Helguera 1

Mapping the Republic of Contemporary Art

(Notes from the Panamerican Highway)
Pablo Helguera

Bogotá-Cúcuta Highway, Colombia, August 2006

It was August 16, 2006, and I was in Cúcuta, a town on the Colombian border with Venezuela…
I had just arrived from Bogotá having covered more than 13,000 miles since setting out from Anchorage, midway
to my goal of Tierra del Fuego. This journey was part of a public art project, The School of Panamerican Unrest,
which consisted of driving across North and South America with a large installation—a schoolhouse—and erecting
it in various public plazas, universities, arts institutions and anywhere else possible along the way. A variety of
events took place at each stop—panel discussions, civic events and ceremonies, screenings and other impromptu
activities. At each gathering various symbols, such as flags and an anthem, praised the fictional country of
“Panamerica.” Local collaborators would write, sign and read public resolutions about their relationship with this
fictional nation. A string of resultant debates was videotaped for a documentary intended to function as the reunion
of transcontinental voices not normally pitted against each other.

This project emerged out of a word most of us are ambivalent about: Panamericanism—a nineteenth-century idea
that was never a reality, and yet, the term has taken a controversial turn due to neo-liberal economic policy,
Chavista neo-socialism and Cold War-era U.S. policies. These ambiguities, expressed in the fictitious utopian
country the project promoted—Panamerica—as well as the kind of institution it purported to be (a school)—became
a traveling think tank with the objective to push discussion toward defining the tangibility of what connects
nationality and culture today. Somehow, however, the SPU ended up existing in flux, between being perceived as
art or an unconventional school, a church, a political project or a missionary enterprise, depending on the places it
appeared and audiences it engaged. Discussions often turned into giant group-therapy sessions (someone in
Argentina nicknamed me the “Panamerican Therapist”) in which people debated topics of their own choosing,
usually about their relationship with their own country, local cultural and social conflicts.

Over the course of four months, the SPU was officially presented in thirty cities and included three dozen
discussions attended by a wide audience, functioning, in many cases, in non-art related contexts. Captured on video,
the transcription of these dialogues runs several hundred pages long. Responses to the project were so wide-ranging
and complex that—along with endless border-crossing adventures and other experiences—one would never be able
to describe them all in a single essay.1 But I do think the engagements that took place amidst different art
communities along my route are worth comparing and reflecting upon.

My presence in Colombia was quite eventful. We erected the schoolhouse at the Quinta de Bolívar, Simón
Bolívar’s Colombian home, along with a panel discussion with local curators on issues of national patrimony and
conservation, as well as a number of workshops. This was surrounded by plenty of adventures. Upon my arrival in
Bogotá, a man posing as a hotel manager had stolen my laptop. The day I arrived on the border, I survived a
collision with a passenger bus and the subsequent chaos that ensued, culminating at the police station in Cúcuta.
Now I was on hiatus, waiting to be granted an elusive permit to enter Venezuela.

That night, I logged on at a shabby Internet café and was notified about a post in a widely read Colombian arts blog,
Esferapública.2 In Colombia, as in other places in Latin America, blogs are the most effective means of
communication amongst those interested in contemporary art, reaching far beyond newspapers and magazines.
Colombian artist Lucas Ospina had posted a piece on my recent passage through Bogotá. The text was a fablelike
satire of my project, mixing fact and fiction. Making the points that I was an artist from New York who had worked
in a large New York museum and received a U.S. foundation grant to do this project, Ospina’s text characterized
SPU as a flawed attempt at institutional critique as I was an artist living in the “center,” endorsed by the center and
operating with like mentality.

While Ospina had seen me discuss the project at an informal gathering, he had not seen the installation nor had he
been present during the performance and panel discussions in Bogotá. I wrote an emotional response. My reply led
to a flurry of posts from other Colombian artists, most of whom, like Ospina, had not seen the project in person.
Regardless, they began taking sides, dissecting the now public argument between Ospina and me, some of them
saying my inability to accept his criticism corroborated the failure of the SPU as yet another intolerant institution.
 Helguera 2
Others supported my intentions. This inevitably led to a debate on the age-old problem of center/periphery relations
and the mechanisms of institutional critique. As I accused my blogger critics of being paranoid and acting with a
self-colonizing mentality, I was in turn accused of being naïve about the local art context and hopelessly trapped in
an institutional mindset.

The debate went on for weeks, as did my journey. Every remote town I arrived at, I logged in and read the latest
posting on Esferapública. In blogging culture, entries slowly start to feed each other, resulting in an ever-escalating
series of misreadings. This debate provoked particular unrest in me, perhaps because it misrepresented the project
to thousands of readers throughout Latin America where the smaller but most meaningful face-to-face SP dialogues
had taken place. It also seemed ironic that the most intense and public debate of the trip was occurring in
cyberspace amongst people who, for the most part, had not even seen the project. I initiated the SPU with the goal
of having the kind of exchange that simply cannot happen online. The Colombian blog experience made me think
that, regardless of how much one may attempt to engage with others physically, in our information age, ultimately,
the virtual—along with its unpredictable implications—supersedes all.

(Tent being carried)

Asuncion, Paraguay

The Colombian debate typified some of the polarities that the SPU generated amongst art communities, although
there were also patterns of reactions linked to the cultural climates I interacted with. In cities in which the art
market is well established (for example, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, San José, Vancouver),
response to the project was largely polite and uncontroversial, making a tiny ripple—if any—in the busy scenes of
those places. Little critical attention was paid to my presentation. Instead, a lot of attention was given to the content
of ensuing discussions, which included the crisis of liberalism, real estate, immigration, tourism, arts education,
cultural policy and geography.

Meanwhile, in cities with limited financial or critical infrastructure for art production (Anchorage, Asunción,
Mexicali, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa), a visitor such as myself was such a novelty that the local art community was
entirely well disposed, fully engaged in all the activities and discussion topics that the SPU proposed. This context
seemed to be where the SPU best contributed and where I felt a greater sense of accomplishment and even a small
amount of success. For example, through their discussion, the arts community in Mérida recognized the lack of
criticism in their area and decided to organize an annual “criticism month,” which was first celebrated last October.
In cases like this, discussion of whether the SPU was a good or bad art project—or if it was art at all—seemed
irrelevant.3

It was interesting to me that art communities in places as different as New York and San Salvador generally
responded to the project unambiguously. This was due, I think, to the fact that in those places, there are no great
 Helguera 3
doubts as to the role of artmaking and in their place in an international context, of New York knowing that they
form part of “the center” and San Salvador clearly knowing that they exist outside the mainstream. Somehow this
allowed us to focus on other subjects. But the discussions became most animated, combative and aesthetically
based in cities with strong art activity that are not powerhouses in the international art market. In such cities (e.g.,
Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Guatemala City, Santiago), I received the strongest criticism and skepticism
regarding my project, typically, the accusation that I was replicating the institutional structures of the art world, and
I was often pressed to define my political and aesthetic positions.

Debates in these cities may have been politicized because of their current political situation, and perhaps because of
the intense self-questioning that characterizes certain arts communities. In Guatemala, certain suspicions about the
project seemed connected to my being a Mexican national and similarities to NGOs—volunteer organizations with
stated altruistic intentions but sometimes hidden agendas. In Venezuela, some saw the SPU as a Chavista
enterprise, being that “Panamericanismo” sounds a lot like “Bolivarianismo.”  4 Perhaps due to the political climate
there, my interlocutors in Caracas were extremely passionate—polarized in support of or against me—and, at times,
hostile. This was striking in contrast to tempered but unfortunately predictable discussions in Los Angeles, Portland
and San Francisco, which also revolved around politics and were highly informed but characterized by a benign,
politically correct emotional detachment, critiquing neo-liberalism and globalization while at the same time sipping
on Starbucks products.

(Tribunal)
Panamerican Ceremony, Mexico City

(Erected tent)
Plaza de la Merced, Tegucigalpa

To anyone familiar with the general political apathy that exists in the United States, the SPU didn’t uncover
anything new about the extent to which those who rarely experience unrest in their own lives have difficulty
understanding the unrest of the others. With this in mind, there is something to be said for the intensity of
 Helguera 4
discussions on Esferapública, which seem to maintain the tradition of never-ending café discussions—something
that, in places like New York, has long been lost.
In Latin America, debates were not all belligerent in nature, nor did questions about the project’s intentions always
stand in the way. In the end, discussions everywhere revealed common concerns, conflicts and agreements on all
sorts of issues. There were similar discussions about landscape and creative isolation in Anchorage, Mexicali and
Tierra del Fuego; Buenos Aires, Chicago and Mexico City seemed to mirror each other in their intense self-
examination. Immigration is a common denominator in places like Guatemala and Phoenix; la Mara Salvatrucha
(the MS-13 gang) impacts people’s lives from Los Angeles to Tegucigalpa.5 Real estate is a determining factor in
the cultural landscape of Panama City and Vancouver. No real debate can take place in cities like Managua or San
Salvador if one bypasses the history of their civil wars, or Chile and Paraguay if one ignores the historical impact of
military dictatorship. In San José—as in Mérida—the impact of tourism in local artmaking was a common thread.
Everywhere I went, there was intellectual uncertainty as to where to position oneself between Chávez and the
United States. The list goes on.

The topic that least interested me during these interactions was, predictably, the SPU itself. And yet this became
unavoidable when certain interlocutors, conditioned by their need to interact with me, centered discussions upon
whether or not the SPU was conceptually sound. In Latin America, we are often more interested in hearing the
theoretical defense of an art project than experiencing the project itself, which often results in judging works by
their mission statements. The project became a case in point to argue about the institutional frameworks of this
dialogue.

Amidst the sticky debate on Esferapública, Colombian artist François Bucher, who lives in London—and, like
Ospina, did not see the project in person—compared my predicament to Jean-Luc Godard when he traveled to
Mozambique, commissioned to create a TV channel that embodied the autonomous perspective of the local people.
Godard’s experiment resulted in a self-acknowledged failure due to the fact that he could not prevent his personal
artistic vision to filter through the process of helping Mozambicans come up with a media outlet that reflected their
own image. Bucher wrote, “Pablo is like Godard, who cannot jump his own shadow upon arriving in Africa.”

While I happen to agree with the idea that the artist can never be invisible, I have never believed that this
impossibility is necessarily a recipe for failure. Months before, I had written that the artist could never disappear in
any public art interaction, but rather, the success of a public art project depended on place and the terms upon which
public participation and input are established. In any case, I wasn’t a famous French film director trying to teach
Africans about video technology but a Latin American artist seeking to connect with other Latin American artists. It
seemed to me that if we all were quoting Rosalind Krauss—as many were—and invoking Godard, weren’t we all
coming from the same place anyway? I wrote in Esferapública, “we all are the others and we all are a self, but
when it comes down to the art world, we all are New Yorkers.” François replied, “to me, to say that we all are New
Yorkers is the same to say that we live in a classless society. It’s like in architectural design: the more you use glass
in corporate or government buildings to give the impression of transparency, the more intricate the labyrinth of
codes security personnel control so that those who don’t know the protocol shall not pass.”
I never replied to that statement partially because at that point I was bogged down amidst the difficulties of crossing
the Paraguayan border. Once I emerged from that ordeal, the discussion had already taken a different direction and I
felt it was too late to reply, but François’ words stayed with me for the rest of the trip.

Despite its unwieldy political and natural borders, Latin America is no longer defined in terms of national territories
as much as by zones of commerce. While Internet cafés are present everywhere (thanks in no small part to online
gaming), some towns reminded me of the Mexico of my childhood—the years before NAFTA—while some appear
to have barely reached the 1950s. Some neighborhoods in Panama City, parts of San Salvador, Santiago and
Tijuana are at the economic forefront of the twenty-first century, while neighboring communities are still in the
nineteenth. But everywhere, it was clear that the forces of globalization are undeniably at play, and things are
changing rapidly. Perhaps more than ever, in the past two decades, tension between the left- and right-wing is
dividing the region between a pro-United States, neo-liberal climate—in most of Central America, Colombia, Chile
and Mexico—and a left-leaning, pro-Chávez bloc in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Mercosur.
 Helguera 5
I was doubtful as to whether local art production has managed to keep up with these rapid changes. To do so would
mean to make art that truly departs from old-fashioned political art of the seventies—as well as art that conforms to
a straightforward market-pleasing aesthetic—but also revising mythologies that remain from old center/periphery
debates. While contemporary art practice in Latin America has largely evolved from such debates so commonplace
in the nineties, the idea of a north-south polarity was still implicit in local discussions. While this is not always
expressed by directly regarding New York as symbolizing the dominant power center, dialogue dynamics revolve
around themes like “the mainstream art world” vs. “the local artist community” and the individual artist vs. “the
large and evil institution,” as the SPU was regarded in Esferapública.
But while artists see artmaking as a way to contest every sort of dominating power in their lives—be it the New
York art world, the local bureaucracy, their own governments or a conservative local cultural scene—their
intellectual tools, strategies and visual languages are basically taken from the “center” and expressed as
contemporary strategies only intelligible to someone with access to and an understanding of the general referents of
contemporary art. This in turn creates semi-isolated art spheres that are equally ambivalent about their place of
operation—their city, their country—with a reduced immediate audience who understands their views and a virtual
or distant interlocutor (the mainstream), which is hard to locate and access. This begs the question: who is the real
audience for artwork?

“A system of representations is a system of exclusions.” This phrase in the collectively written “Panamerican
Address of Mexico City” was part of the emphatic central resolution by local artists and curators to renounce the
notion that artists are representatives of their country’s feelings or concerns. Given the history of Mexican art post
Gabriel Orozco—and the way in which the art market of urban Mexico has been nourished—the need to overcome
a pattern of national representation felt urgent amidst this community. As Mexican art from the nineties became a
sort of mélange of arte povera, conceptualism and social commentary on the urban environment via the ethnic or
cultural specificity imbedded in subject matter, materials or place, artmaking managed to position itself in a perfect
place from which it was dialoguing with the international art world while solidly referencing an indigenous and
tangible reality.

One of the most common misconceptions that we hold while discussing nationalism, hegemony and resistance from
the standpoint of the visual arts is that artists, curators and art historians that work on the margins are often assumed
to be adequate spokespersons for the feelings and thoughts of their fellow countrymen or ethnic group. Aside from
the fact that many members of the art world do try to assume this role—be this due to legitimate interest or a sense
of opportunity—the likelihood is that their relationship with their own localities is much more complex and often
much more conflictive than that of the average national. This is, I believe, because the Western tradition of the
intellectual from which the contemporary art world emerges moved from the affirmation of national identities in the
postwar era to the condemnation of aesthetic regionalism, making us highly suspicious of those who place national
pride before art. But at the same time, there has always been the unspoken expectation of the international art world
that artists of the periphery defend aspects of locality by becoming a representative voice.

(Van and dog)

Plaza de la Merced, TegucigalpaBogota-Cucuta highway, Colombia
 Helguera 6

Contemporary artists thus exist in open contradiction to the notions of hegemony and nationalism, alternately
embracing and rejecting it at the same time depending on circumstance. We seem to be at the end of the bridge of a
multigenerational gap, from the time when writers and artists in mid-twentieth-century Latin America took on the
role of political actors and the philosophical voices of their countries, to today where we are part of a profitable
international art scene that is interested in hearing from us but only through the rarified codes of the art object.
More than a decade after the proliferation of the Internet and nearly thirty years after the publication of Edward
Said’s Orientalism (1978), the art world has negotiated a formula in which apparently irreconcilable opposites—
local color and aesthetic worldliness—can come hand in hand with what was once termed “global conceptualism.”
In regions with no hegemonic influence, artists with the ambition to show internationally may have to face the
question of how their work will be regarded in connection to their national context and consciously decide whether
to avoid or incorporate local referents of this reality.

While national adherence in the general population is expressed in straightforward ways—waving a flag,
celebrating holidays, going to soccer games—nationalism in art, along with all that accompanies it, generates great
aesthetic and existential conflicts to an artist. Perhaps as a result of this, contemporary artists since the 1970s have
slowly become postnational. And while many of their works may still function against a background of references
that includes national origin, it is clear that most of their work is less understandable through local referents than in
the language of conceptualism.

Additionally, adding to the myth of being “the voice of the people,” Latin American artists’ case of being
underdogs of the art system weakens when one knows that the hierarchies in the art world do not necessarily obey
national borders. For instance, an unspoken truth about Latin American art is that significant numbers of those who
make and write about art professionally in cities like Asunción, Caracas, Mexico or Panama City generally belong
to the upper-middle or upper class. And those artists in Latin America recognized by the international mainstream
often do not differ much in terms of their formal education from their American or European counterparts: many of
them were educated or lived abroad and have a substantial set of international experiences.
Certainly, there are many people who make art in Latin America who are entirely disenfranchised from mainstream
contemporary art. But they are not too different from endless artists from developed countries, including the United
States, who also make art in critical darkness. A struggling artist living in Brooklyn has closer proximity to the
power centers of the art world, but local hierarchies—as well as the sheer cost of living, assistant labor and
materials—do not necessarily make it easier for them than for an artist that makes art elsewhere. François Bucher
protested when I called all artists New Yorkers, but perhaps he had forgotten that the South Bronx and East
Brooklyn are far scarier places than Chapinero Alto in Bogotá.
Like any other social system, the art world is definitely a hierarchy, but more than being composed by nationalist
interests, this results from a complex and transnational conglomerate of criticism, fashion, private collecting and
scholarship in which consensus makes some players rise above others. In this intricate system, a Cuban artist living
in Havana may make significantly more money than the average American artist, and a contemporary artist working
in Mexico City today will likely have a better chance to be noticed by the art world than one living in Calgary or
Phoenix.

The elitism to which Bucher referred to and his metaphor of the corporate glass building is justifiable when one
thinks of, say, MoMA. But as I went through my journey, I felt that by thinking that way, not only do we continue
to propagate the imprecise notion of the periphery, we also fail to understand the extent to which the power
structures of our world have already changed, noted more than a decade ago by sociologists like Néstor García
Canclini and Arjun Appadurai. It is as if artists all over the world want to see themselves as separate from a system
that clearly involves almost every aspect of their lives. The attempt by anyone with an arts background (including
artists accepted by the mainstream) to contest that aspect of the establishment falls into a familiar cul-de-sac—a
paradox. In trying to play the underdog, we face the uncomfortable prospect of critical indifference (which is equal
to invisibility) or acceptance (which neutralizes critique).
 Helguera 7

Panama Canal

Our greatest contradiction is that the more we attempt to renounce the art world, the more we become entangled in
its matrices. There is a famous saying: there is nothing more Latin American than pretending not to be one.
Similarly, nothing may make you more part of a system than portraying yourself as its underdog. The corporate
glass building is not only New York: the contemporary art world mentality in itself is a giant, provincial, virtual
glass head case that lives in constant delusion, ignorant of difference and change while seeming to homogenize
ideas, aesthetics and identities wherever it goes. The traveling schoolhouse clearly became a symbol of this to
certain artists because they saw it replicating the structures of institutionalism, but also, in my view, because it
further reminded them of the ways in which they are active participants of its trappings.

My trip came to an end when I reached Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego. A small town that only recently became
touristy, Ushuaia has begun to attract visitors through cultural initiatives. At the time, the city was hosting events in
preparation of their first international biennial, La bienal del fin del mundo, and it looks, so far, like all featured
artists and curators hail from elsewhere. I visited a gallery where Buenos Aires conceptual artist Alicia Herrero was
giving an introductory course on contemporary art to the small art community of Ushuaia, many of whom were sold
on the pleasures of conceptualism. I guess it should come as no surprise that even at the tip of the hemisphere,
global notions are being exported—or that local artists were being indoctrinated and versed in the language of
conceptualism to better integrate them into the international festival mentality that will soon descend upon their
quiet little town.

As I spoke to the group, a familiar discussion along the lines of “why should I admire something that has no labor
invested in it” began. I quickly found myself once again in the inevitable and paradoxical role of the conceptual art
missionary. Should I say what I think or shut up and simply allow local perceptions of art to prevail? In my many
interactions, I was dispirited by the way in which I had seen contemporary art practice prescribed to communities
for all the wrong reasons, turning it into less of a liberating practice than an obliquely understood alienating force—
something that we have to do in order to be “in touch” with what we think the rest of the world is thinking.

The problem with contemporary art is that it is usually taught to speak only about itself. And, as the Ushuaia
Biennial seemed to attest, artmaking today operates by creating islands wherever it goes, building embassies of
local interpretation of realities that may well contribute to the places where they arrive but are, generally,
inaccessible to the audiences that go about their lives fairly unconcerned about what art says or may be about.

It didn’t really matter how many borders I crossed. The true tests were the intellectual labyrinths of Latin America
and the many extensions of art thinking, including my own. During the journey, the few redeeming times when
small windows of clarity appeared occurred when we stopped talking about art. Art has an enormous potential to be
relevant outside the art world, but for that to happen, we need to use the tools of art to create understanding instead
 Helguera 8
of simply promoting the understanding of art. And in order to accomplish this, we may have to learn to disengage
from the old, discursive structures that define artmaking and cultural dynamics. This is a tall order given that there
is nothing more artistic than thinking that we are detaching from art thinking. Perhaps when we stop worrying about
making something that looks like art, we may be able to transcend the borders of this hermetic, virtual and odd
nation of ours, the Republic of Contemporary Art.

Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego

1 -Comprehensive documentation and descriptions of what happened during my journey and the general exchanges
that took place are being reunited in a longer text for future publication. Accounts of some of these events can be
read at www.panamericanismo.org.
2 -http://esferapublica.org/portal/index.php.
3 -In fact, the question on whether the project was art or not ironically became an issue only when an art-informed
audience was present, and not otherwise.
4- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarianism.
5- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_Salvatrucha.