CubaTrade-April2017-FLIPBOOK

"From Aachen to Zurich” (2005) depicts the word Revolución in changing typographies
“Untitled” (2013) by Alejandro Rodríguez Falcón
Russian military-style posters at the installation of Adios Utopia
The museum had not yet opened and there was already
a line of people all the way to the corner. It was a rainy
Sunday in March, and the exhibit “Adios Utopia: Dreams
and Deception in Cuban Art since 1950” was opening to the
public at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFAH).
From the museum’s second floor, huge panels depicting heroic
images with Russian lettering ushered visitors into what might
have been an homage to a bygone dream world, the revolutionary
utopia. What followed, however, was not the evidence of a failed
project, but a testament to the creative experimentation made
possible by revolutionary socialism—even if in spite of itself.
Adios Utopia is ambitious. Organized by the Cisneros Fontanals
Foundation (CIFO), in partnership with the MFAH and
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, it is co-curated by René
Francisco, Gerardo Mosquera and Elsa Vega, all distinguished
scholars, critics and curators. It is probably the most comprehensive
exhibition of post-revolutionary Cuban art ever undertaken.
It is not, however, a chronological retrospective. Rather, it responds
to a thesis: Artistic experimentation was intrinsic to a revolution
that was, first and foremost, ideological. Even as it pushed
the limits marked by Fidel Castro’s guiding motto, “Within the
Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing,” art was
meant not to merely interpret reality, but to remake it.
The exhibit spans the last six decades, with works familiar
to connoisseurs but unknown to the general public. It includes
photojournalism as well as poster art and comic strips that were
central to a revolutionary project that sought to make culture
available to the masses.
That raw zeal is apparent; it was more than a quarter century
after the Revolution before the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA)
was founded for the professionalization of contemporary artists.
But by the time the first cohort graduated, the crisis of the Mariel
boatlift had left behind a general disenchantment that produced
the most critical art in recent memory. This well-educated elite
became at once the Revolution’s source of pride and failure. The
New Man was not a yes-man.
Adios Utopia only loosely follows a time line. It is instead
structured around recurrent preoccupations, both in terms of artistic
form and of the artists’ critical gaze. The marvel of pre-revolutionary
abstraction that sought to speak in a universal language
is soon silenced by the euphoria of the epic sixties. Photojournalism,
poster art, and comic strips served the state’s merger of art
and ideology in the service of a political project.
Later this popular art was deconstructed by Cuba’s newly
educated artists. In the museum, a heroic image like Korda’s Che
is pointedly placed in dialogue with its subversions, including
Tomás Esson’s painting of a mute Ché watching a scatological
act (“My Homage to Che,”1987) and Arturo Cuenca’s photograph
of the supporting structure to a gigantic Che billboard
(“Science and Ideology: Che,” 1987-88).
Similarly, in a section on revolutionary rhetoric, works seek to
divert the viewer’s attention from content to form. Ernesto Oro-
za’s animation “From Aachen to Zurich” (2005) flashes the term
“Revolution” with changing typographies, as if to strip the term
from its aura, while contributing to its overwhelming presence.
In another section, devoted to what playwright Virginio
Piñera called the “damned circumstance of water everywhere,”
artists ponder the twin conditions of island and exile. The
exhibit’s own farewell is “Inverted Utopias,” comprising works
that challenge that “within” of the Revolution by exposing both
ideology and the critiques that have worked to reinforce it.
Among all these works, one that is small, understated, and
as white as the wall behind it, can be seen as a powerful synthesis
of this proclaimed post-utopian turn in Cuban art. It is a scruffy
square volume of what appears to be paper pulp, still revealing
fragments of words and ink: “Untitled” (2013), by Alejandro
Rodríguez Falcón. Through a manual process of paper recycling,
Rodríguez reduced an official pocket-sized copy of the 1976 Cuban
Constitution—its first socialist Constitution—to wet paper.
In so doing, it turned it into a unique art object.
Like Ai Wei Wei’s famous smashing of archaeological vases,
Rodriguez’s iconoclastic gesture is the art’s genesis. He degrades
the most valuable symbol of the nation, its foundational document,
the revolutionary state’s own contract with its citizens, in
an act of wishful thinking. Then, it carefully displays it behind
glass and inside an oversized frame, as a precious object whose
value no longer resides in its content but in its bare materiality.
Unlike Wei Wei, Rodríguez does not claim the capitalist
market as the arbitrator of value. His might be the kind of act
that in 1990 cost another artist, Angel Delgado, prison time
when he defecated on a Granma newspaper. Today, however,
the Constitution’s defacement hardly produces scandal. Instead,
we squint at the nicely framed volume and celebrate the clever
aesthetics of the transmuted object, whose destruction we were
not invited to witness.
If the museum is the place for salvaged relics, the Cuban
Constitution is there before its time. The Constitution’s power
exceeds its matter; and it still rules the law in the land, unthreatened
by the artist’s act. Which begs the question: Has art, like
the Revolution itself, lost its power to shock and awe, or at least
provoke the imagining of another world?
We know one thing: They no longer need each other, and the
very organization of Adios Utopia proves this point. Cuban state
institutions did not participate, and the artworks were selected
from private collections and museums outside Cuba, apparently
to prevent bureaucratic impediments at an uncertain time in
U.S.-Cuba relations.
One has to wonder if an adios to utopia is not a farewell to
art itself—and hope that this is just a momentary surrender. H
““Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950” is accompanied
by a catalog coordinated by CIFO’s chief curator Eugenio Valdés Figueroa.
The exhibit is on view through May 21 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
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