Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

132 Rachel Weiss
displeasure: the group was censored, had their works conWscated by the police,
and on several occasions was arrested. Ultimately, two of its members were
imprisoned, and the exile that González entered in 1991 was not the “low
intensity” one of his contemporaries who had left for Mexico.
THE ART SYSTEM AS TARGET
In addition to this cluster of politicized collectives, the spectrum of aestheticideological
strategies extended to yet another group, the quartet of ABTV, 99
which fell somewhat outside the largely performative, street theater arena
of these groups. The critical position adopted by ABTV was no less concerned
with the political situation of the country, but in their case this was
couched primarily in terms of the systems and institutions of art. Over the
course of several years, ABTV developed a series of complex collaborative
projects that, informed by the practices of Hans Haacke and Group Material,
stripped bare the ideocuratorial and economic agendas of the various cultural
institutions through which the work of the entire generation was being
both enabled and hobbled.
In contrast to the “hot” political critique practiced by Arte Calle
and Art-De, ABTV maintained a “cooler” mode, in part because of their
sense of being at a further remove from the catharsis and charisma of the
revolution. ABTV convened spontaneously, around 1988 or 1989: their work,
based in an informal attitude toward authorship (“it was something we didn’t
believe in, as if we said to ourselves, ‘If we spend all our lives copying everybody,
how are we going to start demanding originality, authorship?’”) 100
and a critique focused on the institutions of Art, stood as a kind of counterpoint
to the work of the other groups, among other things contributing
a potent analysis of the commercialization of Cuban art, which was then
emergent. 101 In their identity as a collective there is an interesting convergence
of the postmodern idea of appropriation/copying (with its particular
idea of the death of the author) and of the antimodern death of the author
that came from the ofWcial Cuban invocation of collectivity.
ABTV often worked as a sort of copy machine, producing critical
commodities and countersystems of distribution. In their exhibition “Él
que imita fracasa” (He Who Imitates Fails) they faithfully reproduced—in
triplicate, with astonishing technical bravura—the abstract canvases of one
of their teachers. In their curatorial project Nosotros they repeated the retrospective
exhibition of work by Raúl Martínez staged earlier at the National
Museum of Fine Arts, in such a way that their selections and narrative exposed
the lacunae of the museum’s version (“emphasizing those aspects, let’s
say, that were the loose ends of the big exhibition”), 102 their simulation of