An Insider’s Cuba

“You can’t be neutral in Havana,” Tim Wride announces. “It’s impossible.”

In the final stages of organizing the exhibition, “Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution,” the associate curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art reflects on the difficulty of putting together a show about a place he fell deeply in love with.

“Cuba’s amazingly seductive. The whole outlaw aura of it has its own seduction, and it’s the single most sensual place I’ve ever been in my life-the way the sun hits your skin, the way the music hits your ear, the smells in the street.”

One pitfall Wride tried to avoid was making the show simply stylish, a reflection of Cuba’s intense surface appeal. Just as incomplete would be the story of Cuban photography over the past 40 years told primarily in political terms. That approach would be unavoidably flavored by the curator’s upbringing as an American “of the duck-and-cover generation.”

We’re conditioned in the U.S., says Wride, 46, to think of Cuba in adversarial terms, “as this monolithic Communist state, and to think of all communist states the same way. But it’s a rapidly changing place-and always has been, which is interesting. One of the things you learn about Cuba, in looking at the art and how the art relates to the place, is that it’s been a terribly fluid place-politically, socially and economically. It’s anything but dogmatic.”

Ironically, that image of Cuba as ideologically one-dimensional has been reinforced by several of the nation’s own photographers, who, in the early years of the revolution, portrayed Che Guevara and Fidel Castro as monumental, heroic personalities. Their photographs are widely known, especially Alberto Korda’s iconic image of Guevara in a beret, gazing intently into the future, an image reputed to be the most reproduced photograph in the world. Several portraits that play into this cult of personality, as Wride terms it, serve as a prologue to the “Shifting Tides” exhibition, which opens today. From these, the show moves into territory quite different and unexpected.

“We all have this sense that we know what to expect when we look at Cuban photography,” he says, motioning to the office wall, where Osvaldo Salas’ closely cropped portrait of Castro smoking is propped. “You know, black-and-white, photo documentary, the definitive Cuban style-which is far from the truth.”

On the opposite side of the room, against the photography department’s floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, stands a sequence of huge photographic panels by Manuel Pina. All texture and tone, the panels together read as a crumbling, abstracted stripe, an Expressionist gesture of urgency and simplicity. They constitute an image of the Malecon, the sea wall that fronts Havana. Pina’s work, Wride says, “talks about the idea of the Malecon not merely as physical definition, but as a metaphorical one, as beginning and end, promise and restriction. The way the wall has weathered, sometimes beautifully and sometimes not, mirrors a lot of the ideas going on politically and socially and economically in Cuba. It all becomes part of the piece and allows it to resonate on more complex layers.”

From the photographs of Guevara and Castro to the Malecon sequence, one can trace the trajectory of the exhibition, “from work that is localized in Havana to work that is broad-based and internationalized, visually and conceptually.”

Wride’s own trajectory in organizing the show has been nearly as dramatic. A curator at the museum for the past six years, he got a call one day in 1997 from his friend Darrel Couturier, owner-director of Couturier Gallery on La Brea Avenue, where numerous Cuban artists have exhibited.

“He said, ‘Tim, I’m going to Cuba. Do you want to go?”’ Wride’s dark eyebrows scrunch in recollection of the surprise invitation. “What? It was so all of a sudden, but it was irresistible. I just couldn’t say no.

“I went on 10 days’ notice. I had very little time to formulate any game plan and very little time to do any research. I just went to observe and absorb. I really was going as a blank slate.”

The focus of the trip was the Sixth Havana Contemporary Art Biennial. “I wanted to look at contemporary art in general, just poke around, get a feeling for what was going on and test what I thought I knew about work down there. What I found out was that I didn’t know anything.”

Just as his expectations of Cuban art dissolved upon exposure to the work, expectations that artists and other contacts had of him also began to break down when he took the second of what ended up being six trips. “The idea for a show was formulating so I went back with a purpose, and did studio visits day after day after day. My first trip there, I was just somebody else from America coming down to look at work, and it was no big deal. My second trip there, doors began to open, and people began to talk a bit more freely. Ideas began to become more complicated.”

The standard, American image of Cuba as insular and restrictive gave way to the reality of a vital culture, where artistic freedoms have shifted like the tide over the past four decades, and art materials remain a precious commodity. Though many accomplished artists fled Cuba during what came to be called the “special period” beginning in 1989, opportunities for those on the island improved greatly as the ‘90s progressed. Arts professionals from around the world have been visiting Cuba in greater and greater numbers, resulting in a continual flurry of international exposure for Cuban artists of several generations. In Los Angeles, the Couturier and Iturralde galleries have led the way in showcasing Cuban artists, and are currently exhibiting five artists included in the LACMA show-Jose Figueroa, Jose Manuel Fors and Carlos Garaicoa at Couturier; Marta Maria Perez Bravo and Juan Carlos Alom at Iturralde.

In the course of organizing the show, Wride decided to limit his selections to photographers living in Cuba, or to work made in Cuba by artists who have since settled elsewhere. Gradually, a structure emerged that clarified the shifts between the ideologically driven, declaratory images of the years immediately following the 1959 revolution and the more recent work favoring the elusive and the ambiguous, the personal over the collective aspects of identity.

Fors sculpts bundles and mosaic mandalas out of modest, sepia-toned photos that look like they’ve come from an old family photo album. Ernesto Leal shoots in corners, crevices, spaces beneath and between things, where something might be hidden, and calls his recent series “Aqui Tampoco” (Not Here Either).

Contemporary Cuban artists, Wride believes, have a “ferocious idea of what photography is and what it isn’t. They have a sense of philosophical and conceptual and intellectual awareness of what photography does, how it works, what it should be, what it can be, that I find amazing.

Photography is still not taught as a separate subject at the nation’s leading art school, the Instituto Superior de Arte (known as ISA), but artists studying there receive rigorous training, supplemented by an influx of ideas from abroad responding to a hunger that has swelled since the 1970s. Wride marvels at a story he was told about how art news from the West would make the rounds in Cuba. When a single copy of Artforum magazine would reach the island, “the articles would be typed on a mimeograph sheet, then copied and distributed. People would read them and pass them from one to the next.”

Epic photographs of Castro and Guevara serve as the baseline for post-revolution Cuban photography. From this style followed an interest in the common citizen, the worker, cane workers especially, whose everyday labor helped actualize the revolution, and whose images filled the pages of new Cuban picture magazines. In the 1980s and ‘90s, a concern for personal history and the creation of new myths preoccupied the Cuban art world, which embraced photography as a critical tool for investigating issues of authority and truth.

Wride acknowledges that the classifications he’s assigned to the work on view-’Cult of Personality,” ’Everyday Heroes,” ’Collective Memory,” ’Siting the Self’-constitute just one way of understanding the material. Cristina Vives, the independent scholar and critic in Havana who helped Wride make contact with Cuban artists, argues for a more heterogenous view in her essay for the “Shifting Tides” catalog.

“What has never been published, nevertheless exists,” she writes. Epic photography was but one strain of work being produced in the 1960s, for instance. “In reality there was, in general, no ‘epic’ photography, but rather an ‘epic’ selection, produced by an ‘epic’ vision, promoted by an ‘epic’ social revolution.”

Hers are the views of an insider, one who has been intimately involved in the Cuban art community for more than 20 years. Wride, a sixth-generation Angeleno, is an admitted outsider. “And when we disagree,” he says, “I don’t see that as a bad thing, actually. I see that as part of the dialogue.

“I knew that the history of the place was not mine to write. I was there to react to the work that I was seeing, as somebody that didn’t grow up with it, that hadn’t internalized the economic, social and political lessons that drive the work. Intellectually, I may understand them, but they weren’t mine from the gut.”

He deliberately kept the show small, at just over 100 pictures, and the structure clear.

“It’s a more simplistic plan than I would do if I were doing a 400-page volume,” he admits, but immense shows often raise more questions than they answer. His photo history classes at Cal State Fullerton provided a useful curatorial model.

“When I teach, I’ll trace a thread, to show my students how things interrelate on one path, even though there are paths that branch off from that central path. That’s what I decided to do here, to really choose a path. It’s not the only path to take in looking at the work. It’s not the only viewpoint to expound, but a way to understand the trajectory from 1959 to the present, in a way that gives the artists working in a more contemporary vein something to work off of, and a way for us to understand how they got there.

“I know that a lot of Cuban artists are struggling with the idea of wanting to be taken just as artists, not as Cuban artists. So many of the artists [in ‘Shifting Tides’] could exist in so many different shows that really have nothing to do with place. I think that’s what they’re all looking for. It’s what they deserve. But there’s an entire audience that needs to know how they function and how the work functions, its conception. That’s why shows like this are valuable, but they’re only a first step.”

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* ‘Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 857-6000. Through July 1. Closed Wednesday.