King Shango and Saint Peter in the boycott.
Territorial References Project
by: Frency Fernández
Art critic and curator.
There is no truce / 2008 / For more information about this work: Click here!
Territorial References Project / To see the complete project: Click here!
Territorial References Project
by: Frency Fernández
Art critic and curator.
There is no truce / 2008 / For more information about this work: Click here!
Territorial References Project / To see the complete project: Click here!
It did not require any effort to leave the exhibition TERRITORIAL REFERENCES halfway between its apparent interests. Thunder, clouds and rain served as simple “agents” to disconnect it and dismantle it in one of its critical enclaves: Pier 3 on Havana Port Avenue.
Installations, sculptures, some paintings, photographic images and video projections by twenty-five self-proclaimed independent Cuban artists, qualified as emerging and experimental, opened the exhibition on August 5. Several of us read an electronic note with this information, emphasizing the surprising nature of the intervention after two previous successful experiences.
Coincidentally, on November 22, 2007, when the first success, MARINA 255, opened in the building at Humboldt and Malecón, the Habana Club Foundation presented the post-Soviet line of Stolichnaya for bigwigs, snobs, well-off kids, managers, corporate executives, wives or lovers, the newly rich, and a few artists from the then semi-censored VOSTOK exhibition. MARINA 255 took place among simple but perceptive neighbors who welcomed the exhibition with the pleasure of being part of an unusual artistic event in their monotonous lives. The second, INFORMACIÓN DESPLAZADA, took place on January 29, 2008 in the park at Calzada and C del Vedado. One day after the commemoration of the birth of that national symbol, sacred martyr and presumed precursor of the good and the bad of this Cuban nation project (and woe to anyone who dared to place an exhibition like that on such a day). Days before, the park had been a protest square for some so-called dissidents, with UNESCO on one corner, the Amadeo Roldán Theater on another, in front of the park the Menocal family of Nina the gallery owner; and in the neighborhood people with housing, construction or sanitation problems and a lack of common water.
Now with another commemoration: the “day of the sons of the Fatherland”, REFERENCES… suffered again the cursed territorial circumstance with the water contaminated with hydrocarbons everywhere.
Initially, the idea, although everything remains nebulous for its creators, as some do not remember, others remain silent and a few affirm it, focused the arrangement of the more objectual and installation works on a symbolic dialogue with the sea (as Jaque's work seems to affirm and timidly others, such as Yeni Casanueva's). The succulent dish was more the location, with metal scaffolding, stairs, rental of overhead lights, sound equipment and projections. Like a mise en scène given by light environments emphasizing works in a somewhat tenebrist space, with baroque effects, overloaded by the ruined, as ruined as almost everything else.
Beyond the seafront everything is watched by police, security guards, and panoptic cameras. Just sitting on those docks is like showing your personal identity to a police officer, not always in a very nice way. And we all, we all know that around August the ghost of 1994 weighs on us as if it were resurfacing to serve some civic act.
All these elements added interesting airs to TERRITORIAL REFERENCES, with the risk of playing in a peculiar space, which requires being sharpened in terms of art, in “museographic” terms, to negotiate or impose a visual concept that, although heterogeneous, would create a kind of great work.
The REFERENCES… are ambiguous: the intervention was not at all surprising, the artists had been under the sun for three days and setting up the shed, letters had been delivered to institutional levels, including State Security, but as in every bureaucratic state, and given our average legislative ignorance, something was finally missing: it is alleged that an instance of the Harbor Master's Office and the argument of structural danger of the dock - a story that we have heard before and almost believe but is always followed by a policeman and a patrol with a not very good face. In the end, like art itself, the transparency of reality is an illusion that an artist must know how to sniff out almost paranoidly. Because we must not sin of so much operational naivety: there have already been too many examples.
And we can consider the intention suspicious, which sometimes reminds us of wanting to shock, of needing scandal under this idea that censorship legitimizes even if it is labeled as “extra-artistic” the work is a pamphlet. Behind this, the amnesia of the artists themselves. Yes, twenty years have passed since the eighties, but some in REFERENCIAS TERRITORIALES do not seem to know it. A few of them have it as a “reference” but the general result leads us to works that are quite elementary, class exercises from those elementary level art schools of the eighties. On the other hand, an ambiguity referred to above. Like wanting to flush the toilet but not catch the monkey.
It could be considered greater suspicion when one knows the position of some of the participants of …TERRITORIALES, given to a certain opportunism and somewhat creatively empty, which perhaps speaks of why they are not legitimized by the supposed officialdom and hide behind an “independent” status that we could also review – in these cases there is always someone behind the scenes, and the mere fact of touching institutions in a pyramidal society discredits such a position.
In Cuba, the alternative is not clear, the “emerging” is elastic and much is blurred by that other bag of the official. They are connected bags, convenient presentation labels. We know artists positioned in biennials, scholarships and international galleries who have been “non-official” and others so important within the truly contemporary who are not absolutely so and do dissent symbolically and expressively. Without falling into the clichés of identity – already in crisis for better or worse – or in that imprecise and even poorly produced area under the imposture of “the procedural” and the false experimental; due to emptiness.
In the end, TERRITORIAL REFERENCES reaffirms a sad reality of art, socially and economically, that we constantly tend to wear ourselves out in companies that turn out to be insipid, although a few ignorant people believe them within a carnival of masks that hide their desire to rise.
Frency. Havana, August 13, 2008.
1. The list is long, only a few artists will be named, depending on the symptomatic nature of their works in relation to the spirit of the text. But they are all the following: Adriana Arronte, Alejandro Gonzalez, Carlos Lama, Carlos Caballero, Darlyn Delgado, Elizabeth Cervino, Francisco Espinosa (Paco), Gustavo Del Valle, Irvin Vera, Jairo Gutierrez, Jose Eduardo Jaque, Jorge Luis Del Valle, Katia Olver, Lester Alvarez, Michel Perez (Pollo), Osvaldo Gonzalez, Raunel Gonzalez, Rodolfo Peraza (Fito), Raychel Carrion, Yenyeski Bernal, Yeny Casanueva, Yordanys Jimenez (Pipo), Yunior Acosta (Yimi) and Yornel Martinez (Chino).
2. The police and authorities present, in front of more than two hundred people, of course, addressed themselves with a certain care and one of them even read his poems..
3. These adjectives gave a triumphalist aura that can be read as presumptuous.
4. On August 5, 1994, one of the boats that were migrating was sunk by Cuban authorities – with kidnappers, yes, but also with families and minors – causing several deaths.
5. Speaking of opportunism, the theatre group El Ciervo Encantado burst onto the scene with a performance not included in the exhibition that was more theatrical than plastic: as a “finishing touch”.
2. The police and authorities present, in front of more than two hundred people, of course, addressed themselves with a certain care and one of them even read his poems..
3. These adjectives gave a triumphalist aura that can be read as presumptuous.
4. On August 5, 1994, one of the boats that were migrating was sunk by Cuban authorities – with kidnappers, yes, but also with families and minors – causing several deaths.
5. Speaking of opportunism, the theatre group El Ciervo Encantado burst onto the scene with a performance not included in the exhibition that was more theatrical than plastic: as a “finishing touch”.