BEYOND SHARED LANGUAGE - Society for Contemporary Craft

THE ART OF CONTEMPORIZING CRAFT
In 1995, the Salon de Arte Cubano Contemporáneo (organized by the National Council of Visual Arts)
of Havana, Cuba granted the Prize of Curatorship to Dannys Montes de Oca for a project titled
“El oficio del arte” (The Craft of Art). The proposal was supported by a trend in Cuban art, which
recognized a “revival of craftsmanship,” with the focus on the production of carefully executed work.
This trend saw an increase in the creation of beautiful objects, ready to be commercialized. The
climate in Cuba at that time, while marked by its worst financial and social crisis of the century, saw
the emergence of a new art market unique to generations of artists trained under the aegis of socialism.
This arts revival, countercurrent to conceptual practices that had predominated in the previous
decade—neo-Dadaist and neo-Fluxus artists who rejected the prevailing standards in anti-art cultural
works—deepened a certain cynicism among avid, young artists who sought to sell their work to the
highest bidder. (Hardly two years earlier, the exhibition “Cómprame y cuélgame” [Buy Me and Hang
Me] had been realized, in which some who participated soon turned into stars, such as Kcho and Los
Carpinteros—the Carpenters). Under this new market—the same economy that ruled in the rest of
the world—young artists were forced to become small entrepreneurs,“independent workers” according
to the nomenclature used by the government. Having witnessed the end of an era, cultural institutions
no longer offered necessary support; artists now had to manage on their own and develop skills enabling
them to make beautified things to generate currency. The challenge was to integrate this practice, openly
mercantile, in a discourse of cultural interest, so that the institutions could promote them.
The artists’ response to this challenge varied from the metaphorical rescue of the crafts in terms of the
postmodern aesthetic debate between “what’s cooked and what’s raw,” which favored the image over
the narrative and the figural over the discursive (in other words, between cultured art and folk art);
to the appropriation of historical-cultural values associated with these occupations, that could be
advantageous towards social critic, politics or even ideology. For example, Los Carpinteros reintroduced
woodworking combined with painting in autobiographical sculptures; a cynical exercise that culminated
in their thesis, which was the simulation of an auction in which all works were sold. In contrast, Kcho
used recycled materials and fiber to create sculptures with overlapping symbols of the Sacred (Afro-
Cuban religions) and the Nation (the island, the flag and the star). The subtext was that popular
religious practices had been labeled by Castro as superstition, and remnants of Capitalism that had to
be eliminated. Other artists integrated crafts like plaster casting, ceramics, sewing and embroidering, in
many cases alluding to their marginality within the economic socialist model.
When Kate Lydon visited me at El Museo del Barrio several months ago, looking for information on
Latin American artists who used craft in their work, I noticed how different our views were on the
subject.While she focused on the materials used (fiber, clay, glass, textiles, leather, paper), that is to say,
in the aesthetic dimension of the phenomenon, I looked for the cultural and social resonances that
these materials had within the poetic content of each artist, probably influenced by the Cuban
experience of 1995.
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