Affirmation Of The Curatorial Class - Seventh Havana Biennial art exhibition

Afterimage, March, 2001 by Gregory Sholette

November, 20, offsite from the Biennial

We visit artist Fernando Rodriquez Fakon who also happens to be Francisco de la Cal--one body hosting two artists. Fernando makes it clear that he came first however and that he, Fernando, anointed his alter-ego with the decidedly unexceptional name of Francisco as a way of mocking the revolutionary sacrament of collective life. But in so many ways the rust-covered yet often waterless city of Havana through which we have traveled offers its own reproach to the ghost of socialism past. We visit with Fernando/Francisco in the elegant home of Cristina Vives who is the representative and intellectual confidante of both Fernando/Francisco as well as other Cuban artists including Los Carpinteros. The latter is an art collective consisting of three individuals sharing one remarkably integrated artistic practice. While Fernando (as Francisco) produces paintings, sculptural reliefs and prints that depict a hapless looking, mass-man inhabiting utopia lost, Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) collectively construct elegant objects and installations of wood, metal and drawings that appear like images from Franz Kafka's mind rendered in the style of a Leonardo Da Vinci notebook. Each of these artist exhibits widely outside of Cuba. One recent installation the group had documentation for showed a room-sized, wooden lighthouse. It is at once a light-less object and an enormous filing cabinet housing dozens of fully workable but empty drawers. The implications are both obvious as well as subtle invoking both hope and bureaucratic malaise while offering further evidence that Cuban artists today, like their contemporary northern counterparts, prefer a carefully measured social criticism to the openly activist practices of the early 1980s.

According to Erena Hernandez, a specialist at the Center for the Development of the Visual Arts in Havana, the more overtly political and activist work of the 1980s has evolved into a more commodity-oriented practice that infers rather than asserts nonconformity. Government censorship and even prison sentences can explain part of this, but the increased living standards of cultural workers cannot be factored out. Because Cuban artists are now permitted to sell their work on the international market for U.S. dollars it is no surprise that artists, as well as curators and dealers, have gained a singular advantage over other Cubans. Not only can they travel abroad but in general their living standard is higher.

November 21, Central Havana

We visit the workplace and home of the painter Jose Angel Toirac, a well-known Cuban artist who was not included in this years Biennial. Toirac's recent paintings consist of smudged newspaper images reminiscent of Gerhard Richter's recent work only with thicker, almost confectionery surfaces. Missing now is the overt parody found in Toirac's earlier paintings: iconic images of Castro and Guevera selling luxury goods such as Absolute Vodka, Calvin Klein and Sony. The new work is also very different from a 1989 piece entitled Homenaje a Hans Haacke that Toriac made with a group of artists called ABTV. The homage to Haacke borrowed the German-born, conceptual artist's use of deadpan irony and documentary tropes to show that one of Cuba's official portraitists, Orlando Yanes, actually depicted pre- and post-revolutionary leaders in the same glowing, social-realist style. Homenaje was never permitted to open to the public.