That applies both to the bond between Cuba and America and to the tumultuous relations between Fidel Castro and his people. The hurdles don’t end even with Castro's recent death, which may lead to more struggles and an unforeseeable future for the island. Through it all, artists have continued to create; Complicated Beauty, the Tampa Museum of Art’s first survey of contemporary Cuban art, is a small but satisfying overview of works created in the past four decades.
Though Castro’s death colors the exhibition in a new light, the burden of his legacy shouldn’t necessarily become the burden of these artists. Yet, because art is not created in a vacuum, the uniqueness of Cuban lifestyle and politics is clearly visible. The question as the curator becomes: How does one encompass the complexities of a particular culture with a coherent narrative? And the answer is, you really can’t. Instead of rounding up the works under one topic for a particular agenda, the exhibition allows diverse works to meander in their own directions.
That’s not to say that you couldn’t note a few strong recurring themes. While some works are steeped in politics, other pieces focus on mapping and tracking, the slow degradation of the city, or the constant thought of escape.
Castro is a “love him or hate him” kind of leader, but there is mainly contempt for him from this selection of artists. Artist-activist Tania Bruguera comes out swinging, and has been arrested and beaten by the police because of her work — evidence of the fear of artists’ power. In a video of her performance “Cabeza Abajo (Head Down),” Bruguera lampoons the heroics of dictatorial rule by walking across a floor covered in the bodies of her peers. Binding people’s hands together or blindfolding them, she stalks like a hunter, lamb’s wool bound to her body with strips of red cloth.
In contrast with Bruguera’s in-your-face style, Humberto Díaz’s series “Libertas Condicional” uses an unassumingly subversive approach in his photographs of simple patio chairs. Everything seems normal at first glance until you look closer (which could also describe the way an outsider sees Cuba). Hidden in plain sight are the locks that keep the chairs from being stolen. Diaz suggests that this is how the Cuban government prefers its people: as inanimate pieces of furniture chained to their country and used at their own expense. Everything, including liberties, comes at a cost.
The dilapidation of Cuba can be seen in the reuse of any available supplies as art materials in many different works, but Diana Fonseca Quiñones’s “Untitled” piece stands out in a pop of bright pinks and blues. From afar, the color blocks are abstracted from their source, but as in Díaz’s photographs, not everything is what it seems from a distance. Made of paint fragments from the outsides of buildings, these collaged pieces take on heavier meanings of poverty and political degradation — candy-colored shells that slowly reveal the truth.
Ana Mendieta uses her body as a tool to map, measure and record her presence with earthly materials. “Earth and Tree” and “Sharon Creek” work together almost like a diptych, in that their effect is even more powerful when you go back and forth between each photograph. In one, the artist is covered in mud, holding her body against a large tree with her arms; in the other, the artist is present only in her temporal impression in the riverbank’s soft soil. Eliciting the connectivity of mind, body, and soul through a sincere union with the earth, Mendieta’s work resounds loudly at a time when we seem to be at odds with nature.
While Esterio Segura imagines escape from his country via various flight machines, Yoan Capote captures the sense of fear in a watery getaway in “Isla (Umbral),” in which globs of oil slathered on the surface between nails and fishhooks form the image of a dark horizon line. It’s less narrative in nature than other pieces since no figures are portrayed, but the notion of the body is very much present in the use of man-made products and the self-awareness provoked by the presence of hundreds of sharp projectiles.
Contemporary Cuban life will most likely continue to be complicated for a while. But for artists, no matter what the subject they choose, the passion driving the work will always be visible.
Complicated Beauty: Contemporary Cuban Art
Through Jan. 22.
Tampa Museum of Art. 120 W Gasparilla Plaza, Tampa.
tampamuseum.org.
This article appears in Dec 15-22, 2016.