Art and Politics in Cuba
Throughout May, MAP explored the cultural and political situation in Cuba, sharing insights from artists and curators during a pivotal time for the island nation. In a conversation with Guggenheim assistant curator Amara Antilla, Cuban-born MAP artist Wilfredo Prieto discusses art’s potential to create meaningful social change: “Especially in a period like today, when people no longer believe in it, journalism represents the commercialism of the banal, activism loses the essence of reality and instead perpetuates the errors of the system, and politics loses its logic, becoming a vicious circle. Art and philosophy are therefore in the best position to channel an understanding of our time.” Prieto's work is on view through July 23 in a solo exhibition at Havana’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. MAP artist Tania Bruguera, who was arrested in December 2014 and detained again this month, spoke with Elvis Fuentes when the curator visited Havana recently. In his blog post about the current state of Cuba’s art world, Fuentes describes Bruguera’s situation—she is not allowed to leave the city—and her response to the boycott of the 2015 Havana Biennial that some have called for in her name.
Carlos Amorales, We’ll See How Everything Reverberates (Ya veremos como todo reverbera), 2012 (detail). Copper alloy, steel, and epoxy paint, three parts: one part 700 cm diameter; two parts 500 cm diameter. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund 2014.7. Installation view: Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 13–October 1, 2014. Photo: Kristopher McKay
A Look at the Havana Biennial
Works by MAP artists Carlos Amorales, Regina José Galindo, and Shilpa Gupta are on view in the Havana Biennial—this year titled “Between the Idea and the Experience”—which opened last week and runs through June 22. This edition of the Biennial features panel discussions, talks, and a number of group projects. Notable among the latter is Mountains with a Broken Corner, co-curated by Wilfredo Prieto—an exhibition of site-specific interventions by an international group of artists that takes place in an abandoned bicycle factory.Storylines at the Guggenheim
Opening next week at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim presents more than a hundred works from the museum’s permanent collection, most made after 2005. The exhibition, which examines the diverse ways in which artists today engage narrative through installation, painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance, includes works by MAP artists Mariana Castillo Deball, Simryn Gill, and Iván Navarro.On Our Radar
- MAP artist Carla Zaccagnini is one of six women artists whose work is on view through June 6 in the E-Flux exhibition So You Want to See. The works in the exhibition investigate social norms and the way they are affected by visual culture.
- MAP artists Mariana Castillo Deball and Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker are participating in the Biennial of the Americas, an international cultural festival that runs July 14–August 30 in Denver.
Candide is a French satire first published in 1759 by the philosopher Voltaire. The 
Self-portraiture remains one of the most direct and powerful means of visually communicating stories. The image of an artist who shares a version of his or her life appeals to a human desire to plumb individual and collective existence through narrative. Standing before an artwork depicting its creator, the viewer responds to the artist’s accrual of life: before us is someone who can truly be said to have lived to tell the tale.
On stationery with a Documenta 5 letterhead, dated December 8, 1972, Harald Szeemann, the curator of that year’s legendary installment of the important exhibition of contemporary art—which takes place in Kassel, Germany, every five years—typed a letter to artist John Baldessari: “Mario Pedrosa, the Brazilian art critic and museum curator, has gone to Chile in order to found there a museum of solidarity between the artists and the experiment of the country, Chile, itself. Some six hundred works of art have already arrived in Chile, among them Mirós, Calders, Vasarelys, and Stellas. Mario Pedrosa has asked me to send his quest to artists of Documenta 5, and the painters and sculptors known to me, in order to help create an activity for this museum of solidarity by means of works of art and the creation of a collection, which alone would justify the construction of a new building. I would be grateful if you could support this project with your thought and your assistance. With best regards, Harald Szeemann.” In the same letter—written on a continuous strip of paper and postmarked California, U.S.A.—Baldessari incorporated the text: “Dear Mario Pedrosa. Please let me know what I can do to aid in the creation of your museum and how I go about it. Sincerely yours, John Baldessari.”
On stationery bearing the letterhead of the Institute of Latin American Art, the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Chile, Mario Pedrosa wrote to the North American art critic Dore Ashton, collaborator and member of C.I.S.A.C., who lived in New York: “Did I tell you that Harald Szeemann, in reply to my letter, wrote 405 artists of Documenta V to ask them to cooperate with our museum? I was surprised at this reaction. If you like it I will send a copy of this list to you. Many, of course, of the artists are in the States, and some were already on your list. Of course, many of these names are of minimal or conceptual artists. Now a big number of them are writing me to enquire about the museum. The idea of calling Szeemann came from De Wilde and J. Leymarie. Love to you all, from Mario Pedrosa.”
Dated November 29, 1973, a letter sent from Dusseldorf to Mario Pedrosa, addressed to the Museo de Arte Moderno de Ciudad de México, reads: “Dear Mr. Pedrosa, during a meeting in Berlin some days ago I learnt through Harry Szeemann that you arrived from Chile in Mexico. He told me that you are trying to bring all art objects belonging to the Museo de Solidaridad in Santiago de Chile to Mexico. Harry Szeemann pointed out that this will be a very difficult enterprise. Therefore, I have sent you a telegram to your present address to declare our solidarity with your initiative and your endeavors in the respect. I do hope sincerely that it will help your situation. With best wishes, sincerely yours, Dr. Katharina Schmidt.”
The Museo de la Solidaridad (1971–73), or Museum of Solidarity, is a singular attempt to reconcile the conflicting couple of art and politics. In this institutional and artistic project, the drive of the ideological discourse of President Allende seemed to coincide organically with the context of works reflecting the early 1970s in different parts of the world.
While the genealogy of the museum was clearly rooted in the development of the Chilean socialist project and its symbolic representation in both its own internal organization (i.e., its institutionality), and internationally, it was supposed to project an image of the successful development of Chilean popular unity. The case of the museum suggested the opening up and plurality of the state, and aligned with the polyphonic nature and imagery of the Chilean model at that time. Words like solidarity, experimental, fraternal, and revolutionary from President Allende’s appeal in his “Letter to Artists of the World” resonated and were interpreted in local cultural contexts of the early 1960s, as well as in broader, global processes, shaping in the artistic imagination the possibility of creating a utopian model adapted to social change and linked to experimental museology, bringing art to new audiences.
Numerous artists were interested in the idea of the museum, expressing their hopes for it in diverse imagery, as can be seen in the letters of intent to participate in the project, and in the records of donated works. Some of these works managed to arrive before the military coup of 1973, while others were recovered in subsequent years.
This first stage of the museum thus saw the creation of a network of people from the world of culture who contributed works, ideas, and connections to shape the dream of a museum that was not hierarchical but transversal and polyphonic. The momentum to build this network for circulating aesthetic and political ideas and imagery was generated by the agency of Brazilian art critic and historian Mario Pedrosa, who was part of the Chile Solidarity Committee organized by the state with the support of President Salvador Allende. In this way, the model of the Museum of Solidarity operated organically in both areas, its ideological function emerging from state politics, and its polyphony of voices from the work of artists, curators, and architects who shaped the possible—and at the same time improbable—script of this public and international museum for Chile.
Albert Ehrenstein (1886–1950) was a writer and one of the main figures of 
Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki, the architectural team who practice in Paris under the name 
The last works by 
In the 1950s, artist and lecturer Allan Kaprow coined the term “happening” to describe many performances and events. These included a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction. Above all, 
It all began with a casual conversation. Marco Leona, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 
This month marks an important milestone: the 25th anniversary of the 
Sociologist Gilberto Freyre, from the state of Pernambuco, has been studied extensively in several countries, but there has been little discussion of his tropicology seminars, which were first held in 1966 and are still taking place even after his death in 1987. Among the many aspects of the discipline that Freyre was working to establish, some may be of particular interest in the 2010s, namely the attempt to “Brazilianize” and tropicalize customs, techniques, and products for the sake of a more consistent approach to the country’s ecological specificities; the pursuit of convergence across transnational issues, for which “tropicality” provided the linkage, and the use of a transdisciplinary methodology shaped at Columbia University in the 1930s by Professor Frank Tannenbaum, who sought to go beyond specializations, which was honed by Freyre and empowered by knowledge generated in countries yet to be named the “Global South.”
Regenerated concepts (such as mestizo or hybrid) and a positive view of Brazilian traits were central to Freyre’s Masters and Slaves (1933), but the author subsequently extended his analysis to the tropical world. From 1959 to 1962, four of his books featured the word tropics in their titles, and he spoke of tropicalization and Brazilianization. These terms, previously considered pejorative, were put through a rehabilitation process in an attempt to decolonize local ideas and habits, thus weakening the dynamics of cultural imperialism. As he traveled through Portugal’s colonies during the 1950s, Freyre’s ideas gradually matured. He realized that the language and culture imposed by Portugal bred familiarity between countries on continents as different as America, Africa, and Asia, for which he coined the term Luso-tropicalism. An important point is that Freyre poses his ideas about brotherhood and his praise of the Portuguese settlers’ “adaptability” and sense of aggregation precisely as the struggle for independence was erupting in Portugal’s African colonies. In fact, this proximity to dictatorial power (not only in Brazil, during the military regime, but in Portugal) was to pervade Freyre’s writings in the second half of the twentieth century.
Interestingly, Freyre’s attempt to shape a tropical point of view comprised a critique of European modernity and presented a counterpoint to it based on the rationality typical of the northern Old World. Peter Burke suggests that Freyre saw the tropical way of life as better adapted to the requirements of postindustrial and postmodern society than so-called Western ways of life. Freyre framed attitudes toward time as an example of the sympathetic “edge” the tropics had for the future. Contrasting the English sense of time (precise, mechanical, and measured) with what he called “less precise, rooted in nature’s rhythms, earthy Hispanic time,” he pointed out that the peoples of tropical regions show more propensity to leisure culture. Pondering these ideas today, we can see the ambivalence of our own period, in which the malleability of time has become an important part of the logic of capitalism—with its increasingly fluid distinctions between leisure and work—and in which respecting an individual cadence may also be interpreted as a form of resistance to the pace imposed by a time-is-money approach. Freyre ultimately anticipated the way that twenty-first century social sciences would highlight the importance of “provincializing” Europe. In this respect, tropicology should be taken as a kind of tropical anthropology fed by concepts and methods derived from ecology, anthropology, sociology, and history as a way of identifying and comparing traits shared by tropical societies and cultures.
Freyre’s tropicology seminars may be seen as part of the process of building an experimental science based on comparing ideas and perspectives. Around thirty specialists were selected to speak and intervene in these debates each year; the overwhelming majority were men, but they came from different fields of work and intellectual trends, from universities and other institutions, and representing different generations. A chairman was tasked with ordering their interventions and the time allotted to each of them. All the sessions turned on a speaker’s introduction. In 1967, for example, the speakers were Fernando Henriques (speaking on sociology and the tropics), Mario Barata (painting and the tropics), Roberto Burle Marx (garden and landscape design and the tropics), Mario Lacerda de Mello (modern geographical studies and the tropics), Frederico Simões Barbosa (health and the tropics), Flávio de Carvalho (clothing and the tropics), and Marco Aurélio de Alcantara (industry and the tropics). In Freyre’s words, “in terms of how it functions, this seminar has something of a ballet that is almost the same on the intellectual level as soccer on the choreographic level. Somewhat like a game of soccer, with the ball being passed from one player to another for offensive and defensive moves. Whatever the preferred comparison, this seminar is an expression of intellectual dynamics with individual participation in a collective game and these participations must be not rigidly ordered but somehow disciplined so that ballet does not degrade into sheer anarchy or the game into just a knock-about with a ball.”
The tropicology seminars are worth revisiting not only as subject, but also as turning points that may be reinvigorated and applied to the study of present-day globalization and the crisis of capitalism. Some of Freyre’s ideas may help develop alternatives to the asymmetry of the geopolitics of knowledge and art, and help us to articulate voices and models from the South.
