Relics and Erotics: Cuban Art after the Revolution

Tropes of both the “Baroque” and the “utopian” have long persisted in readings of twentieth-century Latin American art and literature. Two new books, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts by Rolando Pérez and To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art by Rachel Weiss, draw upon these interpretive metaphors in considering aspects of Cuban visual culture in the decades following the Revolution. Their subjects are separated by time and space: Sarduy left Cuba in 1960, remaining in exile for the duration of his life, and Weiss’s narrative unfolds almost exclusively in Havana during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet their exegeses of opposing impulses—toward the imperfect (likely from the Portuguese barroco, or “rough pearl”), on the one hand, and on the other toward the impossible ideal—speak analogously to the historical conditions that have shaped the past half-century of Cuban arts and letters.

These books contribute to a body of scholarship around contemporary Cuban art that has swelled in recent years, sparked by reconsiderations of post-Revolutionary culture at large and, with respect to the visual arts, seemingly insatiable market interest. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera’s recent book, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora (2011), describes the connective tissue between Weiss and Pérez’s contributions, chronicling the amorphous landscape of Cuban art in exile. Lynette M.F. Bosch, in Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity and the Neo-Baroque (2004), focused on a very specific Cuban community (her Neo-Baroque does not engage Sarduy’s). Luis Camnitzer (New Art of Cuba [rev. ed., 2003]) and Holly Block (Art Cuba: The New Generation [2001]) provided authoritative, early accounts of the “New Cuban Art,” defining the movement in generational and historical terms and relating key documentary and encyclopedic information. A holistic history of contemporary Cuban art, one attempting to relate work by artists who stayed on the island and those who left, remains to be written.

Despite the proliferation of these targeted histories and of monographic studies, Cuba and the Caribbean tend to be dissociated from surveys of contemporary Latin American art. Differences in postwar developments need not preclude conceptual homologies, however, and hemispheric constructions of the Baroque and the utopian may yet prove instructive in this regard. Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor thoughtfully engaged the leitmotif of the Baroque in their exhibition, Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000), although they referenced Cuba at only a theoretical level. By and large, scholars in literary fields have taken the lead in considering these aesthetic questions in relation to hemispheric topoi. Recently published books by Lois Parkinson Zamora (The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction [2006]) and Monika Kaup (Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film [2012]) are particularly notable; Rafael Rojas (Las repúblicas de aire: utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica [2009]) and Antoni Kapcia (Cuba: Island of Dreams [2000]), among others, have critically explored utopian discourse. The recuperation of Sarduy as a bridge figure between literature and aesthetics may serve not only to better illuminate his own work, as Pérez’s book begins to do, but also to more fully integrate the Cuban philosophical tradition within the fields of Latin American art history and criticism.

Read together, these books by Pérez and Weiss offer new meditations on the conjunction between Baroque and utopian praxis in post-Revolutionary Cuban visual culture. They manifest two discrete approaches to the field—academic monograph; eyewitness historical survey—and yet each seeks in a basic way to excavate an ideational provenance for creative work across Cuba’s cultural field. Before further consideration of common interests, each book is here discussed separately and within the scope of its given intentions.

Reimagining the Neobaroque Body

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