Pablo Helguera - Generation 1.5 artist
Pablo Helguera was born in Mexico City and has lived in Chicago and Barcelona. His piece, Everything in Between (2007), is a newly-commissioned, multi-media installation that functions as an autobiographical novel. Based on a küaut;nstlerroman-a novel in which the protagonist undergoes an artistic evolution—Helguera's installation depicts a 4-year transition (1988-1992) in 20 explanatory chapters and will soon be accompanied by the book The Boy Inside the Letter.
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Everything in Between - An interview with Pablo Helguera
QMA
Everything in Between is a project based in the display of your drawings and the publication of your writings from adolescence, some of which are very private. Can you talk about how you came to the decision of displaying these materials?
PH
When I was invited by Tom Finkelpearl and Valerie Smith to participate in this exhibition, “Generation 1.5”, I was immediately interested in the paradox that such a subject poses: it is hard to ignore the fact that many artists working today come from very culturally hybrid backgrounds. Furthermore, it is becoming the norm, rather than the exception, for artists to become globetrotters, just because of the way in which this profession has now been shaped. At the same time, many of us cringe at the deterministic assumption that our national origin necessarily informs cultural hybridity or shapes the content of what we do. The truth is that we cannot freely ignore cultural backgrounds and contexts as if every artist was born in a vacuum, nor can we use our assumptions about those backgrounds as a formula to understand the artist’s ideas or intentions.
So, while I wanted to contribute to this exhibition, I didn’t want to do it with a work that addressed the hybridity paradox in the typical “either/or” proposition that is usually used when speaking about identity politics (namely, that either it provides a context for the work or it doesn’t). The whole process of migration, artistic influence and individual education is way too complex to be reduced to those terms. So, in order to get a better sense of that issue, I decided to revisit the facts of my actual experience as an immigrant adolescent (I left Mexico when I was 18 to go to college, and never moved back).
Fortunately, my family had kept all the writings and artworks I had made during that period. Taking them out of the family basement back in Chicago was like dealing with Pandora’s box. I had not read those diaries since I had written them, and while they were embarrassingly romantic and naïve, I also thought they were the most authentic statement about that experience that I could possible provide.
QMA
There is a famous phrase that you quote in your book: “youth is a sickness of which one gets cured a little every day.” What do you think about this?
PH
I like that quote very much—which apparently was said by none other than Mussolini! Yes, adolescence usually feels like that annoying stage of our lives which, like acne, we are happy to leave behind forever. But I also think that we are very dismissive about adolescence, and we tend to forget that it is a very challenging age. True, when we are adults we face problems in our lives that make our adolescent concerns look like nothing, but I think that if we are able to undertake those big challenges when we are adults it is largely because adolescence helped us prepare for them. In contrast, nothing really prepares us for adolescence (childhood is kind of a universe of its own). And at that stage we live life with little or no mediating criteria, which makes every experience very intense. Every small problem becomes a life or death proposition, the world is largely incomprehensible, the options of our life are overwhelmingly limitless, we don’t know what our place in it is, and we feel grossly misunderstood. I also like another phrase by the quote master George Bernard Shaw: “adolescence, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing; age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing”.
QMA
Did you write a lot at that time?
PH
I was obsessed with reading and writing. During those years, I read several books a week, ranging from 19th century novels to poetry and philosophy. But I had an older brother who was a writer, and because of that I felt that my place was in art, not writing. And yet, I wrote every day. I was surprisingly diligent as a diarist: I filled endless notebooks with daily descriptions about what I was doing and feeling. I wrote poetry, plays, beginnings of novels, essays about art, and palindromes. Aurelio Asiain, who was editor of Octavio Paz’s magazine, Vuelta, published those palindromes in 1988, when I was 17, in that magazine. But mostly, writing was the way in which I dealt with my sentimental woes. So those diaries are mostly an interminable series of broken-heart stories, interspersed with my idealist notions about what love and art should be.
QMA
What kind of transformations do you think you went through in the period that is covered in this project?
PH
The project covers the years 1988 through 1992, when I was between 17 and 22 years old. It was the most important transition of my life. Not only was it a transition from adolescence to young adulthood, but at the same time, from one cultural worldview to another (or, to the awareness of multiple worldviews), and also from a vague awareness of art to a full discovery of its infinite landscape. I moved to Chicago wanting to be a muralist, with aesthetic ideas that were closer to the 1930s, and what I encountered in art school at the center of the culture wars of the late 1980s: Mapplethorpe, the NEA, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, and the flag controversy initiated by a student colleague of mine, Dread Scott. I was shocked and overwhelmed about what art could be. At first, I didn’t know what to make of it, and for a while I was very dismissive of it all. I criticized political art and particularly abhorred performance art. At the end of that period, I was only making conceptual pieces and performances. It is funny, because today I can’t see how performance or politics could ever be detached from my practice.
QMA
It is very rare for contemporary artists to share their student work. Doesn’t it bother you to have people see what you were doing then?
PH
Well, it definitely was a hard thing to do for me, even if someone may think that it is a narcissistic gesture. But adolescence is so narcissistic. Anyway, when you really start reading all my naïve ideas and my ridiculous sentimental confessions, you may agree that it is not the kind of thing you would be very proud to show to an audience!
Actually to me, it was more of an anthropological impulse, like trying to show myself as a specimen of adolescence. One of the reasons that motivated me to do “full disclosure” of my formative years is precisely that it is so rarely done by contemporary artists, and I think we could learn so much by looking at their very early pieces.
We are very familiar with Picasso’s childhood drawings, of course, but the phenomenon of precociousness in art was inadvertently redefined by the advent of conceptualism: it is hard to imagine a onceptually-based artwork made by a thirteen year-old- its almost an oxymoron. Artists today generally start making their meaningful work after adolescence. And for that reason I think there is a lot of understandable trepidation amongst artists regarding their early and/or student work, given that it is usually underdeveloped, technically deficient, naïve, etc. We are so vulnerable at that age, and artists don’t like to share that vulnerable side for whatever reasons.
Richard Prince, for example, recently tried to prevent the Neuberger Museum from displaying some of his early works from the 70s; when they did it anyway, he refused to give them reproduction rights for the exhibition catalogue. And, of course, I don’t consider myself anywhere as relevant as Richard Prince is, but I want to believe that the experience of the early student years is somehow common to all artists, and thus I thought it would be useful to share these writings.
My hopes for lifting the “privacy curtain” is that the works may not be judged as full-fledged artworks, but rather as markers of a process of development. That is why the works are not displayed in a traditional exhibition style (frames, white cube space, etc.) but rather as artifacts behind vitrines, more in the fashion of a natural history museum.
QMA
How do you think your experience from those years relates to those of other artists?
PH
I wish I knew more about the early experiences of other artists of my generation.
I suspect, however, that I am not a typical case. Particularly in Mexico I believe that the generation of artists that emerged in the late 90s was very precocious. A good example is Iñaki Bonillas, who at 17 placed a conceptual sound installation in a mall; at that age I was making metaphysical paintings. I guess I was less of an “enfant terrible” and more of a “vieux terrible” or a “enfant benigne.” A partial reason is that I left Mexico in 1989, before the “boom” of the 90s, before Gabriel Orozco became known, and before neo-conceptualism became so ubiquitous in the Mexican scene. But that may miss the point in what directly concerns my own education: I was way anachronically situated, in a bubble of my own. When I came to the United States, I had to assimilate five decades of art in four years.
QMA
How do you think your immigration to the US at 18 makes you different from other Mexican artists of your generation?
PH
As it turns out, many contemporary artists of my generation left the US at that age to study abroad, but I think they kept very close ties or went back fairly quickly. Partially because I emigrated with my family, I rarely went back during those years, and as a result I became disconnected from Mexico and the Mexican art scene for most of the 90s. Furthermore, the place I arrived to, in the heart of the Midwest, was a bubble of its own, a place for introspection, and in a way that only increased my isolation. Intellectually I was very confused. I was a product of Mexican, middle class literary intellectuals. It was a generation dominated by the aesthetics of Octavio Paz, which promoted a kind of art of open metaphors and a universalist view. While I was attracted to socially engaged art, that attraction was more in form than in content. So when I came to the US and saw all that political art, I thought it was superficial because it seemed to be about one-liners and about abandoning the poetics of ambiguity, which to me were very important. I even published an essay in the student newspaper of the Art Institute of Chicago (of which I became the editor) arguing against that literalness and about the tendency of making journalistic art, art that editorialized on issues. In retrospect, I think that I was trying to negotiate two different ways of thinking about culture. But mostly, I was able to see in a critical way the conservative and/or contradictory aspects of where I had come from, and at the same time, remain critical of my new environment while embracing what I thought to be its best aspects.
QMA
Can you speak about the book that will be published in conjunction with this project?
PH
The book is entitled “The Boy Inside the Letter,” and it is inspired by the format of the Künstlerroman, which is the literary term for the novel of the artist’s education. Nonetheless, it is a non-fiction künstlerroman, which includes a translation of my diaries and contemporary texts that reflect on those times.
QMA
What kind of things have you learned from examining this period of your life, specifically as a generation 1.5 artist?
PH
The main thing was that the whole artistic education that one undergoes becomes inextricable from ones’ experiences as an immigrant and as someone trying to enter into adulthood. At least in my case, the three things went hand in hand. And, since one is trying to learn to express oneself as an artist, the art becomes like therapy, a way to channel those concerns. So artworks become something like documentation of assimilation, a personal account that unfortunately we don’t have for every immigrant. In this key period of our national debate where immigration lies at the core, I think it is important to bring forth as many first-hand accounts of the immigration experience as possible in order to humanize the issue as much as we can.
QMA
As a Mexican immigrant, what do you think of the current immigration legislation being debated in the US Senate?
PH
I am a middle-class Mexican who came legally and obtained permanent residence status, so my situation is quite privileged from the one of many of my paisanos, but I strongly sympathize with their situation and feel that Mexicans in the US are constantly misrepresented and demonized by the media--as if we needed to find culprits for the decay of the country’s economy. While I believe that the current legislation being debated has some favorable points (legalizing all the illegal immigrants, for instance) I think that some proposed amendments reveal an almost complete disinterest in the immigrant’s ordeal and those who go through unbelievable hardships to barely make a living. In contrast to what Conservatives want to make us think, illegal immigrants are about the most hard-working and peaceful people in this country, and we all benefit from their presence in one way or another.
QMA
What would you say to art students between the ages of 18 and 22 that may come see your installation?
PH
I would be very interested in hearing their thoughts and knowing if their current experiences resonate in any way to what I went through at that time. I would encourage them to keep track of their daily experiences through diaries, photographs or whatever, and save them in a box. One day, eventually, everything –or almost everything— will make sense.
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