Grupo ABTV (ABTV Group) was the name given to the artistic collaboration between Cuban artists Tanya Angulo (1968), Juan Ballester Carmenates (1966), José Toirac (1966) and Ileana Villazón (1969) by the Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer.
Camnitzer created the acronym with the surnames of its members during his research on Cuban art that he would later publish as New Art of Cuba.[1] In his book Camnitzer refers to ABTV work as “possibly the most rigorous group in Cuba today (…) Though they occasionally produce individual work, the group as such applies itself to appropriating other artists’ work to make theoretical criticism about culture and society. The team started with Ballester and Villazón, with Toirac joining a little later, and them Angulo. By 1989 they decided to split up again, although temporarily. They regrouped in 1991. Ballester and Villazón set the direction of the group with a team project realized while they were studying in the ISA”.[2] Juan Ballester Carmenates and Ileana Villazón used quotation and Appropriation (art) as a creative procedure as well as the use of curatorship as a critical structure in their exhibition El que imita fracasa (He Who Imitates Fails) that they presented in 1988 at Galería L in Havana.
The artist Ballester and Villazón acted as curators of their exhibition He Who Imitates Fails while at the same time dividing themselves into many other successful Cuban artists while inventing their new work, appropriating their formal solutions to polemicize the contents, thematic and stylistic, of the parodied artists. The exhibition worked “as a critic, bringing to the fore the stylistic miseries of appropriation. The works magnified those telltale effects of a constant search for prestige in the use and abuse of metropolitan models”.[3] Ballester and Villazón questioned controversial local issues such as the relationship between mainstream and periphery, cultural policy and national identity, international Avant-garde and local adaptations, Art market and notion of style, original and aura vs. copy.
The use of strategies such as quote and appropriation, as well as manipulation through exhibition curation, simulating institutional mechanisms capable of altering the functionality of each work, would be incorporated to a greater or lesser extent in all ABTV projects.
In 1989, while studying at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) (The University of Arts of Cuba), Juan Ballester Carmenates, José Toirac and Ileana Villazón were invited to participate in Young Cuban Artist, an exhibition curated by Rachel Weiss for the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Ballester, Toirac and Villazón carried out a team work in which they rephotographed reproductions of the famous appropriationist Sherrie Levine, the gesture of appropriation of their reproductions in books and art magazines critically pointed to the only way in which international art could be consumed in Cuba, deprived of direct experience through its massive reproduction. Parodying the titles of the famous North American artist the work was called After Sherrie Levine.
This strategy of manipulating through the curatorship of exhibitions and simulating the institutional mechanisms capable of altering the functionality of each work, would be incorporated to a greater or lesser extent in all ABTV projects.
For Luis Camnitzer “What is interesting in the work of this group is that they do not use the appropriation process like a recipe. Instead, each project has its own distinct structure and point, all carefully researched. The ABTV team can be better understood, in their present work, as a counterpart to the U.S. Group Material than as followers of Sherrie Levine [4] (…) ABTV works with appropriation, or with the appropriation of appropriation, but there is always an ethical component in the work, an element of social criticism. The reference to art becomes a metaphor, not an end in itself, at least not in formalistic terms. A particular tension is created by the use of a procedure traditionally considered unethical, as plagiarism would be, to transmit messages based on moral indignation".[5]
In 1990 ABTV received the Special Prize of the Cuban Section of International Association of Art Critics (IAAC) for this exhibition.
From July to December 1988, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana ((MNBAC) (National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba) presented a major exhibition of the work of Raúl Martínez (artist) under the “museological conception” of Corina Matamoros, specialist from the Museum. For young Cuban artists, Raul Martinez's work was a point of reference in the problem of recontextualizing international artistic trends within the rigid official discourse of national identity.
For ABTV the National Museum presented the work of Raúl Martínez (artist) as a great socialist, colorful and pop propaganda billboard, which celebrated the social achievements of the Revolution while hiding the complex scaffolding of contradictions of a complex, at times violent, revolutionary process that the same artist had suffered and was somehow implicit in the author's representative irony. The Museum exhibition focused on formal analysis that presented him as a successful artist, while displacing or omitting the contents of his complicated relationship between personal life and artistic production in relation to the social and historical context and its institutions.
A few days after the closing of Nosotros (We) at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana (MNBAC) (National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba), ABTV inaugurated its alternative anthological exhibition at the Provincial Center for Plastic Arts and Design in Havana in January 1989. “We": Anthological Exhibition of the Work of Raúl Martínez parodied the title of the Museum exhibition and criticized it by emphasizing the problematic contents that the official exhibition avoided. For this ABTV selected six works not included in the official exhibition and accompanied them with factual documentation. One of these works was made by ABTV in collaboration with Raúl Martínez (artist) as a nod of complicity between the artist and the alternative rereading that the new generations made of the work of the established artist.
It is impossible to understand this project without an introduction to the context.
The Proyecto Castillo de la Fuerza (Castle of The Force Project)In the late 1980s, the cultural life of Havana was shaken by a wave of young art critical of the tightness of the structures of the Cuban government. These projects were developed in galleries with high visibility and others were carried out directly in public spaces. Following the controversy, Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture, published an article in the official Granma (newspaper) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. In his article, the Minister of Culture did not hide his concern about how the new critical audiovisual production, which was exhibited in some state galleries not suitable for the content of the works, could be received by the Communist Party of Cuba and interpreted by a society without rights to spaces for exercise institutional criticism and without cultural education in Contemporary art.[6]
In this context, the Castle of The Force Project arises. Taking as a frame of reference the concerns of the Minister of Culture, its organizers, Félix Suazo, Alexis Somoza and Alejandro Aguilera, conceived it as “a project that would make it possible to carry out critical artistic proposals in a space for debate that would lay the foundations for later circulation broader social ”,[7] they were assisted by the former Vice Minister of Culture Marcia Leiseca who then chaired the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (CNAP) (National Council of Visual Arts). With irony, the Project took as its name the name of the building where it would be developed, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (Castle of the Royal Force) of Havana, an old Spanish military fortress that, after having been the headquarters of different cultural institutions by then, functioned as an exhibition space attached to the National Museum of Fine Arts.
The production process of the Project included several meetings between the organizers, the invited artists and the National Council of Visual Arts subordinated to the Ministry of Culture, the meetings should guarantee the control of the contents as well as an assessment of their possible repercussion in context. The Homage to Hans Haacke exhibition was scheduled as the fifth exhibition and should have opened in late September 1989. ABTV presented their project as a tribute to German conceptual artist Hans Haacke, the parody and quote of "political seriousness and professional rigor" of the German author's methodology was again used as a resource for a deep critique of institutions and official cultural policy. The exhibition overcame the initial control mechanisms and came to be installed in the Castle, but hours before the opening the alarm went off, the National Council of Visual Arts called an urgent meeting with Omar González where the contents of some works were questioned because the Ministry of Culture found it problematic. The officials of the Council demanded to suppress information that the artists considered essential for the understanding of their works. Consistent with Haacke's methodology, ABTV refused to meet the Council's demand, them the exhibition was "canceled" not without the Council first demanding that the content of the meeting not be unveiled in order to prevent the “failed negotiation” from being construed as official censorship. Tanya Angulo and José Toirac did not agree to release a note that Juan Ballester Carmenates and Ileana Villazón wrote detailing the details of the censorship. Ballester and Ileana printed hundreds of copies that they distributed themselves the night Homage to Hans Haacke was due to open. The Ministry of Culture deleted all information related to the censorship of Homage to Hans Haacke. In 1990 the Kuba o.k. exhibition was opened at the Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The project, which was curated by Jurgen Harten and advised for the Ministry of Culture by the artist Antonio Eligio Tonel, included in the catalog an Osvaldo Sánchez text on ABTV, as the text provided information on Homage to Hans Haacke, the Ministry of Culture pressured Harten to suppress the Osvaldo Sánchez text from the catalog. Harten had no choice but to yield to official pressure but finally he published the text as an annex to the catalog, distributing it within him. When the catalog arrived in Cuba, the Ministry of Culture kidnapped all annexes. In 1991, Art collector Peter Ludwig expressed interest in buying the controversial The Smile of Truth, but the National Museum of Fine Arts declared it of heritage interest and acquired it for his collection even though the Museum has never allowed its public display. ABTV was dissolved after the censorship of Homage to Hans Haacke.[8] In 1991 Ileana Villazón went into exile in Mexico and in 1992 Juan Pablo Ballester went into exile in Spain.
ABTV ended its text of presentation of the catalog with the following self-critical reflection: "paradoxically, our criticism of the institutional framework could also be registered as institutional self-criticism", but the unexpected closure of Homage to Hans Haacke recalled that, even after a period of tolerance, censorship continued to be part of the repressive framework of the totalitarian regime, because "...In Cuba, as in any other regime of real socialism, censorship is a resource of the State, inscribed in the Constitution, the Penal Code and the laws".[9] The need for dialogue and negotiation that Castle of The Force Project and the Ministry of Culture failed. [10]
For Osvaldo Sánchez: "Homage to Hans Haacke’... was announced as an ideological operation worthy of Haacke. The extreme critical acuity towards institutions and representation - cynical, burlesque, terrible - of not a few inconsistencies between art and status, between art and merchandise, between art and politics; It seemed to be more than what the aforementioned institutions could allow. The tribute to Haacke - what a paradox, precisely to him! - never got to opened. The pieces resorted to parody effects, especially promotional manipulation was parodied. The important thing was to accuse the institutional mechanism (commercial or political) that corrupted the semantic nature of the work (…) Even though it has not was opened, Homage to Hans Haacke is one of the key exhibitions of the 1980s in Cuba; and not precisely for the reasons that determined its cancellation. Whoever likes it, the Cuban visual art from 90’s will have it as a paradigm”.[3]
The Castle of The Force Project was closed after the censorship of Homage to Hans Haacke and the castle became the Museum of Cuban Contemporary Ceramics. In a new act of demonstration of power, the Cuban Communist Party reaffirmed the limits that young visual artists questioned as a revolutionary act. After the Project was censored, an atmosphere of cultural repression was unleashed, reminiscent of the atmosphere of "dark episodes" that occurred before the creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1976.
Work 1556—1988 established a parallel between the history of the construction of the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (Castle of The Real Force) in Havana and the history of the organization of the Castle of The Force Project. The comparison revealed analogies in terms of objectives, official production, setbacks in performance, limitations and expectations of its defensive function.
Orlando Yanes is a painter promoted as an official artist by the Communist Party of Cuba, because his realistic work specializes in portraits of revolutionary heroes. The Smile of Truth presented a large portrait of smiling Yanes in the billboard style of Che that he had designed for the facade of the building of the Ministerio del Interior (MININT) (Ministry of the Interior (Cuba)) in the Plaza de la Revolución (Revolution Square) and included his quote of 1963: “… we can count on a powerful source of inspiration such as our Revolution. This fact imposes on us a fundamental question: How to merge aesthetic demands with revolutionary inspiration? I believe that the answer cannot be condensed into an only one formula; I believe that each artist must find his formula”. The portrait in the style of a revolutionary propaganda billboard was supplemented by factual documentation, a resume witch included significant - omitted - facts from his artistic career before the Cuban Revolution along with photographic documentation of a portrait of Fulgencio Batista from 1952 and another one of Fidel Castro from 1986 formally represented with the same style. The work demonstrated how Orlando Yanes had used the same "formula" to express two different political realities and obtain personal benefits with the complicity of the institutions.
This work included a photocopy of the article by Jose María Juara "Hay razones para quemar un cuadro” (There are reasons to burn a painting) where the author explains the political reasons why he bought the painting El Pavo Real (The Peacock) by Manuel Mendive and later burned it in front of the Cuban Museum in Miami. According to Juara, his burning was a symbolic way to protest against "the artists who still collaborate with Castro's tyranny" and against the sale of Cuban Marxist culture in Miami.[11] For his work ABTV bought a serigraphy by Manuel Mendive to Fondo Cubano de Bienes Culturales (BFC) (Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets) and burned it as a performance that appropriated Juara's action. The video documenting the burning of ABTV was accompanied by the text “Hay razones para quemar una serigrafía” (There are reasons to burn a serigraphy) in which its authors explained that their action opposed Juara's political manipulation, but also the cultural manipulation of the Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets by the “hyperbolization of the exchange values and commodification of the Cuban cultural heritage assuming the work of Manuel Mendive as the victim and a banner of this policy”.
In An Image Travels the World, ABTV told the little-known story in Cuba of the photograph of Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda that became famous thanks to the editing and marketing of the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The Italian publisher visited Havana looking for the image that he would use on the cover of his publication of the Diario del "Che" in Bolivia and the Poster that would accompany the edition. Feltrinelli chose a photo of Che de Korda and edited it, Feltrinelli did not pay copyrights and Korda did not claim them, among other things, because in the first years of the Revolution, Cuba maintained an ambiguous relationship with international Copyright laws. ABTV used the history of photography as a pretext to denounce the process of cultural and commercial fetishization to which the image is subjected by conserving, as if it were unique, an object that by its nature is multiple; and ideological fetishization as it is promoted as the image that best embodies the values of the historical character. ABTV emphasized that this fetishization was not an inherent quality of the object but was determined by the institutions that preserve and promote it. An Image Travels the World reproducing the famous photograph superimposed with its history and the work would be finished when it was sold - as a poster that recognizes itself as merchandise - for a three-peso bill. Ernesto Che Guevara had been president of the National Bank of Cuba from 1959 to 1961, in 1983 the Bank printed his three Pesos bill for the first time, it did not include the original photo of Korda but the Feltrinelli edition that made it famous. The purchase of the poster closed the cycle of the commodification of the hero reduced to its currency value.
ABTV closed her exhibition with this work that reflected on how the critique of institutions would end up becoming part of her falsely self-critical discourse. To do this, they intentionally invited Glexis Novoa, an artist who had already participated in the Castle of The Force Project. Glexis Notes was a work that would function as an "alternative" curatorial project within the Homage to Hans Haacke and the Project itself. For ABTV "Glexis appropriates the methodology of Homage to Hans Haacke to parody our attitude towards the institutional framework that promotes us. This work reveals that Glexis's critical attitude was premeditated by us in the same way that the institution that promotes the Project (National Council of Visual Arts), anticipated and sustained our criticism of it. These appropriation and parody procedures show that the Ministry of Culture offered its support to the Project as a way to update its institutional policy and management; that we take advantage of such coverage to make this exhibition; that Glexis used us ’to re-expose in the Project, and that we used Glexis to express all of the above".
In 1991 ABTV regrouped for this final project.
Por la plena igualdad. Juntos y adelante (For full equality. Together and Forward) was the slogan of a propaganda billboard designed by the Editora Política (Political Publisher) in the early 90s. ABTV used as the conceptual structure of the project the same inclusive rhetoric of the political slogan that they cited, for this occasion they invited artists from different generations to participate, with opposing aesthetic discourses, with various formal solutions, both artists promoted by the Ministry of Culture and artists marginalized by institutions and their circumstantial cultural policies. For this project ABTV rescued works by artists who had fallen into oblivion such as the so-called Socialist realism cuban artists who in the 1970s went to study Art in the former Soviet Union, for example, from this group of realistic artists, Cosme Proenza was invited to exhibit alongside young critical artists such as Pedro Álvarez Castelló. Together and Forward! parodied the ideological cynicism with which the Editora Política (Political Editor) advertised the achievements of social integration of the Cuban Revolution. In this project, ABTV acted as curators of a choral group show that they inserted from a small cultural institution into the great official event of the IV Havana Biennial. The exhibition and the montage design of the works evaded any notion of hierarchy for use in local institutions, the works were distributed in the space through a visual design that privileged their formal values.
