A Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement Author(s): Antonio Eligio Source: Art Journal, Vol.

57, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 62-73 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777928 . Accessed: 15/10/2013 12:07
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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.

in a smallplaceto reach thepeakof its splendor. should A greatevent (Un acontecimiento develop su de en un desarrollarse debe paraconseguir punto esplendor.) lugarpequefio, grande delarbol -Jos& Lezama Lima, Playas 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 up an extraordinary prospect: the "extraterritorial" manifestation of an artistic phenomenon generated by the historical and political milieu of Cuba. Journalists, critics, and artists themselves entertained the possibility of the continuity of Cuban art outside of Cuba.' As the critic Peter Plagens wrote in 1992, "Here come Antonio Eligio (Tonel) 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.

-I--ernationl Dispatches

A Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement

. Like the German and Italian neoexpres-

On the hundredth anniversaryof the SpanishAmerican War, which inaugurateda new era in the history of the Caribbean, ArtJournalis pleased to publishthe following two internationaldispatches 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 subsidizingthe first phase of this initiative. I. Regardingmedia 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,"Newsweek (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,"Pldsticacubana en el exilio,"Arte en Colombia62 (April-June 1995). 2. Plagens, 76.

sionists who took over the scene in the '70s and '8os, the Cuban artists may be on the brink of changing the face of contemporary 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 descriptions 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 artistic 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~agonoin 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 increasingly 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

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could be established with Western hegemonies, the Bienal became the undisputed 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 functioning 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 ideological 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 ideologies 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 impossible. Students and recent graduates of the ISA, particularly after 1986 with the
3. LuisCamnitzer, "LaHabana: Un imin que nuestro arte necesita," GranmaInternacional (Havana), February 15, 1987, 7. 4. Artists who joined these figures include Carlos Garcia,Jos6 Franco,Jos6 Bedia, MariaMagdalena and Ren6 Francisco Campos, Eduardo PonjuAn, Rodriguez, as well as the critics Orlando Tajonera, Madelinlzquierdo, Osvaldo Sdnchez, and Magaly Espinosa, among others.

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-

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economic crisis known as the Special Period and simultaneously by the growing 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 But in spite of the initial emcrisis on the island as part of a corrido mexicano.6 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 paradox. 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 distinguished 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 acknowledged 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, oversensitiveness, and unresolved debates on art and politics, relationships between artists and institutions became precarious. Artists were confronted with a depressed cultural space, in which subsidies were scarce and openness was discouraged, 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 and others, joined the faculty of the ISA later in the Bruguera, Douglas P&irez, 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 JOrgenHarten and Antonio Eligio(Tonel), KubaOK,exh. cat. (Dusseldorf: Stadtische Kunsthalle, 1990). 6. This phrase plays on the Spanishterm for Mexican revolutionary ballads and the word for fleeing.

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7. See Artes visuales-ISA (Lasmet6forasdel templo), exh. cat. (Havana:Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, 1993), which includes texts by Carlos Garaicoa and MadelfIzquierdo.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. JuanA. Molina, "CubanArt: The Desire to Go New Art From on Playing,"in Utopian Territories: Cuba,exh. cat. (Vancouver: Morris and Helen BelkinArt Gallery, University of BritishColumbia,

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 experimented with radical artistic practices since 199o. He defined artists as hardworking 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 anthropological 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 metaforas 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 first large exhibition Bienal (i994), and "Uno de cada clase" (i99g)-the de Cuba-a the Fundaci6n playing field open to all and Ludwig organized by and situation new social to the emerged. Cuban art became political adjusted more metaphorical, ambivalent, and concerned with simulation, and the primary art institutions on the island became more pragmatic and less argumentative.

1997),31.

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

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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 paintings 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 themselves in a thinly veiled mimicry of neo-academic trappings. In presenting satirical and ambivalently nostalgic scenes of conflicting realities co-existing in Havana's urban milieu, Alvarez dissects stereotypes and typologies of or Cubanness. He grasps the hybridity cubanidad of Cuban culture; the persistence of racial prejudices and a colonized mentality; and the difficulty 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 rearview 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 socialist 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 proliferation. "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 ambiguous, 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 international galleries and collectors, as well as multicultural or postcolonial curators and critics whose often touristic mentality contributes to the fixing of stereotypes 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.

I. Pedro Alvarez. Findel

bloqueo (End of the

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

9. Lupe Alvarez, "Registro c6mplice: Pulsando el arte cubano de los '90," in I990s Artfrom Cuba (New York:Art in General and Bronx, N.Y.: Longwood Arts Project/Bronx Council on the Arts), 17.

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In his photographs and installations, Carlos Garaicoa, for instance, traverses 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 forties, 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

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1993 to 1995, also reveals

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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).

a recuperation of adornment, a stylized pictorial neo-academicism, and so on. FlyingPigeon(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 visible 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 independentista 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 stridency 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 continuity between the two generations. The craftsmanship of many of Los Carpinteros' early works suggests another 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

.... . ..

a certain nostalgia for the past. In this case, it is disguised as traditionalism: a re-evaluation of artisanal skills and trades,

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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 historicism 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 the Tailon the Donkey tourist souvenirs. Pinning (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 historically 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 below 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 intermediary 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 sense of humor. His resulting wooden reliefs narrate a idealism, and a criollo and political satire shielded behind a "primitivist" mask. tale of costumbrismo 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 documentary 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

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-P i

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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 unsavory story but to laugh as a group at anecdotes that return as rumor and collective 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 decoration, through his incorporation of elevated themes blended with controversial ingredients from the recent past-patriotic symbols 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 hackneyed 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 survivor of the Grupo Pure in Cuba, has maintained 1 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 capital:ii;i i :;:;-:i:::;:;:, :~:::--:"q---~~~ ist corporate image and its clash with another omnipresent likeness-the socialist image of power identified with the fig?;; P; ure of Fidel Castro. His current work reveals the hybridity of Sandra social, economic, and ideological aspects of cubanidad. Ceballos continues to tenaciously explore peripheral or unstable territories-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 (The Psychogenic sic6gena This installation is constructed around a surgical Expression, 1996) (fig. g). 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 consistently 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

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5. Sandra Ceballos. La expressi6n sic6genica (The Psycho-

genic Expression), 1997. Installation with paintings, surgical table, and various objects. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Access Gallery,Vancouver.

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,low.
T
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VI
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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 de la postguerra, an and, more recently, video. The former editor of Memorias 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 relations, as intuitive as they are reflexive, between dissimilar problems, including 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 representation 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 commercial 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 wellinformed wealthy collectors, to curators of major museums, to European visitors 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 subsidized 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

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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 international 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 external 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 children 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 recurring 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 molded 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 installation 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-

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WINTER 1998

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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 marginality, which in turn has fostered the transgressive and oppositional 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 a that burned its ties each classicism that would return to tie vanguard night, 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
He receivedhislicenciatura inart history AntonioEligio fromthe (Tonel)was bornandlivesin Havana. in 1982.An artistandartcritic,he receiveda fellowship inpainting andinstallaUniversidad de LaHabana tionfromthe JohnSimonGuggenheim in 1995anda fellowship Foundation in humanities fromthe Foundation in 1997. Rockefeller

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

10.Jose Lezama delgusto," "Variantes Lima, en LaHabana tratados (Barcelona: Algunos Anagrama, 1971),149. I1. Ibid. 12.Ibid.

73 art journal

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