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160 Rachel Weiss
123. Much of the exhibition was bought by the German chocolatier and art collector
Peter Ludwig. According to Magaly Espinosa, that was “the unexpected part
of the exhibition . . . opening the Cuban artists’ eyes to the tangible possibility of a
market. So artistic experimentation, and the development of personal poetics, met
at the border of extra-artistic requirements with this insertion into one of the most
important art collections in the world.” Espinosa Delgado, La espada y la cuerda, 3.
The activity around the “Kuba OK” show built on momentum that had already
been established by earlier exhibitions of Cuban art in the United States, including
“New Art from Cuba” organized by Luis Camnitzer for the Amelie Wallace
Gallery/SUNY Old Westbury in 1985 and “Signs of Transition: 80s Art from Cuba”
organized by Coco Fusco for the Center for Cuban Studies and Museum of Contemporary
Hispanic Art in 1988. An enthusiastic article by Lucy Lippard in Art in
America reviewing the new Cuban art (“Made in USA: Art from Cuba,” April 1986,
27–35) was also inXuential, as was the invitation (by curator Heidi Grundmann) to
Flavio Garciandía to participate in the Aperto section of the 42nd Venice Biennale
in 1986.
124. These are aims that artists have expressed on various occasions throughout
the latter half of the twentieth century, and the history of this trajectory in Latin
American art is especially marked. An important precedent for Pilón can be found
in the Argentinian project Tucumán arde (1968): Rubén Naranjo, one of the participants,
explained that project as an attempt to create “a space that opens coming
from art, in which social reality is offered in a dimension that exceeds denunciation
of the kind usually provided by social or political chronicles.” Cited in Luis Camnitzer,
Contextualization and Resistance: Conceptualism in Latin American Art (unpublished
typescript, 2003), 152. The manifesto distributed at the Tucumán arde opening
called for “total art, an art that modiWes the totality of the social structure; an art
that transforms, one that destroys the idealist separation between the artwork and
reality; an art that is social, which is one that merges with the revolutionary Wght
against economic dependency and class oppression.” Ibid., 153.
125. 1988–91. The group included Abdel Hernández, Ernesto Leal, Alejandro
López, and Lázaro Saavedra.
126. Unattributed “author’s note,” in Memoria: Cuban Art of the 20th Century,
ed. Veigas et al., 293.
127. The Pilón project took place during 1988 and 1989. The participants were
Abdel Hernández, Lázaro Saavedra, Nilo Castillo, Alejandro López, Hubert Moreno,
and the musician Alejandro Frómeta.
128. “The public that went to the galleries was practically the same, they were
art students, the artists themselves, or people who in one way or another were connected
with art, worked in it or were part of the institution of art. Everything was
closed. Obviously, the artists had friends and maybe occasionally a lot of those friends
visited the galleries. There were also students at the university who had nothing at
all to do with art, physics students, mathematics students, or other subjects. And
then there was a moment when there was a desire to open up a lot. They even did
things outside the gallery as if trying to Wnd another type of public.” Lázaro Saavedra,
interview with the author, Havana, March 20, 2002.
129. As Saavedra notes, “it was a kind of project that not only wanted to extend
this investigation into new sites to produce art but also the process itself of the construction
of the work, wanting to make it totally dependent on that new place; that
is, starting from zero. In general, what had been done earlier was to always keep the