Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

126 Rachel Weiss
Guevara]), 74 was a large portrait of the guerrilla martyr that covered most of
the gallery Xoor. During the opening, someone dressed in a policeman’s uniform
(a stranger to the artists) walked across the work, and then some others
improvised a kind of dance on it. 75 This generated an enormous scandal,
with the artists accused of sacrilegious treatment of the revolutionary icon.
In a harshly critical review published in Juventud Rebelde (authored not by
an individual writer but by the entire “Cultural Editorial Group”), the show
was attacked for “vulgarity, superWcialism, the absolute absence of convincing
artistic value, and an excess of snobbery.” With their “coarse dogmatism
and schematic pronouncements, supposedly critical of socioethical problems,”
it declared, the artists had only succeeded in deWning a position “contrary
to the interests of our socialist culture.” 76 Despite its denunciation of
the exhibition on aesthetic grounds, however, there is no mention, much
less discussion, of any of the exhibited works in the review, a fact pointed
out in the artists’ response (which the newspaper refused to publish). The
review, they wrote, was a political manipulation: whatever the weaknesses
of the artworks, they were the sincere expressions of young people “who are
part of this Revolution and who are integrated and committed to the destiny
and political reality of this country in the process of building socialism.” 77
The review is a telling document for two reasons. First, it discredits
the art on aesthetic terms, without bothering to make any aesthetic
argument: this Ximsy strategy was used regularly to deXect attention away from
the content of problematic works. It also had the indirect effect of divorcing
a work’s form and content (an odd feature of Cuban cultural policy since the
beginning of the revolutionary period), 78 placing primacy on formalist criteria
in the evaluation of a work of art and in fact disallowing any critical
expression that did not Wrst conform to unspeciWed and evasive standards of
technical accomplishment. Second, while the review acknowledged that
there were problems in Cuba and that it was acceptable for “revolutionary”
artists to be critical, it insisted that this must be done in a “revolutionary”
manner: here, in full bloom, was the danger signaled much earlier by various
critics in response to Castro’s 1961 dictum “Within the Revolution,
everything. Against the Revolution, nothing,” namely, that of who would
have the power to determine what was “inside the Revolution” and what
was not. In the wake of this scandal, Arte Calle was placed under continual
surveillance by State Security, and not long afterward, in January 1988, it
dissolved for real and for good.
Grupo Provisional (which started at more or less the same time)
was a kind of fraternal twin to Arte Calle in its roughhouse aesthetic, its
strong ties to the punk and rockero subcultures, 79 its generally anarchic ethic,
and most importantly its supra-artistic conception of art’s relation to politics.