The Artist Traversing Perilous Waters

I have hopes that I will get to see the time when to be an artist becomes a respectable lifestyle again, the way it used to be in pre-capitalist times. My hope doesn’t come from nowhere since the tendency of post-industrial capitalism is to leave people with more free time available as manufacturing jobs go away to areas of the world where cheaper labor is available.
To be an artist today still carries upon the stigma of being a social parasite. The artist is seen as some sort of perennial bohemian who does not contribute anything relevant to the commonwealth. The artist is compared to someone pulling our hair and playing some sort of make believe, an ideas butcher trying to make you buy --and sometimes achieving it-- a cat, thinking it was a rabbit.
It still amaze me that despite the rejection society exerts on them, the alienation they suffer and the psychological flagellation they undergo, there are so many young people, year after year, semester after semester, registering in art classes and yearning to be an artist.
It used to be that the formation of an academic trained artist lasted about four years. The first and second years the art student will spend the time copying Greek sculptures and still lives using pencil and charcoal. By the third year he would start using color in a limited way, sanguine or gouache in monochromatic harmonies. By the time he reached the fourth year he would finally be allowed to use oil paint and apply full color.
If the artist was formed in one of the artisan guilds that existed in Europe since around the 15th C. he would have to start at an early age, maybe seven or nine and by the time he was eighteen or nineteen years old he would be a fully formed artisan ready to start a career on his own. The art student would have to go through a series of steps, the first one consisting of painting clouds, then after a few years he would rise in the apprentice ladder and start painting animals. Finally and after about a decade, he would be asked to take on the responsibility of painting faces and hands, achieving the mastery that would bring recognition to his skills and talents and those of the guild he represented.
The industrial revolution and the advent of photography ended all this. It didn’t make sense anymore to spend four or nine years learning how to reproduce the facial features of a person when the daguerreotype and later the Kodak machine where capable of doing this in a matter of minutes. Consequently art schools, if they wanted to keep art programs going, needed to cut the time spent by a student and change the curriculum accordingly.
Today few art schools in the world have the luxury of providing undergrad students with full four years curriculum. M.F.A.s have three to four full years and much of it would be spent doing theoretical research on visual art and other disciplines related to the work of the graduate student. Almost nobody have the leisure to spend four years in an art school, it would cost too much money that most probably is not going to be recouped. Exactly the opposite would happen if money invested were going to law or medicine school, where you can pay back loans and investment after few years practicing your profession as a doctor or a lawyer. Therefore is natural that painting and drawing classes had to be reduced to a semester in college or, if taken seriously, by the ones who wanted to develop in the profession, a couple of more semesters before entering a B.F.A or an M.F.A. program.
It is impossible to form a visual artist in one year, don’t even think in four months. Art professors have struggled to create methods from which the student, although not fully formed as an artist, at least would have some tools to use to make a respectable portrait, a landscape or a still-life. In one of the art classes I took at an American college I painted twelve big 72 x 72 inches canvases in a semester, very much in accordance with American grass-roots philosophy of hard work. That class was the closer experience of American pragmatism I ever had. Forget about European rationalistic-too much complication method of having to learn every facial bone and muscle in order to do a good portrait. You needed only to make a grid and translate your snapshot picture into an unusual large-scale canvas. The result was that you would recognize your face in the painting after you finished in one week, and not only that, you would see yourself capable of creating a portray of such a huge dimension. You would feel proud of being able to manage such a big scale in such a short period of time. The author has spent four years in an art school in Havana and many years making a career as a visual artist and can testify that dominating big canvases is a psychological tour the force that take years to solve. What I couldn't do during four years -dominating big spaces and canvases taller than yourself- was easily achieved using this method.


I passed by my old college today as I took a quick detour from my Central Park strolling and watched the students involved in the process of making their portrays, landscapes and abstractions. Today was not a typical day at the studios and my eye and my ears were caught. They were playing music in the studio. That was something that was not allowed while I was an art student at Hunter and I asked them about the unusual event while congratulating them about it. A skinny girl called Barret, which I know since my years as an student told me that they agreed to play music to make the experience more relaxing. I answered that the whole thing reminded me of times past in my studio in Havana, always full with loud music, alcohol and cool conversation with friends that came to visit. I also remembered my students at Altos de Chavon school of design, in Dominican Republic, were I spent some time as an invited professor. The students over there enjoyed loud music night after night while doing their homework. They would take turns playing their favorite musicians and they would never fight over certain type of music or certain author. Music was for them part of the experience of painting, as it was for me, something inseparable from art learning and art making.
While at Hunter I always wondered why music was banned from the studios while you could still listen to it using earplugs. They said is because fights between students have broke over the choice and volume of the music played. I used to think the real reason had to do with puritanical culture, with an attitude of austerity, a kind of Kantian morality towards art making, a sense of solitude in the universe and left alone with only the company of the art work you were creating. I believed that what was truly at stake by making art in silence was a tale of the lonely creator giving birth to life from the void, an interpretation of the religious American puritanical narrative and an embrace of American culture at large. The artist as the existential next frontier conqueror fighting alone against the threatening forces of nature that came to challenge him from the emptiness of the canvas.
I witnessed today several creators in the process of giving birth to their creatures, some of the many that are going to populate our spiritual universe in the years to come. As I said at the beginning of this paper I hope post-industrial society gets to appreciate what they are doing. Since post-industrial society gives way to so much free time and un-employment, the un-employed and free-timers probably will. Maybe the artist would not be anymore such a stigmatized creature mostly rendered as a producer of things with no value.



In capitalist society the figure of the artist goes in opposite directions, from excoriated to idolized. Those artists who make it and achieve international recognition and tons of money along the way are ridiculously worshiped by the media and by the social mind. Since art is such an unnecessary activity and the artist such an unnecessary figure only the ones who get to prove that they are really one of a kind get to be appreciated. Only the ones who show their willingness to cut an ear or throw themselves into the waters of overdose get some measure of credibility. Only the ones that fly into the eye of the storm get to be respected and counted as valuable. When is too late and when is not worth it. I will never understand why would anyone commit suicide leaving his legacy to someone who is going to enjoy it while he is six feet underground.
When an artist gets recognition society sees herself vis-a-vis the encumbered artist on his pedestal. If post-industrial society gets a grip on reason it would not worship artists and their blockbuster masterpieces as emissaries of some sort of Hegelian realization of the absolute. Post-industrial society may be start doing some good by learning to elucidate and separate the superficial art from the substantial, the serious artist from the specialist on the tricks of the trade. If this becomes a fact, both the un-employed proletariat and the solitary artist could start getting to respect and appreciate each other more. After all we are navigating the unpredictable and dangerous waters of post-capitalism –not post-apocalypse that is— in the same ship. And nobody would like to see a fight broke in a boat traversing perilous waters in the middle of a storm. Neither to say, nobody wants it either.

The Tetrad Tina Modotti, Vittorio Vidali, Diego Rivera and Julio Antonio Mella before his death.

Tina Modotti went to Mexico together with Edward Weston and his son in 1923. She agreed to run Weston’s photographic studio, free of charge, at the tender age of 26, which is the age in which we start questioning our reason of being in the universe and forget about having some fun. It may have not come as a slow realization to Tina, born in a proletarian family, to experience traces of servility and exploitation in her work relationship to Weston. Her feminist nature rebelled and she soon found out her natural soul mates in the members of the Mexican Communist party, among them the muralist painter Diego Rivera.

It is not difficult to visualize Diego Rivera in an affair with Tina Modotti. After all, he was as wonderful a womanizer as Picasso was. In his Mural “The Arsenal”, Tina Modotti is shown at the right of the canvas holding an ammunition belt. Modotti was a very active figure in the struggles of international communism and she is staring at no other than the founder of the International Communist Party of Cuba, Julio Antonio Mella. Behind Modotti the face of Vittorio Vidali snakes in, his eyes full of hate and ire, projecting forward his evil eyebrows; his head covered by a dark hat that signal darkness of thoughts and sentiments, the semblance of the notorious assassin suspected of having murdered many deviant communists. In the purges against Trostkyists --and Julio Antonio Mella was one of those deviant Trostkyits – orthodox Vidali may have played an active role.

What this painting by Diego Rivera conveys is not only the proletariat getting ready for battle; it also portrays the most base instincts of human nature. For the Communists, who had as their ideological tenet the belief in a selfless human being, this realistic portray of human nature is what may have ultimately triggered Rivera’s dismissal from the Communist party. 

It is likely that Comandante Marcos, Vidali, felt jealous of the relationship between Tina and Mella. After all, Rivera’s painting shows him hurt by her preference for Mella, envious and offended in his twisted macho-man code of honor; which seems to be the strongest motive behind Vidali’s possible assassination of Julio. His hate of a wonderful, intelligent, capable and good-looking Cuban competitor may have pulled the culprit’s trigger. He may have killed Julio and used political treason as an excuse, when the real motivation was a beastly sentiment of hate, jealousy and possession.

Rivera may have been jealous, and envious too, of the relationship between Tina and Mella. Rivera’s wife of that time, Lupe Marin has testified somewhere that the breaking up of her marriage to Rivera was due to Diego’s affair with Tina, which lasted for about a year and gave birth to five murals and numerous drawings. He may not have been the hand behind the trigger that killed Mella but he could have known of the event without doing anything to avoid it. In the competition among Vidali, Rivera and Mella, low sentiments of possession and desire for the heart of Tina could have played  no small role in Julio Antonio Mella assassination.

There is a detail in The Arsenal that calls my attention; Diego Rivera has placed Modotti’s hands in such a way that instead of holding a lifeless ammunition belt resembles caressing Julio Antonio Mella’s penis. About that time Tina mentions that "recently Diego has taken to painting details with an exaggerated precision. He leaves nothing to the imagination”. Perhaps Rivera is metaphorically alluding to the projectile qualities of Julio Antonio Mella’s virility, his gun powder explosiveness and extraordinary capacity for producing children of the Revolution, such as the one placed in front of Tina, who seems to be holding her umbilical cordon, maybe the result of Mella and Tina relationship.

This painting has been rendered as proof of Diego Rivera’s involvement in the death of Julio Antonio Mella because it shows Diego’s awareness of the events. The connection of Rivera with the murder, supposedly revealed by the scene, and which cost him the separation from the Communist party, seems to be just a fabrication, a smoke curtain to hide the real motives behind this painting’s rendition of proletarians and revolutionaries as ordinary human beings. This negation of reality has ultimately cost them their credibility and reality test common sense.

Please enjoy the beautiful, courageous, wonderful and rebellious Tina Modotti in The Tiger's Coat.

Trash comes in all colors (Quick notes on a post-racial America).

I intend to spend the night working at the studio. There are couple of paintings that I want to finish but I’m not sure how. I will go first to the local liquor store for a bottle of Merlot so help me find a solution to the aesthetic riddle I’m stuck with. I’m debating myself which way should I go? The Greek, classical way, or the Romantic/Expressionist, German way? We Cubans chose the Russians over the Americans, Tio Stiopa -ДЯДЯ СТЕПА- over Uncle Sam, Ciburaska over Mickey Mouse trying to build ourselves from the ground up after a New Man archetype. To be Cuban is to be perennially involved in a quest for identity. We struggle between white or black. We are the bubbling fume in the mulatto lab tube, thinking we are superior that the rest of Latin Americans, being neither Latinos, nor white Europeans.
The wild call to arms of your individuality rising up to explosion, ascertaining your personality. Your bones and tendons refusing to accommodate, rejecting to conform, to be the same, gray, mutual, mass. The American born to be wild. After all the mass needs the lead of new ideas and unseen horizons were to move forward.
Which way should I go? The way of education, master degree, PhD in philosophical pains of sadistic ideo-frustrated professors. Attain a certain level of knowing about the history of how we came to be illustrated savages of barbarian Parternon. Distinguish myself by wearing a tie, maybe a lose tie to signal that I’m not a greedy materialistic pig despite my middle class gloss but a man of letters. Or should I go the way of aberrant obscurantist who happen to be Cuban and use his Cubanness to extol a sense of superiority that he will never have in order to justify his beastly idiocy and Harpyan arrogance? The big motherfucker with his rice and beans pork tire belly who doesn’t move when you says “excuse me” at the local Newjersian liquor store and you ask him to get his vomit ass out your way in order to grab the bottle of wine that would give some aspirinical relieve from the mediocrity that is to be uneducated and presume to be proud of.
Then comes a Cuban black guy in sleeveless shirt and this white trash who happens to be originally from Havana tells him “ Negro y en camiseta: ladron (black and sleeveless equals to thief”). I wan to spit in his face, break his nose and marked him forever to society as racist scum, a sputum of pretentious difference. Then he goes “ The town is full of bedbugs, they come from Center America, this people, they don’t wash their sheets”. How does he know that Center American immigrants doesn’t wash their sheets? My stomach is revolving and feel like throwing in his face. I’m eager to punch him so bad but I remained silent, swallowing the chauvinism that emanates from his stinking glorious path as a Marielito. There is this theory that I threw some years ago when somebody asked me why Cubans were so vulgar and uneducated. I answered that there are two types of Cubans, the ones that are educated, have good manners, they know how to behave in public, they know how to pronounce words correctly; and there is this other Cuban type, uneducated, ominously vulgar, street wise, lazy, who doesn’t even bother to learn to speak English and that is the kind I happened to come across today at the liquor store.
The first group, the educated, belong either to the first wave of exiles that came during the 60’s. They belonged to well off families, either middle class or high class, sophisticated in manners and uses due to their privileged backgrounds. There is also another educated group made of youth that managed to escape Cuba after getting a degree from a University. Those are artists, filmmakers, engineers, architects, doctors, etc who happen to have an academic education but who some times slip into some kind of vulgarity in expressions and manners due to the general state of decomposition of the society in which they grew up.
And there is the Mariel generation. Most of them, for sure, are good people, well mannered and educated. But among them there is this social scum that Fidel Castro got the opportunity to get rid of in the Mariel boat lift, among them criminals and the mentally ill taken directly out of prisons and mental institutions. The very low–low of the social scale who came 30 years ago to this country and still think and behave like they never got out of Cuba. By looking at him I know this guy is in his 50’s –and still capable of talking so much non-sense. He is one of the trash Marielitos, part of the third of the total of them, the social ejection that Castro missiled to Carter. And because of him I realized that all the people at this store that are paying attention to his mouth crap are going to perceive me and all the Cubans like me as if we think like him, we are like him, racists, bigots, xenophobic and chauvinists. I wish I could send him back to Cuba.
He is the Cuban white trash. But to be fair, there are not only Cuban trashes in American society. There is the archetypical American white trash; the Mexican immigrant trash distinguished from the educated, well off Mexican who usually comes only to the States on vacation or because he has a high paid job here. The Dominican trash, discriminated by the Puerto-Rican trash. The black, un-adapted trash that blames and justify everything with tales of centuries old slavery. Trash comes in all colors.
We are now moving into a post-racial American world. But, really? There is no doubt that after Obama’s presidency black discrimination has receded and perception of Afro-Americans in society has improved. What about the other colors of the racial spectrum? What about the discrimination of Latinos by Latinos? Puerto-Rican against Dominican; Dominican versus Haitian; Argentinian versus the rest. What about discrimination of Asians against Asians, such as Japanese against Chinese, Chinese against Vietnamese, Vietnamese against Cambodian, Korean against Japanese? This is what I see only in the surface of things. We are certainly moving into a post white against black racial world but what about the other colors? After all racism and xenophobia is polychromatic.
Maybe in a truly post-racial world I won’t have to be looking for solutions about which to go regarding aesthetic preferences. In a world with no racism and xenophobia Greek columns would stand only for their mathematical proportions and their intrinsic beauty, and not for their connotation of white culture and Western ethnocentrism and imperialism. German expressionism will only be a scream of the ID and not an indictment of European rationalism. It would be easy to chose forms and styles based on what they denote, what they express and makes you feel and not what they connote in terms of political and ideological implications. And I won’t have to try to figure out all day long what I’m, black, white or mulatto and how to paint accordingly since those questions would have no meaning or relevance anymore.

Cowgenics

In the 1960’s and 70’s Fidel and his older brother Ramon were running experiments trying to create a super cow. This kind of neo-cow was supposed to be actualized by means of a series of crossbreeding executions using artificial insemination. The first product of any of two pure crossed breeds was called F-1. The throw out of a crossing between a F-1 and a pure breed was called F-2. The crossing of an F-1 and a F-2; was called a F-3. Between a F3 and a F-2 was called F-4. There could be some inaccuracies regarding the name of these ejections but there's no doubt that the program was implemented for years.

One of the paintings I made with this subject shows several laboratory vessels and a bull blowing out from one them like a genie coming out of an oil lamp. The bull is transparent and you can see the background through him, a flower stemming from his back. This is an allegory of the super-cow program started by the Revolution. A representation of tropical Cowgenics: La Nueva Vaca.

Another of the paintings that deals with the subject depicts a group of livestock against a landscape. Formally, the composition is derived from 17th century dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp's "Young Herdsmen with Cows." But the space is and the elements are conceived after American abstract expressionism, particularly Pollock and De Kooning, This by-polarity of the composition connotes the opposites forces of bi-culturalism that informs my Cuban-American identity.