Designing Post-Communism: Recent political imaginaries in Cuban contemporary art

Exhibitions, projects, theories, and artists that represented socialist state cultures became immersed in the new cultural generated by the globalization logic of cultural differences. In spite of the liquidation of the communist State, cultural imaginaries have found ways to reconstruct history under the sign of the post-communist condition. The total political project of the communism has left us with shattered images of its own past.

It is thus not a contradiction that after the crumble of modern utopia, contemporary art in these last decades has insisted in recasting the artistic, formal, and discursive legacies of socialist visual and propaganda culture. The idea of utopia appears not longer as the political avant-garde that once was, but as the rearguard of an aesthetic project of what has already been.

The exhibition “Designing Post-Communism: recent political imaginaries in Cuban contemporary art”, at Collage Gallery, Miami, tries to articulate this paradigmatic change in global political culture through the singularity of the event of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The Cuban Revolution, although miles away from the cold weather of the Soviet Union, still experienced its own socialist society. This communism in the heart of the Caribbean, argued Jean Paul Sartre after his visit to the island, did not come from the cold, but we are right to say that its cultural and artistic dynamics did try to place art production in service of the State’s vision in pursue of a grand total design of its social space.

The post-communist condition, most famously associated with Boris Groys’ elaboration in the 1990s, appears as both as an investigative and aesthetic project. The impulse towards investigation dimension tries to reconstruct its aesthetic imaginaries and probe the political with the aesthetic regime, as the work of Cuban artist Hamlet Lavastida tries to bear witness. His replicas of political emblems of different institutions of 1960s Cuba (Columna Juvenil del Centenario or the Congreso Nacional de Educacion y Cultural of 1971), as well as the political speeches of Fidel Castro, are some of the ways in which the aesthetic dimension functions as a constitutive part of everyday politics. Lavastida reproduces political propaganda, speeches and signs, to interpelate the spectator by the spectrality of the communist past and the current condition of its post-communist present. Besides Lavastida, young artist Filio Galvez, in a similar gesture, reproduces the graphic poster art as monochromatic banners juxtaposed with red lettering that the spectator decodes as antagonistic to official narratives. Language and design, in both of these artists, are practices of announcing and confront the historical weight of communist past.

If real state-communism was conceived as a totality based on future time, the post-communist design is fragmentary and relates constantly to a past temporality. In his series of photographs entitled “Nichos” (2011-2012), Ezequiel Suarez puts to the test the ways in which communism inhabits isolated spaces of Havana through archaic remains of socialist inspired soviet architecture. Suarez’s photographs bring to bear the materiality of a past history not in order to announce its closure, but in order to make visible its remnants. In this sense, following Walter Benjamin’s characterization, the artist becomes a student of the historical time as that who is able to stop time and progress to look at the remains of the destruction. There is, in this sense, an intimate relation between photography and the past: what a photograph captures is indeed the fleeting moment of appearance itself, an almost desperate gesture to make “real” what is only and barely visible. “Nichos” has the merit, however, not to delude the moment of being contemporary to the image we are immersed in, but of providing the imaginary dimension of photography with a material form (architecture, ruins, and dirt) as if it were the remains situated at the threshold of a post-war period.

A project that is more ambitious in nature and that interrogates these problems through the use of new-media is “Juega y Aprende” (2008), by artist Rodolfo Peraza. “Juega y Aprende” is a video-game console that could be played like any other Nintendo, although it is design to unravel the moralizing discursive practice of the communist pedagogy. Intervening the field of socialist knowledge, Peraza extracts fragments from “Manual de Educacion Formal”, an indoctrinatory elementary school pamphlet, in order to interrogate the linguistic and formal ground that led to the idea of the “New Man” proposed by Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Through the usage of new-media Peraza is not only able to display the political use of this conceptual dimension, but also is also capable of parodying the official historical narrative through play and gaming. Before the artwork of Rodolfo Peraza, the spectator unlearns a history that was meant to transcend and traverse the position of the subject himself. Thus, gaming functions as an artistic strategy that profanes, as studied by philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the economic sphere of all forms of use-value, whether it is historical, discursive, and iconographic. The effigies of Lenin, Jose Marti, and Che Guevara, three pillars of Nationalism and International Socialism appear at the last level of the game as avatars of the transcendental power of ideologies in dispute. The logic of design in Peraza works at least in two levels: first, within the construction of the video-game platform itself, and from the perspective of the spectator who interacts with the video-game.

The four artists that are part of “Designing Post-Communism” (Filio Galvez, Hamlet Lavastida, Ezequiel Suarez, and Rodolfo Peraza), experiment with the historical socialist imaginaries in an array of artistic practices. Whether it is in the case of Suarez examining the soviet ruins in Havana or the material construction by Hamlet Lavastida’s appropriation of Fidel Castro’s historical speeches, these artworks seek to work through the symbolic legitimization under communism, and in particular, that of Castroism.

A word must be said in terms of this latest generation of Cuban artists. Unlike the previous generation of artists from the decade of the 1990s, this recent generation seeks to unravel the symptoms of politics through the artistic practices of contemporary art, such as documentation and post-photography, to name but two forms of anti-aesthetic tendencies. Before articulating a particular political demand, their investigations of the recent global past is a strategy to rethink the very space of our present. Far from a nostalgic or melancholic attitude towards the past, these artists situate themselves in constant valences between past and present, a movement that fosters the possibility of reimagining new political futures. Thus, post-communism as an artistic practice rather than being a triumphant inscription about the end of history, becomes a venue in which to call into question all putative historical and political closures.

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*curator of the exhibition