Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

124 Rachel Weiss
artistic production. Puré was no longer a collection of individuals talking and
showing together; it was more internally coherent, and the works (the Wnal
works, as it were, being the exhibitions as totalities) were a collective product.
In 1986, a group of students (ringled by Aldito Menéndez) at the
vocational art school “20 de Octubre” launched Arte Calle, 61 initially as a
kind of “discharge” or “unloading,” more than as a strategy for working. 62
With them began a period of increasingly disruptive and radical work, often
in the form of performances and interventions, that opened a discussion
about art beyond art, art that was very directly intended to reach beyond its
own cloister and beyond any ofWcial, institutional frame in order to function
directly in the society at large. In the undated document “Arte Calle Teoría,”
they asserted that “the group Arte Calle proposes to transcend the frame of
the artistic so as to keep investigating, but now beyond a social point of
view. In order to do so they use all necessary means that are available to them,
whether artistic or not.”
Arte Calle was a sort of “SOS to revolutionary art.” The group’s
members, adolescents between Wfteen and eighteen years old, thought of
themselves as art terrorists (an “aesthetic and Cuban parody of the Red Brigades,”)
63 a clandestine gang that wanted to function “as a catalytic agent,
a bomb: . . . we had some proposals, that the government would never
accept. And so we functioned more than anything else as a sort of catalyst
within the Weld of art so that other people might feel themselves somehow
within this space or in the context, in order to be able to do things . . . [we]
wanted to discuss things and change things . . . somehow, by aggression.” 64
Arte Calle is mostly remembered for the humor of works such as
No queremos intoxicarnos, their intervention at a roundtable discussion on
“The Concept of Art,” to which they arrived wearing gas masks and carrying
placards mocking political slogans (e.g., “Art critics: know that we have
absolutely no fear of you,” parroting the billboard that has stood for years in
front of the U.S. Interests Section, declaiming “Señores imperialistas, know
that we have absolutely no fear of you!”). For their exhibition “Ojo pinta” 65
nothing was predeWned or predetermined (nonetheless, amazingly, it was
allowed to take place in an ofWcial, public gallery): an anarchic spectacle ridiculing
the protocols of art openings, the “exhibition” consisted of inviting
friends to install whatever they liked. Among the most memorable contributions
were a goat tied to the gallery door and a performance by Grupo
Provisional, disguised as the trio Rock Campesino, who wandered the gallery
incessantly playing a tuneless, drunken version of “Guantanamera.” 66
In general, Arte Calle’s works that confronted the institution of
Art shared this levity and earned them the admiration and affection of
Havana’s artists and critics. On the other hand, their works attacking larger