ilana Boltvinik and Pablo Helguera made in response to the increasingly conservative climate of government-run cultural policy—or lack thereof— in Mexico. The project took form of an actual conference in the Hotel de la Ciudad de Mexico in downtown Mexico City in May of 2003. The project was never advertised as an art project but as a real conference with a call of papers that insidiously claimed that “culture, like the environment, is polluted”, and invited submissions as to how to “purify” it. Many submissions were received from as far as Colombia, and 6 were selected for the conference, while 6 others were written as scripts and read by actors, unbeknownst to the audience. The 6 “scripted” submissions were in a sense a response to the 6 “real” submissions, formulating statements or points of view that are rarely expressed in academic or public forums. The following two scripted papers here include the one read by the Mexican curator Marco Barrera Bassols, calling for the complete elimination of national arts funding —arguing that most of that funding goes to support a bureaucratic apparatus and too little to actual art making. At the time, Rudolf Giuliani had been hired by the Mexico City government to be a security advisor. The paper read by performance artist Ryan Hill, who was introduced as director of a pro-Giuliani organization, proposed a US-run cultural policy program for Mexico inspired in Giuliani’s own conservative view of culture (not to long ago Giuliani, while New York City mayor, had sought to take away funding from the Brooklyn Museum for the display of Chris Ofili’s painting).
This last paper generated a media blitz and outrage over the notion of an US-led cultural policy, published by the papers La Jornada, Reforma, Universal, Milenio and others, which in turn led to a public debate on cultural policy as originally intended.

–

(exerpt from the performace script:
Ryan Hill’s paper)

Thank you for coming today to this event. As assistant director of the department of cultural services and assigned representative of the Rudolph Giuliani Commission for this congress, I would like to start my presentation by speaking about our current positions and our projects related to our improvement of the cultural life of Mexico City. After that, I will get into th specifics of our cultural program, known as PROLICU.

As you may or may not know, the Commission is an independent, not-for profit, organism of philantropic nature, which focuses its energies in solving the current problems experienced in Mexico City in what culture is concerned. The Culture Department, which was created at the beginning of 2002, with the intention to increment the range of action of the Commission, is based on the same theorical principles, that is to say, to “condemt and do everything that could be done to abolish all and every one of the abuses towards life and humanity”, followed by various accords such as “ bringing to light and clean all the physically hazardous practices to mental health, and preserving such cleanliness”. Of course, it is of utmost importance to consider cultural practices as part of mental health.

From its very beginnings, the members of the commission have made an uninterupted stand against the brutal treatments and criminal practices and abuses against social and cultural human hygiene, following as its main principle the emphasis of moral renovation implemented by Rudolf W. Giuliani as major of the City of New York. The Commission has become a really effective force in the promotion of changes in this area.

Our program known as PROLICU is dedicated to the research and identification of any violations to cultural hygiene, both in the psychiatric and physical sense. Although it is a relatively young organization, it has already accomplished a profound cultural study with the help of many national and international experts in order to present, in the most complete way possible, the action plan that we plan to follow to implement the cultural cleaning of this city.

I will now describe the Program of Cultural Cleanup (PROLICU) in its first stages and Characteristics.

Program of Cultural Purification (PROLICU)

The international program for the cultural purification of Mexico City, better known as PROLICU, was launched in 2002 by the Commission. The project, carefully developed with the objective of completely reforming the life of Mexico City through a thorough cultural cleanup, consists in a series of key steps that need yet to be implemented.

First Phase: Case Study and Cultural Evaluation
The general comission of PROLICU, composed by those members of the government who may consider themselves knowledgeable in the field of arts, will carefully analize the cultural program of each one of the city’s museums, houses of culture, universities, schools, galleries, and activity centers open to the public, identifying where they can, those instances in which the activities may be considered immoral — which is not the case of every institution, although it is estimated that 78% of cultural centers in Mexico City have such condition to some extent and need of profound renovation in this aspect.

Second Phase: Cleanup and Renovation
All the directors, curators, museum administrators, and employees of government-run galleries, cultural centers and community centers whose cultural discipline and challenge to authority will be immediately dismissed, without any previous notification.

Third Phase: Reprogramming, Regulation, and Quotas

After the selection of the new group of directors from all cultural spaces in Mexico, a new Organization will be announced, known as the Comission of Morality and Public Decency (CoMoDePu), a principal organ of PROLICU, which will be in charge of supervising all the cultural entities in Mexico City, ranging from public dependencies to private ones, with the objective to approve any artistic proyect on the basis of its civic decency. Every exhibition project, concert, publication, or expression that shall be transmitted to a public larger than 8 people should be presented to the authorities of the CoMoDePu and meet the following requirements:
1)    To promote a positive image of Mexico City;
2)    Completely lack any reference to sexual acts or attack to morality,
3)    Not use bad words,
4)    Not utter the name of God or Mexico in vain, nor in a profane way under any circumstance;
5)    Not use foreign words unless to announce commercial products; local indigenous languages also excepted

Those cultural producers and/or administrators who would participate in works supposedly of an “artistic” nature that would not follow the previous rules, will be immediately subject to fines and quotas of up to $10,000.00 U.S. dlls. Additionally, any other work that would be considered to make reference, either directly or metaphorically, to any slanderous attack of political, social, religious or economic nature will be confiscated and examined by the CoMoDePu until deemed appropriate or not for public viewing. Exempted from this rule are all the artists and creators who may have received lifelong scholarships by CONACULTA.

Fourth Phase: Education and Progress
The Commission will simultaneously establish a renovation program in the artistic curriculum in Mexico City schools, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.
In this program, ellaborated by experts, the lacks in the current educational system will be addressed and there will be special classes given for the training of future artists.

Fifth Phase: Unforseen Changes
The Commission will take on the task of replacing any directive whenever necessary, without making any explanations for the reasons of his or her dismissal. Possible reasons for such dismissal may include:

1)    Expressing aesthetic points of view which may differ from the preestablished guidelines for the artistic advancement of the city,
2)    Unnanounced activities,
3)    Collaborations with international institutions that are not sanctioned by the government.

Sixth Phase: Social function of Museums and Others
The commission will establish a special calendar of availability of all the cultural centers in the city, wether public or private. Under the instructions of CONACULTA, these spaces will make their locations available to realize, in strict order of priority:
1)    government-related and official events,
2)    official exhibitions and events organized by CONACULTA,
3)    exhibitions, lectures, and events by government-approved artists.

These few steps, which are only the first ones to accomplish a true renovation of the management of culture in Mexico City, will no doubt bring an immediate benefit to all the audiences and the people who appreciate art in the city, and will also provide a more efficient mechanism for the development of the cultural program in the city. ****

Instituto de la Telenovela / Soap Opera Institute

admin — Thu, 02 May 2002 04:56:28 +0000

Instituto de la Telenovela in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Galerija P74, 2002

The Instituto de la Telenovela (2002-2004) functioned as an actual research organization that seeks to trace the impact of latin american televised culture (particularly soap operas) in the rest of the world. Part media literacy project, part conceptual exhibition, part collaborative, site-specific project with sociologists, educators, and communication specialists, the project consists in installations, display of data, creation of domestic spaces, and a functioning resource center, all of which intend to show the impact of this form of drama, the origin of its industry, the way in which its dramatic forms is conditioned by the market and the viewership, and the impact that it has both on the Latin American society and on the perception of Latin America abroad. The project was first exhibited at the Galerija P74 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and later traveled to the 8th Havana Biennial, HDLU center in Zagreb, and the RCA in London, amongst many others.

Memory Theater (2001)

admin — Fri, 15 Jun 2001 04:13:21 +0000

During the beginning of the sixteenth century, a mystic by the name of Giulio Camillo attempted to construct a memory theater, a place where all the things of the world and the universe could be seen and experienced. His utopian model for knowledge was based on 49 crucial memory images constructed from mnemonic devices and drawn from biblical, classical, and esoteric sources. His project was never completed and only a written text about his intentions remained. This project attempted to reconstruct Camillo’s theater, first physically as an interactive museum, and then virtually as a search engine, trying to put forth the notion that Camillo was really trying to envision something similar to the internet back in his own time, as well as trying to articulate the notion of the encyclopedic museum. The classic icons given by Camillo to the theater were replaced, through questionnaires, by contemporary symbols provided by students and other communities who participate in workshops connected to the project, so each installation the imagery of the theater changes.

Memory Theater, Banff, 2004

The project was first exhibited at the University of Montana in 2001 and since has been traveling to various locations, including the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, for the exhibition Database Imaginary (2004). The story of Giulio Camillo was included in the performance Parallel Lives (2003).

Memory Theater, original installation, University of Montana, 2001

see

Essay by Victoria Noorthoorn on Memory Theater (2001)