ISSN: 0845-4450 Issue 31
English version of Spanish text
The mediated image defines contemporary language and subjectivity; forms of reproducing and understanding our reality within a context that leads to rupture from already established processes of media creation that are static. The basis of this situation is the hegemony of a culture of mis en scene, the spectacle, or of symbolic layers, which destabilizes values and authority and tends to anarchy; it is transitory and highly transferable.
In a country such as Cuba, this situation is even more complex. It refers to a context unequipped with technological arsenal and less interested in the aesthetic exegesis than in the role and social scope of the image and its construction. Luis Gómez, Lázaro Saavedra, Raúl Cordero, Ernesto Leal, Sandra Ramos, Glenda León, Alexandre Arrechea and Fernando Rodríguez are architects in this Cuban art methodology currently in expansion.
The essay “Contact and mediation: Poetics of the digital in Cuban art ” addresses the material “contact” between reality and new technology as well as the “mediated practices” produced by technology of form and perception. Moreover, the artists discussed overall transgress the limits of the traditional photographic imagery, and the restrictions to separate the different expressions or aspects of new medias. Indeed, they point to the dislocation, contamination and subversion of such regulations and experiment with the superposition, juxtaposition and the embrication of signs and codes, thus contributing to the paradigms of aesthetics and communications in today’s world.
For Luis Gómez, an artist trained in sculpture and installation, the use of new media derives from his understanding of the nature of art itself. For him, because it fundamentally tends toward mental processes, art is inherently virtual and immaterial. The new technologies are good forms of expression for Gomez because they emphasize the immaterial – they thus manifest his own ideas about the nature of art. Also, he believes that Cuban art does not use video as a medium, but rather as a source of ideas or concepts, which is a conscious way of working with illusion.
Works like Ernesto Leal’s usually refer to the issues raised by modernity (in terms of modernization) and the technological gadgets in people’s daily lives –using linguistic, ideological and communicative models propagated by these gadgets. His work is a commentary on our methods of approaching reality and how these have been created by ideologies. Frecuently these ideologies have materialized by arguments which tend to blur our perception of what is real and what is invented.
Lázaro Saavedra is an artist deeply rooted in a hybridization of diverse processes, combining drawing, painting, installation and performance, all of which are connected through the artist’s incursions in digital technology. Saavedra is an artist of broad perspectives and horizons, a conceptual artist who adapts the various presentations of his ideas according to the media that best supports their articulation. But an essential question for him is the social reference and the human being in their context.
The contacts and mediation that Raúl Cordero presents to us, the photographic space, the reproducible, the serial, and the transit or temporal as intrinsically valued qualities in the discourse of technologically mediated practices. Principally, he deconstructs (by omission or elliptic reference) a new consciousness of visual discursivity, the existence of which permeates behavioral and mental space, affirming and requiring differing levels of participation and approach which today denominate digital technologies’ presence and tele-presence. In the end, he creates games of media and linguistic possibilities questioning their own structure and social significance.
Sandra Ramos is interested in making visible imagery representing human subconscious, images making evident an essential connection and contradiction between the material and the immaterial: the material and its impermanence, its ephemeral character. The artist associates this relationship with mental and transitional states, which do not have an apparent beginning or end, but rather remain as intent or pathways that lead to another point. Thus, she tends to represent theses states in images –digital photography and video– related to flight, to immersions, or to limited situations leading to death or to the inability to transcend. Apparently, the target or pursued objective will always be closer to the desire than to the final act of possession.
Through the use of digital photography, installation and video, Glenda León manifests an exercise of simulations, extrapolations, and mimesis of one medium to another, one state to another. In her work, Glenda uses photographic frames, the histrionic representation typical of a performing arts video; the simulated representation of painting in video, of photography as painting, or a performance as video; all of them intertwined. What unifies them is a methodology inclined toward detail, the sublimation of the intrascendent and the value of everyday beauty.
If, years ago, we had been informed that Alexandre Arrechea, ex-member of the group, “Los Carpinteros” (the Carpenters), would become a digital artist, we would not have believed it. As independent artist since 2003, his methodology has been transformed, not precisely in opposition to sculpture, three-dimensional art, or installations but rather through the path to a virtual embodiment that is realized in a new kind of spacialty, temporality, and relation. The object has not been abandoned even when digitally perceived or in the form of video-installation, but what is essential is a new type of experience.
Fernando Rodríguez has always been concerned with the materialization or translation of ideas, particularly when working under explicit instruction by his alter ego, the character of Francisco de la Cal. How to translate an idea from one medium to another furthermore, how to converge opposing discourses and material realities relating to lack of resources and advanced technology, continuing in a pattern that is now realized in the friction, opposition and decentralisation of expressive modalities. His exploration is directed toward the legitimization of digital art that is not perfect in terms of technological resources as an object of “higher” culture.
What is essential in the construction of digital images for all of these artists –some as pioneer of a digital images in Cuba during the last ten years, others working in this field more recently– is the consciousness of new medias as a different perception of the world rather than compartimentalized or even mixed, traditional artistic media. This different perception transcends the multimedia level to become a new perceptive experience of contact with reality, a contiguous state of mind.
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