PATRIA O MUERTE. VENCEREMOS.
A classic slogan of the Cuban revolution echoes in Tania Bruguera's resonant
installation as: ARTE O MUERTE. SOBREVIVIREMOS.
Slogans, so dear to the social engineering of Communism, have a Capitalist
twin sister in the sound-bites of advertising or even in old recurrent
phrases of certain cloying lyrics of my youth: "All or nothing at
all" when in love or revolution or buying there is no "in between".
Slogans are absolutes you cannot avoid repeating over and over again.
Slogans, ditties, jingles, commandments, and mottoes are orders, piercing
sound-bites that leave no space to maneuver, that haunt you and adhere,
stick to your brain. "I can't believe it's not butter" is an
attempt to subvert your taste buds; "hasta la victoria siempre"
turns you into a robot that marches from failure to failure and yet claims
victory. Slogans are powerful things. They blind you to the ambiguities
of existence. Makes no difference if "history is bunk" in Brave
New World or "history will absolve me" in Cuba. Slogans are
leeches.
Maybe all systems function through slogans. Maybe to see alternatives
is not good for business. The market will take care of everything. Maybe
to doubt threatens the authority of the Politburo. The party knows best.
To act without thinking is bliss. "Thus conscience does make cowards
of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sick lied over with
the pale cast of thought," as Hamlet discovered, "and enterprise
of great pitch and moment... turn away and lose the name of action."
Yet conscience is what subversive art is all about.
Tania Bruguera has consecrated all her creative energies to exposing the
contradictions, the hidden meaning of blind revolutionary action and rhetoric.
By simply changing the environment, the lighting, Tania reveals the true
content of the official image of patriarchal power. The image is already,
by its mere presence, an order: COMANDANTE EN JEFE: ORDENE.
Slogans put you to sleep, they are a form of anesthesia, depriving you
of independent thinking and feeling. One must remember that the opposite
of anesthesia is aesthetics, from the need to perceive, to come to your
senses.
Slogans are disemboweled in this same hallucinating manner: pulling you
out of the quotidian and plunging you into a nightmare. Art is a subversive
thing of beauty. Tania's installation cracks open the stubborn rhetoric
of slogans. If a slogan is an absolute that takes over your critical awareness,
it is in our power to answer, reject traveling on a one-way road.
There was a slogan, I remember, launched in 1968 to encourage the people
to persevere in the fight for a brighter future. It marked the anniversary,
the centennial of Cuba's first independence war of 1868. "Cien años
de lucha," a hundred years of struggle and, therefore, we should
continue and be proud of the tradition. But the people couldn't accept
that after a century we still had to fight and sacrifice, they needed
a respite. "No cojas lucha", do not engage in the struggle;
give yourself a break from relentless sacrifice was a common reaction
when pressured to fight against insurmountable odds.
There is something to be said about art in a socialist society. Art is
taken seriously by the government, the leadership feels challenged and
threatened by the metaphors of painting and literature. It is the opposite
from the free society where artists are court jesters entertaining the
citizens with mocking comments that are usually ignored. You complain,
you let off steam and yet everything remains the same. In socialism you
are always in danger of being repressed, denounced. And you feel important
because the regime takes you seriously. Freedom is the very air an artist
breathes --but it is also important to be taken seriously. I take Tania
Bruguera seriously and her siren songs very seriously. I believe Tania,
as an artist, is not destroying but rescuing the living atmosphere, the
blinding light, the very air we breathe in a radical revolution; actually
revealing the impossible dreams of the Cuban revolution.
During the zafra de los diez millones, the sugar cane harvest of l970
when the government proposed a bumper crop of ten million tons of sugar,
the country struggled but barely managed to reach seven million after
every single stalk of cane yielding sugar was harvested. It was a failure,
yet the week after the failure was announced, a new slogan hit the island:
convertir el revés en victoria, the people must transform the setback
into victory. The "v" of revés, setback, jumped out of
the text and became a humongous V for victory.
I would say that such a feast is only possible in the realm of art, in
the realm that allowed Don Quixote to thrust his humanity upon a cruel
world. That is what Tania Bruguera has done with the many setbacks of
the revolution, she has turned el revés en victoria, the setbacks
of our island into artistic victories.
EDMUNDO DESNOES
New York and 2003