Affirmation Of The Curatorial Class - Seventh Havana Biennial art exhibition

Afterimage, March, 2001 by Gregory Sholette

The Seventh Havana Biennial (Septima Bienal de la Habana)

Havana, Cuba

November 14, 2000-January 5, 2001

November 17, 2000, arrival, Central Havana

At first sight, the city appears to be an enormous film noir set. Streets are filled with a still functioning fleet of pre-revolution-era Ford and Chevy motorcars that mingle with water trucks and orange pedicabs. Men, women and children spill over broken sidewalks in between picturesque colonial architecture collapsing at a rate of almost one building per day. This leaves a maze of jagged pastel walls and shadowy apertures. Despite all the apparent poverty and physical decay, the Cubans I meet are well educated and robust looking. Compared to other "third-world" nations I have visited, it is clear that the revolution has succeeded in raising most people's living standards. Many also immediately nail down where I am from, leading some individuals to offer me black market cigars and other goods. Nevertheless, I am impressed by the civility of Havana and its residents as well the city's urban vitality, all qualities that are rapidly receding from public spaces in the United States. This in turn makes some of th e observations that follow all the more disconsolate.

November 18, the opening of the exhibitions at Castle El Morro and Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabana

In a city where North American visitors otherwise appear only in diluted concentrations, we join ranks with several swelling battalions of art tourists unloading like occupation troops from buses and cabs onto the bluff overlooking downtown Havana. Armed with palm-sized digital cameras and hygienic water bottles, most have, for this occasion, forgone heat-trapping black on black for cotton attire that exposes un-tanned legs and necks to the tropical glare. Many wear oversized white t-shirts. Some are imprinted with candy-colored portraits of Che Guevara rendered in a 1960's, retro Cuban poster style. Perhaps it is inevitable that 40 years after the revolution, Cuba markets the iconography of what is the last Marxist-Leninist government in the western hemisphere. After all, dealing in the revolution is already an enterprise of Madison Avenue. Perhaps filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller put it best when he stated that "Guevara and the Cuban Revolution have become upscale icons for the aging boomer market." [1 ] No doubt Gap Jeans and Taco Bell ads along with cigar bars and Salsa music have helped to make this forbidden island if not exactly radically chic, then at least cut-rate exotic. Skoller goes so far as to ask whether revolutionary iconography itself "has become so much cultural baggage, exhausted, now simply nostalgic, preventing the present from rethinking the past critically and imagining the future in new and original ways?" [2] Meanwhile, like a winding sheet, the still lingering shiver of cold-war politics envelopes Havana in a singular allure, especially vibrant to people who recall the 1960's Missile Crisis, or grew up watching James Bond movies.

Meanwhile, to those of us with obsolescent socialist sentiments, Skoller's haunting appraisal is difficult to shake, especially when confronted with the paradoxes that make up contemporary Cuban life and culture. Yet perhaps more than any other kind of strangeness was the way this beautiful, struggling city managed on this occasion to again play a significant role within the international art world. At the same time it became one more occasion for the affirmation of the curatorial class: that transnational detachment of specialized professionals who manage the global spectacle called contemporary art. Perhaps this is the context in which those exhausted signifiers that Skoller alludes to seemed most in play. While there is still something different about the Bienal de Ia Habana when compared to other global art festivals--more artists of color from the southern hemisphere are represented--the same aura of exotica provides a particular status within the larger cultural tourist landscape. The significance of t his special position is not lost on the Cuban artistic community.

According to Rafael Acosta de Arriba, who chaired the board for this year's event, the Seventh Havana Biennial focused on art "not found in the great scenarios of the hegemonic market." [3] It also marks a return to the event's original intentions that he defines as "a prime concern for the marginal and peripheral subjects." [4] Yet, as theorist and curator Gerardo Mosquera explained to us from his home outside Havana, biennials are essentially modeled on the nineteenth-century institution of the "world's fair" with its promise of modernity and universal progress. If Mosquera is correct, then the hope of returning to an original position, however noble, seems doubly disconcerting. Not only have conditions changed within the economy of high art since the 1980s, but so too have cultural conditions been transformed within Cuba. Regarding the Cuban situation, one can cite the end of Soviet financial support along with the 30-year-old U.S. blockade recently amplified by the Helms Burton law which penalizes foreig n countries that dare to trade with the island. But, there is also the new, two-tier currency exchange within Cuba that permits artists (among others) to sell their work for U.S. dollars instead of devalued pesos adding another level of irony to the Biennial. Curiously, Mosquera himself, one of the first to organize the Bienal de la Habana in 1983, was altogether missing from this year's events. Despite public questioning, Biennial organizers never explained Mosquera's noticeable absence. When asked about this an ever modest Mosquera cited differences of an intellectual and historical nature including those described above. However, this only begs the question, is this not exactly the kind of discussion that should be taking place within the circuitry of contemporary art?