Dear friends and colleagues
Manila-Toronto-Havana-Toronto-Manila
For the last eleven days I have been in Havana installing a work by Geraldine at the Bienal there as she couldn’t make it, and, of course, looking at a lot of art, and a country I had never visited before.
I will try and write a more inclusive account next week but for now, writing from Toronto airport (Wow! There’s a big Richard Serra sculpture in the departure lounge!)
… I will just give a few snapshots:
In Toronto on the way to Havana I stopped off for three days, meeting friends, seeing art. In the Art Gallery of Ontario I looked at drawings by Annie Pootoogook. She is, or rather, sadly, was such an instinctively good artist. It is on the surface a very simple drawing of someone sleeping, but it is so well, balanced, each mark so assured and so right. She is important because she was not content to recycle or reinvent traditional motifs: she seems to be the first Inuit artist to make images of her actual life, living in suburban style homes, watching TV, getting drunk, being hit by her partner.
Pamela, an old friend I met in Toronto, pointed out indigenous art gets interesting when the traditional and the modern collide. Reading about Njideka Akunyili Crosby the next day I see she uses the term “contact zones”– for her it means the collision of the Nigerian culture she grew up in and the LA she has moved to. An awful lot of the best art today is made in some sort of “contact zone”.
Why does Cuba & Havana matter? For most of the tourists – and there is a serious plague of tourists in Havana – it is the music and the cars. The music is fantastic, ever-present but surrounded by tourists filming it. The constant search for the authentic eventually kills it. It is not yet as bad as Bali but heading that way. Watching a small, old black guy sitting on the street corner playing his trumpet, with a semicircle of six white tourists standing in front of him, all filming him, some with cameras bigger than his trumpet, summed it up. They looked like an execution squad. And the big American cars, these big Dodges and Cadillacs, often painted in Lady Penelope pink. What dream, what fantasy do they represent? Some bogus free life cruising the Malecon in the corrupt Bautista era then getting drunk with Ernest Hemingway, perhaps?
What about those other cars still puttering around Havana, the Ladas, Skodas and Moskviches that are ignored by the tourists? What dream do they represent?
(The green car in my picture is a Moskvich; I am not sure what the black one is, something big and American.) Cars built for the supposed paradise of the Soviet Bloc. But, however flawed the execution, however vitiated by Stalinism and corruption, the dream of a different kind of state to capitalist democracy still matters. Cuba matters because it chose to be communist. Sure, the current administration is currently struggling, scared of losing control in the age of the internet (hence Decree 349), trapped in the absurdity of the double currency they created, one for tourists, one for Cubans – which means, I am told, the taxi driver who drove me to the airport at 4.00 AM yesterday (Aaaaaargh!) earnt more in an hour than a teacher does in a month.
One thing I will say, I have never been in a country where black and white people seem to mix, talking together, walking together in such a relaxed way.
The bienal matters because in 1986 it became the first global biennale – specifically focussing on the Third World. It has stayed committed to that anti-Imperialist/colonialist position. Without the big budgets of Kassel or Venice it relies on the good will, improvisation and camaraderie of artists and supporters. More of that next week.
I was caught out by almost all the texts being in Spanish. One is so used, in Asia as in Europe, to English being used as the lingua franca of the art world.
Before the biennale there was talk of how Tania Bruguera with others would organise all the participating artists to protest and wear T-shirtshowing their opposition to the Decree 349, a new and far reaching censorship bill.[1]I have always respected Bruguera but I think this is problematic and presumptuous. However, I was at three separate openings and didn’t see a single such T-shirt.
All though she has been lionized in the UK she does not seem to enjoy such a high acclaim here. Her name was rarely mentioned. “We all have our own problems to think about,” said one artist. There was more curiosity about the Egyptian artist Ilham who was forbidden to exhibit his work as apparently it looked like the American flag and was not what he had proposed to show.
There was even more talk about the problems many people, including myself, had getting work out of customs. The five African artists showing at Casa d’Africa had still not installed when I left four days after the opening. If you have had to deal with customs in China, Indonesia or the Philippines this was no new experience.
One thing that intrigued me was how many artists used textiles: Abdoulaye Konatéfrom Mali showed large tapestries, some basically abstract, some with statements against violence; Cheikh Ndiaye from Senegal showed a more sculptural work in Pabellon Cuba, a modernist pavilion out in Vedado, a mainly residential area with a wonderful mélange of colonial, art deco, Victorian and Modernist houses.
Geraldine and Reena Saita Kallat from Mumbai (Bombay) were in old buildings in the old, town. I will speak a bit more about Geraldine’s work next week. Kallat’s work presented large fabrics back to back giving the opposing declarations of nationhood of countries that had separated: India and Pakistan; North and South Korea, the USA and Cuba. How similar they all sound, grand, elegant – and ignored.
And just as I prepare to send this and board my plane to Manila I see on Hyperallergic that Bruguera is fulminating again. Presumably peeved by her failure to mobilise the support of other artists she tells us she will not visit the Bienal – and presumably expects others to follow her lead. I find myself angry and agreeing with those people in Cuba who intimated she is now only interested in herself and showboating on a global stage. What right has she to effectively herself try and censor the work of two hundred or more artists, many Cuban, in the Bienal? I try to compose a reply for Hyperallergic but find myself too repulsed by the self-righteousness of her sermon to write it in a clear and succinct way.
Let’s see if I can do it once I get back home and have recovered from a fifteen hour flight!
Best wishes as always.
Tony