Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

118 Rachel Weiss
of socialism, and of the New Man who was to construct it, this body has
generally been imagined as multiple, an “aggregate of individuals” in Che
Guevara’s words, 15 which was simultaneously heterogeneous and consensual.
“This multifaceted being,” wrote Guevara in his classic text Socialism and
Man in Cuba, “is not, as is claimed, the sum of elements of the same type
(reduced, moreover, to that same type by the reigning system), which acts
like a Xock of sheep.” 16 The New Man was neither alienated nor “housebroken”
nor fooled by bourgeois idealism with its deceitful yearning toward
“freedom”: he was an individual being whose individuality did not clash with
his simultaneous subsumption into the collective social body. Or as Muguercia
puts it, “not a being but a principle of association that rejects the categorical
division between the self and the society, between the personal and
the mediated,” and constituting the Cuban people’s “potential for obedience
or revolution.” 17 (Guevara’s formulation, however, was not the only one with
traction: against his emphasis on ethics, conscience, and cultural change, a
more traditional and orthodox Marxist model was held by Carlos Rafael
Rodríguez, in which productive forces transform productive relations, not
the other way around.) 18 For leftist intellectuals elsewhere in Latin America,
the revolutionary achievement in Cuba signaled an unprecedented and
precious moment: the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti, for example, wrote
in 1968 that, even though increased pressure on intellectuals to “participate”
in the revolutionary process was likely to develop, nonetheless it was
worth it, as “the only opportunity (and watch out when it is lost!) that a
human being has for participating in a collective assumption of dignity.” 19
“Volumen Uno,” the exhibition that launched the new Cuban art
in January 1981, 20 manifested the loose collective spirit born among young
artists of a shared refusal of the ideological prescriptiveness applied to art and
culture as a consequence of the Sovietization of Cuba in the 1970s. 21 In place
of instrumentalization they proposed that ethics lie at the core of art, and further
that such ethics are situational rather than metaphysical, derived from
their work and from the afWliations and obligations they had to each other
rather than from grand claims. The show was organized by a group of artists
who—more out of friendship than from any concerted aesthetic or ideological
platform—opened a process that transformed not only artistic practice
in Cuba, but also the ideas and aspirations that were its foundation. With its
mix of installations, performance, and pop inXuences, and its general freshness,
the show overturned reigning visual orthodoxies and presented, in their stead,
what the Cuban critic Tonel has called “an almost totally renovated image
of what a work of art could be in Cuba.” 22 What bound this group together
was a conviction about artistic creation as a process of investigation and
introspection, cognitive-ethical in nature, that was conceived not within the