What’s the Use?
Essay Tamara Díaz Bringas
Constellating History
I'd Like to Be Karl Ioganson... (But It Won't Be Possible) CUBAN APPLICATIONS OF ARTE ÚTIL
Quisiera ser Wifredo Lam... (pero no se va a poder) [I’d Like to Be Wifredo Lam... (But It Won’t Be Possible)] was the title of a Flavio Garciandía retrospective held in 2014 in Havana. The Cuban artist uses the same formulation—part parody, part homage—in the title of other works, but in reference to Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian instead of Lam. 50
Tamara Díaz Bringas
I'd Like to Be Karl Ioganson... (But It Won't Be Possible)
There are also works in which he ‘insults’ John Baldessari, Barnett Newman, Brice Marden, and Sol LeWitt. Although Garciandía has never mentioned Karl Ioganson— the most radical of the Constructivists founding the Productivist movement after he abandoned sculpture in 1923 to take a job as a metalworker in a Moscow factory—the desire (or the impossibility of the desire) to become a Productivist can help us to review some of the applications of Arte Útil in the Cuban context. Garciandía was one of the participants and the main organizer of the groundbreaking 1981 exhibition Volumen Uno,1 generally considered to have inaugurated the so-called ‘New Cuban Art movement.’ A generation of young artists was emerging at the time with the first batch of graduates from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), founded in Havana in 1976. Garciandía was one of the first ISA graduates and began teaching at the school in 1981, becoming one of the key figures behind the changes that transformed art education at the ISA in the 1980s. In 1976 Garciandía began working as a specialist at the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Visual Arts and Design, where he devised Arte en la fábrica [Art in the factory], a project that involved the participation of over forty artists in eight factories during the first edition in 1983.2 The artists had to negotiate with the workers and make use of waste or other materials available on the industrial premises. Participants included artists who had taken part in Volumen Uno (José Manuel Fors, Gustavo Pérez Monzón, and Ricardo Rodríguez Brey), as well as younger colleagues such as Consuelo Castañeda, Sandra Ceballos, Marta María Pérez Bravo, and Tonel. Garciandía describes his own experience in the project as follows: ‘They asked us to decorate a 1 The exhibition Volumen Uno opened on 14 January 1981 at the Centro de Arte Internacional in Havana, with the participation of eleven artists: José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, José Manuel Fors, Flavio Garciandía, Israel León, Rogelio López Marín (Gory), Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Tomás Sánchez, Leandro Soto, and Rubén Torres Llorca. A landmark exhibition noted for its formal experimentation and for including new subjects such as popular culture, kitsch, and Afro-Cuban religious practices, as well as for the intense critical debate that accompanied it. This exhibition is generally considered a symbol of the emergence of new Cuban art. 2 Arte en la fábrica was an initiative of the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Visual Arts and Design, along with the ‘Hermanos Saíz’ Brigade of young artists. The first edition was held in 1983, and the project was repeated for a further two years.
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Fig 1 Exhibition Volumen Uno, Centro de Arte Internacional de Ciudad de La Habana, Havana, 1981 Fig 2 The project Arte en la fábrica [Art in the Factory] involved the participation of over forty artists in eight factories during the first edition in 1983. Mural by Flavio Garciandía at the 'Juan Hidalgo Valdés' Paper and Cardboard Recycling Factory, Havana, November 18-December 1983. Left to right: Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Lázaro Saavedra and Flavio Garciandía. Fig 3 Telarte VI Internacional in 1989. People walking around Plaza Vieja in Havana using clothes designed by Madahui el Iraní and Sosabravo.
What’s the Use?
Fig 4 Desde una Pragmática Pedagógica [Based on Pedagogic Pragmatics], La Casa Nacional, 1990, organized by the artist and teacher René Francisco Rodríguez. 1ª Pragmática Pedagógica. Acela and Pila Reyes decorate the sofa of Mirtha Hernández’s house.
Constellating History
damaged mural; they wanted us to make signs to label communal areas, to fix the ANIR (National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers) exhibition space, to retouch the painting of Che… .’3 The artists placed their skills at the service of the workers, who considered them useful for ornamental types of tasks: decorating, fixing, retouching. The changes that were already transforming the way art was produced and understood in Cuba in the early 1980s did not affect the factories, or at least not to the extent that they shook up the country’s cultural and educational institutions. Arte en la fábrica officially billed itself as a ‘salute to the 25th anniversary of the Revolution.’ This initiative, similar in spirit to Soviet Productivism, did not grow out of the revolutionary changes that got underway in Cuba in the 1960s, but out of the push for institutionalization that reached its peak around 1976: the year in which the ISA and the Ministry of Culture were founded had begun with the enactment of the Socialist Constitution, which formally established the Cuban state under a legal framework along the same lines as that of the countries that became part of the Soviet Bloc after World War II. In the 1980s, the Cuban Ministry of Culture implemented a programme of designs for the textile industry reminiscent of a 1920s Soviet avant-garde project organized by artists such Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova. From 1983 to 1991, Telarte was the government’s main project for the functional application of art, producing a substantial amount of fabric printed with artists’ designs. The 150 participants produced fabric that included adaptations of motifs by Wifredo Lam and Amelia Peláez as well as designs specifically produced for the project by members of the Cuban avant-garde, and by artists, photographers, architects, and designers. In 1989, Telarte opened up to international participation, with artists such as Luis Camnitzer, Shigeo Fukuda, Julio Le Parc, and Robert 3 Flavio Garciandía, quoted in Cristina Vives, ‘¡Bases llenas!... o, el arte en la calle (Una brevísima ojeada al arte público de los 80 en Cuba),’ in Trienal de Gráfica, special issue, Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (December 2004).
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I'd Like to Be Karl Ioganson... (But It Won't Be Possible)
Rauschenberg. The commercially produced fabrics were shown at exhibitions under the oft-used title Lo útil y lo bello [The Useful and the Beautiful]. In the catalogue for the fifth edition of Telarte in 1988, the art critic Adelaida de Juan contextualized the project within a genealogy of relations between art and industry: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus.4 In the early 1980s, Cuban artists and institutions shared the desire to imagine new functions for art. This convergence of interests explains the founding of ISA in 1976 and the Havana Biennial in 1984, which gave impetus to the New Cuban Art movement, and the experimentation promoted by the Ministry of Culture. But as Osvaldo Sánchez has suggested, this government support can also be read in terms of the political instrumentalization of art: ‘Too often, we ignore the fact that this emergence in the eighties was not just a result of an art education system or of organizing a “third world” art biennial; it was also the expression of a new, postMariel political strategy: 5 the Ministry of Culture took it upon itself to lobby for a new international image for Cuba.’6 The generation that came to be known as the ‘Cuban Renaissance’ emerged in parallel to the greatest mass migration and social crisis in the country’s history, with the exodus of over 125,000 people. The Mariel exodus had an impact on Cuba’s cultural policy, and even though the art of the time rarely refers to the migration crisis directly, it also influenced the artistic revolution insofar as artists sought new languages for a changing 4 See Telarte V. Lo útil y lo bello, exh. cat., Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires, May 1988). 5 Mariel is the port from which more than 125,000 people left Havana in 1980 in the biggest exodus in Cuba’s history. The migration crisis and social divide resulting from what is known as the ‘Mariel boatlift’ began with the occupation of the Embassy of Peru by some 10,000 people in April that same year, and the Cuban government’s subsequent announcement that anybody who wanted to leave the country could do so. Those who took the opportunity to leave from Mariel were publicly decried as ‘scum.’ They included the people who had sought refuge in the Peruvian Embassy and political prisoners, as well as people who were joining their families, who had criminal records, or who engaged in behaviour that was ‘antisocial’ or contrary to ‘revolutionary morality.’ (See Armando Navarro Vega, Cuba, El socialismo y sus éxodos (Bloomington, IN: Palibrio, 2013). 6 Osvaldo Sánchez, ‘Los últimos modernos,’ in Cuba: la isla posible, exh. cat., CCCB (Barcelona, 1995) reissued in Antología de textos críticos: El nuevo arte cubano, ed. Magaly Espinosa and Kevin Power (Santa Monica: Perceval Press, 2006), p. 151.
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What’s the Use?
Fig 5 Sandra Ceballos, Absolut Delaunay, 1995, 132 x 112 cm, oil on canvas, The Farber Collection
Fig 6 Tania Bruguera, Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 1985–1996, long-term, site-specific media piece
Constellating History
social reality and questioned the role of art in society. The highly ambivalent relationship between art and the art institution gradually changed over a decade, culminating in several cases of censorship and the emigration of almost an entire generation of artists. But before the era drew to a close there were further attempts at the social integration of art, originating from artists themselves and from a certain overflow coming out of the institutions. One influential project in the late 1980s—a period unique for the profoundly collective nature of its debates—was called Hacer [Make]. Organized by a mixed group that included artists, musicians, and journalists, its aim was to ‘connect art to socially useful labour, offering individuals new approaches and ways of understanding their work; to design an educational method for art schools geared towards professional activity; and to generate cultural wealth from the heart of communities, from their vital and spiritual nature.’7 In another text, the artist Rubén Torres Llorca writes: ‘Once the work of the hacedores had been separated from its creators, it took on a life of its own. It could no longer be judged on the basis of the individuality of the artist, but of its effects on society.’8 Hacer encapsulated some of the pressing issues in Havana’s cultural debates at the time, but the project was thwarted and its activities were restricted, so that it essentially became a theoretical proposal set down in a few documents. In the middle of 1989, the group’s main theorist Abdel Hernández concluded a long text also entitled ‘Hacer’ with circumspection: ‘The possibility of institutional support must consider its own limits.’9 When a group of hacedores (Lázaro Saavedra, Abdel Hernández, Hubert Moreno, Nilo Castillo, Alejandro López, and musician Alejandro Frómeta) decided to move to the village of Pilón at the eastern end 7 José Veigas, Cristina Vives, Adolfo Nodal, Valia Garzón, and Dannys Montes de Oca, eds., Memoria: Artes visuales cubanas del siglo XX (Los Angeles: California International Arts Foundation, 2003), p. 293. 8 Rubén Torres Llorca, ‘Una mirada retrospectiva,’ Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño (Havana, 1989), in Antología de textos críticos: El nuevo arte cubano, ed. Magaly Espinosa and Kevin Power (Santa Monica: Perceval Press, 2006), p. 294. 9 Abdel Hernández, ‘Hacer,’ mimeographed text, unpublished, Havana, June 1989, 55 pages.
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I'd Like to Be Karl Ioganson... (But It Won't Be Possible)
of the island that same year, one of their initial principles was to remain outside of official cultural institutions. They agreed that their work would focus on the local community, which Hernández described in the following terms: ‘8,000 inhabitants, low educational level, Santeria, spiritualism, large families, rapid spread of oral information (myths, gossip, etc.).’10 Poverty and disenchantment were additional factors that emerged along the way, which was probably why the project encountered resistance from local political authorities and was eventually abandoned. The artists in Pilón took on the challenge of living side by side with the villagers so that their work would spring from a genuinely collaborative process. Their efforts to collectively identify the community’s problems and possible solutions ended up drawing attention to areas of social conflict and political discord, such as the indignation and disillusionment with the revolution that the artists encountered when they moved to Pilón. It appears that the project’s success at bringing these conflicts to the forefront also helped to hasten its end. In a sense, art had been presented as an unauthorized channel for the exercise of civil liberties that had been curtailed by the Cuban Constitution, which restricted freedom of speech and opinion to the social and mass organizations designated by the state. Although the Pilón project ended abruptly for the artists, their long stay affected life in the village, and in particular their own lives. In his account of his experiences in Pilón, Lázaro Saavedra wrote: ‘Many of my utopias crumbled, it diminished me somewhat ... or I was a little more realistic about the transformative capacity of art.’11 The ten months in Pilón oscillated between an idea of social change and a practice of subjective transformation. In La Casa Nacional, another project produced by a group of students from the ISA in 1990, one of the aims was for participants to become ‘instruments’ or ‘bridge10 Ibid, p. 3. 11 Lázaro Saavedra, interview with Rachel Weiss, Havana, 12 December 2002, quoted in Rachel Weiss, To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), p. 203.
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Fig 7 The opening of the exhibition Volumen Uno, Centro de Arte Internacional de Ciudad de La Habana, Havana, 1981
What’s the Use?
Constellating History
tools.’12 The project, an intervention in a tenement building in Havana, was one of the first actions of the educational programme Desde una Pragmática Pedagógica [Based on Pedagogic Pragmatics], organized by the artist and teacher René Francisco Rodríguez. For almost a month, the students lived with the building’s inhabitants and carried out tasks entrusted to them. René Francisco wrote:
Fig 8 Workshop with Thomas Hirschhorn at Cátedra Arte de Conducta [Behaviour Art School], Havana, 2007 Fig 9 Adrián Melis, The Making of Forty Rectangular Pieces for a Floor Construction, 2008, video, dvd, colour, stereo, 5'30'' min.
… as if we had relegated ourselves to their ‘insignificance’, we set out to carry out their requests: repairing personal objects, refurbishing the building, providing paint for doors, numbers to label the apartments, tables for the dining room, paintings of martyrs for the common room, paintings of religious scenes with personal historical descriptions, a mural for committee announcements, a plaque to historically identify the building, and so on… .13 In this case, the question of the usefulness of art was addressed in terms of meeting the particular needs of a specific group of individuals. And it didn’t take long for the scope of the project to adapt to the range of possible actions that were within reach of a bunch of art students, such as painting the image of a saint or decorating a wall. A year earlier, the artists in Pilón had brought to light a series of social and political problems, but La Casa Nacional seemed to narrow its scope to the economic sphere. The artists offered repairs and improvements on request, but failed to engage in a more radical questioning of the precariousness of living conditions. ‘Pedagogic pragmatics’ continued to work along the lines of the social integration of art that had been a key concern in the 1980s, but within the context of the then pervasive economic crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the overhaul of socialist thought in the late 1980s and early 1990s had significant 12 René Francisco Rodríguez, ‘La Casa Nacional,’ June 1990, in Danne Ojeda, ‘Proyectos-Arte en acción de reescritura,’ MA thesis, Universidad de La Habana (Havana, 2000), appendix III, p. 114. 13 Ibid.
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I'd Like to Be Karl Ioganson... (But It Won't Be Possible)
consequences in Cuba, particularly as its economy had thus far depended on favourable transactions with the Soviet Union and other Eastern countries. Within Cuba, 1989 was also a year of deep-seated political tensions and crises that ended with the televised trial and subsequent execution by firing squad of senior military personnel accused of drug trafficking and other crimes. In the late 1980s, Cuban Socialism, and particularly the art world, was challenged ideologically and politically through a series of projects and debates initiated by artists and society at large. But the spirit of perestroika and glasnost were not welcome on the island, and attempts to engage in political debate through art were immediately suppressed. In Cuba, the political crisis, aggravated by the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, was interpreted primarily in economic terms, and was officially dubbed the ‘special period in times of peace.’ The 1990s began with a strong focus on the economic sphere due to the severe shortages of fuel and other resources, the pressing needs of a subsistence economy, and the introduction of an incipient market, but also due to a strategic emptying of politics from public debate. La Casa Nacional played out against the backdrop of that tumultuous time, and by and large embodied some of its contradictions, such as the new (privileged) status of artists in an increasingly beleaguered social context.14 Nonetheless, it also brought up many social concerns of the time, mainly to do with the social function of artistic practice. During the implementation of La Casa Nacional, participants wrote letters to each other as a way of sharing their thoughts and discoveries, and as a singular record of the experience. Over and over, the question of the useful ness of the art object echoes in their words ... ‘many useful things are beautiful precisely because of the usefulness,’ 14 In To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art writer and curator Rachel Weiss wrote: ‘In fact, the work seemed less adequate to the blurring of art and life than to the staging tableau vivant representing the dilemma of being privileged artists in a socialist system; the artists’ genuine desire to “do something” with their work inadvertently to the spectacularization of poverty, and while the project empaneled them as Samaritans in the local context, it also aligned them with benevolent imperialism as the intervened into the local from the vantage point of the international.’ Ibid., pp. 206–207.
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What’s the Use?
Constellating History
wrote ‘Dago’ in one of the letters.15 Another, addressed to him by ‘el Profe’ [the teacher], says: ‘... I started to read the book about Russian Constructivism, guided by you and by the strange, mysterious intuition that ends up leading us to the things we need. … This book about the great utopians has arrived at the right time to spread amongst us.’16 Aside from Constructivism, ‘pedagogic pragmatics’ was also influenced by Cuban political history through José Martí’s Campaign Diaries: 17 ‘That was the first book I read in all my classes. Martí recounts the advance of a guerrilla army, but at the same time he describes how a peasant woman places a tablecloth, how she makes coffee..., La Casa Nacional was a bit like that to me, it was about reducing ourselves to degree zero and taking notes from there... .’18 The gesture of returning to degree zero became a recurring strategy for artists in Cuba in the early nineties, partly as a means to circumvent censorship through the (real or fictitious) concealment of authorship. Some artists carried out works ‘commissioned’ by fictitious third parties. Fernando Rodríguez, for instance, presented himself as the executer of works that had been ordered by Francisco de la Cal, a heteronym with whom he has shared authorship of his works ever since. Other artists turned to intertextuality, such as Sandra Ceballos in her 1994–1995 series based on quotations from Lyubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, Olga Rozánova, Sophie Tauber, Sonia Delaunay, Nadeida Udaltsova, and others. And Tania Bruguera in Homenaje a Ana Mendieta [Tribute to Ana Mendieta] (1986–1996), which recreated objects and performances by Mendieta—a Cuban artist who had migrated to the United States as a teenager—in order to claim her place in Cuban culture at a time when the 15 Letter from Dagoberto Rodríguez to Dianelis Pérez, February 1990, ‘Correspondencia epistolar efectuada durante la primera edición de la pragmática (fragmentos),’ in Ojeda, ‘Proyectos-Arte en acción de reescritura,’ appendix III, p. 135. 16 Letter from René Francisco Rodríguez to Dagoberto Rodríguez, 22 December 1989, ibid., p. 128. 17 José Martí (1853–1895) was a Cuban politician and writer. He was a prominent precursor of Latin American modernism and one of the principal leaders of Cuban independence. 18 Interview with René Francisco Rodríguez by Danne Ojeda, November 1999, quoted in Ojeda, ‘Proyectos-Arte en acción de reescritura,’ p. 64.
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I'd Like to Be Karl Ioganson... (But It Won't Be Possible)
issue of migration was both critical and silenced.19 Homenaje a Ana Mendieta, which is also Bruguera’s first long-term work, offers a different way of exploring the notion of Arte Útil: through the connection between Bruguera’s and Mendieta’s work, and between their work and that of Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, and José Bedia in the early 1980s. The practice of these artists was steeped in Afro-Cuban cultural and religious traditions such as Santería and Palo Monte, but also formed part of the Western artistic tradition in which they had studied. Some of Elso’s works could be described as ‘installations,’ for example, but his use of materials laden with ritual meaning—such as his own blood—were closer to the elements of an altar or a Santería ceremony than to the formal and symbolic relations characteristic of the art world. Elso had grown very close to Mendieta after her first trip to Cuba, which coincided with the opening of the exhibition Volumen Uno in 1981. Also around that time, he was one of Bruguera’s teachers at the Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas in Havana. Bruguera writes: I think I am strongly influenced by the work of a Cuban artist—the late Elso Padilla. My work is influenced by his work not because of the way it is seen, but because of the way art is conceived. He was my teacher, and I took from him the idea that art had to be completely linked with life—and not a fiction or a virtual reality, but as alive as possible. My art has to have a real function for myself, to heal my problems or to help other people to reflect and improve or think about certain subjects.20 The notion of art as therapy and the quest for a ‘real function’ of art ran through the 1980s and can be traced in many of the country’s artistic and educational projects. 19 Ana Mendieta was born in Havana in 1948. At the age of twelve, she was sent to the United States by her parents through Operation Peter Pan, a collaborative programme run by the US government, religious charities, and Cuban exiles in which more than 14,000 children arrived in the US between 1960 and 1962. After her tragic death in 1985, Mendieta’s work became an essential legacy for many art and feminist practices and narratives. 20 Johannes Birringer, ‘Art in America (the dream),’ Performance Research Journal 3, no. 1 (1998), pp. 24–31.
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Constellating History
In the case of Elso, Bedia, and Brey, this function was also linked to Afro-Cuban cultural and religious practices, in which ceremonial actions or objects have the power to change reality. To some extent, the idea was also present in Mendieta’s actions and in Bruguera’s reenactments at the start of her research on performance, conceived as both representation and ritual. But the use of art as a tool is also echoed in many other works from the period. The exhibition that Bedia organized at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1984, which summed up his research and interests at the time, was entitled La persistencia del uso [The Persistence of Use]. It presented a series of work tools from different cultures, placing equal importance on their utilitarian, magic, and religious aspects. In the exhibition catalogue, the curator and critic Gerardo Mosquera wrote: ‘They are not axes and sickles from this culture or that culture, but artistic axes and sickles from the imagination, which are also “real” axes and sickles that can be used. Objects that are reality and metaphor at the same time.’21 This ambivalent status—both reality and metaphor— could suggest other conditions for a ‘useful art.’ But the notion of Arte Útil in Cuba can also be addressed from the perspective of pedagogic practice. Through their work as teachers, artists such as Garciandía, René Francisco Rodríguez, and Bruguera have played a pivotal role in linking several generations of artists. From 2002 to 2009, Bruguera ran the country’s most radical educational project: the Cátedra Arte de Conducta [Behaviour Art School]22 for political and aesthetic change, collective discussion, and social impact. The work of some of the programme’s participants resonates with avant-garde practices that connect the present with Soviet avantgarde experiments from the 1920s by way of the 1980s in Cuba. In 2008, while he was a student in the Cátedra programme, Adrián Melis carried out an action at a 21 La persistencia del uso, José Bedia, Instalaciones y dibujos, Pequeño Salón, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, 1984. 22 The Cátedra Arte de Conducta was conceived and produced by Tania Bruguera in Havana between 2002 and 2009 as a long-term artistic project in the form of an art school.
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I'd Like to Be Karl Ioganson... (But It Won't Be Possible)
state-owned brick factory where production had ceased due to a lack of raw materials. Even so, workers had to continue to clock in each day and sit idly through the regulation eight-hour day. On one of those workdays, Melis suggested that they use their bodies and voices to imitate the sounds of the factory if it were operating normally. The result of that collective fiction was Elaboración de cuarenta piezas rectangulares para la construcción de un piso [The Making of Forty Rectangular Pieces for a Floor Construction] (2008). While in the 1920s Karl Ioganson had been more concerned with the intensification of work in the factory than with worker alienation, 23 at the start of the twenty-first century Melis engaged with the industrial world unconcerned with economic productivity, which by then seemed impossible. In his action, Melis and the workers harnessed elements such as play, noise, invention, and disobedience. Perhaps the oblique and vaguely useful functionality of this action in a factory should be read as one of those ‘desiring machines’ that ‘interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction.’24 The juxtaposition, in the Museo de Arte Útil,25 of a machine (Ioganson’s) that increases labour productivity by 150 percent and another machine (Melis’s) that produces on the basis of non-productivity, offers a lens through which to understand the complexity of Bruguera’s notion of Arte Útil. I believe that these traces of desire and uselessness are precisely the point of tension at which Arte Útil resists merely instrumental art. In spite of Bruguera’s insistence on achieving practical uses, results, and tangible benefits, the notion of Arte Útil defies translation strictly in terms of usefulness, and instead extends to the sense of art as a tool. The Cuban art projects that we have looked at in this text resonate with the ideas, 23 Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 188. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 34. 25 Finishing Machine, by Karl Ioganson and Vigilia, by Adrián Melis, are included in the online archive of the Museo del Arte Útil available at http://museumarteutil.net/projects/vigilia-night-wacht/ and http://museumarteutil.net/projects/constructivism-finishing-machine.
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Constellating History
ways of doing, and terminology of Arte Útil: the functional application of art, measuring the value of works by their effects on society, art as a tool at the service of specific needs, the potential of artistic actions to transform reality. These concerns that ran through the Cuban cultural context from the early 1980s onward, and that echoed certain Soviet avant-garde movements, now seem to be missing from that same context, which is experiencing the retreat of the public into the private, the collective into the individual. Through her research and practice, from a ‘state of emergency,’26 Bruguera radicalizes the desire to bring about social change and to find a use for art within society. Likewise, the Arte Útil archive-in-progress suggest ways of imagining or experiencing other, more sustainable and socially committed, ways of living together. 27
26 Estado de excepción [State of Emergency] was the title of a project by the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, Galería Habana, at the 10th Havana Biennial in 2009. Curated by Bruguera, it presented a new exhibition each day over seven days. The limited duration of each exhibition proved to be an effective way of avoiding censorship. 27 See http://museumarteutil.net/archive.
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