Gerardo Mosquera
The Third Bienal de La Habana in Its Global and Local Contexts Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
and Third World cultures; on the other, this inclination was exploited and supported by the Soviet Bloc to gain political influence over Third World countries.
This background made the historic role played by the Bienal possible. The Cuban regime launched the event with political aims – unaware of its artistic and cultural scope and importance – but was smart enough to leave its organisation to a team of specialists from the visual arts field. The government left considerable room for the curators involved, imposing only decisions that could have a direct political impact, such as the ex-clusion of the Chinese or the inex-clusion of North Korean artists who, given that country’s authoritarian regime, were just doing official propaganda. Such a policy has been typical of the Cuban government since the Revo lu-tion: it has generally allowed a degree of freedom for the arts and culture, although it has gone through numerous repressive episodes. It was also clear that in order to organise an event dealing with such a vast range of countries and artists, it would not be pos-sible to keep a restricted Marxist ideological frame – for example, a text in the second Bienal’s catalogue began by invoking Allah and stated that the main purpose for an Iranian Muslim artist was ‘to access a divine condi-tion’.2 The Bienal was conceived as a largely open space for contemporary artists, critics, curators and scholars from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East, including immigrants to Europe and North America, to meet and become acquainted with each others’ works and ideas beyond ideology or sheer politics. The Bienal also functioned as a platform for research and promotion at a time when artists from the ‘peripheries’ (most of the world) were unknown beyond their own local contexts. Of course, by so doing the regime was successfully contributing to fulfilling its political goal of becoming a Third World leader. But, at the same time, it was satisfying a criti-cal need for contemporary art outside the mainstream, and was giving room to a sincere commitment by the Bienal’s curators to work inspired by a vision that they considered of global importance. There was hence a convergence between governmental politics and a plau-sible commitment to transform circulation, knowledge and legitimation of contemporary art at a global scale with a vision for the future.
The Centro Wifredo Lam reported to the Ministry of Culture. The Centro’s director, and therefore the Bienal’s director, was a Communist Party member trusted by the Ministry, but she, the curators and other specialists had a chance to shape the Bienal conceptually and in prac-for Cuba to access government resources to organise
such large events. The reason for the Cuban regime’s intense expenditure in cultural activity has always been ideological with a strong international side. But we would restrict our view of it if we merely think that its purposes were only to promote socialist ideas, to fight against political isolation imposed by the US, to show-case a good image of the country and to co-opt Cuban and Third World intellectuals. Since the Revolution in 1959, Cuba has been an outpost for ideological struggles by virtue of its combination of geographic location and political messianism. The Cuban Revolution has always had an expansionist agenda, and has been involved in revolutionary warfare and subversion throughout the world. Beyond obvious differences, the arts were ap-proached in a similarly aggressive way. The Bienal took advantage of the facilities and networks that were established to implement the Cuban state’s geopolitical goals, especially its immense web of embassies through-out the world – a network comparable in scale to that of larger powers and absolutely beyond what might be expected of the country given its size and resources.
This network – with its diplomats, buildings, transporta-tion, communication facilities and connections – was instrumental for the Bienal’s organisation. If, during certain periods, Cuba maintained considerable politi-cal autonomy, by the 1980s it was fully within the Soviet Bloc. However, Cuba was a strange member of the Bloc: a Caribbean country with a very distinct culture, the most Spanish and simultaneously one of the most African Latin American countries, ninety miles from the United States, its clocks showing the same time as New York, with a long and consistent modernist tradition beginning in the early twentieth century… The Cuban Revolution produced one of the toughest and most radical regimes, but, since it happened in a Caribbean country famous for its music and nightlife, it was also, as Che Guevara proverbially put it, ‘revolución con pachanga’, or ‘revolution with party’.
Moreover, Cuba had a genuine Latin American and Third World cultural and political agenda that was sometimes at odds with the Soviet Union’s communist orthodoxy. And as part of the role of beachhead for communism and USSR policy that Cuba had always played, it was in competition with China, which was opposed to the Soviet Bloc and was also trying to accomplish that role. This confrontation was the reason why Chinese artists and artists of Chinese descent were not invited to the first Bienals. Therefore, on the one hand and for historical, political and cultural reasons, Cuba was inclined towards Caribbean, Latin American
restricted to the Western mainstream, and their organ-isers were not interested in exploring what was going on elsewhere. Thus the Bienal created a new space, acting as a gigantic ‘Salon des Refusés’ that involved most of the world, born from a spirit of action. If, in those days, the Bienal only included artists from the Third World, this was in order to confront their exclusion and lack of communication and networking opportunities, not be-cause the event organisers considered that there existed a ‘Third World art’ as a distinct, ontological category opposed to a ‘Western art’. As Luis Camnitzer has said, the Bienal was not about ‘otherness’, but about ‘itness’.5 The Bienal, of course, recognised and emphasised artistic and cultural differences, but within a shared, postcolonial practice of contemporary art. In this sense, too, it was foreseeing the current way in which art is created and consumed internationally. Paradoxically, as a result of its focus on contemporary art, the Bienal was accused of being Westernised.
The third edition of the Bienal took place one year later than originally planned, in 1989. Actually, even though the event has kept its name, it has been more of a trien-nial, since several of its editions were delayed owing to organisational problems and economic constraints.
Such a delay was worthwhile for the 1989 Bienal. The event was brought under control and narrowed down to a more reasonable – even if still very large – scope:
there were 300 artists from 41 countries.6 Its catalogue credited the Bienal’s ‘general curating’ to Llilian Llanes Godoy, Nelson Herrera Ysla and me.7 However, since its inception the Bienal has always been the result of a broader teamwork. The ‘general curators’ travelled throughout different regions in the world and came back with information and recommendations. In my case, I visited seventeen sub-Saharan countries during 1987 and 1988, and several others in the Americas – in this case responding to invitations to conferences, to give lectures and to other events to which I was invited.
For organisational purposes, the globe was divided into zones in which the different Bienal curators special-ised. An important part of the curating was indirect, performed through researching the significant amount of documentation that the Centro Wifredo Lam was collecting, and by examining applications sent by artists from all over the world who responded to a public con-vocation. The Centro’s curators Leticia Cordero Vega, Magda Ileana González-Mora and Nora Hochbaum actively participated in this process for the 1989 edition.
Since the Bienal was an ensemble of different exhibi-tions, conferences, seminars, workshops and interdisci-plinary events, these young curators were also engaged tice with considerable freedom. Llilian Llanes Godoy
held directorial responsibility from the second Bienal in 1986 to the sixth in 1997. Created in 1976, the Ministry of Culture was developing a liberal policy partially in response to a radical cultural renovation carried out in Cuba by a new generation of visual artists and critics emerging at the end of the 1970s. This so-called ‘new Cuban art’ transformed forever the ideology-oriented, conservative, official culture that had prevailed during that decade.3 It developed a critical, postmodern, inter-nationally open approach in the 1980s that expanded from the visual arts to the rest of the arts, and continues today. The Bienal’s foundation coincided with this very intense period of renovation in Cuban arts, and the new liberal climate was crucial to shaping the event’s nature.
The first Bienal de La Habana in 1984 was huge, but restricted to Latin American art for reasons of logistics and organisation, and functioned as a sort of test and training experience for the organisers. The second edi-tion, in 1986, reached a full Third World scope. It was the first global contemporary art show ever made: a mammoth, uneven, rather chaotic bunch of more than fifty exhibitions and events presenting 2,400 works by 690 artists from 57 countries. The Bienal’s variegated structure made it a true urban festival, a pachanga that involved the whole city.4 More importantly: never before had artists, curators, critics and scholars from so many places – Beirut, Brazzaville, Buenos Aires, Jakarta and Kingston, to name just a few – met ‘horizontally’.
What made this Bienal historic was not its curating but its curatorial perspective. If its curating suffered from the vastness and swiftness of the task and our lack of knowledge, preparation and organisation, the event’s curatorial standpoint was the result of a clear vision, in the making, towards the internationalisation of con-temporary art that we enjoy today. The importance of this breakthrough at the time is more evident when we witness that, even today, a deficit in South-South link-age and interaction persists as a postcolonial legacy. It is true that globalisation has activated and pluralised cultural circulation, making it much more international.
However, it has done so to a great extent by follow-ing the channels designed by the globalised economy, reproducing its power structures.
Around the mid-1980s, segregation was an essential part of the visual arts system. The periodic international art events already in place, from the Venice Biennale to Documenta, were far from global. This was not only be-cause the participating artists were mainly from West-ern backgrounds, but because the events’ idea of art was
The Third Bienal de La Habana in Its Global and Local Contexts Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
in each particular event. It also proposed, early on, a move away from the nineteenth-century fair-like bien-nial prototype, structured around national representa-tion and the salon-style big show, whilst opposing the idea of the biennial as a big spectacle with direct market reverberations. However, the Bienal never abandoned the customary large, blockbuster exhibition – regarded by many as ‘the Bienal’ – surrounded by smaller events or exhibitions that appeared as fringe ventures.
The open and diverse structure of the Bienal’s first editions also looked for a broader social and educa-tional impact, and a deeper involvement with the city.
Entrance to the Bienal was free, and the event was discussed in the media and in schools. There were outreach programmes but, more importantly, the Bienal was everywhere. Artists and critics worked at houses of culture in the city’s neighbourhoods, they talked and danced with people at grass-roots parties, were mugged, had love affairs, were joined by students who volun-teered to put the shows and workshops together…
Most local artists, even if not exhibiting at the Bienal, became involved with it in one way or another.
A meaningful element of the Bienal’s programme in the early days was the bar. We were always concerned with providing an accessible space for informal meet-ings and exchanges among participants coming from different continents, many of whom worked in isolation.
This was not so easy in 1989 Cuba, before the country opened up to tourism, when the few bars, cafes and restaurants that were open to the public were usually both terrible and packed. The two bars that the Bienal created and placed at two main exhibition venues were even included in the second Bienal catalogue’s long list of exhibitions and events, where they were referred to as ‘meeting places’. The bars were perhaps emblems of one of the Bienal’s main achievements: the founda-tion of a space for encounter and shared knowledge.
The 1989 Bienal made some crucial changes from previ-ous editions. Awards and representation by countries were both eliminated.10 A general thematic approach was also introduced. The subject for the whole event was tradition and the contemporary condition in Third World art and design. The third Bienal expanded the exhibitions and debates to include international design and architecture, in a move that was later reversed.
Even if too general, the event’s subject was a timely one for analysing the predicaments of ‘peripheral’ and postcolonial art at the time it was beginning to face in organising them together with the ‘general curators’
and other staff members (José Manuel Noceda and Hilda María Rodríguez in this case), and were credited in the catalogue accordingly. This team spirit reached beyond the Centro Wifredo Lam’s staff, as we actively consulted curators, critics, scholars, artists and other experts from different countries and from other institu-tions in Cuba and around the world. We were curating with our eyes, but also with our ears. In spite of all this, there was plenty of improvisation and lack of curatorial rigour, especially in the main show, where the works were often badly displayed and protected, with no con-sistent exhibition design. The technical deficiencies and the shortages typical of communist countries affected the curatorial process.
From 1984 to 1989, all the Bienals were curated by the Centro Wifredo Lam’s staff. This system has continued since then, but with a more institutional, anonymous and centralised style, focused on the Centro’s director.
This scheme reproduces the country’s own centralised political system and shows the organisers’ apprehen-sion about opening up to the participation of foreign curators. The Bienal has paradoxically become a global event that is always curated by almost the same of-ficial Cuban team. While most international biennials present themselves as less canonical, more autonomous spaces than contemporary art museums – on the basis of the guest curators’ role in their organisation and their less institutional, more flexible framework8 – this is not the case with the Bienal de La Habana. All the more:
its centralism has predisposed the Bienal to a certain authoritarian, bureaucratic and even repressive stance, and indirect or straightforward censorship has occurred in the latest editions.9
The third Bienal, like the second one, I insist, was not conceived as an exhibition but as an organism con-sisting of shows, events, meetings, publications and outreach programmes. It assembled a big main interna-tional exhibition, eleven thematic group shows (three by Cuban artists and eight by artists from other countries), ten individual exhibitions (two by Cuban artists and eight by artists from other countries), two international conferences and eight international workshops. Apart from this central programme there was a constellation of exhibitions and artistic, cultural and educational events organised by many museums, galleries, univer-sities, houses of culture and community institutions throughout the whole city. This model intended, ideally, a more diverse approach at the general level, while keeping a specific thematic, artistic and cultural focus
The Third Bienal de La Habana in Its Global and Local Contexts Contemporary Art Biennials—Our Hegemonic Machines
a leadership of Latin America to a form of an artistic OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America), to then become an alternative independent forum, and finally to become a provider of the international market.’13
By 1989 the new Cuban artists were trespassing the boundaries that the Cuban regime was prepared to tolerate. Their criticism of Cuba’s society and their deconstruction of the official rhetoric were becoming too radical for an authoritarian, military regime. Even if the Bienal was a particularly tolerant space due to its international implications, in the third edition Cuban artists with hard-hitting critical work – which meant most of them – were ghettoised in a group show called
‘La tradición del humor’ (‘The Tradition of Humour’), together with cartoonists, some of them official. This decision was imposed from the top as a way to divert and reduce the artists’ social and political impact in the Bienal. It was a sign of the repressive backlash that was going on in Cuba, which a little later imposed drastic censorship on some shows, while liberal Ministry of Culture officials such as Vice-Minister Marcia Leiseca and Beatriz Aulet were fired. The most repressive act was artist Ángel Delgado’s sentence of six months in jail for public scandal after a performance, in what felt like a clear warning to artists and intellectuals. As a result, the
‘new artists’ escaped en masse at the turn of the decade and settled abroad.14 Cuban art’s golden age was over.
Even if such a dramatic diaspora made Cuban cultural authorities readjust their policy to more permissive standards, the limits for radical artistic practice in Cuba became apparent. For me, it was contradictory to continue working for the Bienal after what happened, especially since, as an art critic, I had been an advocate for the new critical art. This was one of my reasons for resigning after the 1989 Bienal, together with an erosion of trust that I experienced as a result of other incidents.
Also, even if I had always been a radical component of the Bienal’s team, my transgressive spirit was escalating, becoming more at odds with the prevalent inclinations.
In this sense, a main question for me was the following:
if we were organising a groundbreaking biennial, an event that was different and that aimed to open a new space and challenge the mainstream, why do so by re-peating prevailing structures? Why put new wine inside an old wineskin? Why not create something distinct for the needs of a complex constellation of artistic and cultural practices? The Bienal never did this. Although it made substantial efforts in this direction, the issue was never an overall priority for the Centro Wifredo Lam.
globalisation, a process towards which the Bienal had been contributing since 1986. We could say that, given its philosophy and projection, the Bienal’s theme in its third edition was the Bienal. The event has always fo-cused on modern and contemporary art, developing the notion of a plurality of active modernisms, and giving
globalisation, a process towards which the Bienal had been contributing since 1986. We could say that, given its philosophy and projection, the Bienal’s theme in its third edition was the Bienal. The event has always fo-cused on modern and contemporary art, developing the notion of a plurality of active modernisms, and giving