Pablo Helguera

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel: Pablo, we met at The Bronx Museum in 2001! We were both participating in the AIM Program (Artists in the Marketplace). At present, I could not care less about the marketplace, but I do care a great deal about witnessing art like your compelling performance, Cuarto de Pegar / Collage Parlor, at Hispanic Society in Harlem/Washington Heights.

Cuarto de Pegar / Collage Parlor, was part of your research fellowship with Hispanic Society, where we were in the same cohort organized by arts visionary Alex Campos. Can you talk about Cuarto de Pegar / Collage Parlor for those who were not there?

 Pablo Helguera: Nicolás, I have vivid memories of a performance  you did at The Bronx Museum shortly after we met, where you appeared in a bathing suit, surrounded in a tropical environment and  offering  something that looked like Hawaiian Punch but that, if I recall correctly, was intended to be the drink of the fountain of youth. I always related to the way you merged the structure of the religious ritual with the protocol of the postwar, post-minimalist, Fluxus- style performance.

As to my fellowship at the Hispanic Society: I had always been intrigued by this museum and its history, but had never seen the institution engaged with contemporary art with the exception of the famous Francis Alÿs piece (Fabiola) that was presented there under the auspices of DIA. Alex Campos is someone I /we have worked with for many years, and I was excited to come and explore the Hispanic Society’s collection.

As you know, I worked in museums (mostly in a senior programming capacity) for nearly 30 years, a time during which  I did more than my fair share of interpretive projects and artists residencies (managed by me); that is aside from the artist residencies I have done as artist for other museums. Perhaps for that reason, I am not so interested anymore in the traditional dynamic of coming as artist to “interpret” a collection, but I am rather interested in interpreting the identity of the institution as a whole, its soul, sort to speak. You could say, if we discuss this in spiritual terms, that I am interested in capturing the “aura” of the institution, or better put, its unconscious. And in that regard, what has simultaneously fascinated and haunted me about it is the building itself and its history. The whole environment reminded me of my grandfather, Ignacio Helguera, who was himself a big Hispanophile and shared a fascination about Spain that I think is comparable to the one of Archer Huntington. And weirdly enough, my grandfather emigrated to New York in the early 1900s and lived in the Upper West Side with an uncle; he lived in New York for 20 years before going back to Mexico. It is possible he might have been at the Hispanic Society. Cuarto de Pegar is, in a way, a piece about my family’s relationship with Spain, using the building as a site for invoking those connections.

NDEREOM: At the core of Cuarto de Pegar / Collage parlor is Colonia Roma in Mexico City, the place where you were born and one that, in your case, goes back to family lineages. I first connected with Colonia Roma in the 1990s, through two dear friends who had an old house near Hospital General: Enrique Estrada and Maurice Harrah. I am hoping to find an image of the place as I last experienced it in 2017, right before Enrique died and after Maurice’s death. By the way, my uncle from the Dominican Republic trained as a gynecologist at Hospital General. And now the Colonia Roma has been dubbed by Vogue the Williamsburg of Mexico City. Awful comparison in my opinion, since Colonia Roma has its very own soul, and it does not look like Brooklyn at all, except for the gentrification that it is undergoing. But back to our conversation, houses are living entities, just like people. Can you share about the life of your actual family’s home at Colonia Roma as it pertains to the personal or in relationship to what transpired through Cuarto de Pegar / Collage Parlor?

PH: When he returned to Mexico City in 1924, my grandfather had learned a method to cast bathtubs and started a business selling bathroom supplies, which prospered, especially after the war. He was a self-made man, and one of his life obsessions was to buy the house of Orizaba 21 in Colonia Roma (which, by the way, was next to a hospital, the IMSS, which still stands there to this day). My father used to tell me that my grandfather sometimes would sit in the porch of his own house in disbelief, feeling so lucky that he had been able to buy that place. You are absolutely right that houses sometimes feel like people; that was true of Orizaba. It was a very large house, one that eventually did not make much sense for my grandparents to live in because their four sons were grown up. When I was born both of my grandparents had passed away and my parents had moved in the house, initially to take care of my grandmother. My first life memories (when I was about 3 or 4 years old) are of the many, seemingly infinite rooms of that house (we lost the house due to a turn for the worse in family finances and had to move out when I was 4). As artists, as you know, those visual memories of childhood are incredibly important. Most important was the fact that my father created some kind of art room for my siblings which they called “El cuarto de pegar”. He had placed  reproductions of famous paintings in the room mainly as decoration, or perhaps I suppose, for inspiration: Velázquez, Rembrandt, Titian, Goya, and so forth. I suspect that my own relationship with collage-making is rooted in that room. I also have to say (no offense to the Hispanic Society) that parts of  the building, which have seen better times, also reminds me of how I remembered my grandfather’s house, which at some point was considered a great mansion but by the time we left it, it already was a fading historic building. I am stimulated by the buildings that are saturated with their own memories.

NDEREOM: The house I was related to at Colonia Roma was almost at the corner of Coahuila and Mérida Streets, and had an interior courtyard full of plants that hummingbirds would visit. Can you believe that? The house was also full of interesting objects and books, some of which we still care for in the South Bronx. You grew up with an art room in Mexico while I grew up with an altar room in the Dominican Republic. My family’s art making revolved around Catholic and Afro-Caribbean spiritualities (like altar-making and rituals) more than with formal art trainings, although there are seamstresses, writers and poets within my relatives. When I turned seven or eight, I started to study theater with the most radical thinkers in Santiago, the Dominican city where my family lives. But you had a collage room. What were some of your first incursions in the arts, there, in that space, and how do they speak to your performance-based work?

PH: In contrast to yours, my family was vehemently atheist, although my parents did marry through the church since it was the 1950s anyway, and the older generation were still religious.  Nonetheless, there was a  true, deep religion in my family: music. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart,  Brahms: that was our pantheon. I grew up listening to piano, orchestral and chamber music. My sisters are professional musicians; I in fact am one of the only ones who went in a different (art) direction. So in that regard, you can see why performance is important to me. And then there were the writers, poets, and storytellers of my mother’s family. My life has thus been an ever-unfolding attempt to bring together those various threads.

NDEREOM: Your performance at Hispanic Society took place at the magnificent Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s room: Visions of Spain. In your piece you talked about your Spanish elders and their migration to Mexico. However, you ended up migrating to the US, like your grandfather, thus expanding your ancestors’ journey through the hemisphere and into the complexities of identities like Latinidad and Latinxidad (my neologism). Where is home for you? I am also curious as to what has replaced your family’s house in the DF in Mexico and the emotions that the space (as in the meters of Earth where the house once stood) continues to elicit for you.

PH: You ask a very simple, important, and yet difficult question for me. In simple terms, the house of Orizaba was torn down; in its place now there is a parking lot. It is painful and somehow depressing for me to go back there, where only a portion of the iron gate of the house remains. My family emigrated to the US in 1989, primarily because my sisters were already here and when I came to study my parents came along. As immigrants, especially for my parents, objects, family heirlooms, became incredibly important: books, paintings, silverware, the stuff we could bring from Mexico. But physically in terms of buildings, nothing remains. Over the years, and perhaps precisely because I worked in museums so long, I have grown suspicious of the purported magical powers of objects. I don’t believe they replace people; I don’t believe in magic, I don’t believe in spiritual powers. I believe in feelings and in ideas and their survival through the memory of generations. All this to say that I no longer think of home as an address, a physical location. I believe home is our culture, our memory and our language, and that the self is a dwelling — Las Moradas, if you want to think of Santa Teresa. But to put it in the words of a Mexican poet, Pita Amor, “yo soy mi casa.”

NDEREOM: Pita Amor! Thank you for introducing me to this incredible person. I plan study her work and legacy. I am a fetishist by nature. Perhaps it my upbringing in Afro-Caribbean religions and the power imbued in objects and personal belongings that is so central, in my opinion, to this kind of spiritualities, from hair stands to nail clippings and to clothing.

To conclude, I would like to return to the arts. Cuarto de Pegar / Collage Parlor, from what I experienced, combines elements of theater, research and singing with the visual arts, and I understand that this is because of your own artistic training. Is this something that you see yourself continuing to explore with future work? Where do you see Cuarto de Pegar / Collage Parlor going after your research residency at Hispanic Society, and in terms of audiences? I thank you, Pablo, for talking with me. Gracias.

PH: I have recently come to terms that a vein of my work has to be autobiographical, and I can’t escape it— like Félix González Torres, perhaps. Sometimes it is explicit, other times it is hidden. I don’t think it is important for viewers to know my life story (nor do I necessarily want them to know it), and in fact I think if artworks are relevant it is not because the stories we tell about ourselves are interesting or relevant, but because (hopefully) they relate to important aspects of human experience. I try to assemble those pieces with the elements I have at my disposal— images, text, music— always hoping that they can transcend the initial autobiographical impulse. I was grateful to be able to attempt just that, that is, to play in the very mysterious and captivating environment of the Hispanic Society, and maybe in a small way (and here I might sound contradictory, but so what) help invoke its ghosts.

Gracias a tí, Nicolás.

All slides courtesy of Pablo Helguera except for the four photographs of the house at Coahuila and Mérida Streets by Nicolás

Pablo Helguera’s links: Website / Instagram / Publications / Beautiful Eccentrics

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work incorporates pedagogy, sociology and theater and literary strategies. His project, The School of Panamerican Unrest, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between and covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work of socially engaged art.

Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005). From 2007 until his appointment at the New School, he was the Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized more than 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September, 2011.

Helguera is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received the Creative Capital, Art Matters, Franklin Furnace and Blade of Grass fellowships, as well as the First International Award of Participatory Art from the Region Emilia Romagna (Bologna). He holds a PhD from Kingston University, London, and an honorary PhD from the Kansas Art Institute.

Pablo Helguera has exhibited and performed individually in many museums and biennials around the world. He is the author of several books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), The Parable Conference (2014) and An Atlas of Commonplaces (2015)