Cuba + The Body Politic

Cheryl Kaplan


The curator Gerardo
Mosquera notes that “political criticism has become a selling point for
foreign galleries and collectors.The resulting pitfall is the creation of art
about politics rather than political art. “ In looking at the work of the
eleven artists presented in Women Artists of Cuba a curious shift is apparent
and it may just change how we see Cuban art. In Fetishism and Curiousity, Laura
Mulvey talks about the collapse of the division between high and low art and
its impact on post-modernism and feminist art. She talks about how Cindy Sherman
“brought back a politics of the body that had, perhaps, been lost or neglected
in the twists and turns of 70s feminism.” Sherman’s use of the self-portrait
and its relationship to feminism and politics is useful in understanding the
transformation of Cuban art from exterior political statement to what Holly Block
calls a “self-reflective approach.” The rules for living in Cuba are
changing. Partly this may be the result of a long process of clarifying just
what Cuba is in the first place. As Yamilys Brito told me: “In the XVIII
century, the first prints made in Cuba are created by foreign artists mainly
from Holland, France and Spain they made prints for Tourism in albums of pictures
and sometimes they never travel to Havana, so the pictures had images of Havana
with a Dutch mill or a French castle. My work make the other side of this , I
represented in Havana not the landscapes but the problems of the daily life,
the way common citizens try to life with blackouts, shortage...”


Several of the
artists in the exhibition have left Cuba and are living in the USA, like Elsa
Mora and Jacqueline Maggi. Those living in Cuba exhibit extensively in the USA
and Europe. As the pressure to comply with “official discourse” diminishes,
Cuban artists are able to explore their individuality more freely. Mosquera attributes
this change to several key moments in Cuba’s history, from the 1959 Revolution
to the moment when “Cuba entered the Soviet bloc in the 1970s, (and) the
Soviets put pressure on Cuba to curtail artistic freedom.” To “the
artists of the 80s generation... (who) emigrated en masse at the very beginning
of the 90s.” The artists at the Cuban Art Space belong to the following
group, with the exception of Alicia Leal and Jacqui Maggi who are older. Their
“self-reflective approach” is enigmatic, but also familiar. The drawings
of Elsa Mora, Yamilys Brito and Alicia Leal recall the drawings and water colors
of Carol Rama, Mimmo Palladino, Enzo Cucchi and Fontana. By way of Mexico, there
is Frida Khalo. The question they are asking is “what is it is to be Cuban
in the generation after the 90s?”


As Yamilys Brito
told me, her work is about “rescuing the life of my city ... my version
of the History, always my point of view of the world where we live.” Her
use of the word rescue is an important reminder of an earlier rescue, namely
that of Ana Mendieta as a young child from Cuba, when she was taken to the USA
in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan. Brito’s use of the word rescue is
more about a re-rescue. But as Elsa Mora put it: “I saw a video at The Art
Institute of Chicago about Ana Mendieta’s first visit to Cuba after she
left ... a victim of that “project” called Peter Pan. I liked her need
to be connected to her roots... Ana Mendieta became to me something very familiar
since she was a woman, Cuban, and artist.”


The Cuba of Wilfredo
Lam and Ana Mendieta are past tense or if experienced, they are experienced remotely.
While Cindy Sherman was able to “slowly strip away the sympton,” —
the sympton being the gap between the political and 70s feminism — these
Cuban artists are still coming to terms with what Mulvey identifies as a “mythological
contradiction lived by women under patriarchy.” The Cuba of Belquis Ayon,
who shot herself on September 11, 1999, is more likely the Cuba that sits behind
the work of much of the art in this exhibition. As Elsa Mora admits: “My
connection with her became deeper after her death... I tried to put myself into
her body to explore the extreme feelings that took her to commit suicide.”
Mora’s drawings and works on canvas bear an almost direct connection to
Belquis Ayon’s cast of repressed and looming characters. Mora has described
Belquis Ayon’s work as “all about secrets, fear, mystery recreated
by dark characters that seemed to be always busy.” Like Rama, whose use
of the decorative constantly swapped places with a tortured interior, the tragic
and the real exist in an open wound. Mora’s careful usage of transparency
in her linen-based drawings add to a sense of the fragile and the delicate, and
also to issues of doubt.


In Alicia Leal’s
silkscreens, the domestic appears as a hyper-naive episode that is also weighted
by an eery sense of the expectant and the melancholic. Her colors are rich and
playful, throwing the viewer off from the real nervousness that exists below
the surface. Most of these artists hop in and out of several media at once. Within
a single work, one can find ceramics, drawing, photography, painting. Maybe it’s
because technology, in its most obvious sense is largely missing in Cuba, which
is not to say that the conceptual is absent. The internet can be used for work,
but not privately.

Jacqueline Brito’s paintings are embedded with tiles that act as separators
or demarcators to a landscape that is as real as it is imagined. The physical
boundaries are set up as an indication of both a moment of loss and a willingness
to reconstruct. The mosaic is a meandering grid or cage that leaves off at a
gentle hill. Sandra Ramos also switches media, from etching to installation,
focusing on Cuba’s difficult past.


Jacqueline Maggi’s
work loosely recalls the wooden sculptures of Georg Baselitz, though her work
features bits of wires embedded in toy-like wooden sculptures and is based on
creating facsimiles of everyday life.


The work follows
Giorgio Agamben’s concept of play that “preserve...behavior that has
ceased to exist.”

The toy here is seen as a reduced historical essence. Throughout the show there
is an emphasis on the diagramatic — a mapping process of indicators that
finally takes the viewer to a place of slow arrivals, an evaporated, but hopeful
romanticism that transforms the body politic into the self-reflective.