Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

130 Rachel Weiss
of Arte Calle and Grupo Provisional, yet another group, Art-De (Arte-
Derechos), 90 took the decisive step of abandoning “art” and the shelter of
its various institutional mechanisms. 91 With their direct invocation of the
issue of human rights (taboo in Cuba, since all activism vis-à-vis human
rights is seen as external [meaning, U.S.] subterfuge), Art-De brought into
play yet another aspect of the dilemma of collectives under socialism: in Cuba,
where priority is placed on a collective conception of human rights, Art-De
located those rights within the individual, as is typical in Western liberal
tradition. The fact that they performed this move as a collective bespoke a
more strategic and cunning use of the collective body, and also a more directly
antisocialist formulation of it: under the cover of the collective, this group
of three managed to give the impression of being considerably larger than it
actually was, 92 and by forming a collective based explicitly in political dissent,
they declared the socialist collective promulgated and prophesized by
the state to be a fraud.
Art-De organized a series of events in busy public locations in
Havana’s streets and parks 93 that stepped over the dividing line between “art”
and “politics” that artists had been carefully guarding: there was, as one
spectator put it, “no divorce between their role as citizens and as artists.”
These events were mostly of an audience-participatory sort, in which the
encounter with the spectator was seen as an integral part of the work. 94 Art-
De performed anguished, abreactive performances such as Me han jodido el
ánimo (They’ve screwed up my spirit), in which Juan-Sí González wrapped
himself in a large plastic bag and slowly suffocated in a gesture of existential
agony until a panicked spectator Wnally stepped in and tore the plastic
away from his face. These events were of mixed success in artistic terms and
were easily relegated to the status of mediocre art that was employed in order
to discredit, and disappear, work that had gone too far, 95 but the public’s
reaction was often supportive, welcoming the artists’ stance because of the
debate it inspired. 96 Probably the most important achievement of Art-De
came from its resort to the direct, unmediated encounter with the public:
their events became the site of extraordinary public debates about art, about
Cuban society and its problems, and about the places where those could or
should intersect.
Art-De’s works used traditions from art (especially Dadaist provocation)
as the mise-en-scène for what were essentially public allegations
against political censorship made by “sons of the Revolution” for whom free
expression was a birthright. 97 In González’s formulation, Art-De was an effort
not only to break with the artist’s dependency on the state but also to establish
a real “state of rights” within Cuba, from Cuban traditions. 98 Of all the
contestatory groups, it was Art-De that received the full measure of the State’s