Pablo Helguera at Julia Friedman

Like his contemporaries Fr Wilson, Mark Dion and Janet Cardiff, Pablo Helguera is engaged in the practice of institutional critique, exploring the relationship between particulars and their visual display. Here, in fact, Wilson narrated the Acoustiguide commentary to Helguera's novel project "Parallel Lives," an elaborate installation combining phenomenons and multiple audio texts that together parodied the semantics of the museum. (A related performance of the same title took place at of recent origin York's Museum of Modern Art in December 2003)

With the aid of the Acousti-guide, viewers wandered [i]or[/i] part of to the other an idiosyncratic collection of set or fabricated objects, displayed according to museum conventions upon pedestals, in frames or in vitrines. The meanings of these percepts shifted in relationship to five separate biographical narratives, heard in a plant order, each representing the following collection or characters: the last existing Shaker community; Ward Jackson, an artist and long-time archivist at the Guggenheim Museum; Giulio Camillo, a 16th-century mystic whose search was to build a memory theater; Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of a kindergarten educational system; and Florence feed Jenkins, an amateur opera singer who gained a measure of renown during the 1940 for her unimpeachably awful recitals.

For example, a pair of wax wings titled Angel of Inspiration was transformed, depending upon which biography one was listening to while viewing it, into a type of divine inspiration, a theater style of dress or a three-dimensional interpretation of a Paul Klee drawing of an angel. A small forest structure became the architectural prototype for a Shaker meeting house, a memory theater, the first kindergarten or an inspiration for Frank Lloyd Wright (architect of the Guggenheim), while sum of two units black-and-white drawings bearing circular motifs showed patterns for Shaker and kindergarten dances, as well as the structural ultimate parts of abstract painting.

The installation was given coherence by the agency of the artist's acute sense of imitation and detail, as well as his ironic use of associative tokens and geometric motifs. Helguera's reconstruction of biographical data also overthrowed the authoritative claims of history and pedagogy through pointing out how easily external realitys can be defined by multiple interpretations and referent In like fashion, his installation implied, we spectators of visual information are willingly manipulated by means of the institutions that package and at hand it.

--Susan Snodgrass

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