Endurance on the Looking Glass: An Art Exhibition
of Cuban Art
Egberto Almenas-Rosa
In the late 60s the noted Cuban author Gabriel Cabrera Infante squalled
a most revealing pun when an interviewer asked him why all the people
from the Caribbean look alike. "It is not that all the Caribbean
people look alike," he said; "it is that all the Caribbean people
look like us Cubans!" Brassy as it might have sounded-as do most
natives from Oriente, the eastern part of
the Island, and cradle of her national joust and banter-the easy play
on words points to an unassailable fact. Since the beginning of colonization
Cuba was the most likely to become the cultural epicenter of influence
in all the countries that make up the Caribbean basin, and beyond. For
her sheer "strategic" location with respect to the emerging
New World Order led by the Spanish Crown, the largest of the West Indies
turned into a catalyst for the most formidable example of transculturation
in the Americas.
The term transculturation is in itself a
domestic invention meant to spot the resulting mix of a timely give-and-take
accord among contrasting cultures. It subsumes syncretism in its classical
Greek rendition of a "united front" in order to "fight
a common enemy." For a colonial outpost soon troubled by invasions,
piracy, brigandage, illegal trade, misgovernment, and the internecine
grudges that emanated from the long-stretched institutions of servitude,
this type of unity came in handy. Foremost, it managed to mask by the
mid-1800s a true outlet against foreign rule and abjection for all the
parties involved. Aspiring outcasts from the metropolis along with sub-Saharan
African slaves (over one third of the total population then) layered by
periodic inflows of Coolies and underground subjects from the Antilles
blended to form something new, combative. When the last War of Independence
against Spain broke in 1895, Cubans had become especially deft at imprinting
a political sense of detachment from Europe while remaining receptive
to the universal values of art and culture. The genes of a national consciousness,
so to speak, matured by factoring this odd challenge.
In the United States fresh descriptive miscegenation attempts to update
Cuban's fate. Rubén Rumbaut, for instance, coined those that were
born in Cuba but reached adulthood as integrated members of the US society
as the "1.5 Generation" -a quantitative shortcoming of sorts
recounted as the Desi Arnaz syndrome. After the Revolution the element
that the "hyphenated Cuban" attaches implied collaboration with,
rather than a resistance to, the historical "common enemy."
At the blameless poles of these compounds we get the acronyms ABC (American-Born-Cuban),
and most recently, the CBA (Cuban-Bred-American). Just when the symmetry
seemed to bamboozle even further the limbo in Cuba-no,
America-no, Cubans on all sides of the spectrum- latecomers included-are
giving way to a "biculturated" feel of identity. According to
Gustavo Pérez Firmat, the experience does not manifest itself by
opposition but rather by "aposition" between the two cultures
in question. In other words, it verifies that contiguity
rather than contradiction defines the Cuban
way of life in the US.
Looked as a whole, "Images and Reflections: an Art Exhibition of
Cuban Art" accounts for an adequate representation of this rich intricacy
and progression. It shows that Cuban imaginative thought hangs about immune
to stagnating divergence and conflict, artificial hybridization and bracketing.
Furthermore it tells about one of the most intriguing synthesis known
to modern art and culture: the speedy audacity to become an Original-Self
largely through the selective overpowering means of others. An antecedent
helps us grasp this point.
In the quest for parity with the more advanced literary forms of Europe,
Cuba's National Poet and Independence Hero, José Martí,
broke in cleanly with modernismo towards the
last quarter of the nineteenth-century. By the early 1880s, this highly
integrated "mental movement," as Rubén Darío called
it, was endowing Spanish America with an equally commanding voice of her
own. The today almost forgotten Joaquín Tejeda, whose denunciatory
impressionism gained him some recognition while living in Barcelona, may
be a precursor of modernismo in the Cuban
plastic arts.
What later attracted the painters most to modernismo
was that it licensed extra-pictorial borrowings not only with respect
to the imagery of other creative genres, but from the so-called hard sciences
as well. The US intervention during the Cuban War of Independence against
Spain in 1898 had shocked the "national spirit" of the Island.
During the first decades of the twentieth-century, history, physics, biology,
psychoanalysis, and archeology, among many other specialized fields of
research, became household probing venues for an atonement. So much so
that the publication of non-fictional works by then surpassed that of
fiction. "Diagnosis," "radiography," "biopsy,"
and even "post-mortem" and "requiem" were modish metaphors
in Cuba well into the 1950s.
Scholars and artists alike charged national pride from the "laboratory"
by reverting "theory" and "experimentation" to the
roots of Cubaness. They "unearthed" on the living the long decimated
aboriginal population that once roamed free in the Antilles. "Clinical
studies" were conducted on the latent rituals and beliefs of African
and Asiatic descent. Conciliatory images and reflections mostly drawn
from the past ensued. The timing coincided with Decadence in Europe. Festered
by the predicaments imposed by the late nineteenth-century industrial
bourgeoisie, the artist there sought for mystical purity and joy in primitive
visual phenomena. Jacques Barzun makes a note on this shift:
All that is meant by Decadence is "falling off."
It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent
or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep
concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance.
The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life
seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions
function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.
Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces. (From Dawn to Decadence:
500 Years of Western Cultural Life; 1500 to Present, New York: HarperCollins,
2000, p. xvi.)
Those historical forces yielded fruitful consequences under US dominated
Cuba. Some modern European artists-Pisarro, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse,
Klee-had had a filial connection with the Other World and were picking
on it. By the time the Avant-garde gained momentum, the European angst
turned to a more promising Cuba for solace.
Gripped with the same formal motifs, the Cuban artist recycled them in
different molds, year after year, as if hoping to hit upon each flip on
the definitive shed of identity that never surfaces as such. The process
construes an open, all-encompassing swing-linearity that defies Western
logic.
This unendingly nascent and therefore often elusive virtue in Cuban art
was recently at stake at the University Art Museum in Santa Barbara, California,
where Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival
on the Utopian Island was showing. Its promotional brochure falls
into the typical ambush of scholastic criticism. "This is the first
major exhibition in the United States", it claims, "dedicated
entirely to the work of a new generation of Cuban artists who explore
irony as a strategy for psychological survival and oblique commentary
on the realities of post-revolutionary Cuba." Drop a "post,"
focus on momentary themes and procedures, slice them into a generation,
and one instantly wipes out over 500 years of a growing tradition otherwise
splendidly represented in the overall quality of the same exhibition.
Suggesting afterwards that "the improvisation and creative resourcefulness
so often required for everyday life in Cuba" is particularly germane
to this "new generation," one meets with a quote from the curator,
Marilyn Zeitlin. "Cuba's isolation," she consigns, "has
produced an artistic output that is fresh and independent. Nothing seems
jaded or self-indulgent, but rather full of vitality and relevant to the
core issues of living." The true irony,
however, lies in that the "creative resourcefulness" of Cuban
art, its freshness and independence, its vitality and relevance, stems
from all that is contrary to "isolation." In order to apprehend
the full dimensions of its merits one needs to trace how Cuban art has
tamed and imposed itself over titanic cultural dominance, and where "generational"
schemes, incidentally, have shrunk in importance. In assessing the painters
that in 1927 propelled what came to be known as New Art in Cuba, Roberto
Méndez writes that they cannot be measured by the same means as
the European: they unite nationalism with cosmopolitanism, social criticism
with artistic exquisiteness, and they nourish on influences that were
restricted in Europe. Perhaps the most lucid aspect in their work is the
notion with which they entrust the Island with a new art: they cannot,
as with Picasso, look back at Velázquez, or as in Dalí,
find formulas in Leonardo or Raphael. In Cuba, there is no need to break
with tradition, nor less to rescue it. In Cuba, the artist must inaugurate
tradition. (Quoted from "Amelia, el logos Eladio González
definidor", La Gaceta de Cuba, 34.5,
septiembre / octubre 1996: 11. Translation supplied.)
Likewise, Juan Marinello had observed in relation to the artist of this
period:
It is not about a generation, which, as such, would raise
one single flag. It is about a group united under the clear assumption
of their creative function and faithful to the poignant calls of the times,
with good loyalty, and better dissidence. Had they limited themselves
to the sensual epidermis of Cuban matters, we would no longer remember
them today, nor would they be remembered today if they had imitated only
the masters with the greatest universal projection. (Comentario al arte,
ed. V. López Lemus, Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983, p.
114. Translation supplied.)
During the very first decade after the installation of a Revolutionary
State in Cuba, the painters again warned succumbing to tutelary politics.
Marta Traba, in a volume published in 1973 (Dos décadas
vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas: 1950
/1970, Mexico: Siglo XXI, pp, 123-29), wondered about the extent to which
this self-governing thrust of the artists could carry on. It was a conjuncture
without precedents in the New World, she notes, and the Revolution was
mostly receiving rather than manufacturing sympathetic painters. Most
held up to this point that aesthetic ideas must necessarily live in constant
struggle, and that any form of suppression to favor a given leaning would
arbitrarily restrain the development of the arts. Nearly twenty years
have elapsed since Marta Traba ceased to be among us, and her acute, critical
eye will be forever missed. She would not be surprised to discover, however,
that Cuban plastic expression continues to strive as always.
One could imagine that forty years of restraints would eventually mar
the development of Cuban art. What then explains its current predominance
in the Caribbean? Why does the materially less needy Cuban counterpart
in the US show no remarkable difference in the overall aesthetic attribute
of its production?
One of the artists whose work is on display in this exhibition, Barauj
Salinas, observes that "Cuban painting, in the Island as well as
abroad, is in my opinion one of great vitality. Not one single 'school'
or direction from outside stirs us. There is a lot of diversity, and that
is what makes it in part universal. It is really incredible that such
a small Island has produced so many good painters." (Translation
supplied.)
Oscar Martínez, the curator of "Images and Reflections"
and he himself an accomplished painter, has opted instead for a river-time
sampling of Cuban art in the United States. Mastery of craft, shared sympathies
with the object and immanence unleashes a continuous flow from which many
streams may branch out onto other directions but prove to remain part
of the same recurring source. Rather than speaking here about "influences,"
one must refer instead to "active absorption" amid the disparity
in the artist's ages, and the persistence of the synecdoche-the representative
part for the whole- as a deliberate point of departure.
Although Humberto Calzada's many aesthetic solutions are very much his
own in his own right, he acts in this sense on the towering legacy of
Amelia Peláez (1896-1968). As a reaction against academicism, she
had arrived in the late 20s at alternative pronouncements of self by free
analogy especially to the now emblematic stain-glass fan that tops the
windows of many older urban dwellings in Cuba. "I am not interested
in copying the object," she once remarked, tacitly referring to the
ornamental wrought-iron screens, the columns and the laced baskets filled
with local fruit stocks with which she also became associated. "What
is important is the relation of the motif with oneself, with our personality,
with the power it carries in helping the artist organize his emotions."
Similarly, Eladio González references through his compositions
an encounter that really predates the European, African, and Asian nexus
in Wifredo Lam. The continental elements may seem hefty but González,
more concisely, defrays river-time by evoking the voluptuous Neo-Baroque
embellishments that had already forced themselves upon the colonial architecture
of his native land. The current work of Rafael Soriano sponges up even
hazier nuances. His fractional and nocturnal hold on eroticism bonds nevertheless
to the same strained conquest over the provisions of the Baroque style.
In no other artist from this exhibition is the ever nascent more emphatically
genetic than in the creations of Ricardo Manuel Díaz. His reiterated
concern with the intuitive process at the precise point of genesis overrides
the poetic, late Giacometti-like ambiance of forlorn hope that they may
instill as finished by-products. The likeness here locates the legitimate
snatching of a cultural tone secondary to the expression that emerges
out of the earthy conception of "absoluteness," or the pre-natal
space of "darkness and emptiness." Whether by "force of
nature" or by "choice," the chaotic footprints of cosmogony
in his paintings and sculptures manage to arrest the "Profound Stillness"
that "permits the object to be observed at the moment of realization."
Hence those bearings of a spontaneous memory, of an "effort"
or the "act of existence." Everything in Ricardo Manuel Díaz'
art is in itself beginning-even beauty and death.
If "exile" for Salman Rushdie in his Satanic Verses"is
a dream of the glorious return," in the pieces of Paul Sierra the
correspondence equates with tropicalismo.
The concept, despite its resonance of lush and pride, sprang from a resentful
trend in criticism that extended irregularly well into the 40s. Eager
to set the pace of Cuban culture according to northern paradigms of progress,
it denoted that readily given exuberance of nature was in part to fault
for Cuba's supposed dawdling attitude. Paradoxically, the false accusations
led to discover a positive undercurrent in tropicalismo.
For many artists it has been operating as a perceptive "psychic state"
that fuels the imagination with clues for novelty within the hallucinatory
beauty of the tropical landscape. It saves in culture what may be otherwise
lost with the fleeing riches of material goods, the trivialized depiction
of fondness, time and exile. Having grown in the United States, Paul Sierra's
figurative "glorious return" to his birthplace streams the parlance
of tropical imagery.
An expressionist adaptation of the same principle applies to Baruj Salinas.
The chosen mode in his pieces subdues tropicalismo,
especially in relation to its expansive stellar secrecy, for it is mostly
a recast of nighttime bewitchment before the picturesque. (Hitler had
labeled its Nordic variant as "degenerative" for its "clear
derivation from Negro art.") As an artist form Cuba, he cannot escape
from his dynamic historical condition (past, life occurrences abroad,
contact, mutations and growth), but has resorted to deflect it in a highly
contained, symbolic manner. The gray tones in the flower series shown
in this exhibition, for example, signals his subliminal rapt in the less
sun-drenched regions of Europe, as he himself observed in an interview.
Michele Touhey comes in as an exception. Perhaps because she is the youngest,
Irish on her paternal side and the only artist in this exhibition that
was not born in Cuba, her work branches out the farthest in the river-time
flow of Cuban art. The constructs here target on the unfolding instances
of the Individual-Self and that Entity's eerie relation to fixed structural
environments. Designs in subjectivity (in her case, as if cutting self-portraits
from photographic studies and latter pinning them against the preconceived
backgrounds) invites quirky interpretations. Since she has expressed a
willingness to identify as partially Cuban (significantly, not by a hyphen,
but by a slash), there may lay in her approaches a connective stratum
of preoccupation with the regenerative, or the ever nascent, as defined
earlier. How far beyond will she distend this concept without straying
away from Cubaness waits to be seen. Historically, art as an intrinsic
personal tonic not always risks sinking into oblivion if the appeal is
right.
We read from her "Artist Statement" that she tries to subtract
herself or keeps a healthy distance from the only society she has known
by questioning through subterfuge "the manner in which we are influenced
to conform." Offset variations of inner-strength in Touhey's creations
intend a "dialogue" that would vent the "desire for the
experience of feeling alive." Thus, she may indeed be reinserting
herself this way into a continuum that dates
as far back as the early 1600s.
As far as we can tell, it all began in Cuba with the epic poem by Silvestre
de Balboa entitled Espejo de paciencia -literally,
"the mirror of patience." The poem tells about the exemplary
deeds that Bishop Friar Juan de la Cabezas y Altamirano sustained while
the French pirate Gilberto Girón held him hostage during an attempt
to siege a village. Perhaps inadvertently, the poet's allusion to a looking
glass that "reflects" the "will to endure" also reflected
the first traits of a society that was already ceasing to be Spaniard
at the onset of Spanish colonization. In the end, critics now agree, this
is a "moral story" with a "collective hero" deep within.
How much of the artists shown in "Images and Reflections: an Exhibition
of Cuban Art" triggers this "collective hero" is a standing
proposition. Meanwhile, let us appreciate the "reflections"
in this exhibition as if they were in "mirrors." One may be
compelled to discover "images" that have long ceased to be what
they were meant to be, yet continue to "endure" far into the
realm of utmost significance to artists: the realm of Possibility.
Egberto Almenas-Rosa is Visiting Associate Professor of
Humanities at the University of the West Indies (Barbados)
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