1
”Man dancing with Havana: the city and its ghosts in twenty-first century art”
by ANTONIO ELIGIO (TONEL)
“History is made,
but it must be made again.”1
José Lezama Lima
Introduction: Notes on the art of crisis
In the following pages I propose to describe some sectors of Cuban art “of the moment”
as we move further into the second decade of the twenty-first century. If admittedly
partial and incomplete, there is no doubt that the selected works and artists cover
essential areas and that they also include many of the spheres (generational, thematic,
morphological) where individuals and trends worthy of inclusion, or at least of brief
mention, are bubbling up right now. It is a group portrait, without pretending to be a
documentary catalogue of the state of the visual arts in Havana.
In these pages I will attempt a summary, adhering to precise historical coordinates, that
situates the selected artists and their works within the ebb and flow of the artistic scene
in Cuba, and more precisely, in the capital city. These coordinates will be located in the
recent past—I think in about the last twenty years—in order to explore the threads that
I suspect are woven through the works that have been developing in the changing
socioeconomic and cultural environment in and out of Cuba.
This essay is based on a very simple working hypothesis: I am inclined to think that the
societal, cultural, and economic changes in and out of Cuba—from the fall of the Soviet
1
José Lezama Lima, “Paralelos. La pintura y la poesía en Cuba (siglos XVIII y XIX),” in La
cantidad hechizada (Havana: Unión, 1970).
2
Union and communism in Europe to the events of the present century—have visibly
affected the art produced in this Caribbean country. To this I add the following
conjecture: during that recent past, Cuban art has moved beyond the already explored
terrains (geographical and aesthetic) and is traveling over its own map, expanded by
countless trajectories, some very predictable, others completely unexpected, many
extraordinary. Several artists who arrived on the scene after 1990 have achieved
considerable visibility outside of Cuba. Kcho, Tania Bruguera, Carlos Garaicoa, José
Toirac, Los Carpinteros, Alexandre Arrechea, Diango Hernández, Yoan Capote, and
Wilfredo Prieto, are part of the not very much longer list of artists who have access to
the circuits mapped out by the capital of globalization. These circuits are defined by
institutions— in Kassel, New York, London, and Basel—and by biennials such as Venice,
São Paulo, Istanbul, Shanghai, and Gwangju, that weigh in decisively at the moment of
establishing hierarchies in the global market.
The landscape at the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the present century
are woven into the historic curtain that is backdrop to these works. It cannot be
forgotten that this is the art that emerges from the “end” of the Cold War and from that
historic phase that Peter Sloterdijk identifies as the third stage of globalization—what he
calls “electronic globalization.”2 While these works have been accruing, much has
occurred on the planet, so much that there is not room here for even a minimal
summary. I prefer to synthesize humanity’s recent past with a revealing fact, banal or
terrible according to where it is received and who reads it: on earth—our “planet of
slums” as Mike Davis has dubbed it3—the urban population has surpassed the rural for
the first time in history.
2
Peter Sloterdijk, En el mundo interior del capital. Para una teoría filosófica de la
globalización (Madrid: Siruela, 2007), 27.
3 Mike Davis, Planeta de ciudades miseria (Madrid: Foca, 2007), 13.
3
For Cuban society, the nineties meant “the extremely rapid colonization of social
relations and everyday life by the market.”4 That process contributed to the equally
rapid increase of the presence of Cuban art in galleries and fairs worldwide. That
expansion was basically imposed by these new circumstances, especially since the
market inside of Cuba is limited and unstable, and depended largely on foreign buyers.
Because of this, during the past decades and for the first time since 1959, any artist with
aspirations of an active career has sought to establish professional relationships outside
of Cuba.
Seen in relation to its country of origin this is the art that belongs to the “Special
Period”5 and to the “balseros crisis,” to the circulation of the US dollar and other foreign
currencies, to the visits of two popes in less than twenty years—Pope John Paul II and
Benedict XVI—and to Fidel Castro’s resignation, due to illness, from the presidency of
the country. This is art from an archipelago and a city competing, with other
destinations with sun and beaches, to become a centre of global tourism. Art that was
4
Haroldo Dilla Alfonso, “Cuba: The Changing Scenarios of Governability,” Boundary 2.
From Cuba: A Special Issue 29:2 (Fall 2002): 65.
5 The “Special Period in Times of Peace” is a profound crisis foreshadowed in the mideighties and officially begun at the beginning of the nineties. Ariana Hernández-Reguant
places the official beginning in 1990 and also remarks that the “Special Period…” has not
yet officially ended. “Writing the Special Period” in Cuba in the Special Period: Culture
and Ideology in the 1990s, ed. Ariana Hernández-Reguant (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 4, 7. This crisis was detonated by international geopolitical changes,
exemplified by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). Haroldo Dilla explains that the socialist
“program of regulation” “began to show its cracks in the eighties… but the real crisis
came when the external economic subsidy provided by the Soviets disappeared, and it
became clear that the national economy was incapable of guaranteeing its simple
reproduction. The facts are well known. After exhibiting virtually stagnant growth
between 1986 and 1989, the economy declined by 35 percent in the next four years.”
“Cuba: The Changing Scenarios of Governability,” Boundary 2 29:3 (Fall 2002): 59. Rafael
Hernández confirms this interpretation writing on the retraction of the Cuban economy
in the mid eighties, with “declining growth rates, weak work productivity, wasted
resources, … excessive centralization and bureaucratization of government functions,
high dependency on imports, growing debt.” Mirar a Cuba. Ensayos sobre cultura y
sociedad civil (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1999), 94.
4
created during the implosion of the sugar industry, for centuries considered the
principal economic engine of Cuba. Many of these works are born from a political
situation presided over by Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother, among very timid
overtures to private initiatives and fluctuating injections of foreign capital, in an
economy that depends more than ever on exporting services (the hundreds of doctors,
sports trainers and other skilled workers contracted in foreign countries) and on
remittances from the mass of Cubans emigrated to North America, Latin America, and
Europe. This is an art born from a city that has seen, in some of its most central
neighborhoods, the transformation of empty lots into urban truck gardens, whose crops
grow surrounded by an extraordinary architecture crumbling in plain view. In summary,
these works are witness and to a certain point documentation of what the Cuban
intellectual Fernando Martínez Heredia, referring to Cuba, defines as “a crisis of the
economy and great part of the institutions, ideology, and beliefs.”6
The reference to this multiple crisis should not overshadow the recognition that art is a
potentially autonomous domain, with the capacity to exist and proliferate in the most
dissimilar, even unfavourable, circumstances. By mentioning up front the “Special
Period” and its consequences I am not launching an argument for determinism in the
relationship between art and the society from which it emerges. I share Gramsci’s
reasoning in that history—in this case art history—“is not only documented with
economic facts. The root causes are complex and tangled, and a profound and broad
study of all spiritual and practical activities is required to unknot them.”7 Limited by
brevity, I propose to delve into the viscera of this historic skein of causes and effects to
arrive at some preliminary conclusions in these pages.
6
Fernando Martínez Heredia, “En el horno de los noventa. Identidad y sociedad en la
Cuba actual,” in Corrimiento hacia el rojo (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2001), 76.
7 Antonio Gramsci, Antología (Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1973), 45.
5
It must be remembered that the arrival of the “Special Period” coincides with a difficult
situation in the movement labeled “new Cuban art” by some critics.8 At the beginning of
the nineties that movement was in full bloom, well positioned nationally and with a fast
rising international reputation. But it was also a challenging moment for an art
movement still reeling from very difficult events, such as the Castillo de la Fuerza Project
(1989) and El Objeto Esculturado / The Sculptured Object (1990), two of the most
relevant chapters in a sum total of frictions and collisions that, beginning in the second
half of the eighties, led to a considerable deterioration in the relationship between
artists and institutions. The emigration of key figures, above all towards Mexico, had
begun before 1991, but it reached the level of exodus during the following five years.
Thus, the “Special Period” lent speed and magnitude to an already brewing artistic crisis.
A short-lived vacuum was created, and it offered, as a possible result, a breach in the
continuity of the artistic movement, affecting the creation and promotion of works as
well as art training. The aggravating circumstances of the “Special Period,” together with
the ongoing crisis in art, converged to touch everything that subsequently occurred in
the visual arts. As a perhaps paradoxical consequence, these factors drew together that
era’s youngest generation, which was taking its first steps on the national scene at the
beginning of the nineties. For this generation, the absence of many teachers and
colleagues could have become an adverse factor, because it carried with it a deficit
situation for apprenticeship, training and dialogue. At the same time, those absences
allowed the youngest—and up to a point, also their successors in the dawn of the
twenty-first century—to create a generational identity in unique circumstances, in the
midst of an environment temporarily more leveled and less competitive, with a group of
8
The expression “new Cuban art” or “new art from Cuba” is without a doubt a
recognized brand. It is impossible to sketch out the evolution and full meaning of this
phrase in a footnote. Gerardo Mosquera used the phrase in the late eighties to refer to
the art of that decade. Various writers have adopted this way of referring to the process
of transformation that took place in Cuban art since the end of the seventies well into
the nineties. Those who have used this brand include, among others, Luis Camnitzer,
Lupe Álvarez, Magaly Espinosa, Kevin Power, and Scott Watson.
6
new professors, especially at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), and in an artistic scene
where many of their immediate predecessors rapidly became only a memory (no longer
an acting presence, at best they functioned more and more as a canon to emulate).
Developments in art and art pedagogy after 1990
The succession of generations, above all in a historic juncture like the one described, is
inseparable from the educational structure, the modes of organizing the transmission of
experience and knowledge in educational institutions. One of the essential traits of the
Cuban visual arts movement (and perhaps comparably speaking of ballet and music) is
found in the quality and range of the education system that has traditionally
accompanied it. This system reached a memorable milestone in 1976 with the founding
of the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), an academy that established art degrees at a
university level for the first time in Cuba’s history. Housed in the same buildings—the
organic architecture of clay and Catalan vaults designed in the sixties by Ricardo Porro,
Vittorio Garatti, and Roberto Gottardi—which until then had hosted the Escuela
Nacional de Arte (ENA), ISA, or more precisely the College of Visual Arts, evolved from
its primary pedagogical function to become, very soon after its establishment, a place of
experimentation and debate inextricably bound to the development of art in Havana
and Cuba at that time. Many of the ideas, influences and artistic practices that define
Cuban art after 1981 (the year in which the first graduates of that new academy
received their degrees) had their trial by fire at that institution, as influential in its time
as the San Alejandro and the ENA had been in their day.
After the nineties the teaching of art, above all at ISA, had to overcome the absence of
important and experienced faculty members.9 Work in the College of Visual Arts
9
Among the absent professors, whether they moved away from Cuba or simply decided
to stop teaching (and sometimes a combination of the two), are Flavio Garciandía,
Consuelo Castañeda, María Magdalena Campos, Carlos García, José Franco, Osvaldo
Sánchez, Luis Miguel Valdés, and Luis Cabrera.
7
continued uninterrupted, although its importance off campus and its public profile were
undeniably diminished. The perseverance of some professors committed to their role in
the educational system was key during these years: among them, in the areas of theory
and aesthetics, Lupe Álvarez, Magaly Espinosa, Orlando Tajonera, Madelín Izquierdo,
and Gustavo Pita stand out. As much or more important was the school’s gradual
addition (or continued presence) to the faculty of already recognized artists such as
Arturo Montoto, René Francisco Rodríguez, Eduardo Ponjuán González, Lázaro Saavedra
González, Ibrahim Miranda, and Belkis Ayón, all of whom were joined by a number of
recent graduates from that same academy beginning their teaching careers, such as
Robaldo Rodríguez, José Toirac, Tania Bruguera, Abel Barroso, Sandra Ramos, and
Douglas Pérez. Equally influential was Adalberto Roque’s establishment of a
photography workshop that encouraged the practice of this discipline by students in
several cohorts, and also served as an incubator for many significant works of art
created during the nineties.
Without a doubt DUPP, because of its length of existence over several academic years
and its repercussions on the overall art scene, was the most important project that
originated in ISA’s domes during that time. The letters stand for “De Una Pragmática
Pedagógica” (“For a Pragmatic Pedagogy”) and they identify the most well known phase
of a living phenomenon that, established in 1990 and evolving its structure and name
over time, was developed on the initiative of René Francisco Rodríguez.
The early work carried out by René Francisco and his students extended beyond ISA,
with events in 1990 such as La Casa Nacional / The National House, La fiesta de los
jimaguas o el cumpleaños de Zobeida / The Festival of Twins or Zobeida’s Birthday, La
region de Ismael / The Region of Ismael, and other projects in homes, Havana
neighborhoods and galleries. Also in 1990, the professor and students capped off the
first year of the course with their participation in the El Objeto Esculturado, at the
Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales.
8
By fusing theory and practice, René Francisco drove art education as a flexible process
that was open to collective participation by the students and directed towards a fluid
dialogue with those to whom the work was intended. From his position as professor he
encouraged direct interventions in public places, preferentially with forays into the city
environment. Sometimes called simply “La Prágmatica,” the diverse iterations of this
experience extended its practice to housing complexes, private homes, commercial
centres, and some of Havana’s most central streets. It contributed to the widespread
use of performance, video, and intervention in public places, among other features that
even today reappear in the practices of the youngest generations. Well up into the first
decade of the twenty-first century, the project functioned as a veritable laboratory with
these principles and it served as school as well as platform for successive cohorts of
artists.10 This workshop’s importance was confirmed by the awarding of the Premio al
Fomento de las Artes / Prize for the Promotion of the Arts by UNESCO during the 7th
Havana Biennial (2000).
As the nineties wore on other pedagogical projects just as valuable appeared, given life
by the efforts of very well known artists who would reach their artistic maturity as they
committed to their role as educators. Lázaro Saavedra González and Eduardo Ponjuán
González are two such figures who emerge, like René Francisco, from the environment
of the late eighties.
Saavedra organized several memorable workshops at ISA, including ¿Creación? /
Creation? and Imposibilidad Posible / Possible Impossibility, before sponsoring the
establishment of the Colectivo Enema / Enema Collective, a group characterized by their
10
Among the dozens of students who took part at any one time in the education
experience led by René Francisco are Fernando Rodríguez, the future members of Los
Carpinteros (Alexandre Arrechea, Dagoberto Rodríguez and Marco Castillo), Carlos
Garaicoa, Esterio Segura, Gertrudis Rivalta, Alberto Casado, Tanya Angulo, Jorge L.
Marrero, Glenda León, Yoan and Iván Capote, Wilfredo Prieto, José Emilio Fuentes, and
Ruslán Torres.
9
preference for using the body in collectively created works based above all in
performance, and documented in video and photography.11 Exploring from different
angles the concept of the “collective body,” Enema’s work built bridges with popular
religion, by adopting rituals such as the pilgrimage to Havana’s El Rincón sanctuary—
affiliated with the San Lázaro cult—and also by recreating the “cleansing” ceremonies
practiced by Afro-Cuban syncretic religions. Some of Enema’s actions dialogue with
works by Cuban and foreign artists, from Fernando Rodríguez and Marina Abramovic to
Dennis Oppenheim and Linda Montano, in order to stimulate the interpretation and recreation of the local and foreign canon, above all in performance. Under Saavedra’s
leadership the group explored the possibilities of humour and the grotesque by focusing
on both art history and the nearest social reality. One of their more significant
achievements was their work Morcilla / Blood Sausage shown in the 8th Havana Biennial
(2003). The photographic documentation of this collective performance shows them
cooking this version of the traditional food, made of the blood of all of the group’s
members. Equally important was Enema’s publication of four issues of a homonymous
magazine.
Besides René Francisco, Ponjuán, and Saavedra, other artists involved in teaching during
the past decades share a similar trajectory: their careers grow from the end of the
eighties on, while they engage in similar professional experiences and their work
develops at an almost equal, parallel pace. It would be impossible to mention them all,
although a minimum list should include Luis Gómez Armenteros, a poly-faceted creator
11
In her graduation thesis, Liliam Rodríguez notes that with Lázaro Saavedra González,
the members of Enema were: Pavel Acosta, David Beltrán, James Bonachea, Alejandro
Cordobés, Zhenia Couso, Edgar Echavarría, Lino Fernández, Nadieshzda Inda, Janler
Méndez, Fabián Peña, Hanoi Pérez, Rubert Quintana, and Adrián Soca. Enema: Una
experiencia de creación colectiva. Trabajo de Diploma (inédito) (Havana: Facultad de
Artes y Letras, Universidad de La Habana, 2005), 72.
10
who has excelled as professor of video and new media, and Belkis Ayón and Ibrahim
Miranda in printmaking.
Belkis Ayón (1967-1999), Abel Barroso, Sandra Ramos, Isary Paulet, Ibrahim Miranda,
Yamilis Brito, and Dania Fleites, along with others, form the core of a group of graphic
artists who are largely responsible for the greater visibility of Cuban printmaking in
recent decades. The first three established La Huella Múltiple / The Multiple Trace in
1996, which has revolved around several editions of a group exhibition inspired in the
concept of the reproducible work based on any kind of matrix. La Huella is the best
example of the momentum of printmaking in the nineties, when several artists
interested in this field started to create and show large format, three-dimensional and
sculptural works.
The call for entries to the printmaking competition Premio La Joven Estampa / Young
Printmakers’ Prize, sponsored in Havana since 1987 by Casa de las Americas and open to
young artists in Latin America, drew attention and gave momentum to the revitalization
of the technique in the 1990s. The prize, awarded by an international jury, highlighted
the contribution of very young artists. Jesús Hdez-Güero, with his monumental etchings
characterized by bricolage and improvisation, was one of the winners. Hdez-Güero’s
graphic works refer to a material universe full of unexpected encounters that border on
the absurd and the oneiric. But rather than being innocent artifacts his devices are
somber instruments that threaten and intimidate. His technical ambition and the scale
of his prints link him to the possibilities of large formats and installations that other
Cuban graphic artists explored during the past decades.
Any review of the most significant pedagogical milestones of the recent past should
mention the role of Ruslán Torres at ISA, where he has been a professor of painting after
participating for several years in the DUPP experience. Ruslán created the
11
Departamento de Intervención Pública / Department of Public Intervention and the
Taller de Arte y Experiencia / Art and Experience Workshop, two spaces which again take
up the concept of fusing art with daily actions and events, while the repercussions of
disrupting the public arena serve to reflect on subordination, power, and the norms of
social relationships.
The artist Tania Bruguera, for her part, founded and directs the Cátedra Arte y Conducta
/ Art and Conduct; although ensconced in ISA’s orbit, its independence and range are
notable, as it has regularly reached out to collaborate with institutions such as the
Centro Teórico-Cultural Criterios / Criterios Theorectical-Cultural Center directed by the
scholar and cultural promoter Desiderio Navarro. From the Cátedra, equally a
pedagogical project and Bruguera’s creative accomplishment, art has been implemented
as a multi-directional investigation, addressing the private as well as the public and
collective. The experience has attracted a considerable number of mostly very young
and diverse students, and the program has facilitated production together with
apprenticeship by hosting sessions of dialogue and exchange with Cuban and foreign
scholars, artists, and creators from various disciplines. Performance and actions for the
camera are present in many of the works realized by the participants, while their video
work ranges from an emphasis on physical actions and the grotesque to testimonial and
documentary objectives. Many of those who enrolled in this singular Cátedra—today
artists with their own practices—very often examine views and positions on social
phenomena rooted in political, economical, ethical, and cultural issues, which in their
ubiquity shape the daily existence of Cubans. Tania Bruguera participated in the 7th
Gwangju Biennale in Korea (2008), and in the Liverpool Biennial (2010) together with
several artists enrolled in Arte y Conducta.
To these experiences that tie together art and pedagogy, the revival of the Academia
Nacional de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro also bears mentioning, especially for the
establishment of the Nuevas Fieras painting workshop, organized by the painter and
12
teacher Rocío García. The workshop confirms the importance of figures who, recognized
for their role as creators, are at the same time committed through teaching to keeping
alive the experimental tradition of the visual arts.
The mobilizing role of Espacio Aglutinador should certainly be mentioned on the list of
other people and events that have brought about the shifting and renewal of the art
scene, in and out of the salons and schools. Halfway between gallery and workshop, it
was founded by Ezequiel Súarez and Sandra Ceballos Obaya in their home in El Vedado,
with the goal of putting on events and hosting solo and collective shows. Recently
Ceballos announced that she has created another extra-official venue in the same space,
the Museo de Arte Maníaco MAM / Museum of Maniac Art. Aglutinador overcame
generational differences and oppositional ways of making and understanding art in
order to present, sometimes in early and significant shows for their careers, an eclectic
list of invited artists including Manuel Piña, Benito Ortiz, Chago Armada, Ernesto Leal,
Carlos Garaicoa, Tania Bruguera, Lázaro Saavedra González, and Ernesto Pujol, among
other Cuban (living in Cuba or away) and foreign artists.
The roster was expanded in recent years with the promotion of several young artists,
some better known than others, in an effort that seems to be directed toward the
softening of professional hierarchies, that is, avoiding the (inevitable in the small world
of art) rankings of artists according to their ties with local and foreign institutions and
the market. That “egalitarian” ideology permeates most of Ceballos’s activities and is
evident, for example, in a public action that she and Samuel Riera coordinated called
Arte normado para el consumo de la población / Rationed Art for Consumption by the
Population. In December 2009, Riera, Ceballos, and the other participating artists
temporarily created an art gallery out of a bodega—the local small store where the
neighbours buy food at subsidized prices, according to the “libreta” or ration book
issued to each family. There they threw an “art festival” aimed at facilitating “popular,
13
not elitist or speculative, collecting.” Dozens of neighbours visited the bodega and
bought, at very low prices, original works by the participating artists.
Samuel Riera has also opened another private venue, Riera Studio, which organizes
meetings and workshops as well as keeps a schedule of exhibitions. In this accounting of
independent venues that have appeared in the last few years, almost always in private
homes, we also must mention the Cristo Salvador Galería, founded by Ezequial Suárez
and Otari Oliva in Oliva’s home, and which is presently coordinated by Jazmín Valdés,
Álvaro Álvaro, and Oliva himself. In answer to questions posed by this writer, the artists
stated that Cristo Salvador Galería “not only has a mission of exhibitions, but also
participates in the public discourse regarding questions and circumstances that can
affect a process of considerations about art and culture.” Referring to the growing
existence and diversity of autonomous venues in the cultural life of Havana and Cuba,
they claim that the five years since 2005 have seen, “one of the most intense chapters
of private cultural and artistic activity in Cuban history.”12
The incessant activity within and without the official establishment, and the increasing
importance of new cohorts educated in institutions such as ISA and San Alejandro,
confirm that the arts assimilated and survived the difficulties and absences that
definitively impacted the last decade of the twentieth century in the arts, culture, and
society as a whole. Now the art scene is part of a very different reality from the spiraling
economic descent and the uncertainty that marked the beginnings of the crisis in the
early nineties and in whose shadow the cohorts of the eighties disbanded, giving way to
the generation of the nineties. Today’s Havana occupies an apparently more
socioeconomically stable reality, but it is also the capital of a country which, together
with modest economic growth, is showing visible signs of inequality and poverty, and
where the state is cautiously backing away from its historic role of providing
12
The information comes primarily from the answers to questions submitted to Otari
Oliva by the author. These were answered in an email from Jazmín Valdés and Otari
Oliva on December 12, 2013.
14
employment and subsidies. Like never before, officialdom is encouraging private
employment — “por cuenta propia” or “on your own,” as it is called in Cuba—mainly in
limited commercial and service sectors. The social safety net, vital for protecting the
most vulnerable citizens, still exists but may have been irreversibly damaged.
Uncertainty is a daily presence in the lives of many people in Cuba and Havana, and the
crisis, which began more than twenty years ago, has become a latent but no less
dramatic phenomenon.
If it shines, is it gold?
The vestiges of romanticism and nostalgia that were so important in the mid-nineties
(remember Carlos Garaicoa’s attention to ruins, Los Carpinteros’s references to colonial
and republican ostentation, and Alberto Casado’s paintings mythologizing Cuban art of
the eighties) have been fading. In contrast to those visions, somewhat colored by
idealism, several of today’s outstanding figures bring a clear-eyed view as they relate to
society from a certain distance, as if assuming the dispassionate objectivity of an
anthropologist or ethnographer conducting a field study.
Many recent works look the viewers straight in the eyes to tell them that life is tough,
and very hard, and it is best to get used to it. Grethell Rasúa’s entrepreneurial
proselytism derives from that pragmatic conclusion; only her zeal could convince her
neighbours of the benefit of keeping and sharing the excrement of individuals and
families; that waste will be treated like a collective good and invested in a small business
administered by the artist and dedicated to the community. Here we also see the
impassivity behind Javier Castro’s lens, as he collects testimonies from black and
mestizo mothers, who speak with unsettling naturalness about the street violence that
involves their sons. In a similar fashion, Luis Gárciga Romay assumes the role of
documentarian with his family and neighbours, who make him a participant in their
aspirations, frustrations and failed dreams with moving sincerity. Celia - Yunior,
15
meanwhile, graphically expose the fault lines in the public health system, and show the
ways in which citizens create alternative networks to deal with this deterioration. They
develop this subject, which intimately affects the people involved, in a cold, informative
didactic style. In another of their works, they document the exercise of power in Cuba
after 1959: they report various acts of appropriation and reutilization of the
architectural patrimony by casually scribbling them down in a notebook. The apparent
lack of formality in this work, presented as very simple collages juxtaposing photos of
buildings and historical data, underlines the fact that these acts of appropriation have
become a common, almost invisible phenomenon. This is the exercise of power treated
as trivial acts, part of a cycle as natural as the lives of plants, associated more with the
inevitability of botany than with the swings of ideology.
These artists invite us to reconsider the nuances of Cuban identity at the beginning of
the millennium by directly confronting issues such as domestic and urban violence, the
stratification of society in classes and racial groups unequally affected by the changes in
the economy, and the growing divergence between the dreams of families and
individuals and the possibilities of achieving those dreams. The population of Havana
appears in their works as a complex whole, a mosaic of fragmented identities,
representative of classes, subcultures, urban tribes, sexual orientations, and races. The
documentary is inseparable from the anthropological in works by Javier Castro, Luis
Gárciga Romay, Grethell Rasúa, Celia - Yunior, and Jesús Hdez-Güero, as well in the
works of artists with more extensive careers, such as Juan Carlos Alom (in his interest in
the world of music behind the scenes and in the dressing rooms, and his photos and
films portraying the peasants in the most remote parts of the island) and Ricardo G. Elías
(in his portraits of the sugar workers affected by the implosion of this age-old industry).
The works of all these artists reveal investigative intentions, as if they were delving into
reality in order to better understand the character of human relationships in the social
microcosm: in the home, family, marriage, neighbourhood, sugar mill outbuildings, and
little village in the mountains. They inquire, examine, and reveal to us the negotiations
16
between individuals and the state, and between all the inhabitants of the city as they
navigate the seas of social unrest and bureaucracy, and as they relate to their urban and
architectural environment.
This last does not mean that art is solely focused on producing imagery that illustrates
what sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, and other scholars debate as
the most pressing problems in the country today. Stating that the works comment on
reality includes other possibilities, from the metaphorical voice to tangential sayings to
the oblique gesture. As almost always, the works farthest from didactics and lecturing
are also the most convincing: in Ponjuán’s drawings representing gold and money—
which is treated as a pure object, the pretext for exquisite still lifes, and reduced to a
monochromatic icon—I see an incisive meditation on the possible destiny of the country
and its finances and economy in that globalization which Sloterdijk calls electronic, as
mentioned earlier. Ponjuán mines art history books for these works, using the pages of
yellowed cardstock where old plates of architecture, painting, and applied arts were
once pasted. While the plates with their reproductions of art works are missing, the
artist retains their identifying texts printed at the bottom of the pages, and the results
are paradoxical: the association of the text and image underlines the idea of money as
valuable and desirable; however, when the currency depicted is the Cuban peso, the
most devalued of all, its presence in the drawings degrades the cultural and financial
value of the monuments and paintings described so suggestively in the texts. The ingots
and sheaves of paper money receive similar treatment, with their chiaroscuros and
impeccably rendered volumes underlining the materiality of both instruments and
suggesting an equalization between precious metals and currency, in an historic
moment when the accumulation of capital in private hands seems to be, for Cubans, an
ever closer reality. For the time when Cuba starts taking baby steps towards the world
markets, Ponjuán asks us to imagine a future in which the relationship between paper
money, precious metals and the economic structure of the country becomes much
17
clearer for its citizens. A future perhaps tied to the monetary system on which the
financial institutions of global capitalism uneasily rest.
The manner in which Ponjuán, with his meticulous technique and love of description has
chosen to remind us of the importance of money, contrasts with Calobar, a work made
by the duo Luis Gárciga Romay and Miguel Moya. In this case money itself is absent; in
its place we see a series of documents, receipts collected after a public action in a state
foreign currency exchange office (known as CADECA). There each of the artists
exchanged a US dollar for Cuban pesos, at the official exchange rate at the time (the
performance was in 2003; then the rate was 27 pesos to buy a dollar, and 26 pesos to
sell a dollar). One after another the pesos were converted to dollars, and vice versa. The
artists continued the exchanges until they lacked enough pesos to purchase another
dollar. What is left is a collection of faded receipts, a compelling testimony of decisive
economic and social circumstances in Cuban society during the last decades; one of the
severest consequences has been the devaluation of the national currency and the rise in
influence of foreign currency.
Eduardo Ponjuán González, Sandra Ceballos Obaya, Celia - Yunior, Javier Castro, Luis
Gómez Armenteros, and Jorge Wellesley dedicate a part of their works to reflections
upon language, particularly the obfuscating potential of words and texts. Ponjuán’s
interest inclines toward a language compromised by its use in mass culture. In his
paintings A la plaza / To the Plaza (2012) and Dona tu sangre / Donate Your Blood
(2012), the texts have been appropriated from sayings on posters and billboards created
by Revolutionary propaganda. The shapes of the words in these images have been
modeled by the aesthetic decisions of graphic designers, who were charged with giving
form to those sayings and finding the most effective way of representing them. Ponjuán
subscribes to the effectiveness of those typographical decisions, and examines and
parodies them. By expanding text and image, and going from poster to painting, he
magnifies the ideological messages, which are paradoxically neutralized and
18
domesticated—reincarnated as beautiful objects, suitable decorations for a living room.
Other paintings—Pensamiento I / / Thought I (2013) and Pensamiento II / Thought II
(2013)—also address an equally filtered language, and adhere to the aesthetic
conventions of the comic book. The balloons where dialogues are normally located in
comics and caricatures become obstacles to communication, as the words have
disappeared, perhaps covered by layers of paint. If the outlines of the balloons suggest a
conversation conducted out loud, even estrepitously (where they are sharply pointed),
the invisibility of the texts confirms that they deal with thoughts, with fragments of an
interior monologue—logically invisible.
In Sinfonía di-fusa para Batman / De-fused Symphony for Batman (2012), Sandra
Ceballos Obaya also draws upon texts that can be associated with propaganda, or at
least with political ideology. Sinfonía is a sculptural work derived from a performance,
which is documented in the work itself. The title implies the idea of the diffused or very
dilated, and also refers to a musical note, the fusa or demi-semiquaver. An extensive
speech given by Cuban president Fidel Castro as “the central report” to the First
Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1975 is the focus of the work. Where
Ponjuán neutralized propaganda by transforming it into salon art, Ceballos decided to
experiment with the manipulation of the propagandistic object (the political discourse,
converted into book) that she destroys and afterwards reconstructs. The process of the
work implies an active reading, as a way of immersing oneself into an already
established order: we suppose that the speech was first text, perhaps handwritten or
typewritten, before being oratory that became a book. Ceballos introduces a certain
disorder in this sequence: she reverts from the printed word to the handwritten word,
as she copies by hand the text from the pages of the book, which she then rips out and
tears into pieces; the fragments of distressed paper are then used to stuff the spaces in
a music stand, so that the printed speech becomes part of the furniture, something as
utilitarian as wood or screws. The meticulous transcription into a student notebook
indicates an intimate, obsessive, and infantilized appropriation of the speech, which by
19
being fused with the music stand supports the score of an unknown music (although
suggesting that the music is the text itself, in its handwritten version). Converted into a
musical work, the speech becomes sound rather than thoughts or words: the ideological
transformed into aesthetic. Dedicating the work to Batman is a trans-cultural gesture
that compares the political leader, the author of the speech, with the famous American
superhero—with all of the imaginable consequences.
With their installation Apuntes en el hielo / Notes on Ice (2011-12), Celia - Yunior
concentrate on academic language and by extension on the role of universities and
intellectuals in society. They project an interminable list of titles of university theses, all
concerned with sociological, cultural, and anthropological issues of much importance in
Cuba today, and by doing so they underline the potential value of research in the field of
social sciences. The lists of titles, that appear and disappear to the monotone clicking of
the projector, leads us to think of the unpardonable waste of so much intellectual effort,
if outside of academe the results of the research have little or no effect on the lives of
the people. Everything indicates that the possible answers to many societal problems
are buried in those mountains of shelved paper, while the publishers, press, and media
have little interest in this accumulation of knowledge and analyses.
Similar to some of Ponjuán’s pictures, Jorge Wellesley’s paintings tend toward a
language shaped to function as graphics and finally as image. His work recalls the
frugality of artists (John Baldesarri, Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, among others) who in
the seventies attempted to create works that were readable in the obvious sense of the
word.13 From those ideas came an entire working plan for contemporary art, very
closely identified with conceptual orthodoxy. There were important antecedents in the
context of Latin America, where groups such as Noigandres, led by the brothers Haroldo
13
Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 142-143.
20
and Augustos de Campos, have been established since the fifties.14 Interestingly, there
was a flowering of artistic ideas informed by these precedents recently in Cuba. Today in
Havana there is an abundance of works focused on language and the relationship
between word and image, so much that three years ago an extensive group exhibition
was organized dedicated to this type of work by artists in Cuba and Latin America. 15
Wellesley’s work, with its sober typographical design and maximum contrast of white on
black, seems to be inspired chiefly by the Cuban poster tradition, and on the
characteristic designs of Félix Beltrán, one of the most important designers in Cuba in
the sixties and seventies. Wellesley creates a personal style with those basic formal
elements and achieves expressive images of a visual clarity that counterpoints the
polysemic, elusive and ambiguous meanings of the words and concepts that appear in
each of his pictures. Taken together, this series he calls Truth (2005) seems to perfectly
illustrate Roland Barthes’s idea that “language has this property of denying, ignoring,
dissociating reality.”16
Text has a special place in Gestalt (2008), a series by Luis Gómez Armenteros. The title
suggests a concern with the form or the figure. The paintings respond affirmatively to
that suggestion: they are always images that represent something recognizable; an
attentive perusal reveals the possibility that what is recognized may be nothing more
than copies, versions of illustrations from art history, maybe from a deluxe coffee table
book. Details of architectural monuments, African masks and sculptures, and here and
14
Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007), 140-141.
15 The exhibition was Ya sé leer: imagen y texto en el arte latinoamericano, at the Centro
de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam and the Biblioteca Rubén Martínez Villena,
Havana, April-May 2011. It was curated by Elvia Rosa Castro, Sandra Contreras, Ibis
Hernández, and Margarita Sánchez, and it included works by ninety artists, among them
some mentioned in this essay: Wellesley, Ponjuán, Gómez, and a collective work by
Gárciga, Rasúa, Castro, Celia - Yunior, among others.
16 Roland Barthes, Sade-Fourier-Loyola (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1989), 137.
21
there a landscape of snowy mountains. The monochromatic and gestural treatment,
which very effectively manipulates modernist pictorial vocabulary, describes but at the
same time deforms what it represents. The gold highlights impart a patina of mystery,
elegance, and respectability to the objects and monuments. The habitual hermeticism of
Gómez’s work is very apparent in this series, as the gold veils evoke (wealth, value,
alchemical transmutations) as much as they hide. Floating over each of the images are
the names of an array of drugs and psycho pharmaceuticals—sedatives, barbiturates,
hallucinogens—which at times have been criminalized; traced to their origins, they are
almost always from the plant world: psilocybin, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, diazepam
or Valium, ergot and dry sclerotium, etc.
The juxtaposition of images and words suggests a relationship between the hypnotic
state or euphoria that results from using these drugs, and the representation, study and
appreciation of art, especially non-western art forms—often from colonized cultures—
that were appropriated and integrated into Western avant-garde aesthetics. By
extension, this series could be understood as an evaluation of the distorted
interpretations inflicted upon “exotic” cultural productions. The fuzzy appearance and
fugitive color of the paintings also refer to an altered perception, perhaps affirming the
escapism intrinsic to the production and analysis of every work of art. Art according to
Gestalt is a hallucinogen, a drug that facilitates the mental evasion of concrete and
historical reality to its producers and consumers. This tie between artistic
representation and hypnosis is reiterated, albeit more directly, in the video Coartada /
Alibi (be there) (2012). In this work, as in the paintings, Gómez seems to state that the
represented is banal and secondary when compared with the really important: the
possibility of escaping, of using artistic representation to arrive at an unknown and
distant “other side.”
In this context, the sentence carved on the gallery wall (“Would you like to buy my
misery?”) in the installation Un sufi sueña / A Sufi Dreams (2012), should be seen as an
22
extreme gesture. The artist has eliminated any representation and images (pictorial,
audiovisual) included in the works discussed earlier. He has also tossed away the need
to hang an object: the work is imposed as a mark or wound on the very wall of the
architectural space, in an act of violence against the art institution. Gómez goes right to
the heart of the matter: he offers the hypothetical buyer a concentrated dose of the
drug (that is, art), a dose as pure as the direct language of the words on the wall. It is
very probable that in this luxury market, the artist and buyer will be very pleased with
their commercial transaction: they can both use art to escape, to go to other worlds.
Even if the title links the work with Sufism, an Islamic sect traditionally associated with
humility, asceticism, and spirituality, the tone of the question—a cry as well as a
challenge—brings us back to material concerns: to the market, money, and artistic
activity as pure commercial transaction, empty of all idealism.
City in body and soul
Many of the works shown here are focused on the physical aspect of the body, and
insist on a humanity that is as much social as biological. In these images of bodies,
humans are portrayed in all their beauty and fragility—handsome but wounded,
twisted, scarred, victims of physical and spiritual violence. These bodies are “in the act
of becoming” as Bajtín would say: moving, trying to touch, excreting, and connecting
with other bodies and with the universe, with nature and with the city.17 From there
they extend out: they flow like excrement and urine towards Grethell Rasúa’s garden,
where they unite with the soil to fertilize the edible plants. They also feed on the blood
dripping from the mouth of the woman personified by Rasúa herself, who voluptuously
and masochistically caresses the thorns with her lips. In these works by Rasúa, the body
is defined primarily by the ducts and orifices that connect with its environment (anus,
urethra, mouth) and by what emanates from them. It is art about “the matter that
17
Mijaíl Bajtín, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984),
317.
23
wants to be creator…the assimilated…germinative matter.”18 Conceptually, they are
associated with what Freud defined as the “anal stage,” the second stage of human
sexuality between “oral” and “phallic.” This stage is associated with sadism, and as
much with the desire to expel and destroy as to control and possess.19 That complex of
feelings and desires informs the social space where the artist-impresario and her
public—also her clientele—interact. They are all residents of a carnavalesque world,
transients in a time of liberation and chaotic change, of “permutations between high
and low, noble and grotesque.”20
The scatology present in some of Rasúa’s work reappears in Saavedra’s videos: in his
animations of grotesque persons, who gouge out each other’s eyes; in the bean-person
unapologetically smashed upon trying to separate from the flock; and in the mutilated
doll in El ideológo / The Ideologist (2006), the victim of a macabre and pitiless
trepanning executed for the camera. Another one of Saavedra’s works, Acariciando mis
calles / Caressing My Streets (2006) is constructed on the idea of using the camera as an
extension of the body; now it is the individual who is wounded in his intimate contact
with the city. In the friction between body and streets, the damaged urban
infrastructure is lined with the bodies of its equally injured inhabitants. Scatology
returns in Gárciga’s tragicomic Jacuzzi (2009-10), where once again the body expands,
always through an orifice (the mouth), to join the world, like breath. In all of these
works, there is an underlying element of black humour, directed to soften their
reception; as Keith Wallace shows in his essay, viewers will oscillate between smiles and
grimaces when they see such images.
18
José Lezama Lima, Oppiano Licario (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), 427.
Terry Eagleton, Una introducción a la teoría literaria (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura
Económica de Argentina, 1998), 159.
20 Agustín Redondo, “Tradición carnavalesca y creación literaria. Del personaje de
Sancho Panza al episodio de la ínsula Barataria,” Bulletin Hispanique 80 (1978), 40-41.
19
24
Meanwhile, in Javier Castro’s works the dilated expressiveness of the female bodies,
those dark-skinned mothers who talk and gesture for the camera, becomes a channel, a
means of giving mediating agency to the women, whose words (again breath and
mouths) describe as well as conceal all sorts of male violence. For the viewers, these
women’s speeches (dramatic, sometimes resigned) are the only way to learn of the
men’s brutality and incivility. In another of Castro’s works, that maternal discourse
returns in the words of a woman who is talking animatedly to two adolescents, warning
them of a type of street violence—the danger of being victims of a sexual assault or
attempted rape—and advising them on how to handle such eventualities. Castro also
lingers on the tattooed body and bears witness to this other kind of violence that, in a
desire for beauty and fashion, marks bodies in a piercing, indelible and sometimes
counterproductive way—as some of the inscriptions the artist collected in La traición de
las palabras / The Betrayal of Words (2009) show. Generally, Castro’s works call
attention to identity at a very fine level of detail, as in his treatment of anatomy and
bodies, where he and several colleagues define sex and race in very precise terms. Thus,
the body of a black man who appears and disappears mysteriously from the screen in
Castro’s Negro sobre negro / Black on Black (2008) is emblematic.
Racism and racial inequalities, combined with a focus on race-defined identity, are
central concerns that many Cuban artists have shared since the 1990s. At the very least I
must mention the pioneering work of Pedro Álvarez (1967-2004). His Havana
Dollarscape series (1995), by combining symbols of American and Soviet might with
ones that evoke the colonial past, delineates a nightmarish “Havana,” a site where
neither foreign domination nor racist humiliation ends, and where the roles of master
and slave, and who plays them, are fixed and irremediable. Also very noteworthy are
the contributions of Alexis Esquivel, Douglas Pérez, and Armando Mariño—artists who
share with Álvarez a humourous, sarcastic tone—as well as the installations and
paintings of Roberto Diago. Gertrudis Rivalta interweaves her reflection on black and
mestiza identity with aspects of feminism, and in so doing incorporates the problem of
25
gender in Cuban art. Elio Rodríguez pokes fun at the stereotype that presents blacks
(men as well as women) as hypersexual beings. A good part of his work can be defined
as satirical commentary, or parody, on racist expectations in relation to black sexuality;
the racial presents itself in his work in a context dominated by a tourist economy and
openings for foreign investment. We should stress that since the nineties several Cuban
photographers have been working on a detailed description of the identities of their
fellow citizens;21 that focus is continued today by the generation represented by
Gárciga, Rasúa, Castro, Hdez-Güero and other young artists.
Juan Carlos Alom comes precisely from this Cuban photography of the nineties. The
body that seems ready to merge with the universe—bare feet covered with mud, about
to be swallowed by the earth—appears in images he captured in the deep countryside.
In another sense, the importance of physical contact and expression in daily relationsips
among the residents of Havana are central themes in Habana solo (2000), one of the
classics of Cuban art at the turn of the twenty-first century. To create this work Alom
went out on the streets with his 16mm camera and composed a portrait of decayed
neighbourhoods, inhabited by people who express themselves in variations of
vernacular gestures, and whose effusiveness more than repays the attention of the lens.
Onto the gestures and faces the artist superimposes the score contributed by musicians
(who were also filmed, and some of them, like Frank Emilio, Tata Güines, Enrique
Lázaga, and José Luis Cortes, are true stars of their instruments) and showcases the
movement, physical closeness and fluidity of the city residents. Finally, in a moving
sequence, a soundless dance is performed on a rooftop, a “solo”—an exuberant
21
In works by those photographers (Alom, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Eduardo Muñoz
Ordoqui, Katia García, René Peña, Ramón Pacheco, Manuel Piña, Eduardo Hernández,
Raúl Cañibano, José Ney, Abigail González, Cirenaica Moreira, Pedro Abascal) the body
has been a recurring trope, permitting many of them to refer to the fragility of humans
in times of crisis. Frequently the works deal with burning issues in contemporary Cuban
society—racism, black and mestizo identity; woman as symbol of maternal strength,
sustainer of cultural traditions and object of desire; sexualities counter to the
heterosexual canon, and the gay body; poverty and marginalization.
26
dissertation of an instrument: the body. This ending, filmed against a background
alternating sky, clouds and buildings, shows the city from a high and distant perspective.
At the end the dancer does not dance alone: he dances with the city, in front of the city,
and for the city. The point of view in that final sequence offers a panorama of Havana
similar to one in an earlier classic of Cuban cinema: it repeats the noteworthy telescopic
vision with which Sergio, the main character in Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968,
directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) sweeps his doubting gaze over the city from the
balcony of his apartment in El Vedado.
In Habana solo the body, the architecture and the city are represented as inseparable:
the people of Havana, and everything around them, the streets, buildings and ruins, are
transformed into a homogeneous texture of luminous silver and dappled chiaroscuros.
Alom experiments with a kind of expansive pantheism that, together with the flora used
in traditional medicine and the landscapes and dwellers of the most remote parts of
Cuba, incorporates architecture into the realm of God, all part of a universal and
indivisible reality.
Psicofonías / Psychophonia (2011) by Ernesto Leal approaches the relationship between
architecture and individuals from another perspective. While other artists mentioned in
this essay assume the role of anthropologist, documentarian, activist who founds and
participates in social networks, and as entrepreneur who exploits the intersection of art
and commerce, Leal focuses his investigations on areas that at first seem distant from
the swings of daily life. Much like other works—his extensive production is intellectually
biting but almost always softened by a dry sense of humour—Psicofonías is concerned
with obscure aspects of reality, in this case the paranormal. Leal disguises himself as a
ghost hunter and records those inexplicable sounds, supposedly of electronic origin,
that are heard in the classrooms of the Universidad de La Habana. He chooses several
colleges, including schools like Mathematics and Computing (the buildings where reality
is analyzed and studied from a scientific perspective). In an implicit, slightly mocking
27
tone, he calls attention to the presence of phenomena that science does not accept, in
the very place where the believability of such manifestations is denied.
The work’s resonances go beyond the irony manifest in the process of making it. If
among the explanations for the electronic voice phenomenon is the possibility that all
the voices from the past have been trapped in a determined architectural space,
bouncing from wall to wall, then Leal has asked us to think about the complex history of
the country’s principal institution of higher learning. His work points out that the
university is the site par excellence where the thoughts and discussions of many persons
are accumulated, and whose ideas shape, or should shape, an essential part of the
nation’s intellectual debate. Those voices (really extensions of bodies), although
disdained or ignored by some—something that Celia - Yunior touch on in Apuntes en el
hielo—are carriers of thoughts and opinions that deserve our attention out of historical
justice. From the oldest to the newest, those disembodied voices, Leal tells us, run
though the campus like an ectoplasm enlivening the nightlife of one of the city’s most
illustrious elevations, the university hill.
If Leal is interested in capturing the sounds that no one listens to and the voices that
could be lost forever, Glenda León is more interested in transcribing the scores that the
natural and artificial worlds dictate to her. In much of her work she aspires to reveal to
us the hidden meaning in the familiar, above all in nature. The sounds, music and voices,
recorded for anthropological, parapsychological or documentary reasons by some of her
colleagues (Alom, Leal, Castro et al) are, for León, above all part of the natural order of
the universe. In this sense, we might say that her intention is to describe and share with
the viewers feelings associated with the sublime, an expanded aesthetic pleasure
(references to the cosmos and constellations are not lacking in her iconography) that is
truly universal.
28
In León’s work the poetic is inseparable from chance, and we find an echo in her work of
concepts outlined by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima: “poetry prefers to be the
configuration of concurrent chance. It has eyes….”22 Her photographs and digital images
can be read as a particular kind of visual poetry: as in the pages of a book where she
attempts to free iconography from fixed associations and expose reality as something
pluralistic, varied but never chaotic. Above all, the function of the artist in these works,
always assisted by chance, is to find the unity and harmony in that plurality. Echoes of
Lezama’s wisdom are intertwined here with the knowledge of other poetics: it is not
surprising to see the almost direct reference in her work Escuchando el azar / Listening
to Chance (2012) to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de des (Tossing the Dice) or the
confluences between her ideas and some key concepts fundamental to the
development of the European avant-garde—that is, the importance that Breton and the
surrealists gave to chance, which they understood as a kind of “superior law” that
guides the presence of the marvelous in everyday life.
Many of the works collected here share an interest in flora, dealing with the plant world
in the context of agriculture rather than in the observation of virgin nature. Examples
include Rasúa’s garden, Garciga’s documentation of the citywide propagation of
morinda citrifolia, and the video Detalle num. 5, 2008 efemérides / Detail No. 5, 2008
Anniversaries (2009), by Celia - Yunior. Alom has been dealing with nature and
cultivation for some time in his photographic series on medicinal plants and the
countryside.
In this direction, Ricardo G. Elías has created an ambitious photographic essay titled Oro
seco / Dry Gold (2005-09) that focuses on the current state of the sugar industry. The
title ties the precious metal to that industry, in a clear reference to its economic and
financial contributions to the country for many years. In this context “dry” refers to lack
22
José Lezama Lima, “Saint-John Perse. Historiador de las lluvias,” in La cantidad
hechizada (Havana: Unión, 1970), 411.
29
of energy and loss of value, and “oro seco” identifies a kind of ritual drumming,
practiced by Afro Cuban religions. The references to gold and its colour call to mind
Oshún, an orisha (deity) of the Yoruba pantheon who is syncretized with the Virgin de la
Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba; Oshun’s attributes include sweetness,
sensuality, and fertility. By extension the title refers to the history of the systems of
slavery and plantations upon which the sugar industry was built in Cuba. A key aspect of
the crisis of the “Special Period” was the loss of the very favourable prices (higher than
in the global marketplace) that the USSR paid for Cuban sugar during many decades. The
elimination of the subsidy was a mortal blow to this industry—essential for the
country’s history, culture, and economy, at least from the eighteenth century until the
1990s—and has converted it into barely a shadow of its past splendour.
Cuba’s production of sugar cane has been reduced to irrelevancy, above all in the
context of the world economy. As in any other country crossing through a period of
contraction and the closing of fundamental industries, this decline has a social and
cultural cost that touches the lives of hundreds, perhaps millions, of Cubans, beginning
with the residents of the little towns built around the sugar mills. The ruin of the mill is
also the almost assured ruin of those settlements, and a major part of Elías’s series is
composed of portraits of the old sugar workers, witness to the human cost associated
with economic decisions. That human presence is also registered in an indirect way
through lists of numbers and names posted on blackboards in the factories,
documenting the energy and time the workers invested in production.
In the centre of the series there is a collection of impressive images, all describing the
abandonment and ruin of the architecture and machinery that were the spine of the
system of sugar production. Elías transmits an irreconcilable mixture of respect,
compassion and bitterness with these very formally composed photographs. Taken
together, the photos in the series reveal a consciousness that what he portrays
30
(tottering towers, idled locomotives, paralyzed machinery) is part of some extraordinary
chapters, as admirable as they are painful, in the country’s history.
In the context of this exhibition, artists such as Ricardo G. Elías, Glenda León, Luis Gómez
Armenteros, Juan Carlos Alom, Eduardo Ponjuán González, Jesus Hdez-Güero, and Jorge
Wellesley are among those who cultivate a polished formal expression, to a certain
point dependent on traditional technical skills in photography, painting, printmaking,
and drawing. This manner of understanding and realizing art works still enjoys much
prestige in Cuba. On the other hand, in some areas of Cuban art in the past years a taste
has grown for what seems less concerned with artisanal refinements—above all in
comparison with emblematic works from the nineties and earlier—and more inclined to
using technology (for example computers) even when problematic, instead of more
traditional materials and techniques. Some videos and digital works display a crudity
that, while possessing a very appropriate immediacy in terms of style, could also be
attributed to the difficulties many artists have in accessing the most sophisticated
technologies and materials. In video and new media art, two forms of international
artistic production very dependent on the technological advances which have
accelerated since the turn of the century, the works coming out of Havana often seem
to emulate the freedom and ease of the improvisation characteristic of Cuban
“cacharreo” or “tinkering”—that skill of many to repair, adapt, and transform, without
the right tools or equipment, any type of electronic device, from a computer to a flat
screen TV to the latest generation digital telephone. Generally and at this time, despite
the technological limitations of making virtual or interactive works, the production of
audiovisual and new media works has increased. It is amazing that this happens in a
country that is barely connected to the Internet.
Internet or not, the artistic Havana has been for many years, and still is today, an open
city, with a very vital scene developing in parallel if not lockstep with what is happening
in other places. Bearing this out is the appreciable harmony between important
31
segments of art in Havana—represented here by artists from several generations—and
the kind of packaging of art favoured in global circuits. Interchanges and coincidences,
and access to information, are equally important in this equation. Luis Camnitzer has
observed that since the eighties, the art of Havana has tactfully navigated the
differences and distances with dominant cultures, such as that of the United States,
saying that Cuban art converted “what was locally fundamental into something
internationally valid.”23
We might say that this exhibition of art made on the Island responds to that tradition
that Camnitzer recognizes, while it connects with an international idea of conceptualism
used now as a convenient label for describing a very broad range of artistic practices.
Among these are “performance-related activities (often accompanied by video
technologies or installations)…and frequently underwritten by a politics of identity.”24
The idea of conceptualism emerges from this environment, where it is used, according
to Paul Wood, “to describe the range of object-, video-, performance- and installationbased activities that currently hold sway across the international art scene.”25 And he
adds with unmistakable irony, “«conceptualism» in this sense is effectively a synonym
for «postmodernism».”26 In the works of these Havana-based artists, this type of
conceptualism functions as a kind of umbrella sheltering the coexistence of a style and a
tone similar to those in great international circulation, with clearly idiosyncratic subjects
and materials.
On the other hand, if the nineties were prodigal in new materials and artisanal
refinements, they also ushered in industrial finishes, monumental scale and the
spectacular, features that the art of the new millennium has adopted and in some cases
23
Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007), 211.
24 Paul Wood, Conceptual Art (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002), 75.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
32
amplified. To sum up, we might say that the artists who have established themselves on
the local art scene over the past few years work with the care of the archaeologist:
conserving and exploiting the foundations and the structures still standing from the
successive scenes that have been built and abandoned in Havana over the past decades.
In view of this, perhaps it would be wise to refer to a cumulative renewal, untouched by
spectacular change; seen at best as a field inscribed with concentric circles in which
works and artists of diverse tendencies and generational groups are mingled, like
sedimentation. Superimposing that imaginary spatial structure of expanding rings onto
the conventionally drawn timeline of successive eras—from the “eighties” to the
“nineties” and later to the most recent events and figures after 200127 —could function
as an alternative to simplistic linear, unidirectional narratives. Accordingly, in the
possible chronology of Cuban art, each segment, placed in sequence and influenced by
the segments coming before and after, would become part of a constantly growing
spiral, one informed by a process of ceaseless transformations.
Local history and global horizons
After the nineties the majority of artists—young and not so young—associated with the
foreign market have decided to stay active, or at least locate an important part of their
production and exhibitions in Cuba. This is a noteworthy decision, very different from
the norm for the immediately past generations. If the cohorts extolled as protagonists of
the “new art” during the eighties decided to emigrate and settle mostly in the United
27
The year 2001 is significant because of the reopening of the Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes in Havana. This institution opened its doors after an extensive architectural
remodeling that considerably expanded—from one to three buildings—the spaces
occupied by the different collections and various departments. From this date and for
the first time, the Cuban Galleries permanently displayed works from the eighties and
nineties. As a result a segment of the art of those crucial decades is canonized, officially
accepted into the (great) history of the nation’s art, and recognized as a part of the
tradition that should be studied and conserved.
33
States, the artists of the nineties—no matter where they maintained their principal
residence—largely kept up very close ties with the Cuban art scene and institutions. The
youngest generations, from 2000 to the present, have learned—no doubt from
observing the careers of artists such as Los Carpinteros, Garaicoa, José Toirac, Tania
Bruguera, Kcho, Abel Barroso, and Sandra Ramos—that their works may be seen by a
global audience; they also recognize that this reception will always be informed by the
umbilical cord that links them to the Cuban womb. So in one way or another, the
majority of artists who landed on the Havana art scene in the twenty-first century and
who have a sustained international presence—think of Yoan Capote, Iván Capote,
Wilfredo Prieto, Glenda León, and Duvier del Dago, among others—cultivate often very
active professional ties with venues and events in Havana.
It is good to remember that, at least since the mid-nineties, more than one
commentator has characterized the arts environment in Havana with terms such as
“cynicism” and “opportunism.” In segments of art produced since the nineties, some
critics discover “postmodern investitures” that lead to, among other things, “the culture
of cynicism.”28 The poet and essayist Orlando Hernández has been very direct in his
assessment, maintaining that “the Cuban artistic scene—with few exceptions—has been
becoming ever more negligent and hedonistic, more concerned with its own
appearance, with its possible successes and rewards.”29 Otherwise it could seem at
times that the “cynicism” or “hedonism” of the nineties is inseparable from the new
importance of the art market in Cuba.
Certainly, we must consider the current importance of the market in the production and
social functioning of art from Havana. This is not totally new even in Cuba: after 1979 art
already functioned within a system of market relationships, initially only on the national
level. Commercial transactions were reestablished after the lifting of a kind of
28
Magaly Espinosa, El Nuevo arte cubano y su estética (Pinar del Río: Cauce, 2003), 58.
Orlando Hernández, “La importancia de ser local,” in Alberto Casado. Todo
clandestino, todo popular (New York: Art in General, 2005), 19.
29
34
“prohibition” pertaining to the sale and purchase of works that was imposed during a
good part of the so-called “grey” period of the seventies.
It seems clear, however, that a key feature of today’s Cuban art is the forging of ties
between a growing number of artists and the markets, several markets in fact. These
would include the fairs with their tents offering shade and souvenirs to tourists, the
houses and studios provisionally converted into spaces for showing and selling works,
and a part of the institutional network of galleries. To this last we should add the
participation in one or another level of the international art market, in galleries and
through national and foreign intermediaries and promoters connected to the
commercial world, not forgetting the various “not for profit” circuits, none of which of
course escapes the economic logic of global capitalism. The number and importance of
collections focused entirely or in part on Cuban art have increased.30 The commercial
activity in Havana’s galleries and studios likewise shows signs of very early steps toward
the revival of a national breed of art collectors.
Keeping an eye on commercial possibilities encourages the inclusion of works dealing
with typical and stereotypical aspects of daily Cuban life. Certain segments of the
market are receptive to works showing a little or a lot of “local colour.” This partly
explains the more or less fleeting popularity of certain iconographies so often repeated
that they became fashionable in the eighties and continue to be up to the present: the
map of Cuba, the national flag, the raft, the wall, the airplane, etc. These localisms
appear not only as subject matter, but also in the guise of formal and stylistic devices
that reinforce the idea of Cuban-ness as synonymous with economic uncertainty and
30
The exhibition Kuba o.k. (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, 1990) sparked the interest
of German collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig in Cuban art. That led to their purchase of
the majority of the works in the Düsseldorf show, which were then placed in the new
Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany. In 2001 the Americans
collectors Howard and Patricia Farber started collecting Cuban art from the eighties
forward. Donald and Shelly Rubin, American collectors based in New York, have
assembled an equally outstanding collection of recent Cuban art.
35
inventiveness in recycling and combining objects, parts, and diverse materials, or with
artisan skills and crafts that are now outdated and almost non-existent in other
societies. For some time now these characteristics have been appreciated as typical of
the art and culture of Cuba. Luis Camnitzer has written that in Cuba “[the] reuse of
materials and devices, which came from coping with poverty in an ingenious and
creative way, had nothing to do with any affectation or cosmopolitanism.”31 As
Camnitzer notes, there is no doubt that these traits reflect characteristics visible in
Cuban society, although it is not less certain that when applied to art they satisfy an
expectation (mainly generated in the West) about what Cuba “should be” on an
environmental and material level.32
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assess recent Cuban art by criteria that sharply
separate the “national/local” from the “international,” whether in one work or a group
of them. The discussion of aspects tied to the climate or local color can seem forced if it
is used as a tool or an excuse for a Manichean, partial interpretation. A variety of
perspectives and opinions should be included, if we are to understand that many of
these artists and their creations are part of something complex, of a reality that is
nourished simultaneously by local references and by sources to be found much further
away, beyond Cuba’s borders. At this point, we should remember that at least from the
beginnings of the modern tradition in the early 1900s, art made in Cuba has achieved a
balance in its priorities, while oscillating between the intense attraction to vernacular
sources and the fascination for foreign art and culture.
This all implies that the current experiences of artists in Cuba are subject to the rise in
importance and growing influence of the phenomenon known as “glocal” and its
31
Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007), 210.
32 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 63.
36
consequences, above all with the so called “glocalization” of worldwide culture.33 This
phenomenon is a result of the fusion of the global and the local, and presents us with
questions worthy of our full attention: how will the island’s art be integrated (in the
best-case scenario) or be subordinated (in the worst-case) into the cultural glocalization
supported by worldwide capitalism? What kind of balance can it achieve in this direction
as we advance into the twenty-first century? Looking at the artistic “now” in Cuba, there
are signs of ongoing, intense negotiations, clearly with varying results. Together with
works in which this equilibrium crystallizes easily and smartly, other works adopting
recognizable, even superficial, forms of integration into current internationalism are
appearing.
Since its founding in 1984 the Havana Biennial has embodied the most productive
avenue for Cuban art to mesh with the outside world. But starting in the nineties
relationships with the foreign have been affected by more than one historic change. In
that final decade of the twentieth century Cuba and its artists had to learn, along the
way, to deal with the not always pleasant implications of “waking up in the post cold
war world” as Rafael Hernández points out.34
We must reiterate that this phase—which we could alternatively call globalization, the
end of the cold war, and in the case of Cuba, of the “Special Period”—is also the historic
time in which “the regulation and inclusion of art in the new world order” occurs, as
Julian Stallabrass argues, who adds that this new order implies for art “the
abandonment of universality in favor of an exploration of diversity, difference and
hybridity.”35 At the end of the twentieth century this phenomenon spread powerfully all
over the world from the geographic and financial centers of international art, New York
33
Thierry De Duve, “The Glocal and the Singuniversal. Reflections on Art and Culture in
the Global World,” Third Text (November 2007): 682.
34 Rafael Hernández, Mirar a Cuba. Ensayos sobre cultura y sociedad civil (Havana: Letras
Cubanas, 1999), 97.
35 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 28, 19.
37
and the United States. In his somewhat hurried but at times incisive review of the
Havana Biennial, the same author comments on works by Kcho, Los Carpinteros, and
Tania Bruguera and opines that, given the unique cultural mix of Cuba due to its
European, African, and American elements, this country “is well positioned for the new
global circumstances.”36
“Global” art clamours for the preeminence of huge multicultural exhibitions and
biennales, the latter appearing or reappearing with astonishing speed and numbers
since the eighties. Accordingly, Havana and its biennial find themselves today in
competition with Athens, Berlin, Dakar, Gwangju, Porto Alegre, Prague, Yokohama,
Zagreb, and an ever growing list of cities vying for the capital and cultural tourism of
globalization.37
In some measure, the globalized situation in which Cuban art participates today is
characterized by the correspondence between the movements of capital and the
opening of markets in the general economy, and the parallel movement of artists and
works across borders that capital brings together, connects and makes ever more
interdependent.38 Post-Soviet Russian art, current Brazilian and Indian art, and above all,
the extraordinary position that contemporary Chinese art has achieved in the
international art market, serve as examples of the interdependence between capital
expansion and investment in an area, and its subsequent growth and participation in the
art market.
The phenomenon of the biennials and the mega-exhibitions based on perpetual
nomadism (with the portable and interchangeable installation as the preferred art form)
36
Ibid., 58.
Thierry De Duve, “The Glocal and the Singuniversal. Reflections on Art and Culture in
the Global World,” Third Text (November 2007): 682.
38 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 4-10.
37
38
brings with it an increase in the visibility of some “peripheral” artists who are at times
able to merge into these currents through galleries and/or institutions of power and
influence in the market. These artists join the global art caravan on the road, stopping in
stations such as Istambul, Kassel, São Paulo, Sydney, Tirana, and Venice. In the case of
Cuba, it is obvious that some artists—whose participation in the Havana biennial is a
must on their resumes—have succeeded in assimilating their works into these circuits,
and we can expect that the possibilities of their participation in the global art economy
will continue and will grow in the future.