Pablo Helguera

The School of Panamerican Unrest

“What happened to all the great ideas?” asks Pablo Helguera, an artist who dares to look at the big picture—even at a time when it seems unfashionably ambitious to ask such questions. But Helguera, whose projects range from performance and installation to video and sound recordings, also has a savvy understanding of art history and art audiences—enough to know that a little humor and irony are sometimes the best tools in an artist’s arsenal.

With support from Creative Capital, Helguera is producing The School of Panamerican Unrest, a portable schoolhouse that will travel from Alaska to Patagonia, on a mission to stimulate discussions about history, utopian ideals, and revolution along its route. At each stop, the one-room structure—modeled on a traditional Shaker school building—will be the site of lectures, classes, discussions and exhibitions. By merging education and art, Helguera is staging a public art project of the most insidious kind. He’s making audiences think about what they expect from art and artists by providing a version of history traditionally ignored by art museums.

At the same time, Helguera is seeding a network of cultural communities far from traditional art centers. Local cultural institutions, artists, performers, and activists will be invited to join the school’s staff, adjusting the curriculum for each locale. The program will function as a school, including the distribution of a textbook created by Helguera himself.

“Humor is a door to very serious issues,” maintains Helguera, who understands art education from the inside out. Having worked for a decade as an arts educator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Mexican-born artist has mastered the vocabulary, ambitions, and goals of these worthy programs. Mimicking the style of this often-pedantic profession, Helguera offers a different kind of art education, designed to engage audiences who might never otherwise enter an art museum. “Though I am a professional educator, I’m tired of insisting that art is always ‘making a profound statement’ or always ‘socially conscious’,” he says, referring to oft-repeated phrases favored by museum docents. “Instead, I want to make a place for real exchanges.”

Influenced by artists who pioneered the field of institutional critique—Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and Mark Dion, among others—Helguera adds a foreigner’s perspective to the discussion. In the Instituto de la Telenovela (2002), for example, he established an official research foundation to study the impact of Latin American soap operas on international media outlets. Another project, the fictitious International Museum of Radically Ordinary Things (2004), is as paradoxical as it sounds. But absurd as they may seem, Helguera’s projects raise serious questions: Is culture just Picasso or the films of Matthew Barney? Or are other things—soap opera, schools, history books, even museums—part of a network of influences that reflect and alter public opinion?

Since he began his career as an artist in 1998, Helguera’s work has been shown in such prestigious venues as The Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Havana Biennial, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In fall 2005, he was featured in Performa ’05, the first biennial of performance art in New York City. But by establishing an identity that encompasses a wide-range of personae—teacher, foundation organizer, archivist, and activist—Helguera is also critiquing himself as well as arts institutions. In the end, he makes us wonder why so many artists, once so engaged with the notion of an avant-garde and committed to changing the world, now seem to limit themselves to working in studios far removed from the broader cultural arena.