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Performing Revolution 123
lies in Grupo Puré, which was formed in 1984. 48 Puré did not identify itself
as a political group, but rather as one that was “detecting,” and responding
to, “new situations, new problematic conditions that were not being
addressed or had been treated earlier but with very little depth.” 49 The
group “was born of the need to make a collective statement . . . [the] work
uses contemporary forms and media to express a critical and judgmental view
of [Cuban] society and times,” as they explained in the catalog for their Wrst
exhibition, “Puré Expone.” 50 Puré’s preoccupation with the popular and
quotidian linked them to their predecessors, but they felt that they were pushing
the question further: 51 the observations are more pointedly situated within
the daily tensions of life and stood as a kind of “critical empathy” 52 expressed
as scatological funfair.
As an example, Adriano Buergo’s interest in the ubiquitous Cuban
habit of material-mechanical improvisation inevitably placed emphasis on
the deteriorating conditions that necessitated such continual improvisation,
reworking Cuban art’s traditional preoccupation with representing lo cubano
to insert an indirect, but unmistakeable, critical voice. 53 Equally important,
the street and cartoon humor of Lázaro Saavedra and Ciro Quintana introduced
a new acerbity into artistic satire 54 at the same time that it opened
questions about mass culture that functioned, in their work, as a type of midground
between a quotidian and an ideological frame of reference.
Puré’s work served as a kind of bridge to a more explicitly political
critique that began about a year or two later, 55 mining the depth charge
latent in the registration of Cuban quotidian reality. While Volumen Uno’s
treatment of materiality (in Juan Francisco Elso especially, and also Ricardo
Rodríguez Brey and José Bedia) was related to Arte Povera, in which the
povera had some sense of ennoblement, Puré’s installations really were materially
impoverished (“squalid,” in Tonel’s words), a brazen, disorienting agglomeration—a
“demystifying Bronx cheer” 56 that had an element of aggression
in it that had been mostly absent in the gentler and more pleasing aesthetic
of much of the earlier group. 57 Puré also foregrounded what had been a tendency
among some in the Volumen Uno generation (especially Consuelo
Castañeda) toward a postmodern pastiche and appropriation, and that later
became a primary methodology for ABTV. Puré’s “brazen idea of exhibiting
their genealogy” as Tonel put it, “wearing their debts . . . on their sleeve,” 58
making “the borderline between plagiarism and quotation foggier than
ever” 59 struck another in a continuing series of blows against the modernist
conception of authorial, and individual, artistic identity.
Puré’s way of hanging shows, such that the works of all the different
artists intermingled and interpenetrated, 60 was central to their identity
as a collective and opened a fuller consideration of the group as a form of