VIII Bienal de Habana: various venues

ArtForum, Feb, 2004 by Christian Rattemeyer

Organized by a team of six local curators affiliated with the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo Lam, including its director, Hilda Maria Rodriguez Enriquez, the eighth Bienal de Habana faced difficulties on several fronts--political, financial, and conceptual. After the Cuban government arrested seventy-five Cuban intellectuals in the months prior to the exhibition and the biennial failed to distance itself from the government's actions, the organization found itself severely compromised, as key European foundations withdrew their support. A statement by the president of the biennial's board in the exhibition catalogue sweepingly condemns the withdrawal of funding as "part of the wave of hostile actions carried out by the European Union against Cuba." The biennial struggled as well in trying to maintain its role in relation to the growing number of other recurring international art events. As Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer writes in his contribution to the catalogue, rather than partake in the "system that defines art at a given moment," the Havana biennial has traditionally aimed to "underline the ethical context within which that definition occurs." Inscribing the exhibition into a discourse that favors moral judgments over aesthetic ones, and local authenticity over global intelligibility, Camnitzer iterates a position often assumed by "peripheral" biennials that claim an advantage derived from geographical (and economic) marginality. With this installment, titled "Art and Life," the Biennial attempted to perpetuate its ethical prerogative while simultaneously aligning itself with the history of the European avant-garde and the Cuban revolution. The hybrid agenda was an awkward one. Referencing artistic practices of the 1910s and '20s as well as the climate of cultural and political change in the 1960s, the exhibition merged the current trend toward reengaging historical utopian propositions with Cuba's grandiose postrevolutionary rhetoric.

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Camnitzer, while not among the exhibition's curators, went on to provide lucid guidance as to how the exhibition's theme might be understood: "If Art and life as title of this Eighth Biennial pretends to be more than a purely anecdotic theme, the election of the phrase revives two main hopes that go hand-in-hand: the blockade of the temptations of mercantilist artistic tourism, and the maintenance of a forum for discussion of the ethical contexts that to such great extent go beyond the mere making of objects." Here, Camnitzer confronts the most paradoxical aspects of contemporary art in Cuba head-on: For as art in Cuba is less policed than other goods (it's not embargoed either), artistic production has become a tempting prospect toward participating in the world market. And while the desired discussion of ethical contexts beyond the mere making of objects would be a more radical conceptual proposition, it would require a culture of tolerance and openness incompatible with government censorship.

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The biennial brought together works by 150 artists and artists' groups and was largely concentrated in three venues, the Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabana, an eighteenth-century colonial fortress across the bay from the historic city center; the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo Lam; and the Pabellon Cuba, a '60s modernist trade-fair pavilion. Several smaller projects were scattered throughout the city, and a range of additional exhibitions coincided with the main event. There was also a three-day forum for discussion, which complemented the organizers' interest in exchange and debate. But while the symposia addressed theoretical issues raised by the biennial, as well as current curatorial practices, the exhibition itself remained largely disconnected from the debates. Rather, the correspondence between art and life seemed to be confined mostly to works that engaged with aspects of everyday living, such as domestic environments. A number of artists presented dinner tables and food as signifiers and sites of intimacy and ritual. Only a few artists attempted to interact directly with the living conditions of Havana or their own city or country of origin: The Havana-based artists' group Department of Public Interventions staged several events in public places in Cuba's capital; Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg's video Devotionalia, 1995-2003, documented a project for which the artists worked with inner-city youths in Rio de Janeiro, producing plaster casts of hands and feet to learn about creativity and regain a sense of self; and Mexican-born artist Pablo Helguera presented Instituto de la Telenovela: Fase Habana (El Derecho de Nacer) (Soap Opera Institute: Havana Phase [The Right to Be Born]), 2003, a long-term research project about the impact of the telenovela on Latin American culture.

Absolut Revolution, 2003, an installation by Nelson Ramirez de Arellano and Liudmila Velazco, most readily acknowledges the competing influences that the curators tried to bring into play for the biennial. Crossbreeding revolutionary symbolism, popular objects, and icons of avant-garde art history, the artists effectively vacate these signifiers and ironically undermine their heroic histories. The protagonist in Absolut Revolution is the monument to Cuban writer and independence fighter Jose Marti, a well-known feature of the Havana cityscape and a favorite backdrop for Castro's early public addresses. Inserting an image of the monument into iconic photographs--from Rodchenko's mother to Man Ray's Violon d'Ingres and August Sander's peasants in their Sunday best--the artists inscribe the multilayered revolutionary history of Cuba into the tradition of avant-garde Western art. Displayed in a mock living room, placed on side tables and hung in small recesses and corners, the framed manipulated images are kept deliberately ambiguous in their purpose, while three-dimensional replicas of the monument, assembled from small Cuban flags rolled on wooden sticks, add to the obsessive character of the room.