Like his contemporaries Fr Wilson.

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

With the aid of the Acousti-guide, viewers wandered by means of an idiosyncratic collection of fix or fabricated objects, displayed according to museum conventions onward pedestals, in frames or in vitrines. The meanings of these purposes shifted in relationship to five separate biographical narratives, heard in a plant order, each representing the following clump 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 pursuit was to build a memory theater; Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of a kindergarten educational system; and Florence cherish 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 forward which biography one was listening to while viewing it, into a token 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 example 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 portray by actioned patterns for Shaker and kindergarten dances, as well as the structural component parts of abstract painting.

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

--Susan Snodgrass

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