April 06, 2004
Toirac the Tame and the Tiempos nuevos Series
Sit down, you're rockin' the boat. -- Frank Loesser.
by Jerome du Bois
I bought Holly Block's Art Cuba: The New Generation as background and research for the continuing series on Cuban Art (see sidebar). I'm not going to review it here; I'm just going to tell the story of a particular series of paintings prominently featured in the book: Jose Angel Toirac's "subversive" Tiempos neuvos group. They include Obsession (below), Opium, wherein Quién Tu Sabes shakes hands with the Pope, Marlboro, with the Maximum Leader on a horse, and Eternity, with the Cuban Head of State speechifying. Though famous, and widely reproduced -- and though the artist has been offered $200,000 for them -- these paintings have never been exhibited, they probably never will be, and they never need to be. They are far too valuable as pure propaganda for the major players involved -- Toirac, Cuban artists, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban-art trafficking nexus, all of them talking to each other's pockets. And laughing at the rest of us, just like this:
Obsession, (1996) by Jose Angel Toirac. Oil on canvas. 36 x 24 inches.
A so-called subversive reading of this painting would be that Castro, the paranoid, is obsessed with plots against his life. But it's far more likely that the artist is celebrating, along with Castro, yet another thwarted assassination attempt, many of which Castro seeds himself, just to see who they attract. Just look at the man himself: a picture of health, young and handsome, supremely confident and serene, eyes cast modestly down, with an almost indulgent smile: Oh, my childish people. Not to mention those others.
In Martin Cruz Smith's novel Havana Bay, Arkady Renko searches the office of a former Russian spy in Cuba, "where the computer monitor told a tale that was sad but true:"
American attempts on the life of the Cuban Head of State have included the use of exploding cigars, exploding sea shells, poison pens, poison pills, poison diving suits, poison sugar, poison cigars, midget submarines, snipers, bounties. They have employed Cubans, Cuban-Americans, Venezuelans, Chileans, Angolans, American gangsters. Cuban Security has investigated 600 plots against the President's life. The CIA has tried to introduce hallucinogenic sprays into television studios where the President was broadcasting and depilatory powders to make his beard fall out.
They -- Toirac, Castro -- they're laughing at us.
This painting is the frontispiece for Chapter One in Block's book, filling page 12, facing Gerardo Mosquera's essay "New Cuban Art Y2K." Opium and Marlboro have full pages of their own, later in the book, pages 140 and 141. (Marlboro is innocuous and mannerist. As for Opium, the stale Marx reference has never taken hold in Cuba, whose people embrace as many religions as they do drums. They are psychospiritually polyrhythmic. Even Castro could never fight that dynamic.) But nowhere in the five essays does the reader learn that these are, in effect, forbidden paintings -- I learned this elsewhere -- so to prominently display them in this book is to mislead the reader into thinking that Cuban artists can be edgy and political and critical. When Tonel discusses Toirac, these are the paintings he refers to, but he never mentions that they have always been, effectively, in a closet -- taken out only for their propaganda photographs.
Justin Webster included Toirac two years ago in a Cuban art story for the Boston Globe Magazine:
The series for which Toirac is best known, New Times, daringly places Castro in well-known advertisements: as the Marlboro Man or as an orator set against an image promoting a perfume, Calvin Klein's Eternity. Censorship is an issue. [Sandra] Ramos, for example, says she cannot use Castro's image. Toirac has, but he has not yet let the works leave Cuba. How these are interpreted -- for or against the Castro regime -- is the key to whether Toirac has broken the unwritten rules. In speeches to visitors, he argues that the series is not anti-Castro, but the visitors often assume that he is obliged to say this, and he is naturally cautious about these works reaching a wider public. The striking mix of images from two such separate and antagonistic political cultures -- one, Castro, in a famous revolutionary pose, the other, a luxury goods ad from a thriving capitalist economy -- appeals strongly to US collectors.
One tour guide says Toirac turned down a $200,000 offer for the ad series from a US bidder. According to another, the enthusiasm of visitors can be so fierce that two competed to buy a canvas -- of Castro leading a demonstration -- that was splotched with red paint, despite Toirac's telling them the splotches had been put there by his young son. Later, by e-mail, I ask why he has turned down the offers.
"Because of the characteristics of this series, I have to be patient and wait for the right moment to exhibit it," he writes. "I've decided not to sell it for various reasons. The main one is I haven't received a convincing offer.
"It's not about money, it's about placing it in an important collection, of artistic prestige, so that the day it's exhibited it will be valued as art and not political propaganda."
Toirac says he's using Castro against a backdrop of advertisements to make a universal statement about mass communication and its false objectivity. Like many of his contemporaries, he fears a simplistic interpretation of his work. Though generally seen by visitors as subtly satirizing the Cuban government, New Times can also be read as a succinct expression of the way Cubans, and especially their artists, are waiting for change, caught between two rival systems, of which they are equally wary.
What was that? he [Toirac] has not yet let the works leave Cuba.
Let? Riiight. I don't think Toirac decides the destiny of these works. They have too much light on them, and too much cachet. Castro can afford to be magnanimous, allowing the photographs to carry the message, but keeping the objects themselves confined. Toirac gets it both ways, too, and stays safe as milk. Cuban art boosters like Marilyn Zeitlin of Arizona State University can tell nervous collectors that there are cracks in the regime, they won't be supporting a dictator, see what the artists can do?
Zeitlin discusses another of Toirac's work in the popular exhibition she co-curated, Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island (1998):
He follows this logic in Silencio, silencio. . .escuchemos (139 martíres del MININT)(Silence, silence. . . let’s listen[139 Martyrs of the Ministry of the Interior]). Toirac has worked from Martíres de MININT, a two-volume set of books commemorating a group of officers who died in the line of duty. Forgotten by those who make heroes, they now have their memorial, thanks to Toirac. These are not guerrilla heroes. These are the forgotten or inconsequential. But if they are heroes, Toirac will treat them as such. He has made a series of badges modeled on one genuine one. Each hangs from a ribbon. Each badge has a tiny bell attached to it, the kind of bell used in santería ritual to evoke the orishas. The background from which they hang is painted with Toirac’s hands with text that says, "Silencio, silencio, escuchamos." (Silence, silence, let’s listen.) This quotation from the theme song of a television series about the feats of the MININT.
How sweet. Let's not forget that MININT is like the SS, the Internal Police, of Cuba: MININT "remains the regime's first line of defense against internal subversion and opposition."
What could be more sycophantic than hailing these goons, except painting backdrops for Castro speeches, which KCHO now does?
You want subversive? Let's literally take a page from Felix Gonzales-Torres. In Death By Gun (1990 - ) he created a single large sheet (4 x 3 feet) of photolithographed newsprint in unlimited edition of, say, 464 Americans killed nationwide by guns in one week of a year. Each victim was represented by a frontal head photo and a written description directly underneath. (He ran the edition several times, so the numbers and faces vary.) It was free, in a stack on the floor of the exhibition space.
Now, Toirac, why don't you compile a similar photo gallery of the librarians, journalists (Cuban and international), and other political dissidents now languishing in Castro's prisons while you drink your mojitos and fold the dollars handed you by the other sycophants of the art nexus?
To get you started: twenty-nine journalists right here. Here's the first of at least ten Google pages on "imprisoned journalists cuba." Here's another list, from Amnesty International. And more here, at cubafacts.com. Don't forget the librarians. Cubanet is essential, of course . . . There's at least seventy-five total, so . . .
Oh, but no, no, no -- because think what would happen if you made up such a giant wanted/lost poster and distributed it all over town: crackdown. End of party. No more living in the green world. No more mojitos, no fist-sized roll of Benjamins held with a fat rubber band. Better just stay a sellout like most other Cuban artists, and let the fools who rock the boat suffer.