MYRON HELFGOTT
Tyranny of the Theoretical
Tyranny of the Theoretical, the Myron Helfgott piece documented here, was included in an exhibition of his work at Sweet Briar College’s Babcock Gallery from January to March, 2008. The piece occupied a sectioned-off area in the space; the “Freud” table and the “Art” table were positioned approximately twelve feet from each other, close enough so that the audio emanating from one table could be heard as a background murmur at the other.
Each table was slightly smaller than a card table and carefully made, the surfaces laminated and smooth. The elegant construction of the tables gave a greater weight to the objects placed on them, some of which appeared to be insignificant in and of themselves. Chairs were available so that a viewer could sit, listen to the recorded monologues, and examine a table and its particular array of objects.
Of the work, Helfgott writes:
The structure of the work I have been making in recent years has been influenced by literature, film, and architecture. With the use of audio and traditional sculptural materials I have attempted to address such diverse subjects as the self-portrait, landscape painting, and gender and age issues. Trying to harness the diverse content and materials in these sculptures is like trying to organize debris at a picnic on a windy day.
I had the vision of my going up to my grandmother’s attic (if she had an attic), beginning to partially unpack boxes of memorabilia and arrange them in such a way as to just enjoy reminiscing over these wonderful objects. This became the organizing principle of Tyranny of the Theoretical. The text was written over a period of three years.
In this representation of Tyranny of the Theoretical, we invite you to look at the pictures of the tables and the objects, listen to the monologues, and appreciate the ruminative voice that gives the objects a context, a local habitation, and a name. 
Click on the thumbnail images below to open a documentary photo of each table. Each photograph is mounted with a control in the lower right corner that allows you to zoom and pan. Upon visiting either page below, the audio for a given table will autoplay and loop in an embedded RealMedia player. Though the restored audio will be set to autoplay, browser settings may interfere and you may have to manually start the audio for a given page below.
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| Art table | Freud table |
Blackbird Founders Archive Restoration Note
The audio content for Tyranny of the Theoretical was not available after VCU shutdown the server supporting Real Media content in 2016; furthermore, the Flash-based interface that allowed panning of Helfgott’s two images, “Art” and “Freud,” no longer worked after the universal drop of Adobe Flash Player support early 2021.
In 2024, Kurtis Zirkle, a former Blackbird intern, continued to work on the Founders Archive as a volunteer lead coder and pagebuilder. Zirkle introduced open source Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator, as the solution for viewing legacy Flash content. While his work to install Ruffle and update content pages succeeded in restoring nearly all of our Flash dependent content, one of the Helfgott images (“Freud) would not load. The missing audio, unrelated to Flash, remained unrestored.
In July of 2026, after restoring the audio, I spent time comparing the working and nonworking pan and zoom interfaces and was finally able to get the “Freud” image to load.
In the original presentation, the audio auto-played in RealPlayer on opening either of the two content pages. I am trying the HTML 5 audio interface pointed to mp3s (no frills, but the easiest solution) to restore audio controls to the “Art” and “Freud” pages. Though I will set each to autoplay, viewers may have to manually start the audio depending on overriding browser settings.
As noted in the introduction, the two tables of objects pictured were in the same room twelve feet apart with the audio playing at each table. In the restoration process, I discovered an audio file we did not originally publish; this file contains both audio tracks playing simultaneously to emulate what a viewer may have heard in Sweet Briar’s Babcock Gallery if standing midway between the two tables. I have published this rediscovered audio file below.
Tyranny of the Theoretical content was restored and amended on July 15, 2026.
—M.A. Keller
Previously unpublished audio
"Art" and "Freud" voiced simultaneously