Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

group, and their inauguration into the Cuban art world read additionally as
the consolidation of a group effort. Another factor that probably forged a
sense of collective will and determination among them was the Mariel exodus
in April 1980: the departure of friends (in some cases, forced) and the
acts of ferocious public repudiation staged against remaining family members
were profoundly disillusioning for many, a loss of political innocence that
led to a loss of faith in the revolution. 39 The project of together developing
an “autonomous” art was therefore also in some ways a project directed against
and in spite of the regime, a project to create within the corrupt surrounding
a shared, independent zone of creativity.
Paradoxically, the “Volumen Uno” artists’ insistence on autonomy
for art eventually resulted in that very rare phenomenon of a contemporary
art connected in complex and organic ways to the life of the society.
Its formal breach signiWed and detonated a deeper schism between liberal
and orthodox-dogmatic positions about the right to—even the responsibility
for—critical speech under socialism. In this, “Volumen Uno,” like the legendary
Los Once group of the 1950s, 40 behaved collectively mostly in terms
of being united in the struggle for an open space for art. They were not a
collective in the sense of coming together in an act of shared authorship to
produce works, but rather in the production of a new situation.
Several members of the Volumen Uno generation were also involved
in a pedagogical effort that served to both set them apart from their
predecessors and augment the sense of mutual purpose among the group:
Flavio Garciandía, along with Consuelo Castañeda and Osvaldo Sánchez at
ISA and Juan Francisco Elso at the Escuela Elemental level, developed curricula
that jettisoned the academic, Soviet-style pedagogy to which they had
been subjected. In this, they also had an indirectly uniting effect on the subsequent
group of artists who shared the experience of a credible, challenging
educational formation. Tania Bruguera, who studied with Elso, recalls that
time as key in her own artistic development, motivating her to adopt a skeptical
and problematizing approach to artmaking, and most importantly to
see herself, as an artist, as an “agent of change.” 41
“DETECTING A NEW SITUATION”
Performing Revolution 121
The extended process of testing the limits of the permissible moved from Volumen
Uno’s initial, apparently formal challenge to convention and status
quo to the emergence, around 1985 or 1986, of a more explicitly political and
critical art, a type of public articulation of peoples’ private discourse about
the public. By the mid- to late 1980s, the Cuban national situation was spiraling
downward into a crisis of ideological isolation and the beginnings of