Pablo Helguera Mexico City, is a New York based artist working across disciplines including installation, drawing, socially engaged art and performance.
This interview is really important to me. In this interview we talked about how he considers the viewer in his work and the role language plays. Singing seems to be a recurring motif in your work. Could you talk about that? I come from a musical family. My sisters and many of my relatives are classical musicians. I was always interested in music; I wanted to be a singer at one point when I was a teenager.
Although my interest in painting and visual arts eventually took over, music never left me. I feel that is why I gravitated towards live performance art. I also realised later on that the notion of scoring was very important within my practice. The idea of sequentiality, whether in narrative format or a concatenation of experiences.
From the standpoint of being an educator, an artist and a writer, everything you produce needs to follow some kind of structure or score. And that has manifested in many different ways in my work. Music is present in everything I do. As an artist that has been involved in socially engaged practice from very early on, one of the issues that I face is the challenge of creating socially engaged art in the context of a pandemic where social distance and isolation is essential. I was discussing this with John Spiak, an old friend and curator at Grand Central Art Center in California, and we decided to do something that would help people connect.
Everyone feels isolated in this moment, and the initial lockdown was particularly severe. I decided to revive my old project, The Singing Telegram. I had already done one performance, and we thought it would be interesting to update the format and do it over Zoom. I offered to become a messenger for people. They could pick from a selection of songs that I knew, and I would sing to the recipient of the message on Zoom. There were roughly 60 songs to choose from, ranging from Broadway tunes and Frank Sinatra to opera and Mexican folk songs.
