A Brief History of Finitude
Leah Oates
Pablo Helguera is a New-York based artist whose multimedia installations and performance pieces ask and investigate questions of memory, loss, and culture. Drawing on cognitive theory, Hermetic thought, and phenomenology, Helguera’s work displays a wide-ranging, insatiable intellect; however, this engagement with currents of 20th century theory constitutes a starting point rather than a destination–Helguera’s work manages to transcend the particularities of doctrine, becoming visceral and palpable while retaining a haunted determination to confront some of the heavier questions of life. Leah Oates speaks with Helguera about his recent work and his ongoing projects.
Leah Oates: What would you say is the subject of your work?
Pablo Helguera: My work has usually dealt with subjects like memory, the mythology that originates from memory, institutional critique, the interrelationship between writing, music, and the visual, the relationship between the personal and the collective, and self-referentiality. I have also been influenced in my thinking by my past experience as a museum educator, which lasted nearly 15 years.
LO: How does your latest work, Swan Song, fit in relation to your other projects?
PH: Swan Song is the end result of a critique of creativity that I have developed over the years in my works and writings–trying to put in the gallery what is built by the critique itself.
I consider Swan Song perhaps the most important turning point in my activity as an artist so far because it presents a summary of the work I have done previously and also seeks to mark a path, a statement of purpose for future work.
The three-part way in which Swan Song was presented–the musical performance, the book, and the exhibition–was intended to critique the conventionality of the exhibition package in galleries. The book is not a catalogue, but an essay written by the artist, and simultaneously a work within the show. It springs from my interest in reclaiming the textual voice that once artists had in the art discourse–through manifestos, for example. And similarly, the musical composition was intended to show that artists could also enter other languages, some of which cannot be discussed with the conventional tools of art criticism. This, I think, is a particularly challenging aspect for the average art critic.
LO: Swan Song is a group of artworks and performances that elaborate on the theory of finitude or endingness. Endingness is a creative state that is triggered by the personal confrontation with endings. How does this relate to your experience as an artist? As a person?
PH: Previously you asked me if having an impact is what propels you to create. What I have always thought that ultimately propels me to create is the certainty that I will die someday–which may be a self-evident thought, but one that is still on my mind. If I were to live forever, there would be no urgency to become an artist or to make certain kinds of works. But more than my ultimate death, what I think is critical is that art contains moments of reality–entire periods, everyday life. They become the definition of an era, as we understand through art history. I think in our over-self-conscious art world today we are very much aware of that condition, and we thus make art which is a self-proposed historical perspective of itself. This is what I call Terminalism, or Endingness. I believe we live in a terminalist art period. It is a very Heideggerian concept.
LO: It seems there is an aspect of ritual and remembrance involved in your performances. Is this accurate?
PH: I started as a painter years ago, but I had a background in literature, opera, music, etc. So the medium of performance seemed to bring it all together somehow. It is true that the performances I do have a very pre-determined, sometimes rigorous structure, and it is true also that they usually are structured around conventional social rituals that we all have: attending a lecture, a concert, and a dinner. In my fist solo show, in 1993 in Chicago, I reconstructed a 1943 Rotary Club dinner (an absurdly unimportant social event) and asked the audience to join in recreating the "historical" event. The "reconstruction dinner" in itself was documented and made "historical" later on. The plan is that we will recreate that dinner 50 years from then. I think I like performance art because it is so immediate, so much so that it is almost a memory almost as it is happening. One of the great contradictions about my work, and which has been pointed out a few times, is that I make work that usually is fragile or ephemeral, and yet it is mostly about commemoration, about holding on to a very important thing that vanishes. I don’t know why I do it. Maybe it’s because in the end what is most important to me is to remember one thing at one particular time, not to preserve it forever–because ultimately I am skeptical about the eternal preservation of anything. I think preservation is, paradoxically, a perverse way of dying.
LO: Your work deals with visionaries and strong individualism. Creativity and recovering memory are central ideas in your work, so is this why you have focused on forgotten "visionaries"?
PH: That is particularly true of the project I did in 2003, "Parallel Lives," and the biographical shows that preceded it. I have always been attracted to biographies, I think mainly because many abstract ideas that we try to grapple with can be best represented by learning about the lives of certain individuals–a concept that is widely used by Hollywood. I also gravitate towards anti-heroes, or obscure people with great conflicts. I find them more human than the monumental figures of history.
There is an autobiographical reason too. My family, the Helgueras, have been characterized for generations for being somehow eccentric "visionaries," mostly failed or inconsequential in the larger scope of history, but visionaries in the end: we had inventors, business entrepreneurs, delusional dreamers, eccentric artists, town leaders, revolutionaries. And all reverts back to the condition of an artist, who makes a living by putting the eccentricities out there. Thus my interest in people like this, and in wanting to know if there is an intrinsic value in really believing in something despite facing total adversity. I did exhibitions about each one of these individuals because I think I wanted to celebrate that kind of vision, particularly today when it seems to me that it is hard for us to find something in which to believe.
LO: Your work has a reverence for preserving memory, ritual, language and it seems to me has a spiritual component as well as a sense of wonder. One quote that jumped out for me was "We are all others, we all are self". Please speak about this aspect of your work.
PH: I am drawn to social–not religious–ritual, as I grew up in a traditional, yet atheist, Mexico City family that placed a lot of importance on social conventions. At the same time, I have always been critical of ritual, because while it provides you with a safe structure, it also undermines your ability to change. So, my use of social rituals in my performances is both a nostalgic celebration of that tradition and at the same time a critical reflection about the things that we all do without even knowing why we do them.
Similarly, I strongly believe that our relationship with reality is largely dependent on our relationship with our memories, and thus I think keeping our memories alive is critical to knowing who we are. But at the same time I am critical about favoring specific interpretations of memory as ‘historical truths.’ This is a practice that has always been implemented by authoritarian governments that want to present history as one unassailable line of thought, and it leads to ways of homogenizing feelings and thought that I don’t like at all. To do this, is like claiming ownership of those memories that belong to all. This is why in my work I try to maintain a constant reflection on how my personal memories relate to the others, and how what I do connects with my time, with my generation, with the world we all live in.
And this is also why, in my life-long quest to restore collective memory, and specially after 9/11, I have wanted to create a kind of work that stresses the value on our collective humanity (trying not to fall into typical political correctness). "Parallel Lives" was for example a project about very different people who pursued idealistic goals, simultaneously succeeding and failing in their attempts. I wanted to communicate the universality of that idea.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, who built Hermeneutics onto the foundation laid out by Heidegger’s, was the one who said that famous phrase "we are all others, and we all are self". John Donne also put it very well when he wrote: "no man is an island, intire of it iselfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine.. (etc)".
I seek the others in me, because I think they help me see something about myself, and thus I would like what I do to serve the others in creating a reflection about themselves.
In terms of spirituality, I very much admire those who have it, but unfortunately- and to my regret- I don’t believe in it. Rather, I believe in personal connections. I do believe in wonder, however, and I want everything I do as an artist to have a bit of it.
LO: What other projects, concepts or ideas your are currently working on?
PH: I am working on two performance projects that will be presented in New York this fall, as well as the publication of a "Contemporary Art Style Manual." Most importantly, I am preparing a highly utopian project entitled "The School of Panamerican Unrest," a nomadic think-tank in the shape of a traveling schoolhouse that I will physically transport, by car, from Alaska to Chile, exploring old notions of Panamericanism and organizing discussions all across the Americas about the ways in which the arts can have influence again in the public, social and political realm. It is another crusade to restore memory–this time, a geographical and cultural memory–of who we are. It is a challenging project, but I suppose I can never get away from the model of those eccentric, utopian entrepreneurs that I have always loved.
