Myron Helfgott | An Inventory of My Thoughts

Tyranny of the Theoretical, 2008

HOWARD RISATTI

Myron Helfgott: Who Am I? Who Are You?

¹ “Chide/Cajole/Rant,” audio text excerpted from Tyranny of the Theoretical (2008).

Myron Helfgott’s Tyranny of the Theoretical (2008), a sculptural installation from which the above audio text is taken, reveals something of the concerns and insecurities that underlie, perhaps even drive, much of his work. The title itself is revealing. It implies a juxtaposition between the solid, tangible reality of the world and abstract, intellectual thought. According to Helfgott’s view of this relationship, the applied (what in philosophy is often called praxis) is unjustly characterized as somehow inferior to the theoretical, so much so that he uses the word “tyranny” to describe this relationship. And as if to dispel any doubts about where he stands on the issue, he titled another work from this same year The Feel of the Thing, Not the Think of It. Here the word “feel” suggests both physical touch and inner feeling—the idea of being touched emotionally.

The two audio texts of Tyranny of the Theoretical, which are spoken by the artist, reveal another aspect of his thinking, this time vis-à-vis his audience. By directly addressing his audience, regardless of how confrontational he may seem, it becomes clear that Helfgott is attempting to expand the work into the actual world around him. He believes that the work should not, indeed cannot be hermetically sealed for purely abstract, aesthetic contemplation and still be vital and meaningful. The point he seems to stress is that the real world does exist, that it is a landscape full of tangible stuff that we continually bump into, including other people. What we are to make of this “bumping into” is another question, one that lies at the heart of his work. For it is as if the artist himself is trying to find an answer, and his art is the tangible result of his investigations. This also may explain why the many art styles that were so prominent when he came to maturity in the late 1960s never really dominated his work. Yes, one can find hints of all of them—bits of formalism in his structures, traces of pop art and photo-realism in his use of borrowed imagery, even Post Modernism in his critical stance—but they never actually shaped his work. This go-it-alone attitude, or at least his indifference to art-world trends, stems directly from his attempt to understand the self in relation to a wider world.

While Helfgott’s approach to issues such as those outlined above is more apparent in later works like Tyranny of the Theoretical, in one way or another the germ of these ideas is already present in his earliest works. The acknowledgment that we exist in a wider world comprised of others—something especially symbolized by family—is already evident in Being Looked After by Ida, Jeri, and Megan (1981–82). This mixed-media sculpture, modeled after a work by Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), is comprised of three busts of important women in his life: Ida, his grandmother; Jeri, his former wife; and Megan, his daughter. The piece may contain Helfgott’s most overt reference to family, but it is not unique in this respect. References to family occur in many later works as well, attesting to their continuing importance to the artist.²

² According to Helfgott, Giacometti’s Petit Bust d’Annette (ca. 1946), a work in polychrome plaster, inspired his piece. Photographic references to family appear in later works, including Tyranny of the Theoretical (2008), The Feel of the Thing, Not the Think of It (2008), and Science Fiction/My Anxieties (2006), to cite three examples.

Such references are Helfgott’s way of expressing his deep sentiments for family and though these sentiments spring from heartfelt personal feelings, surely he is aware that they also have the effect of expanding the work outward into the larger world of the viewer. Otherwise, why make such a work and exhibit it if no one else cares? But others do care. Everyone has family of one sort or other—parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, caretakers—that, for better or worse, forms the initial core of an individual’s life world, the world making up everyday reality. Simply put, this subject is something everyone can relate to; it compels the subtle but genuinely interactive aspect of Helfgott’s work, which operates on both personal and psychological levels.

In a profound way, the use of such a strategy to reach a wider audience has clear existential overtones. According to existential philosophy, which gained much prominence in the postwar period in which the artist grew up, “existence precedes essence.” As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre further states, “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.”³ However, moving from a state of simple existence to defining oneself is a complicated process that hinges on the development of human consciousness. As Helfgott would argue, this development does not occur in a vacuum or on its own. It is shaped within and by family and a family’s historical circumstances—religious affiliations, level of affluence and education, ethnic backgrounds, political views, etc. Thus in a very real sense, even from an existential point of view, it can be argued that family determines the initial shape and form of being and the essence that then develops from it.⁴ Family encapsulates history, both actually and symbolically, at the personal level. That Helfgott would be interested in such existential ideas and the kind of soul-searching they inspire is not surprising. His generation experienced the tail end of the Great Depression, all of World War II, the Korean conflict, and the A-bomb scare. These experiences, in some form or other, help explain why family and even its extended network of friends and colleagues (i.e., community) play such an important role in his work.

³ The quote is from Sartre’s famous 1946 lecture “L’existentialisme est un humanisme,” translated simply as “Existentialism” in Walter Kaufmann ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Meridian Books, 1956), 289-90.

⁴ This holds true regardless of which side of the “nature-nurture” argument one is on, i.e., whether one believes it is a family’s genes or cultural attitudes that shape human consciousness. Helfgott has frequently discussed existentialism and his disagreements with the way it seemingly places the individual outside history. Some of his ideas concerning existentialism’s influence on contemporary art were presented in a paper he delivered at a Southeastern College Art Conference. Unless otherwise noted, details about the artist’s life and work come from numerous conversations over the years, as well as e-mail queries and several interviews conducted with him by the author and Ashley Kistler.

The artist’s concern with friends and colleagues shapes many of his early pieces. One such work is 33 Years & 6 Months (1970), a sculptural relief in lead that Helfgott dedicated to Marvin Mills, a friend he met in college who died in his early thirties of a brain tumor. It features a window shade partially drawn over a pair of men’s jockey shorts as if to metaphorically close the curtain on a life dear to the artist that ended too soon. He intentionally does this with a touch of humor and without being overly dramatic—no heroic figure, no angels, just jockey shorts. While this work specifically commemorates a dear friend whose passing at an early age diminished the artist’s world, other of Helfgott’s works also seem to express similar concerns and sentiments, as if the artist believes picturing his world is a way to capture and hold it, to prevent it from changing and slipping away. After all, holding is a way of remembering, and remembering is a way to keep things alive, at least inside us where our actual being and essence reside.

33 Years & 6 Months, 1970–71
Lead

This same impulse may lie, at least in part, behind the series of small balsawood tableaux the artist made in the early 1970s. One of these tableaux, Kozminski School (ca. 1972), was inspired by his eighth-grade graduation class photograph taken in 1950 at the school he attended in Hyde Park in Chicago. In this three-dimensional version of the image, Helfgott is the smiling figure in the upper row of boys, seventh from the left. Another tableaux from the same year is more psychologically complex with surrealist overtones. This untitled work features a classroom scene with cutouts of nuns (symbols of chastity?), oversized bananas (phallic symbols?), a teacher at a blackboard drawing a shouting face (distress?), and a version of one of Picasso’s 1938 paintings of Dora Maar, the so-called “woman in tears” (anxiety or homage?).⁵

⁵ Dora Maar, who was often painted by Picasso as the “woman in tears,” was treated by psychiatrist Jacques Lacan at the behest of Picasso and surrealist poet Paul Éluard. See William Rubin, Pablo Picasso, A Retrospective (The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 348-78, especially Picasso, Seated Woman, Paris, 1938, 356.

About ten years later, Helfgott revisited the theme of school and classmates in Senior Team (1981). This work juxtaposes one photograph showing his 1953–54 senior year high school basketball team with another depicting an improvised team lineup comprised of VCU colleagues and various friends from Richmond.⁶ Obviously, the actual people in the two photos are different, but Helfgott has tried to imagine what his former teammates would look like a quarter century later by posing his friends as his former teammates. Surely this is an attempt to bring memory up-to-date. Judging from the rather goofy expressions on many of the participants’ faces, including the artist seated in the first row, second from the left, the endeavor was intended to be lighthearted and humorous. Despite the humor in Helfgott’s attempt to link past and present worlds together, however, an unsettling undercurrent creeps into the work as youth gives way to middle age. For even as the photograph holds things in place, time inevitably erodes them away.⁷

⁶ Helfgott grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. After graduating from Kozminski School in 1950, he attended Hyde Park High School. Sometime in 1952, when his family moved, he transferred to South Shore High School in Chicago. He graduated in 1954, around the time the basketball team photograph was taken. When Senior Team was made, Helfgott was teaching in the Sculpture Department at VCU.

⁷ For viewers who recognize members of Helfgott’s reconstituted team, this humor is heightened as individual personalities show through. At the same time, as age has taken its toll, and many friends have since passed away, there is an aura of sadness that tempers this humor in a way the artist probably couldn’t have imagined at the time he made the work. Participants’ names are listed in exhibition checklist, page 154.

We Share the Same Interests (1981–82) is another work from the same period, one that also incorporates a performative aspect. To create it, the artist carried around town a coarsely made, life-size sculpture of a female figure and had himself and various other people photographed with it. The sculpture and group photographs then became the finished piece, which documents the artist’s world and the connections to people that define and give it meaning.⁸

⁸ This work recalls Lars and the Real Girl (2007), a Canadian American film directed by Craig Gillespie in which townspeople accept an inflatable doll as a real woman out of human kindness for a troubled young man.

Even as his work develops in other ways over the years, Helfgott’s endeavor to explore relationships through images of friends and loved ones continues, as evident, for example, in A Disquieting Void (1995) and The Feel of the Thing, Not the Think of It (2008). The latter work features two-foot-high photographic images of the faces of friends, fastened to one side of large, head-shaped wooden armatures. These armatures, which are quite complex and beautiful in their own right, are placed on chairs and casually arranged to fit the gallery space. Quotes from various artists, writers, and philosophers, collected by Helfgott and read by his friends and colleagues, make up an accompanying audio.

A Disquieting Void, on the other hand, incorporates a tripod and a motor-driven projector. Placed near the corner of a room, this apparatus projects the image of a woman’s face (a friend of the artist) onto a small, blank head-shaped object, hung on a wall at eye level. This placement insures viewers will directly encounter the image, face to face, relating to it as a life-like presence rather than as a disembodied figure.⁹ As the projector rotates, the image slowly sweeps across the wall, crosses the corner, and moves onto the second wall, where it pauses on a larger ovoid form constructed as a metal grid. Because the projector is not the same distance from each wall, as this process repeats, the image not only goes from small to large and large to small; it also distorts and then is reconfigured as it travels back and forth across the corner of the room. In this, unlike earlier works, Helfgott’s use of kinetics generates an actual time-based transformation of face and head, the seat of consciousness, with a visual impact evoking psychological as well as physical change.

⁹ This projection recalls the work of Tony Oursler, who presented The Watching at documenta 9 in 1991, which features a video of a face projected onto a spherical form. In much of Oursler’s work, the spherical forms are placed on the floor, suggesting the face is that of a disembodied person. Something very different occurs in Helfgott’s work. For more on Oursler, see Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 178-79.

The introduction of technology and even a fourth dimension (sound-text in the Feel of the Thing, Not the Think of It and movement-time in A Disquieting Void) reflects the increased complexity of the artist’s work from the mid-1990s onwards. While technology can be seductive in and of itself, Helfgott never uses technology in the service of spectacle or entertainment; always he uses it for something serious, something that compels extended contemplation. And because these works require time to unfold in their entirety, they can make extra demands on the viewer-listener that stand in stark contrast to the quick reads typical of so many contemporary encounters. Nonetheless, despite the technical complexity of these works, their conceptual focus has much in common with the artist’s earliest pieces, which likewise focus on friends and family. In the interim, that is to say in the early 1980s when he made Senior Team, Helfgott seems to alter his approach in other respects; not only is there a dramatic change in style and scale in the work, he also begins to use his own image as a focal point.

His use of self-portraiture continues through much of the 1980s. But rather than an egotistical shift from a concern for others to a declaration of the primary importance of the self, this development instead seems to serve as another vehicle for addressing larger issues. For instance, certain images of the artist are not actually self-portraits but portraits drawn by friends at his request—in particular, friends who had no art training. Collaborating with others on these images was Helfgott’s way to get outside himself, to see himself from a different perspective. Whether self-executed or not, the portraits are sometimes rendered in profile or, more often, in a three-quarters view. Consequently, the subject seldom confronts the viewer directly, as if he’s not secure enough to make eye contact. Considering this, Helfgott’s emphasis on portraits of himself seems less a shift in attention than a change of methods, less an insistent statement about the importance of the self than an inward examination to achieve a greater understanding of the self.

A case in point is the self as portrayed in Fear Not (1981–82). Rather than heroic and confident, this depiction seems timid and insecure. Rendered as a flat, simplified profile of the artist’s head cut out of tin, it has been placed in the middle of a rectangular armature made of wood, now one of the artist’s preferred structural materials. Isolated and alone, with mouth agape and eyes closed, this image betrays a sense of existential angst and longing that even the work’s title, hung in large letters above the head, cannot dispel. Two small photographs, attached to supports extending beyond the frame of the armature (the artist calls them footnotes), reinforce this impression of longing, especially the image of outsider artist James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly (1950–ca. 1964).¹⁰

¹⁰ This work by Hampton (1909–1964), who was an unschooled artist, is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Following Fear Not, a greater degree of both structural sophistication and painterliness in Helfgott’s handling of media characterizes his large-scale sculptures from the mid-1980s through the early 90s. A neo-cubist fracturing of space and form also emerges around this time, most clearly evident in the structurally complex works Detail (1986), Under the Rose (1987), and Waterfall after Duchamp (1990). Along with these changes are frequent references to classicism and to past art and artists that reflect the importance of history to Helfgott—how it weighs upon and shapes one’s view of the world.¹¹ The presence of such references in his work is in keeping with the significant role that the historical dimension of family, especially ancestral family, continues to play in his thinking.

¹¹ Besides references to Picasso, Duchamp, and Giacometti, Helfgott also refers to the painters Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia, and Yves Klein, and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Waterfall after Duchamp, 1990
Plywood, plastic, paint, aluminum, motor, and lights
84 x 82 x 20½ in.

Some of these changes may relate to Helfgott’s familiarity with the Chicago art scene, which he experienced as a young man growing up around Hyde Park. This scene included the so-called Monster Roster artists, a late 1950s group made up primarily of World War II veterans. Much of their work is deeply psychological: “the figure under stress” is how one critic described it at the time. Not insignificantly, their art also contains references to classical mythology and ancient art. Leon Golub (1922–2004), whose work is still much admired by Helfgott, was an especially important member of this group; his early works are thickly painted canvases of classical torsos that recall the mutilated bodies of war victims. Also of importance were the Hairy Who artists of the mid-1960s; Helfgott remembers seeing their first exhibition, which took place in 1966 at the Hyde Park Art Center.¹² All these artists, later collectively dubbed the Chicago Imagists, represented an anti-cool, decidedly un-New York sensibility reinforced, in part, by a continuing interest in Dada and surrealism, and by the ideas of French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), who believed in innate creativity and the work of unschooled artists.¹³ In general, there is an irreverence in their work that aligns with the contemporaneous anti-formalism and funk sensibility of artists in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

¹² Exhibitions by both groups were organized by Don Baum, head of the curatorial and education departments at the Hyde Park Art Center. The names “Monster Roster” and “Chicago Imagists” (a collective name for both groups, as well as several later artists) were coined by the Chicago critic and art historian Franz Schultze. The name “Hairy Who” came about when the artists were trying to decide on an anti-cool, un-New York sounding title for their up-coming show. When someone mentioned the Chicago radio art critic Harry Bouras, someone else asked “Harry who?,” hence their moniker.

¹³ During his exhibition in Chicago in 1951, Dubuffet, who coined the term l’art brut (unrefined or raw art), outlined his ideas about art in a lecture titled “Anticultural Positions.” Dubuffet is also one of the artists quoted in the audio of The Feel of the Thing, Not the Think of It (2008), as is surrealist André Breton.

One of Helfgott’s most overt references to classicism is Classical Figure with Corrections (1986), a free-standing, sculptural self-portrait that evokes the ancient orator pose from classical antiquity. Nearly ten-feet-high and composed mostly of fractured planes somewhat in the manner of cubism, it is best viewed frontally, like a painting. Helfgott believed at the time that the pictorial space of painting was more challenging than the actual space of sculpture. His desire to engage what he regarded as the more seriously intellectual format offered by painting, however, did not prevent him from including a degree of irreverent humor in the work, apparent in the way he included the original and “corrected” versions of various details (e.g., the elbow, hand, and arm positions) and the same three-quarters view of his head for that of the figure, this time oversized. Shorts on the figure humorously evoke the traditional fig leaf.

Reflective once again of his interest in classicism and family, Helfgott has also drawn inspiration from the story of Laocoön, the Trojan priest from Greek mythology who, along with his two sons, was killed at the behest of the goddess Athena.¹⁴ Not only does the theme of family connect Helfgott’s Laocoön (1990) to his work generally, but the story surrounding the ancient sculpture of Laocoön also connects it to Classical Figure with Corrections. When this statue was discovered in Rome in 1506, various parts were missing, including the central figure’s right arm. Numerous artists made replacements representing what they thought these parts should look like, especially the missing right arm, which they envisioned as extended. According to some historians, even Michelangelo made a replacement. Four centuries later when the original arm was discovered, it was actually bent, revealing that most of the “corrections,” including the one attributed to Michelangelo, were incorrect.¹⁵

¹⁴ According to Virgil’s Aeneid, Laocoön, a priest of Poseidon, was punished for warning the Trojans not to accept the horse offered by the Greeks sieging the city of Troy. Athena sent two giant sea serpents to kill Laocoön and his two sons.

¹⁵ When news of the statue’s discovery reached the Pope, he sent the artist Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo to investigate. For a recounting of the discovery, see Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo: Painter, Sculptor, Architect (Chartwell Books, Inc., 1975), 54-55. The original arm was found in 1905 in a sculptor’s workshop in Rome, near to where the original statue had been discovered four centuries earlier. For a fascinating account of the many “corrections,” see Bernard Frischer, “Laocoön: An Annotated Chronology of the ‘Laocoön’ Statue Group,” Digital Sculpture Project, www.digitalsculpture.org/laocoon/chronology. For a romanticized depiction of the statue’s discovery, see Hubert Robert’s The Finding of the Laocoön (1773), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; note that Robert depicts the statue as it looked in 1773 with its “incorrect” straight right arm.

In Helfgott’s version, a sculpture in high relief, a straight, lightly colored arm rests across the face of a partially armless figure that is rendered in a contrasting dark color, suggesting the living and the dead—a possible reference not only to the ancient legend but also to personal loss. As already noted, references in Helfgott’s work to past art and artists reflect his belief that history plays a significant role in shaping one’s worldview. For him, history continues to have validity in the present, in real as well as in symbolic and metaphorical ways, because earlier meanings establish the ground upon which contemporary meanings (i.e., interpretations) develop.¹⁶ Thus, it should not be surprising that his Laocoön, with its prominently positioned arm, brings to mind what artist David Freed has called the extra arm in Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà (1550s–64). In this unfinished work, a late recarving by Michelangelo of one of his earlier sculptures, a realistic, highly finished arm from the original pietà remains, offering a stark contrast to the coarsely carved figures of the new version. It is as if Michelangelo were reimagining (correcting?) his earlier vision of Christ’s death and lamentation. Whether or not the relationship between the Rondanini Pietà and Helfgott’s Laocoön was consciously intended isn’t the issue; as Helfgott would argue, art works are latent with meanings that often overflow their makers’ original intentions. These meanings are carried forward into the present, and artists expect viewers to excavate them. In this case, clearly the theme of death—not only of Christ, but also of Michelangelo who worked on this, his last sculpture up until six days before he died—links the Rondanini Pietà to Helfgott’s Laocoön and to many of his earlier pieces about the passing of loved ones.

¹⁶ This reflects the thinking of German philosopher Edmund Husserl, whose ideas Helfgott has discussed. See Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 1970), 363.

Another important feature of Helfgott’s sculpture is his use of a complex, beautifully crafted plywood matrix that not only functions as a frame to support the figural elements, but also plays an aesthetic role in the way it echoes the contours of the figures. Helfgott often speaks about the need for an artist to be skilled in craft and yet able to hide his craft so that it doesn’t dominate the work. Here, he “hides” his craft by carefully integrating the matrix formally into the piece in a manner that recalls the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom Helfgott studied as a graduate student during the late 1950s and early ’60s at Southern Illinois University (SIU).¹⁷ It is especially reminiscent of Fuller’s geodesic dome projects in which the open-matrix structure actually forms an integral part of the architecture. Helfgott learned a great deal about structures from Fuller, in part because structure was the essence of Fuller’s work. That’s why, as Helfgott has pointed out, Fuller’s method stood in contrast to Frank Lloyd Wright’s approach: Wright designed from the inside out, while Fuller designed from the outside in.

¹⁷ Helfgott was drawn to Southern Illinois University to work with Fuller on a project in the Design Department. Eventually he transferred from Design to the Art Department and majored in sculpture. After receiving an MFA in 1964, he taught at Northern Illinois University (1964–67) and then at Edinboro State University in Pennsylvania (1967–68), before coming to VCU in 1968. For more on the SIU Design Department, see Al Gowan, Shared Vision: The Second American Bauhaus (Merrimack Media, 2012).

Of even greater importance in shaping Helfgott’s attitude about art making, however, was the philosophical vision of the SIU Design Department where Fuller was in residence. Developed from ideas inherited from the Bauhaus, design at SIU was not necessarily about instruction in making the kind of beautiful objects that today characterize so much fashionable high-end design. Rather, it was about trying to adapt design to something useful, like solving social problems. In short, the program revolved around the idea of socially responsible design.¹⁸ In a real sense, these two ideas—problem solving and social responsibility—characterize Helfgott’s approach to art making, and they undergird the seriousness of his work. Though he often speaks of problem solving from a technical point of view, when one examines his work, it is clear that technical considerations are always used in support of content, of something more all-encompassing than pure formal invention.

¹⁸ For more on this, see “Discovery in the American Classroom: Replacing Products with Problems” in Al Gowan’s Shared Vision, 200-01.

This becomes clear in the series of mixed-media sculptural works incorporating audio and kinetics that Helfgott began making in 2000. According to the artist, he wanted to add the element of time to his work, something he had already done five years earlier in A Disquieting Void. The first of these newer time-based works, A Film in Three Chapters and an Epilogue (2000) includes various moving components and audio text, its four wall-mounted sections unfolding in time as viewers move around the gallery from “chapter” to “chapter” listening to the audio. Among the major elements is a monumental version of the same three-quarters view of the artist’s face seen in earlier pieces. Here, however, it has been rendered in black with blue outlines, cut into several large pieces, and disassembled on the wall, suggesting a psychologically fragmented self. The audio, comprised of questions reminiscent of those on psychological personality profile tests but actually composed by the artist, reinforces this impression. Moreover, by addressing these questions directly to the viewer, the audio transforms the viewer into an active participant in the work. This first chapter sets the tone for the remaining sections and is followed by a section featuring several travel posters (longing?), then by a section with pajamas tacked to the wall as if to suggest a ghostly figure (perhaps a dream state?), and finally by an “epilogue” in which an actual hammer repeatedly strikes a photograph of a Parisian manhole cover that resembles a face. The audio in this last section raises questions about the confusing nature of visual perception, likening it to a Zen koan.

The psychological undertone of this piece is also reflected in several other mixed-media pieces with audio. In Buddha Wisdom/What Women Have Told Me (2005–06), for example, Helfgott combines several of his own sculptural interpretations of Buddha with a small ceramic version acquired from his father’s house after his death, bringing together images that suggest spiritual wisdom and a stoic view of the world. The audio, in stark contrast, turns the viewer-listener into an inadvertent voyeur, eavesdropping on the personal and sexually suggestive comments of several women, to which a male voice periodically responds.

Buddha Wisdom/What Women Have Told Me (detail), 2005-06
Text: Myron Helfgott
Plywood, wood slats, electric motor, mixed media, and audio
Dimensions variable

A related work introduced at the outset of this essay is Tyranny of the Theoretical (2008), an installation comprised of two desks and two psychologically probing audio tracks. Both desks hold a variety of disparate objects that, according to the artist, remind him of his grandmother’s attic. This reference to his grandmother’s attic, however, is not meant to be taken literally but to be understood as an imaginary place laden with memories of family, friends, and events, real and otherwise that make up the artist’s life world. Probing this psychological space, a repository of everything he has encountered over a lifetime, the artist imagines himself unearthing disparate objects that he then combines in an intuitive manner, in direct opposition to abstract theoretical calculation.

With this as a working method, it is not surprising that the general theme of one desk seems to concern the recurrent subject of the artist’s family. Family is here represented by photographs of his parents and grandparents, and even a very old photograph of his great grandparents taken in Ukraine in the late nineteenth century. Tellingly, given Helfgott’s interest in psychology, there is also a picture of Sigmund Freud’s desk in Vienna, as well as an ashtray filled with cigar butts and various sexual images; these images and items recall both Freud’s psychoanalytical method, which was based on analysis of a patient’s sexual impulses, and a quip attributed to him that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

The objects on the other desk seem devoted to the artist’s professional and social world. Among them, strangely enough, are lamb bones salvaged from a dinner party at a friend’s house after a reading by the poet Philip Levine. There also are various art books, a small model staircase¹⁹, an obituary of the aforementioned artist Leon Golub from The New York Times, and a statuette of Michelangelo’s David with its head and an arm broken off and carefully arranged in front of the small figure. One wonders, is the inclusion of these broken pieces an oblique reference to the story of Laocoön and his sons and the Renaissance discovery of the ancient statue with its missing arm?

¹⁹ After graduating from high school, Helfgott studied architecture at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier in Chicago from 1954 to January 1957. He then transferred to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent the spring semester before going to Southern Illinois University.

The audio texts of Tyranny of the Theoretical, which are essential to expanding the meaning and scope of the work’s visual elements, are interchangeable and not specific to either desk. However, so the audios can be clearly heard and understood, the installation is designed so that the viewer-listener hears only one at a time. While the text for each audio was written in one sitting in a stream-of-consciousness manner—one thought flowing into the next, similar to the way in which the objects were assembled on the two desks—both were carefully composed and touch on many of the same themes, though from somewhat different perspectives. Each audio is of a confessional nature, incorporating a self-exploration that exposes the viewer-listener to the artist’s hopes as well as his insecurities. In the audio titled “Alone,” he speaks of friends and his fears and desires—fears about his intellectual life, fears of aging, fears about the quality of his work. He also explores the philosophical implications of becoming rather than being. In the second audio, “Chide/Cajole/Rant,” quoted at the outset of this essay, his insecurities surface as he aggressively challenges the viewer-listener’s qualifications to judge his art. Not insignificantly, this audio also includes a philosophical passage on being and consciousness—on being aware, on being aware of another, and on being aware of being aware.²⁰

²⁰ This self-conscious introspection clearly echoes the ideas of Edmund Husserl. See his Crisis, Part III, especially pages 252-53, and Morton White, The Age of Analysis (The New American Library, 1955), 104.

In one way or another, the question of being and of being aware runs through much, if not all of Helfgott’s work. However, as noted earlier, his questioning is not about an egocentric self, something the self-effacing nature of his self-portraits makes clear. Rather, it is about seeing and understanding the self in relation to a larger world of others. Helfgott develops this idea early on in his work by focusing on family and friends as a way to symbolize the self’s outward gaze. This continues in later works as well, perhaps most significantly in The Feel of the Thing, Not the Think of It (2008), a work in which he gathers together the images and voices of friends and family. He also explores this concern in Here and There, which includes innumerable obituaries (mostly from The New York Times) that the artist began collecting in 2001. This ongoing project exemplifies his interest in humanity and the way our lives are defined by those around us, including the departed who are commemorated in the news; after all, they also make up our world.

Helfgott’s engagement with others is also evident in the audios accompanying some of his installations. While certain audios feature the artist himself speaking, the voices of friends and colleagues are heard in other works, sometimes responding to questions he asked of them. Helfgott considers this a genuine, if limited, form of collaboration because he incorporates their unedited responses exactly as they were given. Participants took a more prominent role in creating several other pieces, including Two Beautiful Women in the Luxembourg Gardens (2000) and Please Except Jesus (ca. 2000–01). For the former, which involves a conversation between two Parisian women, Helfgott invited his poet friend, T.R. Hummer, to compose the text, giving him general guidelines but also freedom to work within them. In an even more open-ended way, to make Please Except Jesus, based on a photograph he took of this admonition spray-painted on a wall, Helfgott asked another friend and artist, Richard Carlyon, to write a critique. To his surprise, Carlyon’s text parodied a formalist interpretation of an image dependent on content, not structure, which then became the audio for the piece in counterpoint to Helfgott’s visual component.

For his latest project, he has taken to heart his own words about the importance of others in perhaps the most significant way an artist can: he invited fellow artist Javier Tapia to “correct” one of his works and thus complete it. While previously Helfgott had added his own corrections to Classical Figure with Corrections, now he was handing this responsibility to another, a move similar but more radical in spirit to his use of the portraits he earlier had asked others to draw of him. Instead of determining how to incorporate in his work a visual element made by someone else, he relied on his collaborator to also make this decision, a genuine act of trust in another person.

Classical Figure with Corrections, 1986
Oil paint on plywood
118 x 74 x 17 in.

Tapia’s correction involved painting a large, bright blue shape on a clear plastic sheet, overlaid across the central portion of the work. It was a bold gesture that dramatically changed Helfgott’s original composition. He acknowledged Tapia’s efforts and several other people in a rather poignant way by titling the finished piece, With the Help of Javier, Luis, Ann, and Susan (2014). This title embodies a wider frame of reference by acknowledging the support of two female friends and the inspiration Helfgott has drawn from the work of surrealist avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). Such collaborations go beyond an abstract, philosophical awareness of others by actually creating a dialogue with real people, not only affirming their existence as living, breathing human beings, but also recognizing their role in shaping the artist’s life and work.

Even though Helfgott’s work makes demands of time and attention on its audience that go against the contemporary impulse for instant gratification, it consistently rewards attentive viewer-listeners with something of substance. When all is said and done, what comes across most overwhelmingly is a belief that life is centered on interpersonal, human relationships with family, friends, and colleagues that must be carefully cultivated, even cherished. For it is through them that we are defined as human beings and a sense of community develops. The imagination and conviction with which Helfgott conveys these sentiments give his work its special power and relevance. Ignoring fashionable art-world trends and instead following a fundamental human impulse to care for others and extend to them a sense of empathy, Helfgott has created a body of work that not only stands apart in its originality, but also embodies ideas and concerns of a more profound nature than simple careerist aims..

Howard Risatti is emeritus professor of contemporary art and critical theory in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of five books: A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression (University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Skilled Work: American Craft in the Renwick Gallery (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), co-authored with Kenneth Trapp; The Mountain Lake Workshops: Artists in Locale (Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1996); Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art (Prentice Hall, 1990); and New Music Vocabulary (University of Illinois Press, 1975). His work has appeared in Winterthur Portfolio, Artforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Art Journal, among others.