Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

128 Rachel Weiss
Provisional’s carnivalesque, faux-groupie play was masterfully impish in its
dismissal of the “very good” artist, the simple, silly gesture farting on myth
at several levels: the art student’s adulation of fame, the anti-imperialist position
of the Cuban national institution, the “Indian’s” warm embrace of the
conqueror, the “universality” of the language of art. Meanwhile Menéndez’s
cooler response might be read as not so much mimicking as over-identifying
with the Cuban public’s role as habitual receptor of weighty orations.
As witty and amusing as these works of Provisional’s may have
been, they are misleading in reading the group’s actual work. More than a
producer of art, Grupo Provisional was the mischievous ghost in the machine,
the undifferentiatable substance that seeped into and transformed the whole
system of artist-audience-power. Their absolute refusal of stable authorial
identity (even to the point of consecrating a nine-year-old schizophrenic child
as a full member) and their total rejection of Wxed, conventional, artistic borders
framing the group was a de facto declaration of the unspeakable corollary:
this is not just an argument between artists and institutions. Everyone
is involved.
Arte Calle is often considered to have been both aesthetically
more conservative (having started out as grafWtti muralists) 85 and considerably
more positivist than Grupo Provisional: its message was that of “Revive
the Revolution . . . , a positive message from a contentious, rebellious language,
but there was still a possibility, it was believed, that we could work
FIGURE 5.2. Grupo Provisional, Very Good Rauschenberg. Photograph by Adalberto Roque.