Havana Biennial

Havana Biennial

Located in several key sites in and around Havana's elegant, crumbling colonial center and select farther-flung spaces, the 16-year-old "Bienal de La Habana 2000" opened Nov. 17 to a packed house. Receiving what must certainly be the biggest U.S. and New York attendance on record, this year's Havana Biennial currently plays host to the usual staunch bunch of internationalist veterans?left-listing artists, art writers and curators?while simultaneously entertaining 57th St. and Chelsea dealers and purse-heavy collectors like Peter Norton.

Cuba's art carnival: As trying as a bread line sometimes, but never, ever boring. All day and much of the night, large, air-conditioned buses tower over Russian-made Lada automobiles and 50s chrome-plated, vintage American cars on Havana's terminally rutted streets. Resembling feverish archeological digs, Havana's potholed roadways bumpily conduct patrons of art institutions like MOMA, the Bronx Museum, the Soho not-for-profit space Art in General and Frankfurt's Ludwig Museum toward vernissages, lunches, studio visits, cocktails, more vernissages, criollo rice, bean and pork dinners and, finally at day's end, to the Biennial's ubiquitous parties. Approaching the bar, folks from the Upper East Side enthusiastically greet folks from Brooklyn; savvy Cuban artists dust off smart English phrases; Swiss dealers' backs are routinely slapped and the French proffer genuine hugs. This is the international art crowd with its librarian's hair bun down. Nearly drowning out the salsa, the dancefloor vibrates to the sound of a single, giant air kiss.

Featuring more than 170 artists from more than 40 countries, the "VII Havana Biennial" is, like Cuba itself, equal parts historical anachronism and a roiling, mixed-market, multiethnic and ethically varied laboratory. Founded in 1984 as the very model of a Third World art biennial, the Havana Biennial has spawned many imitators (the Istanbul Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Lima Biennial) even as it has gradually defected from its heady mission of spawning a cultural insurgency against the all-consuming international art hegemony (read: New York). Adopting the minimalist-conceptualist style that for a while became the only style for international art and grafting the endgame rhetoric of postmodernism and identity politics onto millennial Marxist precepts, the Havana Biennial at its most ambitious sought not only to "contribute to the investigation, diffusion and recognition of the visual arts of Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and the Middle East," but also to seek out and "find a Third World visual culture."

Alas, after several no doubt genuine attempts, the Havana Biennial's organizing committee quit searching for its idealized esthetic for the wretched of the Earth (it was to be something of a cross, surely, between the Mexican Muralists and the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations) and looked, along with nearly everyone else, toward the art world's center. With resources especially scarce after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Havana Biennial of 1997 dutifully offered up the first formal invitations to artists from the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Of the American artists invited to participate in this year's Biennial, only those in the video section, Susan Hiller (virtually an English artist) and Guillermo Gomez Pena (the Mexican-American border brujo, or sorcerer), bear mentioning. A quick read through the list of invitees nevertheless discovers a number of influential artists from the equally feared and admired New York circuit. Among others, there are the artists Francis Alys, Leandro Erlich, William Kentridge, Annette Messager, Antoni Muntadas, Liliana Porter, Miguel Angel Rios, Eugenio Dittborn and several Cubans like Raul Cordero and Tania Bruguera, who are represented by galleries in Manhattan. Another show that is listed as one of the important Biennial highlights: an exhibition of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, poster boy of New York art world excess.

The catalog for this most recent Havana Biennial lists as sponsors a large number of rich European foundations alongside the Cuban Tourist Agency and the Cuban Cultural and Educational Development Fund (FONCE). Among them is the Prince Claus Foundation of Holland, a fund that is reputed to be, how shall one say, especially well-endowed. Other "patrons" are Art for the World, a Swiss foundation and the French Association for Artistic Action, a cultural division of the French Foreign Ministry.

With the Cold War well thawed and transformed into a warm embrace with most of the West (excepting the U.S., of course) the Marxist Cuban state and its semi-autonomous cultural agencies like the FONCE and the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Center (the institution that organizes the Biennial) are now forced to actively court the private moneys that make the international art world go around. As with the rest of Cuba and its dollarized tourist economy, so with the Havana Biennial: what were once practices that ran counter to Marxist revolutionary ideals today are resolved into an undialectical, sunny, ad-hoc gloss.

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At night, quoth Ovid, all cats are dark and all the women are beautiful. I am reminded of the author of The Metamorphoses as I traipse down the pitch-black Havana night. Catcalls follow foreign footsteps from momentarily unlocatable balconies. "I likey Englaish," one shouts. "Bailamos, baby?" another queries a few street corners ahead. After adjusting my eyes, I spy a figure backlit against a window waving a pair of drawers, at me, it would seem. I feel like Graham Greene's character Wormold in Our Man in Havana. Greene had Wormold's employee Lopez gently chide him: "I have studied you. You are not Cuban: for you the shape of a girl's bottom is less important than a certain gentleness of behavior." It must be my sparkling personality, I think to myself. That and my irresistible art critic's aura.

On the way to the well-appointed home of Cuban dealer Christina Vives in Havana's Vedado section, my taxi passes a huge reviewing stand for Fidel's speeches, several heroic billboards proclaiming the victory of the revolution and two pharmacies quaintly named "Socialism or Death." Vives' house, besides having a fantastic bar, is hung like a gallery with all of the works on view for sale. Speaking of the well-traveled Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros, I hear Vives describe herself as the artists' exclusive dealer. Arrayed on her walls are prints by the Cuban photographer Korda, the man who snapped the stern image of Che Guevara that launched a thousand products, from English beer cans to Venice Beach acid tabs. It was only several months ago that Korda acquired, it appears, commercial rights to his endlessly reproduced iconic image. Framed and matted prints from his original negatives sell today in Christina Vives' drawing room for a mere $500.

The sheer incongruity of Cuban "private art dealer" Christina Vives is lost on nearly everyone who enjoys her mojitos and rum and Tropicola mixtures. So the Cuban cultural bureaucracy manages to effortlessly elide the competing ideological strains and financial and artistic forces animating the VII Havana Biennial into a segregated but amazingly variegated and spicy stew. The answer to the question raised by the Havana Biennial's graduated embrace of the mainstream art world lies, surely, in the annals of Cold War history and geopolitics. But just as surely the future of the Havana Biennial and that of Third World Biennials in general remains largely hidden or unresolved. The only strategy left for culturally ambitious nations with dwindling resources rests in the momentary importation of rich international collectors and other art-world bigshots. Which, to be sure, fosters cultural and economic dependency: just what every Havana Biennial since 1984 has pledged to avoid.

"Bienal de la Habana 2000," through Jan. 5, 2001, at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wilfredo Lam, Havana, Cuba.