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”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 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 it[3]—the urban population has surpassed the rural for the first time in history.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 re-creation 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 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.