Tarde de Sándwiches: The Failure of Participation in Contemporary Cuban Art
Celia Irina González Alvarez
An anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist art, alternative to neoliberalism, has been reclaimed by the Cuban state in its revolutionary discourse. It has also been of fundamental interest to intellectuals interested in a disruptive production, from art and anthropology, to think about socially engaged practices. However, the Cuban state has perpetuated rhetoric more than truly disruptive action, and theoretical arguments against an anti-capitalist art have been useful in cancelling all intellectual endeavours that oppose it through irreverent and socially active production; above all in works in which the artist takes a strong stance, demands participation, or promotes engagement.
I am interested in the political potentialities of socially engaged practices capable of producing “the essential friction that is necessary for any kind of genuine democratic or political dialogue” (Schneider & Wright, 2013: p. 11 [author’s emphasis]). It is not a matter of “positive” participation in short-term events closer to those described by Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (2002), but rather the emancipatory capacity of artistic practice to produce a reconfiguration of society (Bishop, 2012). Authors interested in the political character of a socially committed art frame these practices in a Marxist and post-Marxist stance that seeks a critical production against the alienation of entertainment as an ultimate aim (Foster, 1995; Bourriaud, 2002; Bishop, 2006, 2012; Schneider & Wright, 2010, 2013, 2017; Kester, 2009, 2015). In other words, these practices set out to restore social ties through the production of situations that mobilize the collective. However, in this case I am interested in discussing artistic practices that respond to the excessive collectivization of society and participation as a requirement of the state in a totalitarian system.
Here I concentrate on artistic practices that have made participation and their emancipating failure in the face of the state’s call as essential to their work processes. I intend to highlight four moments and ways of embracing participation under the island’s specific conditions. First, the artist who prompts participation in public spaces through performance, opting for the emancipation of the viewer through engagement with a symbolic gesture. Second, the artist who adopts participation as a learning opportunity about the social and historical Other cancelled by the state narrative. Third, the artist who approaches participation by appealing to a cynical position in response to the state’s spent participation-emancipation formula. Fourth, the artist who resorts to legislative mechanisms and performative gestures to demand a change in the state-citizenry relationship, calling for participation in public spaces, not only as an artistic gesture, but above all as a civic act. These four moments permit an analysis of how these artists have responded to a leftist political context, proclaimed as socialist at the same time as it is repressive. With this analysis I intend to add new dimensions to the habitual opposition between collectivization vs nihilism and emancipating symbolic gesture vs the hegemony of capitalism.
I am interested in the design of the operation of these practices as relational mechanisms in the context of a totalitarian state, as scenes of ethnographic encounter with a political otherness. My approach to these works is not only as a Cuban artist directly involved in many of the processes described here, but also as an anthropologist interested in the methodological exchange between contemporary art and contemporary anthropology.[i] Participation has been a fundamental point of encounter between that niche of contemporary anthropology interested in ethnographic experimentation and an art engaged in its social and political context.[ii]
Claire Bishop in “The social under socialism”, a chapter in her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), posits a disinterest in the participative and an emphasis on the individuality of artists within the Socialist Bloc in the context of the collective spectacle of the masses organized by the state. “Given the saturation of everyday life with ideology, artists did not regard their work as political but rather as existential and apolitical, committed to ideas of freedom and the individual imagination” (Bishop, 2012: p.129). However, the participative practices of the Cuban art that I analyse here permit a discussion of whether the practices developed under socialism have effectively shown a disinterest in the political and participative, or whether they have been about the systematic cancelation of new mechanisms of “participation.”
Participative art, according to Bishop (2012), operates starting with the reconsideration of the artist-work-spectator triad: the artist does not make objects, but rather situations; the work is understood as a long-term process without a clear beginning and end; and the audience moves from spectator to co-producer or participant. When reflecting on participation and art in Cuba, the state is inevitably viewed as a new element, which the artist challenges by instigating moments of spontaneous participation. This art from the Caribbean does not confront capitalist rhetoric, instead totalitarianism rhetoric identified with a leftist discourse, where participation has been completely controlled by the state in the name of defending an “anti-hegemonic” position. However, this artistic production in Cuba also responds to a hegemony, namely that produced by a totalitarian state.
Art-De (Arte y Derecho) Juan-Sí González and Jorge Crespo: Three Years of Performance and 31 Years of Exile
Art-De (Arte y Derecho; Art and Rights) is the only example of collaboration between an artist and an attorney in contemporary Cuban art. From 1987 to 1990, Juan-Sí González and Jorge Crespo conducted interactive and street performances: ‘Ego/Art’ (1987), ‘Yo no te digo cree, yo te digo lee’ (I don’t tell you believe, I tell you read; 1987), ‘Un modelo para seguir’ (A model to follow; 1987), ‘Artista como hombre público’ (Artist as public man; 1987), ‘Vence/Remos’ (We shall overcome; 1987), ‘Tarde de Sándwiches’ (Afternoon of sandwiches; 1988), ‘Alegato contra la censura’ (Indictment against censorship; 1988), ‘Me han jodido el ánimo’ (They’ve screwed my mood; 1988), ‘A palabras necias, la silenciosa, sangrante, santa . . . oreja de Van Gogh’ (Obstinate words, the silent, bloody, holy . . . to the ear of Van Gogh; 1988), ‘Yo soy un hombre sincero’ (I’m an honest man; 1989), ‘Buenos días, señor ministro’ (Good morning, Mr. Minister; 1989) and ‘Acción Ritual’ (Ritual action; 1989). Art-De’s practice, concerned with the place of human rights in Cuba, was civic more than artistic.
Projects such as ‘Arte en la carretera’ (Art on the highway), ‘Arte en la fábrica’ (Art in the factory), or ‘Telarte’ (Clothart) are noteworthy examples of participative practices in the history of Cuban art from the 1980s. They were initiatives that called for a greater presence of art in everyday life by positioning art on highway billboards or printing work on fabric for domestic use, equality between the artist and worker by promoting the presence of artists in factories, and de-centring the active/producer-passive/spectator relationship. The artist should be one more among the rest of the workers in a socialist system to prevent labour alienation. However, these essential concerns for a socially engaged art were exclusively resolved through state projects. Leftist intellectuals like Luis Camnitzer described the success of these state projects that lacked tensions or contradictions by systematizing art from the 1980s in his book New art of Cuba (1994).[iii]
Juan-Sí González began studying art at the age of eleven, following the system of art education from the time, and he was successful in his career until he refused to participate in state acts of repudiation against ‘counter-revolutionaries’.[iv] Jorge Crespo studied law at the University of Havana, however, as the son of a political prisoner, he was never able to practice his profession. The two young men began to collaborate in 1986 with the aim of promoting zones of dialogue, through symbolic gestures, in the public sphere not controlled by the state; at the same time, Perestroika was sweeping Eastern Europe.
The first action carried out by Juan-Sí González and Jorge Crespo was an interaction to gauge levels of permissibility in public spaces. They decided to go to one of the most central bus stops in Havana at 5:00 in the afternoon, armed with controversial, sexually or politically explicit paintings. They interacted with the public there as if they were transporting the images. The people at the bus stop began to ask them about the canvases, even though the works were not set up to be explicitly displayed.
After this first action, González and Crespo were detained and interrogated by the police, who prohibited them from carrying out any action at that bus stop, under the pretence that they were provoking illicit activities ‘because it was a place where many gay, many counterrevolutionary, hostile people gathered.’[v] This initial approach allowed them to assess levels of censorship and repression they were exposed to, by attempting to establish zones of interaction beyond art institutions. After this experience, they began to perform weekly actions at central points in the city, as the sole mechanism of establishing a regular dialogue with the public.
In ‘Alegato contra la censura’ (1988), Juan-Sí González donned attire usually worn by state Security agents and he began to interview people in the park with a tape recorder, asking them what censorship was. Then he removed that garb and burned it, while a colleague covered his body with a plastic bag and tied it shut, cutting off his air supply. He began to speak in a loud voice from within the bag, and as he consumed the air, the plastic began to adhere to his face, until a female student in the public reacted and tore the bag open, allowing the artist to breathe. The performance prompted a controversial dialogue on censorship in Cuba among artists, critics, and those who appeared to be security agents who infiltrated the debate.
For Art-De, participation did not imply interaction with objects or previously designed actions, but rather the reflective awakening of citizens who had naturalised censorship and repression in the face of dissent:
It wasn’t about standing out as an individual performer, as something aesthetic, but rather the true concept and power of what we were doing was that we had created a space, that maybe wouldn’t last, but it was a space where there was no official intervention, where no member of officialdom or curator or artist could intervene in what we were doing.[vi]
The arrests and interrogations did not stop them from continuing their actions, although they did succeed in turning the state into the almost exclusive public of Art-De. ‘A palabras necias, la silenciosa, sangrante, santa . . . oreja de Van Gogh’ (1988) is the performative response to the Minister of Culture’s invitation to dialogue within the institution: the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba; UNEAC).
After an initial attempt at dialogue, cancelled by the state in response to the presence of Art-De followers, a second encounter was agreed upon in the UNEAC. This time the artists attended with a performative operation designed ahead of time, because they had been forewarned of the presence of state film crews and a state-controlled public.
González and Crespo decorated the conference hall in line with official Communist Party events. Throughout the performance, a looped recording reiterated a word play, saying: ‘espacio cerrado pienso, espacio cerrado pienso, espacio cerrado pienso’ (closed space I think, closed space I think, closed space I think) and after repeating it around ten times, a voice broke in, saying, ‘ti, ti, ti’, alluding to a word play on ‘pienso’, which also means ‘animal feed’. This was immediately followed by a recording of the national anthem, which brought the public solemnly to its feet. In the middle of the chairs for the public, they placed an easel with a mirror on which they had written: ‘if you have something to say, stand in front of the mirror, your opinion is part of the work’. At the end of the anthem, when the debate was about to start, Jorge Crespo approached the mirror and shattered it with a single blow of a hammer. Miguel Barnet, a well-known writer and government official, made a scene over how breaking a mirror would bring bad luck. Taking advantage of the confusion that ensued, both artists left the room and put a padlock on the door, leaving everyone inside locked up for hours. Before leaving, they set up small posters on the lawn in the garden outside, facing the conference hall, that said ‘Walk on the grass’. Almost immediately, the two artists were arrested by the political police.
The action had been directly designed for a precise scene of encounter: the institution of state art and for state officials as the ideal public. González and Crespo did not intend to engage in any dialogue or seek any emancipation; it was clear there was no possibility of an agreement with the state. Therefore, given the officialdom as their public, participation was not even attempted, but instead cancelled beforehand as part of the design of the performative operation.
As police repression increased, stigmatisation on the part of the art profession grew as well. After this performance, they never again had the support of the art scene - not only the official art scene, but also the younger, more daring art scene, which also condemned Art-De because they too feared the same repression and losing what little visibility they had gained - which aesthetically and ethically branded them as bad artists after having crossed the line separating art from activism. The aesthetic and ethical delegitimisation of Art-De, by being branded as bad artists by the art scene, was a strategy of invisibilisation of state repression that their artistic practices made clear and of the existence of a political opposition in the country that had been outlawed for decades.
The Cuban intellectual scene contended with the daring of Art-De by disparaging its actions as art works and claiming that the path of activism was an easy way to attract attention. Recognizing that the actions of Art-De, in its attempt to mobilise citizens, spotlighted the repressive acts of the state, art professionals accepted that as intellectuals, they had chosen to shun their responsibility and, thus, avoid a direct clash with the state. Cancelled by the art scene after it addressed activism, which has been illegal in Cuba since the triumph of the revolution, Art-De’s performance and cinematographic work was expunged from the history of Cuban art [CI1] . Their works were never mentioned in publications, lectures, or classes on Cuban art; this systematic omission invisibilised Art-De for the new generations of artists.[vii]
The last action carried out by Art-De, ‘Buenos días señor ministro’ (Good morning, Mr. Minister; 1989), consisted of conducting races every Wednesday to the Ministry of Culture wearing a jersey that read ‘Health for Art’. There, at eight in the morning, they left an envelope with excerpts from the speeches of Armando Hart, then minister of culture, highlighting the contradictions in the institutional rhetoric. Juan-Sí González and Jorge Crespo were detained, beaten, and interrogated again, as a result of this action. In this situation, there was no public present. The artists were sure they would be arrested. The design of artistic practice had been produced with the state as the sole spectator, at the same time it was the repressor of any participative act.
In 1991 Juan-Sí González was forced to leave Cuba, going to Costa Rica in exile. Meanwhile, Jorge Crespo and Marcos Antonio Abad were arrested for filming an act of repudiation targeting the poet María Elena Cruz Varela.[viii] After their detention, both artists were sentenced to two years in prison for secretly making the film ‘Un día cualquiera’ (An ordinary day, 1990).[ix]
At these three Art-De actions, the state gradually began to occupy the place of the viewer. The artist-work-spectator triad underwent a shift from general spectator, in which public space was the scene of encounter, to an exclusively state spectator. In the end, the spectator was replaced by the police as the sole entity attentive to group actions. Thus, the triad was reduced to artist-action-state.
The emancipation of the spectator, the dissolution of authorship, and the restoration of social connections in the context of the crisis in collective responsibility are three points in the agenda of a participative art highlighted by Claire Bishop in Participation (2006).[x] What happens to this agenda when artistic and civic practice is analysed in a socialist context, predating the fall of the USSR?
There was clearly an emancipating spirit in Art-De’s practice, however, it was an attempt to politicise a highly ideologized citizenry. The act of emancipation of individuals capable of producing their own social reality was considered highly dangerous and unnecessary from the perspective of state rhetoric, for being a goal already fulfilled by the Cuban Revolution.
In contrast, authorship was assumed by Art-De in a collaborative dissolution between the two members of the group, by recognizing that the most important purpose was to promote spaces of participation, more than individual creation. However, authorship is fundamental for the state; it is a vital element to identify those artists who must be repressed for promoting any non-state participative initiative or any other type of dissident action, publication, association, or event independent of the state. If there is something that repressive forces have not forgotten, it is the names of those members of the group Art-De. After thirty years in exile, the State Security department took away Juan-Sí González’s Cuban passport in February 2020 for trying to give a presentation on Art-De in the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (Hannah Arendt Artivism Institute; INSTAR), founded by the artist Tania Bruguera and located in Old Havana, Cuba, since 2015.
Finally, more than a crisis in collective responsibility, Art-De faced the dissolution of the individual in the face of the state project. However, this was not resolved with a contraction of participative practices toward the individual sphere, instead Art-De forged a space of collective reflection, attempting to circumvent state interference. There was no abandonment of participative works, but rather an attempt to salvage civil society from state-run society. What turned Art-De into the most civic of artistic projects in the Cuban 1980s was the recognition of those highly stigmatised civil associations or dissident groups as equals.
The Artistic Practice of Henry Eric Hernández in Producciones Doboch
In 2005, unaware of the actions of Art-De, the artist Henry Eric Hernández, as part of the collective Producciones Doboch (Doboch Productions) composed of Iván Basulto, Dull Janiell, Giselle Gómez, and Abel Oliva, returned to collaborative practices[xi] beyond art institutions with the fundamental intention of challenging the national narrative. Producciones Doboch produced the interventions Controversia con el ghetto (Controversy with the ghetto; 1999), ¡A quitarse el antifaz! (Off with the mask!; 2000), Los que cavan su pirámide (Those who dig their own pyramids; 2000), Lampo sobre la runa (Radiance on the rune; 2000), and Kermesse al desengaño (Kermesse to disillusion; 2001), as well as the documentaries Almacén (Warehouse; 2000), Bocarrosa (Pink-mouth; 2000), and Sucedió en La Habana I and II (It happened in Havana I and II; 2001).
Henry Eric Hernández, as part of Producciones Doboch, was interested in recovering minimal narratives -a notion used by the artist- in contrast to the supposed coherence of the state narrative. Unlike Art-De, more than promoting spaces of participation in the public sphere and setting out to emancipate the viewer, Producciones Doboch turned to long-term collaborative processes that implied research and interaction with experts in other fields of knowledge.
In three of his interventions, Los que cavan su pirámide (2000), Lampo sobre la runa (2000), and Kermesse al desengaño (2001), the act of burying and excavating are recurrent symbolic moments dedicated to commemorating the subjects excluded from history’s purview.
In Los que cavan su pirámide (2000), the artist worked in collaboration with Lil Domínguez, a biologist, to participate in the exhumation of six individuals. The operation, designed by the artist, consisted of producing commemorative urns in marble and ceramic to deposit the bones, after exhumation, of individuals regarded as ordinary by the historical narrative. The location where these bodies had been buried was the Cristóbal Colón cemetery, the largest in Cuba. Prior to that, Henry Eric Hernández and Lil Domínguez conducted research in the cemetery records on the names of the deceased who were to be exhumed, in order to then pay a visit to their relatives.
The artist went to see the six families; all of them accepted his proposal and they told their relatives’ stories. The scene of this first encounter is fundamental in the operation of the artistic practice; it is the moment when the story that has not been incorporated into the official account is told. The deceased were two Spaniards who migrated to Cuba in the early twentieth century; a bus driver; a geologist; a female literacy instructor; and a mother. The stories recounted were not recorded or incorporated into the work, instead the symbolic movement of the relocation of these narratives was the focus of the exhumation process.
The artist and two photographers from the Producciones Doboch collective were present during the exhumation along with relatives, surrounded by the solemnity it implied in a process that became the symbolic core of the operation. The exhumations were the second scene of the encounter, dedicated to the commemoration of this intervention through a map of the cemetery identifying the location of the urns, along with a photographic record.
For Lampo sobre la runa (2000), Henry Eric Hernández worked on building the tomb of Samuel Nisenbaum, the most respected elder in the Old Havana synagogue. Jews, like all religious groups, were segregated after the triumph of the Revolution. The focus on this ‘social ghetto’, as Henry Eric referred to it, was another opportunity to commemorate a group that had been marginalized in the official narrative. As a starting point for the intervention, the artist approached the Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa, in search of a subject of importance for the community buried there. The gravedigger was the man who guided him to the spot where Samuel Nisenbaum’s remains had been buried in 1995, but that still remained without a tomb.
In the second step in his fieldwork, he visited the Old Havana synagogue, to which the Guanabacoa cemetery belonged. There people spoke to him of the importance of Samuel Nisenbaum to the community. With the collaboration of Producciones Doboch, the artist carried out the construction of a marble and ceramic tomb. The subsequent inauguration of the tomb, the final part of the process, prompted the encounter between the synagogue’s younger generations, the Nisenbaum family and the artists, approximating a commemorative act dedicated not only to an individual, but also to the Jewish community as a social group.
The third intervention, Kermesse al desengaño (2001), involved an archaeological excavation in the cemetery of slaves found in the patio of the Manuel Ascunce Domenech primary school in San José de las Lajas. A church patio had been built on this property in 1788 and served as a cemetery for the townspeople until the early twentieth century, when the same site was occupied by a school. For this intervention, Henry Eric Hernández investigated locations of slave cemeteries to finally select that site, because it covered two zones that interested him: an educational centre, as the preparatory start for the civic space, and a cemetery, designed to remember those who were part of it.
For this intervention, Henry Eric Hernández worked with archaeologist Jorge Garcel, who led the excavation, and archaeologist Liset Roura, of the Archaeology Lab of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. After several weeks of work, the artists of Producciones Doboch and the archaeologists, with the attentive presence of the school’s students, uncovered the human remains of two female bodies. The find was documented in photography and archaeological drawings, following the necessary technical requirements. Then the remains were extracted and placed in ceramic and marble urns, constructed by Henry Eric Hernández, to form part of the San José de las Lajas museum. Even today the remains are still on display, as part of the site’s patrimony.
The collaborative processes brought about in these three interventions were not immediately aimed at a specific public, instead access to these practices was produced through documentation: photographs, maps, chronologies of historical events, and drawings. However, with the exhibition of the remains of the slaves’ bodies in the San José de las Lajas museum, for example, Henry Eric Hernández carried out an emancipative gesture through the restoration of the connection with the zone of the local narrative cancelled in the monumental state narrative.
Furthermore, in Producciones Doboch authorship was not entirely dissolved, instead it operated as a work team activated as a function of the work of its members, incorporating occasional collaborators depending on the project. It was not an interaction that proposed shared authority, instead an operational authority. Finally, these interventions were not intended to create ties given the perception of a crisis in collective responsibility, but rather they were an opportunity to confirm an intuition: the existence of minor stories that go against the grain of the state narrative. For Henry Eric, the task was to address the other to, more than give it a voice, assume a position of authority, to know and understand the narrative that had been denied by the state.
Henry Eric Hernández proposed, through collaborative practices, reflection on the relationship between historical construction, citizen, and state. Again, the state appears as a variable that inevitably must be responded to, both by carrying out artistic practice and by attempting to show it and inscribe it in the history of Cuban art.
Cynicism as a Civic Stance in a Context of Ideological Saturation
During the same time, I was one of the artists being trained at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA; 2004–2009) and the Cátedra Arte Conducta (2004–2007), founded by the artist Tania Bruguera. Neither my colleagues nor I were aware of the previous work by Art-De’s, nor did we see exhibitions of the interventions of Henry Eric Hernández, who migrated to Spain in 2004. Therefore, the only known references to participation-driven art were those developed within state institutions, such as the ISA, through pedagogical projects such as Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP), founded by the artist René Francisco Rodríguez, Departamento de Intervenciones Públicas (DIP) founded by the artist Ruslán Torres, and ENEMA collective, founded by the artist Lázaro Saavedra. In this context, the Cátedra Arte Conducta introduced new questions about performance, its documentation, and its function in the social sphere.[xii]
The state’s complete control of participation and its strong ideological motivation was not resolved through a call to practice civic responsibility, but rather through a cynical stance. In other words, in no case was there explicit confrontation with the state, the presence of the artist’s body, nor any challenge to state order; instead, artists attempted to skirt the state’s social and legal inflexibility by producing collaborative operations that involved services, payments, illegal actions, or corruption. The design of these operations often mimicked the social behaviour of Cuban citizens contending with the economically, legally, and ethically precarious conditions imposed on them by state order.
In the work ‘CDR 11, zona 10’ (2005), the artist duo Celia-Yunior (Celia González and Yunior Aguiar) - of which the author is one member - were able to get the CDR 11 - Comité de Defensa de la Revolución (Revolution Defence Committee)[xiii] - in Yunior Aguiar’s barrio selected as outstanding for exceeding expectations in the blood donation campaign within its community. The duo’s strategy to meet this goal was to pay five dollars per donation to anyone interested in the transaction. Celia and Yunior managed to collect twenty blood donations for the CDR 11 in zone 10, many more than those usually collected by appealing to the solidarity and social commitment of the barrio residents.
Consequently, the CDR 11 in zone 10 was selected as outstanding and Yunior Aguiar received a diploma in recognition of his altruism by collecting twenty blood donations for his community. The diploma awarded served as verification of the action’s effectiveness and documentation organically produced directly through the action’s operation.
Purchasing blood donations for surgical procedures at a price of five dollars was customary in Cuba. The Celia-Yunior duo transferred the operation to a state organization that appealed to the solidarity of the citizenry for its success. The artists tried to challenge, from a cynical perspective, the emancipatory effectiveness of state discourse, by calling for the altruism of citizens in a moral context dominated by economic insecurity.[xiv]
‘En medio de qué’ (In the middle of what; 2008) was a collaborative action carried out by artists Renier Quer, Javier Castro, Grethell Rasúa, Luis Gárciga, Yunior Aguiar, Adrián Melis, and Celia González. For this action, an exhibition space was conditioned to evoke the aesthetic of the bar ‘La Bodeguita del Medio’, an emblematic tourist landmark, known for its Cuban music, famous mojito cocktails, and the custom of patrons writing their names on the wall. During ‘En medio de qué’, while the public enjoyed the ‘healthy’ tradition of musical sones and Cuban rum, they could write on the walls, but not their own names, only those of censored artists and their censors in the history of Cuban art.
Starting from the cultural tradition - used by the state to strengthen nationalist sentiment, at the same time that it promoted tourism targeting the Caribbean cliché - the appropriate ambiance was produced, as ‘acceptable’, to challenge censorship in Cuba. For hours, critics, curators, and art historians wrote, crossed out, corrected, highlighted, not only names, but also titles of exhibitions, phrases, dates, and events related to censorship in Cuba.
This action was carried out in the earliest and oldest space of independent Cuban art, ‘Espacio Aglutinador’ (Gathering Space) of the artist Sandra Ceballos. ‘En medio de qué’ was one of the projects presented during ‘Curadores [Curators] go home’ (2008), coordinated by Sandra Ceballos and that was closed down one day before its inauguration by the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (National Visual Arts Council)[xv] - a state institution - accusing all the participants of being counter-revolutionaries in a massive mailout[xvi] sent to the Cuban art community. Most of us artists decided to continue participating in the exhibition and it opened a few days later than originally planned.
‘En medio de qué’, more than an attempt to restore social ties, made an effort to spur dialogue in order to create a record of those moments when emancipated citizens had tried to exercise their right to freedom of expression in the face of a totalitarian state. This call to participation occurred, furthermore, in a space stigmatised as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and ‘dissident’, labels that have serious implications for the social life of any initiative and its creators.
These artists were more interested in promoting productive tensions[xvii] under specific moral, economic, and political conditions than in creating overwhelmingly positive practices, such as those referenced by Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (1998). More than pursuing a restoration of the civic potential of the subjects, they underscored the ethical position of Cuban citizens faced with the ideological saturation of participation, producing an effect of solidarity through an economic transaction or taking advantage of a traditional setting to challenge sanctioned topics.
Right to Have Rights, MSI and 27N: Post-2018 Cuba
On 27 November 2020, an unprecedented protest march took place outside the Ministry of Culture in Havana. For the first time in decades, unrelated to official calls for participation, hundreds of young people protested for hours in the street in a peaceful sit-down to demand a response to the brutal dispersion of the crowd by State Security Forces - the political police -from the headquarters of the Movimiento San Isidro (San Isidro Movement; MSI), where fourteen people, including artists, journalists, and activists, eight of them on a hunger strike, were congregating.
The MSI’s initial demand was the release of rapper Denis Solís, a Black anti-establishment musician and resident of a marginalized barrio, who was condemned in a summary trial to eight months in prison for contempt of court. This sanction against the rapper, whose lyrics explicitly expressed opposition to the Cuban government, was a habitual strategy to imprison ‘uncomfortable’ (i.e., annoying) and socially and politically stigmatised citizens. He was hit with this accusation for transmitting in real-time the illegal entry of a policeman into his home.
The Movimiento San Isidro arose in 2018, after the passage of Decree-Law 349, which legalised censorship of art and the criminalisation of exhibition and promotion spaces and carrying out independent art proposals, among other prohibitions that undermined freedom of expression.[xviii]
The hunger strike of MSI members and allies took place inside the movementʼs headquarters; although the body was not physically present in the public space, the individuals on the hunger strike caused a major media stir through photographs, posts, and direct messages on social media networks. Meanwhile, from the street, the police blocked access to the headquarters day and night. However, the control of public space was not enough; the state needed to control those allied bodies for defying state control. On the night of 26 November soldiers dressed as physicians cleared the venue, under the pretext of the possible transmission of Covid, at the same time that the state blocked access to the internet throughout the country.
Artists, filmmakers, actors, curators, writers, musicians, journalists, and intellectuals, mostly young people, who gathered outside the Ministry of Culture on 27 November, asked for an immediate response to the brutal clearing of the MSI. They also demanded the release of the artist and MSI member, Luis Manuel Otero, who was held in a hospital after the crowd was dispersed and, of course, the release of rapper Denis Solís.
From 10:00 in the morning, without moving from the site out of fear of police detentions, the group of protestors outside the ministry was growing. That night, the numbers grew to more than 400, even though the police tried to clamp down on the arrival of more people from 6:00 in the afternoon. After hours of waiting, with limited access to food and water, unable to charge mobile devices that were transmitting the events in real time, and without public illumination, the Ministry of Culture lined up five officials to meet with thirty representatives of the protestors. While the meeting was taking place in the Ministry, the rest of the protestors applauded every fifteen minutes from the street, so their thirty colleagues inside would know they were still onsite. More than choruses or chanting slogans, there was applause, but if a phrase that was repeated that 27 November night could represent the 27N movement, it was ‘Right to have rights’.
This time it was the physical presence of supporters in public space that pressured the state through the Ministry of Culture. The applause outside the Ministry was not commemorative; it was a performative gesture that, in addition to carrying a symbolic weight, served a practical purpose: indicating that the mass of young people had not been dispersed by the police while the meeting was being held. It was already night and the electricity services had been cut, both on public streets and in the ministry itself, therefore, it was a situation that would have been easy to destabilise, especially because undercover agents dressed as civilians insisted on stirring up belligerence among the protestors.
At this first meeting with the institution, the young people demanded the end to repression against artists, journalists, activists, and citizens in general; the end to the defamation of independent artists and journalists through the state press and television; recognition of the independent press as an interlocutor; and conditions permitting the transmission of dialogue by non-state media.
These demands were not exclusively of interest for the art scene; they were fundamental civic demands for a depoliticised, highly ideological nation lacking the basic tools to demand rights: freedom of association and a multiparty system, public protests, the free press, and access to the internet. The latter had only been provided for five years by the state enterprise Etecsa at specific Wi-Fi sites, not free of charge, instead at extremely high mobile data prices. Homes in Cuba do not have any access to the Wi-Fi network.
Despite state control of work, public and private life, the artistic elite - writers, filmmakers, actors, curators, and academics - have managed to uphold the right to free thought in a country where legislation prohibits freedom of association. The autonomy of art in the face of the state - not of its institutions, but indeed in thinking and producing it - has successfully shaped political citizens. A small group of professionals, such as attorneys and journalists, also participate in this autonomy and after years of work, they have been able to practice their profession independently, although they are still criminalised.
However, less than twenty-four hours after that initial encounter in the Ministry of Culture, the government began a defamation campaign in the national press and television. From that moment on, the police undertook a surveillance campaign targeting MSI participants and artists, journalists, and intellectuals led the November 27 demonstration. For days, a patrol car outside their homes prevented them from going out to the street in a sort of arbitrary house arrest; mobile communications were also blocked.
Despite the defamation and repression, the thirty representatives and other professionals, moved by the same grievances, continued working on the possibility of a second dialogue. This coalition between professionals began to recognise itself as 27N. A few days later, they sent to the deputy minister of Culture, Fernando Rojas, the conditions for the coordination of a second dialogue, promised by the ministry officials at the 27 November meeting.
On 27 January, commemorating the anniversary of José Martí, 27N called for a new action. However, the night before, the action was leaked and State Security forces blocked the arrival of the participants. Then 27N decided to change the meeting place to hold a poetry reading. Before 9:00 in the morning, the artists Camila Lobón and Tania Bruguera, poet Katherine Bisquet, and journalist Camila Acosta were arrested. State Security agents prevented journalist Luz Escobar from leaving her home. In light of these arrests, 27N decided to call for their release by going to the Ministry of Culture, where more artists, journalists, activists, and musicians joined in.
Deputy minister, Fernando Rojas, first demanded that the twenty-some protestors withdraw, and then invited them to enter the ministry headquarters, to avoid protests in public spaces. However, the arrests of other artists continued, including Amaury Pacheco and Iris Ruiz - both MSI members - so 27N decided to remain outside the Ministry until the others were released. While they were waiting, they repeated the poem ‘Dos Patrias’ (Two Homelands) by José Martí in unison. The readings took place at a prudent distance between the protestors - to prevent accusations of lack of care in the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification to disperse the protesters - each one read the short poem from their cell phones led by the art historian Carolina Barrero, who indicated the start of a new round of reading.
Even when the State Security forces cut off internet access throughout the country, videos circulated live from the moment when the Culture minister, Alpidio Alonso, physically attacked the journalist, Mauricio Mendoza, of the Diario de Cuba, and when the police and Interior Ministry agents beat and dragged protesters to a bus. They were detained in a police unit for more than six hours, during which they were interrogated, and their mobile phones were confiscated so all the information could be removed. That same night, the national news broadcast their names in a new defamatory act linking them to the CIA.
The opposition of art professionals to Law Decree 349, since 2018, has meant a shift in strategies to respond to the state in three ways: first, the use of legal resources began to support an explicit confrontation with the state; second, the physical presence of people in public spaces became a regular practice; and third, alliances began between stigmatised art professionals, elites, and other professionals such as filmmakers, actors, writers, journalists, and attorneys.
For the Cuban state, accustomed to dividing the population as either legitimate or illegitimate, according to class and race, the post-2018 performative gestures - which emerged from MSI, the opposition to Law Decree 349, and later from the 27N - have been intolerable because they were unclassifiable. The habitual strategies of control through repression have become more difficult to justify under the political dismissal of the protesters as ‘uncultured’, ‘slackers’, ‘thieves’, ‘antisocial’, or ‘paid by the CIA’. The ‘intolerable’ impossibility of classifying performative actions post-2018 has been upheld, not only by its multiple, open, not particularly homogeneous ways, but also through the array of its protagonists, when legitimate citizens - artists collected by the National Museum of Art or curators with international careers - and ‘banned’ individuals - criminalised independent journalists or black artists who had not graduated from art schools - formed an alliance to demand basic civil rights.
The hunger strike in the MSI headquarters, the ongoing applause during the sit-down outside the Ministry of Culture on 27 November, and the 27 January poetry reading in response to the arrests were not artworks; they were not conceived as such from that place, nor were there authorship claims, nor a distinction between the public and makers. These were, in any case, collective performative gestures that arose as strategies of direct and explicit confrontation with the state. Mobilised by a spirit of civic more than artistic participation, the participants were now emancipated subjects who, above all, addressed the state as the principal interlocutor.
These performative gestures have been effective in that they have successfully evinced the state’s incapacity to contend with the symbolic destabilisation that they provoked. At the same time as the rupture of the supposed coherence of the state narrative, it announced the nonviability of its administration to respond to the basic demands of the citizenry.
After knowing and analysing the work of these artists, how can we ignore the fear of repression that artists in socialist countries faced by employing participative non-state practices, or the systematic deactivation of those who have been attempting it? And if looking in archives, how can we overlook the annulation of information or the rewriting of fundamental events stemming from political stigmatisation?[CI2]
Under a totalitarian state, participation and its failure have been essential to the practices of Art-De, Producciones Doboch, the artists in Cátedra Arte Conducta, the 27N, and the MSI. They have responded to the exhaustion of the emancipatory possibilities of participation, at the same time as the state’s utilization of participation as a tool of control and repression. The civic failure of participation, therefore, has been double: on the one hand, due to the ideological saturation of participative strategies, and on the other, due to the systematic stigmatisation of any non-state participation initiatives.
For these artists it has not been about an attempt to emancipate the spectator - disgusted and intimidated by an act of participation - but rather, an inevitable response to a totalitarian state. The participation practices analysed here repeatedly contend with something more than with the relationship involving artist, work, and the public, and instead a relationship involving the artist, work, and the state. The total control of participative experiences has positioned the state as an inevitable entity, turning it into an element shaping these practices, simultaneously a protagonist and spectator.
The anti-capitalist discourse that has shored up the totalitarian state in Cuba has also been supported by an art of participation and emancipation on the international scene. Understanding the place of the state in the art and emancipation relationship problematises participative practice, not exclusively as anti-capitalist, but above all as possessing the power to overthrow.
[i] Marcus, G. (2010) Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology: Experiments in Collaboration and Intervention. Visual Anthropology: published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology 23(4), pp. 263-27; Marcus, G. & Myers, F. (1995) The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley, University of California Press; Marcus, G. & Elhaik, T. (2012) Diseño curatorial en la poética y política de la etnografía actual. Una conversación entre Tarek Elhaik y George Marcus, Iconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 42, pp. 89-104; Elhaik, T. (2013) What is Contemporary Anthropology? Critical Arts: Journal of Media and Culture Studies 27(6), pp. 784-798; Elhaik, T. (2017) The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts. Edinburgh, University Press; Schneider, A. & Wright, C. (eds.) (2010) Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford, Berg; Schneider, A. & Wright, C. (eds.) (2013) Anthropology and Art. London, Bloomsbury; Schneider, A. and Wright, C. (eds.) (2017) Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters. London, Bloomsbury; Sansi, R. (ed.) (2020) The Anthropologist as Curator. London, Bloomsbury.
[ii] Bishop, C. (2006) The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents. Artforum, (February), pp. 178-83; Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London, Verso
Books; Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Paris, Les Presses du réel; Kester, G. (2009) Lessons in futility: Francis Alÿs and the legacy of May ’68. Third text 23(4), pp. 407-420; Kester, G. (2015) Editorial. Field: a Journal for Socially-Engaged Art Criticism 1 (1), pp. 1-11; Foster, H. (1996) The Return of The Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, The MIT Press.
[iii] Camnitzer, L. (1994) New Art of Cuba. Austin, University of Texas Press. American artist and researcher Coco Fusco, in her book Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), analyses how in his book New art of Cuba, art critic Luis Camnitzer discredits the work of Juan-Sí González at the same time that he minimises the repressive acts he was subjected to.
[iv] Acts of repudiation consist of groups of people summoned by the state to offend and attack, almost always outside the homes of those considered enemies of the ‘revolution’.
[v] Interview with Juan-Sí González conducted by the author, August 2020, Mexico City.
[vi] Interview with Juan-Sí González conducted by the author, August 2020, Mexico City.
[vii] In his article ‘El amigo totalitario’ (draft pending publication 2020) Cuban artist and researcher Henry Eric Hernández analyses the political violence not only exercised by the state, but also, above all, by the group of art professionals, specifically in the case of Art-De.
[viii] Interview with the poet María Elena Cruz Varela at INSTAR. https://www.facebook.com/InstitutoArtivismo/videos/288710236164650/
[ix] The film ‘Un día cualquiera’ (1990) was a collaboration between the group Art-De - Juan-Sí González and Jorge Crespo - and the group Ritual - filmmakers Marco Antonio Abad and Ramón García (Mongui). It was filmed in secret by the four artists in the home of Marco Antonio Abad while the property was under surveillance by the political police. Juan-Sí González and Ramón García had already left Cuba when Jorge Crespo and Marco Antonio Abad were condemned to two years in prison for making the film.
[x] Bishop, C. (ed.) (2006) Participation. London, Whitechapel Gallery
[xi] Even though in 1990 the artist René Francisco Rodríguez created the pedagogical project Desde una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP) at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Producciones Doboch is one of the few examples of collaborative projects independent of state institutions.
[xii] Text read by Tania Bruguera about her project Arte de Conducta (Behaviour art) at Casa de Las Américas, Havana, 2003. Debates de Arteamérica. Available from: http://www.arteamerica.cu/2/debates.htm [Accessed 20th January 2021]
[xiii] Comité de Defensa de la Revolución (Revolution Defence Committee; CDR) is a mass organisation created by Fidel Castro on 28 September 1961 to control and oversee dissident political stances –counterrevolution- and later common delinquency from the barrio.
[xiv] Other collaborative practices with a cynical position in the face of the saturation of participation: ‘Con tu propio sabor’ (With your own flavour; 2005–2006) by Grethell Rasúa, ‘Reunificación Familiar’ (Family reunification; 2005–2006) by Javier Castro, ‘Contraseña VHS’ (VHS password; 2005–2006) by Celia-Yunior, and ‘Vigilia’ (Vigil; 2005) by Adrián Melis.
[xv] The Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (National Visual Arts Council) is the institution that oversees the system of state galleries in the country to offer economic support and keep in check the ideological stances of artistic production. This institution responds directly to the Ministry of Culture.
[xvi] Note released by the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas: ‘Next Saturday 18 October 2008 a propagandistic show has been organised for openly political ends at the “Espacio Aglutinador”. Among the leading guests are representatives in Havana of the genocidal government of George W. Bush and mercenaries as discredited as Marta Beatriz Roque and Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz. Its intent is for our artists to legitimise their contribution to the media campaign against our country with their presence. We denounce the attempt to give artistic coverage to provocations of this nature. We regret that Sandra Ceballos has played into the hands of the servants of the empire’.
[xvii] Schneider, A. and Wright, C. (eds.) (2013) Anthropology and Art Practice. New York, Bloomsbury.
[xviii] Some of the independent spaces that remained in the zone of illegality after the passage of Law-Decree 349 are artist Sandra Ceballos’s Espacio Aglutinador - the first independent gallery in Cuba since 1994; the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR), created by the visual artist Tania Bruguera; and curator Solveig Font’s Avecez Art Space. New regulations for private enterprises were added and published on 10 February 2021, which prohibited recording studios, film production, the exercise of journalism, architecture, the legal profession - among other professions - and any type of non-state association.
Reference:
Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and The Politics of Spectatorship. London, Verso Books.
Bishop, C. (2006) Participation. Documents of Contemporary Art. London, Whitechapel Gallery.
Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Paris, Les Presses du réel.
Camnitzer, Luis. (1994) New Art of Cuba. Texas, University of Texas Press.
Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, The MIT Press.
Kester, G. (2009) Lessons in Futility: Francis Alÿs and the Legacy of May ’68. Third Text, 23 (4), pp. 407-420.
Kester, G. (2015) Editorial. Field: A Journal for Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, 1 (1), pp. 1-11.
Schneider, A. and Wright, C. (eds.) (2010) Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice. Oxford, Berg.
Schneider, A. & Wright, C. (eds.) (2013) Anthropology and Art Practice, London, Bloomsbury.
Schneider, A. & Wright, C. (eds.) (2017) Alternative Art and Anthropology. Global Encounters. London, Bloomsbury.