Art amid the apparatchiks

Art amid the apparatchiks

At Havana's biennale, SARAH MILROY explores the work of Cuban artists
forced to operate in a society where freedoms and consequences are never
entirely clear, and where life and art constantly crisscross in a
political hall of mirrors

SARAH MILROY

HAVANA -- 'Welcome to Cuba, where nothing is clear." Over mojitos at La
Guarida, an elegant restaurant on the third floor of a crumbling
19th-century building in Havana, noted Cuban independent curator Magda
Gonzalez-Mora is explaining the complexities of her homeland to me, a
visitor who has come to visit the Havana biennale and has found a whole
lot more than art to think about.

The topic of conversation is the all-Cuban group exhibition Pacemaker,
which Gonzalez-Mora has been trying in vain to mount. The government --
which controls the official display of art in the country -- has been
switching venues on her, and she is now throwing up her hands and
declaring the show undoable. The conversation deepens. Maybe Pacemaker
can come to Canada -- perhaps to the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
in Toronto, which has organized our trip to Cuba? Our group of visiting
Canadians -- art lovers, collectors, critics and curators -- are as
welcome to the artists here as desert rain.

Are Gonzalez-Mora's hassles evidence of censorship? If so, it is
censorship of a subtle, Kafkaesque sort. Yes, you can show the work; no,
we cannot assure you the space.

Fidel Castro's government has made a point of cultural diplomacy,
inaugurating the Havana biennale 22 years ago with the aspiration of
making the capital city the cultural hub of the Third World. Throughout
the city, museums have been refurbished, and installed with many
politically charged works that speak both for and against the
revolution, displays that seem to demonstrate the government's tolerance
of dissenting voices.

But in the studios, we see many works that will not be publicly
exhibited in Cuba. The artists know the consequences: irresolvable
bureaucratic hang-ups, complicated exit visas, harassing calls from
state security. These artists and curators function in a shadowy world,
where freedoms and consequences are never clear. And nothing is quite
what it seems.

Uncertainty: It's a theme that runs through much of the best
contemporary art made in this city. On the third floor of the historic
Convento San Francisco, in the heart of old Havana, celebrated Cuban
artist Sandra Ramos is showing a book sculpture with text and mirrored
pages that she has titled Jabberwocky. (The group show in which she
appears is one of several collateral biennale exhibitions around the
city; sidebars to the main exhibition, they are organized by various
curators, and presented under the aegis of the culture ministry.)

Each page of Ramos's book features a fragment of Lewis Carroll's famous
nonsense poem, and the corresponding illustrations show John Tenniel's
Alice afoot in Havana -- climbing the bus, walking the streets, floating
in mid-air. But Carroll's text is printed backward; it's only in the
mirrored reflections that you can read the words, and even then the
narrative reveals itself to be scrambled and incomprehensible.
Obliquely, the work speaks of a way of life in a political hall of mirrors.

Carlos Garacoia's work, too, can be read as a lament and a critique. In
his home studio in the residential Miramar district of the city, he
shows our Canadian group his works on paper, which have the flavour of
fanciful architectural drawings. They mourn the disappearance of Havana,
suggesting the need for both social and architectural reconstruction.
(Buildings collapse every week in a city that boasts four centuries of
exquisite colonial architecture, much of which is only now starting to
be repaired.) In one elegant pair of photographic works on paper,
Garacoia presents a colonial building and then the absence of it, with
the shape of the lost structure embossed over the open wound in the
city, where it once stood.

Other works present utopian schemes for public spaces and housing
projects, visionary speculations that inspire dreaming over despair.
Garacoia shows his art more outside Cuba than within, and has made
numerous international sales. Next September, for example, he will have
an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. But here at home,
one senses he prefers to stay below the radar.

The theme of uncertainty emerges again in Yoan Capote's Doubt, a
sculpture shown at the gem-like Galeria Villa Manuela in another of the
collateral exhibitions. A set of interlocking salvaged wooden doors are
displayed propped against the wall; they intersect and overlap, and have
multiple knobs. Can they be opened, or are they a sham? Painted black,
white and, in the centre, grey, the construction instills both intrigue
and frustration.

In the studio of Jose Toirac, one of the artists who had been slated to
appear in Pacemaker, he shows us the offending work that particularly
provoked the government's concerns: a suite of portraits in blurry
black-and-white depicting all the presidents of Cuba, many of whom held
the position for a matter of mere days or even hours. At the end of the
line is Castro, and beyond him, an empty nail on the wall, suggesting a
space where the future can unfold.

Toirac works in black-and-white, he says, because it is the visual
language of propaganda, and he shows us, through his collection of
clippings, that many of the most famous images of Che Guevara and Castro
were originally shot in colour. Now, all over the city, those images are
reproduced almost exclusively in black-and-white, a strategy that
elevates the figures above reality into a realm of heroic destiny.

Interestingly, Castro is seldom represented, only Che -- a figure who
still holds the nation in a grip of almost erotic obsession. It seems
that it was Toirac's representation of Castro, more than the empty nail,
that provoked the censors; intriguingly, the leader prefers to remain
strategically disembodied. As Toirac said to me, "Sometimes we wonder if
Fidel really exists. Maybe he's just a phenomenon of the mass media.
Perhaps it doesn't really matter either way." It's the concept of Fidel,
and the invisible but all-pervasive ideology of the revolution, that
control the social order.

Another series by Toirac, never shown in Cuba, features propaganda
images of Castro coupled with corporate logos such as Calvin Klein
Obsession (with a picture of Castro and the Pope), Canon (showing Castro
with his famous telephoto camera), and Dolce Vita: Christian Dior (a
pink-screened image of Castro stretched out and sleeping, taken during
his guerrilla days). Like a Madison Avenue executive, Castro understands
the power of the revolutionary brand, and how to protect it. Cuban
artists know, just as well, how to take it apart.

The artists' collective Los Carpinteros (Alexandre Arrechea, Dagoberto
Rodrigue and Marco Castillo) offers another take on Cuba's complexity.
In their collateral show at Galeria Habana, they are exhibiting an
enormous model of the El Moro lighthouse (one of the most important
historic military sites of touristic Havana) tipped over on its side.
Inside its upper chamber the rotating light still flashes, but the tower
has fallen, no longer guiding the ships to safety. The work reads as a
metaphor for a compromised ideal, toppled, perhaps, by incursions of
non-Cuban capital and influence. Looking into the tower through its
exposed base, you see only a receding spiral staircase, winding away
into the darkness.

Their second work here consists of what at first appears to be a
segmented rectangular solid, made of concrete. But closer examination
reveals that the segments, if reassembled, don't in fact fit together to
form a true rectangle. What looks to be concrete is in fact hollow wood
construction covered in grey stucco. Appearances are deceiving, and the
parts don't add up to comprehensible whole.

The biennale itself is housed in a stunning series of historic garrison
buildings beside El Moro. Here, things get a lot less interesting, with
gallery after gallery filled with politically motivated photo-based work
depicting urban poverty in developing countries (many of the artists are
from Africa and South America), forgettable bricolage of the
robot-made-from-a-muffler variety, and sculptures fashioned from sticks,
corrugated tin and miscellaneous rusted urban detritus.

Garbage is a big theme. Cuban artist Franklin Alvarez Fortun is showing
a high-diving board made from recycled metal sheeting, which protrudes
above a cluster of open dumpsters filled to overflowing. Fellow Cuban
Roberto Diago has made a shantytown from wood fragments, tin and chunks
of cinderblock. Neither work really amounts to much aesthetically.

Only the very rare piece rises above the fray, such as Yenniferth
Becerra's haunting installation made entirely from string held aloft by
a series of winches and pulleys. The piece suggests a room filled with
tables and chairs, their forms traced in space with the twine. The work
has several things going for it: simple materials used with great
imagination and ingenuity, and the evocative suggestion of a phantom
reality. Although the artist is Chilean, the work feels of a piece with
her Cuban compadres. In the void, the artist imagines a concrete world
of possibilities, a place of certainty where now there is only flux.

Always, though, the ongoing collaborative project that is Havana
continues to unfold, upstaging the art on display. Back in January, the
American Interests Section (which functions in lieu of an embassy) in
the much-visited Malecon section of the waterfront began transmitting
slogans of American democracy from the top of its building via a giant
LED sign. Two weeks later, Castro's government erected a thicket of tall
flagpoles, each one bearing a black flag with a white star: memorials,
officials said, to the Cuban heroes who have fallen "at the hands of
American terrorism against Cuba."

These flags now blow in the wind, obscuring the American slogans from
the view of passing drivers and pedestrians below, and defiantly
obliterating the impact of a countervailing ideology. But, according to
the artists, the idea for the black flags was borrowed from Cuban artist
Wilfredo Prieto, who lined the entrance to the last biennale in
black-and-white flags of the world, to stunning effect. (The work was
called Apolitico.)

In Cuba, it's a delicate dance between the government and the artists.
The one thing they can agree on is the power of the visual in mobilizing
thought. No one here is underestimating the power of art.

The Havana Biennale continues in the Cuban capital until April 27.

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