Endless love

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By Elvia Rosa Castro

Also for Ana Mendieta

In the spring of 2007 Berlin was full of ads that read as a slogan: "The most beautiful come from New York". Those posters referred to the sample of impressionistic art from the Museum of Modern Art of New York that was being exhibited in those days in the German capital. Such phrase not only provoked the French and had a very fine and hyperbolic sense of humor but also alluded to a well known truth: the repertoire of universal art of all times and latitudes that for different reasons is treasured in museums and private collections in the United States of America is overwhelming.

It would suffice to recall just the excellent sample Cubism and Abstract Art exhibited in the United States in 1936 as a result of the tours undertaken by Alfred Barr in the European continent, specifically in the Soviet Union (1927) in spite of the fact that his visit to Moscow deceived him a little, since he found that many of the great Russian artists at the time were devoted to design and to serial productions, as in the case of the so-called factography. But still, that great exhibition remained, even though the representation of this period was minimal.

Notwithstanding, we can deduce from it all that if the art produced in that country was being shown in North America with such energy, the westernmost and Parisian vanguards had long entered in contact with the "American way of life".

However, Europe was not the sole objective of that very peculiar cultural policy. Mexico was one too, and in the summer of 1942 Barr visited Cuba. The consequences of that meeting, in my opinion, are still being perceived and may be summarized in the phrase that is pronounced by all contemporary artists and critics: the United States is the natural market for Cuban art. Following that visit, new promotion and commercialization routes began to open for the insular creation of the first and second vanguards of the 20^th century: the inuguration of the first commercial gallery in Cuba of Cuban-made art: Prado No 72, owned by María Luisa Gómez Mena, who patronized the book Pintura cubana de hoy (Cuban Painting of Today), written by José Gómez Sicre and considered "the first text of modern (Cuban) painting". In addition, a project began to be conceived for an exhibition of Cuban art in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New York.[1]

Modern Cuban Painters was the title of said sample, exhibited in the well-known museum in April 1944 and later traveling to several states of the Union. The cover of the MoMA bulletin that month was illustrated with the work Balcón, a watercolor by Amelia Peláez, who, together with Mexican Frida Khalo and Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral, is considered the great feminine painter of the 20^th century in our continent.

In chapter 7 of his text contained in that booklet, Alfred Barr wrote what might be considered self-critical:

"The exhibition Modern Cuban Painters is limited in size and scope and is entirely unofficial in character. No attempt has been made to present a comprehensive survey of contemporary Cuban painting or a history of its development. In fact only a dozen artists have been included and almost all the paintings were completed during the past four o five years. Only painters living in Cuba are represented".[2]

Evidently, it did not result in the expected large and excellent exhibition on Cuban art and he was conscious of it. It worked as a sample, even as a tendentious[3] one, although we should not be too strict: the best rooster ever painted by Mariano Rodríguez (Gallo, 1943) was part of that show and in fact today is part of the permanent collection of that institution.

On the other hand, its echo resounded among the critics of the Island –at least in one of its leading and best-tuned voices– in the following brilliant review of the event:

"In April, the Museum of Modern Art of New York officially organized an exhibition that received considerable attention from the press. Americans were captivated (somewhat naïvely) with the freshness of colors of the Cuban palette. Mr. Barr, the Museum director, wrote at the time: 'The sun and tropical fruits, the Cuban African rites, the golden and polychrome trimmings and also the heraldry of the cigar boxes seem to have contributed to this intoxication'. But he did not perceive that this same baroque style contained our tragedy, our anguish in the face of the void that writhes, swells, loses its shape and searches itself time and time again. Our art is sensual, that is unquestionable; but a spiritual element is also alive in it, something that detained Víctor Manuel for so long in his same girls with shawls; that produced Portocarrero's huge hesitations (…); that provoked Mariano's indelible colors; that created Lam's terrible and inhuman jungle. The Tropics are very far from being Arcadia, and in the end, suffering and anguish may be equally expressed by painting flowers or heartbroken creatures". [4]

The writer is Guy Pérez Cisneros. He, well understood, tries to destroy the existing cliché on our country and our art. He manages not to grant much importance to the existing domestic and lax vision on the Cuban "certificate of nationality", and at the same time weighs up the importance that such promotional –and also commercial– event had for the Island.

"Notwithstanding those erroneous interpretations, we can say that the New York exhibition has been very timely, and thanks to it Cuban painting reaches a rank close to Mexico's in the United States, the country of advertising, the country that is currently the distributor of awards for the whole continent. The sole thing we regret is the unfair and inexplicable absence of Ravenet and Pogolotti in said event". [5]

The following year, 1945, the MoMA purchased, from the Pierre Matisse collection, La jungle (The Jungle), considered Wifredo Lam's masterpiece and almost by extension, the masterpiece of Cuban art. Of course we can understand –even believe– that the most beautiful paintings in New York went to Berlin in the spring of 2007!

However, the opinions of all our thinkers, for a change, did not resemble one another. Many years before, in the early 20^th century, Fernando Ortiz had reproached the Cubans for their lack of "mental aristocracy", i.e., lack of thought, absence of conceptual constructions. It was not without some reason that he dedicated his book Entre cubanos with that phrase that contains great sadness and deception: "To you, who only thinks of a way to stop thinking".[6] Following the steps of this scholar was Jorge Mañach, whose unsurpassable essay "Indagación al Choteo"[7] grants him a special place in our theoretical production. Less philanthropic than Ortiz, he speaks of the excess of sympathy as consequence of the lack of earnestness and density or of not having the capacity to think in abstract; of being prey, according to him, of the dominion of the "logics of the concrete". The following promises to be brilliant:

"(…) our average mentality lacks the sense of the third dimension –the dimension of profoundity. We see things in shapes more than in reliefs. The deepest implications, the farthest scopes, escape us almost always, with the result that life as a whole becomes something of a stage design;  that there is nothing we grant sufficient reality to so as to take it very earnestly nor sufficient importance so as to devote ourselves completely to it".[8]

I, who on quite a few occasions fall into the realm of the image, have referred to the royal palm as "the other", that alter of an absent anchor. Hence that sensation of eternal oscillation and surf, and the lack of solidity of a substrate. Perhaps for that reason many persons see us as unprejudiced, open-minded beings, illustrated and superstitious at the same time. We are not much interested in being authentic except in the discourses that build a modern style identity. Historical revenges appear to us as innocuous and we would never speak in terms of revenges and compensations. That is why we steal manners, graphs, codes with impudence and without ethical prudery or historical styles, why we manage so well with recycling and pastiche. With no traumas. Behind this there exists, in addition, a huge insubordination to the criterion of authority, a genetic idleness, to express it somehow. That attitude may be resumed in a well-known Cuban 19^th century phrase: "no tener ni Rey ni Roque", i.e., has no rules or goberment.

Such a statement of free will and of being beyond good and evil, that condition of absorbing sponge, united to Jorge Mañach's theses, can explain in a certain sense the setting that gradually emerged since 1898 after departure of the Spanish government and beginning of the United States' meddling.

"(…) the barberías in Havana turned into barber shops as if by magic, and many shops in Obispo Street began to hang signs in large letters that read: English spoken here. Chic people began to organize tea and garden parties; young men practiced sports and emancipated ladies and young ladies were known as 'new women' and worked 'outside their homes' as typewriters in offices or nurses in hospitals. Tramway cables transformed the urban landscape from one day to the other, and inside the homes the made-in-USA toilets gave a touch of modernity and comfort. From shop windows and counters or through prints and photographs in press ads, the common man was invited to become a gentleman by buying an "American" bowler hat, and women were invited to become ladies by wearing for the first time an "anatomical" corset designed in New York. And even children began to dream with Champion bicycles or have nightmares with the "man carrying the cod" of the Scott emulsion." ^[9]

To explain the above, I have somehow moved within the psychological premises of something perhaps inexpressible, but all of it had a tangible correlation: beyond all speculation, it is indeed indisputable that the United States' sanitary policy and airs of progress contrasted with the "huge gambling spot" that Havana had turned into during the times of the Spanish colony. In like manner it reveals our chameleon-like nature, and this fate predisposes us positively in the eyes of the visitor, as happened with modern Cuban painting, whose domestic and at times bucolic halo awoke the interest of the North American public, even in spite of the exoticism it entailed. "Natural sites, landscapes or urban scenes contemplated from the point of view of the relaxed spectator, the unemployed or the sportsman who valuate the landscape mainly as a source of pleasant sensations or effects…"[10]  This statement, though written to describe the dilemma of the modern artist, comes to round up the remarks by Guy Pérez Cisneros in 1944.

The other great wave of interests toward the art produced in the Island appears after the visit of several critics and scholars in this field since 1980, among other reasons moved by the courage of artist Ana Mendieta, well-known in the United States' artistic scene of those years and who, together with Félix González-Torres and José Bedia, has become part of almost all catalogs edited to legitimize the best of 20^th century art in the world: Art Tomorrow, Art Now, Arte de Hoy, etcetera, etcetera.

The inscription of New Art of Cuba, a book by Louis Camnitzer, was reserved for her, and Holly Block affirms having taken interest in the art of the island also because of her.[11] We owe Ana Mendieta not only her spectacular performances or her interventions in Jaruco, or her whole work, but the way in which she established a link between what was later to be called "new Cuban art" and the thirst of periphery forged upon the disillusion in that "first world" [12] of the seventies. To the above-mentioned names we can also add those of Lucy Lippard and Rachel Weiss, just to mention two examples.

However, beyond the achievement of the works, which evidenced an enviable savoir faire and "updating" as to medium and recycling of alien styles, it was attractive and enigmatic to see how artistic discourses so distant from socialist realism could originate in a country like Cuba, and at the same time that they would comment that process in such an openly critical, ironic or satirical manner. But all the more bewildering was the fact that it was that art and not a different one the art promoted by the Cuban official institutions. The exhibition The Nearest of the World. Art and Cuba Now, cured by Gerardo Mosquera and Rachel Weiss, was presented with the collaboration of the Cuban ministry of Culture and the Center of Development of the Visual Arts[13], which together with Wifredo Lam Center have produced many of the present curators and free lance researchers in Cuba and abroad.

           

"Artists in Cuba focus their works on their own country more than other Latin American artists and in order to fully understand Cuban art, one must know the Cuban public and the Cuban socio cultural conditions to which the art is primarily addressed. But since Cuban artists are knowledgeable in the art game as it is played internationally, and since they play the game well; it is tempting, to judge Cuban art by international standards".[14]

Such was the jubilee and enthusiasm. "Cuban Renaissance". "Prodigious decade". The art produced here fits in perfectly with the notion of "otherness" that followed the so-called post-modern disillusion: the culture of the borders, the unavoidable presence of kitsch, "the nightmares of modern art", as well as our cultural mechanisms of resistance have been set on the table to reflect, ultimately, on the art-life relation. This, united to the obsession of being updated present in the Cuban artist, has created an artistic culture of vice-versas, of "give and take" with the rest of the countries. This inter textual relation with other codes of expression makes the island's production dislocate the classical meaning of modernity, causing the frontiers between center/periphery, tradition/contemporariness, model/copy, cultured/popular to disappear… We are speaking of claims that are answered by our creators with a learned knowledge that does not abandon its origins, whether marginal, multi-ethnical, high, religious or popular. Its displacements occur naturally, without bewilderments, and this perhaps has one of its explanations in the very formation of Cuban culture: we have always experienced a unique confluence of different historical times and spaces, a fact that facilitates the inter-contextual dialogue at all levels.

That organic nature, this living in and from the duality assumed without traumas in a diffuse zone similar to a "no man's land" also has its social roots:

"The 'Cuban way of life' is difficult for an American to understand. Cubans live in a double economy: they have jobs and purchase goods legally, but they also buy and sell through black market (...) Cubans live a dual life, with their own words, phrases, and "isms" to describe their unique situation".[15]

Confluencias Inside. Edición 2 attempts to grant coherence to that discursive multitude, to call to a certain order in the "empire"[16] at the same time it does not insist on typifying or identity aspects. But, just like Modern Cuban Painters in 1944 and the editorial effort made by Holly Block, it is indeed interested in showing the art from (at least the one made in) Cuba.[17]

And this is not a point in favor or against it, but completely the opposite.

work by Reynier Leyva Novo.

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[1] Prior to this exhibition, some pieces were exhibited in the Latin American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in June 1943.

[2] Museum of Modern Art Bulletin. April 1944 Vol. XI, No. 5.  The underlining is mine.

[3] Exhibiting, expressing opinions and "advising" on the Cuban side were María Luisa Gómez Mena, Mario Carreño and Gómez Sicre.

[4] Guy Pérez Cisneros. "Balance artístico de 1944". In Las estrategias de un crítico. Antología de la crítica de arte de Guy Pérez Cisneros. Editorial de Letras Cubanas, La Habana, 2000. pp. 48-49.

[5] Idem.

[6] Fernando Ortiz. Entre cubanos. Psicología tropical. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. La Habana, 1987. p. 1.

[7] Jorge Mañach. Ensayos. Editorial Letras Cubana, La Habana, 1999.

[8] Ibídem. P. 67.

[9] Marial Iglesias. Las metáforas del cambio en la vida cotidiana: Cuba 1898-1902. Ediciones Unión. La Habana, 2003. p.14.

[10] Meyer Schapiro quoted in Tomás Crow. El arte moderno en la cultura de lo cotidiano. Ediciones Akal, Barcelona, 2002.

[11] The assertion is made by Holly Block in Art Cuba. The Next Generation. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 2001.

[12] Term used in those days.

[13] The nearest of the World. Art and Cuba now. 1990. Polarities, Inc. of  Brooklin, Massachusetts. Curators: Gerado Mosquera y Rachel Weiss. New England Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Cuba and CDAV. Artists:: Alejandro Aguilera, Lázaro Saavedra, Ana Albertina Delgado, Tomás Esson, Glexis Novoa, Marta María Pérez, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Segundo Planes and Ciro Quintana.

[14] Luis Camnitzer. New Art of Cuba. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1994. p. XXI.

[15] Holly Block. Art Cuba. The Next Generation. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 2001. The book also contains essays by Gerardo Mosquera, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, Orlando Hernández and Antonio Eligio (Tonel).

[16] Used here with the same meaning granted it by Toni Negri.

[17] A convincing example opposed to this one and to the already mentioned ones is the book-catalogue for an exhibition that never took place: Memoria. Artes Visuales del Siglo XX. California International Art Foundation. With the authorship of José Veigas, Cristina Vives, Valia Garzón and Dannys Montes de Oca, this book unique in its kind did include all Cuban artists it could, whether or not they lived in Cuba.

I would also like to quote the ecumenical and democratic Killing Time, cured by Yuneikys Villalonga, Elvis Fuentes and Alexis Novoa in 2007, New York, whose list of artists is simply overwhelming.