Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

144 Rachel Weiss
historically continuous, and recognizable idea of art. One of these exits led
to exile and the other to despair: Saavedra, after living in Pilón for eight
months, Wnally went back to Havana, stopped making art, and joined a construction
brigade. 146
THE NEW BODY
The implosion, disillusionment, and dispersal of artistic energy in Havana
that followed the events around 1990 produced an interregnum during which
collective practice among artists became rare, victim to, among other things,
a sense of having been mistaken, of having believed when belief was not
warranted. The daily struggle for survival during the Special Period came to
be the linking, uniting experience of the Cuban population: a collective
formed of individual, and privatized, struggles. Provisionality and precariety,
in the 1980s a centripetal force, became a centrifuge in the 1990s.
It was against the Guevarist-idealist backdrop that the artists who
comprised the groups of the early 1980s (Volumen Uno, Grupo Hexágono)
were raised; it was in light of the crisis that this ideal had entered that subsequent
collectives (Grupo Puré, Arte Calle, Grupo Provisional, Art-De,
ABTV) formed; and it was around the absence of it that the new, millennial
collectives (DUPP, Enema) have coalesced. The “new body,” which has
gradually replaced the “New Man,” is one of complicity rather than solidarity,
within which the collectivizing gesture stands as anomaly rather than
synecdoche. It seems that much of the recent impulse to work in groups comprises
a collectivism in reaction, a gesture of refusal pointed to the social and
philosophical-ethical withdrawal that these younger artists have witnessed in
their predecessors. Part of this gesture has been to reromanticize the moment
of the 1980s, especially for its vaunted solidarity among artists 147 and its
political-moral agency. In the face of the deWnitive end to the idea(l) of the
socialist body, these groups have been concocting a postsocialist collective
body that is, paradoxically, inherently Emersonian with its romantic, spiritualizing
overtones and emphasis on self-reliance as almost an aesthetic virtue.
It is the paradox of a collective based in what Emerson referred to as his single
doctrine, the “inWnitude of the private man,” not unrelated to the idea
currently fashionable in marketing of “mass individualism.” In fact with the
emergence of market forces in the 1990s (or, it could be argued, their supplanting
of the ideological space of socialism) and the survival mentality
under dollarization, collectivization has taken on new strategic and tactical
dimensions, reXective of the political and economic realities. 148 This new
collectivity has also been characteristically more tentative, chastened and
generally delimited by the borders of the student experience.