IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 97

One of the most worrisome issues for the
biennale was where commercialization
was going. After so many years of restrictions, how can one erase the history
of effects for both sides; how can one
leave behind prejudices and deconstruct
the entire apparatus that was created to
endure between the embargo and
threats? On the one hand, there were the
traditional polemical issues that had
made Cuban art attractive for some time
now, and other, new rhetoric that alluded
to our collective memory, perhaps
transmitted from generation to generation for more than 55 years. Such is the
case of Andy Rivero’s work. His installation work i s based on Land Art resources and refers to the abstraction of
the 60s. Now, in light of new hopes, it is
emerging from its own tomb. There is
another one in which the chromatic and
graphic colors of the flags dominate
through symbols that identify the conflict. For his part, David Valázquez’s
work highlights the question of what to
do with the history of the “Missile Crisis,” which brought the world to the
brink of nuclear war when the two superpowers’ military strategies involved
Cuba with the pretext that it not only
served to protect the island against imperialist aggression, but also increased the
Soviet Bloc’s defensive capabilities. The
atmosphere in Cuba was that it was “a
country about to start a war” and there

were many uncertainties about what the
consequences would be. Some artists’
works with a persistent and formal
theme now seemed to have been brought
up to date, once again, in line with the
demand of a new contracting party or
with the promotion that dominated very
markets such as the Christies and Sotheby’s galleries. These creators, with their
extremely personal themes and ways of
working saw a need to modernize their
rhetoric in order to be in keeping with
the mainstream. They also had to try to
be in keeping with the possible preferences for the kinds of visualizations that
were more widely accepted. So, they recodified symbols to give them new readings that, in a certain way, seduced the
other recipient with known referents.
Alpízar re-functionalizes the constructivist sculpture Monumento a la Tercera
Internacional, by Russian Vladímir Tatlin, and turned it into a Cuban-styled
Tower of Babel, a spiral tenement yard
that implies all the icons of the cultural
universe, including the painting American Gothic, by Grant De-Volson Wood,
which illustrates a farmer and young
woman in front of a gothic style, rural
house: it is one of the most well-known
images in American, twentieth-century
art. It is often parodied in popular culture
and of the most notable examples of
regionalism.

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