Danilo Maldonado Machado's testimony

Danilo Maldonado Machado Testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights and Global Women’s Issues February 16, 2017
Thank you for the opportunity to amplify my voice to denounce the situation of human rights violations of where I come from, Cuba. I am 33 years old and have already served 4 sentences for the only reason that I have critized the Cuban dictatorship through my art. In Cuba, freedom of speech by artists is prohibited by Article 39 of the Constitution. According to this, “artistic creation is free provided that its contents is not contrary to the Revolution.” This means that the work of artists such as myself and my collegues Gorki Águila and Tania Brugera, which is critical of the dictatory regime of the Castro brothers, is illegal in Cuba. For that reason I served 2 years when I was 18; 1 year when I was 24; 10 months at age 31 and most recently 2 months at the age of 33. Now I’ll refer to the last two occassions in which I was in prison. On Christmas Day 2014, as part of a performance, I tried to release two little pigs on the streets of Havana, both painted in green, one with the name of Raul and the other with the name of Fidel. I called that performance “Animal Farm in memoriam”in honor of Gorge Orwell. This cost me 10 months in prison. During that time I was tortured physically and psycologically by the dictatorship to the point that I declared myself on hunger strike and even considered the possibility of letting myself die in prison as a result. After 10 months without previous warning, I was released and driven to my house from prison. Until today I have not been served any notice of pending criminal charges nor have I been summoned for any type of trial. At that time I was released following my protests and my hunger strike in prison, and constant protests by my mother, my sister, my grandmother, friends, and international institutions such as the Human Rights Foundation, the Cuban American National Foundation, Amnesty International, etc. These same friends and others came together again this last time I was in prison. I was in a maximum security prison in Havana for the simple crime of not having expressed any “sadness” over the death of dictator Fidel Castro. On the night of December 26, when his death was announced, I was awakened by calls from friends and my sister. I dressed quickly and when I left my house I could surely perceive fear as the streets became emptier and more silent. That day I began to think over how many atrocities and how many crimes against humanity had been committed in more than 56 years by brothers Fidel and Raul Castro. So I went out to the streets to shout "Take the streets, the murderer died, the mare died." I walked about a mile, took transportation to the other side of the city, and walked for a while celebrating until my video, that went viral on social media, was transmitted live as the only celebratory event in the city of Havana, and on the island. In the video, by assuming my itendity as a free person in a country controled by a totalitarian dictatorship, I took the risky decision of graffiting the wall of the hotel where Fidel Castro’s troops were quartered for the first time in Havana almost 60 years ago, armed and a without democratic election. I did that following the example of the great Vaclav Havel, the artist and former president of the Czech Republic, who advised all those who, like him, had to live under communist totalitarianism, to LIVE IN TRUTH. To stop pretending that the reality imposed by the regime by force is genuine. Upon the death of Fidel Castro, this notion would have meant that I should feel sad for the death of the dictator, as was pretended by thousands of people for fear of repression on that day. That day, after walking through the city, I returned home. I was tired and went to bed when I was awakened by a noise that made me worry about my door. Then I saw a patrol car with a policeman and two other men in plain clothing, when I saw the owner of the house handing them the key to my door. In the process I was able to call my fiancée, Alexandra Martinez, and I said, "Call everyone, they are taking me prisoner." The two of them threw themselves at me without even identifying themselves verbally and I received only insults and blows from these characters, because according to them, I had disrespected Fidel Castro. And so I was taken to the police unit of La Lisa as they continued to hit me even after I got off, which did not stop my cries of "Murderers, yes the mare died, and good thing." When in the unit I asked: Do you know me? Have I done soemthing to you? If I have not committed any crime, why do you beat me for my way of thinking? To which they only claimed "the laws support us." This time the cost was 55 days in prison. At this time, I once again suffered physical and psychological torture, preventing me from seeing my family and my fiancee. I was transferred to 6 consecutive detention centers, including the high security prison "Combinado del Este." Also at this time I was deprived of the right to be represented by a lawyer since my probono international attorney, Kimberly Motley, who had tried to visit me in Havana was arrested and immediately deported from Cuba. Combinado del Este is a horrendous high security prison where only the most dangerous prisoners are sent. The roofs were rife with leaks, the 6x4 square meter cells were overcrowded for 36 people and bunk beds for 3, arranged in order to avoid the leaks. During the day the lights were off and although it was daytime the sunlight did not penetrate the bars. On several occassions my jailers tried to terrorize me my threatening that at any time they could take me to the yard to execute me by firing squad. I was very worried by this because I knew that could easily happen given the record of the hundreds if not thousands of political prisoners executed by the dictatorship. I had to undergo all this abuse and humiliation for not shedding tears and for grafitting “He’s Gone” when an assasin died, one who with his brother, the current president of Cuba, Raul Castro, never allowed a different party to the one he created at gun point. The Castro brothers and their family own the 3 newspapers, radio, TV, the only telephone company in Cuba which is the only one allowed to supply internet. These gentlemen have remained in power during almost 60 years not only giving order to masacre Cubans such as those aboard Tugboat 13 de Marzo but also various attempts against Oswaldo Paya Sardiñas’ life and his eventual murder, as well as that of Laura Pollán. The Castros not only divided all Cubans, but also made exiles of them, manyof whom are in this country. These characters contributed high numbers of mercenaries and arms, to the wars of Angola, Ethiopia, under the command of the Russian Army, the FARC in Colombia, and guerrillas in Venezuela in the 60s and in last two decades have support the dictatorial Chavista regime, who today have plundged their people into hunger and oppression. I want to close my presentation requesting two things to the people and the government of the United States. First, we request solidarity for the cause of democracy in Cuba, given that we have suffered a regime that does not allow democratic elections for almost 60 years. The world should give us solidarity and should ask Raul Castro for a plebiscite and democratic elections in Cuba. And secondly, I ask the people and the governmentof the United States, to pressure Raul Castro’s regime to release the thousands of political prisoners existent in my country. Due to the totalitarian system we Cubans live under, at least 85% of the present prison population would be considered innocent in any democratic country and would have never been sent to prison. All Cubans are hostage of the Castro brothers’ regime and the life of all Cubans, parriculalry artists, opponents, and dissidents, are under permanent danger at the hands of the repressive dictatorship. Once again we need the solidarity of the United States and the support of all people of the world.
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Felix Gonzalez-Torres in Chelsea

Felix Gonzalez-Torres in Chelsea Longtime gallerist Andrea Rosen, a close friend of the artist, takes visitors through a new exhibition

 Published: May 02, 2017    Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Summer), 1993; installed in connection with "Untitled" (America #2), 1992, and "Untitled," 1992 Photo: Cuban Art News While Carmen Herrera’s show opens this evening, last Thursday a show of work by her friend Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) opened just a few blocks away. That morning, longtime gallerist Andrea Rosen, a close friend of Gonzalez-Torres and executor of his estate, guided visitors through the new exhibition at David Zwirner gallery. The show draws from many bodies of work spanning his career—photography, billboards, videos, light strands, and curtains, among others. Installed in spaces ranging from large and open to small and intimate, the works interact with and animate their settings. Among the works in the large first gallery is “Untitled”, 1989/1990, a “stack piece” consisting of two stacks of large-sized white paper side by side. In small print at the center, the sheets in one stack read “Somewhere better than this place”, while the sheets in the other read “Nowhere better than this place.”   

 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled", 1989/1990 (two stacks) Photo: Cuban Art News   Like all of the artist’s stack pieces and candy spills, visitors are invited to take one. When depleted, the works are replenished. “He once said, the important idea is, how do you reinvent—how do you reactivate—a space?” explained Rosen. “How do you use space in ways that are subtly subversive, or subtly altering?” In 1990, when Rosen opened her gallery with a show of the stack pieces, “it was really shocking to have works that could be taken away.” Gallery visitors then passed through “Untitled” (Chemo), 1991, a floor-to-ceiling beaded curtain that spanned the width of the space, activating it in a different way.  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Chemo), 1991 Photo: Cuban Art News   Filling the far wall is “Untitled”, 1995, a public-art billboard that is also appearing on advertising billboards in all five boroughs of New York.  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled", 1995 Photo: Cuban Art News   Works in the next room include “Untitled” (Placebo-Landscape for Roni), 1993, an endless supply of gold-wrapped candies running the length of the space.  Andrea Rosen, left, with Emilie Keldie of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation and Christopher D’Amelio of Zwirner. In the background is the candy spill "Untitled" (Placebo-Landscape for Roni), 1993. Photo: Cuban Art News   Also on view in this room: “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990. “On a technical level,” said Rosen, “the clocks are allowed to fall out of sync, as life does. And they are already out of sync to some degree.” As soon as one stops, the batteries must be replaced and the clock reset to the same time as the other.  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987–1990 Photo: Cuban Art News   “It’s about inevitability, but it’s also about continuation,” Rosen said. In the gallery stairwell, three separate light strings from 1992 and 1993 are joined together in one expansive work that ends in a coil of lights on the ground floor. Gonzalez-Torres "was very particular about why a stack was different from a light string,” Rosen explained. “Stacks, beaded curtains, and candy works can all exist in more than one place at a time. Whereas light strings, even though they’re also made of very common material, have a physicality and can only exist in one place at a time.” A light string, she said, “can never be shown with light bulbs burnt out. Those are some of the intrinsic rules of the work.” 

Partial view of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, foreground, and "Untitled" (Loverboy), 1989 Photo: Cuban Art News   A small, intimate space on the second floor holds two works: the sheer blue floor-length curtains of “Untitled” (Loverboy), 1989, and “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. As part of this work, a male go-go dancer performs once a day for 15 minutes, unannounced, at a time of his own choosing. “They dance only for themselves,” said Rosen, adding that “the stage is activated with or without a dancer. Absence is as important as presence.”  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Ross), 1991 Photo: Cuban Art News Other works in the second-floor galleries include a colorful candy spill, a second beaded curtain, and another, slightly different installation of “Untitled” (Loverboy). On a wall near the stairwell is a drawing from the Bloodwork series, “Untitled” (Bloodwork – Steady Decline), 1994, which quietly acknowledges Gonzalez-Torres’s battle with AIDS, from which he died two years later. Rosen noted that the Bloodwork pieces are “the only body of work that Felix made by hand.” But it’s inaccurate, she said, “to assume that these works were actually made from real [bloodwork] charts. They’re not.”  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Bloodwork - Steady Decline), 1994 Photo: Cuban Art News   Even so, she pointed out that, with its medical implications, the single diagonal line “subverts this from an abstract object to a non-abstract object.” In closing, Rosen said that as the show prepared to open, one of her strongest realizations was how Gonzalez-Torres’s art “continuously works. Whatever those rules were that Felix set out, whatever those boundaries were, the work maintains its ability to continue to evolve and sustain its core.” Felix Gonzalez-Torres runs through June 24, 2017 at David Zwirner, New York.

above copied from http://www.cubanartnews.org/news/felix-gonzalez-torres-in-chelsea/6073

 

UNFORGIVABLE. | ERIK RAVELO.

In the spirit of International Workers’ Day—also known as May Day or Labour Day—Erik Ravelo released his latest series, UNFORGIVABLE. Reminiscent of his previous series Los Intocables (The Untouchables),  UNFORGIVABLE spotlights the almost 6 year quagmire that is Syria; depicting the most vulnerable victims of the Syrian crisis in the arms of the current presidents of countries whose policies, right or wrong, have contributed to this atrocity.  Though some may feel it is unfair to use some of the leaders who did not cause the conflict, Erik explains:

“I DIDN’T WANT TO USE FORMER RESPONSIBLE LEADERS I JUST FOCUSED MYSELF ON TODAY’S SITUATION. I KNOW THE LIST MIGHT BE ENDLESS. TO BE HONEST, I DON’T HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT, I GUESS I FEEL [THE] PAIN AND I GUESS THE IMAGES TALK ENOUGH.” – Erik Ravelo     

above copied from http://quietlunch.com/unforgivable-erik-ravelo

Ivan Capote's Words

Ever since he left the tobacco-producing region of Pinar del Río to study art at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, Iván Capote has been drawn to conceptualism and visual poetry. ‘During that time I started writing poems on an old typewriter and I became fascinated with the possible meanings a word could have just by changing a single letter,’ says Capote, whose text-based art took root with his 2003 sculpture Dislexia (Dyslexia), which was exhibited at this year’s Havana Biennial. The work was a kinetic sculpture that temporised the reading of an engraving in the bottom of a tray covered with dark industrial oil. To wit, a machine cut a line through the oil giving viewers a quick opportunity to read the sentence — LIFE IS A TEXT THAT WE LEARN TO READ TOO LATE — before the oil covered it again. ‘Language and poetry offer me so much freedom to express my ideas. A raft of new ideas have surfaced in Verbum (I), a solo show at the blue chip state-run Cuban exhibition space Galería Habana, where Capote and his art star younger brother Yoan conceived and exhibited a series of back-to-back shows, Fonemas y Morfemas, in 2011. Two of the works were shown in the Vedado studio that Capote shares with Yoan during this spring’s 2015 Biennal — Mantra occidental (Western Mantra), stainless steel letters O-W-N tacked to the wall holding lit incense sticks (a commercial play on the eastern meditative mantra of ‘om’) and No more words, a nearly full glass of water that contains the letters spelling out MENTIRA (lie), with an ‘S’ left to the side — multi-mendacities would force the glass to overflow. Capote is also exhibiting a series of recent and recurring paintings and sculptures, including No Rearview Mirror, a clock with the phrase ‘do not look back’ substituted for numbers; canvases covered in phrases like ‘Horror Vaccui’ and ‘Vacio (Emptiness)’, as well as a long link of chain that spells out ‘Deseo (Desire)’. 'The verbs express animus states, feelings, actions and aptitudes, and the whole exhibition comments about how art shares the capacity (with words) to freeze actions for external thought,’ says Capote, who is sending works to New York with Galería Habana for the Armory Show next March, and will participate in a group show in April at the Ludwig Forum in Koblenz, Germany. Though he plans to make more material-focused sculptures and paintings without texts for an upcoming solo show, he’ll continue to express his linguistic concepts in more ambitious formats as he did at Havana’s La Cabaña fortress this spring. Inside the 18th century fortification, Capote installed a wooden scaffolding that appeared to support the vaulted munitions space while spelling out the word FAITH. ‘This was an old idea that I had in my mind from the time of the breakdown of socialism in Europe, but I didn’t have the courage to present it to the public until this Biennal,’ says Capote. ‘It’s like a renewable reinforcement that calls our attention to keep the faith in the face of any kind of collapses we face in our lifetime.’ Wise words from an artist who has overcome many.

Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters)

Curated by Ximena Caminos

 

Los Carpinteros is one of the most exciting artistic collectives to have emerged from Latin America in recent decades. Since joining forces in 1991, Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez have garnered international acclaim for their installations and blueprint drawings that merge aspects of architecture, design and sculpture in unexpected and often playful ways. The adopted moniker, Los Carpinteros, refers back to the older guild tradition of artisans and renounces the notion of individual authorship. Working between Madrid and Havana, the award-winning Cuban duo explores the interface between functionality and art.

Los Carpinteros: Dismantling the World Essay by Paulo Herkenhoff
One might well start out by imagining all the things engineered by modern man being perverted by Los Carpinteros until the whole of their work coincides with the disconcerting totality of industrial society itself—or at least with such things as bricks and cities or beds and swimming pools. Yet such a prophecy shall never be fulfilled, for the mordant act of perverting everything in existence could never be accomplished in a subject’s lifetime, even if the subject were a group of artists. 
Art History 
Certain works in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre instantly remind us of historic pieces of art from modernism to the present, by artists as disparate as Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaists, surrealist René Magritte, Joseph Beuys, Pop artists Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, minimalist Carl Andre, and neoconcretist Lygia Clark. Los Carpinteros may also be referenced diffusely to fairly recent Latin American art, as exemplified by the work of Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas, Guillermo Kuitca, Jorge Pardo, Carlos Garaicoa, and Iran do Espírito Santo among others. The output of all these artists is reduced to the condition of stylemes that are devoured and metabolized by Los Carpinteros in a discourse of their own, including the form and material conditions of the sign or rule of their agenda by the signifier. Ironically, there is a material vocabulary with technical connotations that takes shape based on the concept of styling within the system of industrial objects, in which carpentry and watercolor—as well as chrome metal or industrialized tents—all become material and sign.
The Name
The choice of the name Los Carpinteros corresponded to the symbolic construction of the artists’ social status. In the case of the Cuban group, the name grew out of the praxis of art, out of that which refused to seek the useless transparency of merely indicating the division of labor, leaving an authorial vacuum. The name was given by other people, however, who identified the work of the artists with materials, tools, and forms that pertain to the work of carpenters. Because they are neither architects nor engineers, the name indicates the specific nature of their work and problematizes manual craft for the execution of ideas in industrial society. This is not only an affirmation of manual labor but also an operation that occurs within the field of the superstructure, at the forefront of which lies the problem of the division of labor and its relation to the production of the exchange value of objects.
 Economy of Pure Visuality: Manual Labor
The deliberate contradictions of the artistic practices, technical processes, images, and things produced by the group—in their double condition as artists and artisans—are inscribed within the historicity of collective existence. In the social process of knowledge, the art of Los Carpinteros chooses to replace cynicism with irony. The artists attack the separation between manual labor, technique, and imagination in the aesthetic object. The choice of the name emphasizes the “labor” factor in producing works of art—an evocation of the Aristotelian relation of techné as poiesis. The availability of materials in each place is a decisive factor in defining the form of an object constructed by them. A lighthouse can be a tent in Belgium, because the material is found there, or it might be a product of carpentry because wood is available in Cuba. What they have in common is that, to them, all materials must be correlative to human labor with regard to vocation or traditional trades such as plumbing or carpentry.
 System of Objects The universe of Los Carpinteros is centered on objects produced or constructed by man, that is, on commodities. Occasionally the transference or distortions of functions are modes of mutation of the logical regime of such objects. They established their discourse around 1995, a dramatic period in the life of that country, what with cold war Soviet protectionism suffering a collapse that was reflected in Cuba’s social dynamic and the u.s. boycott reaching maximum levels of effectiveness. Food and electrical power shortages resulted in rationing and long daily blackouts. In some cases the objects do not deal with technical deficiencies but with an economy of improvisation and precariousness, as in the tent-buildings of Ciudad transportable (Transportable City, 2000). Affluent consumer society can be seen only as the antithesis of the society of minimal, marginal, and rationed consumption. The irony and paradox staged by them are constituted in the consumption/ trash binomial that is planned obsolescence and the ecological imbalance of waste.
Their objects resist functional domestication (as in the case of gadgets or kitsch) or the extemporaneous, gratuitous associativity of forms and functions. They are operations in counterdesign. After all, revolutionary Cuba was never known for its industrial (or even gra- phic) design work. No matter how confusing the object’s identity, the convulsive beauty of these works does not stem from abjection or from the surreal quality of their structures but from the discomfort that they cause by establishing a world recognized as plausible but executed as the failure of a certain kind of instrumental reason. In the end, Los Carpinteros defend the existence of the world of objects at the brink of a total collapse of logic that affects the functioning of the world and the economy. […] 
About Los Carpinteros
Marco Antonio Castillo Valdes (b. 1971, Cuba) and Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez (b. 1969, Cuba) together form the collective Los Carpinteros. Contrary to the implications of their name, their artwork spans the intriguing and ambiguous space between conceptualism, activism, and formalism with monumental sculptural and architectural constructions. Works by Los Carpinteros are part of the per- manent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation in Vienna, and the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Their commissioned installations are featured at institutions around the world; the most recent, The Globe—a latticed beechwood structure inspired by Enlightenment illustrations—opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in December 2015.

Tania Bruguera: the more the secret police torture me, the better my art gets.

Frieze Fair 2015

Tania Bruguera: the more the secret police torture me, the better my art gets.

by Hermione Hoby

The performance artist was hounded in Cuba for an artwork championing free speech. Why did she end up thanking the secret police who surrounded her house, cut her phonelines then jailed her?

Tania Bruguera sits down on the grass and crosses her legs, as casual and at ease as the undergraduates all around us. “This,” she says with a gesture towards the grand facade of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, “is a really nice place for a recovery.”

As water flows out of the fountains and the well-trimmed lawns glow in the sun, there is nothing about the Cuban performance artist’s behaviour to suggest she’s just been through “eight months of psychological torture”.

She’s now a teacher at the Ivy League university, but in December last year she was in a Havana holding cell, being subjected to 26 hours of interrogation over a performance art piece. She refused to eat for the whole time. “In that situation, behaviour is your best communication tool,” she says. In the months that followed she was incarcerated three more times and subjected to twice-weekly “visits” from secret police, suffering 20 interrogations in all.

After her first arrest, she was incarcerated three more times and subjected to twice-weekly 'visits' from secret police

“I use the word torture very cautiously,” she says, “but I had moments in which I felt it was abusive and more intense than it should be.”

She had no access to a lawyer: even if her interrogators had granted her one, no Cuban would have dared represent her. “Legal vulnerabilities in Cuba,” she stresses, “are immense.”

The work that got her incarcerated, Tatlin’s Whisper, is brilliantly simple – just a live mic and an open invitation to enjoy one minute of free speech. She’d staged it several times before, including in 2005 at London’s Tate Modern where she employed mounted police to do arbitrary crowd control, corralling blocks of people through the space (most of whom had no idea it was part of the piece). In 2009, she did Tatlin’s Whisper at an arts centre in Havana, and several participants asked for freedom and democracy. Soon after, the government denounced the occasion as “an anti-cultural event of shameful opportunism”.

This time was even more politically charged, coming two weeks after the US government re-established relations with Cuba. She met with Ruben del Valle, the president of the National Council of Arts, who, after a four-hour meeting, denied her a permit to go ahead with the piece in Plaza de la Revolución, the huge square in Havana where Fidel Castro held rallies. Bruguera says Del Valle told her he washed his hands of her, and that whatever happened to her “legally or otherwise” was not his problem. None of this, of course, dissuaded her.

Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana version), by Tania Bruguera, performed in 2009.

In the days leading up to the performance she stayed with her mother, “because she was really freaking out that some ‘accident’ would happen to me. I know Cuba pretty well, and I miscalculated one thing, which is how afraid the government is at the moment. And a government that is afraid is extremely dangerous.”

She adds: “In Cuba we’ve been in two dictatorships after the other,” referring to Fulgencio Batista’s authoritarian reign until the revolution of 1959, and the communist state that followed under Castro. “A lot of people don’t see it that way yet, and for me it’s hard, still, to say those words. People have been under fear. We need a process where people understand not only what their rights are, but what to ask for.”
That process began for Bruguera when she left Cuba for the first time in 1999 to take an MFA in performance at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Most Cubans can’t travel, but the government tends to give artists and sportsmen and women preferential treatment.) In her first class, a professor asked her the seemingly innocuous question: “Well, what do you think?” For Bruguera, then 28 years old, it was a revelation. After a rote Cuban education and the strictures of its regime, she suddenly found herself “in a participatory situation where every idea counts”.


She started making performances, but initially didn’t dare use words: “When you are censored,” she explains, “you try to go through back doors.”

She found herself asking “not only what I want to say, how I want to say it and for whom I want to say it, but also how honest can I be? How nakedly can I present myself? That was when I started to become [politically] conscious.”

Bruguera is an ardent believer in “how art can give tools to people, make us freer, more aware ... help us imagine the future differently”. Gradually, her work (for which she’s been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship among other accolades) has become more direct – which in turn has made it far more dangerous for her.

Her idealism was put to the test when secret police surrounded her house “like I was Osama bin Laden”. At 5am on 30 December 2014 – the day Bruguera was due to stage Tatlin’s Whisper – she was woken by harsh knocking and an enormous crowd outside.

“And I go to use the phone,” she says, “but both lines are cut. This is what it’s like to live in a totalitarian state: they control everything. My mother and my entire family were very nervous. To be a political artist, you have to work with consequences as one of your materials. You have to work out potential outcomes, and you have to be responsible with that.”

She was taken to a holding cell and, “at that moment,” she says, “the piece changed. Because it became about how the government keeps the status quo, how far they will go not to lose the control they have. There was this artistic conundrum, this fight over ‘who owns the piece’. Me as the artist, the audience, or the government? And I think the government was so totalitarian they even wanted to be the author of the work.”

That the regime should unwittingly highlight its totalitarian tendencies, only bolstering the piece it sought to suppress, seems very ironic. She laughs: “At one point I wondered, do they not notice that they are making the piece even better!”

During one interrogation, she actually thanked the secret police.

“And they were so mad at me,” she grins. “They said,” she mimics them spluttering with fury, “‘what do you mean ‘thank you?’”

I replied: ‘Thank you for this – you actually made me a better person.’”

Her situation, like that of fellow dissident artist Ai Weiwei, elicited an outpouring of global support. Thousands of people worldwide, including Turner prizewinners Elizabeth Price, Jeremy Deller, Mark Leckey and Simon Starling, signed an open letter to the Cuban regime calling for her release. On 2 January, she was freed and her passport returned.

“When you do this kind of work,” she says, “you can never forget that you are an artist, but it’s hard because you have to be an artist, an activist, a citizen, everything simultaneously.”

As an artist, she says, “I am very happy ... even if it’s cost me quite a lot. It was beautiful to learn how solidarity feels – we use a lot of important words, without knowing their real meanings – ‘solidarity’ is one, ‘love’ is another, so is ‘friendship’, ‘support’. This year, I actually learned what these words mean.”

copied from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/13/frieze-tania-bruguera-artist-cuba-torture-interview

Wilfredo Prieto and the Work of Art as a Direct Gesture by Laura Bardier

It was love at first sight when I saw Wilfredo Prieto’s work Speech (1999), the ceramic toilet roll holder carrying a roll of toilet paper made from Cuba’s official newspaper Granma. It was indeed something I had never seen before, but was awaiting all my life.  The piece proved that Prieto’s strategy is to reduce the metaphor as much as possible, compress the information in order to make it as small as a placebo, but with the intention to live in your head afterwards.

Wilfredo Prieto was born in 1978 in the town of Espíritu Santo, now known as Sancti Spiritus, located in the central part of Cuba. Though he lived in one of the most beautifully preserved colonial cities in the region, Prieto moved to study at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Arte (ISA) in Havana. In 2002, he graduated in painting, a discipline he has not practiced since.

In 1959, after the revolution, Cuban art became isolated, state-sponsored, and auto-referential. Artists  were developing their work in the turmoil of discovering and shaping a national identity. Later, this sense of renovation and nationalism will be degraded and tokenized to the use of Cuba’s geographical silhouette and flag.[i] Prieto’s work is atypical and emerges from a personal point of view of this history, where Havana is a main reference, but the outcome is universal.

Linked to conceptual art, Prieto stays away from conventional artistic practices—constantly changing his medium as much as his ideas. Through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data, Prieto has become an archeologist of concepts, primarily focusing his studies on society. The artist’s goal is to excavate these concepts as a means to better understand contemporary culture. In this process of analysis, the ideas are cleaned, catalogued, and compared as a channel for synthesis in order to create the most effective images. For example, Grease, Soap and Banana (2006) consists of a daub of axle grease, a bar of soap, and a banana peel placed in a meticulous little pile on the floor of an otherwise empty exhibition space. It is a piece that evokes the idea of falling, without the actual fall. The missing elements in Prieto’s work are often evident, and it is this blatant absence that creates a powerful meaning. The banana peel would not guarantee a fall but could still prove to be a very useful slapstick comedy device.

Prieto’s body of work is, by its very nature, created to be intellectually contemplated. He is connected to the Isouian movement, defined as the art of the infinitely small and the infinitely large.[ii] Untitled (2002), in which ink markings on a chickpea suggest a globe, is a work where the miniaturization of the planet emphasizes the subject of world destruction–not as a cataclysm, but as a slow process of homogenization. As Mike Kelley writes, “In low comedy and political cartoons, reductive and distortional practices exist side by side. Here, both approaches are set to attack false or hated authority, for in the context of caricature’s distortions the refined figure becomes comic butt. In ‘fine art,’ on the other hand, reduction tends to be associated with revelation of the ideal.”[iii] Prieto’s artistic vocabulary, strategy, and gestures engage in this pattern of witticism. The consistent irony in his work is achieved through the presentation of sense within nonsense and illumination amid bewilderment. Above all, it is the brevity in Prieto’s wit that is essential to his artistic production.  The point is to reduce the metaphor so that it can be assimilated in an instant, in order to gain the highest effect with the least possible intervention.

Prieto does not employ his sense of humor as a means for entertainment within the work. Rather, it serves to amplify the critical scope of the piece. His use of atypical taxonomies and dialectic disparities manages to provoke optimal impact. The subtle repetition of words or elements in his works, along with variation, are techniques not intended to provide clarity, but to augment reality. This practice can be seen in Time is Gold (2007), consisting of a gold watch hanging from the ceiling, and Mucho ruido y pocas nueces II (2005; Much Ado About Nothing)[lb1] , which displays several meters of a water pipe and cables with an electric generator capable of providing power to a whole city, just to bring light and water to one small potted plant.

The seemingly effortless formalism of Wilfredo Prieto’s work is misleading. The artist embodies the challenge as a personal competition that is in constant reach of an unachievable goal. His work is highly structured and well planned, realized through a careful association of ideas that interact  with one another in a spare presentation.  Like a principal ballet dancer, with elegance and grace he is able to hide the hard work that is put into the production of his art.  Significant in this respect is White Library (2004), consisting of  more than six thousand blank books, each designed with its specific paper, cover, and dimensions. Every day we are expected to select the information that enters our lives; through this piece, Prieto introduces himself  as an administrator of this knowledge. The irony in the work lies in the fact that the books are there to be viewed by the public, but there is no text. However, like zombies unable to control the urge to leaf through the blank pages, the gesture is an automatic impulse, therefore the missing element—which is the text–allows for the construction of a new mode of representation  in the collection of knowledge. The participatory element of White Library is the key function that creates  the framework for a library; without the public, it is merely six thousand blank objects.

For Prieto, humor, irony, and sarcasm are systems of communication that permeate culture and political criticism. Politically Correct (2009) consists of a photo reproduction of a watermelon made to fit a cube to be placed on the floor. The piece strives to be adequate, to adapt to its new form, but it also needs to lose some its essential characteristics: to be round. If all of us were squared, we would be all easier to stack and store![iv] At least it might be what the farmers of the Zentsuji had in mind back in 2001. Through the standardization of the attributes that Mother Nature provides, fruits, people, and places could lose their own significance. As Marc Augé argues, one of the consequences of hyper-modernity is the non-place,[v] and Wilfredo Prieto refigures in the work Airport – Madrid, Brussels, Roma, Paris, La Havana, Barcelona (2008) a series of photographs of the floors of international airports, where besides the title, nothing in the image could identify them.

Prieto’s widely recognized piece Apolitical (2003) consists of thirty one flags from different countries, where the representative colors are represented in grey scale. Here the artist examines the concept of citizenship with the assumed pretense of abandoning barriers of ideology, identity, and politics. By reducing the symbols or canceling the colors, as the character Cobb from the neo-film-noir Following (1998) summarized, “You take it away, and show them what they had.”[vi]

In broader terms, the work of Wilfredo Prieto does not intend to proffer a new reality as an alternative to politics, but rather identifies political reality for what it is, without apology. It therefore maintains a certain reservation about promoting or creating an apology for politics. As a commitment to demystifying and criticizing the self-legitimizing attitude of modernity, he develops a project of dissection in order to construct a lexicon for defining contemporary facts and situations. Many elements in Prieto’s work have strong local connotations, though they still hold significance in a global context. Examples can be found in the use of particular materials, such as  peas, bananas, yeast, sugar, rum, and lemon, which serve as references to Cuban traditional cuisine and the Cuban agriculture system.

Prieto’s work is direct, but it is also open to different interpretations. Crane (2006), for example, is a sixty-meter high crane that unsuccessfully tries to lift itself. It is an epic image of the poetry of infinite disappointment. Moreover, Crane is an iconic image that is related to other contemporary artworks such as Francis Alÿs’s series “Paradox of praxis,” which reflects the sense of impotence and impossibility that we experience when dealing with the bureaucratic system.

By employing ostensible simplicity as strategy, and drawing on everyday spaces and objects as a communication code, his work shares methods with other artists of his generation such as Ivan Capote, Tatiana Mesa, and Orestes Hernández.  Prieto’s pieces generate constant reflection, demonstrating the capacity to alter forms at will through installations, sculptures, interventions, videos, and drawings. However, through their various media the ultimate focus is to synthesize and express a concise idea. As Gerardo Mosquera comments, “Although Prieto is an artist of ideas he is not a critical artist, inasmuch as he doesn’t set out to produce political or social commentary. [ . . . ] Prieto is a critical artist who does not ‘do’ criticism: it merges from the very context of his works.”

copied from

https://bardier.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/wilfredo-prieto-and-the-work-of-art-as-a-direct-gesture/

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s “The First Kierkegaard”

Kierkegaard has been a constant source of inspiration for the Cuban-born painter Enrique Martínez Celaya, one of a number of philosophers and writers whose work he has studied, absorbed, and responded to.

Enrique Martínez Celaya, “The First Kierkegaard” (2006), oil, wax, and tar on canvas, 100 x 78 inches, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Gift of the artist in honor of Klaus Ottmann, 2015 (courtesy The Phillips Collection) In the opening of his first book, the two-volume Either/Or (1843), Søren Kierkegaard asked “What is a poet?” and promptly answered his own question: “An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.”

Kierkegaard has been a constant source of inspiration for the Cuban-born painter Enrique Martínez Celaya, one of a number of philosophers and writers whose work he has studied, absorbed, and responded to (the roster includes Robert Frost, Joseph Brodsky, Mandelstam, Rilke, and Maeterlinck). Celaya has produced a series of paintings related to the Danish existentialist, starting with “The First Kierkegaard,” 2006, which is on view at the Phillips Collection through April 2.
Celaya’s painting portrays the spectral figure of a thin, naked adolescent boy standing both against and within a dark background, the surface of the painting resembling a blackboard that has been scratched and erased over and over. The boy’s body, painted in a soft brown tone, is lightly outlined, with his anatomy minimally delineated: facial features, collar bone, nipples, genitals, feet. His left arm rests by his side while the right is held straight and slightly away from his body. He wears a thoughtful expression on his face — something like resignation — while turning slightly to the left.
The figure stands just off center, with a circular scattering of small colored dots above and to the right of his head. In the middle of this circle the name “Kierkegaard” is inscribed in simple script. Is this an imaginary portrait of the Dane in his youth, beginning his quest to understand the world?

Dr. Klaus Ottmann, art historian and the Phillips Collection’s deputy director for curatorial and academic affairs, ties the figure in Celaya’s painting to Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), which revolves around the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Asked to sacrifice his son, Abraham finds himself, in Ottmann’s words, “in the in-between of nothingness and anxiety, between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the ‘disquieting supervision of responsibility’” — a kind of limbo such as Celaya depicts in his painting.

In 2015, Celaya gave “The First Kierkegaard” to the Phillips Collection in honor of Ottmann. He was subsequently invited to be part of the One-on-One series, for the third exhibition since Ottmann launched the series in the spring of 2011, shortly after his arrival at the museum. Learning that Peter Doig would be giving the Duncan Phillips lecture at the museum in April of that year, Ottmann invited the Scottish painter to select a work from the collection to hang alongside his own. Doig chose Georges Braque’s 1956 “Bird”; it was exhibited with three paintings of ravens he had made in Trinidad for the first One-on-One. The second One-on-One, in August 2015, featured Washington, DC-based artist Carol Brown Goldberg, who juxtaposed one of her paintings with Matisse’s 1948 “Interior with Egyptian Curtain.”

When Celaya visited the museum in 2015, Ottmann took him into the Phillips’s art storage and showed him a number of works, including several Albert Pinkham Ryder paintings. Celaya connected to the American painter on several fronts, including their shared use of tar (bitumen) in place of black paint. In addition, recounts Ottmann, the dark, mystical quality of Ryder’s works, with their religious underpinning, seemed “a fitting match for Celaya’s painting.”

Three of Ryder’s greatest works hang across the hallway from Celaya’s: “Macbeth and the Witches,” from the mid-1890s and later, “Desdemona,” 1896, and “Dead Bird,” 1890s. Without forcing a dialogue between Ryder and Celaya, you can make those aforementioned connections: the shared love of a richly worked surface and the ethereal quality of the imagery. (In 1926, Duncan Phillips, who was a champion of Ryder’s work, wrote that the painter was “always superbly plastic with simplification which contains powerful suggestions and persuades us to believe in the reality of his visions” — a commentary that could apply to Celaya.)

At the same time, Ryder turned to Shakespeare much as Celaya turned to Kierkegaard: as a source for models of worldly doubt. Macbeth and Desdemona confront their own existential situations; Ryder heightens their angst through the dark settings in which he situates them. Likewise, Celaya’s vulnerable youth seems caught in a moment of transition: in the transom of some invisible doorway between innocence and knowing.

Art historian Elizabeth Broun wrote of Ryder’s “Dead Bird” that it was “perhaps his single most affecting image” and noted how the image distills “pathos to a monosyllable.” She further remarked, “The extreme isolation of the image demands the most intense concentration from the viewer.” Pathos, too, is provoked by Celaya’s isolated individual, a distant relative of Giacometti’s “Walking Man” and other icons of modern dread.
One-on-One: Enrique Martínez Celaya / Albert Pinkham Ryder is hung in a hallway portion of the second-floor gallery space in the Phillips’s central building. Just behind it is the museum’s Rothko room, a fitting neighbor — the color field painter also found wisdom in Kierkegaard. As Ottmann has noted, the abstract expressionist “had Kierkegaard in his veins.” He points to Rothko’s biographer, James E. B. Breslin, who reported that the painter kept a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling next to his bed.
In a conversation with Ottmann at the museum back in October, Celaya offered thoughts on what the act of art means to him. “Art is, for me (but I think not just for me), it’s not really a cathartic experience, but rather … you have a sense of clarity. What happens is, it reveals the luminosity of the secrets sitting underneath all things. And in some way that luminosity is some sort of guidance or clarity, but it is not an answer in the conventional sense. But there is a promise in there, that if you continue on, somewhere around some corner, when I am 175, I will actually have some insights into what’s really happening.”
Celaya is Kierkegaard’s poet, able to transform anguish into visual beauty: the tender boy on the brink of experience. The Ryder accompaniment only underscores that perception.
One-on-One: Enrique Martínez Celaya / Albert Pinkham Ryder continues at the Phillips Collection (1600 21st Street NW, Washington, DC) through April 2.
The following was copied from the website Hyperallergic written by Carl Little

María Elena González Talks to the Trees at Hirschl & Adler Modern

copied from ArtNews
María Elena González Talks to the Trees at Hirschl & Adler Modern
The artist continues her exploration of the dialogue between nature and art.
Sarah Cascone, February 10, 2017

For most people, a tree is a just a tree. For Cuban-American artist María Elena González, a stand of birch trees is the source for a detailed body of work that began with the transformation of bark into music (via player piano roll) and has evolved into a deeper exploration of the language of trees. The fruits of this study, a series of sculpture, video, works on paper, and installation, are on view in “Tempo,” her just-opened show at Hirschl & Adler Modern. Titled Tree Talk, the series’ genesis dates to 2005, when González spent the summer as a resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Each morning, she sat overlooking Lake Wesserunsett, taking in the beauty of the surrounding trees. After creating rubbings from several birches, the artist began noticing that the subtle patterns in the striations of the bark looked almost as if they were notations. “The particularity of the birch and its visual parallel with the piano roll is so uncanny,” González told artnet News in a phone conversation. In response to that visual, she digitally scanned the tree bark and its distinctive markings, and laser-cut the resulting musical “score” onto a player piano roll. “I had no expectations whatsoever,” said González of the experimental piece. “It was an amazing thing to hear the first time—and it’s still an amazing thing to hear. It’s such an incredible composition with musical riffs that repeat in different keys.” The contemplative beginnings of the series are prominently referenced in Tempo, the new video installation piece featuring a leafy view of Lake Wesserunsett (precisely the spot where the artist was sitting when she conceived of Tree Talk). González has crafted two miniature wooden chairs (from birch she collected on site) that are placed in front of a video projector so they cast a shadow, to scale, in the shade of the trees in the projection. Watching it, you can almost feel the coolness of the shade and the sounds of the birds can cause your mind to wander in revery. Although this is González’s first exhibition with the gallery, Hirschl & Adler previously showcased her work in a monographic booth at the 2016 ADAA Art Show, also in New York. There, the highlight was undoubtedly the player piano, which, several times a day, would be turned on and begin playing the birch tree’s haunting natural composition. Because the piano is part of an earlier phase of the series, the artist chose not to include it in the current show, focusing rather on the evolution of the language through objects. Visitors who want to hear the music, however, are able to listen to the music via iPad in the gallery. “I was asked so many times, ‘How did you get that idea?'” González said. Her response, Tempo, “is capturing the moment of conception, in a way.” The artist returned to the lake at Skowhegan to film the spot where it all began. The hour-long footage, shot in the early morning, plays on a loop. To accompany the video, González has crafted two miniature wooden chairs from birch she collected on site. Placed in front of the projectors, the chairs cast a life-size shadow on the video, showing where the artist was sitting when she conceived of the work. “It’s one of those places where contemplating nature, its bucolic splendor, has an amazing effect,” said the artist. “At least it does on me.” That engagement with nature helps tie González’s work to the gallery’s overall program, associate director Tom Parker told artnet News in a phone conversation. “We consider ourselves one of the last truly encyclopedic galleries in the world today, and we really enjoy being able to create certain juxtapositions,” he said, noting that “Tempo” fills three of Hirschl & Adler’s five exhibition galleries, and is being shown alongside more historical work. “There is a very established tradition in American art in interest in the land,” said Parker, who believes there is a strong connection between González and the great nature painters of the Hudson River School. “When I see Maria Elena I can’t help thinking that this is right out of Thoreau. She is contemplating nature in its purest form.” It hasn’t, however, always had such a prominent role in her work, which started off with a far more architectural bent. Her rise to prominence can perhaps be traced to Magic Carpet/Home, a 1999 Public Art Fund project that took the floor plan of a Red Hook apartment building and transformed it into a wavy flying carpet, with playground surface material. In a 2002 installation at the Bronx Museum of Art, titled Mnemonic Architecture, she did a full-size recreation of the layout of her childhood home from memory, creating a sculptural dialogue with the architecture of her memory. Since receiving her MFA in sculpture from San Francisco State University in 1983, González has had solo shows at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996) and the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2006), among other venues. She also received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2003), and was a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow. After years spent working closely with the bark stripped from two fallen birch trees in Skowhegan (after the show she plans to start in on a third tree), González has returned to the sort of object-making that defined her earlier practice, and remained a through-line even as she experimented with executing the piano roll. “When María Elena got the idea that she thought that she could transfer the markings on a tree into music, she had no idea how she was going to do it,” said Parker, who believes she succeeded because “she’s a maker.” González would likely agree. “Making things has always been my thing,” she said. As a child, while her brother was off taking piano lessons, she would be in the carpentry studio. Though the artist doesn’t consider herself musical, incorporating music into her work was a natural thing: “[As] I grew up, the family was always dancing at every party. So it’s always been part of my life.” “Throughout the process of making these compositions…I started thinking about bringing the music back to the object,” González said. Riffing off the shape of the piano roll, her new works, which she conceived of as sculpture as musical instruments, are made in wood, concrete, and ceramic. In some ways, the project has perhaps reached an inevitable conclusion for the artist, who said that “though it was fantastic not to have an accumulation of actual spacial things, I can’t help it…. I can’t stop making objects.” “I think people who give it the time to truly understand it, and understand the entire group as an overall statement, are pretty entranced by it,” said Parker. “It involves sound, video, music, sculpture, works on paper… it’s just an incredibly rich experience.” As for González, the overarching feel is that of the wonderment of nature. “It’s such an astonishing thing that comes from the tree. I often feel that the tree is the composer,” she said. “A lot of the time, I don’t even take credit.”

 “María Elena González: Tempo” is on view at Hirschl & Adler Modern, the Crown Building, 730 Fifth Avenue, New York, February 9–March 18, 2017. Follow artnet News on Facebook.

About Statement by Karla Ochoa Verdecia

When you think on Cuban contemporary art a priori it is difficult to diagram a common topic line. Discourse proposals are as wide as the existing spaces for their spreading; it is a feature of post modernity the proliferation of trends, of artists, curators, art dealers, purchasers. Art in our country is living, stronger than ever, the experience of cohesion between painting, sculpture, installations, conceptualism, drawing, performances, photography, video-art, video performances, new means, etc. Likewise, there are authors that has chosen the social criticism, the erotic, the afro Cuban visualization, the genre discourse, the landscape, the hedonism, the consumerism or the heinous. But what happens when the artist’s interests go above the social problems, when his questioning becomes a reflection about art as such and about the theoretical, critique and investigative paraphernalia? What happens when the highly conventionalized means of communication are not enough for the individual expression? It is how Yornel Martínez proposes his thesis, from the purest conceptualism, about post modern art and its theoretical course during the last 50 years. Statement, title of the exhibition opened last February 16 in the alternative space El Apartamento, refers to the culture, the critique, the post critique, among other learnings that comprise the curricular base of an artist. Likewise, he establishes direct connections between personal creation and the theories that have supported the beginning and consolidation of hermeneutic movements, trends and methodologies. His production comes from the whole involvement of the walls in the exhibition space ,with texts that go from the introduction and definition of essentially post modern concepts, to the dissimilar bibliographic references and quotations of philosophers, professors, artists, writers and theoreticians as renowned as polemic. That is the case of John Cage, Jacques Derrida, George Bataille, Harold Bloom, Rimbaud and Lezama Lima. The proposal is found as luck of mélange where the links are given by the artist, who is in charge of coherently connects each one of the obvious discourses. In Yornel Martínez’s words: “my intention is to create a poetic untranslated influence in terms of language”. Therefore, the objective of giving new semas to typical conceptions in the history of art is explicit, with the aim of asking oneself about the value of those terms, interpretative techniques and classifications which in a way, have created the foundations for future conjectures about the artistic creation . On the other hand he sets groups, movements and trends like Dadá, Fluxus, the povera art, minimal and conceptual within the ideo-aesthetical possibilities of the twenty century, due to the aperture of the visual art and new expressive mechanisms. At the same time puts them as debtors Marchel Duchamp and the object trouvé, the one who made the target– book possible, the visual poetry and the “letrismo” that in this occasion is evident in his rhetorical. Yornel Martinez makes an interpersonal game with the receptor in which the premise of art for art´s sake and the inherent gesture supporting the theorical conceptual. Is in the very last, where in most of the time a total understanding of the works is achieved; and where positive or negative values are given to both, the author and to the work. It is not fortuitous, then, that one of the walls at the gallery has been selected for the bibliographic references that there are about him in magazines, blogs and catalogues. Thanks to the numerous publications, and to the signature of outstanding intellectuals in the field of national plastic art, it is possible to the author to establish his critique, his basis, his statement.
copied from http://artoncuba.com/blog/about-statement/

CONCEPTUAL ARTIST FROM CUBA INTENDS TO STAY IN A CRAWL SPACE BEHIND GALLERY WALLS FOR THREE WEEKS

“When you enter this space, I am here, but you will not see me. I am behind the walls.” Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera.Despite the fact that conceptual art can often change direction and go into hidden and mysterious territory, Chicago-based artist from Cuba Diaz-Perera’s message is quite apparent. His solo exhibition “In the Absence of the Body” will last three weeks and throughout this entire time the artist will remain quiet and unseen from the public, confined in a 2.5-foot wide and 10-foot long crawl space between the walls of the gallery who is hosting his art, West Loop. Equipped only with a sleeping mat, a pillow, a blanket, a lamp and a hammer (for emergency use only), Diaz-Perera will only engage in the basic actions of eating, sleeping and breathing. Gallery-goers will be able to hear -but not see- everything.

This work intends to investigate the delicate balance between presence and absence, powerlessness and empowerment.

The Cuban artist was born in Havana in 1991 during a time period in Cuban history known as “The Special Period”, an entire decade of poverty, famine and overpopulation. Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera was marked by absence from a very young age. First, his father left Cuba when Diaz-Perera was still a child and then the artist himself moved to Chicago at the age of 22, leaving his mother behind. In Diaz-Perera’s performance, the definite sense of being alone is made clear.
The grandmother of performance art herself, Marina Abramovic, was the artist’s mentor during his preparation to spent three weeks in extraordinary isolation. Abramovic conducted a meditation training in Cuba during a visit of hers to the country in 2012, which Diaz-Perera attended. Other artists who influenced him during his training were Gabriel Orozco and Tania Bruguera. Cara Megan Lewis, the artist’s romantic companion, will be helping him throughout the duration of the exhibition by bringing him food, and the news through a vent in the wall.
This performance, which will run until February 26, puts Diaz-Perera in a condition of in-between, a doubtful state of uncertainty, suggestive of his political positions. In December 2014, U.S.A. president Barak Obama and the Cuban president Raul Castro affirmed the normalization of the relationship between the two countries. Despite that, practical consequences of the announcement have a long way to completely reveal themselves. In the meantime, the people of Cuba are left waiting, silently, in ambivalence’s hidden domain.
Julia Horeftari for Art-Sheep
via huffingtonpost
Copied from http://art-sheep.com/conceptual-artist-from-cuba-intends-to-stay-in-a-crawl-space-behind-gallery-walls-for-three-weeks/

A Bumpy Journey From Havana to New York Ends at ‘Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje’

Kcho’s “Siempre Fue Verde,” part of the show “Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times
Storm clouds have piled up around “Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje,” an exhibition of contemporary Cuban work at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The show was planned a few years ago as a two-part mutual exchange of permanent collection work between the Bronx Museum and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. In May 2015, the Bronx material, a juicy globalist grab bag, made the trip to Cuba without a hitch and returned home safely. The prearranged shipment of Cuban art from the National Museum to New York, however, hit a roadblock when, according to the Bronx Museum, Cuban authorities refused to let any of it leave the island. Whatever the full story of that setback, the Bronx Museum moved ahead with a make-do version of the project. Working with two National Museum curators, Corina Matamoros and Aylet Ojeda Jequin, it patched together the present show from its own holdings and American loans. And even then there were problems.





At left, Carlos Garaicoa’s “Untitled (Decapitated Angel)”; and three works by the art collective Los Carpinteros: “Embajada Rusa,” center; “Bloque de Cemento,” top, on wall; and “Pared Celular (Cellular Wall),” bottom.Credit2017 Carlos Garaicoa/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Michael Nagle for The New York Times

One scheduled artist in the Bronx Museum’s collection, Tania Bruguera, was under government house arrest in Cuba in May 2015 and not included in the Bronx show there, though she could and should have been. She recently backed out of the New York leg of “Wild Noise,” protesting the museum’s failure to speak out critically to the Cuban government. (The museum, for its part, harbors hopes that a Cuba-to-New-York exchange will at some point come off.)

There’s no question that the exhibition as it will finally open here is a far less challenging affair than Ms. Bruguera would have wished. Although it claims to be “an exploration of contemporary Cuban art from the 1970s to the present,” it is in no way a representative survey. Like the Bronx collection display in Havana, it’s a sedate sampler, one without a shaping point of view. Wild and noisy are exactly what it is not.

This is disappointing. At the same time, the show doesn’t lack for political content; there’s plenty, however discreetly framed. And there are advantages to having no ironbound curatorial concept in play: At least the 30 or so artists get equal time with their varied voices, some mild, some strong, several new to New York.




Pedro Pablo Oliva’s “Marti de Blanco.”CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

Still, some thematic structuring would have been a help, even at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of tropical exoticism, revolutionary fervor, etc. One obvious theme is the presence of nature, a universally loaded one in the age of climate crisis. It’s everywhere here. The performance artist Glenda Léon notates music and dance scores with images of raindrops. The Cuban-American conceptualist Maria Elena González punches holes in photographs of palm trees.


Humberto Díaz, currently an artist-in-residence at the Bronx Museum, extends the active life of fallen tree branches he scavenges from the city’s parks by attaching industrial brooms to their tips. For a long-unseen installation from the early 1990s, the artist Alexis Leiva Machado, known as Kcho, transforms a set of palm saplings into what look like giant oars, a reminder of earlier waves of exodus from the island by boat to escape political persecution.

The Cuban-born Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was part of that refugee generation and came to the United States as a child. Her attachment to Cuba remained profound, often expressed as an intimate, sacrificial identification with the natural world. In a series of works called “Siluetas,” she virtually merged with it, buried herself, by tracing and burning the shape of her body into the earth, as documented in a dozen photographs from her art school years at the University of Iowa in the 1970s.





“Silueta Works in Iowa (Tree and Fire, Old Man’s Creek),” from 1976-78, by Ana Mendieta.CreditBronx Museum of the Arts

In such images, Ms. Mendieta was indirectly referring to a specific aspect of Cuban cultural history: the forced mass migration that was the Atlantic slave trade. Beginning in the 16th century, hundreds of thousands of slaves were shipped from Africa to Spanish colonial Cuba to work on sugar plantations, bringing their languages, arts and spiritual lives with them.

The spirit of Afro-Caribbean religions that developed on the island was central to much of Ms. Mendieta’s work, and to that of several other artists in the show. In the 1980s, José Bedia became a priest of Palo Monte, a religion with roots in the Kongo kingdom of Central Africa, home to many New World slaves. Belkis Ayón, who took her own life in Havana in 1999 at age 32, was inspired by Abakuá, an all-male, Nigerian-derived secret society that she, heretically, infuses with female energy in a magnificent body of black-and-white figurative prints.

These hybrid faiths, and others, are still widely practiced. And skin color continues to be, even in a country that once made utopian claims to colorblindness, a social and economic determinant. This is a reality that the artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons has been addressing for years in ritualistic whiteface performances — one took place, unannounced, in Piazza San Marco during the 2013 Venice Biennale — and in role-playing photographic self-portraits, like the ones in the show.




Two works from Belkis Ayón, who was inspired by Abakuá, an all-male, Nigerian-derived secret society that she infuses with female energy in a body of black-and-white figurative prints.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times


The Cuban Revolution is itself a state religion and its gods inevitably find a place in the show, though as objects of ambivalent devotion. A cigar-puffing Fidel Castro makes an early appearance, surrounded by peasant soldiers and patriotic kids, in a 1969 painting by the political Pop artist Raúl Martínez. José Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero depict Fidel Castro as an absurdly towering titan, while Carlos Garaicoa emblazons his name above a photograph of a headless sculptural angel shot in an upscale Havana restaurant.

Ezequiel Suárez, who with the artist Sandra Ceballos founded Havana’s oldest alternative space, Espacio Aglutinador, was hounded by censors in the 1990s. In response, he took to writing secret, tweet-size messages to Castro on the reverse side of his abstract embroideries, literally hiding subversive content in his art.

For decades, to the outside world, Cuban art meant propaganda. Portraits of Castro and Che Guevara were best sellers because that’s all that was on the market. The curators of “Wild Noise” put an antic spin on this phenomenon, without abandoning it. But they also include some genuinely moving political work. In 1996, Mr. Toirac and Ms. Marrero did a series of 12 portraits, from news photos, of corpses found in a city morgue after the Cuban president, Fulgencio Batista, had been overthrown by the Revolution in 1959. Who these people were, and why and how they died, is unrecorded. The military has memorials to unknown soldiers; these are unknown citizens. The artists treat them with reverence, painting their features with wine and gold leaf.




“The Twelve,” by Meira Marrero and José Angel Toirac. CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

They take a refined, even delicate approach to a large subject. There are other examples. Diana Fonseca Quiñones distills the texture of a crumbling Havana in small abstract collages made of paint scraps harvested from building exteriors. Pedro Pablo Oliva portrays José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence, as a slumbering saint in dapper tropical whites. And the conceptualist Wilfredo Prieto sketches, in the faintest of ink lines on a long paper scroll, images of every project he has completed in a prolific career.

In the end, Ms. Bruguera’s resistance to a show that she found to be too unprotestingly in line with the Cuban government’s dictatorial control of art is well taken. And this leads to a natural question: If work from the permanent collection of the National Museum in Havana had traveled, would it be any more radical than what we see here?

In short, “Wild Noise” maybe as good as we could expect considering the official sources and compromises involved. We may find a bolder take on truth-in-history in a larger show, “Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950,” which opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on March 5. In terms of point of view, the title alone speaks volumes.