The New Art
The 1960s and '70s saw the introduction of Conceptual Art: shifting the importance away from craftsmanship to ideas. This often means the elimination of an object in art production; only an idea is stated or discussed. It requires an enhanced level of participation by the patron (interactive participation or a set of instructions to follow).Conceptual art, Minimalism, Earth art, and Performance art mingled together to expand the very definition of ‘what art is’.
In Cuba these new developments along with Photo Realism naturally synthesized through the Afro-Cuban sensibility and emerged as The New Art, an art movement widely recognized in Cuba as Cuban. Made up of young artist born after the revolution these young creators rebelled against modernism and embraced Conceptual Art amongst other genres. Many were to carry on folkloric traditions and Santeria motifs in their individual expressions while infusing their message with humor and mockery. The art took a qualitative leap by creating international-art structured on African views, not from the outside like surrealism but from the inside, alive with the cultural-spiritual complexities of their own existence.
The exhibitions Volumen Uno, in 1981, wrenched open the doors for The New Art. Participants, many of whom were still in school, created a typical generational backlash by artists of the previous generation including Alberto Jorge Carol, Nelson Dominguez and Cesar Leal who went on the attack against the upstarts. The group, Volumen Uno, made up of Jose Bedia, Lucy Lippard, Ana Mendieta, Richardo Brey, Leandro Soto, Juan Francisco Elso, Flavio Garciandia, Gustavo Perez Monzon, Rubin Torres Llorea, Gory (Rogelio Lopez Marin), and Tomas Sanchez presented a “fresh eclectic mix filtered through informalism, pop, minimalism, conceptualism, performance, graffiti and Arte Povera reconfigured and reactivated … to be critically, ethically, and organically Cuban”.
By the middle of the 1980s another group of artists sought for a more explicit political responsibility to “revive the mess”, “revive the confusion” as Aldito Menendez incorporated into his 1988 installation. Accompanying Menéndez’s installation was a note: “As you can see, this work is almost blank. I could only start it due to the lack of materials. Please help me.” Here is the Cuban humor, the choteo, “perhaps the most quintessentially Cuban expression” gallery.
Laughter became the antidote of an anarchistic energy for and from the revolution, “one moment an aggressive undertow, then a jester’s provocation, pressuring the tensions gallery. “The choteo is allergic to authority and prestige, the enemy of order in all its manifestations…civil disenchantment, the incredulous and mocking inner nature of the Cuban rises to the surface” gallery. The choteo, doing away with exactitude, always tends to depict at the extreme limits of an example. This Cuban humor of sarcasm has become as ubiquitous in Cuban art as the bright Caribbean colors of its palette. Eduardo Ponjuan, Glexis Novoa (of the ABTV group), Carlos Rodriguez Cardenas and Rene Francisco are exemplars of this sensibility, mixing it with kitsch and harkening back in time while identifying with current Cuban attitudes that was liberating art on the eve of the Cuban ‘special period’ when the Soviets would withdraw their financial aid.
In 1990 the Cuban government began programs to stimulate its tourist trade as a means to offset the loss of Soviet support. In 1992 the constitution was amended to allow and protect foreign owned property and in 1993 the dollar was permitted to circulate legally. In 1994 a cabinet level department was created, the Ministry of Tourism, to further enhance tourism which accounts for Cuba’s largest source of income gallery. The initial reaction of the artists as well as the general population was withdrawal; “Withdrawal from the public to the private…from the collective to the individual…from the epic to the mundane…from satire to metaphor...Withdrawal from controversy…withdrawal from confrontation” gallery. But it was the withdrawal from the conceptual to figurative art that defined the change in painting. Due in a large measure to the habits of tourists, art took on a higher visibility as well as a return to more a figurative art expression.
Every Cuban is an artist and every home is an art gallery.
Read more about this topic: Cuban Art
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“American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
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