Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

developing schema within which to read the works and artistic trajectories,
has probably tended, if indirectly, to encourage a reading of these individuals
as being more Wrmly situated within group (or “generational”) identities
than they actually were. (To be fair, Mosquera has consistently taken pains
to point to the heterogeneity of proposals and approaches.) 9 Historicizing of
the period has also tended to have this marshalling effect, tracking apparently
telltale currents that typify and congeal the artists into a “movement”
revolving around an axis of sociopolitical concern and comment. 10 Such
collectivizing baptisms run the risk of creating an exaggerated sense of collective
purpose at the level of “generation” or “movement” 11 and make clear
that, in the case of Cuba, artistic collectives have been the product not only
of artists’ self-deWnition but also of pattern-seeking narrations. Within these
“generations,” however, there were subgroups that coalesced and those are,
for the most part, the “collective” subject as deWned here.
Moreover, collectivism under socialism has another implication
in relation to the question of the origin or genesis of the artwork: if modernist
authorship implied a process of exteriorizing an internal subjectivity,
then socialism demands an inverse operation through which an exterior,
social, collective reality is absorbed into the new, collectively creative subject,
forming its essence. 12 This expectation yields a programmatically freighted
paradigm of the revolutionary intellectual as “reproducer, transmitter, illustrator,
preferably collective, of ideology generated from outside of art,” a more
properly antimodern than postmodern dissolution of the authorial subject in
order to “prevent [him/her] from becoming a source of heteroglossia within
ideological space.” 13 All of this is to indicate, preliminarily, that collective
artistic practice in the Cuban context has contended with an array of sometimes
conXicting precepts, histories, and directives during the length of the
period under review.
AUTONOMY
Performing Revolution 117
Certainly in the case of Cuba the idea of the collective, Wrst of all, must be
considered in proximity to the revolutionary ideal of a communal social
body. Some sense of what this ideal has meant in affective terms is conveyed
in Magaly Muguercia’s description of Cuban youths who worked in the literacy
brigades of the 1960s: “The neighbors didn’t recognize them when, a
year later, they returned to their homes, thin and muscular, their uniforms
reddened by the earth, garlands of seeds around their necks, and with an air
of conWdence mixed with sadness. Enormous and varied cultural crossings engendered
in the Cuba of the sixties a democratic, egalitarian, digniWed and
communal body.” 14 Owing, however, to the particular Cuban conception(s)