Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

120 Rachel Weiss
The impulse of “Volumen Uno” formed against the backdrop of
a corseting, overdetermined state voice regarding culture, including schemes
for the instrumentalization of art in the national economy, 29 elements of
proscribed and prescribed content (abstraction 30 and campesinos, respectively),
incidents of censorship, and a general depletion of energy and creativity
among the artistic proposals of the 1970s. 31 As Tonel has explained: “With
the Declaration issued [by the Wrst National Education and Culture Conference
in April 1971], cultural bureaucracy was handed an aggressive program,
directed toward the imposition of Socialist Realism—to some extent
‘tropicalized’ and almost never mentioned by its name in that context—as
the only valid method of art and its interpretation on the island. Certain
ideas contained in this document became familiar slogans in the art world,
such as the fragment which said: ‘. . . art is a weapon of the revolution. A
product of the spirited morality of our people. A shield against enemy penetration.’”
32 According to this logic a “desubjectivized” art was advocated,
sheltered in the alibi that “true genius is found in the womb of the masses,” 33
a process to dissolve the creative-modernist personality and the legitimacy
of personal artistic discourse.
“Volumen Uno” was staged only after a protracted battle to obtain
an exhibition space (in fact it was Wrst installed in the home of José Manuel
Fors, one of the participating artists) 34 and was organized in a collective
manner that was unheard of at the time in Havana: together, the artists curated
the show, installed it, printed and distributed the announcements, and
so forth. 35 Their efforts were rewarded with the extraordinary attendance of
thousands of people. 36 The aesthetic iconoclasm of “Volumen Uno,” which
in retrospect might seem rather formalist and tame, nonetheless ignited a
campaign against the young artists launched by the artistic and critical
establishment, full of accusations of ideological diversionism and bad art.
As Flavio Garciandía has explained, “when we did ‘Volumen Uno’ we were
very, very conscious of the fact that the ‘state of the arts’ in Cuba was
absolutely terrible, precisely because of those ideas of programmatic ‘contentism’
(contenidismo prográmatico). 37 And we knew that we were introducing
a totally new vision (óptica), and that ‘Volumen Uno’ was a political exhibition.
Given the circumstances of the context, it was an exhibition that
was proposing . . . art as a totally autonomous activity, not as a weapon of
the Revolution as the Constitution says. No, art is a totally autonomous
entity with its own discourse and its own directions . . . it is in no way a
weapon of propaganda, nor can it be directed by anybody, nor channeled by
anybody. And at that moment that was quite a strong political statement.” 38
Being forced to publicly defend their work almost certainly
enhanced the sense among the “Volumen Uno” artists of themselves as a