Cuban Art Research Articles

‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics

This article explores the emphasis on usefulness in contemporary art, focusing on social practice art in the United States and Europe through Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s establishment of the ‘Asociación de Arte Útil’ in 2011, and the rebranding of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) as a ‘useful museum’. The article addresses the affirmation of usefulness and ‘use values’ within these case studies and beyond in relation to Marxist, post-Marxist, and feminist theories of social reproduction and the state. By attending to issues of citizenship, race, and migration, the article asks how we should approach the aesthetic and political stakes of artworks that strive to be ‘useful’ through performing tasks associated with social reproduction as they have historically taken place in the home or via the welfare state.

Remembering Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian: An Interview with William Karg

Remembering Alexander “Skunder” BoghossianAn Interview with William Karg Charles Henry Rowell and William Karg (bio) ROWELL: How did you come to know Skunder? He seemed to move about to many places—e.g., in Africa, Europe, and North America. KARG: I did not start working with Skunder until he was well established at Howard University where he taught a masters class. I do know that he came to America in the early 1970s. Speaking of dates, there are some facts about Skunder that I think many people may not recognize. Skunder, after winning a competition, was sent by the Emperor to art school in Europe when he was fifteen years old. He did not return to Ethiopia until 1968, where he stayed until 1970, when the country was becoming increasingly unstable. He migrated to the United States never to return. So here is this quintessential Ethiopian artist, many would say the father of Ethiopian contemporary art, who only spent three years of his adult life in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian iconography, it seems, was as strong as his ability to absorb it. Another interesting fact about his early life is that, the best I can figure, he was in art school at the School of Paris about the same time as the father of Senegalese contemporary art: Iba Ndiaye. It was a big and free-wheeling school so it is certainly possible that their paths did not cross; however, one must wonder if a friendship might have formed or there might have been a cross current of artistic influences. While in Paris, Skunder reported to be influenced by Barque, Picasso, and he often mentioned Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. However, as an impressionable young adult, he recalled that on a personal as well as a societal level it was Paris that made its mark. It was Paris that allowed him the freedom and independence to move outside the beautiful, but conservative, constricted, and traditional Ethiopian society he had known. In Ethiopia artistic freedom and experimentation would not have been welcomed or encouraged. Paris is the place that Skunder was both encouraged and allowed to become Ethiopia’s first modern contemporary artist. Skunder stayed in Paris well after his education ended. Paris has a way of capturing your attention and your heart. When he returned to Ethiopia he taught at their School of Fine Arts and he made such an impression that the half dozen “second generation” artists I knew, to the person, talked about their personal struggle to create their own visual “voice” and independence. It is my opinion the Skunder influence was so strong that some of them, sadly, never did. While in Ethiopia, there was an interesting and unusual work that Skunder created. He was there just at the time when Hilton was building the first international hotel in the country. One wall of the main restaurant/bar was a glass wall composed of 6″ × 6″ squares each encased in a heavy picture frame cornice. They invited Skunder to create an abstract work of each of those 6″ × 6″ squares. The abstraction of the panels would have been a challenge [End Page 14] for anyone who had not seen abstract art, but they certainly announced the “newness” of the Hilton Hotel. At least twenty-five years later I went for the first time to the Hilton with my wife and two Ethiopian children. We walked into the Hilton and there in front of us were Skunder’s works, many of them in disarray. A number had slipped out of position and some were loosely positioned as if waiting permanent mounting. I took this oversight to the hotel manager who, I think out of both embarrassment and gratitude, insisted we stay in the Hilton for free. Eventually, the works were properly placed and protected, and I take pride in that. ROWELL: Could you explain exactly where that artwork was mounted in the Hilton in Addis Ababa? During my first trip to Ethiopia, Dagmawi Woubshet and Elizabeth Giorgis took me to the Hilton for tea. What a pity that I did not see Skunder’s work there. Where specifically at the Hilton was his art displayed? KARG: I don’t stay...

Books to Be Looked At

This article explores a trend in contemporary Cuban art that takes the book as its subject and object. It attributes the renewed interest to factors ranging from a changing textual environment in public spaces to the rise of digital content to newly re-discovered traditions from historic and neo-avant-gardes, among others. It first maps out a number of new artworks about books, then turns in the second half to focus on two book-based art projects of particular note : La Maleza, an editorial project by Lester Alvarez, and a series of 2015 interventions into Havana's Fayad Jamis bookstore organized by Yornel Martinez, whose own artworks are also analyzed .

Architectural Ruins and Urban Imaginaries: Carlos Garaicoa’s Images of Havana

Contemporary Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa juxtaposes photographic images of Havana’s architectural ruins with timidly articulated drawings that trace the outlines of the dilapidated buildings in empty urbanscapes. Each of these fragile drawings, often composed of delicate threads adhered to a photograph of a site after demolition, serves as a vestige of the sagging structure that the artist photographed prior to destruction. The dialogue that emerges from these photograph/drawing diptychs implies the unmooring of the radical utopian underpinnings of revolutionary ideology that persisted in the policies of Cuba’s Período especial (Special Period) of the 1990s, and suggests a more complicated narrative of Cuba’s modernity, in which the ambiguous drawings—which could indicate construction plans or function as mnemonic images—represent empty promises of economic growth that must negotiate the real socio-economic crises of the present. This article proposes that Garaicoa’s critique of the goals and outcomes of the Special Period through Havana’s ruins suggests a new articulation of the baroque expression— one that calls to mind the anti-authoritative strategies of twentieth-century Neo-Baroque literature and criticism. The artist historically grounds the legacy of the Cuban Revolution’s modernizing project in the country’s real economic decline in the post-Soviet era, but he also takes this approach to representing cities beyond Cuba’s borders, thereby posing broader questions about the architectural symbolism of the 21st-century city in the ideological construction of modern globalizing society.

Arte cubano contra la homofobia: Corpus frágile, una poética de resistencia

El presente artículo analiza la serie titulada Corpus frágile del artista cubano Eduardo Hernández Santos (La Habana, 1966). Este trabajo nos enfrenta a los fragmentos de un cuerpo alimentado por la compleja problemática que implica el hecho de ser homosexual en Cuba. Así, estas fotografías construyen un hombre que desmonta el arquetipo patriarcal de virilidad y derriba el caduco patrón masculino que la propia Revolución Cubana ha creado a lo largo de estos cincuenta y seis años de trayectoria. Estas y otras maniobras alimentan la carga ideológica de Corpus frágile para construir una personal iconografía de la resistencia.

¿Meter el arte en el mundo? Sociedad, conducta y arte en las propuestas de Tania Bruguera.

El presente ensayo versa sobre el impulso constante en la poética de la artista cubana Tania Bruguera hacia una búsqueda de mecanismos, estrategias y herramientas para incluir el arte en el mundo. Proposiciones que van en contraposición a la práctica de inclusión de otros aspectos de la vida cotidiana en el arte de manera superficial, sin una real indagación sobre los motivos y objetivos que mueven el acercamiento del arte con la vida. Para comprender esta trayectoria y como esta desemboca en una mimetización casi completa entre arte y sociedad se hará un análisis de dos momentos de la carrera de la artista. Primeramente de las acciones impulsadas por la Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, tamizadas por los estudios de estética relacional de Nicolas Bourriaud. Desembocando, en un segundo momento, en sus últimas acciones como el Partido del Pueblo Migrante y el Movimiento Inmigrante Internacional, que se aproximan a la idea de antagonismos propuesta por Claire Bishop, debido al desarrollo de sus conceptos de arte útil y de arte de conducta.

Identidades en tránsito: Reformulando el Caribe desde España a través de la obra de Gertrudis Rivalta y Brenda Cruz.

Este artículo analiza las obras Soy Cuba y Verano de la artista cubana Gertrudis Rivalta y Soy: un cuerpo tatuado y Fronteras de la puertorriqueña Brenda Cruz, en las que ambas creadoras, que emigraron a España hace casi dos décadas, problematizan acerca de los movimientos migratorios, la raza, la identidad cultural y la ciudadanía en el Caribe hispano, profundizando en nociones como la de “mulata”, “transculturación” y “otredad” desde una perspectiva de género, decolonial y autobiográfica. Teniendo en cuenta su condición de mujeres, mulatas, caribeñas, migrantes y artistas, utilizan sus proyectos creativos como altavoz desde cual reivindicar visibilidad e igualdad para los sujetos afrodescendientes, tanto dentro como fuera del Caribe, especialmente de las mujeres, reconociendo a la mulata como símbolo de la hibridez de sus naciones, en donde la herencia africana es tan importante como la española/europea; a la par que critican la imagen estereotipada y prejuiciosa que de la mujer caribeña se tiene en Occidente, así como de todos sus ciudadanos y del Caribe en general -especialmente perceptible cuando se vive en la diáspora, como ellas. Asimismo, en dos de las obras objeto de estudio cuestionan la eficacia de los gobiernos ante el problema de la inmigración, criticando la insensibilidad de la sociedad receptora hacia el drama de sus protagonistas, así como los abusos y precariedad a la que éstos son sometidos para optar a un futuro mejor, y nuevamente al estatus de “ciudadano”.

Itinerarios de artistas cubanos en México: Pensar la ciudadanía desde otro lugar.

La reconfiguración del concepto de ciudadanía en el Caribe hispano, tomando en cuenta los procesos migratorios, son abordados a través de las experiencias de un grupo de artistas cubanos. La presencia de México como paradigma y lugar de vivencias personales y profesionales para los creadores cubanos, se incluye en este análisis de los itinerarios artísticos de la ciudadanía. El tema de la revisitación de la cultura latinoamericana, a partir del contacto del artista cubano con el universo mítico de la cosmogonía mesoamericana, ofrece alternativas para el análisis de los procesos creativos y de las interacciones con sus respectivos contextos de formación y realización y exhibición de sus propuestas. La postura ética del artista cubano ante el tema migratorio y su exploración en nuevas acepciones de ciudadanía, son abordadas en el texto a través de la obra de artistas como Juan Francisco Elso, Leandro Soto, José Bedia y Sandra Ramos. Los repertorios sígnicos que se generan a partir de la migración, operan como dispositivos de significado y se integran a un discurso visual profundamente reflexivo acerca de la ciudadanía, entre la política y la estética.

On Truth and Opacity. Symbolic Translation and Legibility in Contemporary Text-Based Cuban Art

This paper examines text-based artworks that employ symbolic translations as a way of analyzing the discursive constrains regulating the Cuban public sphere. Through a revision of artistic projects that turn to translation and intend to provoke the spectator’s active engagement, I seek to understand which possibilities are opened by translation in order to escape the burdens of representation and commoditization shaping contemporary Cuban art. I argue that the encouragement of direct experience could be framed as that possible alternative. The potential attributed to experience and practicality, nevertheless, cannot be directly deduced from the artist’s intentions, being contingent ultimately of how each project works.

Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of Fidel Micó: A Case Study

AbstractThe Fidel Mico Catalogue Raisonne serves as an example of the type of research project a single scholar with limited resources can create. The author describes his methodology in exploring and documenting the works of the Cuban painter Fidel Mico, the obstacles he faces with provenance research, the challenges of compiling an accurate catalogue raisonne, and his goals for the project. Although the project is currently the work of an individual researcher, additional resources and scholarly collaboration could broaden the scope to increase its value for scholars of Cuban art.

El negro(a) en la pintura y la poesía de Max Jiménez

The theme of Max Jimenez in his painting is mainly black and, above all, the black Cuban woman. Much of his work with this subject occurs between the decades of the thirties and forties of the twentieth century. Jimenez is considered an avant-garde, particularly expressionist, though his work also presents influence of other Vanguards, and is an expression of Latin American identity. In the same period, the black man and black woman as a motif in painting the Cuban avant-garde, it is uncommon as if it is in the case of Max Jimenez, who was not a Cuban national. This near absence of black as the theme of these Cuban artists, is notable for being the black important part of Cuban ethnic and cultural composition.With respect to poetry , Jimenez shows the same identification with Afro-Cuban , similar , at the time, which only shows the great mulatto poet Nicolas Guillen.In the comparison between poetry and painting Jimenez, the black man, especially black woman, is a central theme in his paintings , often tied to the land , often with a strong presence. In his poetry is not an issue that appears frequently because only dedicates three poems, but the place of enunciation and the attitude of the lyric speaker shows identification and involvement with black , black and culture as seen in his painting

Stillness in Motion: Todos los caminos conducen al mar

'The photographic', as I imagine it, is not reducible to photography even while borrowing part of its soul and the fate of which we believed photography to be the guardian. The photographic exists somewhere in-between; it is a state of 'in-betweenness' in movement, it is that which interrupts, that paralyses; in immobility, it perhaps bespeaks its relative impossibility.-Raymond Bellour, Concerning 'The Photographic'Installation artworks are participatory sculptural environments in which the viewer's spatial and temporal experience with the exhibition space and the various objects in it forms part of the work itself. These pieces are meant to be experienced as activated spaces rather than as discrete objects: they are designed to 'unfold' during the spectator's experience in time rather than to be known visually all at once. Installations made with media screens are especially evocative in that as environmental, experiential sculptures, they stage temporal and spatialised encounters between viewing subjects and technological objects, between bodies and screens. A potentially new mode of screen-reliant spectatorship emerges in the process.-Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation ArtconteMpoRARy ARtists ' cineMA hAs ReceiveD incReAseD schoLARLy attention internationally as film and video produced by visual artists highlights the need for expanded frameworks in the interpretation and analysis of moving image production.1 The work which came to prominence as video art in the 1960s and continued into various forms of site-specific installation now encompasses a range of material that brings new perspective to the idea of the cinematic. Artists' cinema is produced principally for the art gallery, the museum and biennial exhibitions. Freed from the physical space of the cinema as viewing context, this work creates modes of perceiving and interacting which reconfigure our ways of thinking in relation to elements such as screen, image, sound and dimension in time-based media. In the Anglophone Caribbean, artists' film and video has received attention in art journals, but is seldom discussed in academic publications.2 Yet this work offers an opportunity for exploring the ways in which contemporary art might contribute to innovation in both cinema practice and cinema theory. I am interested in the ways in which specific forms of art practice might allow one to think through the interpenetration of visual media in the wider arena of moving image studies.This essay is a reflection on the video installation Todos los caminos conducen al mar (All Roads Lead to the Sea) (1997-2007) by Cuban artists Liudmila Velasco and Nelson Ramirez de Arellano Conde - and on the issue of the relation between still and moving images raised by the work. The artists - known professionally as Liudmila & Nelson - have been working together in conceptual photography since 1995. They began their video practice in 2001. Todos los caminos conducen al mar was originally produced and exhibited as still photography - a large collage measuring 3 metres by 37 centimetres which documented ten streets in Havana that lead to the sea. It was produced in 1996 (Figure 1). The idea for completing this project as a video installation was present at the inception and was realised in 2007 (Figure 2).3 The same streets were videotaped and the installation was produced as a five-channel projection displayed across what appears to be one continuous screen.4 The video is run as a loop of approximately twelve minutes. Each channel has a unique soundtrack - ambient noise of the street as well as music and singing (in Spanish). Each channel shows two streets, flanked by colonial buildings which direct the viewer's attention to the final destination - the water at the Malecon.5 The images are offered to us through a stationary camera which captures the comings and goings of pedestrians in the foreground and middle ground and vehicles in the distance at the sea. …

United in Love & Violence

United in Love & Violence Marc Jampole (bio) Rootwork Veronica Golos Three: A Taos Press www.3taospress.com 122 Pages; Print, $25.00 Veronica Golos’s Rootwork packs structural elements as densely as the underground root system of a tree that graces its cover and many of its pages. She weaves at least three different organizing principles into her material, starting with the absolutely beautiful graphic design, which is dominated by the cover’s crisp photo of a sculpture of a root in electrical wire, paper, acrylics, and fabric, created by contemporary Cuban artist Jorge Mayet. Each chapter begins with a block of yellowing parchment, as if from an antique book, on which we see the chapter number, the years covered by the chapter, the Mayet root image, and the words of a popular spiritualist. After a blank page, the second printed page of the chapter always contains quotes. To the right of the poems, presented as letters or diary entries of either American abolitionist John Brown or his devoted wife Mary Day Brown, sits a postage-stamp sized image of whoever’s voice it is. One or more poems in every chapter is printed over a shadow image of Mayet’s root. With occasional variation, the book repeats this visually rich and antique-looking design pattern eight times. The second structural layer is the story told in Rootwork’s seven chapters plus coda. The narrative takes a circuitous route, going back in time from Mary Brown mourning her husband’s lynching in 1859 to the early days of their 1833 marriage when he was twice her age, and then forward to the end of Mary’s life. The third level of structure involves the interweaving of the three types of documents that Rootwork comprises, all written by Golos even when attributed to either Brown or his wife: entries from Mary Day Brown’s notebook and letters primarily between the Browns, plus the reconstruction (from someone’s notes) of a speech Mary gave near the end of her life; a “chapbook” of May Day Brown’s poems titled “Water Cure” that stands roughly in the middle of the book; and very modernistic poems that Golos calls “ghost code” poems. Each of these types of poems has its own typeface, and each is written in its own style. The contrast between the aesthetics of these three styles is striking. The letters and notebook entries are prosy and plain-speaking, light on imagery and very heavy on narrative: “Mrs. Frances Harper has agreed to deliver this letter. I trust her completely, as do you. She will help, I believe, in the days to come. Trust also in the Lord”; or “We have the slate and coal to mark the lines & together we copy the words of God.” What makes these poems compelling is the story they tell: the history of their relationship focused on the Browns’ self-appointed mission in life—to root out slavery. In Rootwork, both John and Mary are equally devoted to their spouse, their god, and the abolitionist movement—both with a blazing fervor, but of a grim sort, as if the most tender of loves could not be made to crack a smile. In stark contrast to the plain style of these imaginary historical documents stand the imagistic and open-ended ghost code poems. The ghost code poems unfold in stark images, changing perspectives, unconventional syntax, and a relentless musicality: into the hair of tidesI am still dampwhen I wake from before [End Page 13] deep in thisin-between or blaze:(a whistlecan kill) conjure wish shout putscreech field holler blues(for)king or in froth foam in free domesdress in the skins of sky and horizon divedown The 14 poems of “Water Cure” stand somewhere in between the open-ended modernism of the ghost code poems and the prosaic narrative of the letters and notebook. They speak in a straightforward manner but with the elevated sense of meaning that is the essence of poetry: We namedinto each other, named in orderto press each wordcleanly, our forgetting fleshso fragile. or YesterdayI knelt in dry dirt...

Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera (review)

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera. Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 272 pp.Critical texts on the subject of Cuban art from the diaspora have been scant. With few exceptions, the existing literature, frequently the province of exhibition catalogs and artists' monographs, has mainly offered traditional arthistorical analyses or curatorial perspectives on the subject. Most studies about contemporary Cuban diasporic art have understood this artistic production through the limited pathos of exile, construed as one of two opposites in fixed binary: displacement versus rootedness, here versus there. Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House is muchwelcome departure from these dominant narratives. O'Reilly Herrera sets out to intentionally move away from essentialist, and territorially and linguistically based, concepts of racial, national or cultural identification, embracing instead relational, multi-axis analysis in order to capture the movement of culture across borders (9). To that end, the author draws from range of theoretical frameworks that include cultural and literary studies, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, citing the likes of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Hamid Naficy, and the oft-quoted Nicolas Bourriaud from more obscure work titled The Radicant, to locate the (contemporary) narrative of Cuban migration as constitutive of the island's historical identity since its inception. More important, the groundwork she lays serves to problematize the discourse of Cuban displacement outwardly toward more transnational way of thinking about issues of migration, beyond ruptures and continuities, locating notions of exile and diaspora as multidimensional and contemporary processes of identity formations always in flux. Without eschewing the political and affective realities that result from Cuban emigres' loss of the homeland, the author reminds us that cultural identity can be best understood as what Stuart Hall succinctly describes as a state of becoming.O'Reilly Herrera first introduced these identitarian preoccupations in artistic practices in ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of Diaspora (2001). However, in Cuban Artists across the Diaspora, her scholarly propositions enter in conversation with other scholars, such as art historians Kobena Mercer and Margo Machida, whose studies on the intersection between identity construction and visual art practices have been pioneering, principally in looking at the work of African American and Asian American artists, respectively. Thus, situating and contextualizing Cuban artistic production from the diaspora within this growing discursive field is one of the author's most valuable contributions.However, there is an unfortunate disconnect between the fertile critical ground O'Reilly Herrera lays out and her curatorial methodology, which drove the selection of artists and artworks highlighted in the book. The author hung her theoretical propositions on the armature of one single project, the artists who participated in CAFE (Cuban American Foremost Exhibits): The Journeys of Cuban Artists, an itinerant group exhibition initiative conceived by painter and performance artist Leandro Soto. …

Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary by Jacqueline Loss (review)

Reviewed by: Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary by Jacqueline Loss Michael Bustamante Jacqueline Loss. Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 254 pp. Far west along Havana’s Quinta Avenida looms the sprawling, partially vacant former embassy complex of the Soviet Union, built in monumental, constructivist style. But as Jacqueline Loss reveals in this absorbing study, “Sovietizations” of Cuban culture, politics, and economics in the 1970s and 1980s—coupled with islanders’ own travel and educational experiences in the Eastern Bloc—left behind far more than architectural oddities. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuban writers, artists, and filmmakers continue to process the multifaceted material, human, and psychic traces of a relationship with the Soviet Union that at times felt ordinary, even intimate, yet at others, epic, unnatural, or forced. The resulting accumulation of cultural production hovers between interpretations of the Soviet legacy as a repressive scar, nostalgic kitsch, or absurdist joke. Loss opts for a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological approach to her subject. Chapter 1 highlights the efforts of so-called polovinas (children of Cuban and Soviet marriages) to forge bicultural space in the Cuban national ajiaco. Chapter 2 pivots to a different kind of crossing: the drag performance of “La Rusa Roxana Rojo,” whose satires of Eastern Bloc material culture exert “revenge” upon “Soviet grayness” (14). Chapter 3, the most ambitious of the book, assesses “fictitious and pictorial travelogues” (17) of the Soviet Union and Russia from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century—a surprisingly developed and diverse genre in Cuban letters. Chapter 4 considers the writing and art of what Loss terms the “muñequitos rusos [g]eneration” (18), those Cubans indelibly marked in the 1970s and 1980s by Eastern Bloc entertainment products as children. Their post-Soviet melancholia spills onto the pages of a final chapter focused on contemporary Cuban artists’ and writers’ sardonic takes on [End Page 233] Soviet discourses of progress and modernization. If the order or progression of arguments in this analytical “jigsaw puzzle” (15) is at times dizzying—moving back and forth between past and present, island and diaspora, literature and film—this effect appropriately encapsulates a Soviet legacy that remains fragmented, disjointed, and in some ways submerged. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s distinction between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgias in Eastern Europe, Loss positions her eclectic collection of texts against the backdrop of recent Cuban government efforts to repair diplomatic ties with Russia after a prolonged post–Cold War freeze.1 In this light, the 2010 Feria del Libro—with Russia as guest of honor—highlights state attempts to selectively suture cultural and historical memories into a rehabbed narrative of “Russian-Cuban friendship” and common resistance to US hegemony. In contrast, the “reflective” nostalgics of Loss’s literary and artistic archive remain more circumspect, hunting down the Russian science fiction films of youth, yet lingering on the asymmetries of a thirty-year partnership that did not always live up to pretensions of eternal brotherhood. Indeed, while Cuban intellectuals and politicians have long distinguished their country’s relationship with the Soviet Union from a prerevolutionary history of dependence on the United States, the specter of empire haunts many of Loss’s sources. Cubans jokingly disparaged Russian technical and military advisers as bolos (bowling pins). Yet such benign expressions of cultural superiority did not diminish the ways Soviet “structure[s] of knowledge” (7), consumer products, heroes, and visions of modernizing, technological utopias (contrasted with perpetual Cuban underdevelopment) bored their way into Cuban consciousness, especially that of youth. When Cuban writers critically assessed Cuban-Soviet ties—particularly in the wake of perestroika—the ultimate “incommensurability” of Russian and Cuban historical circumstances, cultural outlooks, and power relations came to the fore. Novels and short stories described the racism suffered by darker-skinned Cubans contracted to work in Russia, not to mention their exotic appeal to Soviet women, some of whom relocated to Cuba to find themselves marooned in the post-Soviet “Special Period” of the 1990s. In this way, writers on and off the island exposed the “tense and tender ties” of empire of which Ann Laura Stoler has written in another...

From Pancho’s Hankie to Pablo’s Hippo: An Interdisciplinary Tour of Latin American Popular Culture

From Pancho’s Hankie to Pablo’s Hippo:An Interdisciplinary Tour of Latin American Popular Culture Emily Hind Geoffrey Kantaris and Rory O’Bryen (Eds). Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect. Woodbridge UK: Tamesis, 2013. Pp. 314. ISBN 978-1-85566-264-3. Kantaris and O’Bryen have edited a brilliant volume that makes excellent use of the academic reader’s precious time. The impressive range of material, drawn from Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, entertains and informs. From the ambiguities of Cuban art in a global market to the authority-confounding “reverse” graffiti in São Paulo, this book covers culturally intriguing topics without simplification of their possible “popular” nature. Excellent photographs support the discussions when helpful. All serious academic libraries should own this book. The introduction supplies a masterful, if thickly written, overview of the popular. Kantaris and O’Bryen reinforce their theoretically solid thirty-eight page text with an extensive bibliography, ranging from William Rowe and Vivian Schelling’s Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (1991) to thought by Gramsci, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, among many others. Next, Francisco Ortega’s dazzling first chapter recovers the various etymologies of el pueblo, a concept subject to significant change. Ortega argues that Christian religion, urban geography, and political voices inform just a few of the documented incarnations of the pueblo. His concluding remarks on spectrality as characteristic of the “people” unsettle with the observation that “emancipation” is “produced as a social impossibility” (64). The remaining ten articles fall into three sections, “Politics,” “Media,” and “Affect.” My review organizes these texts by nationality. Two pieces contemplate Argentina. Joanna Page’s wonderfully intriguing article on Lucrecia Martel’s films ducks the prevailing approach to Martel’s work. Page overcomes the reader’s initial objection that Martel’s work is not popular but “arthouse.” The critic’s luminous alternative examination of patternings in the films, inspired by Bergson and Deleuze, searches for “relations” rather than “essences,” and thus offers an exciting approach to Martel’s cinema. The last piece in the volume, by Edward King, studies the Argentine comic book series Cybersix, created by the writer Carlos Trillo and artist Carlos Meglia, [End Page 206] and first published between 1993 and 1999. King harnesses Bernard Stiegler and Deleuze’s differing notions on affect to study the conflicted character Cybersix, an unhappy android in a “chaotic and depersonalized end of the century,” who is hunted by the former Nazi doctor Reichter. According to King, the character arc developed for the protagonist “stages the anxious process of coming to terms with the increasing externalization of memory in technological systems” (273). This timely concern extends far beyond a graphic novel, although King carefully respects the context supplied by the detailed plot. Cybersix suspects that all her memories may be programmed by her nefarious creator, and thus the reader and character focus “on the repeated attempts and repeated failures to ‘capture’ or narrativize the realm of affect” (277). Clearly, King challenges the idea that comic books fail sophisticated readings. Three additional pairs of articles feature the popular in Cuba, Brazil, and Colombia. Stephen Hart contemplates Cuban santería from the complexities of a double economy and points out the existence of a third, “supernatural economy” that intersects with the “money economy,” itself bifurcated between the Cuban peso economy and the more lucrative CUC/tourist economy and its “peso convertible” (worth 24 Cuban pesos). In a parallel study of “Refuse and Disjecta Aesthetics,” Erica Segre returns to the multiple currencies of the Cuban economy and shows how “convertible” art tests the limits of the transferable, in terms of the local environments that feed a global art market. The specialist and nonspecialist alike will find Hart’s and Segre’s perspicacious analyses of great interest. Turning to Brazil, Lúcia Sá writes on the points of contact between two favela films, Antônia and Cidade de Deus. This culturally sensitive analysis points out that neither film makes good on its “documentary orientation”: Sá argues that Antônia’s answer to the all-male barbarity portrayed in Cidade de Deus is a sanitized, women-centered version of daily life and popular culture, “which ironically reinforces...

Cuban Art and Culture In and Around the 1939 New York World’s Fair

Displays of Cuban art and culture were present at a number of sites associated with the 1939 New York World’s Fair. At the fairgrounds, allegorical murals and sculptures decorated the Cuban national pavilion, while dancers performed at the independently owned Cuban Village in the Amusement Zone. In Manhattan, the Riverside Museum displayed Cuban artworks as part of the US government-sponsored Latin American Exhibition of Fine and Applied Art. This article explores how the concerns and tensions between the organizers of these diverse contexts, each with unique political, economic and cultural motivations, informed presentations of Cuban art and culture in and around the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Review: Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933–1959, by Timothy Hyde

Timothy Hyde Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933–1959 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, x + 371 pp., 11 color and 67 b/w illus. $31.50, ISBN 9780816678112 Through times of democracy and dictatorship, revolution and rebuilding, cultural actors in twentieth-century Cuba self-consciously constructed national traditions, synthesizing colonial anachronisms left after the island’s independence from Spain in 1898 with imported modernist innovations. Between the ouster of the infamous president-cum-dictator Gerardo Machado in 1933 and the revolution of 1959, a complex set of historic, social, and aesthetic conditions emerged that set modern architecture in dialogue with a developing discourse of civil society and constitutionalism. These were years of military rule under Fulgencio Batista, an autocrat who haunted the Cuban political landscape as a behind-the-scenes puppeteer, quasi-legitimate president, and eventually an unfettered dictator until Castro’s coup. Alongside politicians and civil servants, writers, artists, urbanists, and architects simultaneously struggled to define Cuba’s national identity. The resulting urban forms and social and legal histories are the subject of Timothy Hyde’s Constitutional Modernism . The book focuses in particular on modernist architecture and urbanism as forms of civic expression, and it deals almost exclusively with the capital city of Havana, which is understood as an urban metonym for the nation as a whole. It brings welcome complexity to discussions of mid-twentieth-century Cuban art and architecture, which are often framed in terms of design typologies. Bringing the social, civic, and architectural realms into dialogue with one another, Hyde asks, “How does architecture make its appearance in civil society?” (2). His thorough and scrupulous study charts the confluence of politics and architecture, anchored by the discourse of constitutionalism. The Cuban Constitution of 1940 aimed to establish a stable, independent republic, enacting a historical transition from colony to nation, a transition that many still believed incomplete. It is no small thing, then, for Hyde to claim that the principles and intentions of …

Relics and Erotics: Cuban Art after the Revolution

Relics and Erotics:Cuban Art after the Revolution Abigail McEwen Rolando Pérez. Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2012. 318 pp. Rachel Weiss. To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 322 pp. Tropes of both the “Baroque” and the “utopian” have long persisted in readings of twentieth-century Latin American art and literature. Two new books, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts by Rolando Pérez and To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art by Rachel Weiss, draw upon these interpretive metaphors in considering aspects of Cuban visual culture in the decades following the Revolution. Their subjects are separated by time and space: Sarduy left Cuba in 1960, remaining in exile for the duration of his life, and Weiss’s narrative unfolds almost exclusively in Havana during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet their exegeses of opposing impulses—toward the imperfect (likely from the Portuguese barroco, or “rough pearl”), on the one hand, and on the other toward the impossible ideal—speak analogously to the historical conditions that have shaped the past half-century of Cuban arts and letters. These books contribute to a body of scholarship around contemporary Cuban art that has swelled in recent years, sparked by reconsiderations of post-Revolutionary culture at large and, with respect to the visual arts, seemingly insatiable market interest. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera’s recent book, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora (2011), describes the connective tissue between Weiss and Pérez’s contributions, chronicling the amorphous landscape of Cuban art in exile. Lynette M.F. Bosch, in Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity and the Neo-Baroque (2004), focused on a very specific Cuban community (her Neo-Baroque does not engage Sarduy’s). Luis Camnitzer (New Art of Cuba [rev. ed., 2003]) and Holly Block (Art Cuba: The New Generation [2001]) provided authoritative, early accounts of the “New Cuban Art,” defining the movement in generational and historical terms and relating key documentary and encyclopedic information. A holistic history of contemporary Cuban art, one attempting to [End Page 109] relate work by artists who stayed on the island and those who left, remains to be written. Despite the proliferation of these targeted histories and of monographic studies, Cuba and the Caribbean tend to be dissociated from surveys of contemporary Latin American art. Differences in postwar developments need not preclude conceptual homologies, however, and hemispheric constructions of the Baroque and the utopian may yet prove instructive in this regard. Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor thoughtfully engaged the leitmotif of the Baroque in their exhibition, Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000), although they referenced Cuba at only a theoretical level. By and large, scholars in literary fields have taken the lead in considering these aesthetic questions in relation to hemispheric topoi. Recently published books by Lois Parkinson Zamora (The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction [2006]) and Monika Kaup (Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film [2012]) are particularly notable; Rafael Rojas (Las repúblicas de aire: utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica [2009]) and Antoni Kapcia (Cuba: Island of Dreams [2000]), among others, have critically explored utopian discourse. The recuperation of Sarduy as a bridge figure between literature and aesthetics may serve not only to better illuminate his own work, as Pérez’s book begins to do, but also to more fully integrate the Cuban philosophical tradition within the fields of Latin American art history and criticism. Read together, these books by Pérez and Weiss offer new meditations on the conjunction between Baroque and utopian praxis in post-Revolutionary Cuban visual culture. They manifest two discrete approaches to the field—academic monograph; eyewitness historical survey—and yet each seeks in a basic way to excavate an ideational provenance for creative work across Cuba’s cultural field. Before further consideration of common interests, each book is here discussed separately and within the scope of its given intentions. Reimagining the Neobaroque Body A...

Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba

In this age of e-books and mobile media, of pages on screens and images in malleable pixels, this book is the antithesis of all that. A gorgeous, weighty volume with gleaming reproductions and bilingual columns of text, it is a reminder of the sensory pleasures books can inspire. But this book appeals beyond the aesthetic. As a history, archive, and catalogue of Cuba's forgotten Grupo Antillano, it is also a necessary intervention in the political and cultural histories of race in the Americas. The Grupo Antillano was an art collective comprised of Cuban artists who exhibited their work between the years of 1978 and 1982. Led by the sculptor and printmaker Rafael Queneditt Morales, this loosely organized group of visual artists understood themselves to be revaluing the disparaged legacies of afrocubanismo and negritude. Their art posited an ongoing African presence in Cuban culture, drawing from surrealist, abstract expressionist, and modernist idioms in provocative rebukes to racism in socialist Cuba. More than that, they aimed to incorporate music, dance, history, and literature in their resuscitation of cultural forms. Working across disciplines, they collaborated on performances, organized forums, and staged concerts within exhibits in efforts to create a broad public. This short-lived assemblage of creative energy faded and left only the faintest traces, until now, in Cuban history and art history.The book itself compiles different kinds of texts and images. A testimonial section includes short essays by the artists with their reflections on the intentions and motivations of the Grupo Antillano's project. Replicas of press clippings, posters, and reviews reconstruct the exhibits from multiple perspectives. Perceptive short essays by the art historian and critic Guillermina Ramos Cruz on each of the artists, excerpts from reviews and critiques, and reproductions of the art highlight the participants' specific qualities. Finally, a sampling of works from a recent exhibit that paid tribute to the Grupo Antillano completes the volume and reminds readers of ongoing artistic dialogues about blackness in contemporary Cuba. The array of media provides a visual and discursive immersion in this creative milieu.As the editor, Alejandro de la Fuente uses his essay to situate the Grupo within the Cuban state's long and twisted relationship with Afro-Cuban cultural production. Opening with a brief account of “drapetomania,” the nineteenth-century pathologizing diagnosis of slaves' desire to flee their bondage, he traces shifting meanings and comes to rest on a notion, developed by Caribbean intellectuals such as Edouard Glissant and René Depestre, of cultural cimarronage, understood as an effort to use aesthetic creation to reshape dire histories. De la Fuente frames the work of the Grupo Antillano with this idea: they were, according to him, the then-contentious and now forgotten inheritors of efforts to sustain and reinvent connections to African cultural forms in Caribbean contexts and to voice critiques of the marginalization of those legacies.From a historian's, rather than an art critic's, perspective, the volume's emphatic beauty does not mute the controversial, political nature of the art. The changing status of Afro-Cuban spiritual and artistic practices in the revolution, ranging from initial condemnation as decadent to Castro's eventual declaration of Cuba as an Afro-Latin country, existed in parallel to but did not extinguish the everyday disregard for people of African descent. Grupo Antillano's artists intended to intervene and reconfigure this with their invocations of Yoruba gods and captive pasts. They did so by drawing from the kinds of bold abstractions that Wifredo Lam, an acknowledged influence and eventual participant, used to conjure coexistent beauty and pain. At the height of the Grupo's public presence, Volumen Uno, a rival artistic movement that would eventually become emblematic of Cuban contemporary art, declared such modern formalism passé. The political and aesthetic roots of the evaluation and subsequent demise of Grupo Antillano remain entangled, and de la Fuente's deft presentation invites further inquiry. The volume does not resolve the debates surrounding the representation of slavery, race, spirituality, and belonging, but it recovers the visual and textual contexts, both in the late 1970s and the early twenty-first century, in which those debates took place and persist.