Today I attended an event at the Johnson Museum about Cuban art.  I assumed we would be viewing some pictures or paintings and hearing something about their artists.  But instead, we were treated to a talk by Sonja Gandert and Enrique González-Conty.  The talk opened by explaining that a lot of what is dealt with in Cuban art is “Memory Wars.”  This concept of memory wars deals with how Cubans choose to remember the revolution and the age of Castro.  It also deals with the different views of Cubans in Cuba and Cubans who fled to Miami.  Art from these different places deals with different things.

The talk began by discussing memory wars as a concept, and then branched off to discuss the artist whose work will be featured in the Johnson in a month.  This artist has had work presented in Cuba and in the United States, and much of it is commentary on the revolution.  One piece that stood out to me related to Operation Peter Pan, a movement to get children out of Cuba.  The work had a sketch of Cuba on the floor, with hanging small white shirts above it in rows.  The piece that was located in the Johnson, that we got to see, was a picture of the artist dressed in a nun’s habit.  This was partially a commentary on the artist’s time cloistered, and on other themes.

We then heard more about cinema as related to Cuban revolution.  One movie that was specifically mentioned, based on a book, was named Memories of Underdevelopment.  The format of this film intrigued me — it was a fictional story with bits of documentary interspersed.  It had the fiction story line, but also contained the revolution in it.  I think this is a very interesting way to do a movie.  We learned that Cuban film was very dependent on the government for funding, until digital mediums came about to make producing films easier.  And we heard about a sequel to Memories of Underdevelopment — Memories of Overdevelopment.

We then finished up the talk by hearing about performance art.  Performance art is the most done in Cuba because it costs the least.  While paper may be difficult to get a hold of at times, same for film or digital cameras, performance art can be done with just a human talking.  We talked in particular about Tania Bruguera, an internationally known Cuban performance artist.  She has done many different performance pieces, involving speaking out when people would not hear her.  I thought her works were very interesting.

The talk then ended with a Q&A session, where we heard a bit more about different Cuban artists.  One thing that stood out to me during the Q&A was the fact that much of Cuban art ends up being political because people expect it to be political.  There exist non-political Cuban art, but it is much harder to find.  This was very strange to me, but also it sort of made sense, as people can tend to conform to what others think they do, in performance mediums.  I was not expecting to learn as much as I did from this talk, and I am very glad I went.