Buena vista with hidden fish-hooks
By Emily Stokes
Published: February 2 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 2 2008 02:00
It is difficult for foreign visitors not to romanticise Cuba. Walking
the streets of Havana can feel like stepping into a 1950s photograph
curling at the edges with age; thickly painted Cadillacs stop at street
corners; buildings, only just held up by scaffolding, crumble in
majestic ruin; young people, apparently with nothing else to do, drink
rum and smoke "Hollywood" cigarettes on the Malecón sea-wall. Life, it
seems, is both hard and carefree. As the journalist Martha Gellhorn,
once wife of Hemingway, wrote of Havana in 1987: " 'No problem' might be
the national motto; it is the one English phrase everyone can say."
Yet, as Gerardo Mosquera, the Cuban co-curator of States of Exchange at
the Institute of International Visual Arts, reminds me, these
impressions of Cuba are, however real, also "official" projections,
promoted by a government that is as proud of its unfaltering socialism
and self-sufficiency as it is of its education system and of Buena Vista
Social Club. For most Cubans, daily transactions are necessarily
"unofficial", because state salaries are insufficient. People take up
illegal work, or get sent money from relatives abroad. "In Cuba, you are
constantly ****fting spheres, moneys, understandings," he explains.
These "****fting spheres" provided the inspiration for this
group-exhibition by six Cuban artists (Iván Capote, Yoan Capote,
Jeanette Chávez, Diana Fonseca, Wilfredo Prieto, Lázaro Saavedra) at
Rivington Place. In particular, the exhibition explores daily
negotiations and exchanges between what Mosquera calls the official
"socialist pristine presentation of the country" and its unofficial
underbelly.
It is perhaps only appropriate that a show shedding light on a country
described by co-curator Cylena Simonds as "a heroic David refusing to
surrender to the Goliath of the United States" should be both
scaled-down and ingenious. The exhibition space in David Adjaye's new
building at Rivington Place is pitifully small, but the works are often
comically so, using their tiny dimensions to punch above their weight.
Take Yoan Capote's "Dinero bilingüe", made from a US dollar coin and a
20 cents Cuban coin spliced together. In their new spinning-top
formation, both coins are rendered useless, overburdened by their dual
economic identities. By a subtle twist, the coins' new broken surface,
beginning with the American message ("Liberty") and ending with the
Cuban ("Patria O Muerte"), now whispers its own, bleaker slogan, as if
giving its verdict on the loss of civilian freedom brought by poverty:
"Lib/Muerte".
Even smaller but equally powerful is "Untitled (Pea)" by Wilfredo
Prieto: a chickpea pinned onto the wall which, upon closer examination,
yields a map of the world in shaky red ink. It is a moving image of
humility, like Julian of Norwich's vision of all creation as a hazelnut.
But Mosquera explains another possible meaning, the difference between
entrapment and self-sufficiency: " chicharos are the staple food in
Cuba. Everyone is bored of chickpeas, we hate them, even though we are
surviving thanks to them," he says, shrugging with resignation.
The artists in this show might all make work about Cuba's bi-focal
vision but it is not difficult to decipher the artists' own, often
angry, stances. Wilfredo Prieto's "Speech" is a memorable symbol of a
desire to unravel, quite literally, the myth of Cuba projected by the
state and its employees (including journalists): a toilet roll made from
national newspaper, each headline ringing with the government's
self-congratulations.
These works could not be shown in Cuba. While the government has often
seemed to sup****t Cuba's art scene, including the Havana Biennial which
begun in 1984 (organised in part by Mosquera himself), it is now, says
Mosquera, the unofficial parts of the Biennial that are the most
interesting. Cuban video has attracted the most attention in recent
years with positive and negative results: international acclaim is
countered with the fear of the state's reaction.
"Autocensura", a video piece by Jeanette Chávez, expresses this double
bind in physical terms: we watch her knotting cord around her extended
tongue and then closing her lips again, hiding her inability to speak.
At 27, Chávez is the youngest artist in the show; she is still at the
art school in Havana, where she is taught by Lázaro Saavedra, another of
the six artists. The fact that this is her first trip out of Cuba only
makes her work all the more poignant. But she is not alone in her
preoccupation with escape; a work by Diana Fonseca, "Pasatiempo", shows
her sewing perfectly designed little pictures - a boat, an aeroplane,
the Eiffel tower - onto the top layer of skin on her hand.
For most Cubans on a state income, leaving the island remains a dream.
"Isla", a pair of paintings by Yoan Capote and one of the most beautiful
works in the show, depicts the horizon, suggesting Cubans' desire to
explore the world, and the danger of making a clandestine escape. On
closer examination, the sharp edges of fish-hooks jut from the canvas,
hidden in the painterly waves.
But artists are not "most Cubans"; over the past 25 years, they have
been seen as both national dissidents and treasures, at once censored by
the state and encouraged for the money that they bring into the country
from international sales. As the international market for Cuban art
increases (US economics magazine Business Week even recommended Cuban
contem****ary art as a top investment in 2007), artists have been in the
unusual position of having enough money to come and go, often in
response to the government's measures. There was, Mosquera tells me, an
exodus in the 1980s in response to a "repressive backlash by the
government because art had become more critical", then a relaxing in the
1990s. Now, he says, "many artists are living abroad on more permanent
terms, like exiles."
For Gerardo Mosquera himself, who had Spanish parents and so has dual
citizen****p, Cuba can be viewed from outside and in, as both a myth and
as a reality. He can see, more clearly than most, both the strength of
Cuba's art and the atmosphere of frustration among artists living in
Cuba: "Now everyone is willing some change. It has been 50 years, and
Castro is sick, and people want change. I can't wait. But young people,"
Mosquera pauses, "they really can't wait. They are going abroad for
adventure."
There is something unsettling about the idea of Cuba gradually emptying
itself of creativity. But this show in London makes clear that, even
while Cuban artists are leaving the island, they will continue to
unravel the romantic myths of their country, and to spin them into new
forms.
'States of Exchange: Artists from Cuba' is at Rivington Place, London
EC2, until March 22. Tel: +44 (0)20-7749 1240, www.iniva.org
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ebb68b4a-d132-11dc-953a-0000779fd2ac.html
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