Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

156 Rachel Weiss
and the group moved to the park at the corner of 23 and G, also in Vedado (April 6,
13, 20, 27, May 18). The group was then prohibited from working further in public.
94. Juan-Sí González notes that “we faced all kinds of publics, we faced their
questions and their thoughts and on occasion they offended us. Everything that
happened there was part of the work.” Untitled video documentary, 1988.
95. Glexis Novoa explains it thus: “They said we were mediocre, they didn’t
include us in any important exhibitions, we didn’t travel abroad, and when foreign
curators came to Cuba they never took them to see us. That segregated you. That’s
what the Cuban government knew how to use, that implacable silence which separates
you and dissolves you as an artist.” Interview with the author, Miami, December
30, 2002.
96. One spectator commented that “to my way of thinking it is more a generational
movement, a sociological phenomenon, which shows the desire of the
youth to participate in a process of change which the entire country is immersed in
. . . As a phenomenon, a movement, it seems to me important: you have to follow
it, look at it closely and support it, and hopefully it will not be just here in the
park.” Untitled video documentary, 1988.
97. “Cronología” of Art-De, unpublished typescript, 2.
98. “I got into a very rare contradiction . . . I did not want to use any of the
materials that the school gave me, I didn’t want to take anything, I wanted to break
that relationship of dependence, of co-dependence with the school, the Party, the
Revolution, everything . . . I wanted to have a voice but be ethical in order to have
a voice . . . and around then I began to say different things, without resources that
came from ofWcialdom . . . I began to get into a battle because I felt that in Cuba
there was not a state of rights, I began to understand all of that better . . . In that
moment I was not thinking from a purely aesthetic point of view like other artists
. . . We were very naive in the beginning, we believed it was possible, a change from
within, we did not believe in any change from the outside, we were against the
embargo, it was to create . . . an internal dynamic of renewal, of thinking, to end
that old-fashioned and even bourgeois attitude, including xenophobia and racism . . .
We were working with those elements, those were our materials, not color . . . and
in general the thinkers we used were not aesthetes, not artists, not cultural ideologues:
some were priests, others were santeros, we used Varela, we used Martí a lot,
but we were always searching for the contrast between what they had always taken
from Martí and the other part of Martí that is never mentioned, that game between
the two.” Juan-Sí González, interview with the author, Yellow Springs, Ohio, April
4, 2003.
99. ABTV did not consider itself a “group” until somebody else called them that:
Luis Camnitzer’s use of the name “ABTV” for the artists Tanya Angulo, Juan Pablo
Ballester, José Angel Toirac, and Ileana Villazón was, effectively, a collectivizing baptism
that gave a Wrm and conventional form to what was more properly an amorphous
relational dynamic. As Toirac explains it: “The business about the group
arose spontaneously because, more than a worker’s collective, we were friends . . .
we had never considered ourselves a group until Camnitzer said, ‘You are a group’ . . .
we were a group of friends who shared countless things, we went to parties, we passed
books and magazines back and forth, we consulted with one another, we helped
each other out in work and never bothered about authorship.” Interview with the
author, Havana, December 22, 2002.
100. José Angel Toirac, interview with the author, Havana, December 22, 2002.