Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

158 Rachel Weiss
agreement was also something else, an ethical problem of the relationship with the
institution . . . the institution can play dirty with the artists but the artists have to
play fair with the institution. And we also disagreed about the signatures . . . because
for example when Arte Calle circulated papers, those who agreed with it signed and
the others did not. But this paper about Haacke wasn’t signed, and so was taken as
a collective decision, which it was not, really.” José Angel Toirac, interview with
the author, Havana, December 22, 2002. The text of that document was as follows:
“The exhibition Homage to Hans Haacke by Tanya Angulo, Juan Pablo Ballester,
José A. Toirac, and Ileana Villazón, which was supposed to have opened today, was
suspended because its authors did not accept the conditions that Omar González,
current President of the National Council of Plastic Arts, proposed to them. These
conditions are: (1) Exclude a photocopy of a portrait of Fidel Castro which Orlando
Yanes made in 1986. (2) Exclude from the Curriculum Vitae of Orlando Yanes that
in 1975 he designed the Xag and logotype of the First Congress of the Cuban Communist
Party. (3) Exclude a photograph in which the authors appear together with
Marcia Leiseca. The authors decided not to accept these conditions since they considered
that the parts which they endeavored to exclude were essential to the exhibition,
and because it was unacceptable to accept them in a project which endeavored,
among other things, ‘to displace the most recent polemics from the realm of the
extra-artistic back into artistic discourse.’ Friday, September 29, 1989.”
107. José Angel Toirac, interview with the author, Havana, December 22, 2002.
108. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of ScientiWc Revolutions (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962).
109. Among the shows closed during 1988 were “A tarro partido II” (The Broken
Horn: work by Tomás Esson), “Nueve alquimistas y un ciego” (Nine Alchemists
and a Blind Man: organized by Arte Calle and Grupo Imán), and “Artista de calidad”
(solo show by Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas), while in 1989 the exhibitions both
by Ponjuán and René Francisco and by ABTV were censored within the Castillo
de la Fuerza exhibition project.
110. Menéndez, “Art Attack,” 276–77.
111. Faculty of Art History, University of Havana, 1988.
112. Lázaro Saavedra, interview with the author, Havana, December 12, 2002.
113. Participants included Abdel Hernández, Ciro Quintana, Hubert Moreno,
Arnold Rodríguez (Peteco), Rafael López Ramos, Lázaro Saavedra, Alejandro López,
Jose Luis Alonso, Luis Gomez, and Nilo Castillo.
114. In general, maintaining contact with the artists advanced the state’s need
to Wnd new mechanisms of control: Leal even says that, ironically, Arte Calle wound
up teaching the state how to manage what was, then, a new level of aggressiveness,
an art that no longer stayed within the precincts of art and that therefore achieved
a new level of “concreteness.” “It’s regrettable, but all that experience of Arte Calle
actually was of service to the state, the government, as to how to treat that kind of
activity. Up until that moment, nothing had occurred in Cuban culture with that
degree of aggressiveness—that we didn’t care about losing anything. They could put
us in prison and there would be no problem because we were students—that is, we
had our parents who would see to us somehow. And up to that moment they had
not known how to tackle that, not even with what happened with the writers in
the sixties or seventies—there had been nothing like what we did because these
were concrete actions that went even beyond art. That reached the social sphere,
to give things to people in the streets, to make performances, to create problems.