Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

122 Rachel Weiss
profound economic collapse. 42 By 1986, the pressures of both external change
and internal corrosion had become intense enough that Fidel Castro launched
the highly rhetorical “RectiWcation” campaign, avowedly to return the revolution
to its original (Guevarist) path. 43 Collectivity as redeWned by groups
of younger artists took on an urgency and radicality that matched these new
circumstances. Many of the generation’s artists formed into a series of shifting
groups, 44 including Grupo Puré, Arte Calle, Art-De, 45 Proyecto Hacer,
Proyecto Pilón, and Grupo Provisional, whose mostly performative and disruptive
works 46 sought to reinscribe a space for a critical culture within the
broad emergencies of Cuban society. Paradoxically, the further challenge
that their work represented was made possible, in part, by a more relaxed
attitude on the part of the government following Mariel’s purge of “undesirables”
that, along with the gradual withdrawal of the Soviet presence,
temporarily resulted in a more benign, permissive climate for culture.
For these artists, collectivity and political critique were inseparable
parts of “that idea, half-utopic if you like, that somehow art should serve
for something,” 47 an art that therefore escaped the risk of formalism and
solipsism. The work of these groups, characterized by audacity, acid humor,
and passionate attachment to the idea of art as ethical practice, was a kind
of hooligan hotwire job, bypassing ofWcial ignition circuits. It magnetized a
large following in Havana, leading the way in raising for public discussion the
taboo subjects of corruption, dogmatism, cult of personality, lack of democracy,
and so on. Despite this strong critique, these groups (with the exception
of Art-De) were not dissident but rather worked in an uneasy and volatile
process of negotiation with state power, opening a space of critique that was
neither fully inside nor outside of it.
The time during which these groups were active was one in which
all the groups, all the proposals, Wlled together into a grand mosaic, a kind
of spontaneous whole. The groups of the mid- to late 1980s spanned a range
of opinions about the willingness of the regime to enter into dialogue and,
thus, about the possibility of political change. All of them, though (except
Puré, which was slightly earlier), shared a conviction about art as a site for
reshaping public agency and saw their own work as part of a broader movement
or sentiment in Cuban society. The collectives of this short period
were, fundamentally, vehicles through which to engage in this political dialogue,
using a grafWtti and guerilla theater aesthetic in order to shock and to
reinvigorate, visually and politically, the languages of Cuban art. The works
often had an intentionally bad-art character, more half-done than poorly
done, refusing to become Art or to become Wxed ideologically.
The transition from “Volumen Uno” to the more intentional
collectivity and more explicit politics of Arte Calle and Grupo Provisional