Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

These privatized 1990s collectives are, in some sense, the synthesis
spawned by the thesis of activist collectivity in the 1980s and the antithesis
of the early 1990s cynical individualism. The disaffection they express
tends to have a diffuse character: it is “not adding up, non-cumulative,” it
does not “condense . . . into a unifying public cause,” much less gather people
“around an alternative social vision.” 149 It is a collectivism much more
similar to the American dream (and this is, even if painfully ironic, not surprising),
of utopia as a mostly private realm. This means that, while the Wgure
of the collective has remained more or less constant during the period of
the “new art,” its fundamental meaning and vision has now inverted, from
a vision that was public and civic to one that is often private and hermetic.
Despite the central role that collective practice has played in the
new Cuban art, the collectives have generally not been accepted into historical
accounts of the period. At ISA, students must graduate as individuals,
and the school’s archives hold no documents pertaining to any of the groups.
And in the National Museum of Fine Arts, the recent reinstallation of the
contemporary Cuban art galleries virtually erases the 1980s collectives from
history: not a single work or piece of documentation is there to indicate the
central role that these collectives played in what was undeniably one of the
most dynamic, most important periods of Cuban art.
These collectives were, almost without exception, the project of
teenagers, midway between a child’s energy of deWance and the adult’s sense
of loss. The sheer excitement of the time, and the sense of participating in
history, is the meaning that they now offer to artists working in a depleted,
dispirited Havana. “At that time,” Toirac recently reminisced, “really, there
was a context that nourished you a great deal, or rather, the relations between
artists were so close. . . . We went to parties, discussed this, that, and the
other thing, it was quite an active collective life. And the ideas arose like
that from nothing. . . . At that time we threw parties practically every day,
there was a reason to celebrate. What times those were!” 150
NOTES
Performing Revolution 145
Translations from the Spanish are by Cola Franzen.
1. The “new Cuban art” is usually dated from 1981 with the exhibition “Volumen
Uno.” The term is generally understood to refer to the appearance of several
waves of young visual artists whose artistic proposals were varied and fresh, and who
shared an ethical presupposition about the role of art. Luis Camnitzer also coined
the phrase “Cuban Renaissance” to refer to this period: New Art of Cuba (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1994).
2. The founding of the Ministry of Culture in 1976, and the appointment
of Armando Hart as minister, is generally recognized as a key stimulus to the