ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

Gean Moreno

In March 1986, Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso presented four sculptures—La fuerza del guerrero (The Strength of the Warrior), 1985; Pájaro que vuela sobre América (Bird That Flies Over America), 1985-86; El viajero (The Traveller), 1985; and Los contrarios (The Contrary), 1985—grouped as Ensayo sobre América (Essay on America) at Galería de la Casa de la Cultura de Plaza in Havana. The quartet, under the same collective title, traveled to the Venice Biennale a few months later, minting the fact that the sculptures go together beyond any one-time presentation. There are the parts and there is the whole: “the essay,” endowed with a certain amorphous consistency as a relational structure constituted by the individual sculptures it brings together or that, conversely, bring it into existence; and individual sculptures which are, as a result, something more when gathered in this way—“a constellation in motion,” as Theodor Adorno would say—than what they are on their own1. The sculptures are composed of fragments drawn from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts set in complex internal dialogues that, like the essay generally, when true to task, falsify neither an internal continuity between themselves nor a continuity in thinking that feigns the impossible inner coherence of experience under current conditions— whether we mean conditions forged by a world of capitalist production or those more relevant to the context in which Elso worked that were established by an atrophied socialism and a persistent coloniality.

Coinciding with Elso’s presentation of Essay on America, the leaders of the Cuban Revolution inaugurated a historical sequence defined by what is known as the “Rectification Process.” It was time, they said, to acknowledge and correct the errors and negative tendencies that characterized the previous decade and a half, a time of deep Soviet influence during which the morphology of the Cuban Revolution changed radically, redefining its state apparatus, ideological profile, and foreign relations. The Rectification Process was characterized by the eradication of a number of economic practices in order to curtail profit-oriented tendencies that had flowered and regenerated forms of private accumulation; by the recognition that a party and bureaucratic elite had emerged and wielded new power and privilege; by the renovation of ideological tendencies that had been set to hibernate at the end of the Revolution’s first decade in order to allow for deeper alliances with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; and, on a lower but still consequential tier of collective significance, by opening a space for cultural production that sought to engage in direct and critical exchange with cultural policy and contemporary realities2.

The Rectification Process was instituted before a looming domestic fiscal crisis and the institution of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. Cuba refused to follow the general tendencies of the socialist world. Instead, facing new economic relations with a liberalizing USSR and its satellites, which no longer included debt payment deferrals and instead turned to hard currency exchange, the island doubled down on its radical tendencies and returned to the discourse that characterized its earlier periods. The adjustment Cuba faced was also determined by falling prices for sugar and oil on the global market, which shook the island’s steady income streams, and the depreciation of the dollar and its effect on both the foreign debt and financing Cuba secured to unprecedented levels during the prior decade.

These changes unfolded against a larger geopolitical shift that far exceeded national or even regional borders. The period of the Rectification Process came at a moment during which what used to be called the Third World restructured itself through and for neoliberal experimentation, fostering the disintegration of revolutionary governments and the emergence of postcolonial societies looking to integrate into the world economy. These processes marked the slow disappearance of the conditions that made Cuba a pertinent international actor with the possible exception of its African military missions. Alongside these more immediate regional alterations, structural conditions of capital accumulation on the global scale also changed, which swept up Cuba as a trade-dependent economy.

In response to geopolitical changes, both inside and beyond the socialist world, leaders in Havana proposed it was time to go back to the original values of the Revolution. It was time to remind everyone that revolutions are moral enterprises as much as political and economic undertakings. Discourse around solidarity and working for the greater good replaced a fixation on productivity. The spirit of voluntarism was called upon again, exemplified in the reactivation at a larger scale of formations such as the microbrigadas, voluntary and unpaid workers who mobilized to build housing and social facilities. Revolutionary austerity and sacrifice were the call of the day, and plunging living standards were to be endured in the name of self-determination and national dignity. Che Guevara and his ideas, which had never quite aligned properly with Moscow, made a comeback3. (Che’s image had always been around, but his ideas and writings were scarce for a long time.) In other words, it was time to return to something similar to the Guevarist system that formally guided the Revolution on the political, economic, and ideological planes between 1966 and 1971, a system that prioritized subjective conditions and considered how advances in consciousness could drive advances in the productive base.

The question that haunts this moment is: With the Rectification Process, does the Revolution return as its own aftermath on the other side of some limit that encloses its vital moment? Does it return as a future that can only live by mimicking its past, enacting a kind of teleology paradoxically jammed on a repeat cycle? Does it return, from a structural point of view, as farce, as a process no longer adequate to a changed geopolitical context because it is not an imaginative response to it, since the very conditions of production

ONE and accumulation have themselves changed on a global scale? The seismic shift that came with the collapse of the international communist project just a few years after the Rectification Process began and the sharp about-face it forced on Cuban economic practices makes it useless to speculate on the long-term consequences the period’s reforms and ideological turns ultimately may have had (however, there are numerous pertinent studies on the immediate effects). What one can claim much more easily is that the Revolution “came back” in the mid-1980s having revealed, despite claims to return to its universal truth, its contingent character. It could become something else. It had. A smelting kiln that extracted from the boiling liquid of revolutionary fervor the lumpy porridge of mirthless bureaucracy, that distilled from the projected irrepressible soaring of a new people toward emancipation and self-fulfillment armies of gray technocrats and renewed market relations at the most granular levels of everyday life. It also revealed its contingent character in the farcical dimension it assumed by being out of step with a changed world, no longer a revolutionary force in it but, at most, an anachronistic irritant.

In a quest to routinize operations, the institutionalization of the Revolution during the decade and a half that preceded the institution of the Rectification Process came with a new constitution based on the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union; the aggressive expansion of the communist party, which was also based on its Soviet counterpart; the professionalization of the army, including a new ranking system that again mimicked the Soviet model; the establishment of a national economic management system and increased reliance of computational analysis for long-term central planning; the reorganization of grassroots and youth organizations; the reconfiguration of unions as instruments of workplace discipline rather than advocates for workers’ rights; entrance into COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), the economic agreement among countries aligned in the Soviet-bloc, alongside intensified trade with the West; the vigorous courting of foreign investment and the return of tourism; and the institution of the Organs of Popular Power and a number of ministries, including the Ministry of Culture.4 It also came with the end of the Revolution’s organic, if unorthodox, unfolding, as characterized by an ideology that turned Marxist logic on its head, putting revolutionary will ahead of productive capacities, offering underdeveloped nations a path toward communist promises. The Cubans, in short, claimed that properly developed consciousness, the production of a “new man,” could alter the material base; sheer willpower would translate into accelerated development. A new people, it was suggested, can leap ahead of history and generate an egalitarian society by acting out their refined desire for such a thing and against every objective metric that claims such a thing is impossible.

Along with institutionalization and the cozying up to its socialist trading partners in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Revolution traded the idea of moral incentives for material ones through its public discourse and its claim to have tempered the “push to communism” without a developed productive base that marked its first decade. Instead, it generated policy and rhetoric that fostered a more reasonable “retreat to socialism,” a transitory economic stage in order to engage in a less radical treatment of the market. It succumbed to the abstraction of quantification in the system of quotas correlated to differential wages and bonuses. Cost-profit analyses, allocation of capital, investment, credit, interest—all pragmatically replaced the questions of need and sacrifice. What were once capitalist tools to be transcended came back as proper instruments to guide productivity. The power and responsibility of “the manager” was shored up through wage reform. Overtime work proliferated, as did its shadow companion, inefficiency. Price gouging, resource theft, corruption, bribing, and other “non-socialist” behaviors spread. The low-wattage humiliation that always permeates life subsumed under the protocols of alienated production must have coursed through everyone’s nerves and dug deep into the collective substrate. The pragmatic development of the material base during this period, and the changes it entailed in relation to the larger social order, should be read, insofar as it affected subjectivity, not in relation to some objective standard but to the heavily propagated discursive formations that trumpeted the exceptional character of the Revolution. Per its own revolutionary program and rhetoric, Cuba had become a social “deformation” riven with reifying processes and differential distributions of power. In these conditions, it seems no great speculative leap to postulate psychic fragmentation born of the impossibility of reconciling subjectivity that has assigned itself the task of moving history forward to the immediate reality of spinning in place and turning to the past. Were it just a matter of clear contradictions, one imagines there could have been ways to mitigate the psychic fragmentation wherever official discourse and ideological production fell short. What complicates things is that this was also a period of social advances or, more accurately, of an oscillation of advances and retreats. There was the massive incorporation of women into the workforce to increase productivity, accompanied by the strong support system of daycares, maternity leave pay, and other amenities; an incorporation that proved not to be permanent by the early 1980s, even if it had originally been the spear tip of social advancement and enlightenment. There was the increased availability of consumer goods to satisfy the higher incomes that differential wages and a bonus system made available for at least part of the population, addressing new desires and power of acquisition but also setting the ground for a renewed class stratification. There was the nascent housing market and a resilient independent farming sector, parallel to the new agricultural cooperatives the state established, which were sustained by a black market, making street-level economies more robust and fending off penury. One finds in this “retreat to socialism,” in the establishment of the transitory step the Revolution once sought to leap over, a tangle of contradictions that only further underscored the improvisational and contingent character of the Revolution as a historical process.

Awareness of the contingent core that allowed the radical change—radical in the sense of being able to reconfigure itself as an antinomy of its foundational character—of a revolutionary process, now pulled from the depths of a social unconscious, marks the difference in the repetition. The “true character” in this return to the true character of the Revolution during the time of the Rectification Process, one imagines, must have graven in consciousness the distance between what the Revolution revealed itself to be through its concrete practices and their material effects and the illusory picture through which it understands—or fantasizes—itself as a process that can change without changing, a process that has some constitutive truth at its disposal to go back to for renewal. In some way, it was the slippage between core and appearance and the need to overcome it, to really get back to something essentially revolutionary, or the impossibility of doing so, that, I think, explains the increasing radicalization and misbehaving of artists as a symptomatic reaction during this period.

By the time the Rectification Process was inaugurated at the 3rd Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, exhibitions such as the famed Volumen Uno (Volume One, 1981), which Elso participated in and that catapulted the careers of some of the most important artists that emerged at that moment, had been absorbed into cultural discourse as an event that signaled, on the one hand, a need for renewal after the leaden cultural atmosphere of the 1970s and, on the other, that there was a generation of young artists, the first born and educated under the Revolution and free of the “original sin” of the bourgeois intellectuals the Revolution inherited from the Republic, ready to lead in this renewal. There were more than a few features in the artworks of this emergent generation that distanced it from its predecessors and which proved to be highly generative. Among them was a new disposition drawn from the lesson of Conceptual Art and the embracing of installation and other “post-mediatic” formats; the employment of poor materials and improvisational modes of assembly that felt properly attuned to the concrete, everyday realities on the island; and a deep interest in popular, religious, and ancestral cultures, presciently foregrounding the Caribbean and the Americas as a dynamic composite of many kinds of temporalities and semantic systems, anticipating to a point what would be codified as processes of decolonization many years later. Above all, perhaps it was the immediate interpretation of this work as not only being intimately bound but also serving as an exciting new approach to the perennial problem of Latin American and Caribbean identity, particularly poignant before an emergent and homogenizing globalization, that resonated and has really stuck. What is striking from the historical distance we now have on this moment is how quickly the work produced at the time was subsumed under a particular narrative. I’m not suggesting the reading of the work in relation to the problem of American and Caribbean identity was inaccurate or beclouding, but I’m merely underscoring my astonishment at how quickly this interpretative tendency was established and how deeply it was absorbed by the artists it affected. Until his last interview in 1988, Elso still claimed, “The first feeling of unity among our generation had to do with the ethical propositions … of making American art.”5 The consensus around this reading, perhaps because it felt so spot-on when first articulated and because it allowed the work to circulate without running into any ideological obstacles, has hardened in such a way that there seems to be a very narrow channel in which to maneuver when interpreting Elso’s work. This channel excludes, almost too precisely, how the work indexes the very moment of social transition it was bound to. The interpretative consensus finds much of its staying power by implicitly suggesting that the immediate social background against which the work was made could be magically muted and its inflections on the artwork dismissed. The cultural renewal is rhapsodically praised; the social regression that marked the moment out of which it arose obscured. Rectification becomes a key word in criticism that addresses the work of artists slightly younger than Elso, who are often referred to as the second cohort of the 1980s. Think Lázaro Saavedra, Tomás Esson, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Glexis Novoa, René Francisco, and Eduardo Ponjuán, etc. But let’s muddy this easy division. Not by spuriously claiming some never-before-seen similarity between Elso’s work and that of his younger peers, but rather by trying to bind Elso more closely to the moment at which the work matures, to look at how his sculptures symptomatically register the immediate social reality around them, how at some level they may be “nonidentical” to dominant readings of them. Our driving thesis: Elso’s work reports from the ground and not just from the American cosmos.

At some point in the mid-1980s, at the very moment the historical sequence defined by the Rectification Process was inaugurated, there was a break in Elso’s work. Most commentators, including Elso, have mentioned it, but few have really dropped the plumb too deep. This break has always been treated simply as the maturation of the work. As Elso stated: “I had to free myself of things I’d learned in school—forms, techniques, solutions; I had to incorporate these things and transform them into organic processes and ideas, and I had to find more appropriate technical means.”6 Rachel Weiss, going deeper, writes that with Essay on America Elso “was no longer resuscitating ancestral cosmologies or reviving lost histories; now, he was proposing his own America.” We are witnessing in this work, she goes on to say, “the disappearance of the referent.”7 America, the thing out there and the codes and narratives that defined it, was being replaced by a new mythological artifact Elso generated. This overcoming of the referent signaled the full flowering of Elso’s work, the claiming of a territory of its own. This could be right, tracking an internal movement of development and the threshold of maturation, but to me it also seems to be naming one thing through the inability to name another. The referent that is not disappeared but seems incognizable to the line of interpretation that has consolidated around Elso’s work—and comes unstuck if you nudge things just right or plunge deeper—is the remainder that exceeds the one-dimensionality that pegged the work exclusively to the problem of American identity or American spirituality. Or, a better way to say this so as not to suggest the work is not bound to those things and wildly interesting and significant because of this bond, is that at a profound level, even if Elso was not deliberately looking for a coherent response to the moment defined by the Rectification Process, his work is marked by its contradictions. Perhaps it’s merely the moment silting its traces in the work, “marking” it in a way that seems closer to the bubbling texture of chemical seepage than a guided strain of reflection. It’s noise in the system, as the metaphor goes. At certain frequencies, before attentiveness that approaches aslant and stereoscopically, it’s noise that crackles free and cracks the full roundness of the work’s identity as a machine to reprocess (or invent) American myths. Elso is not exempt—why should he be?—from absorbing social raw material, kneaded out of renewed alienating practices and conditions. What was effected in the lived reality around him he worked out, like other artists often do, in the domain of representation—a process that itself is never straightforward. Thinking here of representation as a problem-space where reference and expression are pressured by the perennial instabil- ity caused by the registration of social determinates over and often against the intended content of the work.

In their recesses, Elso’s sculptures are burdened by a tension bred by a refusal to carelessly extend an inner coherence to the ongoing moment of social reconfiguration. Elso’s sculptures register the simulacral and farcical character of the period defined by the Rectification Process that calls on an early organic moment of the Revolution without, of course, being able to reenact it properly—an early organic moment that had become all of a sudden the enchanted object that could beckon the future into presence without accounting for an altered global condition or for new desires that may have spouted immanently, through the vector of a new generation that shared few existential points of reference with the old guard, from the Revolution itself. The fixation on the ancestral in Elso’s work, particularly when it is without referent but self-generated, when it is assembled out of materials that come from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts and anchored to no real ancestral tradition, whatever else it does, allegorically casts critical light on the fetishizing of the early years of the Revolution that characterized the times beholden to the Rectification Process.

I’m not claiming that Elso’s work is merely a repository of symptoms that index a historical moment. We know he activated modalities of artistic thinking absent from work being done on the island before he came on the scene. He incorporated a range of new materials and refused to altogether renounce Americanist discourses, incorporating references and aesthetic manifestations borrowed from both diasporic and ancestral cultures. He may have even invented a new mythical America, a capacious new imaginary that runs parallel to José Lezama Lima’s and Wilson Harris’s own re-mythifications of the hemisphere, as has been claimed. These elements and possibilities are what keep the work from being merely a symptomatic registry of the historical real, but none of them bar it from being such a thing at some level either. Studied and invented cosmogonies come down to earth and reveal not only the technics they generate and worlds they structure but also, processed in particular ways, concrete historical details that fall outside their ambit.

If the task is to unearth whatever is dissonant in Elso’s work vis-à-vis how it has been interpreted thus far, responding to the reminder that anchors it to the specificity of his lived historical moment, we’ll have to lean on a very slim and elliptical facet in the works—a tenuous dimension of meaning ensconced in their creases, so to speak, that dominant readings have never cottoned to or even really mentioned, neglecting it to the very edge of expressive opacity. The work to be done here lies in offering quarter to that fugitive side in the work and swelling it with life, making its pulsation more acute, so that it opens its own path, even if narrow, perpendicular to the deep furrows of established interpretations, now ossified. The very tenuousness of the thing in the work we are relying on puts us in the awkward position of having to postulate that the work’s relation to its empirical context paradoxically needed a period of latency to surface, to wait for an approach that came at the angle at which the frequency clarified. A risky proposal, but a risk that, troubling the waters, draws another much more exciting risk to the surface: that something new will be said and the work can rise out of the nested layers of accepted readings that hoist on it that dull sheen, that perfectly even texture, that sticks to things that have said all they have to say.

Endnotes

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, Volume One (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 13.

2 See Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Market, Socialist, and Mixed Economies: Comparative Policy and Performance—Chile Cuba, and Costa Rica (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Susan Eva Eckstein, Back From the Future: Cuba Under Castro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

3 As Fidel Castro stated in a speech known as “Che’s Ideas Are Absolutely Relevant Today,” delivered on October 8, 1987: “It’s not strange if one feels Che’s presence not only in everyday life, but even in dreams if one imagines that he is alive, that Che is in action and that he never died. In the end we must reach the conclusion that for all intents and purposes in the life of our revolution, Che never died, and the light that of what has been done, he is more alive than ever, has more influence than ever, and is a more powerful opponent of imperialism than ever.” Full text of the speech can be found at the In Defense of Communism blog: http://www.idcommunism.com/ 2016/06/fidel-castro-ches-ideas-are-absolutely.html.

4 See Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978).

ONE IS ALREADY TWO

MORENO

6 Luis Camnitzer, “¿Utopía en Utopía?” in Por América: La obra del Juan Francisco Elso, exh. cat. (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), 98.

7 Rachel Weiss, “La órbita de Martí,” in Por América: La obra del Juan Francisco Elso, exh. cat. (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), 141.

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

Jaleh Mansoor

Hi. Gean, thank you for this nuanced presentation. I’ve learnt enormously from it. I should preface by saying that my response to your presentation is broadcast from the unseated ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh peoples here in so-called Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in Canada. And that land acknowledgement bears to a great extent on some of my response to your important work.

First of all, I appreciated very much having an overview of this generation of artists who began to present a kind of attitude of irreverence toward the mainline history of the Revolution as it is received by the mid-1980s in Cuba. And we could say that what you’re elaborating is the beginning of a generation who are dismantling the iconology of the Revolution from within. And this quality of irreverence is part of that project. Some of the artists from this generation - specifically Elso - forge projects in which you locate pre-figurations of decolonial aesthetics. In other wordthe historical Revolution at this moment of The Rectification, or what you call revolution on a repeat cycle, or revolution become anachronistic irritant affords the beginnings of an incipient decolonial thinking. You note that this is the moment where artists begin to summon an autochtonist Cuban culture in order to begin to dismantle colonial and imperial epistemologies. I’m particularly struck by that line of thinking in your project, a new form of critique nested in frustration with the disappointments, the having become authoritarian, of revolutionary impulses that come also to be associated with forms of coloniality.

At the same time that a younger generation of artists are posing new questions at the moment of Rectification in an irreverent key, despite the fact that they see received iconography as an anachronistic irritant, despite the fact that they’re beginning to dismantle some of the cliches and stereotypes of the Revolution - their work is an index of a second wave of revolution. As you say elsewhere, “Revolution is back”. It’s “back in style” in the mid-1980s. Can we set these two strands, an incipient decolonial strain and a second revolutionary wave critical of the cliches of the first, into dialectical relation? I want to take these two tendencies: on the one hand, art sigannling indexically a return of the affects, drives and desires of revolutionary thinking but then, on the other hand, an interest within this first tendency to begin to dismantle a dominant epistemology that the Revolution is also part of. We could call this dominant tendency an unexamined Hegelian insistence on progress. So this brings me to the question with which Amanda Beech opened today’s event, and that is that revolution is not such a popular notion at the particular moment in which we find ourselves. But decolonizatio is. Part of that is that Revolution is understood, dismissively, through a variety of post-colonial and decolonial frameworks as itself a form of imperial domination. A common contemporary claim is that those who have a kind of fetish or nostalgia for revolutionary histories are partaking in a dominant Western Hegelian framework that is anathema to the forms of decolonial thinking that are just beginning at this moment. This seems to me a false proposition, an artificial binary that risks situating one or the other strand as reactionary.

I find the way that these two strands converge in your handling of the artists of Cuba of this generation utterly fascinating and I think we have a lot to learn from the knot that you locate in the mid 1980s in Cuba. I wonder if you could speak to that contradictory tendency that informs aspirations for radical Leftist politics that might motivate art praxis and that is still hovering along the horizon but is, on the other hand, continually under fire on the part of other discourses that claim to greater relevance in undoing a history of domination that locate would revolution as just another cliche and another form of imperialism.

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

Teresa Piecuch

Juan Francisco Elso’s sculpture, “Essay on America,” is an artistic expression of a time in the history of Cuba called the “Process of Rectification.” The “Process of Rectification” was an attempt to bridge the gap between the country’s history and its new political situation. By using natural materials and referring to religious practices, Elso embodies the strong tradition of the land. The sculpture’s composition—“fragments drawn from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts set in complex internal dialogues”—reveals the gap between history and the new political reality.

In “One is Already Two, and Two are Many,” Gean Moreno looks into a formula for restoring the land’s peace of mind. He refers to the importance of religion in this aspect, pointing out the example of local shamanistic traditions. The pattern of a foreign system and people turning to religious practices is familiar to me; since this is part of the history of Poland, where I come from.

After World War II, communism was introduced in Poland. Catholicism formed the bridge between Polish history and its new reality. Religion became the grounds on which the society’s misalignment between the past and the present became visible. On one hand, restrictions and censorship were brought into place by the new government in order to remove local identities. On the other hand, the institution of the Catholic Church supported and celebrated traditional virtues. Religious practice connected people who sought spiritual freedom.

Elso’s artwork bears out a relation to mysticism in Cuba, which I relate to the spirituality that Poles nurtured during the times of the regime. The tensions and attempts of “another arrangement of things,” occurred, too, in the Polish People’s Republic, when the Polish nation was struggling to avoid erasure of their identity. An example of these events is the pilgrimage of the copy of the venerated Black Madonna of Częstochowa’s painting. The Church introduced new ways of professing faith in order to escape the regime that limited religious expression. In 1957, the Church commissioned a copy of the sacred painting from Częstochowa and organized its pilgrimage around Poland. The event was repressed and the painting was seized. The pilgrimage did not stop, however, and continued with solely the painting’s empty frame. With time, the need for spiritual escape became a real support in an oppressed reality. For example, the Church in Poland, represented by the figure of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, mediated between the communist government and the striking workers in the Gdańsk shipyard. Both religion and communism might seem to have similarities in structure when it comes to rules and punishments; but from these two examples, it was a relation to the divine that turned out to provide the people with a feeling of freedom from communism that they started to look away from. Both in Cuba and in Poland, it turned out it was not possible for a foreign system to be fully acknowledged without making a connection to the places’ history. In Poland, the lack of this connection became one of the reasons that pushed the nation to democracy. Despite being distant in time and space, both nations manifested a pursuit for their own aura.

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

Cameron Weeks

In One is Already Two, and Two are Many, Gean Moreno maps the relationship between the economic and political changes in post-Revolution Cuba and the production of creative works by Cuban artists, specifically by sculptor Juan Francisco Elso. Moreno stresses the importance of the country’s economic reliance on sugar production, which was and still is Cuba’s principal agricultural export. When the new, non-Leninist communist regime came to power in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a result of the revolution, market relations began to erode. Eventually, by the 1970s, sugar production and the country’s reliance on this agricultural industry became unsustainable and the communist government chose to retreat to socialism, adapting the Soviet model. This economic downturn and governmental retreat resulted in a deterioration in the quality of life for many Cuban citizens, a condition which was framed as suffering on behalf of national dignity.1

Moreno utilizes the production of art during this post-Revolution era to demonstrate the sentiment shared by those living through this tumultuous era in Cuba’s history. The artist in particular who has captured Moreno’s interest–Juan Francisco Elso, serves as the central figure of the essay. Elso was a Cuban artist best known for his captivating sculptural works, most of which were produced in the 70s and 80s before his untimely passing in 1988 at the age of 32.

In 1986, Elso exhibited a series of four sculptures, collectively referred to as Essay on America at La Casa de la Cultura de Plaza in Havana. In referring to these sculptures as an essay, Elso asserts that Essay on America must be presented as a collective work, as opposed to a series of unconnected, inde- pendent sculptures. Moreno expands upon this designation of the set of sculptures as an “essay” and points to Theodor Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” to further elaborate this comparison. Adorno refers to the essay form as a “constellation” in motion and suggests that this form of writing is both open and closed. 2 It is open through its negation of “anything systematic,” yet closed in the sense that it “labors” on the form of its presentation. Through this consideration, Adorno argues, the essay resembles art, as it “constructs the immanent criticism of cultural artifacts … it is the critique of ideology.”3 Art serves as a vessel through which the individual can encounter and critique culture and systems of belief, a critique that is an inherent element of culture. This can similarly be accomplished through the essay, as both art and essay are means for experimentation and renewed perspectives. Comparatively, Elso’s “Essay on America” functions as a series of highly varied fragments that when drawn together form internal dialogues like that of an essay. This work also produces an “immanent criticism” of culture, specifically the complex cultural exchange between Cuba and the Americas and the lack of representation of the Caribbean diaspora.

Not only does Moreno situate Elso’s work as an essay through Adorno’s analysis of form, but he situates this “art-as-essay” in the context of The Cuban Revolution. The economic and cultural turmoil during Cuba’s process of rectification and retreat to socialism gave way to developments in art as well, specifically surrounding themes of the American and Caribbean identity. Through Essay on America, Elso was generating his own artifacts of a new America, rejecting the historical and ancestral codes and narratives which neglected the Caribbean diaspora.4 This mythologizing of American identity is consistent in Elso’s oeuvre, demonstrated in works such as Por América/For America. This wooden effigy of Cuban nationalist and poet José Martí depicts Martí’s body pierced by darts, in reference to the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian. These collective works converge Elso’s fascination with the Cuban-American identity and secularism and mysticism during this period of economic and agricultural downturn in Cuba. This is accomplished through the cohesion of evocative ancestral imagery and a nuanced critique of the artist’s contemporary socio-political conditions.

Through Moreno’s essay, One is Already Two, and Two are Many, the curator connects Adorno’s theory of the essay as form to the work of Juan Francisco Elso, as well as art as a form of essay in itself. Through the examination of 20th-century Cuban history as it pertains to Elso’s work, Moreno is able to illuminate the relationship between creative production and economic-political phenomenon. Elso’s body of work, specifically the series Essay on America, exemplifies this aforementioned relationship as well as the ability to translate visual art into the essay form. Approaching visual art production as a form of essay-making is precisely what gives Elso’s work its fragmented identity, as elements are gathered through varied historical and cultural contexts.

Endnotes

1 Moreno, Gean. “One is Already Two, and Two Are Many.” [Unpublished Manuscript], pp. 12

2 Adorno, T. W., et al. “The Essay as Form.” New German Critique, no. 32, 1984, pp. 165

3 Pp. 166

4 Moreno, Gean. “One is Already Two, and Two Are Many.” [Unpublished Manuscript] pp. 19

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

SHU L. XU

In section four of “One is Already Two, and Two are Many”, Moreno presents the artist Juan Francisco Elso’s making of American art as situated from both the ground and the cosmos, and relates this making to Elso’s unmaking of his empirical education. As Elso puts it, “I had to free myself of things I’d learned in school--forms, techniques, solutions; I had to incorporate these things and transform them into organic processes and ideas, and I had to find more appropriate technical means.”1 In other words, while Elso is making his America through his work, he is going through his memories to unmake certain teachings which were constructed involuntarily by force from outside. Elso’s works, instantiated in multiple cultural strata, are produced during and share the multiple social strata of the Process of Rectification. It simultaneously points to the earlier revolution, “an early organic moment of the Revolution;” a reference that lacks physical material, unlike the revolution that has to be enforced in the Process of Rectification2.

Although Elso’s artworks sketch the world of materials “[...] that come from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts[…] anchored to no real ancestral tradition,” they ultimately narrow down rapidly from the non-referential status to the time of the Process of Rectification gazing back to the revolution.3 To Moreno, this moment itself is crucial and particular to history, and it shows a contradiction between history and the prehistoric, the absence of the past and present as the past at once. In other words, Moreno considers Elso’s work to index a particular historical moment, and also to hold in view an absence of this relation which is marked as”the absence of non-alienated production that socialism promised.”4 However, in describing Elso’s works as “the essay”, which describes their approach to political economy as a crystallization of the Process of Rectification, Moreno reminds us of an epistemological leak of the local essayist. For Moreno, Latin America’s most famous essayists, from Octavio Paz to León Rozitchner share a tendency of thinking within the realm of the Western Enlightenment discourse, and of the practical failure of maintaining a sustainable network for equitable economic growth, which ties them together with Cuba’s mistakes in the Process of Rectification.5

At the end of Moreno’s argument, the reader sees a contradictory position, in which Elso’s works, the “essays,” point to this failure but “index” historical strata and cultural contexts, undeniably disturbed, clashing, and collapsing, independently within themselves and contradictorily when they confront each other.6 To what extent is the use of the form “essay” clear enough, when it refers to the works of Elso, and when does it remain unspecified? The important sense of the essay is defined by the regular and complex use of the form, which is popularly taken up by canonical Latin American writers, though modeled on European predecessors. According to Moreno, Elso succeeds where previous artists failed, in remaking the “essay” form in a way more suited to expressing Cuban experience and needs.7 However, what exactly is the nature of Elso’s work that reveals itself as “essays,” and why does the fact that Elso responded to both history and the absence of history, necessarily link him with the essay form? For Moreno, the answer comes from Adorno’s conception of the essay as a “constellation” of ideas “out of joint” with the status quo.8 In this understanding, the essay, by examining a given status quo, points outside of it and suggests alternative arrangements of the world. This also made the essay form the necessary vehicle for Elso’s reactions to the moment of Cuban disintegration in the 1980s.

While the reader learns about the potential of the essay form and the political economic nature of Elso’s works, understood in terms of the “essay’s” unique ability to both describe and point outside the given social structure, the connection between the “essay” in general and Elso’s work isn’t as clear as one might expect. Here, it would be helpful to know more about how Elso’s work announces itself as truly being essay-like, besides taking the essay as a name (or mask). What exactly do the “constellations in motion” which Elso made of his sculptures do to show their connection and twisting of the long lineage of written essays? How do they both come as a necessary response to a critical moment in collective Cuban life, and as an individual turn responding to that moment and the memories which came before it?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Moreno, Gean. “One is Already Two, and Two are Many.” Draft.

Endnotes

1 Gean Moreno, “One is Already Two, and Two are Many “ (Draft), 19. There are no page numbers in the copy of the writing itself, so I use the pdf page number as numbering for the article.

2 Ibid, 20

3 Ibid, 20

4 Ibid, 25

5 Ibid, 3-4

6 For Moreno’s discussion on the idea of “index”, see: Ibid, 20-9

7 For Moreno’s discussion with the canonical writers, see: Ibid, 3

8 Ibid., 7-8