Methods of Art – Archive of Artists Interviews

I was just reading about famous last phrases. Alexander the Great when he died, apparently he said
that there are no more worlds left to conquer. That was his famous last phrase. Which to him,
perhaps meant “well I have done it all” and there is nothing left for anyone else to do so I’m ready to
go. Perhaps you could interpret it in that way. But art is a world that can never be conquered. Art is
this environment and this territory that the moment that you try to define it, the moment that you try
to control it and set its boundaries it immediately will show you new boundaries, it will immediately,
it will contradict whatever you attempt to do to give it a final meaning. To me that’s one of the things
that is most exciting about art, that it just can never end, that it’s a world that just can never be
conquered.

Pablo Helguera / Art

Bio

* 1971 Mexico City/MX, based in New York City. Helguera works with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. His work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. Pablo Helguera performed individually at the Museum of Modern Art /Gramercy Theater, in 2003, where he showed his work “Parallel Lives”. His musical composition, “Endingness” has been performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA Boston; RCA London; 8th Havana Biennal, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Shedhalle, Zurich; MoMA P.S.1, New York; Brooklyn Museum; IFA Galerie, Bonn; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center, amongst many others. Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized close to 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September, 2011. He is currently Senior Resident of Location One in New York. He presented a solo exhibition at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 2012

http://pablohelguera.net

Transcript

PDF

Credits

The interview was conducted on March 4 2015 at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Interviewed by: Johannes M. Hedinger

Filmed and recorded by: Konstanze Schuetze

Edited by: Paul Barsch

Transcript by: Wolfram Eggebrecht, Lea Hoßbach, Ella Tetrault

Produced by: University of Cologne (Cologne), Institut für Kunst&Kunsttheorie