The list syndrome is a vice contemporary culture is suffering, determined to canonize, exclude and finally trivialize a scale of values which rarely converge work and career, autonomy and public relations, talent, and strategic parasitism. Simply visit the website of the upcoming XII Biennial to find another list: the invited Cuban artists. This list is exposed to last minute changes, we decided to add endnotes and, somehow, get flake as an exercise of discretion in order to vindicate the contradictory discomfort divergence.
Esterio Segura and Guillermo Ramirez Malberti represent the cautious promotion of the nineties. While Ramirez Malberti develops a leisurely experience at the commercial level and humble at theme-idea level, Esterio tends to be instituted as “illustrated rascal ̋ using the conceptual skill to ensure the financial status of their production.
Occidente tropical (Factoría Habana, February-April 2015) potentiated the office of retro-nostalgic with art sculptural credentials in the blockbuster film Fresa y chocolate (1993). Moral: living from stories is not the same as reinventing a fable, less digestible associated with taboos and exploited until populist consensus.
Rodolfo Peraza is called belonging to “the emerging diaspora ̋. His presence brings to mind the absence of Ernesto Oroza, who mobilizes an imaginary attuned to the curatorial pattern ranging between idea and experience as a social laboratory. Moreover, why would we rule out the former member of the mobile Ordo Amoris Cabinet Diango Hernandez? Another resident outside Cuba that could be asked is Rafael Domenech, young man who showed claws Ya se leer (Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam/Galería de la Biblioteca Rubén Martínez Villena, April-May 2011).
The alarming institutional favoritism enjoyed by Felipe Dulzaides, who travels from the slightest gesture to installative receptive stark with little fortune, if we discard some benevolent note. But this peripheral slip is not important. Even the Venice Arsenale or Fridericianum of Kassel’s Documenta would elevate low intensity pyrotechnics. Doris Salcedo’s crack-scar or Olafur Eliasson’s artificial sun at the Tate Modern in London become miracles of the mainstream culture. Being an artist is not just climb mountains. Much less so when it comes to urban interim reliefs mounds.
An engaging challenge will debutants in the official list: Yornel Martínez, José Fidel García, Levi Orta, Reinier Nande, Luis Enrique López Chávez, Josuhe Pagliery, Rafael Villares, José Eduardo Yaque, Mauricio Abad, Elizabet Cerviño, 3stado Sólido, Omar Estrada, Ariel Candelario Luaces y Néstor Siré. Three years ago, during the Biennal Eleveth edition (2012), the new figures disappointed. The “new chosen” should sort out the monumental make-up, low tech hermetisms, neopovera re-fried, relational fuss or procedural means lacking purpose if they are to do justice.
