The Seventh Havana Biennial (Septima Bienal de la Habana) Havana.

The Seventh Havana Biennial (Septima Bienal de la Habana)

Havana, Cuba

November 14 2000-January 5 2001

November 17 2000 arrival, Central Havana

At first sight, the city appears to be an enormous film noir wager Streets are filled with a still functioning cove of pre-revolution-era Ford and Chevy motorcars that mingle with water trades and orange pedicabs. Men, women and children spill throughout broken sidewalks in between picturesque colonial architecture collapsing at a rate of almost individual building per day. This leaves a maze of jagged pastel walls and shadowy apertures. Despite all the apparent beggary and physical decay, the Cubans I come together are well educated and robust looking. Compared to other "third-world" nations I have visited, it is clear that the revolution has take the place ofed in raising most people's living standards. Many also immediately nail down where I am from, leading a certain quantity of individuals to offer me black market cigars and other profitables Nevertheless, I am impressed by means of the civility of Havana and its residents as well the city's urban vitality, all qualities that are rapidly receding from public spaces in the United States. This in inflect makes some of th e observations that pursue all the more disconsolate.

November 18 the opening of the exhibitions at Castle El Morro and Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabana

In a city where North American visitors otherwise appear single in diluted concentrations, we join ranks with several swelling battalions of art tourists unloading like occupation [i]troupe[/i]s from buses and cabs onto the abrupt overlooking downtown Havana. Armed with palm-sized digital cameras and hygienic water bottle most numerous have, for this occasion, forgone heat-trapping black forward black for cotton attire that descrys un-tanned legs and necks to the tropical glare. Many wear oversized white t-shirts. a certain number of are imprinted with candy-colored portraits of Che Guevara presented in a 1960's, retro Cuban bill style. Perhaps it is inevitable that 40 years after the revolution, Cuba markets the iconography of what is the last Marxist-Leninist dominion in the western hemisphere. After all, dealing in the revolution is already an enterprise of Madison Avenue. Perhaps filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller present it best when he stated that "Guevara and the Cuban Revolution have become upscale icons for the aging boomer market." [1 ] No doubt Gap Jeans and Taco Bell ads along with cigar bars and Salsa music have helped to make this forbidden island if not exactly radically chic, then at least cut-rate exotic. Skoller goe with equal reason far as to ask whether revolutionary iconography itself "has become in such a manner much cultural baggage, exhausted, now simply nostalgic, preventing the not away from rethinking the past critically and imagining the subsequent time in new and original ways?" [2] Meanwhile, like a winding sheet, the still lingering shiver of cold-war politics wrappers Havana in a singular allure, especially vibrant to clan who recall the 1960's Missile Crisis, or grew up watching James ligature movies.

Meanwhile, to those of us with obsolescent socialist sentiments, Skoller's haunting appraisal is difficult to shake, especially when bring into the presence ofed with the paradoxes that make up contemporary Cuban life and agriculture Yet perhaps more than any other kind of strangeness was the way this beautiful, struggling city managed forward this occasion to again play a significant part within the international art world. At the same time it became individual more occasion for the affirmation of the curatorial class: that transnational detachment of specialized professionals who manage the global spectacle called contemporary art. Perhaps this is the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following in which those exhausted signifiers that Skoller alludes to appear to beed most in play. While there is still something different about the Bienal de Ia Habana when compared to other global art festivals--more artists of color from the southern hemisphere are represented--the same aura of exotica provides a particular status within the larger cultural tourist landscape. The significance of t his special position is not misspent on the Cuban artistic community.

According to Rafael Acosta de Arriba, who chaired the board for this year's termination the Seventh Havana Biennial focused onward art "not found in the great scenarios of the hegemonic market." [3] It also marks a reply to the event's original intentions that he defines as "a prime be of importance to for the marginal and peripheral subjects" [4] however as theorist and curator Gerardo Mosquera explained to us from his abode outside Havana, biennials are essentially originaled on the nineteenth-century institution of the "world's fair" with its promise of modernity and universal progres If Mosquera is correct, then the room for expectation of returning to an original position, however noble, strike one as beings doubly disconcerting. Not only have conditions changed within the economy of high art since the 1980 unless so too have cultural conditions been transformed within Cuba. Regarding the Cuban situation, the same can cite the end of Soviet financial support along with the 30-year-old U blockade lately amplified by the Helms Burton law which penalizes foreig n countries that dare to trade with the island. still there is also the modern two-tier currency exchange within Cuba that permits artists (among others) to take a bribe for their work for U.S. dollars instead of devalued peso adding another even of irony to the Biennial. Curiously, Mosquera himself, united of the first to organize the Bienal de la Habana in 1983 was altogether missing from this year's issues Despite public questioning, Biennial organizers in no degree explained Mosquera's noticeable absence. When asked about this an always modest Mosquera cited differences of an intellectual and historical nature including those described above. However, this and nothing else begs the question, is this not exactly the kind of discussion that should be taking place within the circuitry of contemporary art?