Haydee Venegas In the twenty-first century ... - AICA international

DAKAR – ART, MINORITIES, MAJORITIES
JULY 2003
PUERTO RICAN ART. IDENTITY, ALTERITY AND TRAVESTISM.
Haydee Venegas
In the twenty-first century global and post-colonised world, Puerto Rico, an
island in the Caribbean Sea represents a unique phenomenon. Since its discovery in
1493, it remained a Spanish Colony until our territory was handed over to the
Unites States in the year 1898. For the past hundred and five years we have been
booty of war, a colony and a Commonwealth. Even so, Puerto Rico has maintained a
culture, customs and a language that have being steadily transformed and adapted,
making for a solid and vibrant Spanish speaking, Caribbean culture. Puerto Ricans
have lived through five hundred years of history, during which they have known
only the colonial system. Ever since the development of a Creole consciousness
three centuries ago, we have been asking ourselves the eternal questions: what, and
who, are we?
The long search for identity, in all senses of the word, but chiefly the sociopolitical
one, was the principal undertaking of the decade of the 1980s. For many
years Puerto Ricans have been wondering who they are, and for many years wanted
to be someone else, seeking altered as an answer to their quest. To be or not to be
Puerto Ricans? To be, or not to be, Spanish? To be, or not to be, Africans? To be, or
not to be, Americans? These vital questions had no answer then, and have none
today; thus they keep the people divided into layers of complex political muddle.
Puerto Ricans have continually sought ways to be included in important events,
and we often witness, painfully, how we are excluded. Our greatest pride is to see
our Olympic team on parade. The people are overwhelmed when they greet our
medal winners in these international events. The reception accorded to our four
Miss Universe winners were historic occasions. But at the same time our
application to join UNESCO was rejected, so we lost the opportunity to take part in
such an important forum for cultural exchange. One of the political slogans to take
root in our minds is that Puerto Rico has ‘the best of both worlds’. But sometimes
we don’t fit into either of them.
For decades Puerto Rican art has suffered from this process of seeking our
identity as Puerto Ricans. Over the past forty years we have sought inspiration
both from international movements and our own roots, going from one extreme to
the other. That’s why, when Marta Traba published her Polemical Proposal on
Puerto Rican Art, in 1971, she criticised our eclecticism and asserted that ‘Puerto
Rican art suffered from an incapacity to choose between attitudes that were often
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antagonistic’ 1 – namely, those that suited a peculiar system of belief. In contrast,
Edward Lucie-Smith excluded Puerto Rico altogether from his book Twentieth
Century Latin American Art (1993), claiming that ‘it is difficult to draw an
absolutely firm line between twentieth-century Puerto Rican art and that of the
United States’. 2
In spite of everything, I can affirm that in these last four decades there have
been brilliant artists, who have overcome the frontiers of colonialisms and/or
otherness, and who have produced art with character, drama and authenticity.
A decade after the publication of Marta Traba’s book, great changes were afoot.
The year 1984 was an important one, marking the beginning of a sea change. This
was the year when the respected painter, Antonio Martorell, returned from six years
in Mexico; and the young artists, Maria Mater O’Neill and Arnaldo Roche, obtained
their degrees in art and also set foot on the island. These three artists took an
active part in the artistic scene, while also helping to strengthen the art market.
Carlos Collazo, who had never left the island, teamed up with O’Neill. During the
next two years Nick Quijano, Néstor Otero and Néstor Millán also returned, after
pursuing successful careers in New York. In their search for identity, these artists
began to reinvent themselves from the mid-1980s onwards, by adopting different
guises and revealing their chameleon-like ability to change their artistic persona.
The best example of this was Arnaldo Roche’s trilogy of self portraits, in which he
portrayed himself as a black person with blue eyes, or as a white person with
crinkly, blond hair.
In the early 1990s Puerto Rican artists drew strength from the effervescence of
the 1980s. Commercial galleries began to promote local artists and started to
participate in international events. The number of major private collectors grew,
and for the first time demand matched production. The celebration of the 500 th
anniversaries of the discovery of America (1992) and Puerto Rico (1993), the
construction of a Puerto Rican Pavilion for EXPO’ 92 in Seville, Spain and the
staging of AICA’s Annual Congress in Puerto Rico all offered pretexts for mounting
some memorable exhibitions. The opening of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo also
made a major contribution to the local art scene during this decade. Likewise, the
Escuela de Artes Plásticas became the production centre for an entire new
generation of young artists, who are now the ones to be making waves. The 1990s
brought even greater freedom - and problems - as the new millennium approached:
spurred on by the celebrations of the centenary of the U.S. invasion, our artists now
felt an obligation to re-examine our roots and try to get to grips with our hybrid
character, as a people. Given the controversial nature of any attempt at a political
definition of nationhood, they adopted a variety of postures, turning themselves into
chameleons, changing identities and transgressing genres. This cross-dressing of
identities was deliberate, but uncomfortable.
1 Marta Traba, Propuesta polémica sobre arte puertorrique o. San Juan, Libreria Internacional, Inc., 1971, p. 11
2 Edward Lucie-Smith, Latin American Art of the 20 th Century. London, Thames & Hudson, 1993, p. 8.
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Puerto Ricans also sought to follow new paths. Spanglish (the mixing of Spanish
and English words) started to fall in disuse. There was an effort to get rid of these
invented words and to speak a better Spanish. Educated Puerto Ricans, and even
writers, now interject whole sentences or paragraphs in English, before returning to
a grammatically correct Spanish. We switch back and forth between languages with
great naturalness and are often unaware of what we are doing. In our effort to
survive as a Caribbean people, we accept this cultural dualism, or fragmentation, to
which we have been party for the past hundred years.
An analogous dualism was to be found in some traditional African groups, who
were forced to practise a special type of syncretism, by worshipping their own idols
in the guise of catholic saints, as a means of preserving their own religion. And
today we can even find proof that you can be two or more things at once, in the socalled
‘transformer’ toys, featuring a car, a toy or a monster; or in holograms that
allow us to switch between different reflected images, as we change position. Today,
the marvels of design and technology make very plain the ease with which is
possible to represent two or three different things at the same time.
One thing is certain: we were always multi-mulatto, on this most hybrid of all
Caribbean islands. We are part of that mixture of races and tongues that has
existed in the Caribbean for the past 500 years; we experience to the full the
contradictions of being Puerto Rican, speaking Spanish, feeling we’re Latin
Americans and carrying a U.S. passport. The blood of three races courses through
our veins. When those of us with the even the fairest of skins hear the beat of the
drums we immediately begin to adopt a new posture, and our straight hair begins to
curl up at the roots. La bomba, la plena, la salsa and now the raegetón are parts of
the tradition that we now export. But we must eat paella from time to time, to
remind us of our Hispanic roots. We have been active in defence of the Spanish
language for over one hundred years of autonomous existence. But today our
traditions also include taking the kids to McDonalds after Sunday mass, watching
North American cable TV and listening to rock.
Given the impossibility – or the futility - of trying to define a unique identity, the
twenty-first century Puerto Rican has discovered that the answer to our identity
crisis is ‘to be, and to be’ This is where our visual artists, in keeping with their
visionary mission, offer us a wide range of hybrid alternatives.
And, in a way, isn’t the rest of the world heading in the same direction?
‘Britain has become not only a multicultural nation but also one of mixed-race
individuals, couples and families. The artists are beginning to reflect this
complexity.’ 3
Puerto Rico and Cuba have disputed the nationality of three of their children,
Cuban by birth but brought up in Puerto Rico: Félix González Torres, Rosa Irigoyen
and Ernesto Pujol. All three studied at the University of Puerto Rico. In their work,
Irigoyen and Pujol both examine their childhoods in Cuba, the problems that led to
3 Michael Kimmelman, in The New York Times, July 21, 2002
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their migration and their cultural adaptation to their new environment. They have
created similar codes for dealing with thee issues – one, in an almost classical style,
the other in a baroque manner – and they use the same images of airplanes,
suitcases and palm trees.
Most of Irigoyen’s installations have dealt with her departure from Cuba and
subsequent return to the island. She even created her own passport to memory: the
illusions and memories destroyed, the country lost, the family dispersed, the dual
mores. Her work is a never-ending journey, an all-encompassing view of the
Caribbean world, and a fluid transition from one state to another. Her two latest
works are even more personal. Last year she created and printed images from her
memory onto rolls of paper hanging from paper towel dispensers. These were
memories that could be disposed of. For three months this year, she started wearing
extremely long and elaborately decorated false nails and documented the difficulties
these presented for daily life.
Ernesto Pujol, after graduating from university spent thirteen years in a
Cartesian monastery, then moved to New York, to work as an artist. He also went
to Cuba, to decipher the macho patriarchal culture of the white oligarchy into which
he had been born. Back in Puerto Rico, he tried to recover the contradictory
memories of his childhood and adolescence in a bi-cultural country, where in order
to become a macho Puerto Rican, he had to play cowboys and Indians. Now he
makes poetic photos, dressed up as a nun or a monk.
Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, a strange case of a hybrid artist, born in Philippines of
an Austrian father and a Puerto Rican mother, was brought up in Japan, the
Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. After gaining his Master’s degree in fine arts
at Yale University, he returned to the island to teach at the Escuela de Artes
Plásticas, in 1995. Ever since then, his work has dealt with transgression, including
transgression of the ordinary meaning of objects and the uses to which they are put.
As an artist, he is both highly intellectual and daring, and bold and defiant.
Travestoys, the project he completed for his Master’s degree, is made up of three
components that interact with the public: the skeleton of a huge wooden toy model of
a German Focke-Wolf aeroplane, zooming in for a ‘kamikaze’ attack; Hammond
Hall, the Yale building housing the sculpture department, here converted into a
modern brothel and presented as the object of the attack; and the rooms of the
brothel itself, represented by ten drawers, each by a different Puerto Rican artist,
invited by Juhasz-Alvarado himself to ‘infiltrate’ his work.
or many years Juhasz-Alvado was fascinated by the ‘comejénes’, or tropical
termites, those tireless sculptors in wood, who work in dark tunnels and devour
everything that lies in their path. Whilst generally regarded as pests, in fact they
are a vital part of the tropical ecosystem, since they attack only sick trees. He says
that: ‘the “comején” has long served as a metaphor for the Puerto Rican imagination:
Our culture keeps developing intensively, even under the aggressive influence of
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JULY 2003
imperialist policies of assimilation and cultural homogenization’. 4 Physically,
Juhasz-Alvarado works from the ‘other side’. He creates objects culled from
northern cultures, disguises them and infiltrates them, in such a way that they
appear to be purely Caribbean. Infiltration is the key to his work. It is not just that
he regularly invites other artists to intervene in it; he also plays with trespassing on
other types of frontier and invokes certain rites of passage. In 1999 he presented
Tu-Tran, an installation dedicated to the San Juan metro, then under construction.
This consisted of a look-out post, with binoculars for viewing all the train stations,
each one created by a different artist. Two of his latest works have dealt with illegal
immigration of Dominicans into Puerto Rico and their attempts to smuggle
forbidden fruits through the US customs. In both instances, he creates the aura of
a fantastic voyage, both through the images themselves and through the imaginary
accounts that he incorporates into the accompanying texts. He deploys a complex
array of colourful forms and structures, which assail the spectator on all fronts. In
the process, his work has become more colourful, poetic and purely Caribbean.
Javier Cambre also works with hybrid installations. For his contribution to the
Whitney Biennial, Cambre cut a fritter vendor’s hut on a San Juan beach into two
halves. He attached a white post-modernist structure to the half that remained on
the beach and dispatched the other half of the hut to the exhibition in New York,
where he joined it up to a similar contemporary structure. The resulting, modernist
structure is an interpretation of the museum’s windows. Both hybrid structures
speak for tradition and the modernity, for the here and the there, and for two
cultures and two worlds living in the same dimension.
After obtaining a degree in law, José Lerma turned back to art. His works deal
with relationships, changes and transpositions. He built a square room out of foam
that can be mounted anywhere, so the viewer is encouraged to reflect on the nature
of the specific site into which the room has been inserted. Instead of making people
go to the museum, he builds the museum around ordinary situations. Ordinary or
extraordinary objects and places can be seen differently, and reflected upon.
Another of his works involved converting a station wagon into a corvette. The
classic family car was thus dressed up into the kind of vehicle suited to expressing a
typical male’s mid-life crisis. This work dealt with family crisis. At Art Basel Miami
he got hold of a copy of the catalogue and used a two-inch brush impregnated with
polish remover to pick up all the images printed on its pages and transfer them onto
the walls of the gallery...
Three young painters have emerged during the past five years. Rabindranath
Diaz has always incorporated humour and sarcasm into his work. Now he is
making beautiful triptychs, with complicated meanings. Their titles, made up of
indecipherable phrases in Spanish and English, are as intelligent and enigmatic as
the forms and colours of his triptychs. Ivelisse Jiménez works with layers and
layers of images, and her abstract paintings are as complicated as the society we live
4 Conversation with the author, n.d
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in. Bright colours and forms painted over transparent materials create a
mysterious, yet mystical, atmosphere. Miguel Trelles, for his part, has delved into
Asian aesthetics, from the Far East and come up with Chinese look-alike
landscapes, composed with the aid of a Caribbean colour-box. His Sino-Latino series
is a journey into this fascinating culture of the ‘Other’. It opens up new dimensions
to our chameleon-like behaviour.
Two young women make outstanding installations. Ada Bobonis works with
architecture and the environment and creates poetic landscapes with these elements
indoors. In one of these, a meadow hangs from the ceiling; whilst in another, a
rainforest is fitted to a window. In another work, she takes the strands of a rope
apart and dyes them. Through painstaking procedures, such as this, she succeeds in
bringing her artificial landscapes to life. In contrast, Marta Mabel Pérez deals
directly with the multiple tribulations of society. Many of our problems are keenly
presented there. In ‘Hay que echar un pie’ [Lets Get Out Of Here] she present a
piece of paper, with her portrait on one side and instructions on how to make a
paper ’plane, on the other. The spectator then has to throw the ’plane into the area
which s/he would like to explore. For ‘Enfrascados’ [Bottled Up], she printed over a
hundred images of the various problems afflicting the island and then requested
passers-by in the streets to place the image that seemed most apposite to them into
the bottle. Then she made a photo of the person holding the bottle in their hands.
Beatriz Santiago is the most radical and intelligent of the video artists. She
works with forgotten histories or everyday reality. For her videos she asks passersby
to perform an action, while she films the event. For one of these, she selected
seven different events, that had seemed important at the time, but had now been
forgotten: the killing of a notorious fugitive; placing bets on horses on the old
racetrack, now converted into a highway; a night out at a famous dance hall from
the forties; Karl Walenda’s fall to his death, and so on. She then went on to present
several of these, as performances. For ‘Useful, Useless Factory’ she worked with
factory débris, in every sense of the term. She built up a film set from discarded
packing materials; then she made a video, after interviewing many of the workers,
in which she recounted their dreams, their fears and their extra-curricular
activities, such as wrestling after lunch, holding a dance, or organising a party with
typical food. She even staged the announcement of the factory’s closure.
The last four artists that I want to talk about emerged around the turn of the
millennium and have been dubbed ‘Los Novisimos’ by the critic, Manuel Alvarez
Lezama. All of them graduated from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas.
Aaron Salavarias began his career as an engraver, combining religious themes
with elements from daily life, in dark, monochromatic surroundings. Upon
returning with his Master Degree from New York, he ventured into the medium of
installation and began adding colour to his works. Now he seems to play with
variations on the theme of life in Paradise. But his Paradise is a fake one.
Performers have to dress up in an assortment of ridiculous clothing and act as if
they are enjoying the colourful Caribbean. By dressing the locals up as tourists, he
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JULY 2003
makes a statement about the nature of Paradise Lost. We see people posing proudly
in front of plastic pools and plastic plants, with plastic toys in their hands; fat,
skinny, young, old - they all become members of the cast in a surreal form of pseudo-
Paradise.
Carlos Rivera is obsessed with the high crime rates in Puerto Rico. His work is
drenched with an all-pervasive atmosphere of crime and revels in horrifying crimes,
guns, drug dealers’ haunts, killers and all kinds or criminal paraphernalia. Rivera
continuously confronts us with the violent reality of street life in this fake Paradise
Chemi Rosado Seijo is also interested in the double entendres of our society. He
covers up things, so we can see them better. He tampers with billboards, by
covering up some of the words, so that we come to suspect what is revealed as the
real truth behind the original message. His biggest and most important project, to
date, was to paint all 200 houses in a mountain village the colour green. More
precisely, he persuaded the residents of a whole community to paint their houses in
different shades of green. He has spent the last two years working together with the
community. Besides encouraging people to paint their houses, he has introduced a
variety of other projects into the community, and a large variety of social workers,
musicians and other kinds of artist have worked together with residents, to produce
t-shirts and murals.
Guillermo Calzadilla is a very intense, highly intellectual young man who, with
his partner Jennifer Allora, works under the joint name of Allora y Calzadilla.
Allora y Calzadilla’s main theme is the apathy of the younger generation. Their goal
is to break through the limits of indifference by misleading, distracting and seducing
viewers into engaging with a work to which they cannot remain indifferent. They
carefully search for appropriate forms and techniques, experimenting with drawing,
painting, installation or actions. In one instance, they placed huge chalks on the
floor, leaving the spectator with only two options – to work in groups or to break the
chalks into pieces and work on their own. In another instance, the light in a room
changed from yellow to green, to red. When you entered the room, you only noticed
the colours changing, and it was only later that you discovered that the room was
wired up to a set of traffic lights in San Juan. Their latest work dealt with the
Vieques issue. After two years of civil disobedience and political pressure, resulting
in the gaoling of hundreds of protesters, the US marines were recently compelled to
hand back 2/3 of this small, habitated island to the west of Puerto Rico, which they
had been using during 80 years, for weapons training purposes. Locals have now
taken repossession of their raped land and are marching with a firm step towards
freedom and hoping for a better future. In similar fashion, our art, too, is taking big
strides towards mapping a brighter, and more solid future. - What that future will
bring is very difficult to predict, but there’s no doubt that our young students are
creating some strange new hybrid creatures.
© AICA Press et l’auteur
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