A Tree From Many Shores - Cuban Art in Movement

A Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in MovementAuthor(s): Antonio EligioSource: Art Journal, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 62-73Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777928 .

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8. Eduardo Aparacio. HabanaiHavana (Miami Beach and La Habana), 1994. Duraflex prints from color negative. Each, 30 x 40 (76.2 x 101.6). Courtesy the artist.

A great event should develop in a small place to reach the peak of its splendor. (Un acontecimiento

grande debe desarrollarse en un lugar pequefio, para conseguir su punto de esplendor.) -Jos& Lezama Lima, Playas del arbol

Back in the early nineties, the enthusiasm seemed unstoppable, although it

was possible to discern even then that weak arguments sustained it. The group relocation of Cuba's famed

eighties generation from

Havana to Mexico City and

from there to Monterrey, Miami, and New York opened

-I--ernationl Dispatches

up an extraordinary prospect: the "extraterritorial" manifestation of an artistic

phenomenon generated by the historical and political milieu of Cuba. Journal-

ists, critics, and artists themselves entertained the possibility of the continuity

Antonio Eligio (Tonel)

A Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement

of Cuban art outside of Cuba.' As the critic

Peter Plagens wrote in 1992, "Here come

the Cubans. Artists from that fading citadel

of Soviet-style communism are everywhere these days in the most freebooting of all

capitalist enterprises, the Western art world.

S. . Like the German and Italian neoexpres- sionists who took over the scene in the '70s

and '8os, the Cuban artists may be on the brink of changing the face of con-

temporary art."2 Such critics positioned Cuban artists as the figures who would

impose on the hierarchical system known as the international art world new

perspectives from the periphery, as well as from its dispersion. Yet, these des-

criptions of the move abroad by the majority of the eighties generation have

overlooked both the specificity and the social nature of an artistic movement

that developed more as a consequence, rather than in spite, of Cuban cultural

policy since the late seventies.

Heralding the end of the so-called Grey Years of the seventies, in which

the government's bureaucratic control of culture resulted in the support mostly of propagandistic art and the isolation of many important artists, a new artis-

tic generation began to emerge in the early eighties. The group exhibition "Volumen Uno" (i98i), a series of important one-person exhibitions, and the formation of artists' groups such as 4x4 and Hex~agono in Havana during this

period stimulated aesthetic renewal. Departing from the immediate past, these artists joined Third World socialist imperatives with contemporary Western influences. Artists, critics, and institutions sought to incorporate contemporary Cuban art into an international context (as defined by the artistic centers of the United States and Europe). Accordingly, beginning in i98i, contemporary Cuban art began to return to such cosmopolitan settings as the Venice Biennale and the Sa6 Paulo Bienal. Just as consequential in this respect was the increas-

ingly influential elaboration of a cultural paradigm by artists, critics, and curators that privileged the peripheries.

The Havana Bienal, founded in 1984 to showcase art from the peripheries, played a crucial role in the coalescence of this paradigm. Identified as the

"necessary magnet" through which a dialogue with egalitarian aspirations

On the hundredth anniversary of the Spanish- American War, which inaugurated a new era in the history of the Caribbean, Art Journal is pleased to publish the following two international dis-

patches on contemporary art in Cuba and Puerto Rico. These articles mark the beginning of increased coverage of aspects of Caribbean art in these pages. We are deeply grateful to The Reed Foundation for subsidizing the first phase of this initiative.

I. Regarding media coverage of the mass emigration of Cuban artists to Mexico and later Miami, see Peter Plagens with Peter Katel and Tim

Padgett, "The Next Wave from Havana," News- week (November 30, 1992), 76-78. See also Polihster (Mexico City) 4 (1993), which focuses on the theme from varied perspectives, with articles

by Cuauhtemoc Medina, Osvaldo Sanchez, Giulio V. Blanc, and Gerardo Mosquera. See also Ruben Torres Llorca, "Pldstica cubana en el exilio," Arte en Colombia 62 (April-June 1995). 2. Plagens, 76.

63 art journal



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could be established with Western hegemonies, the Bienal became the undis-

puted platform from which the international success of the eighties generation could be launched.3 To be sure, the Bienal, which was triennial in 1989, 1994, and 1997, has weathered the same stormy waters navigated by the balseros-the Cubans who emigrated from the island on fragile rafts in increasing numbers in the eighties. These waters include the sharp economic crisis that still faces the island and the painful establishment of a market economy and foreign investment. Yet, amidst the increasingly fragile and unstable status of the visual arts in Cuba, the Bienal has persisted as a well-known reference point by func-

tioning as a space for global dialogue, while still remaining an alternative to the Western culture industry, which continues to devote scant attention to art from the peripheries.

In the years before the Havana Bienal was established, recent graduates from Cuba's most renowned art school-the Facultad de Artes Plasticas of the Instituto Superior de Arte, founded in Havana in 1976-began to teach at the school in growing numbers. Within five years, this influx of young teachers

played a decisive role in the implementation of new pedagogical strategies that revitalized artistic training on the island. In particular, these teachers provoked a lively dialogue on the relationship between art and society. The most visible

representative of this pedagogical revolution was Flavio Garciandia, who had ties to both the seventies and eighties scenes. At the Departamento de Pintura, Garciandia translated his own aesthetic credo, which blended cosmopolitanism with a critical reception of local culture, into educational practice. He consolidated this strategy with the assistance of the artist Consuelo Castafieda, the

professor of aesthetics Lupe Alvarez, and foreign pedagogical precepts-most notably the doctrine of Conceptual art developed by the Uruguayan-born, New York-based artist and critic Luis Camnitzer, who extended the radical ideo-

logical critique of art and its institutions practiced by Conceptual artists in the United States and Europe to the analysis of specific social and political issues.4

The emigration of many leading artists and art professionals from Cuba around 1990 profoundly affected both the Havana Bienal and the ISA. The

vertiginous expatriation of these figures was the result of several concomitant circumstances. By the late eighties, the arts in Cuba had been swept up by the tornado that had hit the rest of the country. The reigning political climate was dominated by the related threats of the blockade and the besieged plaza. At the same time, it was becoming increasingly clear that reconciling the new ideo-

logies coming from Moscow, as the Soviet Union began to collapse, with

Rectification, the campaign the Cuban government launched around the same time to purify Cuban socialism of its deviations from orthodoxy, was impossi- ble. Students and recent graduates of the ISA, particularly after 1986 with the

emergence of the Grupo Puri, the Ballester-Villaz6n-Toirac-Angulo group, as well as other artists working individually, attempted to blend the turbulence associated with glasnost and perestroika with the government's calls for rectification. They began a new chapter in the history of contemporary Cuban art distinct from the preceding generation, whose members were nevertheless influenced by the new approaches.

For Cuban artists in the late eighties, the growing tensions between art and politics were deeply affected by an internal situation of worsening socio-

3. Luis Camnitzer, "La Habana: Un imin que nuestro arte necesita," Granma Internacional

(Havana), February 15, 1987, 7. 4. Artists who joined these figures include Carlos Garcia, Jos6 Franco, Jos6 Bedia, Maria Magdalena Campos, Eduardo PonjuAn, and Ren6 Francisco

Rodriguez, as well as the critics Orlando Tajonera, Madelin lzquierdo, Osvaldo Sdnchez, and Magaly Espinosa, among others.

64 WINTER 1998



economic crisis known as the Special Period and simultaneously by the grow-

ing interest in Cuban art abroad. In 199o, when the German collector Peter

Ludwig acquired more than two thirds of the exhibition of contemporary Cuban art "Kuba OK," presented at the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf

that year, many young artists began to envision their possible entry into the

international art market-a vision that would prove to be a mirage for many.5 If Ludwig, then one of the most important private collectors in Europe, bought, so might collectors from North America and Latin America.

This could have been the prevailing assumption among Cuban artists who

emigrated to Mexico City in the early nineties to weather the socio-economic

crisis on the island as part of a corrido mexicano.6 But in spite of the initial em-

brace of contemporary Cuban art by prestigious Mexican galleries, including Galeria Nina Menocal in Mexico City and Galeria Ramis Barquet in Monterrey, the attempt to infiltrate the Mexican art market was ultimately disappointing for

most emigrei artists. If Cuban artists introduced changes into their work geared to their new market's demands, they placed themselves at the center of a para- dox. They were expected to reject the vernacular, unpolished, cerebral qualities that had initially made them sought-after in order to attain the status of artist

(a status they had been awarded in Cuba soon after the end of puberty). Faced with the choice of living in a Mexican limbo and a dark, uncertain,

and seemingly paralyzed Havana, these artists did not hesitate for long before

deciding where to land, making the spirit of the eighties vanish in a city dis-

tinguished by the pleasing lightness of Art Deco. A city of beaches, highways,

flamingos, and swamps, of streets with Spanish names and mayors with Cuban ones. This city was Miami. An entire decade vanished like vapor, at the mercy of the trade winds that propel the Gulf of Mexico's current past both Havana and Miami.

Meanwhile, the sudden absence of artists who had also taught created a vacuum in artistic training in Cuba. (Official circles almost never acknow-

ledged this fact; during the Revolution, no one is indispensable, and therefore no one is irreplaceable, especially those who emigrate.) The artists who stayed gave some continuity to the educational process. Strained by censorship, over-

sensitiveness, and unresolved debates on art and politics, relationships between artists and institutions became precarious. Artists were confronted with a de-

pressed cultural space, in which subsidies were scarce and openness was dis-

couraged, as well as a community of hostile-to-indifferent emigre colleagues whose migration taxed the artistic environment in Cuba.

Many artists who persevered in their commitment to teaching played a decisive role at this time. Some, including Eduardo Ponjin, Renei Francisco, and Lupe Alvarez, kept teaching, while others, such as Josei Toirac and Lizaro

Saavedra, entered the ISA, bringing with them their record as participants in recent artistic controversies. A number of very young artists, including Tania

Bruguera, Douglas P&irez, and others, joined the faculty of the ISA later in the new decade.

In 1992 Rene Francisco, a professor at the ISA, organized a workshop in which recent artistic developments could be debated. This workshop proposed to re-evaluate the emerging sociocultural situation on the island and to reflect on the changing possibilities for artistic practice. Examining these issues in this

5. See JOrgen Harten and Antonio Eligio (Tonel), Kuba OK, exh. cat. (Dusseldorf: Stadtische Kunsthalle, 1990). 6. This phrase plays on the Spanish term for Mexican revolutionary ballads and the word for

fleeing.

65 art journal



context occurred at a particularly opportune moment, when it seemed as if recent artistic production on the island was being forgotten. The workshop was an attempt to understand the previous generation's artistic strategies and their potential viability in the context of conditions that differed from those of i980, 1986, and even 1990. Francisco, along Wvith his students, had experi- mented with radical artistic practices since 199o. He defined artists as hard-

working craftspersons subordinate to the needs of their communities. For him and others, art was, in fact, akin to fieldwork addressed to specific groups to satisfy specific demands; the work of Saavedra, Abdel Hernindez, and

Alejandro L6pez, among others, is a more theoretical variant of this anthropo- logical method. Putting theory into practice, Francisco coordinated an important project in which families living in a house being remodeled on Calle

Obispo in Old Havana commissioned a group of students to help remodel the

residence; for example, in addition to making repairs on the house, the students produced a painting of the patron saint of Cuba, the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Helping to salvage a decaying environment, these artists reconnected

with the common people on a human and emotional level.

The work at the ISA workshop in general and on the Calle Obispo house in particular marked this generation of emerging artists. For example, one of

the first exhibitions by the group that later became Los Carpinteros (Marcos Castillo, Alexandre Arrechea, and Dagoberto Rodriguez) was "Arte-sano"-a

Spanish term that plays ironically on the words artisan, art and health, and

healthy art. Presented at the Galeria Casa del Joven Creador in Havana in 1992,

this exhibition included works that manifested the artists' appreciation for the

various trades, such as woodworking. Also relevant is the exhibition "Las meta-

foras del templo," which included work by many artists who had participated in the ISA workshop. Organized by Carlos Garaicoa and Esterio Segura for the

Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales in Havana in 1993, this exhibition, which received an enthusiastic response in Cuba from critical audiences, was

the first major attempt to propose the existence of a nineties generation.7 "Las metiforas del templo" debuted a young generation barely aware

of itself as a group, and its success had an immediate impact on the careers

of several of the featured artists. As the critic Juan A. Molina has remarked,

"since the exhibition coincided with the selection stage for the [Fifth Havana] Bienal," "it was the most recent source of information about current Cuban

art for the organizers."8 Between "Las metiforas del templo," the Fifth Havana

Bienal (i994), and "Uno de cada clase" (i99g)-the first large exhibition

organized by the Fundaci6n Ludwig de Cuba-a playing field open to all and

adjusted to the new social and political situation emerged. Cuban art became

more metaphorical, ambivalent, and concerned with simulation, and the

primary art institutions on the island became more pragmatic and less argu- mentative.

The ISA has remained a prominent institution throughout the nineties, thanks

to the stimulating effects of the activities that Francisco, Ponjuin, Alvarez, and

other professors have organized. But its centrality in the eighties-a golden age when the school produced a plenitude of successful artists-has given way to a

7. See Artes visuales-ISA (Las met6foras del templo), exh. cat. (Havana: Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, 1993), which includes texts by Carlos Garaicoa and Madelf Izquierdo. The featured artists were Ernesto Garcia, Alberto Casado, Jorge Luis Marrero, Fernando Rodriguez, Dagoberto Rodriguez y Alexander Arrechea, Osvaldo Yero, Abel Barroso, Marcos Castillo, Carlos Garaicoa, Esterio Segura y Douglas Perez. 8. Juan A. Molina, "Cuban Art: The Desire to Go on Playing," in Utopian Territories: New Art From

Cuba, exh. cat. (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1997), 31.

66 WINTER 1998



I. Pedro Alvarez. Fin del bloqueo (End of the

Embargo), 1996.Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist.

certain stagnation. The activities of key figures who straddled both periods and

were trained outside of its shade and breezes have mitigated its pre-eminence as an art factory. Among these is the painter Pedro Alvarez.

Alvarez stands out as a singular figure for his attachment to painting,

given the predominance of installation in the late eighties. His work did not

gain wide recognition until well into the nineties, following his inclusion in

the Fifth Havana Bienal. His best-known paint-

ings revisit the work of Victor P. Landaluze

and other Spanish costumbrista painters-a popular genre in Latin America in the nineteenth

century that focused on the depiction of local

customs (fig. i). Nevertheless, they cloak them-

selves in a thinly veiled mimicry of neo-aca-

demic trappings. In presenting satirical and

ambivalently nostalgic scenes of conflicting realities co-existing in Havana's urban milieu, Alvarez dissects stereotypes and typologies of

cubanidad or Cubanness. He grasps the hybridity of Cuban culture; the persistence of racial preju- dices and a colonized mentality; and the diffi-

culty in reconciling the historical precedents that compete for present-day relevance: the

nineteenth century, the forties and fifties, and

socialism. The "nostalgia" that Alvarez uses to such

great effect is also evident in the work of other

artists who play with Cuba's mythic past to shed light on its present, often

mockingly. In such work the future is approached as if it is fleeing from the

present; it becomes a deferred and distorted image, as if seen through a rear-

view mirror. This phenomenon is not surprising when one recalls that the

work's place of origin is a nation that proclaims its advance toward the social-

ist future even as it inexorably incorporates itself into the global market, into

the capitalist "past." As Lupe Alvarez has observed, "The simulacrum, as a

privileged means of producing meaning, has put in evidence the crisis of

authenticity that our society is suffering, the recognized and accepted double

morality and concealed impostures. That is the sociocultural basis for its pro- liferation. "9

The crisis of authenticity to which Alvarez refers is evident in the work

of many artists of the nineties generation. These works tend to be ambig- uous, with one foot in the critical tradition of the eighties, which the artists

refrain from renouncing completely, in part because aligning themselves with

this tradition reinforces their artistic legitimacy. But they are also rooted in

the demands of the market-in an increasingly dollarized economy of interna-

tional galleries and collectors, as well as multicultural or postcolonial curators

and critics whose often touristic mentality contributes to the fixing of stereo-

types in those peripheral areas that benefit from their periodic safaris. To their

credit, contemporary Cuban artists have learned to negotiate this double

demand in their favor.

9. Lupe Alvarez, "Registro c6mplice: Pulsando el arte cubano de los '90," in I 990s Art from Cuba

(New York: Art in General and Bronx, N.Y.: Longwood Arts Project/Bronx Council on the

Arts), 17.

67 art journal



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2. Los Carpinteros. Flying Pigeon, 1995.Wood and oil on canvas. 82 x 182 x 13 (208.9 x 462 x 33).

In his photographs and installations, Carlos Garaicoa, for instance, travers-

es the ruins of Old Havana-at first glance as a compassionate archeologist but

on closer inspection with something of the doble moral (double morality) that

Lupe Alvarez has identified. The heartrending testimony that is initially so

moving in his work becomes less poignant as his framed images of physical and social decay grow increasingly photogenic. The work's confrontation with

rampant poverty is contaminated by an apparent nostalgia for a faded past

exemplified by the splendor of Sloppy Joe's, the famous Havana bar of the for-

ties, even as it ironically comments on the future.

Only in that fictional

past would Havana be redeemed from its tragic contradictions, its stench, and its plagues.

The early work of

Los Carpinteros, from

1993 to 1995, also reveals

a certain nostalgia for the

past. In this case, it is

disguised as traditional-

ism: a re-evaluation of

artisanal skills and trades,

a recuperation of adorn-

ment, a stylized pictorial neo-academicism, and so

on. Flying Pigeon (i99g) (fig. 2), for example, whose title comes from a brand

of Chinese bicycle imported into Cuba to alleviate the public transportation crisis during the Special Period, features a painting in the foreground of which

is a self-portrait of Arrechea on a bicycle. He is trying to maintain equilibrium as he shields himself with a black umbrella; Soviet-brand automobiles are visi-

ble to the rear and to the right. The painting is seemingly hauled by a vintage locomotive sculpted in low relief from wood. The locomotive, introduced into

Cuba in 1837 to transport sugar, evokes the economic power of the colonial

sugar aristocracy, which would later prove to be decisive in the rise of indepen- dentista sentiment. The fact that the locomotive hauls the painting implies that

the machinery of the past sets in motion and pulls with it the present. Many of Los Carpinteros's works take on an opaqueness that contrasts with the stri-

dency of the eighties generation. Indeed, the nineties generation in general is

-less prone to preach or admonish than that of the eighties. Themes with political implications are now subject to often disconcerting degrees of caution, and

the measure of critique is at times reduced to a stylistic device that lends con-

tinuity between the two generations. The craftsmanship of many of Los Carpinteros' early works suggests an-

other tendency in contemporary Cuban art that can be traced from Lizaro

Garcia to Reinerio Tamayo, Douglas Perez, Armando Marifio, and others. This

tendency emphasizes artifice, pictorial technique, and illusionism above and

beyond subtle thematic distinctions. Aymee Garcia, for example, incorporates

68 WINTER 1998



3.Aym'e Garcia. El nido I (The Nest 1), 1998. Oil on canvas and embroidery thread. Courtesy the artist and Art in General, NewYork. Photo Robin Holland.

into her paintings of female figures such traditionally feminine crafts as inlay,

embroidery, and knitting as adornments for a narcissistic and self-absorbed "I" created from overlapping citations (fig. 3). The exoticism which in this case feeds the nostalgia falls back less on an overt cubanidad and more on the histori-

cism of its methods. In general, the so-called refinement of this pictorial mode

brings with it the risk of reviving anachronistic criteria of "good" painting closely linked to certain aspects of the Western tradition

and worse still to a market with limited expectations. Far from the contrived polish of the new painters

are artists determined to conceal artistic expression with

a veneer of naivetei, immediacy, or poverty. In this case, the emphasis is on a witty popular flavor that relies on

humor and parody. Fernando Rodriguez, for example, created the fictional folk artist Francisco de la Cal, who

speaks to him and who appears in many of his carved

and painted wooden reliefs that sometimes resemble tourist souvenirs. Pinning the Tail on the Donkey (1994) (fig. 4) is one of a series of works that Rodriguez presented at the 1994 Havana Bienal that present vignettes from

the mythical de la Cal's dream of the marriage of the

Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and Fidel Castro. This

dream symbolizes the ideal reconciliation at the highest hierarchical level of two camps that have been histori-

cally segregated in Cuba-the Catholic church and the

atheist discourse of the Revolution-and reflects de la

Cal's nalve effort to achieve a dream of harmony. The

vignettes display an air of festivity, and in this one

the characters play the party game "pin the tail on the

donkey" (de la Cal is the figure wrapped in white be- low the main scene). Humble, fervently patriotic, and

blind since the onset of the Revolution, de la Cal cannot

see the translation into deeds of the utopias he struggled to bring into being; his blind faith requires an interme-

diary who can render his delusional fantasies visually, who can describe the world around him. This is the Fernando who lectures through the simulated voice of

an Other, an alter-ego, whose innocence justifies narrow dogmatism, quixotic idealism, and a criollo sense of humor. His resulting wooden reliefs narrate a

tale of costumbrismo and political satire shielded behind a "primitivist" mask.

In Alberto Casado's work, "primitivism" is tied to informal modes of

communication falling outside centralized means of dissemination-gossip, rumor, and street talk. Casado takes these channels for public opinion as docu-

mentary sources and testimony of Cuban art's recent past. Painting in oil, or

using popular artisanal techniques on glass, he represents recent events in

Cuban cultural life-such as Angel Delgado's controversial performance during the opening of the exhibition "El objeto esculturado," which earned him six

months in jail-whose notoriety is owed in large part to their exclusion from

official history. In echoing these anecdotes, he demonstrates the desire to link

69 art journal



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4. Fernando Rodriguez/ Francisco de la Cal. Poniendole el rabo al burro (Pinning the Tail on the Donkey), 1994. From the series Sueiio nupcial (The Wedding). Oil on wood. 39 x 47 (100 x 120). Courtesy the artist.

his practice to the myths' subversive charge. By doing so in a caricatural tone, he counters the excessive drama of myth. At the same time, he confirms for the suspicious gaze of power that the aim is not so much to relate an unsa-

vory story but to laugh as a group at anecdotes that return as rumor and col- lective nostalgia from a nonthreatening past.

Osvaldo Yero engages with the enthusiastic romance between art and kitsch which has inspired Cuban artists since the early eighties. He

parodies artisanal plaster work, associated with unrefined decora-

tion, through his incorporation of elevated themes blended with controversial ingredients from the recent past-patriotic sym-

bols such as the flag and the national shield, icons of the

island, and so on. In the eighties, such symbols had a powerful resonance; in the nineties, they have become hack-

neyed stereotypes. Yero's work partly avoids becoming "controversial" because of its standardized character.

Other artists are producing work with a rougher tone. Lazaro Saavedra, for example, the only sur-

vivor of the Grupo Pure in Cuba, has maintained ties to his early critical edge, addressing topics

such as emigration, the growing competition in the art world, artistic hustling, and the banalization

and commercialization of national culture reduced to tourist attractions. Jose Toirac has focused on this new

kind of marketing, commenting on the rise of the capitalist corporate image and its clash with another omnipresent

likeness-the socialist image of power identified with the figure of Fidel Castro. His current work reveals the hybridity of

social, economic, and ideological aspects of cubanidad. Sandra Ceballos continues to tenaciously explore peripheral or unstable terri-

tories-insanity, illness, the fragility of the body, scatological elements-within which she seeks to induce the viewer to understand art as a space marked

by pain, suffering, and marginality, as in La expresi6n sic6gena (The Psychogenic Expression, 1996) (fig. g). This installation is constructed around a surgical table. On the wall is a series of visceral paintings with allusions to the organic, such as fetal forms, swollen surfaces, hair, and the traces of body fluids. This clinical imagery is repeated in a series of vitrines in which are displayed macabre objects that alternate with cutting and piercing instruments and stained dishes. A shade of green that evokes hospitals is the dominant tone.

In addition, Ezequiel Suirez moves with ease between diverse media

(painting, performance, installation, and text) and contradictory tones (humor and parody, anguish and drama). His work almost always breathes an indifferent air of sardonic mockery aimed at cultural conventions and mannerisms. In 1994 he and Ceballos founded the alternative gallery Espacio Aglutinador in their tiny home in Havana; the critic and writer Orlando Hernindez has been their closest collaborator. Apart from its nonprofit orientation, the con-

sistently high quality of its novel and unconventional exhibitions distinguish this space. Artists such as Chago Armada have shown here, in addition to

self-taught artists such as Benito Ortiz and Bernardo Sarria "El Rey de las

70 WINTER 1998



5. Sandra Ceballos. La expres- si6n sic6genica (The Psycho- genic Expression), 1997. Installation with paintings, surgical table, and various objects. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Access Gallery,Vancouver.

Aw ,low.

T ?R.

VI

-4 r K -t4

Papas" and Cuban Americans such as Ernesto Pujol and Eduardo Aparicio. Tania Bruguera, who presented a performance at the Espacio Aglutinador

in 1996 (fig. 6), is one of the few artists in Cuba focusing on this medium

and, more recently, video. The former editor of Memorias de la postguerra, an alternative newspaper that was promptly censored, she is in fact best known for her performances, which in their organic and even bloody drama are indebted to the work of Ana Mendieta. In these works, Bruguera suggests re-

lations, as intuitive as they are reflexive, between dissimilar problems, includ-

ing the status of women, migration, and physical and spiritual uprootedness. Another artist who deals with similar themes is Kcho. In his best-known

work he alludes to travel, navigation, uprootedness, and exile through the rep- resentation of oars, boats, and rafts. In the Fifth Havana Bienal, he showed the monumental installation Regata (fig. 7), in which he rendered the burned vessels of Cuban rafters as maquettes. This work, emblematic of that Bienal,

definitively consolidated the artist's international reputation. He became at a

young age the most successful Cuban artist to achieve his success from the island and has gained access to prestigious institutions in New York, Los

Angeles, Kwangju, Madrid, and Cologne. Kcho's spectacular rise might suggest that the market is perhaps the most

powerful protagonist on the Cuban art scene today. Many artists face commer- cial demands based on distorted foreign perceptions of what Cuba is and what Cuban art should be. In fact, the market is aimed at tourists-from well- informed wealthy collectors, to curators of major museums, to European visi- tors who buy T-shirts of Che Guevara and sip their mojitos as they remem-ber

May 1968. This phenomenon differs markedly from the internal market subsi- dized by the government that sustained artists prior to 199o. It has been felt in the crisis of institutions instructed to finance themselves and in the shift in the social role of artists, who are increasingly forced to focus on marketing and selling to the detriment of such formative, but less lucrative, activities as

teaching. Moreover, although artists in the nineties have circulated their work

71 art journal



6.Tania Bruguera. Performance at the Espacio Aglutinador, Havana, 1996. Courtesy the artist. Photo Rene Pefia.

in a wide range of international exhibitions to an unprecedented degree, few

are still represented by galleries; accordingly, they lack stable links to the inter-

national market. Following the legalization of the dollar in i993, many have

established a national base of operations from which they may consolidate

their careers outside of the pressures concomitant with immersion in the exter-

nal market, while nevertheless manipulating it with exemplary pragmatism. Finally, the examples of

Mendieta, Pujol, Aparicio, and

Rosa Irigoyen bring up the thorny issue within the island of the role

of Cuban artists who left as chil-

dren to live in the United States. The perennial hostility between

Washington, Miami, and Havana

has greatly restricted exchanges between artists in Cuba and

Cubans in the United States. In

the early eighties, Mendieta, who

had emigrated from Cuba to Iowa as a child as part of Operation Peter Pan, traveled to the island to

rediscover her cultural origins.

During her visits, she established

contacts with the "Volumen Uno"

artists, created works in natural

settings, and exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in

Havana. Not many other Cuban

artists in North America have

attempted her rare gesture of rapprochement.

Pujol, who emigrated from Cuba to Puerto Rico as a child and now lives

in New York, began exhibiting in Havana in a wide range of venues in the

mid-nineties: the Casa de las Ameiricas, in i995; the Espacio Aglutinador and

the Fundaci6n Ludwig in 1996; and the Sixth Havana Bienal in 1997. His recur-

ring presence has allowed him to establish a fruitful dialogue with members of

Havana's artistic circles. He brings to this conversation his particular point of

view as an immigrant, a gay man, and an artist whose identity has been mold-

ed by the experience of exile, a childhood spent in the other Cari-bbean of

Puerto Rico, and adulthood in New York. His work bears a core heavy with

nostalgia that partially coincides with those other nostalgias present in much

nineties art. In his case, however, it is a curious, pained, and earnest memory, rather than a simulacrum or manipulation. He gives a mocking, subversive, gay wink in the direction of the infallible

machismo governing the island's cosmos. His contact with the peak of instal-

lation and object art in Cuba in the eighties has strongly enriched his work.

Something similar could be said about the less consistent trace left by

Aparicio, a photographer born in Cuba who has spent most of his adult life in

Chicago and now lives in Miami. He has produced testimonial portraits com-

72 WINTER 1998



7. Kcho, Oars. 1994. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

bined with interviews of compatriots who emigrated to the United States. In

1996 he exhibited a series at the Espacio Aglutinador in which he suggested parallels between Miami and Havana (fig. 8). Aparicio, who participated in

the Encuentro Internacional de Serigrafos alongside the Sixth Havana Bienal, also edits a gay zine about Latino nightlife in Miami with the witty name Perra

(Bitch). It is noteworthy that these two artists share the experience of being gay in the United States-an experience that has heightened their

consciousness of mar-

ginality, which in turn

has fostered the trans-

gressive and opposition- al attitudes they bring to their activities in

Cuba. An-other Cuban American artist, Rosa

Irigoyen, who left Cuba as part of Operation Peter Pan in the early sixties and now lives in Puerto Rico, participated in the Sixth Havana

Bienal, but her experience on the island was

fleeting. In "Variantes del

gusto," Jose Lezama

Lima wrote, "After a

vanguard that burned its ties each night, a classicism that would return to tie back its ropes and bypass the labyrinth was awaited."'0 The so-called Cuban

vanguard of the eighties burned its ropes, sails, and vessels. With some measure of anxiety, it left behind a labyrinth almost uninhabited and in danger of

collapse. But this space was rapidly filled by others with a "reactionary classicism."" This is ultimately the interminable story that repeats itself in Havana:

props support what is about to collapse but never seems to fall. Feverish and

ephemeral architecture is recycled, divided anew, restored, and damaged. The

new tenants establish their residence "concealing their sparks which in the

end, draw them closer to the other side."'" Now more than ever, that space is outlined like a tree-house, a pigeon loft in a ceiba (silk-cotton tree) whose sacred and moist roots spread out towards many shores. -translated by Miriam Basilio

Antonio Eligio (Tonel) was born and lives in Havana. He received his licenciatura in art history from the Universidad de La Habana in 1982. An artist and art critic, he received a fellowship in painting and installation from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1995 and a fellowship in humanities from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1997.

10. Jose Lezama Lima, "Variantes del gusto," Algunos tratados en La Habana (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1971), 149. I1. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

73 art journal



Documents

A Tree From Many Shores - Cuban Art in Movement