Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

152 Rachel Weiss
thought, his style, his spirit, and his example.” Guevara, Socialism and Man in
Cuba, 34. Cuban RectiWcation was a rejection of the principles of perestroika (economic
and political reform) and glasnost (a policy of openness, freedom to “speak
the truth”), insisting on a “Cuban solution to Cuban problems,” and also probably
to ward off any Cuban version of the changes that did take place under the Soviet
reform movement (in Castro’s view, Gorbachev’s mistake was to undertake glasnost
in advance of perestroika). For this reason, its legitimacy as an authentic reform
movement is dubious: as Gerardo Mosquera put it at the time, “RectiWcation, but
not too much.”
44. These artists have generally been considered a separate “generation” from
Volumen Uno, a distinction supported by the fact that the members of the earlier
group were the teachers of these younger artists. Among this younger group, collectivity
was a much more widespread phenomenon, even to the point that Luis Camnitzer,
writing in 1994, contended that the “generation is (or was) loosely formed
by six groups . . . plus some individual artists.” Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, 177–78.
45. Grupo Art-De formed in 1988. It changed its name to Ritual Art-De in 1989,
to reXect its joining together with Ritual, a group of independent Wlm and video
makers.
46. This period is well known for the sheer quantity of performance works done
then. It was not, however, the Wrst time that performance formed part of artistic
practice in Havana: the members of Volumen Uno had earlier staged various performances,
a fact that is often overlooked. However with the exception of Leandro
Soto, these works were generally of a secondary status in the artists’ overall production,
something they did in addition to their studio work.
47. Ernesto Leal, interview with the author, Havana, March 18, 2002.
48. Members included Adriano Buergo, Ana Albertina Delgado, Ciro Quintana,
Lázaro Saavedra, and Ermy Taño. The name “Puré” (puree) was aptly descriptive of
the group’s jumbling together of various topics, sources, and aesthetics.
49. Puré’s innovations were not solely founded in these changing societal circumstances;
they were also in the more prosaic manner of challenging, in order to surpass,
their predecessors: “And it’s also a mechanism that generations use to impose
themselves, not only formal mechanisms but also content mechanisms. It’s like saying,
‘Here’s what is mine, I’m going to deal with this problem because nobody has
done it this way yet, I want to talk about this, in this way.’” Lázaro Saavedra, interview
with the author, Havana, December 12, 2002.
50. January 1986. The show was installed at the Galería L in Havana, and in the
street outside the gallery.
51. “Really the group had a deep concern for the ordinary life, and having such
a concern for the events of daily life meant including them in your work, which
made you realize that the reality had changed a lot . . . the reality which Volumen
Uno faced was very different from the reality which Puré faced.” Lázaro Saavedra,
interview with the author, December 12, 2002.
52. Eligio (Tonel), “70, 80, 90 . . . tal vez 100 impresiones sobre el arte en Cuba,”
296.
53. According to Saavedra, Buergo had “a very strong concern for a whole series
of topics considered from the Cuban point of view but that were not considered
Cuban in orthodox, more conservative opinions because the Cuban—the ‘real’
Cuban—was what belonged to the old generation of the twenties, the thirties, what
had been proposed as Cuban at that time. And Adriano lived in Marianao, in a very