I Shall Be Several—Cuban Socially Engaged Art Projects as “Author Pedagogies”

Abstract

In this article, I examine two case studies of socially engaged art projects led by Cuban artists René Francisco Rodríguez and Lázaro Saavedra in the 1990s in Havana, Cuba. These professional artist–educators began defining curricula, art-based methodologies, and practices within tertiary art education in Cuba, re-enunciating their role of civic responsibility in society. Collaborative artistic proposals then emerged as forms of learning, encouraging problem-solving strategies when interacting with communities in situ and with the public, which I term author pedagogies. First, I analyze the Cuban sociopolitical scenario that led to the birth of these socially engaged art (SEA) projects, considering their relations with the neo-avant-garde and the expanded notion of art. Second, I examine the modus operandi of SEA projects, aided by Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical and carnivalesque notions, among others. These approaches demonstrate the significance of these author pedagogies in understanding “thyself” as a form of “another” transcultural subject.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See Ojeda (2003, pp. 153–166).

² The socialist nature of the Cuban revolution was declared in atypical conditions on April 16, 1961. A day prior, various Cuban airports were bombarded following orders from Washington, DC, causing seven deaths and wounding 53. At the mass funeral held for the deceased, Castro announced the socialist character of the Cuban revolution. The next day marked yet another historic date: the invasion of Cuba via Playa Girón (Girón Beach), led by the U.S. government and aiming to overthrow Cuban power. The U.S. military intervention was defeated on April 19, 1961.

³ This is the official transcript by the Department of Stenography of the Cuban Revolutionary Government.

⁴ Recently, the Cuban government approved Decree 349, which attempts to regulate the artistic field by restricting freedom of action to artists who the government deems “non-professionals” or “intruders.” Consequently, a debate about freedom of expression by artists and intellectuals followed as a mode of resistance. I stress two issues here: first, how the core ideas of Castro’s speech to intellectuals have prevailed for 57 years; second, how the Cuban artistic field post-1959 has continuously been dominated by tensions between Cuban government officials and Cuban artists. See “349: Transcripción de la reunión entre artistas plásticos y funcionarios del MINCULT.” Retrieved from https://in-cubadora.org/2018/12/08/349-·transcripcion-de-la-reunion-entre-artistas-plasticos-y-funcionarios-del-mincult·/?fbclid=IwAR3bs0Jx-9GTuY9H4Mhw7zRCRqw0tPDpg-tHT0psTPLOqwW0NezLBXOLRvQ

⁵ The exact phrase is “Revolutionaries are the vanguard of the people” (Castro, 1961, para. 49).

⁶ With the launch of the Higher Institute for the Arts in Havana (ISA) in 1976, the Faculty of Visual Arts, the Faculty of Music, and the Faculty of Theater were established, which awarded bachelor’s degrees in visual arts, music, and theater, respectively. Retrieved from www.isa.cult.cu/historia/.

⁷ On the ISA’s pedagogical project and the expanded notion of art, see Ojeda (2000, pp. 30–43).

⁸ The various avant-garde movements that occurred between approximately 1900 and 1920 originated under the stigma of social revolutions: the Russian Revolution (1905), the Turkish Revolution (1908–09), the Mexican Revolution (1910–17), and the October Revolution (1907). Meanwhile, the neo-avant-gardists who marked the decades of the 1960s and 1970s unfolded under the crisis of the welfare state and modern ways of thinking, as well as under the influence of events such as the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1965), the Vietnam War (1965), and the student and youth counterculture uprisings in Paris and Prague (1968) and the United States (1967), respectively, among others. See Ojeda (2003).

⁹ The avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde have not been exempt from criticism. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1993) and art critic and historian Hal Foster (1994) have poignantly assessed the avant-garde gesture. Foster (1994) claimed, “it was always already false” (p. 17). And Habermas (1993) echoed similar criticism: “nonsense experiments… nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow” (p. 105). Foster (1994), meanwhile, claimed that the aim of avant-garde artists such as Duchamp “is neither an abstract negation of art, nor a romantic reconciliation with life, but a perpetual testing of the conventions of both. Thus, rather than false, circular and otherwise affirmative, avant-garde practice is at its best contradictory, mobile and dialectical, even rizhomatic” (p. 18). Foster concluded that the neo-avant-garde even prompts new modes of art institutional analysis and critique (pp. 20–21).

¹⁰ Hacia una Pragmática Pedagógica was the original title, which literally translates to Towards a Pedagogical Pragmatics. I intentionally translate “pragmatics” as “practice” given that the initial idea of this workshop was to explore and redefine a pedagogic practice to be developed from this event onward.

¹¹ This project art was undertaken between January 13 and January 31, 1990, in Havana. The ISA student participants of The National House were María del Pilar de los Reyes, Acela Rey, Dianelis Pérez Travieso, Tania Alina Paredes, Tania Rodríguez, Lucía Piedra, Alexandre Arrechea, Dagoberto Rodríguez, and Ibrahim Miranda.

¹² René Francisco Rodríguez coined new terms to categorize TPP’s social intervention. Participants understood The National House as an “event-class” instead of a usual class setting at the classrooms of ISA. The physical outcomes that resulted from this interaction were considered “living objects” instead of being understood as traditional artworks created for exhibition in a gallery space.

¹³ TPP practices can also be seen as a collaborative participation—in Helguera’s words (2011)—with the inhabitants of Obispo 455 (p. 15). TPP practices are also in line with what art history professor Grant Kester (2005) called dialogical (p. 154) social projects—resting on Bakhtin’s (1981) linguistic associations—to group social projects where “conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself” (Kester, 2005, p. 154).

¹⁴ The significance of TPP has not been emphasized enough in this section due to space constraints. In principle, TPP establishes the basis for a subsequent pedagogic practice developed by Rodríguez. See Ojeda’s (2008) essay based on an existing text first discussed in 2000, and published in 2001 in Proyectos arte en acción de reescritura: La pragmática de René Francisco Rodríguez, in La Gaceta de Cuba (p. 24). Among the internationally well-known artist practices that have been influenced by Rodríguez’s pedagogy, there is, for example, the group Los Carpinteros (www.loscarpinteros.net/#home), whose wood “obsession” and handwork departs from El discurso de carpintería (carpenter’s discourse), organized by Rodríguez after he saw the need for specific manual skills to face community works such as The National House. After TPP, Rodríguez led the Galería Dupp (DUPP Gallery), whose members developed similar work practices in their professional life tacitly influenced by Rodríguez’s actions. Examples are Glenda León and Inti Hernández, who were deeply inspired by the quotidian, the mundane, for their current contemporary practices.

¹⁵ In this article section, I refer to one of the various pedagogical approaches that Lázaro Saavedra put into practice as artist/pedagogue during his working period at ISA. For other workshops led by Saavedra, see Ojeda (2000, pp. 22–25).

¹⁶ Personal correspondence with Fabián Peña, team member of Enema, January 24, 2018.

¹⁷ Enema existed only during their tenure as students from 2000 to 2003. They were, in alphabetic order: Pavel Acosta, David Beltrán, James Bonachea, Alejandro Cordovés, Zhenia Couso, Edgar Echevarría, Lino Fernández, Nadieshzda Inda, Janler Méndez, Fabián Peña, Hanoi Pérez, Rubert Quintana, Adrián Soca, and the lead artist, ISA professor Lázaro Saavedra.

¹⁸ An example of this could be seen in the work ¿Esto que hago puede ser arte? (Is this art?), The Microbrigade Series, Lázaro Saavedra, 1992. Saavedra got involved with the micro-brigades at the beginning of the 1990s. These were groups of social workers that built social apartments to be assigned by the Cuban government to those in need. In return, construction workers ultimately received the privilege of being assigned an apartment. Saavedra, who was at first motivated by personal needs, was also looking forward to assuming this experience as a creative exercise, which embodied the construction of community-based works. In the figure, there is one of his paintings that resulted from The Microbrigade Series, a work belonging to the exhibition under the eloquent title of “The Thought of the Image, the Image of Thought,” exhibited at Havana Gallery in 1993. In this piece, he parodies his work as a painter in the construction site, under a certain naive tone exposing the reasoning behind his experiences at the micro-brigades: reflections about art/reality and art/social function. Like in many of his previous drawings or illustration-based works, the use of speech balloons in The Microbrigade Series appeared in the style of comic books to materialize his thoughts that questioned the image in use in a humorous tone. Saavedra writes in the speech balloon:

I had my ideas about a type of art in which the work fulfilled a specific social function… so this is that idea… my activity is defined by applying pigment to a flat surface. In this case, the pigment is wall painting and the surface is the wall. The work will fulfill a useful function. Let the walls look white… beautiful! This is functionalist abstractionism. Oh, Ives Klein and Joseph Beuys: how you must be envying me!

¹⁹ For example, in Enema’s actions, there are plenty of carnival associations, from their theatrical exaggerations to their musical mise en scène, notable in performances such as Record Güines or La Chancleta o el chancleteo (2002)—in which the group distributed Enema magazine to the public while performing a conga dance—the queen of dances in Cuban carnivals. Carnivalesque references also surface in Mezclilla (2001), where the performers’ bound body walked, recalling Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.

²⁰ Notice that, coincidentally, the leader of Enema inherited the saint’s name.

²¹ The complete Bakhtin (1984b) quotation is: “The body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” (p. 317).

²² This is a continuation of the tradition of artistic proposals developed during the 1980s in Havana, Cuba. See Ojeda (2000), pp. 20–29.

²³ See Ojeda (2000).