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Lupe at the Mic

After January 1959, Havana, Cuba, in Tatlin’s Whisper #6

There was the usual milling around, on the basis of sketchy information. A stage was set up in the patio of a cultural center in the old part of the city—the restored, charming part full of restaurants and shops, the part where power blackouts and water shortages are rare and where crime is minimal because of all the police. Strong lights hit a podium on the stage in the darkening patio; a huge golden curtain hung behind it. A phalanx of big TV cameras, national and international press amid the noisy crowd—by now hundreds of people.

The crowd is pretty mixed. Since the performance is part of the Havana biennial, pretty much all the foreigners are somehow connected to the arts (collectors, curators, artists, etc.), but the Cubans come from a broader slice of the population. After a long while there’s a little flurry of excitement: A cardboard box of something is brought out, and an announcement is made about people taking something from it. The box is filled with several hundred disposable cameras, and people push over to grab them, passing them along from hand to hand. The space has gotten even more crowded and noisy and expectant.

I don’t remember exactly how it started, but someone must have explained that anyone was welcome to take the stage and speak into the microphone for a minute. Maybe they had been there before, but it was then that I noticed a couple of kids in army fatigues holding a dove. After not too long things got going, and in a ragged and stop-start kind of way people went up and spoke: some of them shouting; a few fists raised in the air; some cries and cheers from the crowd; some confusion about what had been said, since the sound quality was bad; some defiance; some awkward declarations; some dead air; some confessions (“I’ve never felt more free”; “I am afraid”). Each time, the dove was put on the speaker’s shoulder.¹ Usually it flapped around in the speaker’s hair or flew off; each time, the guards would catch it and put it back. The performance had started late but ended punctually after exactly an hour, when the artist, the last to speak, said, “Thanks to the Cubans.”

I was standing with a few friends, and over the course of the hour our disagreement about what was happening got stronger, to the point that one of us was furious, one exhilarated, and the other two of us deeply conflicted (of course). The performance was aimed at both romantics and cynics, and it had caught each of us at that edge.

What Happened (First Pass)

Right at the beginning a woman takes the mic and starts to cry. It takes most of the minute she’s up there for people to quiet down, and even then there’s still a lot of hubbub. She leaves without saying a word, still shaking with sobs. Some people recognize her because she had been an important teacher and mentor until she left the country years ago, along with a lot of others.

Yoani Sánchez is next. She goes up right after Lupe leaves, and the shift in tone is almost violent: There’s no interval for the emotion to settle. Now it’s a protest rally, and the atmosphere is emphatic. Yoani reads a short speech: “Cuba is an island surrounded by the sea, and it is also an island surrounded by censorship,” she begins. “Some cracks are opening in the wall of control…. We are still only a few bloggers, our sites highlight the awakening of public opinion.” The sound system is not great, and there’s a lot of reverb, which not only makes it hard to understand but also creates the sense of being in a giant space, an arena instead of a relatively intimate patio. That discrepancy piles onto the latent one—the sense of things just generally being askew, not adding up right. What does register succinctly is that this is a big deal, partly because Yoani is probably the most visible and celebrated dissident on the island, but mostly because this just doesn’t happen in Cuba.

The next statement is also prepared, as is the next: All three of them speak in the same fluent cadence of declaiming, of oracular truths, of nailing lies. All three (all bloggers) are intent on their text, oblivious to the flapping of the bird’s wings, which is amusing to everyone else because it adds an element of the ridiculous.

Another woman takes the mic and speaks “en contra,” the anger rising in her voice. People finally settle down, and in the quiet the reverb completely fills the space. A smattering of whoops and applause, as with the others, and then the din starts right back up.

With the exception of the bloggers and a couple of others, the people who are speaking seem unsure of themselves up onstage. Sometimes the awkwardness lands lightly, and sometimes not. There are a few flashes of the operatic oratory that’s been a staple of the island’s public space since that day in 1959 when another dove had landed on another speaker’s shoulder. A young guy bounds onto the stage after the longest of several uneasy pauses, and as he exhorts people to speak up he gestures in a classic Fidel-esque kind of way, his hand slicing up and down with a pointed finger. It’s not evidently a parody. After him a skinny teenager blabs on about doves, and their meat, and feathers—this time an unmistakable send-up of the Commandante. Rumor had it that he was trying to impress a girl.

The politics are all over the place. Someone talks about hunger strikers in Cuban prisons. Someone with bad Spanish pumps his fist in the air and shouts old slogans to the slightly embarrassed crowd. A woman declares that “millions of children are starving. None of them Cuban!” One guy pleads—addressing the authorities this time, not the assembled crowd—that the performance not be banished from the national media (it was). Eugenio Valdés, a respected curator and critic (also living abroad) goes up and refers to an infamous meeting in the early years between Fidel and intellectuals. “I only know that I am afraid,” the great writer Virgilio Piñera is said to have remarked on that occasion. “Me too,” says Eugenio, and there’s a small grace note as he walks away. There are some soapboxers, denouncing everything from a recent home raid by State Security, to the unavailability of biennial catalogues for Cubans (there are plenty for foreigners), to violence against women in Ciudad Juárez. The level of polemic rises and falls. A woman screams into the mic. When someone asks for a minute of silence, “for ourselves,” it’s the first and only time that the room’s energy focuses.

People are constantly gabbing and joking, and sometimes they look amused by what’s being said or done onstage—even if it’s very self-serious. They’re behaving like an audience, in other words, rather than a multitude, enjoying the performance as performance more than getting whipped up by it. It’s only when there’s a rallying shout from someone near the end that you realize the absence of things like that—no chanting in unison, no sense of the crowd organizing itself into a voice. There’s no big catharsis, no major poetic moment, just a lot of stabs in various directions.

It’s a strange kind of narrative space, never accumulating energy or building in some dialectical kind of way. The long stretches of dead air never find a rhythm, and the reactions to each speaker pass quickly. The waiting puts pressure on whatever happens next. Time tends to draw out. It’s a meandering and unsettling kind of thing, impossible to discern a shape from within it, so whatever is around the edges takes on weight: the jostling and chatting, the constant flashes (meant to make people feel more important), the booming sound and difficulty of hearing, the flapping bird. At times it feels like the whole thing might just drag to a halt, nobody doing anything and nobody knowing if that would be the end of it or if it was a waiting game, where as long as people stuck around it would keep going. So Tania at least gave it a shape by giving it an end. It did seem odd that she thanked the Cubans specifically.

What happened that evening read differently to different people. An open mic and people demanding freedom was just extraordinary in the Cuban context, even though it was also something closer to political kitsch. It’s possible that the discrepancy owed a lot to the incompatibility of the various historical memories in the crowd. Judging from reactions at the time, the awkward and self-conscious declarations were moving for some but depressing evidence for others: “nothing more than the reflection, and maybe the least of the consequences, of the constant ‘nobodyizing’ [ninguneo] that we’ve been subjected to for so many years,” as one guy put it. “Fleeting phrases, choked verbs in which, with some exceptions, you could see the thick and viscous patina of fear.”² Depending on whom you asked, what happened was the germ of awakening defiance, the cynical maneuvering of regime strategists, evidence that “freedom” means the same thing everywhere, and, equally, evidence that a concept of freedom transported from one place to another will turn into a performance rather than a realization of itself. The performance did once again ratify Cuba as an incubator of radical contemporary art, and it convinced some reporters that change was definitely coming on the island. It was proof, for others, that the regime always gets the last laugh.

The huge curtain made everything look important. The incandescent yardage stretching up over the speakers’ heads, the symmetrical tableau, the cameras, the lights facing one way at the stage and the other to catch the crowd, all lifted the patio and the hour into an iconic frame. The people were dwarfed by history and larger than life. Still, it all unfolded in a real time full of stutters, gaps, and miscues: The instantly recognizable image was dragged to the brink of itself by that buzzing, distracting mirror. There was tension between the naturalism suggested by the artist yielding control and the performance’s extreme artifice—what was offered was not in any sense normal. All this made it charged and unsettling, and the obvious, looming question—would the police come?—made it jittery too.

There was wonderment that such a thing was allowed, and the first part of the answer why is that there were just too many foreigners for anything serious to go down. Anyhow, in Cuba, art—as the event made absolutely plain—is given a lot more latitude than other kinds of expression, at least as long as it’s somehow useful to the government’s overall objectives (an “aesthetics of foreign policy,” Laura Kipnis called it).³ There are probably other reasons, like that it could provide catharsis in the paralyzing, Brechtian sense, and some even speculated that the performance gave the regime an excellent opportunity to take the temperature of general discontent, “recalculate their methods, and more.”⁴

Another part of the answer has to do with the artist’s status: She had to be firmly inside and outside at the same time, or she could never have pulled it off. Without her international reputation built around confrontational “political” work she’d be just another troublemaker, and the performance at the mic would have had to be read strictly within the Cuban context. But if the art world calls her “daring” and “important,” then that makes it inconvenient for the Cuban authorities to call her counterrevolutionary. A couple of things are going on here. First, the relatively level playing field puts us more in the realm of constraint than brute force, and, second, they were playing from different sources of strength. Yoani’s fatal flaw was to operate from the same system, and with the same language, as the regime, but the artist brought in an external source of leverage and deployed a compensatory form of power. She changed the price of responding to the provocation.

But anyhow, the piece took place as much offstage as on. As usual in Cuba, it had to be approved before it could be allowed and described and explained in detail in order to be considered. Though they’re the work’s hidden aspect, those negotiations were quite possibly the most artfully elaborated elements of the whole piece. By her own account, the artist confessed her worries in the course of those exchanges, but she gave them such an anodyne face that the image of what might go wrong—either total silence or joking around—didn’t sound all that bad. The ostensible framework for the performance was a series called Tatlin’s Whisper, which consists of restaging media images that have gone stale from over-familiarity. (Earlier pieces included herding people around a museum lobby with mounted police and a bomb-making workshop.) It’s hard to believe that officials could have been ingenuous enough to buy the idea that, in restaging Fidel’s early triumph—sort of—the artist was intent on giving the audience a “direct experience” of that historic moment, one that they’d “understand and that [would] belong to them because they have lived it.”⁵ It’s hard to believe that they might have fallen for her misdirections, but trying to divine what any of the players may have really had in mind is a fool’s errand, and the main point is probably just that the various parties saw strategic convergences in the scenario, if not converging interests.

What We Were Arguing About

By splitting off an hour from the usual state of things, the performance made the lack of free speech in Cuba palpable: It made truth distinguishable from power. This didn’t really resolve anything in a large or empirical sense, because it did nothing to alter the base condition of an entire society being silenced. It’s a good (and painful) question whether we can expect art really to do anything about that, and the discrepant reactions to the performance had mostly to do with how actively and directly anyone thought that art can or should try to change the world.

In any case, the hour was extraordinary and historic, and it happened because it was art; that is, it made a space that would only be allowed to exist in art. It unsealed art’s relatively permissive space and made it accessible to people who were normally at the bottom rungs of privilege. (From the bloggers’ perspective, I suspect that the “artness” of the occasion was secondary at best, hence Yoani’s statement the next day that “it was an artistic action, but there was no game in the declarations we made. Everyone was very serious.”)⁶ It was a masterful deployment of art’s privileged status, but nonetheless it was definitively art, and that’s why, even afterward, official retaliations were minimal. Bruguera’s ending the piece after an hour was the final feint: It really was (just) art, that seemed to say. It would not be allowed to become something outside the boundaries that had been announced; it would not be allowed to continue until it found its own natural end.

Part of the work’s punch came from the fact that, beyond sharing her leverage, Bruguera flaunted it. It was a tricky balancing act: Without identifying with either of two irreconcilable parties, she acted as both. This flew in the face of all those ideas about artistic ethics that insist on rejecting and opposing the apparatus in order to remain outside, uncoopted, and uncorrupted. It also played against the rules of the game of revolutionary compliance, for obvious reasons. Bruguera’s personal capital has both cultural and political valence, it works in both the art world and in Cuban circles of power, and each part has been built up by virtue of the other. The toughness of that double origin kept the work from lapsing into the romantic melancholy of so much political art and steered it clear of romantic protagonism. But the failure of the performance in rhetorical terms (the bulk of what was said was just too null, in either political or poetic terms) was the orphan space where it landed—not exactly art, not exactly insurrection. Although the set had pointed in a more imperial direction, what played out on it was something more like a real—as opposed to ideal—political subject: impeded and constrained, implicated in all kinds of ways, struggling for words and struggling with the fact of being made public. Rancière has been unsympathetic on the question: “Those who want to isolate [art] from politics,” he says, “are somewhat beside the point, but those who want it to fulfill its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.”⁷

Another thing we were disagreeing about was spectacle. There have been all kinds of fantastic capacities imputed to theater: It’s “an assembly where the people become aware of their situation and discuss their own interests,” as per Brecht, or “the ceremony where the community is given possession of its own energies” (Artaud).⁸ Although those two doctrines differ in important ways, they agree on the problem of spectacle, and while the argument I’ve been sketching about Bruguera’s piece fits pretty well with those doctrines in terms of what happens to those who are assembled in a work, it’s undeniable that her performance was intentionally and unapologetically spectacular.

Spectacle is bad because it’s externality and separation (Debord), which is apparently antithetical to the connection and agency (the “infused spectator”)⁹ that’s at the heart of this whole argument. But Bruguera put it at the center of the work and depended on it for fuel. (In fact, she built a spectacle around the spectacle of Yoani—lionized around the world, read by millions every month and denounced by others for her darling, superstar status.)¹⁰ If spectacle is deception, then it’s worth remembering that performance and deceit are basic to Cuban life. The artist embraced spectacle as an inevitable part of the scenario and let the full range of contradiction be visible and operative: the choral and riven social body, the trace elements of utopianism and the “choked verbs” of stunted discourse, the farce of historical iconicity and the continuing force of it, the vainglorious impulse to get up on stage, and so forth. In other words, rejecting the equivalence of externality and separation, playing on the very fact of externality—the alienating rank of He at the podium—and owning it. Spectacle condones distance, but distance is the normal condition of communication. People know how to negotiate it, especially when they’re subjected to it in the extreme form that is the Cuban political arena, and that night in the patio they took it up with a vengeance. Spectacle gave the performance a heavier charge than a more earnest staging would have managed.

The spectacle was theatrical and a little silly and pompous, too, but it was astonishing, and all of that emboldened a couple dozen neophytes. Strangely, it had a less serendipitous effect on the bloggers who were, indeed, “very serious” and came off as strident. This was ironic, since the voice of their blogs is sarcastic, witty, and most of all plain, and that’s why Yoani is called the voice of her generation. That voice, which has been so wildly influential exactly for its lack of cant, turned fulsome on the podium: Others “found” a voice, but she lost one.

For her part, Bruguera has a particular relation to the question since her career, synchronous with the rise of biennials and megashows, has been mostly staged within those premier showcases. There has likely been a complicated back and forth between their demands of splashiness and her tendency to create conflicts that read clearly at a distance. It is easier to argue, at that focal length, on behalf of the sudden and the surprise and less necessary to quibble over what actually gets said or how well the anger gets husbanded into force. Maybe that’s what to make of the melodramatic scenarios, of how close the dead-seriousness comes to farce—maybe the best political weapon that an artist has. The problem with all this might just be that farce, unlike more supple or forgiving narrative forms, depends on momentum—something that couldn’t develop that night in the patio because none of us (and here I’m projecting) could quite figure out what the stakes really were.

A Hypothesis about Why Work Like This Feels So Uncomfortable

Recent works—the mic, the horses, taunting an audience in Bogotá with lines of cocaine—come at a time when Bruguera has built up enough leverage to be strategic, to exercise strategic maneuvers. Maybe this is one reason they can feel so iffy, because they’re her building power and testing it, while arts discourse in general is bending over backward in favor of a tactical approach.

These days in art it’s all about tactics. Tactics are how guerrillas fight; they’re intrinsically inventive and unorthodox. Tactics are for people unencumbered by a home base they have to protect, and art likes them because they’re associated with wit: Tactical trickery is a witty handling of weakness. Being tactical is a way to live in ripple effects of refusal. It’s agile and observant and bold; it hands you surprises, “cracks and lucky hits in the framework of a system.”¹¹ Power, meanwhile, plans, and the strategic plods along with its force in heavy tow. It seems like a pretty risky artistic strategy to take on the role of power, to be willing to be associated with it in political and moral terms. Maybe it’s just because Bruguera grew up with the experience of an absolute form of power, but it seems to me that she’s not very romantic in her view about the struggle against it. At least, not romantic in the ways that contemporary art has tended to be, with its resort to micropolitics and convivial relations. Artists rarely align with power, and when they do it’s generally in the form of money, but Bruguera designs situations where she wields control, even manipulation, and she does that unapologetically and, apparently, unreservedly. Tactics are opportunistic, non- or extrainstitutional, but Bruguera’s performance at the mic waded deep into the negotiated, compromised territory of the most intransigent institution, the place where the state’s performance is most artfully choreographed.

Strategies privilege spatial relationships. This has to do with their function of claiming their “own” place and having the power to defend it. This tends to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones,¹² which sounds right in relation to the particular not-adding-up quality of the stint at the mic or the horses in the lobby, for example. The gist is that the spatial setup comprises the work rather than any dramatic unfolding in how the crowd navigates the situation. And hence perhaps the artist’s odd description of her own role, disavowing direction: “My work is a participatory work, I only extend the invitation.”¹³ In any case, the heavy tableau-like condition also has implications for what kind of afterlife the performances have: They’re easily fixed, whether in memory or recorded image, and the reduction actually seems to amplify the work. It survives stunningly well as afterimage.

Maybe we could also claim that tactics have a proclivity for the emotional, and that also gets sidelined in Bruguera’s role with the mic. Dissidence is a fiery game, and its currency comes out of passion, but her strategy is unfathomability. (“I only extend the invitation.”) She claims the advantage of enigma; she reveals practically nothing and speaks in a flat-footed way that sounds like the opposite of intrigue. It’s the formless, in some military thinking, who have the better chance of emerging intact.¹⁴ She stakes a claim of ethics and proceeds in cunning, defying the usual location of the ethical in the visible, as though ethics without cunning is like knowing how to sow but not to reap. Her dispassion is discipline, attentive to the five martial errors enumerated millennia ago: to be too willing to die, too eager to live, too quick to anger, too puritanical, or too sentimental.¹⁵

And then let’s add this: Bruguera adopts the strategic plane but seems to want her audience to reply tactically: In that sense, they would be “citizens.” But here’s a conundrum, because Being Citizens can consist in anything at all that they decide to do or say—the specifics don’t matter. I can accept the idea that she adopts the position of power in order to deploy it as an artistic field, but in actual situations power is not OK with failing to elicit the reactions it seeks or to exercise the control it exerts. So she is using the methods of power but amputating them from the controlling logics that would normally give rise to their use in the first place. I’m not sure what this gives us: Does the abdication of control over the ends effectively annul it as a real situation? Are the relations that are set up authentically political if they’re so confected? Can there be any real politics in it?

I guess the answer depends on whom you ask. It’s certainly true that politics has a pronounced theatrical aspect, and this is especially the case in Cuba. For some, maybe holdouts from a time when the lines were more clearly drawn, it’s troubling that the emancipatory fiction of the open mic modeled but didn’t actually deliver. But on the other hand, maybe the problem for politics these days is not to contradict appearances but rather to confirm them, to deprive them of their palliative illusions. Another way to ask about politics might be in relation to subjectivity. Presumably, the idea was that by getting up and speaking out people would experience some enhanced independence or autonomy—the classic prerequisite for political action. Was that the dividend paid out by the uneasiness that the performance gave rise to? Or was that old idea of a collective consciousness just refurbished, leaving the exhausted ideas of consensus—and their implicit claims to ethics—undisturbed? This is probably why Lupe was key, but I’ll get back to that later.

Back to spectacle for a moment. The spectacle of the performance, the spectacle of Yoani, struck some people as just too quick to satisfy Western expectations of “the dissident,” too satisfied with the black-and-white fables (“free speech,” for one) that attract foreign sympathies. In this version the catharsis is secondhand, the “second tear” that kitsch sheds as it watches itself being moved. This would apply no less to novice Cubans than to jaded international culturati. But the even queasier question is about aftermath.

What Happened (Round Two)

The things we were arguing about had to do with the experience we’d had that night, but now we have to talk separately about the places where the performance took root afterward, since they totally eclipsed the event. The work went viral, and within a couple of days there were videos, wire stories, blogs, interviews, and rumors, all circulating urgently. Very quickly, it didn’t matter what had been said or by whom or whether it counted as politics: What mattered was the bare fact of the mic and its apocryphal revolt.

The first wave was ecstatic. The performance was global news, generally running under headlines about things like “the winds of freedom.”¹⁶ “The crowd looked on aghast and exhilarated,” the Independent gushed in London. “The government branded those involved as ‘dissidents.’ Too late: Havana had tasted free speech and it was electrifying to watch.”¹⁷ A video excerpt on YouTube was getting hundreds of hits as soon as it went live. Miami was all over it. Yoani wrote about it (her blog is carried in translation by the Huffington Post), and lots of other people did too. The performance’s strong signs had a short lifespan, but they proliferated afterward as snippets, tall tales, and rumors—weaker, but dispersing easily and profusely. That kind of mass production of weak signs is exactly the kind of political ferment that you get at the intersection of a networked age and a clandestine society.

The next wave came from officials, and it was harder to figure. A couple of days after the event the organizing committee of the biennial denounced the “mediocre political take-over of an artwork” by people “far from culture” (“professional dissidents … paid to manipulate public opinion, lie, censure, mutilate and systematically limit the freedom of speech and thought”—all of which are crimes in Cuba). But like all such communiqués the wording was precise, and while it read like a Stalinist screed it was also careful not to implicate the artist. A couple of days later the Cuban minister of culture told the leftist Mexican newspaper La Jornada that Bruguera was an exemplar of revolutionary commitment.¹⁸ Many people took note of the apparent anomaly, and speculation was rampant: The artist won, but she won ugly, saddled with all that approbation.

The performance was “consummated,” according to various perspectives, in its aftermath.¹⁹ Yoani called the biennial committee’s statement the work’s completion, and others said it was the minister’s comments that gave it a real close. Either way, the idea was that things should definitely not be taken at face value. Meanwhile, the business of “saving” Bruguera’s position of apertura (“rescuing her in the corral of positive critics”)²⁰ required the negation of Yoani (“that famous blogger muchacha,” Minister Prieto had called her), since conquer must proceed from divide: The next best thing to winning outright is to break the enemy’s alliances.

Another possibly helpful side note: This all happened right after what had been maybe the most shocking and unnerving among the many shocking and unnerving political purges that had happened since 1959. Just a couple of weeks earlier, and following some nasty remarks by the Commandante about the “honey of power” and the corruption of others, two of the highest-ranking members of the Central Committee had suddenly resigned from all their various state and party positions, with practically no explanation.²¹ Likely, the culture minister had not yet forgotten just exactly how unstable anybody’s position really was. Sure, in one direction he was telling the Latin American Left that Cuba was open to discussion (and sure enough, there were comments in response talking about the singular dignity of the Cuban project despite, of course, the imperialist aggressions),²² and, in the other direction, he was telling the party that things were under control. The first line was the official one, and there’s a good chance that the second one was pure survival. Prieto is no novice, and he speaks the language of “Yes, but …” to perfection: Yes, he supports the “critical spirit” of young artists, but it’s not anything different from the ministry’s own “analysis,” and they’re all together in the business of “defending the utopia.” Yes, the artists are “reflecting on problems,” and so is the ministry, but the problems are basically ones of bureaucracy and inefficiency—which might surprise those critical spirits who tend to focus more on things like the lack of democracy. His job is to adulterate the plural message of the work and collapse it into a universe of For or Against the revolution—exactly the terms that Fidel had set up in 1961. Back, for a moment, to the issue of using power. Of course the minister is using the artist, but the question was whether she had used him equally well, whether she had jangled the dynamic between the two halves of Machiavelli’s old centaur—force and consent.

So, the net effect flies in all directions. The postpartum denunciations of Yoani “completed” the work of Tania because they exposed the “liberalizing discourse” as a lie,²³ and meanwhile the whole episode remained invisible in the Cuban media, even though the vice minister of culture was there and even though national TV recorded the whole thing.²⁴ The flamboyant gesture embarrassed the regime and made it look good. It made Tania look daring and valiant and like she has way too much latitude with the powers that be (“They’ve treated me with kid gloves … maybe too well”). She makes a space that can be claimed by angry, dissident Cubans and by the minister of culture. We might be dealing here with the point at which polysemy crosses over into fatal ambiguity, or it might just be that that was all that was possible. (Or maybe the point is that a tiny step counts because it’s a step. To gauge the scale of possibility, Bruguera’s words are chilling: “My work is to push the institutional limits and theirs is to preserve them, and in this ‘dance’ we all know what we’re doing and that the music will stop…. [But] the dialogue has been strictly with the directors of the biennial and the Ministry of Culture, and not with other political organs, and that’s an important step; I haven’t been forced to sign anything.”)²⁵

In Reverse (Lupe Crying at the Mic)

The performance’s fate was that it ran in reverse. It climaxed before it got going, and then it had to keep reaching for a thread. It was the opposite of what a rally is supposed to be, in other words, which would build to an emotional crescendo that convinced people about the truth. Nor was it like that earnest vein of works yearning toward dialogue or reconciliation: It was set up for sharply punctuated, individual utterances—likely unconnected from one to the next, likely unsatisfying in terms of any of speech’s jobs other than the one of catharsis. Its register was loss more than defiance because precisely in the act of defiance it found debility. Without even meaning to, the performance reversed and annulled the forward obsession of the horizon machine. It refused to resolve anything. The dialectic, as Adorno once said, swings to a standstill.²⁶

A lot of how an artwork works has to do with voice, and we usually want that voice to allow us some intimacy with it; with Bruguera, we get the opposite. Another part is structure, and we usually want that structure to find its way to an end, but Tania wants a hung jury. Another part is proportion, how it fits into the scale of the world or our experience, and Tania tends, more and more, to be in some bigger or louder or angrier register than we are probably expecting. And then there is perspective. Cause related, convinced, and vehement, Tania’s work never seems to split the difference with irony or skepticism.

Catastrophe is the backdrop and the currency. In Beckett’s play of that name, the eponymous event that is the sole subject of the play within the play is finally made present by way of minuscule scenographic adjustments: Pajamas are rolled to the knee, clawed hands are clasped, and so on. Tiny indicators adding up to a vague sense of malevolence. Tania, working some decades further into the disaster, turns up the volume and creates a fracas to confront that catastrophic state of inertia. One is testament to the annihilation of the heroic bourgeois subject, and the other engenders something along the lines of his return or, at least, his replacement.

It was interesting that the more articulate ones in the crowd—and they were there—didn’t take up the offer. It would have been a better rally if they had. Maybe that was because of how schematic the idea seemed—that the fact of the mic signaled anything like real freedom to speak or that the work’s tiny oasis represented any kind of real political space: that being free to speak wasn’t the same as being heard. The deliberately pictorial quality of the mise en scene accentuated this. This was a failure, at least on some level: Rosa Luxemburg notwithstanding, the most revolutionary deed probably is not simply to state things as they are. The performance set out to refuse an annulled political condition and wound up performing it instead.

But what really happened? Sure, “free speech” is mostly an alibi anywhere, concocted in the service of mostly dishonest ends, but, even so, it’s different in a police state. I could argue that it mattered because it was at least something, even if not much, and there would be some truth to that. I could insist that, although the words didn’t add up to much of anything, in any case that night the illusion of total control took a hit. Weakness was made visible, and something unknown was—almost—imaginable. The performance connected to history and put art back into a historical scale, a historical ambition. But like repetition generally does, while the performance destabilized the original podium, it also endorsed its undertow, and arguing for the artwork’s parenthesis of good runs the risk of sidestepping the substantial dilemmas that it set into motion. The performance in the patio was full of painful contradictions, and that was Step 1. And then Step 2, the afterimage, which framed the performance as refusal, traded the off-balance feeling and reduced the emotional room to maneuver because it settled the question of what it was that had happened. Seen in the frame-within-the-frame-within-the-frame, the troubling ambiguities—that sketchy participation, that centrifugal sociality, those unclear edges—stopped making you anxious for things to add up. And then, the final step. The piece begins with the unbearable charge of Lupe’s feeling and ends a year or so later when it’s restaged in a suburban museum north of Manhattan. The symbiotic-neurotic relation between originals and copies stalls out, leaving behind the stray and frightening intensity of the upsetting and implicating moments in the patio.

The performance in the patio ran in reverse. It began fallen, from the catastrophic condition of Cuban society and from the slack commitments of Cuban art. It wasn’t really unpredictable what people would do that night, and the only real question was how far they would go. And Lupe, who couldn’t go anywhere once she got up there, nonetheless went the furthest. It was Lupe who nailed it when, on the brink, she opted out of the language of the patio. Lupe at the mic, crying in the name of nostalgia, regret, frustration, impotence, confusion, anger, and lots more besides. It was because of Lupe, wrenched apart in an artwork’s truce between miserabilism and triumphalism, that I couldn’t get that night out of my head.

Postscript

I wrote this text in July 2010. Since Bruguera’s attempted reprise of this performance in December 2014, I have debated whether to expand or revise, in light of those subsequent events. What follow here are thoughts about that return to the third power.

The 2014 iteration was to have staged an open mic in the middle of Havana’s Revolution Square, the regime’s central space of symbolic power and authority. As was copiously covered in both the arts press and in mass media at the time (copiously, that is, in many places, except Cuba), the performance was shut down before it began, and the artist was arrested and then detained on the island for a few months. She became a cause célèbre.

That iteration, like the earlier one, gave rise to a fractious debate between supporters and detractors. What was notable, though, that next time around, was the locational split—namely, the virtual silence on the part of artists in Havana—their lack of support. The only one to speak out, and critically at that, was Lázaro Saavedra, who was promptly attacked—by figures outside the island. Some observers have attributed that silence to fear and/or self-interest on the part of Cuban artists, but I question the sweeping condemnation of that position. And so, questions about things like what comprises “useful art,” in political terms or about who is the actual audience for the work again come into focus.

Sequelae of that 2014 return included the establishment of the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt and then Bruguera’s call to fellow Cubans to offer themselves as candidates for political office when President Raúl Castro stepped down in 2018.

At base, Bruguera’s performance was about the sea change that’s been going on for quite a while in Cuba, in which the national focus has been shifting from a dream of social ethics to a savage capitalism that dreams in the private confines of property. In a recent interview, she had this to say in response to the perennial question about what art can really do:

I think art, because it’s art, and because it’s about what you feel and it’s about things that are not put into words, it’s about what is happening, the fluid of life, things we don’t understand and want to get at and to know what it’s about, gives you a space and a leverage to talk about things other people don’t feel they have the language to speak, or are afraid to talk about, because in other contexts it is forbidden.²⁷

Art, in other words, is that bridging space that speaks about, acts upon, and moves into intelligibility that which we need to understand.

In the case of Cuba, “politics” is a particularly brutal description of failure. It is tempting to hope that this trail of returns just might have some real impact in this extremely tricky and fraught moment. That the repercussions of the performance, in both its iterations, catalyzed response only from the quarters that it did, however, leaves that as an open question.