Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

142 Rachel Weiss
into rhetoric but rather to realize its potential as a “practical-transformational
praxis.” 133 Inevitably, their embrace of the revolutionary path put them on a
collision course with the revolutionary apparatus. Moreover, the demands for
change in cultural policy were increasingly a microcosm of questions implicit
more broadly in Cuban life regarding individual rights to question, criticize,
and challenge as legitimate participation in the revolutionary project of
“emancipation, self-deWnition, and development.” A double kind of operation
was set up in which, to use the language of the day, the socialization of
culture would parallel the democratization of politics, within the historical
project of the emancipation and disalienation of man. 134 Certainly, then,
this question of the audience for art must be held in proximity to that of the
relation between art and politics, since it was the artists’ base of political
critique that resonated so deeply with the nonart public in Havana.
By the end of the 1980s, many artists in Havana had come to see their work,
and their responsibility, as effecting political and social transformation. This
was understood both as challenging policies and bureaucracies, and equally
in terms of reasserting questions of a just society and digniWed citizenry. Theirs
was an idea of art that worked fundamentally “not in visual changes, but as
a form of mental transformation.” 135 The Pilón project took this ambition,
which until then had mostly been directed toward the transformation of the
spectator’s thinking, and turned it inward toward the artists themselves. The
project was structured such that—in removing all of the assumptions and
tacit agreements about art—it fundamentally challenged the artists’ view of
themselves and of what they were doing. In this, it was perhaps the most
honest collective project of all, if we understand collectivity as essentially
a manner of relinquishing the defended self-identiWcation in search of a
truly social one.
The project in Pilón was utopian and it was read, by some at least,
as utopian-revolutionary. 136 The artists’ idea was, basically, to live in Pilón,
to learn to understand the people and life there, and to make art with them
in a fully collaborative process. The work, and the idea of “art,” would arise
from those people and that place, not from any prior expertise or professionalism
that the artists brought with them: in fact this was the crux of the
matter if the project was to avoid becoming just another example, however
well intended, of cultural colonialism.
Unlike Arte Calle’s works that sought to destabilize ofWcial structures,
the Pilón project made a “pact with power.” 137 The project was formally
proposed to and accepted by ofWcials at the Ministry of Culture who
oversaw visual art: in fact, it generated such strong support that Armando
Hart himself met with the artists during a visit to the region. 138 Despite—or