Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

Performing Revolution 157
101. They were not the only ones to concern themselves with this topic: Ponjuán
and René Francisco had also been working on this, as had Novoa and others.
102. José Angel Toirac, interview with the author, Havana, December 22, 2002.
For example, in the ABTV catalog there is a chronology that repeats, but slightly
alters, the one published by the Museo Nacional, adding notes about when Martínez
began to make a living off his work, when he began to work with assistants, and so
forth.
103. Eligio (Tonel), “Acotaciones al relevo,” 61. In the exhibition brochure,
ABTV wrote: “Even though his abstract paintings did not contribute anything
essential to the language of Abstraction nor of Abstract Expressionism, they worked
in opposition to ‘the stereotypes postulated by the School of Havana: light, the
baroque, colorism, typical-ism’ (Amelia Peláez, Carlos Enríquez, Victor Manuel, René
Portocarrero . . . ), and as a means of political opposition, in his participation in the
antibiennial of 1954 in response to the Hispanoamerican Biennial of Art organized
by Batista’s National Institute of Culture and Franco’s Hispanic Council on the occasion
of the centenary of Martí. When these ‘abstract’ works are decontextualized,
the content that springs directly from the formal properties of the work is lost, which
is why we left out the ‘paintings’ and presented a type of documentary information
that would in some way make those contents plain that the works had been made
to transcend . . . If in the period from 66–70 the political conscience became a fundamental
and indissoluble ingredient of his work (portraits of heroes, etc.), putting
to work in an effective way the contents of our culture, it turns out to be paradoxical
that only a few were exhibited, in an isolated way, in group exhibitions, and
that critics abstained from analyzing them. . . . From July to October 1988, the
National Museum organized what would be the Wrst anthological exhibition of the
work of Raúl Martínez, Us. The exhibition . . . placed emphasis on presenting Raúl
as the myth of the great painter, of the modern artist as a minor deity. [Our exhibition,
also titled] Us tries to show him as an accessible creator, who has used his work
to confront individual, social, ethical, and artistic problems in an effective way.”
104. Actually, the dialogue was with two vice ministers since the Wrst one,
Marcia Leiseca, who had been sympathetic to the project, was Wred before it could
open. The show prior to the Haacke project, an installation by René Francisco and
Ponjuán, had recently been closed down in a furor over images of Fidel (wearing a
dress and standing in line, in one case), and Leiseca was sacked as a result. Her replacement,
Omar González, was much more hardline politically such that his political
interests apparently overshadowed his effectiveness with regard to questions
of art.
105. As Toirac explains, “maybe we could have managed to put on an exhibition
but really by then we were exhausted, the internal relations of the group were
not the same as in the beginning . . . all that tension had had an impact on our
friendship and we decided to call the work Wnished once and for all: the work was
what it was, and if Omar González didn’t accept it, well . . . he didn’t accept it but
we were not going to make any more changes.” Interview with the author, Havana,
December 22, 2002.
106. “Ballester and Ileana circulated a paper telling what had happened, with
which Tanya and I were not in agreement . . . [they thought that, as a matter of
ethics, that] one had to give an explanation, an apology or say what happened. But
the censoring of Homage to Hans Haacke was not an exceptional case; you don’t have
to explain, everybody knows what happened. But the reason why we were not in