Cuban art, multiple themes explored at UF show
BY ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
efernandez@MiamiHerald.com

Here is the superstar of Cuba's art establishment, Manuel Mendive, as well as the superstar of Miami's exilio, José Bedia -- both reveling in Cuba's African heritage.

The dead cult figure, Ana Mendieta. The haunting photography of Marta Pérez Bravo. The provocateur Arturo Cuenca. The conscience-ridden Luis Cruz Azaceta. The Los Carpinteros collective. The ever so trendy Kcho.

A new show at the University of Florida's Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Cuba Avant-Garde, from the collection of Howard Farber, is as visually striking as it is intellectually provoking. What is Cuban about Cuban art? one wonders in the face of this show. And, is there a significant difference between the work of artists in Cuba and Cuban artists outside the island?

Farber, who already has pieces from his Asian collection at the Harn, acquired works from the '80s to the present, when Cuban art reached a cutting-edge maturity -- paradoxical as that might sound.

Even when the pieces in the Harn show play with abstraction or use a personal vocabulary, it's hard to stray from the notion that these works are narratives. This is true of much Latin American art, where the fractured fairy tales of Surrealism have been a stronger current than the paradoxically dynamic stasis of expressionism, where action seems random and content free.

The works in Cuba Avant-Garde range over a broad field of media, style and tone. They borrow freely from international art movements; they are the creation of individual -- or in some cases collective -- imaginations. But they are, in the end, profoundly Cuban.

In their embrace of deep currents flowing through popular Cuban culture. In their radical irreverence. In the irrelevance of where the artist resides -- the only nationality distinction made in the identifying caption is whether the artist resides in Cuba or elsewhere.

This ''avant-garde,'' as the show calls itself, invites comparisons with the vanguardia -- early- to mid-20th century artists who established a firm Cuban identity with the tools of what was then modern. (Recently, a vanguardia work, Mario Carreño's 1943 Danza Afrocubana [Afro Cuban Dance] set a record price for Cuban art when it was sold at auction for $2.6 million).

Like its vanguardia predecessors, the Cuban avant-garde in the Harn show employs a wide range of media. And though the Cuban modernists of the past century now seem more closely linked in style, the artists Farber collected also show, upon close observation, affinities with one another -- for example, a similarity of imagery (a human figure in a boat), style (a studied primitivism), gesture (the figure's body language), and tone (hieratic with hints of tragedy) link Azaceta's Rafter, the Little House 2 and Mendive's The Sons of Water, Talking to a Fish.

Extreme use of the female body links Mendieta, Marta Pérez Bravo and the nude performance art of Tania Bruguera. And appropriation of the discourse of persuasion (propaganda and advertising) runs through Pedro Reinaldo Alvarez Castelló's cheerful figures out of period pop, Abel Barroso's use of Erector Sets, Alexis Esquivel's Nike swoosh, and the Ponjuán-René Francisco collective's socialist-realist Soviet farmworker juxtaposed with Rosie the Riveter.

POP IMAGERY

This openness to pop imagery is entrenched in Cuban culture, where, since the mid-20th century, instead of using the pretentiously French phrase le dernier cri (though the Spanish el último grito is not unusual), the common phrase is lo último de los muñequitos (the latest comics).

Some of the works are not far from the comics, notably (or notoriously) Fernando Rodríguez Falcón's Nuptial Dream. The piece consists of a series of panels, in carved wood and paint, depicting the wedding of Fidel Castro and the patron saint of Cuba, the Virgin of Charity. The cartoonish figures and the ludicrous situations are both comic and look like comics -- in one panel Fidel and the Virgin share a meal at the famous Bodeguita del Medio while a painter writes ''Fidel'' among the wall's graffiti; in another, Havana's El Morro lighthouse illuminates the three sailors saved by the Virgin according to Cuban lore, this time as rafters fleeing the island.

Is the artist, who lives in Cuba, mocking Castro? Anyone outside the island seeing the piece would definitely think so. But the mockery is ambiguous enough to ''pass'' inside Castro's socialist paradise. For one, there's the cult of popular art mentioned above, so making cartoons of Castro and the Virgin can be said to be merely Cuban, not a slap to the system.

Thus, the artist is doing nothing more than popularizing two key figures of Cuban culture. What could be more in keeping with the tone of a people's society? Still, that current of popular culture has always been aggressively irreverent, the well-studied tradition of choteo, which is actually a merciless mockery. Rodríguez Falcón, it could be argued, has borrowed the people's culture to jive the figure of the supreme leader.

Another artist residing in Cuba, Lázaro Saavedra González, borrows Catholic imagery, in this case the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The long-haired bearded Christ -- who looks like the often-persecuted hippies -- exposes his heart, bearing the colors of the Cuban flag, while a speech balloon shows the hammer and sickle against a red background, but a dream or inner thought balloon shows the Stars and Stripes of Yankeedom.

EXIT MOSCOW

The work is from 1995, the Special Period when the hammer and sickle fell, Soviet subsidy stopped and Cubans, indeed, dreamed of, nay, literally hungered for the prosperity 90 miles to the north.

A self-portrait by Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández Rodríguez) depicts another scene of extreme hunger: the artist, also a Cuban resident, is greedily eating a rat that, mouth open, seems ready to eat him. Here art has moved from specific signifiers to an ambiguous sense of dread and horror, not unlike the harrowing first-person narratives of Cuban-based writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.

Even if the personal is political for many Cuban artists -- and for many Cubans who are not artists -- some works move deeper into the self. Eduardo Hernández Santos' depiction of a gay urban paradise, with his own naked photograph adorning a collage of international buildings, comments on sexual liberation -- a human need not linked to a particular political system. And the constructivism of Los Carpinteros alludes to the human impulse to build structures, in their case buildings of pure imagination.

If a piece from the show exemplifies the personal/political, national/cosmopolitan, historical/modern and raw/artful dialectics of Cuban art, it's the photograph of Bruguera's performance, The Weight of Guilt. The artist, naked, is eating dirt, a reference to the earliest form of passive resistance in Cuban history: indigenous Cubans thus committing suicide instead of becoming Spanish slaves. If being Cuban means being the child of that violent encounter of Spaniard and earlier inhabitant -- soon replaced by Africans -- then no act is more profoundly Cuban than eating dirt.

Yet, this is cutting-edge performance, an international and controversial art genre. Dangerous to the point of flirting with death. Erotic, as everything Cuban, no matter how terrible, is in the end. Modern. Avant-Garde. Cubanísima.