Conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil - July 2001

Programmable Revolutions: A Binational Interpretration of the Modernist Dream
by Pablo Helguera

David Alfaro Siqueiros Poliforum (exterior view), c. 1972

When we dream that we are dreaming, we are close to awakening.
--Novalis

I. Institutional Revolutions and Showbusiness

The Longing for the New

The notion of Revolution may be centuries old, yet it still exists in our everyday perception of art. Every major contemporary art exhibition is presented under the assumption that we experience an unheard of aspect of art, something important and unprecedented. Each contemporary art event has aspirations, whether great or modest, of being revolutionary.

Yet we all have known for a while that the model of "tradition of rupture" has been exhausted. In the words of Arthur Danto, we find ourselves after the end of art, or rather, at the beginning of the post-historical period of art, for lack of a better definition. Regardless, museums still organize exhibits, foundations still fund art, collectors still collect, and artists still produce. Art is still being made because we have a need to create. The need to make art, and its ultimate sense of purpose, is what stimulates the art discourse. But just what is the ultimate motivating factor of art production today, exactly?

These motivations may be best understood if we see modernism as a dream conceived at the end of the Eighteenth century, gradually engineered in the Nineteenth, and dreamt throughout the Twentieth. We started waking up around the 1960s, but kept on slumbering for a few more decades until now. We wake up confounded as to the role of art in culture. In this interpretation, I would like to reflect on how our aspirations of change degenerated into an unrecognizable situation that makes us ask how did we get here in the first place.

Mausoleum of Ideology

I grew up in a middle-class Mexico City neighborhood, located four blocks away of the final mural project of the last major Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros. The work was finished in the early seventies shortly before his death. Siqueiros' architectural mega-project, known as the "Polyforum" has exterior relief murals made of concrete and steel, and an interior, 16,000 square feet mural which is arguably the largest in the world, titled "The March of Humankind in the Earth and Towards the Cosmos". The Polyforum was part of a gigantic complex known as the Hotel de Mexico, a project that was never concluded and always seemed to be under suspended construction.

Muralism was the artistic response, and later on, the product, of the Mexican Revolution. Mexico lived in civil unrest until the late 1920's, when the state created a political model that would ensure social and economic stability. This model, however, was an oxymoron: a political party that would simulate change, yet at the same time would retain control. Thus was born the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party. How could a party that was revolutionary be, at the same time, institutional? The notion of institution, is in essence a negation of the revolution. Yet, despite the paradox, the PRI controlled Mexico for 71 years.

Siqueiros' Polyforum is an ironical metaphor of the fate of the revolutionary breadth of Mexican art, and of the Mexican Revolution itself: something that grew to enormous proportions, and fell victim of its own rhetoric and self-aggrandizement. Siqueiros' work had been transformed from experimental and socially compromised in its heyday to preachy and cartoonish, a result of the acceptance by the very elite to which it had once criticized. Siqueiros, a revolutionary himself, was nicknamed "El Coronelazo" (the great colonel) and truly was a "caudillo" in a cultural sense. However, just as his military counterparts, he became just as enamored of his power that, under the pretense of creating an "art for the people", he had fallen into a narcissistic indulgence which was far away from his original mission of social change and nationalist affirmation.

I often see international contemporary art today as eerily resembling the Mexican Revolution, or Siqueiros' Polyforum. Born out of a very strong sense of purpose, it flourished after a very long gestation and exploded giving us great things, but gradually lost its direction and, in a state of inertia, has continued moving searching alternative models without success.

The revolutionary rhetoric in Mexican art--and life--has been fought by the younger generations of artists ever since the early fifties. Since then, Mexican art has pursued a troublesome path which has more or less successfully joggled the global vs. local dilemma. Like in other places, Mexican art in the Twentieth century moved from having to affirm its nationalist identity to becoming a series of diverse voices of individuals that still speak to important collective realities. Mexican artists have also responded with imagination to the challenges of our post-revolutionary times by opening their own alternative spaces, pushing their careers to Europe or the United States, and becoming cultural bridges.

But the old patterns of behavior have not changed entirely in terms of the Mexican institutions. The system of support of culture has not evolved nor adapted to the present. Mexico has many museums, but most of them have little or no money to do their programming. Mexico has avid and large audiences, but little resources in arts education. In a similar way to the financial structure in Europe, the Mexican federal government sponsors practically everything cultural, but is spread too thin to do it all. In a country where there are so many artists and so much art history, there are not enough resources to nourish its growth. Moreover, as art appreciation has been very lacking in the system, there is a poor art collecting market and there is little serious art criticism that could promote an extended cultural dialogue. The gallery system is reviewed more by the social pages than by serious contemporary art publications.

Therefore, the need for improvement in the Mexican cultural scene, to my mind, lies in the need to reform the educational system, decentralizing the governmentÕs funding structure and encouraging private corporations to fund and collect art. With very few exceptions, like the Colecci—n Jumex of Eugenio Lopez in Mexico City, the participation of the private and corporate sectors is almost completely absent.

The need of diversification of resources of support is critical to the creation of a healthy art scene which is not entirely controlled by politicians, a few families with a stake in the artworld, and a handful of famous artists who in Mexico tend to monopolize the dissemination of culture. By maintaining the old government-centered system, there can never be a fully uncensored national or city-level venues for presenting art, a diversified forum that encourages the production of more young artists, an increment of financial resources, and the coexistence of various voices in the art dialogue.

Conceptual Art: the Broadway Musical

Paradoxically, and keeping in mind the evident disproportion of the comparison, in the U.S., there is a huge contrast from the Mexican approach. The government is almost completely disengaged from supporting the arts, to the point of practically having obliterated its federal agency, the National Endowment for the Arts. How and why this happened is a long and complicated subject. Suffice to say that the wealth of the US art support lies in the private foundations, educational institutions, and an extraordinary amount of collectors and individuals. Yet, on this side of the modernist dream, we also find underlying problems, these ones related more to the shift of the role of art in American culture.

By not having a government support for the arts, nor lobbyists in Washington to vouch for it, truly critical art tends to be alienated into the far left, what would seem to be a cultural sect. Partially due to this, there is little public understanding of the civic role of artists in society. The lack of appreciation of the contemporary art practice by middle America pushes the artists to difficult recourses, having to court a cultural elite, and hesitating to be so daring that it would compromise their acceptance into the clan. On the other hand, in order to properly court the general public, cultural institutions have pursued art-as-entertainment, a fat-free, easy to digest model. We may have come up with this idea under the assumption that we are smart enough to create a product that will be absorbed by middle America, and yet have a substantial critical content that will still have validity at a deeper level of art history. But can we consistently present significant art that needs to meet the demands of an audience that wants to be entertained?

The U.S. gave us some of the great artists of the Twentieth century thanks to having a cultural climate that encouraged experimentation, vitality, and a certain ingenuity that is so important to creativity. Yet the art world today is a very different place to the time of Pollock or Warhol. The overpopulated art market, the strain between inner politics, promotion, elitism and commercialism in the practice, gives much less room for experimentation. Self-censorship in artists is common, and social activism is becoming less radical today, sometimes even ornamental. Young graduates from art programs in the U.S. are obsessed with gallery representation, public relations issues, and salesmanship. Have we now arrived to the point that artists are born already behind museum vitrines or even more, store displays? In the same way in which Americans are becoming obsessed with organic food, no pesticides and natural mediums, we seem to be incubating clean, clinical. and 'organic' artists, meeting the nutrition facts of a milk carton, with the right amount of conceptual content, material depth, youth, and visual consistency.

In the same way in which Mexican art's traditional flaw has been empty rhetoric, American art's greatest threat is the superficiality pushed by its market. But doesn't this ring a bell with the larger international art scene?

There, art seems to be a movable feast where the same cultural elite celebrates 10 or 15 international art fairs and biennials and travels constantly from Havana to Istanbul to Venice, and supports a handful of contemporary art magazines. It's a place where the obsession of stardom has invaded not only artists but curators, gallerists, art editors and museum directors who live a simulated cycle of revolution through the tradition of rupture. Of all the things art can be, it now seems to be this watered-down version of all the things it has been in our last century, coming to us now with little depth, with an exhausted series of structures, and in a deep state of identity crisis.

II. Digital Democracy and other Academies

BitStreams and Mainstreams

By going through the latest exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, BitStreams, it is easy to conclude that this century really is about a new reality, and that the issues which will define our future are radically different than the ones of our ancestors. BitStreams really feels like an adequate exhibition for the Twenty-first century, or, to be more accurate, for our vision on what the Twenty-first century should be about. Giant screens with digital paintings, internet projects, and interactive software installations. In our current hunger for revolutionary models, digital art has become our greatest fascination and romance. It is also an opportunity to extend the history of after the end of art under the assumption that the notion of the museum was a cabinet of curiosities in the Eighteenth century, a box in the Nineteenth, a kunsthalle in the Twentieth and a plasma screen today.

The WhitneyÕs press release states that "Nothing since the invention of photography has had a greater impact on artistic practice than the emergence of digital technologies. BitStreams is a provocative and stimulating presentation of contemporary art that harnesses digital media to achieve new dimensions of artistic expression through the transformation of images, space, data, and sound."

What is really most striking about this exhibition, and moreover about the art created by new technologies is its meager content, or rather, the way in which the medium has pretty much become the content. BitStreams may generate strong visual impressions, but once we get over the special effects, something is missing. It could be partially due to the fact that the virtual reality created by the computer screens may still have a long way to go to parallel the visceral experience we usually obtain from art made in more conventional mediums. But the real problem perhaps is that the digital revolution only provides the impression that we are in a new place. In virtue or its virtuality, so to speak, we think we have sensed a content, but our cultural, existential dilemmas remain there without being addressed.

Clearly, digital technology is the new blood that comes into art. Funding for technology allows us to experiment with new boundaries. However, in order to turn this into a significant contribution, we need to go beyond an exploration of form. Jeremy Blake's digital paintings, for instance, are perfect examples of a technological formula; aside from them being some sort of art-historical comment on painting, his pieces are, ultimately, instances of commodified technology. Digital art can easily be our new academy: learning Greek sculpture, and anatomy has been replaced by Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. As we are obsessed with formal solutions and the conquest of the virtual space, we feel we are in front of something new, but perhaps we are just reviving the abstract expressionism movement in art, this time through a computer screen, replayed in DVD. In our quest of finding new boundaries, we have not yet seemed to realize how the boundaries of technology limit us. Have we been the victims once again of the rhetoric of the revolutionary artspeak?

The second deluding fallacy about art and technology today, aside to the tautological relationship with itself, is its strange version of democracy. It is true that we are arriving to a point in time where everyone will have a computer, but as soon as we enter that realm, hierarchies are prevalent and hard to break. You need to have the Flash Macromedia 5 plug-in to see the Whitney's exhibition on the web, and meet certain system requirements in order to view it. The web has brought us closer, but it also has subjected us to a dilemma of forced incorporation by being an active consumer, or of alienation by not being part of it. The visionary Nam June Paik coined the term "information superhighway" in the sixties, thinking that TVs would be the main providers of art and count with an unlimited audience. Yet he thought about the artists as the people in control of communications, not corporate America.

Cultural Time Zones

In art, some of the greatest cultural topics from recent years circled around global vs. local identity. Today, the human gene code has been disclosed, and clonation is possible. Aside to the current fragility of our notion of selfhood, there is our fast-changing relationship with distance. The internet has redefined the notion of place and travel where air miles are a commodity, where the borders are becoming obsolete, and mass-culture is slowly erasing cultural difference. The world that future generations will experience almost certainly will be far more homogeneous Ñand possibly less interestingÑ than ours, as the local languages and colorful traditions slowly fade out, giving way to one main cultural code. We wonÕt see again a Marco Polo describing the wondrous things he saw in his travels through the unknown Asia. We continue traveling and discovering things, but travel has become more and more synonymous with tourism, and tourism nowadays is rather an appropriation of a prefabricated, commodified, and trivial experience. We claim ownership of experience as we stand in front of the Tour Eiffel, the Statue of Liberty or the Coliseum as someone takes our picture.

In Mexico, a country with more than six million indigenous people that speak 50 different languages, which can be as different from each other as the Chinese is from the Spanish, cultural homogenization is coming quickly and definitively. Children in southern indigenous towns do not wear anymore the hand-woven shirts that the elderly Tzotzil or Zapotec women used to make, Rather, they wear washed out t-shirts saying Nike, Pink Floyd and Marlboro. A rich tradition of hand-woven patterns, in which each stitch signifies something different, is being lost to the overpowering arrival of digital production, where every pixel means nothing. Digital technology is our most powerful tool today, but also the most dangerous. We can create virtual life, but in our drive of programming a cultural software code to the world, we are also deleting real culture and replacing it by the suburban unplace, where every spot is the same than anywhere else.

III. A Chinese Dream

The Infinite Dream of Pao Yu

         Pao Yu dreams that he is in an identical garden to the one in his own house. 
         When he finds his maidservants in the garden, he approaches them. They 
         seem to recognize him at first, but then they act confusedly and say "Oh I         
         am sorryÐwe mistook you for Pao Yu, our master, but you are not as 
         handsome as he is." As the maidservants leave, Pao Yu is left dumbfounded 
         and decides to follow them. He then arrives to a patio that seems very 
         familiar. He goes up the stairs and enters his room, where a young man 
         lies in bed talking to his maidservants. One of the maidservants asks the 
         young man: "What are you dreaming Pao Yu? Is something troubling you?" 
         "I had a strange dream. I dreamt that I was in a garden and that you didn't 
         recognize me and left me alone. I followed you all the way to my house and 
         found another Pao Yu sleeping in my bed". When Pao Yu hears this dialogue 
         he comes into the chamber and exclaims, "I came in search of another Pao 
         Yu, and its you". As both men embrace, a distant voice calls Pao Yu from 
         the garden. Both Pao Yus tremble. The dreamt one leaves. Pao Yu wakes up. 
         His maid asks him" What are you dreaming, Pao Yu? Is something troubling 
         you?" "I had a strange dream. I dreamt that I was in a garden and that you
         didnÕt recognize meÉ"
                                                                     --Tsao Hsue-Kin (1719-1764) 
                                                                          The Dream of the Red Chamber 

We all are participants of culture in the making, and as part of that process, we all share a minimal role and responsibility of interpreting our reality, as hard as it may be to have any perspective from it. Like Pao Yu's dream, we perhaps are chasing a simulation of ourselves, maybe a memory, following a circular process of simulated change and difference, but which may not be leading us anywhere significant. We live, perhaps, a dream of institutionalized revolution that has gotten out of hand and whose revolutionary aspect is trivializing, instead of reclaiming, meaning.

Our role is to identify the cultural forces and motivations that shape our idiosyncrasy, and provide a critical view of them. Homogenization of culture may be an inevitable process, as it is the case of the proliferation of technology, but perhaps we can make a difference in influencing this process as artists, cultural critics, and cultural workers, by infusing meaningfulness where there is only meaninglessness.

How we reencounter a sense of purpose is a question that we may need to address by reassessing the very use of the term "art", to which we have become more and more uncomfortable with in recent years. We need to develop a serious basis for the role of artist in society without making artists become outcasts, educators, missionaries, social workers, political activists, or movie stars. There is room for all those jobs in other arenas of society. Artists should keep focus on their unique role and contribution to the development of culture. In the same way in which the traditional format of the museum constantly needs to be redefined, so is art. Furthermore, the reassessment of art is not only about a simple change of names, but a change of attitudes in our practice as art professionals, whether we are artists, curators, art educators or critics.

Continuity and change are the two forces that we joggle with in our lives in our cultures, and in our minds. The art world is no exception to the rule. The challenge is to be able to identify which are the inert obstacles, and which are the important aspects that need to be transformed. Novalis, the romantic German poet, wrote, "when we dream that we are dreaming, we are close to awakening". In fact, I believe that art making is about a constant cycle between falling into dreams and awakening from them as we gain consciousness of our being in them. Like a very long and complicated story, we exist between dreams within dreams within dreams, or in an incredibly long phrase full of parenthesis within parenthesis, where we tend to forget the original meaning of the sentence. Our job is to never loose track of that delicate border between consciousness and somnambulism.

New York City, June, 20 2001
©2001 Pablo Helguera