Traversing: Shifts in identity and gender

Juan Abreu (Havana, 1952) Juan Abreu has lived outside of Cuba for years. His work has links to the past, to the island, and to his old house, from which he feels expelled. The installation, titled "New homes, new maps" is in a varied format and adapted to the exhibit space. It consists of drawings on paper hung from taught cables as if it were a laundry line. It also has photographic material in which his house is reproduced. The artist provides this explanation of the photo: "This was my house, number 4- 302, between F and G. Mail route ‘POEY’, Havana, 1982." Opposite this picture is another in which one can see that the house has disappeared. Beneath the photo: "This is what remains of it. So I said to myself: ‘To hell with it. Now all the houses of the world numbered 302 are my house. I am my own country and my own house’." One’s house is one’s own island. Abreu is also an island to himself. Just as are others: Leonardo Padura, Abilio Estévez, Ernesto Mestre, Zoe Valdés and Cabrera Infante, preceded by Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy. Abreu makes no concessions. He has settled into his nomadic condition and does not try to belong to anything or anyone. The sea, with its immense abyss, is the distance that separates him from the island that he abandoned, where his house is no longer his house, so the loss is complete. His dreams of escaping from the island are recalled in the introduction to the anthology of poetry by Arenas. Any vessel - "a dinghy, a sailboat, an inflatable raft, a submarine, a cargo ship, a canoe, a raft, a trained shark, a giant crab" – anything was imagined as something that could take them "far away from the island." The sea was infinite. It represented freedom, and its waves, protective arms. Memories are traps that he refuses to accept, with a few exceptions, such as when he says "I keep a tactile memory of the sand and of the saliva-covered green reefs." His work is particularly cartographic, but the image of a house dominates and is reproduced photographically in all the houses with street number 302, from any street, from any city in the world that the artist has visited. These houses are connected to each other by a string or rope which imitates the irregular line of a border or the lines separating countries and continents. The strings can also be highways that unite cities or urban centers, identified for having a house or houses with street number 302. The world is his world, his house, a self that does not allow itself to be occupied because it lives inside of itself as a type of liberation from imposed reality. This self was part of a wish whose fulfillment meant giving up the island and beginning a difficult exodus. The only compensation for this was the dream of freedom. The inception of the piece goes back to 1996 when Abreu did his first version of this installation in the Joyce Goldstein Gallery in Soho, New York. Juan Pablo Ballester (Camagüey, Cuba, 1966) This artist has made Barcelona, Spain, his home since 1994. Ballester’s latest photography series (27) is entitled, "From nowhere". Like the artist Marta María Pérez Pravo, Ballester does not reside in Cuba, and although comparisons are impossible, it is obvious that in these works the sense of their homelessness is a recurrent theme. The only nationality one could assign them would be from "nowhere", or that of a "traversing person"; that is, a person who incorporates all the identities that he/she comes across in real, domestic, daily life. Movement is transforming what they are and where they live on a daily basis. The works that these artists are exhibiting have the same date of production and both are the most recent works of each. Neither of these artists could be absent from this exhibit because their pieces, as with all the others, contribute to showing the dimensions of the various artistic languages, as well as the discursive diversity of their predecessors. The artists agonize over the continuous transformations of the happenings on and off the island. There is no art that is only Cuban, nor any art whose only trait is the place from which it emanates. Art that could be called "Cuban" is international art. In this sense it is from "nowhere", because any specific identity is secondary to its being and existing on a wider stage, a stage that surpasses the limits imposed by an anachronistic notion of country or nation. Of course, there are many implications from the not to distant past of Cuba, a past marked by exodus and a present in constant movement that does not stop dreaming. "We still are searching for a dream / in the contradictions of history / (...) / I know that we will not find the time / that there is no time to shout / that our memory is failing", says the poem by Ricardo Arenas, "Introduction to the symbol of faith". Interestingly, as the poem progresses, the term "dream" is replaced with "time" and finally, with "word" (28). This progression is what occurs in the works of the exhibit (although with a different terminology). In "Traversing" one can find the affirmation of art which has completely left the island, indeed, this being the goal of the majority of these artists. José Ángel Vincench Barrera (Holguín, 1973) The installation "Marking the skin" by José Ángel Vincench Barrera is in the same register. The 62 tattoo tools with symbols of the Cuban officialness constitute a good example of the identity that is printed onto skin permanently, albeit allegorically. The artist proposes tattooing the islanders’ skin so that they will be recognized wherever they go. However, the piece suggests that the tattooing has been done already, as if everyone were marked, just by being Cuban, and that this tattoo stays printed on the skin forever. In fact, in spite of the influence of the saints in the artist’s work, this piece coincides with what Gerado Mosquera says about certain artists such as Glexis Novoa or C. Toirac, whose "most usual critical resource has been the appropriation of official regime imagery and rhetoric only to deconstruct it (20) and reuse it against the mechanisms and representation of power." Saidel Brito Lorenzo (Matanzas, Cuba, 1973) The four paintings by Saidel Brito in this exhibit belong to the installation entitled "History is a cat that defends itself face up", which contains a total of twelve paintings and one small scale bronze sculpture. The sculpture, in the words of the artist, is "a sleeping mouse and a cat lying down next to him with its paw on top of its genitals, waiting for some reaction, all atop a mattress covered with sheets. "Each painting corresponds to a month of the year, with the ideal sexual position according to the horoscope." In the text she wrote for the exhibit catalogue (24), Lupe Álvarez refers to this piece and to the artist’s current projects, providing information for its interpretation. But what one can notice at first sight, before the extensive symbolism attributable to this piece and to all of his work in general, is the narrative quality of a painting that transcends the first surfaces to turn into a sum of surfaces trying to reproduce the movement of an action that the portrait consists of. It is real painting, one that draws. At the same time it reminds us of the pictorial work of Sigmar Polke and his steps for inverting whatever makes a painting static into a dynamic element that prevents one from fixing the image. This type of painting transcends the anecdotal to become painting from anywhere. Indeed, it is organized according to a system of its own signs, ones which go beyond the limits of insularity, allowing themselves to be decoded through the semantic complexity visually insinuated in the painting’s labyrinths. Raúl Ernesto Cordero Cepero (Havana, 1971) Raúl Cordero considers himself "outside of" or non-identified with the concept of Cuban-ness that most of his contemporaries’ work seems to deal with. The island is encountered again everywhere, and in almost all the paradigms that express an identity, by the persons who inhabit it, with the shape of the land and the water that surrounds it. Despite wanting to substitute Cuban-ness for the status of a "traversing" person, this original condition does not become less true, rather, the contrary. It is as if one circumstance needs to be understood as associated with the other. By differentiating it this way we organize a system of signs and a group of rules that stimulates a certain understanding of the text(s) or the various pieces on exhibit. These can be understood as representative of a being and an existence through the way they move and act. Douglas Darnis (Cuba, 1972) "Anthropophagy of geographical fatalism" and "ingenuity of the imagination" by Douglas Darnis are two pieces that "speak" of another landscape, but they are no less Cuban than their predecessors, those from the "ingenious ones", the sugar plantations. These two paintings represent a denouncement of the racist treatment of black people in Cuba and of colonialism in general. The support is a figurative painting and narrative that supports the observation of Kevin Power (22) about the nature of Cuban art, whose interest is never-ending despite countless exhibits held in recent years. Power believes that one of the probable reasons for such an interest is that Cuban art is mainly a point of reflection about the tensions and dramas of life in Cuba. "It is the product of its own extreme difficulties and represents a complex history, originating from the history of this century that involves all of us." It is precisely its difficulty, its cast-away feeling that makes it so interesting to the rest of the world. The world’s attention will continue this way as long as the situation continues." Inés Garrido Ramos (Holguín, 1966) The island of Inés is a more folkloric one, a parody conceived through the resources of naïve art, in which the artist reproduces elements characteristic of orography and the most obvious geographical stereotypes. It is a green map with uneven relief that reproduces the island in three dimensions. The large format that the artist uses also contributes to the definition of this idyllic landscape, a shadow of paradise lost. Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado) (Isla de la Juventud, 1970) The sea reappears strongly in Kcho’s work. The presence of the sea is evoked everywhere and anywhere. The result is the island landscape. The ultimate of landscapes, with its eternal sea and pieces from shipwrecks that have remained anonymous. The raft is the constant motif in all his work. An unprotected raft that moves in a disoriented way amidst an immutable, immeasurable ocean. "The perpetual Raft" (1995): The sea turns into a huge wavy sheet that picks up its dead; a text that is written by those who set off in exodus. The absent figures that set sail in these precarious makeshift rafts are real flesh and bone, although they remain silenced. Kcho’s work could not be understood without the presence of an absolute sea that is objectified and re-contextualized onto terra firma. The ocean in "Regatta" is overloaded with a multitude of vessels that sail on a sinister sea towards an unknown horizon . The great exodus was represented as a type of competition of small empty rafts on a sea with no water, rafts that could make no progress in any direction. In "Illness of the body and idiocy of the soul", the oars are transformed into crutches. It is a paradoxical piece that transforms the necessary instrument for flight into a prosthetic device that leaves his hands helplessly needy. Thus, the man who dreamt of freedom returns as invalid to the same place that he left. The raft is replaced by crutches with little plastic bags of salt or ashes tied to one of the oars. They themselves are part of the raft, the only part left of it, a raft that was rescued without the body that sailed on it. The abandoned oars that have been found on the shore are used for an auxiliary function on land, for those who have survived. The series of paintings on exhibit, whose motif remains that of the oars, reconstructs over its surface the map of the island in parts, as if it were a puzzle. Each oar transports a fragment of the island that has been incorporated into it, as if it were a printed tattoo that would never go away, and as if the island itself had been tattooed upon the skin of the sea. The Carpenters (Alexandre Arrechea Zambrana, Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez and Marco Castillo Valdés); Alexandre Arrechea Zambrano, 1970, Trinidad; Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez, 1969, Caibarién; Marco Castillo Valdés, 1971, Camagüey. The work of the "carpenters" is referred to as such because when they started working the instruments they used were those of a carpenter and so people attached this name to them. In 1994 they decided to permanently adopt the name as a "conceptual declaration". When they made their first big appearance at the biennial of 1994 they initiated a socio-political discourse that they have maintained since then. The pieces that they show in this exhibit are from an earlier period of theirs. Since it is thought to still be valid and since this work is little known, it was decided to bring it back for the exhibit. The "Trojan Horse" (1995) is a symbolic work in its literary dimension and above all, its artistic dimension. It is an installation that shares the two-dimensional world of painting with the three-dimensional world of the vessel and the oars that are outwardly materialized. The mobility of the painted figures is provided by the boat that is attached from the outside, a means of transportation in which passengers supposedly travel. However, it is as if they were on a bicycle or any other vehicle, going nowhere. The irony characteristic of the carpenters adopts a critical stance, questioning a factual situation, while distancing itself from it to transform the models of perceiving reality. In "Hunting", the three artists that make up the group photograph themselves in the countryside of Santa Cruz de Mudela next to the kill, with their rifles on their shoulders, just like conventional portraits. It is a unique piece, made during their stay there in 1995. It was obviously a circumstantial situation and for this reason, it is more interesting in that it reflects a very peculiar period in their lives. This group portrait reminds us of another portrait in which they appear playing golf on the course of the old Havana Country Club, now the School of Art, the place where recent generations of artists have been trained. After this date, the carpenters stopped painting and the carpentry associated with it, to dedicate themselves to furniture-making. "We make furniture; That is, we concentrate on what is the idea of furniture, the metaphor of things, objects, and thought. All of this is done through furniture and design. (25)" They are interested in the inspiration, the ideas, because the material they believe is coincidental. In a similar way they say that what really excites them is doubt. Their production has been consistent. Their current goals revolve around making art that is understood as well in Havana as in New York or Rome, and that the meaning they give their art is communicated to everyone. This is what they are trying to show in one of their recent works, "Transportable City" (2000-2001), a large model of an objectified city, one that can be transported and thus, one that can be from anywhere; a city with no nationality, a real city that brings back the idea of travel as a normal experience; a city that moves with us, making it unnecessary to leave it behind. In fact, the need to belong to an international community is evident in most of the artists of their generation. These artists no longer have to leave the island necessarily, since they do not consider it in any way an obstacle to continue their career’s work. They made this point at the last biennial in Johannesburg, where they were selling land in Cuba. José Armando Mariño (Santiago de Cub, Cuba, 1968) "The Dreamer" by José Armando Mariño is a black man, lying face down, body/vessel has an mast fixed in his back with a flag of the European Union hanging from it. This is the same black man who skies, half-naked, challenging the cold temperatures, amidst a pile of canvasses sewn together and painted with snow-covered landscapes; the same black man looking out across the horizon while seated atop a flimsy structure with the form of a "house", made from recycled materials found in the street. Mariño always works with this multi-colored plaster figure. He is the central figure in all of his installations and has a key place in his paintings. The "dreamer" is a figure who lends himself to many connotations, revealing his miserable condition and permanent dissatisfaction. What does Mariño’s dreamer dream about? The European flag that he carries might be identified with European domination or western domination in general. This western world is where the artist currently lives, producing very expressive art, however, art that is at times hard to place. The dreaming man in the vessel piece is the figure of a black man who is held dominated in a position or pose. At the same time, makes us think of the figure of the swimmer, and therefore, we are taken to the sea, even though we are on terra firma. With his adopted flag, the swimmer joins the great exodus, never looking back. Ibrahim Miranda Ramos (Pinar del Río, 1969) The island takes on the shape of a phantasmagoric silhouette in the case of this artist. The outline of the island is designed with a broader brushstroke, letting the background show through, a dark opaque sea that flows around and under the island. Or it could be an opaque mass of white attacked by a sinister sea. Elsa Mora (Holguín, 1970) In Elsa Mora’s work the exploration of pictorial language figures strongly. She presents eight small collages and five two-dimensional pieces in this exhibit. The latter are intended to be registries in which large amounts of data are inscribed. The enigma behind this is only solved after careful and minute examination. The title of the series is "Unspecific hour that loses its shape as it passes" and each drawing or detail is captured between two pieces of clear glass. This work was exhibited in Barcelona (26) two years ago at a collective exhibit designed to introduce artists such as Mora and Glexis Novoa, among others. Heriberto Mora (Vereda Nueva, Havana, 1965) Another piece done in Santa Cruz is "Christ" by Heiberto Mora, an artist relatively unknown compared to other Cuban artists of his generation. He resides in Miami. The piece is Mora’s Christ, as inspired by Santa Cruz. There is not a lot of information, but the little that does exist leads one to think that the artist has made a transcription of this central figure in baroque religious painting. This is a dramatic Christ that emerges from the darkness, removing himself from the cross; a suffering Christ, whose pain is visible in his posture and gestures, just like the veiled face in whose sadness quietly lay a tragic fate. This work is odd and worthy of being known. It seems to be an isolated case within Cuban art in the past twenty years because its religiousness does not coincide with the influence of the saints in Cuban art, nor with other forms of pagan religion practiced on the island whose codes can be explained through their African origin. Nonetheless, if this work is questioned, and indeed it probably will be questioned by those who go to see it, it will be seen as a rare exception, aesthetically unclassifiable, despite the fact that it seems to draw a certain amount of attention to its dramatic nature and pictorial language. Ordo Amoris Cabinet (Francis Acea, Havana, 1967; Diango, Hernández, Sancti Spíritus, 1970) Due to their training, they never disassociate art and design. They always work from pre-existing objects. Their research deals with the world of artistic artifacts, industrial design and simple handcrafted objects. In 1996 they did their first exhibit, but their work to the present date has been extremely rapid. The photography on display in this exhibit is from "Taxi-limousine", an installation that consists of a car designed by them and manufactured with 3 Russian Lada cars that they bought in Poland. They joined these and built a limousine more that 20 feet long. It is a group taxi, on whose roof are packages and suitcases of absent passengers, tied with a rope. The windows are rolled down due to the heat. The overall impression is one of a public transport from one point on the island to another, the daily domestic movement within one of the urban centers. This installation was presented at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen (1998) and later it traveled to Kunsthaus in Berlin and to the Barbican Centre in London (1999). Last year it went to the Fabbrica del Vappore in Milan. Initially, this installation was going to be included in the present exhibit, but the piece needed to be restored and the car, due to the it size, could not pass through any of the entrances at the Foundation. Therefore, the only option was to use the photograph that Jacobo Carpio had enlarged a few days before the opening of ARCO (2002), by express desire of the artists. The limousine is a taxi for transporting people and baggage, conceived of for Cuba. What stands out is the fact that this is a limousine, that it has been made from a weak car such as the Russian Lada, and to top it off, that it is a collective taxi, a very common vehicle in Cuba. Marta María Pérez Bravo (Havana, 1959) Her latest photographic series is entitled "Three Crowns". Like the artist Ballester, María Pérez Pravo does not reside in Cuba, and although comparisons are impossible, it is obvious that in these works the sense of their homelessness is a recurrent theme. The only nationality one could assign them would be from "nowhere", or that of a "traversing person"; that is, a person who incorporates all the identities that he/she comes across in real, domestic, daily life. Movement is transforming what they are and where they live on a daily basis. The works that these artists are exhibiting both have the same date of production and both are the most recent works of each. Neither of these artists could be absent from this exhibit because their pieces, as with all the others, help to show the dimensions of the various artistic languages, as well as the discursive diversity that precedes them. The artists agonize over the continuous transformations of the happenings on and off the island. There is no art that is only Cuban, nor any art whose only trait is the place from which it emanates. Art that could be called "Cuban" is international art. In this sense it is from "nowhere", because any specific identity is secondary to its being and existing on a wider stage, a stage that surpasses the limits imposed by an anachronistic notion of country or nation. Of course, there are many implications from the not to distant past of Cuba, a past marked by exodus and a present in constant movement that does not stop dreaming. "We still are searching for a dream / in the contradictions of history / (...) / I know that we will not find the time / that there is on time to shout / that our memory is failing", says the poem by Ricardo Arenas, "Introduction to the symbol of faith". Interestingly, as the poem progresses, the term "dream" is replaced with "time" and finally, with "word" (28). This progression is what occurs in the works of this exhibit (although with a different terminology). In the exhibit one can find the affirmation of art which has completely left the island, as is the goal of the majority of these artists. Carlos Quintana (Havana, 1966) Quintana is an artist who has lived in Madrid for many years. His vitality in painting seems limitless. His discourse is essentially a narrative one, represented in the figures that live in his large format paintings, gesturing and establishing communication and dialogue between themselves and the viewer. Quintana also seems to live in this world, one that he himself reproduces. He perceives the pictorial act as some type of ritual that calls upon ghosts. This is done through a language that intensifies the contrasts, bringing out the painting’s expressive capacity. Sandra Ramos (Havana, 1969) Sandra Ramos identifies her body with the island. The island is her. The titles that go with her six islands demonstrate the artist’s intention: "There’s damned water everywhere", "A way to kill your loneliness", "Dream of the prophet", and "Migrations I" and "Migrations II". The island is desire, it is dreamt of and at the same time it dreams. However, it can also be hostile to those who inhabit it. We perceive the Cuban exodus on these islands, which are at the same time one and the same island: the possible island, the future island, and the infinite island, are only some of the names the assigned to them. Lázaro Saavedra González (Havana, 1964) Irony is frequently a weapon for destroying that which seems indestructible and for taking apart a political speech, interrogating it with its own images. This can be seen in the portrait of Marx by Lázaro Saavedra, to which Camnitzer makes lengthy reference (21) in his book on Cuban art in the 1980’s. The title is sufficiently eloquent "Gentlemen, Don’t You See? He is flesh and Bone"/ Caballero, no ven? El era de carne y hueso". This is a conventional portrait in which the artist shows a bloody eye, poking it with one of the most common pictures of Marx. Thus, he shows how a simple distortion is capable of manipulating meaning. Esterio Segura (Santiago de Cuba, 1970) "Up against the Wall" by Esterio Segura is an installation that denounces power and the pressure that one can exert with it. "We are all up against the wall", he commented to me when we he was presenting this piece (23) in Barcelona last year. "No one can escape this fact, nowhere in the world." The piece consists of six arms stuck to the wall by the armpits. They are hard, muscle-covered arms, swimmers’ arms, sugar cane harvester’s arms, or those of a boxer. They are arms of a slave who does not accept his condition; arms of a revolutionary who is being pursued. The artist was newly introduced at the Biennial in Havana (2001), despite the fact that his work was already known internationally. Segura's project allows one to expand the meaning, yet does not direct a uniform conclusion or interpretation. The same is true of his second installation, now part of the exhibit, "A Sleigh Went through city, Havana". A woman dressed in a typical Russian outfit is riding a sleigh pulled by eleven crocodiles. In her hands are ski poles and she imitates the posture of and movements of skiing. Russian music from the 1970’s emanates from inside of the sleigh. The image takes the viewer to a non-existent place: a snow-covered Havana (a place where it never snows and never will), a place where sleighs are pulled by crocodiles, animals that will not survive in a climate that we normally associate with a sleigh. On top of it all is the melody. The reversal of codes prompts one to rethink the meaning behind the utopia in order to subvert reality. On appearance, this reality can be neither altered nor changed, unless it were destroyed.

Traversing: Shifts in identity and gender

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