Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

116 Rachel Weiss
signiWcant about these collectives was the phenomenon that they became
and created in a moment of political convulsions, through their confrontation
with power and their magnetizing and catalyzing effect on public space.
From the outset here, it is worth sounding a note of caution with
regard to the question of what constitutes a “collective.” More than collective
in the highly intentional, patently ideological sense (as Wgure of opposition
and/or resistance) that the word generally has in capitalist settings,
the Cuban groups have worked without manifesto or platform 3 and have
tended to be more loosely cohered, organisms of friendship Wrst and foremost,
rather than of methodology or telos. 4 Until relatively recently, the collectives
have therefore generally functioned principally as extensions of typical modes
of interpersonal, social interaction and not especially as instruments of ideological
or aesthetic determinism. 5
Cuba, as a socialist society, obviously accepts the idea of a collective
body as its very substance: the social body in toto is claimed to be, or at
least aspires to be, a collective. To form a collective-within-a-collective therefore
somehow confounds this overall project, demarcating zones of separateness.
This is not to say, however, that the artist collectives under view here
have been antisocialist in position (and they generally have not). In fact it
seems likely that the Xuid range of collective modalities that has developed
in Cuba has been preconditioned by the permeating ethic of the collective
that underlay the revolutionary project.
Following this, then, the “collective” exists at several different
levels and scales in Cuban society. There has been a tendency to insert into
this taxonomy of collectives an intermediary level between that of national
entirety and small band of creators, ascribing a kind of collective character to
the various “generations” of Cuban artists in this period. In fact it is extraordinary
that, among such a small cohort of artists and a group who, moreover,
had extremely close and prolonged contact with each other, the range of
artistic proposals is so diverse, with so little overlap from one to the next.
For probably a whole complex of reasons, including the romantic “heresy”
of Cuban socialism that insisted on creating its own path rather than following
established orthodoxies, 6 Cuban artists have developed a kind of
individualism that is harmonious and continuous with collectivism.
This leads us then to consider the role of art criticism, which has
been largely responsible—especially through the work of Gerardo Mosquera
7 —for forming the reading of this period in terms of consolidated groups.
In fact, as Mosquera has made explicit recently, his writing in defense of
the young artists in the 1980s was strategically voiced, calibrated and aimed
to provide interpretive frameworks that squared the artists with the overall
doctrine and project of the socialist state. 8 Mosquera’s copious writing, in