ART : A World of Differences : In presenting work from 50 countries, the ‘Fourth Biennial of Havana’ proposes that art cannot be judged by Western criteria

The “Fourth Biennial of Havana” was held from Nov. 16 to Dec. 31. Although not as long-established as the biennial surveys in Venice or at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Cuban version is quickly gaining notoriety for its alternative approach to assessing contemporary art around the world. Travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba is still restricted, but Los Angeles-based critic and curator David Pagel visited Havana for 10 days during the exhibition under the auspices of the New York-based Center for Cuban Studies.

In keeping with its steadfast attempt to remain one of the last bastions of communism, Cuba’s resistance extends to aesthetic matters. Although this island remains culturally isolated, every two years it organizes a major international exhibition whose intent flies against prevailing art world trends.

The recent “Fourth Biennial of Havana” is an anti-capitalist extravaganza that manages to move beyond the knee-jerk reactivism that usually results when art and politics mix. Intended to address the contemporary repercussions of centuries of European colonization, this overwhelming exhibition of work by more than 200 artists from almost 50 countries is most successful when such politically charged themes take a back seat to other issues.

In contrast to most art shown in U.S. galleries, however, the best works in this show don’t fall into the trap of having to choose between being either politically effective or aesthetically sophisticated. They avoid this dead end by bringing politics into art, not in terms of content, but in terms of process-- how art gets made today.

In typical socialist fashion, the show, subtitled “The Challenge of Colonization,” examines not only process, but also the variety of ways art fits into radically different societies. The works--by Latin Americans, Africans, Asians and some ethnic minorities from Canada, the United States and Britain--are designed to transform our notion of what counts as art.

What distinguishes the Cuban biennial from other contemporary international art exhibitions is the extent to which it downplays the preciousness of the objects its curators have selected to display. Even in Havana’s National Museum of Fine Arts, the sheer abundance of paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations and mixed-media improvisations prevents the viewer from evaluating the works in the terms that we usually use to determine the value and meaning of artworks. (The show also extends across the bay into the refurbished bunkers and soldiers’ quarters of two of Havana’s historic fortresses.)

Descriptions such as original or derivative, influential or imitative just don’t make sense when objects come from cultures as unrelated as those found in Panama and Pakistan, Mozambique and Malaysia, Chile and China. Within each of these countries, distinctions between contemporary and traditional art forms--such as folk art and modernity--compound complications. Differences among classes, religions and generations--among other even more peculiar subgroups, sects, cliques and movements--preclude a reliable standard against which we may measure any work’s degree of pure innovation.

By dispensing with originality as the primary means for evaluating art, the Havana biennial proposes that art may be a universal experience, but it can’t be universally judged.

Llilian Llanes, the exuberant and intelligent director of the Wilfredo Lam Center, has been involved since the first biennial of Latin American art in 1984 (subsequent ones were held in ’86 and ‘89, and it became global in scope). She has created the framework for a vital exhibition that challenges capitalism by refusing to play by the rules set up by the Western art market. Rather than awarding prizes, grooming superstars and feeding the consumerist frenzy for an ever replaceable yet inaccessible set of collectibles, she and her staff of organizers have forged a complex yet efficient structure that allows her beleaguered but seemingly indefatigable country to host this extraordinary event.

To prevent artist-heroes from emerging, and to present a broader vision of Third World art, they rarely show an artist more than once. A democratic cacophony emerges from this systematic attempt to prevent their exhibition from being a research and development center for American museums and galleries.

Llanes’ patchwork network of experts and amateurs, field researchers, professors, students, artists and critics visits studios and conceives both elaborate and simple schemes to ensure that their governmental organization stays in touch with the grass-roots cultures it is committed to exhibiting. More than anything else, they talk. Discussions, arguments, propositions, manifestoes and speeches are all an integral part of Cuban life, and are central to the organization of the biennial. All decisions are reached by committee, after seemingly endless sessions of seductive persuasion and implacable stubbornness.

When the biennial is finally installed--primarily in the museum and the fortresses, but also in more than 50 “satellite” galleries and public spaces throughout the city--the formally organized workshops and symposia actually outnumber the exhibitions. In addition, spontaneous meetings among the 200 artists add to the ongoing exchanges of information essential to the organizers’ conception of their process-oriented exhibition. (About half the artists were in Havana for the opening, which attracted a crowd of thousands.)

The objects exhibited in the fortresses further confound any visitor’s ability to make sense of the exhibition according to the criterion of commercial galleries. One of the 16 almost 200-foot-long, tunnel-like chambers that have been whitewashed to form strangely bright man-made caverns has been filled with 157 kites that resemble serpentine dragons, fictitious fish, comical politicians and colorful abstract paintings. Together, the kites delightfully confuse the values of craft, childhood amusement and the art world’s latest fascination with site-specific installations. Out of place in a museum, doubly out of place in a military barracks and triply out of place underground, the Chinese kites fit perfectly in the Havana biennial. They exemplify its ambitious attempt to turn art and the world upside-down, so that both once again stand on their feet.

Accessible, aggressive and unrepentantly playful, this component of the exhibition summarizes the biennial’s overall attempt to prevent art from becoming little more than a decorative adornment for the homes of the elite--and to do so without diminishing its interest for participants and specialists.

The graceful yet tangled arrangement of kites symbolizes the commitment of the biennial’s organizing committee to engender multiple meanings that exceed the limits of the mere material objects from which they emerge. Singularity and autonomy, celebrated ad nauseam by modern Western aesthetics, simply do not fit into the aesthetic program the Cuban biennial compellingly articulates.

Also in the fortresses are architectural models and drawings; five decades of documentary photography from around the world; ritual objects made by Bolivian Indians; woven artifacts from Indonesia; computer-generated images by Eugenio Dittborn air-mailed from Chile, and an impressive selection of conceptual art installed by Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan who was born in Germany and now lives and teaches in Upstate New York. (U.S. citizens in this year’s show include Cristina Enmanuel, Caryl Henry, Gloria Longval, Yong Soon-Min, Carlos Villa and Bisa W. Washington.)

These works add strength to the exhibition’s claim that living culture is not a matter of masterpieces made by superstars and destined for presumably eternal storage in a small number of museums in the United States and Europe, but rather is part of an incredibly complex ongoing process that gains interest and impetus as participation--and communication--increases.

The biennial’s dizzying diversity first elicits the sense that whatever is taking place in the myriad exhibition halls cannot be adequately comprehended according to the criterion established by museums and galleries. Then it becomes clear that the exhibition’s organizers intend to attack the limitations this kind of thinking imposes on art that exists outside its conceptual perimeters and national borders. Rather than turning the show into another outpost of (cultural) colonialism, they offer it as a model for an alternative conception of art’s place in society.

Currently, museums, curators and collectors in the United States and Europe are interested in the Third World as long as its art fits into their preconceived picture of established avant-garde practices or has the exotic look of the “primitive,” the integrity of “folk” images, or the raw spontaneity of the purportedly “savage.” The works of very few artists get selected for representing these telltale qualities of the “other.” They are shown in traveling exhibitions and quickly, if fraudulently, come to emblematize the countries of their origin.

A popular, and extremely superficial version of multiculturalism thus gets perpetuated by museums whose very status and selectivity is predicated on the exclusion of most of the work from the suppos edly less cultivated cultures they selectively patronize. This practice is the flip side of cultural imperialism: It imports a misrepresentation of the outposts it pillages while requiring that the rest of the indigenous culture be shrouded in obscurity.

The collectivity that organized the biennial in Havana aims to rectify this exploitative situation. The full-time staff of 24--from janitor to director--of the 8-year-old Wilfredo Lam Center are not trying to make a bigger place for Third World art in established Western institutions, but struggling to transform the ways these institutions operate in the world.

Art and politics dovetail in the Havana biennial not when the former is reduced to a branch of advertising--or propaganda--for the latter, nor when art falsely claims to transcend the worldly specificity of mundane political battles, but when it offers a counterexample to the alignment of art and consumerism that is so prevalent in advanced industrial countries.

Although it remains outlawed by the U.S. embargo and threatened by the disappearance of Soviet support, the Cuban government continues to sponsor an exemplary exhibition whose progressive ideas and responsiveness to individual artists can stand as a model for government funding of the arts in more advanced but seemingly less civilized countries such as our own.