An Eccentric Year in Review
And what prompted some of the columns I wrote this year.
I feel fortunate for often receiving important gestures of support (thank you, paid subscribers) and comments from readers for Beautiful Eccentrics. As we find ourselves in the final hours of 2023 and on the verge of the 3rd anniversary of this column, which launched on January 1, 2021, I feel the need to describe the exhibition projects that prompted some of the texts I wrote this year.
In the past, I believe some are under the impression that I write art criticism— either by inviting me to write about exhibitions or by referring to this column as that. But I am an artist, not an art critic; while a critical stance naturally can be deduced from almost anything anyone writes, not only do I not write art reviews, but my intention has always been to attempt to understand critical issues connected to the art practice. Because I believe that knowledge is best constructed out in the open, I also like to present ideas or questions out in public in the hopes that others might join in the discussion (and many often, thankfully, do).
I write this because, even while I do not always or directly mention it, Beautiful Eccentrics is like an X-Ray of my mindset as I try to figure out questions related to specific artistic projects— and this year I did more than ever in my life. Which is why I wanted to reveal how this column echoed and/or related to the exhibitions I did this year. As I also intimated in a couple previous columns (Ten of Swords and For Every Season There is Overscheduling) I seriously overcommitted to too many exhibitions and projects this year, which I unfortunately paid dearly with my mental and physical health. I have come on the other side, however, swearing that I will never make the same mistake again. With that, here is the story of what happened in 2023:
In January 2023, when I wrote The Unbearable Cuteness of Being and Museum Bloopers (columns about artists being deemed cute against our will and about repressed laughter in the art world) I was deep in the production and presentation of my off-Broadway performance Untitled (Comedy Show), a project produced by More Art. During the pandemic I had proposed to More Art’s Executive Director Micaela Martegani that once Covid was over we should all congregate again like in the Before Times and do an old-fashioned stand-up show, and she enthusiastically said yes. I had never done straightforward stand-up in my life, but somehow we managed to pull it off — with help, I believe, of the goodwill of our art world audience who were equally happy to come back together again. Highlights of that experience were special guests Martha Rosler (who I was able to show how she does have a wonderful sense of humor), Mel Chin and Nina Katchadourian (who channeled the spirit of her dear departed cat Stickies in a Q&A session I did with her) and the participation of Dread Scott and Shaun Leonardo during the artworld quiz portion of the show, The Dan Flavin Awards. The show, which had a few musical numbers including “Artist Cellophane” ended with an ensemble piece, “Make our Art World Grow” (with the music from Bernstein’s “Candide”).
My columns The Guest list for a Joke and Buenos Aires the Memorious, as per the latter indicates, relate to the wonderful dialogue and experience I had working with Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires, where I presented the exhibition Metadrama at Proa 21 and conducted a workshop on the subject of pedagogy and humor— two defining subjects in my career that I had never in fact connected until then; I am hoping to conduct this workshop again. Chuquicamata , which is an excerpt of a video piece I contributed to a Proa/Americas Society organized exhibition titled El Dorado and which tells the story of the Guggenheim family’s fortune, which primarily came from the purchase and ownership of the largest open copper mine in the world, located in the Atacama desert in Chile.
In April of this year, an invitation to me to be the pedagogical curator of a major international biennial fell through. The disappointment and exasperation it created in me (but I should also say, relief that I did not work out as I was already overcommitted) resulted in a reflection on how education continues to be misunderstood and instrumentalized. The columns on this subject were Pretend Play and The Educator’s Turn in Curating.
For the first time in almost 20 years, I was able to do an official summer residency (since my previous museum jobs had prevented me from doing it). I was at Dennilston Hill, the wonderful and intimate artist residency program created by Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer near Monticello. The columns Cabin Fever (and Ecstasy) and The Work that Makes Us, are reflections on the art residency experience and the question of how, exactly, we define the visual artist’s profession. I spent two weeks with Kambui Olujimi, Shellyne Rodriguez, and Zora Casebere, often cooking together, playing board games and even watched the insane Korean zombie film, Train to Busan.
Working in Julie’s old studio, a giant barn space, over that summer, I was able to develop my most ambitious pedagogical project over the last decade, Método de discursos sociales, a card system conceived for generating research ideas, the process of which is described in this column, A Pedagogical Shorthand. The exhibition where I presented this project was at Galería Enrique Guerrero in Mexico City, with the title Museo de la Vida Escolar.
Every time I go back to Mexico is emotionally intense for me; it is packed with excitement for reencountering friends and places but also bittersweet memories of things that are long gone. Some of them are articulated in two pieces I wrote this past summer: Reading Wuthering Heights in Polanco, and Eulogy to a State of Mind, about the legendary hotel Jacarandas in Cuernavaca, which closed down for good recently.
The fall opened with a reflection on façades, in response to an invitation by artist Jon Rubin to develop the inaugural version of a conceptual project consisting in the façade of an imaginary museum; artists are invited to rename the museum using the format “The National Museum of.” I proposed the creation of “The National Museum of Nostalgia for the Moment You Are Living” and the text I wrote on the building façade as art and metaphor was titled Creditable Unrealities.
The exhibition project I developed for the Baltimore Museum of Art, Flor de Juegos Antiguos, which is an interactive space where visitors can learn about the history of five board games (Chess, Backgammon, Mancala, Nine Men’s Morris and Patolli), led me to reflect on the relationship between art making and game design, particularly chess (How to do Chess with Words), but also on how play is a form of cultural bonding, as exemplified by Alfonso el sabio’s Libro de los Juegos, produced during the Convivencia period where Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted in the Iberian peninsula. The piece was published on the week following the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war: Lacrimosa, Convivencia, The Book of Games.
Over the last two years I slowly developed a tribute to my brother, Luis Ignacio Helguera, who passed away in 2003 and was in many ways my mentor and teacher, and likewise the reason why I try to make sense of the world through writing. The project consisted in a solo exhibition which opened at the Museo Cabañas in Guadalajara and the excerpts of the book I wrote (41 prose poems inhabiting his writing style specifically for this project) were published in the column 41 iluminaciones para armar (en tres partes).
Many of my columns, however, are not specifically tied to current exhibition projects, but stem from fleeting thoughts and experiences, sometimes being mere notes about questions I am thinking about on a given week. I had the opportunity to turn some of these into art works in one of the most important exhibition experiences I had this year in Ghent, Belgium. Simon Delobel, who runs the kunsthalle Kiosk at the University of Ghent, is an enthusiastic reader of Beautiful Eccentrics, and sometime in early 2022 we started discussing the idea of turning a few of these columns into art works. I proposed to Simon for him to pick 9 columns from the 110 or so I had written up to that time and based on his selection and I would turn those selected ones into installations. At the risk of stereotyping, I would say that Belgium was the perfect location for Beautiful Eccentrics- a country that culturally has been a haven for nonconformists, surrealists and, yes eccentrics. Simon picked my column about studying as a teenager with my uncle the muralist Francisco Eppens (Tío Pancho, Art Teacher). We displayed my embarrassing mural designs and paintings from when I was 15. The entrance of the show was an amphitheater populated by life-size dolls, in reference to the column Guise and Dolls, about our need for creating imaginary audiences. Another installation was inspired in my column Boteros in the Cereal Section, about the phenomenon of creating generic versions (not forgeries) of artworks, with Botero being a prime example (Simon purchased quite a bit of cheap “Boteros”on Ebay, many actually very nice pieces coming from an Italian artist— sadly Botero passed away on the week of the opening). A column that specifically made mention to a nearby Belgian museum of artist’s shoes to discuss artist’s relics ( A Shoe is a Shoe is a Shoe is a Shoe) was a must for both Simon and I. The list goes on, but most important to me was the inclusion of the column about generosity (Give it Away). For that purpose we revived a project I developed during the 2008 Great Recession titled The Free Art Gallery, a project consisting in giving artworks for free to those individuals who would write the most compelling request arguing why they would need to be the owners of the given work. For the Ghent exhibition we received several dozen submissions for the works I made available and we announced the winners on the last day of the exhibition.
The final exhibition I opened in 2023 was the 10th anniversary edition of Librería Donceles at the Mitchell Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, for which I wrote a column reflecting on the improbable survival of this utopian project (Sawdust Tears of Reading Pleasure). The night of the opening of this project, after the big celebration, I walked down the streets of Annapolis, late at night, and wound up in the harbor where there was a festival of holiday lights in boats. A year of great upheaval all over the world, with enormous professional challenges, had finally come to an end, and before me was this quaint local celebration which somehow became unexplainably cathartic for me. One thing I have never truly learned is how to emotionally detach from the subjects I intellectually engage in art; perhaps I never will. I am grateful this year has come to an end. I am grateful for the privilege, as Oliver Sacks wrote in his farewell essay, about being “ been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet”; unlike Sacks, however I am hoping to remain in it for longer, and I am further grateful for the ability to think and make art in the world, and to be in conversation with the likes of you: tonight I will drink to that.
Wishing you a happy 2024 in beautiful eccentricity to you all.
Happy New Year to Beautiful Eccentrics, always excited to receive the notification. The columns that left me thinking the most this year were Pretend Play and The Educator’s Turn in Curating. Saludos!
Amazing, amazing. Plus teaching. We don’t know how you do it, Pablo!