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Performing Revolution 127
Grupo Provisional, according to Glexis Novoa, consisted of a group that had
neither speciWc members 80 nor “a time”; “the group existed when we were
going to do a project. When the opportunity arose we used the name Provisional
and included any number of artists in that exhibition.” 81 The group’s
strategy was inXuenced by both the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky and the 1916–17 Zurich Dada Cabaret Voltaire, supposing that
“those past experiences were also a reaction to a political and social environment
and could Wnd a similar fate in Cuba.” 82
To some extent Grupo Provisional functioned as a kind of friendly
parasite on Arte Calle. They made an appearance at the same critics’ conference
at which Arte Calle had intervened with gas masks and placards,
following that performance with their own in the form of an awards ceremony
honoring the very same critics that Arte Calle had just catcalled. In
Novoa’s description the group’s cacophonic aesthetic is the crux: “this performance
. . . was called Japón (‘Japan’). This boy [who was performing with
them] was schizophrenic, half crazy, and he had an expression for whatever
he found that was good; instead of saying ‘Yuma’ [a popular colloquialism
for the United States] he said it was Japón, ‘this is Japón!’ We made a presentation
of prizes to certain personalities like Mosquera, Tonel . . . and
every time I mentioned one of those people I asked the boy ‘What is Aldo
Menéndez like?’ and the boy would shout to me through the microphone
‘Japoooón!!’ But it was a hysterical shout, it was crazy, and I’d say to him
‘But why can’t I hear you?’ ‘Japón!!’ The boy was in his element there.” 83
And Arte Calle’s (non)exhibition “Ojo Pinta” was the occasion on which
Grupo Provisional’s alter-ego Rock Campesino materialized, Wlling the empty
container that Arte Calle provided with their genial humiliations.
Grupo Provisional’s 1988 Very Good Rauschenberg performance
took place simultaneously with Aldito Menéndez’s own homage to the American
artist, who was in Havana on the occasion of his exhibition there. Like
the Japón piece, Provisional’s work took the space of art-world ceremony
and protocol as its location and lacerated it for its overly obsequious attitude:
Rauschenberg, whose gargantuan ROCI-Cuba (Rauschenberg Overseas
Cultural Exchange-Cuba) project was at the time stuffed into the city’s
museums and galleries, 84 was greeted by Grupo Provisional who stormed the
museum’s auditorium bearing signs reading “Very Good Rauschenberg” that
they insisted (in Spanish, which he did not understand) the befuddled artist
autograph. Meanwhile Menéndez, dressed only in a loincloth and sitting
on the Xoor directly before the artist, listened intently and inscrutably. In
this work the politics are a bit more conventional than in Japón (at least
for the Cuban setting), skewering the self-colonizing impulse behind the
museum’s decision to turn itself over to Rauschenberg’s self-aggrandizement.