Behind the Iron Canvas

‘Todo Cambia” (Everything Changes), an exhibition by artist Kcho on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is the tip of a large tropical iceberg.

The name of that iceberg, of course, is Cuba. Kcho is one of several Cuban artists who have achieved prominence in their homeland while remaining largely unknown in the United States. Just 90 miles from Florida, Cuba has been an enigma to Americans since 1961, when the U.S. cut off relations with the Fidel Castro government, then in the midst of forging an alliance with the Soviet Union. Thirty-six years later, the cultural conversation between the two countries continues to be strained at best.

The U.S. State Department, for instance, refused the Havana-based Kcho entry into the country for his show, on the grounds that he violated his tourist visa last year when he installed an exhibition of his work at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. American citizens, too, need a permit issued by the Treasury Department to visit Cuba and must travel through Canada or Mexico to get there, as commercial air travel from the U.S. to Cuba is prohibited.

Amid all this Sturm und Drang, Cuba’s artists have never stopped working. But until recently our familiarity with Cuban contemporary art has tended to begin and end with Wifredo Lam, a figurative painter who left Cuba in 1923, befriended Picasso in the ‘30s, hung out with the Surrealists in the ‘40s, and produced a body of work lauded for reconciling Latin American art with the European avant garde.

Less known is the fact that Cuba’s art community is up to speed on every manifestation of postmodernism, that the country has excellent art schools free to any Cuban interested in attending and that a Havana Biennial has occurred more or less regularly since 1984.

Conceived initially to provide a place for emerging Latin American artists to be seen by an international audience, the Havana Biennial is directed by Llilian Llanes Godoy and this year was housed in the Castillo del Morro, a 16th century fortress replete with cannons and prison cells. (The biennial normally takes place in May at the National Museum of Fine Arts, which was closed last spring for renovation).

Because the Havana Biennial focuses on artists who tend to be excluded from the international discourse, the only Americans invited are minorities, and the sole U.S. representative this year was Whitfield Lovell, an African American artist based in New York. With 177 artists from 44 countries, the 1997 biennial centered on the theme of memory, and thus, an invitation was extended to Christian Boltanski, who is acclaimed for work exploring that theme. He was, however, the only white European artist in the show, which attracted an unusually large foreign art audience. Among them were MOCA curators Connie Butler and Alma Ruiz.

“As visitors, our movement was unrestricted, and I noticed that some political content is allowed in art,” reports Ruiz, who was born in Guatemala and was in Cuba for the first time. “There’s still a lot of censorship there, though. Because this biennial included a relatively small number of Cubans, an alternative exhibition was presented in a house in Havana, which was immediately visited by the arts council, who forbade the artists to have a party they’d planned. To ensure it didn’t take place, parties in a large area of the city were forbidden for a period of time.”

Endless restrictions of this sort were among the hardships that led many Cuban artists who came of age in the ‘80s to leave the country and make new lives in Miami or New York. Prominent among that generation are Miami-based artists Jose Bedia (whose work is seen as an outgrowth of Wifredo Lam’s) and Tomas Esson, a Neo-Expressionist; Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who lived in New York until his death last year of complications from AIDS; and Ana Mendieta, who died in 1985.

Cuba’s current generation of young artists, on the other hand, are often “devoted to their homeland, and many consider staying there a political act,” Butler says. Young Cuban artists who share these feelings to varying degrees include the 27-year-old Kcho, Raul Cordero, whose mixed-media paintings make their U.S. debut this December in a show at Iturralde Gallery, and Juan Carlos Alom, who will show with the same gallery in March. Also opening in March is the L.A. debut of Havana-based printmaker Belkis Ayon, whose show is the first in a series of exhibitions of Cuban art scheduled for Couturier Gallery.

Though it seems safe to assume that the nuances in Cuban art would be difficult for American viewers to grasp, Ruiz points out that “artists today share an international vocabulary that allows their work to be understood in many different countries, and Cuban artists are fluent in that vocabulary.”

“Artists there have excellent training,” she says, “and because of Cuba’s political system, people who previously would’ve been marginalized and denied the opportunity to go to school were given good educations. Many of them brought folk art practices into the contemporary discourse too, so Cuban art is infused with folk tradition.”

Says Butler: “I couldn’t believe how sophisticated the art we saw was. Many of these artists travel and are familiar with the international art world, but the way Cuban art deals with memory and history is completely unique to the place. Much of the work is steeped in a nostalgic history of the island, and political issues are woven into it in a very poetic, personal way.

“Tania Bruguera, for instance, is a wonderful artist in her early 30s who worked with Ana Mendieta before she left Cuba. Bruguera’s taken Mendieta’s performance vocabulary and refashioned it for use in her own performances and installations, which deal with the Earth and leaving the land. I was also impressed with work by Carlos Garaicoa, who makes photographs and public happenings about the history of cities, and of Havana in particular. And I thought the work of Los Carpinteros, a collaborative of three guys who make whimsical architectural forms out of wood and found objects was really strong.” (Los Carpinteros make their L.A. debut in October in a show at the Iturralde Gallery).

Don’t expect local galleries to be flooded with Cuban art, however, as there are forces working against getting it here. One such force reared its head last month in Miami, when pop singer Gloria Estefan was vilified by fellow members of Miami’s Cuban American community after she wrote a letter to the Miami Herald in support of a city official who had been fired for proposing that Cuban-based musicians be allowed to perform at local public events.

Cubans living on the island are currently banned from working in Miami, because Cubans who left the country believe that any Cuban who remains on the island is supporting Castro by choosing to stay.

“Miami’s Cuban American community has grown very bold, and many U.S. curators avoid working there because the situation is so volatile,” says Ruiz, who is currently organizing an exhibition of work by Mendieta that will open at MOCA on Feb. 1. “Miami’s Cuban Americans want a total boycott of artists from the island because they claim that 40% of any money these artists make in America will go to Castro.”

Butler adds that Cuban artists in exile generally aren’t as politicized about perpetuating the Cold War.

“Miami’s Cuban American community is undeniably vehemently anti-Castro, though, perhaps because they’ve been unable to forget how terrible conditions in the country were when they left,” she says. “A friend of mine who began visiting Cuba in 1990 said that on those early trips, she met many artists who actually looked hungry, and the people who left at that time still have that image of life there.

“The situation is better now, partly due to tourism, and because they now accept the dollar and foreign currency has pumped the economy up. It’s still in bad shape, but there’s been some improvement. And in ways, the country is surprisingly advanced; because of communism, for instance, women artists in Cuba have achieved more equality than is typical of Latin American countries, and we saw lots of women artists.

“Everybody lives modestly, though. We were told that a Cuban surgeon makes about $45 a month, and the average income is $15 a month. It’s cheap to live there, as everything is subsidized by the government, and because there’s no economy there are no jobs, so nobody works--which is great for artists, who’re free to devote all their time to making work.”

Cuban artists may have time to burn, but Butler reports that the economy of the country makes materials decidedly hard to come by.

“There’s a style of sculpture there based on using the most minimal found objects, and it reflects the fact that Cubans make do with whatever’s on hand. Although they’re not starving, they live in extremely reduced circumstances, and when we left, our guide told us anything we could leave with him would be distributed to people: aspirin, vitamins, plastic bags, old newspapers, half-used bars of soap--anything. You don’t see shops when you wander the streets, and there are no concession stands--they have nothing.

“And yet, it’s not a beaten-down culture,” Butler says. “The people we met were critical of the system, but at the same time, they have this amazing world view. Because they’re trapped there, they look out in a way that we’re unable to, and they have an incredibly broad and optimistic vision.”*

“TODO CAMBIA” (EVERYTHING CHANGES), Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Dates: Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 8. Prices: adults, $6; students and senior citizens, $4; free for children under 12 and for all admissions on Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m. Phone: (213) 626-6222.