Alexandre Arrechea

The tension between the collective space and individual affirmation becomes evident in 2003, the year in which Arrechea left the group Los Carpinteros and moved on from collective authorship to embark on a personal career. Since then, without relinquishing the ludic project involving objects based on and inducing an iconoclastic logic, he approaches the works that bear his signature, within a framework that refers to the Barthesian concept of “idiorhythm” (from idios, own), conciliating collective experience and individual creation. At a time when the specter of generalized failure threatens political systems, his works operate in an area of thought that activates to a maximum the individual mechanisms − as a challenge related to social imagination − in order to be able to bear that shared vulnerability.

His works explore, in a reflex and reflective way, dissimilar contexts such as wild capitalism and communism in crisis, immersed in their irresolvable contradictions. Recreating the spirit of the performance of the 1980’s El juego de la pelota, when Cuban artists, restrained in the expression of their creativity, agreed to address sport, a field which the same authorities that were responsible for State censorship approved of, Arrechea featured − with support from Raúl Cordero − a basketball game with players from El Vedado neighborhood, in which the slates showing the results of a previous match (the sounds of which had been recorded and are transmitted) did not reflect the movements in the current game. This impossibility to alter control mechanisms reaches a different level of development in The garden of mistrust (2005), a key piece in his career. Its point of departure was a series of drawings that preceded the construction of a metal tree laden with pseudo fruits: surveillance cameras that record the viewers who draw near and send their images to an archive in a computer connected to the Internet, and that project these images on the gallery walls, creating a visual forest in motion that is, in turn, captured by the lenses that lie in waiting. “The safest place − the area in which you are out of danger − is under the work, where the cameras cannot draw you into the plot,” Arrechea explains. This instruction is parallel to the strategic gesture of the artist, who humorously inquires into the nature of the personal relationship with “the tree” of surveillance, whether it be a neighbor that watches you, or the Big Brother that scrutinizes in the globalized world, with different methods and identical perversity.

Sport appears repeatedly as a resource in Arrechea’s art, and together with the prominence of architectonic spaces, they configure a visual axis that instead of favoring individual contemplation, takes advantage of the possibilities of the distraction-image that is grasped collectively. His works − drawings, sculptures, installations − composed with a humorous strategy, unaware of the aura of the object that induces the concentration, may be associated with the quality that Walter Benjamin notices in architecture: they are “the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.” They function as objects for a simultaneous collective experience, and besides, they entertain via the surprising and accessory effect of humor −the grotesque method, according to Bakhtin − that uses what is profane or accessible to all.

To “place outside of the forbidden space” − literal meaning derived from the etymology of profanum − objects that function as analogies for power and control systems and confront them playfully has a perspicacious destabilizing effect on the usual perception of these, which paradoxically − and their effectiveness resides therein − unifies distraction and revelation. The effect of his aesthetic derived from its carnival spirit (in the Bakhtian sense of inversion of power and transgression allowed temporarily) in which objects are modified both topographically and in their parts, constitutes an inversion of the dense logics of power via the subtlest humor. Perpetual free entrance, the installation at the Patio Herreriano Museum in Spain combines the screening of images of spectators continually entering a stadium − a substitute for the art institution, where he filmed them − in which it is impossible to sit in the stands. A poignant metaphor for the relationship of control and access to the museum.

The installation The Room of All reactivates the idea of Chris Burden’s conceptual sculpture Samson, but it functions by reducing or broadening the distance between the maquettes of steel houses according to the rise and fall in the Dow Jones indexes. The reduced spaces to which they are restrained by the negative fluctuations reflect the vulnerability of every inhabitant of the planet subject to financial forces.

The series of drawings of historical buildings swaying upon spinning tops −like the Wall Street Building in New York, or that of the Ministry of Education in Caracas (or the one in Havana, which he is planning) − overcome through visual lightness the exhaustion of political utopias and of hopes of economic welfare. At the same time, they employ that key possibility of popular humor that Bakhtin points out: to “disclose the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. “ In the project he will be presenting at the 54th Venice Biennial − The city that stopped dancing − the mounting on spinning tops of the installations representing the sculptures of three buildings that correspond to the same number of historical moments in Havana (the Bacardi, built in 1929; the Someillan, built in 1953; and the building that lodges the USSR’s Embassy in Cuba, dating from 1980) implies the possibility of moving them along their axes. Something which is difficult but not impossible: the hands can reactivate the movement and make the city dance once again. For those who remember that it was the documentary film PM, prohibited in 1961 and focusing on dancing and night life in Havana sectors such as La Regla slum area, the screening of which during the Missile Crisis triggered the beginning of censorship with the famous Words to Intellectuals, the work triggers associations that approach the liberating role of language, and it contains an emotion characteristic of his art, in tune with history. Metaphorically and literally speaking, his dancing past, the spirit of the carnivalesque moves the piece (his uncles handled the street lamps during Carnival time in Trinidad), which is inhabited, according to Arrechea, by “that night thing of Havana”, 1 which after the Revolution, continued to dance for tourists. But sculptures based on the reactivation of participation involve a movement that liberates the conscience and the imagination, driving them towards new potentialities.

The work Dust originated in a personal ritual: a practice of collecting waste in the cities he visited, which contains an allusion to von Humboldt, who lived in Trinidad, and an evocation of his grandmother, a medicinal plant expert. He began the work in 2004, when he gathered debris from Havana which he then stored in glass punching bags representing the struggle in each of the cities in his itinerary. Curiously, these collecting processes in the City of the Columns faced difficulties: in the island he was detained under allegations that taking debris from Cuba was not allowed; and in New York he was also detained as a result of the paranoia triggered by terrorism. Then, the Havana punching bag was broken in a fire in collector Peggy Cooper’s house. I have been tempted to ask her for it in order to incorporate it in another work that makes reference to fragility but that − in a way that parallels the spirit of his installation Mississippi Bucket, which Arrechea constructed after his mother’s death with pieces of wood recovered from the same river that devastated the city during Hurricane Katrina − may invert, subvert the fate of loss, transforming it into a project with the potential to materialize an artwork and suggest a reconstruction of the affective, the artistic and the social space.

1 As it’s reconstructed in the novel Tres Tristes Tigres, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.