Fusco considers performances by artists such as Angel Delgado, El Sexto (Danilo Maldonado Machado), Sandra Ceballos, and collectives such as Omni Zona Franca, the Department of Public Interventions and Enema in light of how their work addresses the Cuban political context. While she discusses artistic censorship and the rules of conduct specific to the island, she compares Cuba’s situation with social and political restrictions in other contexts, including countries widely perceived as “free.” I recently spoke with Fusco about Dangerous Moves, and she expanded on these ideas and more.

LEE ANN NORMAN: In the book, you speak specifically about the unique political situation that gave rise to public performance practices in Cuba. Can you talk a bit more about that?

COCO FUSCO: I grew up during the Cold War, and at that time Fidel Castro was public enemy number one, spoken of publicly the way that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden are today. Every news story about Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s underscored that there was no freedom there. It’s true that political culture on the island is more centralized and authoritarian than in the US, but it’s also true that in the US, for all the rhetoric about freedom, the art world is run by a very small elite, and artists who do not produce work that is in fashion have a hard time securing a place for themselves professionally. Just because we don’t talk about this situation as representative of a lack of freedom, it doesn’t mean that there is no policing of culture here.

Right. I think as Americans, we tend to accept popular media narratives that show our society as the ideal liberal one, and everything else as repressive…

Americans don’t think about the rules of behavior that they conform to because they’re socialized not to see them. We do have very strong codes of conduct here, though. We tend to focus on controls relating to obscenity and sexuality, but think about social codes that are imposed in public spaces like shopping malls or schools. Let’s not forget the recent news story that went viral about Black women who visited a winery and were thrown off a train because they were laughing “too loudly,” whatever that means.

When looking at codes of conduct in Cuba, we have to understand the role they play in the shaping of political behavior. One of the articles of the Cuban penal code refers to social dangerousness, a term that includes public drunkenness and modes of behavior determined to run counter to socialist morality. There are Communist party officials and divisions within the Cuba police whose duty is to identity those engaging in these modes of conduct. There are also socially and politically unacceptable behaviors in the United States. The main difference is that in Cuba, power is centralized, which makes the repercussions for engaging in potentially criminal behavior more draconian. People operate with a clear sense of what is and what is not permitted. If they don’t know, someone will remind them very quickly.

How did performance emerge as a public action? What is that history in this context?

Performance produced self-consciously as art begins in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with a generation of young artists who wanted to shake things up. Their first forays were not so confrontational. Art students staged interventions in their classes because they felt the Soviet pedagogy being imposed on them was retrograde. Some of the artists who spearheaded the renaissance of the early 1980s in Cuba would stage performances privately for friends so they could experiment and not be interrupted. Some of their performances were about policing, state security, excessive bureaucratic control of culture, or the poor food that was being rationed to the population.

Things changed in the mid-’80s when artists such as Juan Sí González and Arte Calle (a group that tried to be clandestine but was “outed” very quickly) began creating street interventions without permission. The reactions varied. Some thought the work was too hot to handle. Others decried that it was not really art, but only a political provocation. There were other people who silently approved, but a sector of the art community expressed the fear that the more politically edgy artists were taking risks that would provoke negative reactions to young artists as a whole, and because of this they rejected their aesthetic proposals entirely.

How were these artists and their performances received? Were critics and historians dismissive, thinking of them like fame seekers?

Some art historians and critics were dismissive of those artists at the time, but I don’t think anyone was saying that they were seeking fame. That wasn’t the language being used. You don’t get famous in Cuba by getting arrested. Many of the artists faced negative judgment by their peers. State bureaucrats said they were provocateurs, but the worst accusation that could be levied against them was that they were “dissidents” because it meant they would lose any protections they might have as artists. Their work would be reconfigured as political provocation, and it is the police’s job to handle that. I remember the time when critics and curators ignored performance art in New York. The commercial art world thought it was a joke. I certainly wouldn’t single Cuba out as being more opposed to performance than other countries, but the centralization of power in the state is special. The Cuban state has the power to determine an artist’s life in a manner that is not very different from the way that the art market wields power over artists in the United States.

What changes, if any, have you seen in Cuban performance art now that the US and Cuba are re-engaging diplomatically?

The rapprochement between the governments of Cuba and the United States in the past year has not produced a change that would conform to any notion of liberalization. On the contrary, what we’ve seen in the last year has been a rise in the detention of people doing street actions. Cuban culture is changing, though, in two ways.

First, the Ministry of Culture is, like all state entities, losing much of its state funding. Administrators are being encouraged to seek alternative sources of financing. The cultural ministry is getting more involved in joint ventures with private investors, both Cuban and foreign. For example, La Fábrica in Havana, a hybrid nightclub, bar, and exhibition and performance space in an old factory, opened not that long ago. It’s a joint venture between the Ministry of Culture, music promoters, and local musicians. The bars are run by private entities, and local designers have display stands throughout. This kind of public-private endeavor is happening more and more in Cuba.

The pursuit of hard currency has completely transformed the Cuban art sector in the past 25 years. Events such as the Havana Biennial rely on money from tourists — not only for funding the event, but also because the back room sales of Cuban artworks allow many artists to live comfortably for months, even years after the exhibition. As the public sector shrinks and the value of Cuban salaries declines, artists become more dependent on the sale of their work. The Ministry of Culture continues to wield power as the broker between artists and foreign collectors, dealers and curators. There have been a lot of articles in foreign press recently suggesting that Cuba has a treasure trove of great cheap art, so this is the moment for foreign collectors to get in and invest. That actually drove a lot of people to go to the last Havana Biennial. What we’re talking about here is economic change, not political change.

Fusco, Coco. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. (London: Tate, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-1849763264, 192 pages, $27.8

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Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

Grey Art Gallery, NYU
September 10 to December 7, 2013
100 Washington Square East
New York City, 212-998-6780

Part two of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art will open November 14 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and will remain on view until March 9, 2014.

The ambitious two-part survey Radical Presence, originally organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is a thrilling endeavor.  The exhibition showcases 50 years of performance by black artists, with two dozen artists featured in the first installment on view at Grey Art Gallery.  According to the gallery’s director Lynn Gumpert, this portion of the show will be the more historical of the two, with a selection of contemporary works to open at the Studio Museum in Harlem next month.  It was inspiring to see a show entirely devoted to black artists in performance, one which exhibits Cassel Oliver’s deep investment in tracing a historical lineage for artists of color outside the modernist fabric of aesthetic judgments or the strategies of production central to postmodern cultural critique. The exhibition will be accompanied by more than a dozen live performances during its run. However, it is the historical evidence of these works—the document, the artifact, the object—which are central to the installation, forming a new heredity of black performance rooted in the subjective experience of viewing.

Cassel Oliver’s mission to find historical precedents (ie generational links) for artists of color is readable through her installation, which places canonized performances (Adrian Piper and David Hammons) next to lesser known ones.  Radical Presence presents black performance art not as an extension of theater—a medium rooted in visual passivity—but rather in terms of body art practices that illustrate questions of racial difference by actually enacting this difference through its relationship to the body of the viewer.  One such artist is the brilliant Pope.L, whose work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) occupies a prominent place in the exhibition.  The installation consists of a toilet mounted on a 10-foot tower where Pope.L originally sat for several days, dressed in a jockstrap and caked in flour, reading pages from the Wall Street Journal before consuming and eventually purging them.  The wall text quotes the artist who writes, “I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will…. My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement … to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.”  His crawl pieces, a project he began in the 1970s, also display the politics of embodiment and social history.  For The Great White Way, Pope.L crawled down 22 miles of Broadway in New York, making himself horizontal against the pavement amidst a capitalist jungle of high-rises and industry.  For this work he donned a capeless superman costume—an appropriated illusion of (white) strength, historically unavailable to him.  These works engage a cross-cultural conversation: why is it that we conceive of whiteness as somehow separate from blackness when one relies on the other for signification?  Rather than seeing either culture as “authentic” or segregated, Pope.L’s work performs the ways in which binary social structures are in fact deeply imbricated in one another.

Coco Fusco is another artist interested in our preconceptions of “the other.”  She is perhaps most well-known for her 1992 collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Peña in The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994), which traveled widely and remains the archetype for contemporary questions of colonization, the aesthetic of primitivism and the very function of the museum.  Fusco’s Sightings Photo Series from 2004 continues her examination of the role and responsibility of the viewer.  The work came out of her video project In her video a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004) in which Fusco weaves together archival video and staged surveillance footage of the FBI search for Angela Davis.  In a portion of the video Fusco narrates “Some women began to fear that an afro had become a one-way ticket to a holding cell, other women decided to put on afro wigs to pass for black.”  During the FBI search, hundreds of black women were wrongly detained or arrested before Davis herself was brought to trial.  What then does it mean when white women appropriate this righteous black aesthetic without any potential for misidentification and thus no actual bodily risk?  This notion of “passing” is something that Adrian Piper commented on extensively early on in her career—a question that is rooted in the experience of the seer as opposed to that of the subject.

Benjamin Patterson’s 1962 work Pond is on display as a series of instructions for performers to produce an indeterminate work.  The open action is guided by a grid designed by Patterson, as well as a number of wind-up frogs that direct the participant’s movements.  In the exhibition catalog Cassel Oliver notes that it was actually an investigation into Patterson’s career that prompted her to begin researching work for Radical Presence.  Patterson, a classically trained musician, was one of the founding members of Fluxus yet remained largely absent from canonical discourse, that is, up until Cassel Oliver organized his retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The Fluxus preoccupations with destabilizing hierarchies through chance operations and the group’s emphasis on the phenomenological (and thus subjective) experience of the viewer is very much in line with the more provocative works in Radical Presence.

The artist Rammellzee (1960-2010) also comes from a musical background.  Known for his elaborate performance costumes and narratives, he became famous in the 1980s New York underground through his freestyle rapping and graffiti tags in the subway.  A photograph on display at Grey Art Gallery features a selection of his elaborate costumes, as the original garments were installed as part of the exhibition in Houston.  Also on view is his 1979 document, Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism.  In this treatise, Rammellzee speaks to the political power of language, in particular letters, which, when separated from their narrative function can become powerful weapons that work in opposition to what he calls “counterfeit linguistic systems.”  He was directly inspired by monastic traditions and illuminated manuscripts, in which letters serve both a literary and formal function.  Interestingly, the wall text glossed over Rammellzee’s sci-fi, urban shaman persona; like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he began as an artist by using the city’s walls as his drawing board.

The art historian and performance art theorist Amelia Jones notes the power of body art, as enacted by the non-normative subject, to expose the naturalized exclusionism in modern art history.  The works in Radical Presence hinge on elements of social construction, intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the idiosyncratic relationship between seer and seen. This is art that challenges not only the structure of the art institution, but also makes an indelible impact on the social structures beyond the gallery’s walls: Radical, indeed.

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