[Blake_Stimson,_Gregory_Sholette]_Collectivism_aft(z-lib
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Performing Revolution 125problems in Cuban society had a different poetics, maybe no more strikingin their imagery but often more resonant. One such work was Easy Shopping,done in response to the government’s establishment of casas de oro thatbought back gold and silver heirlooms from citizens, under disadvantageousterms, in an attempt to generate hard currency revenues. 67 In Arte Calle’sview this amounted to the return of Hernán Cortés (“the Spaniards comewith their little mirrors, the Indians hand over the gold”), and their antineocolonialresistance consisted of painting their bodies gold and silver andwalking through Old Havana’s streets with signs that read “Sígannos, somosde oro, venga con nosotros” (“Follow us, we are made of gold, come with us”)until, having attracted a substantial crowd that followed them to the edge ofthe bay, they threw themselves into the Wlthy, oil-slicked waters. It was,according to Glexis Novoa, “like an act of suicide. For ethics.” 68 SigniWcantly,with this beautiful, tragic image and with their later guerrilla murals(one, painted in the same spot where an earlier mural of theirs had beenpainted out by State Security, said simply “Revenge”), Arte Calle fulWlled itspromise of taking up positions in the city, whether in obscure corners or rightin the middle of things, using the city not as backdrop but as battleground.Arte Calle’s nocturnal, guerrilla actions fed avid rumor circuitsthroughout Havana. “When, for example, we made the mural that said ‘Artis just a few steps from the cemetery’ in front of the Colón Cemetery inHavana,” says Aldito Menéndez, “the rumor that spread was that a group ofyoungsters had painted a poster on a tomb in the graveyard that said ‘Freedomhas been buried by the Revolution.’ Or, when we abbreviated our groupname in signing a mural as ‘AC,’ people would interpret it as ‘Abajo Castro’(‘Down with Castro’). Our works functioned as collective texts withmultiple meanings, and in our inscriptions people saw reXected their ownobsessions with the suffocating reality in which they lived.” 69While for the other groups questions of individualism and authorshipwere mostly nonissues, Arte Calle was explicitly critical of “egotismand individualism,” which they considered “fatal to artistic labor.” 70 By 1987,having become known as an artistic entity, the group felt they were betrayingthe original idea “of taking art to the street and that the artist mergesomehow with the people and that it be an art for the people.” 71 Their solutionto this dilemma of “success” was to dissolve into Arte Calle Tachado(“crossed out”), cancelling the identity that the group had become. 72 Nonethelessas a group they organized one more project, the exhibition “Nuevealquimistas y un ciego” (Nine Alchemists and a Blind Man), 73 which soughtto put into crisis the concept of art legitimated by institutions. Ariel Serrano’scontribution, Dónde estás caballero gallardo, hecho historia o hecho tierra? (CheGuevara) (Where are you gallant knight, made history or made earth? [Che

126 Rachel WeissGuevara]), 74 was a large portrait of the guerrilla martyr that covered most ofthe gallery Xoor. During the opening, someone dressed in a policeman’s uniform(a stranger to the artists) walked across the work, and then some othersimprovised a kind of dance on it. 75 This generated an enormous scandal,with the artists accused of sacrilegious treatment of the revolutionary icon.In a harshly critical review published in Juventud Rebelde (authored not byan individual writer but by the entire “Cultural Editorial Group”), the showwas attacked for “vulgarity, superWcialism, the absolute absence of convincingartistic value, and an excess of snobbery.” With their “coarse dogmatismand schematic pronouncements, supposedly critical of socioethical problems,”it declared, the artists had only succeeded in deWning a position “contraryto the interests of our socialist culture.” 76 Despite its denunciation ofthe exhibition on aesthetic grounds, however, there is no mention, muchless discussion, of any of the exhibited works in the review, a fact pointedout in the artists’ response (which the newspaper refused to publish). Thereview, they wrote, was a political manipulation: whatever the weaknessesof the artworks, they were the sincere expressions of young people “who arepart of this Revolution and who are integrated and committed to the destinyand political reality of this country in the process of building socialism.” 77The review is a telling document for two reasons. First, it discreditsthe art on aesthetic terms, without bothering to make any aestheticargument: this Ximsy strategy was used regularly to deXect attention away fromthe content of problematic works. It also had the indirect effect of divorcinga work’s form and content (an odd feature of Cuban cultural policy since thebeginning of the revolutionary period), 78 placing primacy on formalist criteriain the evaluation of a work of art and in fact disallowing any criticalexpression that did not Wrst conform to unspeciWed and evasive standards oftechnical accomplishment. Second, while the review acknowledged thatthere were problems in Cuba and that it was acceptable for “revolutionary”artists to be critical, it insisted that this must be done in a “revolutionary”manner: here, in full bloom, was the danger signaled much earlier by variouscritics in response to Castro’s 1961 dictum “Within the Revolution,everything. Against the Revolution, nothing,” namely, that of who wouldhave the power to determine what was “inside the Revolution” and whatwas not. In the wake of this scandal, Arte Calle was placed under continualsurveillance by State Security, and not long afterward, in January 1988, itdissolved for real and for good.Grupo Provisional (which started at more or less the same time)was a kind of fraternal twin to Arte Calle in its roughhouse aesthetic, itsstrong ties to the punk and rockero subcultures, 79 its generally anarchic ethic,and most importantly its supra-artistic conception of art’s relation to politics.

Performing Revolution 125

problems in Cuban society had a different poetics, maybe no more striking

in their imagery but often more resonant. One such work was Easy Shopping,

done in response to the government’s establishment of casas de oro that

bought back gold and silver heirlooms from citizens, under disadvantageous

terms, in an attempt to generate hard currency revenues. 67 In Arte Calle’s

view this amounted to the return of Hernán Cortés (“the Spaniards come

with their little mirrors, the Indians hand over the gold”), and their antineocolonial

resistance consisted of painting their bodies gold and silver and

walking through Old Havana’s streets with signs that read “Sígannos, somos

de oro, venga con nosotros” (“Follow us, we are made of gold, come with us”)

until, having attracted a substantial crowd that followed them to the edge of

the bay, they threw themselves into the Wlthy, oil-slicked waters. It was,

according to Glexis Novoa, “like an act of suicide. For ethics.” 68 SigniWcantly,

with this beautiful, tragic image and with their later guerrilla murals

(one, painted in the same spot where an earlier mural of theirs had been

painted out by State Security, said simply “Revenge”), Arte Calle fulWlled its

promise of taking up positions in the city, whether in obscure corners or right

in the middle of things, using the city not as backdrop but as battleground.

Arte Calle’s nocturnal, guerrilla actions fed avid rumor circuits

throughout Havana. “When, for example, we made the mural that said ‘Art

is just a few steps from the cemetery’ in front of the Colón Cemetery in

Havana,” says Aldito Menéndez, “the rumor that spread was that a group of

youngsters had painted a poster on a tomb in the graveyard that said ‘Freedom

has been buried by the Revolution.’ Or, when we abbreviated our group

name in signing a mural as ‘AC,’ people would interpret it as ‘Abajo Castro’

(‘Down with Castro’). Our works functioned as collective texts with

multiple meanings, and in our inscriptions people saw reXected their own

obsessions with the suffocating reality in which they lived.” 69

While for the other groups questions of individualism and authorship

were mostly nonissues, Arte Calle was explicitly critical of “egotism

and individualism,” which they considered “fatal to artistic labor.” 70 By 1987,

having become known as an artistic entity, the group felt they were betraying

the original idea “of taking art to the street and that the artist merge

somehow with the people and that it be an art for the people.” 71 Their solution

to this dilemma of “success” was to dissolve into Arte Calle Tachado

(“crossed out”), cancelling the identity that the group had become. 72 Nonetheless

as a group they organized one more project, the exhibition “Nueve

alquimistas y un ciego” (Nine Alchemists and a Blind Man), 73 which sought

to put into crisis the concept of art legitimated by institutions. Ariel Serrano’s

contribution, Dónde estás caballero gallardo, hecho historia o hecho tierra? (Che

Guevara) (Where are you gallant knight, made history or made earth? [Che

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