Thinking Wishfully: The 8th Havana Biennale Cuba

A r m a n d o M a r i n o , La patera, 2 0 0 3 , (so m et h i n g like: f eet - vehicle). Car chassis, plaster, poliest er, w o o d THE 8TH HAVANA BIENNALE CUBA TERRY SMITH Journal of Cont em porary Af rican Art F rom its inception in 1984, the Havana Biennial quickly built up a deserved reputation as the premier showcase of the contemporary art of Latin America, perhaps even the Third World in general. (These terms have become, in some places, problematic, inaccurate, confining, yet in others, such as Cuba, they persist.) The organizers—an alliance of Cuban artists and intellectuals, along with advisors from elsewhere in the region, focused through the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wilfredo Lam in Havana—set out to plug local and regional art into the international art circuit, but to do so as far as possible on their own terms. This meant, above all, a welcome to art that focused on the specifics of practice at the peripheries, that was critical of the globalizing tendencies of the official circuit, and that made its connections laterally, between the cultures of the South, those with the most direct experience of decolonization. A political program, then, but one astutely executed, with a minimum of ideological boilerplating and a maximum of Latino excitement, communality, fantasy, and fun. Nor did it hurt that, during this period, a number of Cuban artists produced distinctive, collectable work—the best-known being Kcho, the boat-builder—and less collectable, but no less distinctive work, such as that of Tania Bruguera. In contrast, the Bienal de Sao Paulo came to seem conformist. Havana's selfmade successes inspired other "peripheral" voices, and biennales sprung up in Johannesburg, Seoul, and Shanghai, each with defiantly local takes on what it was to be an independent hot spot on the circuit. Kassell and, eventually, Venice took notice. Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11—built around its globally dispersed "platforms," and taking globalization and postcolonial critique as its themes—is widely and rightly regarded as the moment when the peripheries took over the center. A backlash was to be expected. It set in straight away, not just in some of the art world response to Documenta 11, but in the expectations that the next big show, the 5 0 t n Venice Biennale, would restore the natural order of EuroAmerican dominance and aesthetic transcendentalism. But director Francesco Bonami was bent on his version of a globalized exhibition—one that echoed the continents of the world in its dispersion into discrete but randomly connected "archipelagos," or smaller, inter-exhibitions . Under the weight of this contradiction, and the heat of the moment, the mother of all biennials could do little but melt. Meanwhile, in Havana, the Bienal was having troubles of its own. For the past few years, the government has been investing hard-to-come-by funds in fixed asset cultural institutions. This is due in no small part to the increasing impact of the Biennales, to their success in attracting international visitors and local attention. Leaving the Museum of the Revolution in a late- 1960s time warp, the state has transformed the centrally located, palatial headquarters of the Sociedades Asturianas de Cuba so as to house the "arte universal" in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, featuring its extraordinary holdings of the major Flemish, British, and French schools in vast, Belle Epoque halls. And it renovated the 1960s museum building nearby to show Cuban art of the past two centuries so generously that the work of chosen artists, from the Spanish and other itinerants to living moderns, is presented in a sequence of miniretrospectives . All to the general good, but funds are scarce. The political program of the Bienal echoed, in outline, that of the Revolutionary government itself. It still does, but there are tensions all around. The Castro government won few friends with its recent crackdown on Cuban cultural and social activists, M a u r i ci o D i a s & Wa l t e r Ri e d w e g , Devotionalia, 2 0 0 3 . Vi d eo co m p...