Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

138 Rachel Weiss
uniWed a relatively diverse group of artists such that they were understood as
consolidated. The cycle of exhibitions staged shortly thereafter at the Castillo
de la Fuerza went even further in this direction, and additionally made explicit
that the glue that was holding everything together was an antagonistic relation
to power (whether construed as the state generally speaking or, closer to
home, the bureaucracies of culture) and an urgent desire to reform the “rules
of the game.” 118 The Castillo project, “a full artillery schedule” according to
Mosquera, became a crucial framework in the Wnal, deWnitive skirmishes between
artists and power at the end of the 1980s. In Aguilera’s telling, the
project was a way to cut through the Wction that artists did art and not politics,
a Wction that had been convenient in certain ways for both sides:
at that time there was a criterion that we said was “extra-artistic,” that came from the
bureaucracy, of cutting and censoring, separating, leaving works out. Recently somebody
said to me, Look, if you artists make political art, you have to know how to do politics.
For me the Castillo de la Fuerza was in some measure that kind of attitude, a group of
people clearly making political art. At that time it was called “social art,” but it was a
political attitude. You are talking about subjects that, let’s say, politics keeps for itself
alone. You want to remove those subjects from politics and put them into a public discussion,
a social discussion, and that is a political act too. 119
The Castillo de la Fuerza project was organized with the hope
of reversing the crisis by reestablishing a tactical dialogue between artists
and power, but ultimately became one more victim of censorship and hardline
politics. In frustration and deWance, artists pulled together again, this
time not only across group borders but across generations as well into an
extraordinary moment of collective deWance, coalescing Wrst around the
“retro-abstraction” exhibition project “Es solo lo que ves” (It’s just what you
see, which was supposed to have taken place from December 1988 to January
1989), and then the baseball game, La plástica cubana se dedica al béisbol
(Cuban art dedicates itself to baseball) on September 24, 1989. 120 The former
was to have been an exhibition of abstract art staged in galleries throughout
Havana—“an art without problems”—made by the young artists especially
for the occasion (in fact Navarro advocated not only for abstraction but for
geometric abstraction, which he considered to be even more semantically
void and therefore “unproblematic”). The fatal Xaw in the plan was that, as
a traditional gallery-based exhibition it depended on the cooperation of
ofWcial organizations, which was not forthcoming. Nonetheless each request
for gallery space, and each denial, drew more and more enthusiasm for the
project among artists until the list of participants was huge. 121
A few months later the artists perfected this devious, detouring
strategy in the form of the baseball game. “After so much censorship,” recalled
Rubén Torres Llorca, “we organized a performance called ‘The Baseball Game’