Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture Vol 5, No 1 “Agency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu Architectural Ruins and Urban Imaginaries Carlos Garaicoa’s Images of Havana Jodi Kovach Abstract Contemporary Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa juxtaposes photographic images of Havana’s architectural ruins with timidly articulated drawings that trace the outlines of the dilapidated buildings in empty urbanscapes. Each of these fragile drawings, often composed of de licate threads adhered to a photograph of a site after demolition, serves as a vestige of the sagging structure that the artist photographed prior to destruction. The dialogue that emerges from these photograph/drawing diptychs implies the unmooring of the radical utopian underpinnings of revolutionary ideology that persisted in the policies of Cuba’s Período especial (Special Period) of the 1990s, and suggests a more complicated narrative of Cuba’s modernity, in which the ambiguous drawings—which could indicate construction plans or function as mnemonic images—represent empty promises of economic growth that must negotiate the real socio-economic crises of the present. This article proposes that Garaicoa’s critique of the goals and outcomes of the Special Period through Havana’s ruins su ggests a new articulation of the baroque expression— one that calls to mind the anti -authoritative strategies of twentieth-century Neo-Baroque literature and criticism. The artist historically grounds the legacy of the Cuban Revolution’s modernizing project in the country’s real economic decline in the post-Soviet era, but he also takes this approach to representing cities beyond Cuba’s borders, thereby posing broader questions about the architectural symbolism of the 21st-century city in the ideological construction of modern globalizing society. About the Author Dr. Jodi Kovach is the Curator of Academic Programs at the Gund Gallery, Kenyon College. Her scholarship focuses on contemporary Latin American art, specifically in the Mexican context. She has also taught art and design history, and has contributed to multiple exhibition catalogues, including Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009), The Geometry of Hope: Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas and Grey Gallery, NYU, 2007), Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany (Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Washington University, 2007), and Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’s Health in Contemporary Art (Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Washington University, 2005). http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 Contemporary Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa takes the architectural ruins of Havana as a point of departure for imagining new urban landscapes in Cuba’s post-Soviet era. For example, his photograph/drawing diptych, El sueño de algunas ciudades es llegar a convertirse en otras (The Dream of Some Cities is to Become Another) (2001), shows pedestrians passing through a narrow city street in the heart of Havana’s historic district, unencumbered by abandoned sewage trenches and rubble scattered through the passageway (fig. 1). They seem unconscious of the crumbling buildings that are literally collapsing around them—as if they are acquiescent to time’s degenerative process, which has not only taken form in the architecture , but has also shaped their everyday existence.1 This atrophic ethos conveyed through the photograph has a strange, insidious vitality as nature overtakes the remaining fragments of architecture, creating a mass of wooden beams that look more like malignant outgrowths of the languishing buildings than structural supports. In his photograph of the site, Garaicoa highlights this corrosive dynamic by framing the image to focus on a makeshift arch of wooden scaffolding that braces the sagging structure against the building directly across from it in a desperate attempt to salvage the remains of the drooping edifice. Ironically, he then pairs this photograph with a small pencil sketch of the same scene in which he tamed the ungainly architectural forms by straightening lines and smoothing surfaces, by replacing the wooden buttresses with delicate bridges connecting the buildings, and by drawing a set of stairs leading up to an entryway in place of the beams that prop up the façade. El sueño de algunas ciudades es llegar a convertirse en otras highlights the conceptual underpinnings of a series of photographs for which Garaicoa used the deteriorating sectors of Havana as a touchstone in his practice of representing and imagining urban architecture through the lens of the ruin. In his depictions, the improvisational construction and persistent decay of these architectural relics culminate in a clichéd baroque tragic beauty that he overwrites with provisional models and modifiable architectural plans. He pairs photographs of dilapidated architecture with drawings of imagined construction to examine the interplay between concepts of ruin and utopia, which have long figured differently in local and foreign perceptions of Cuba. Intertwined in tourists’ exotic imaginings of Cuba’s tragic baroque beauty, and enveloping the historical narratives of oppression and dreams of modern progress that together fueled revolutionary ideology, the ruin/utopia metaphor romanticizes the link between poverty and creativity, mythologizes m etaphors of Cuban resilience, and destabilizes the historicity of Cuban modernity.2 In the 1990s, however, utopia—the Revolution’s ideological dream of a unified, pan-Latin American socialist society— 1 Benjamin desc ribes the experience of space through architecture—it organizes experience, its presence is received collectively, unconsciously. The relationship is reciprocal: architecture shapes experience but also arises out of it. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans . Howard E iland and Kevin McLaughlin (C ambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap P ress, 1999). 2 Luc ia M . Suarez, “Ruin Memory: Havana Beyond the Revolution,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 39 , no. 1 (2014): 38 -55. Architectural Ruins and Urban Imaginaries Carlos Garaicoa’s Images of Havana Jodi Kovach http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 7 4 U r b a n I m a g i n a r ie s C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 Figure 1 C arlos Garaicoa, El sueño de algunas ciudades es llegar a convertirse en otras (The Dream of Some Cities Is to Become Another), 2001. Left, Duraflex color photograph, 80 x 60 cm. Right, ink and graphite on board, 100 x 70 cm. C opyright C arlos Garaicoa. became the catalyst of ruin in Cuba.3 The Revolution, already defeated following the dissolution of Soviet-led economic structure Comecon, represented nothing more than the desperate effort on the part of the Cuban government to continue its socialist agenda, isolating Cuba from the modern globalizing community. The policies of what is known as the Período especial (Special Period) ushered in a devastating economic crisis that cr ippled the country in the 1990s and into this millennium. The galvanizing political slogan of the Special Period, ¡Socialismo o muerte!, in fact turned out to be a grim omen portending the ruin of the Cuban economy and its society.4 During this time Garaicoa made artwork that cr itically engages his city in ruins: his work appropriates the nostalgia of allegorical ruins to cr itic ize the Cuban government’s blind commitment to a defunct ideology, presenting photographic snapshots of contemporary architecture in disrepute alongside hesitantly executed drawings of the same buildings. Together, the images that comprise his diptychs suggest the 3 Luis Suárez Salazar and C arlos Perez, “The C uban Revolution and the New Latin A merican Leadership: A V iew from I ts U topias,” in “C uba: Interpreting a Half C entury of Revolution and Res istance, P art 2 ,” special is sue, Latin American Perspectives 36 , no. 2 (March 2009): 114-127. 4 Geraldine Lievesley, Cuban Revolution: Pas t, Present and Future Perspectives (New York: P algrave Macmillan, 2004), 4; 161-168. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 7 5 J o d i K o v a c h C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 unmooring of the radical utopian underpinnings of revolutionary ideology, and suggest a more complicated narrative of Cuba’s modernity, in which tentative construction plans represent empty promises of economic growth that must negotiate the real socio-economic crises of the present. This paper explores how Garaicoa intervenes in images of Havana’s ruins through diptych photograph/drawings of dilapidated architecture before and after buildings were demolished. In the diptychs of urban scenes in Havana discussed here, I investigate Garaicoa’s method of writing over the image of a site after a building’s removal. Using delicate pencil or thread, he creates ghostly mirages of the demolished structures, thus reimagining what once existed rather than envisioning something new. These timidly articulated visions of reconstruction bear the persistence of Havana’s present state of poverty, decay, and disrepair, which Garaicoa attributes to blind fa ith in the goals of the Cuban Revolution and the collapse of Eastern European communism. I propose that this strategy for critiquing the goals and outcomes of the Special Period through Havana’s ruins suggests a new articulation of the baroque expression— one that calls to mind the anti- authoritative strategies of twentieth-century Neo-Baroque literature and cr itic ism. I then show how the lens of Havana’s failed modernity has shaped Garaicoa’s perception of urban landscapes beyond Cuba, particularly in a photograph/drawing diptych in which he features the destruction/imaginary reconstruction of an unremarkable site in Los Angeles. A comparison of these two works demonstrates how the artist historically grounds the legacy of the Cuban Revolution’s modernizing project in the country’s real economic decline in the post-Soviet era, but also poses broader questions about the architectural symbolism of the 21st-century city in the ideological construction of modern globalizing society.5 Garaicoa’s interpretations of ruins share affinities with the work of other contemporary international artists like Cyprien Gaillard and Tacita Dean, for example, who represent Eastern European modernist architecture in its present dilapidated state to reveal the failure of its ideological underpinnings and to provoke consideration of what these ruins convey about the changes taking place in post-communist European societies.6 Garaicoa’s ruins likewise criticize the fallacies of the Revolution and its promise of improving Cuban society , but his artwork also ironically reconstructs his downtrodden city. This seemingly paradox ical gesture is underscored by a sentiment of ambivalence about the future that has distinguished the work of his contemporaries in Cuba since the early 1990s. Specif ica lly in Garaicoa’s work, it is driven by the concern that development will not happen unless plans for social and economic progress are grounded in Cuba’s material reality.7 5 A nthony D. King, Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Pos tcolonialism and the Urban (New York: Routledge, 2016), 75 -79. 6 See Francesca P icchi, “Modern Ruins: Intervista con C yprien Gaillard/Interview with C yprien Gaillard,” Domus 926 (June 2009), 70 -73; P . A rdenne, “La terre es t ronde – nouvelle narration,” Art Press 238 (Sept. 1998): 72-73; and Susan Stewart, “Tac ita Dean,” in The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aes thetics (C hicago: University of C hicago P ress, 2005). 7 Enwezor explains how contemporary artists working in C uba, while not conforming to a spec ific s tyle or conceptual practice, subvert the rhetoric of the State without completely assimilating to contemporary “Western” art. See O kwui Enwezor, “Between A pparatus and Subjectivity: C arlos Garaicoa’s P ost-Utopian A rchitecture,” in Carlos Garaicoa: Overlapping, ed. Enrique Juncosa (Dublin, I reland: I rish Museum of Modern A rt, 2010), 16-21. See also Abelardo Mena Chicuri, Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2007), 21 -23. This exhibition suggested that the juxtapos ition of utopia with dys topian realities and ironic humor often found in contemporary C uban art suggests a potential for new beginnings in the troubled pos t-Communist era. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 7 6 U r b a n I m a g i n a r ie s C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 Growing up in Havana during the Cold War, Garaicoa saw the stagnancy of modernization in Cuba as a unique moment for critical reflection on the myth of progress that undergirds the country’s modernist plans for societal reconstruction. Garaicoa explained: After the fall of European socialism, many Cuban construction and architectonic projects were halted or abandoned. In Havana, as well as in other Cuban cities, idyllic and nostalgic ruins from the colonial and first republic periods coexist with the ruin of a frustrated political and social project. Unfinished buildings abound, neglected and in a sort of momentary oblivion. The encounter with these buildings produces a strange sensation; the issue is not the ruin of a luminous past but a present of incapacity. We face a never-consummated architecture, impoverished in its lack of conclusion, where ruins are proclaimed before they even get to exist. I call these the Ruins of the Future.8 In this statement, Garaicoa describes Havana’s ruins as the materia l embodiment of Cuba’s inability to fully realize its socialist goals for implementing modernizing processes. He explained that as a child he found that the baroque aura of Old Havana’s ruins, the palpable and material aesthetic of its decay, emanated a gritty authenticity that disclosed real existing conditions under Communism: “It was a very intense part of the city, a very poor area, dangerous in some places, but rich in its architecture and people…We would go walk ing in the streets competing to discover places none of us had ever noticed before.” 9 Garaicoa’s depictions of Old Havana’s ruins do not aestheticize poverty and human suffering, nor do his images convey an exotic escape from modern life or express nostalgia for the greatness of a past era. In his work, decay disrupts the utopian imaginings of a society beyond the here and now; it is material, tangible, and present. Furthermore, the city is a metaphor for society’s potential and, by contrast, the ruin is a device Garaicoa uses to represent the passage of modern time as fragmented and non-linear. This depiction of modern temporality through Havana’s deteriorating urban landscape undermines the future-gazing of utopian imaginings. Architectural ruins hold particular significance in urban imaginaries, both historical and modern. As a visual form, the ruin expresses the seventeenth-century Baroque fascination with decay and destruction. Using it to give form to his modernist conception of temporality, Walter Benjamin explained that the ruin in Baroque allegorical expressions concretizes the fragmentary movement of time and gives a layered picture of history.10 The ruin complicates notions of historical time as linear and evolutionary and for this reason is used in postmodern 8 C arlos Garaicoa in “C arlos Garaicoa by Holly Block,” BOMB 82 (Winter 2003), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2523/carlos-garaicoa 9 C arlos Garaicoa quoted in Marc Spiegler, “C ity Lights,” in Trans(ient) City (Barcelona: Bom Publishers, 2008), 204. 10 The ruin represents the allegorical structure, which Benjamin contrasts against the “symbol,” which embodies “momentary totality,” as it is “self-contained, concentrated, s teadfastly remaining itself.” Benjamin’s thes is on Baroque allegory c riticized affirmative tendencies in the tradition of idealist philosophy and laid the groundwork for what evolved into his modernist sensibility: the allegorical perspective, or a way of desc ribing nature through the fragment as opposed to a unified whole. For Benjamin allegory is dialectical, “a successively progressing, dramatic and mobile, dynamic representation of ideas which has acquired the very fluidity of time.” See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans . John O sborne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), 165. For Benjamin’s ideas on his torical materialism, see also “Theses on the Philosophy of H is tory,” I lluminations , 262-263. A s Benjamin suggests, “[a] his torical materialist approaches a his torical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this s tructure he recognizes the s ign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed pas t.” http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 7 7 J o d i K o v a c h C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 art to question the teleology of modernism. It figured in Robert Smithson’s critique of modernism in the 1960s and seventies when he depicted the architecture of suburban New Jersey as “ruins in reverse,” or monuments to banality that rise, rather than fa ll into ruin, thus making visual the condition of entropy that Smithson believed character ized modern society.11 In postmodern expressions, the ruin is often viewed as the antithesis of utopia; it emphasizes the inescapability of a present state of dystopia with the same intensity that utopia reaches toward an unattainably perfect future. While utopia is pristine, intangible, and untouched by time, the ruin is concrete, worldly, and fragmented by time’s ravages.12 In the years between 1995 and 2004, Garaicoa documented sites in Havana before and after abandoned or neglected architecture was torn down. From these he created a series of untitled diptychs, for which he then pinned red, green, or blue thread on the photographs taken after the demolition, outlining the razed buildings on the sites where they once stood. For example, Sin título (Hotel San Carlos) (Untitled [San Carlos Hotel]) (1995-2004) includes two black-and-white photographs of the same site: a vacant and deteriorating seven -story building (fig. 2). The photograph on the right depicts the timeworn, hollowed-out encasement that was once the hotel. In the adjacent photo of the same site taken after the destruction, Garaicoa used red and blue thread to outline the geometric shapes of the slender windows, the superimposed pilasters ornamented with small scrolled capita ls, and the carvings along some of the windowsills, all of which crumble and seem to fade into the surface of the façade. Both photographs were taken from the ground looking up, emphasizing the massiveness and verticality of the looming structure in spite of its state of decay. In the earlier photograph, the building hovers above this vantage point in the center of the composition and seems to force the smaller adjoining buildings to the edges of the frame. At the same time Garaicoa’s oblique perspective emphasizes the building’s vertica l thrust, delineated by the narrow elongated windows and the lines of superimposed pediments that extend the entire length of the building, which nearly reaches the top of the frame. In contrast to this portrayed grandeur, the building’s dark empty windows ev idence its somber, haunting vacancy. Meanwhile a stray electrical wire extends from a streetlight and dramatically intersects the form of the hotel at a right angle, but this thin, tenuous line appears as useless and insignificant as the abandoned building in this completely uninhabited space. Cuba’s vernacular architecture, shown by Garaicoa in a state of disrepute, also expresses creative adaptation and inspires Garaicoa’s ironic visions of reconstruction. 13 The accumulation of multifarious styles, pulled together from European sources and modified for local purposes, is apparent in his diptych Sin título (Hotel San Carlos). Here, Garaicoa animates this dynamic, showing Havana’s architecture simultaneously decaying and 11 Jennifer L. Roberts , “Smithson and Stephens in Yucután,” in Mirror-Travels : Robert Smithson and His tory (New Haven & London: Yale University P ress, 2004), 110-112. See also Robert Smithson, “Inc idents of M irror-Travel in the Yucután [1969],” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings , ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of C alifornia P ress, 1996), 119-133. 12 Rahul Mehrotra, “Simultaneous Modernity: Negotiations and Res istances in U rban India,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and A ndreas Schönle (Durham, N.C .: Duke University Press, 2010), 244-249. See also Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 66: “For as an antithes is to the his torical ideal of res toration it is haunted by the idea of catas trophe.” 13 Enwezor comments that, “[Garaicoa’s ] work is inves ted in the investigation of the different architectural discourses of colonial, modern, and soc ialist c ity-making practices. This analysis subtends the late baroque buildings and enormous squares of Spanish colonial urban planning to the modernist experience of twentieth-century architecture and the centralized planning that represents the socialist inheritance of C uba’s pos t-revolutionary period.” See Enwezor, 18 . http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 7 8 U r b a n I m a g i n a r ie s C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 regenerating in a relentless cycle of ruin, particularly by confounding the order in which the viewer reads the process (did the plans for the building emerge before or after the blighted structure?). By portraying sites in Old Havana in this way, he reflects more broadly on the growth of Cuban vernacular architecture as the product of simultaneous additive and fragmenting processes that reproduce miscellaneous architectural fragments of the urban setting.14 Figure 2 C arlos Garaicoa, Sin título (Hotel San Carlos ) [Untitled (San Carlos Hotel)], 1995-2004. Diptych. P hotographs and drawing with thread. 123 x 100 cm each. C opyright C arlos Garaicoa. Like many contemporary Cuban artists who emerged on the international art scene in the 1990s, Garaicoa critiques his country’s communist revolutionary ideology through a specifically Cuban artistic voice that he draws from his country’s rich “unoffic ial” aesthetic history, which emerges from Havana’s architectural landscape.15 Baroque influences have shaped this aesthetic history from the colonial period to the present day. Modernist and postmodernist appropriations of baroque aesthetics informed an insurgent modernist perspective in Cuba the fifties, sixties, and seventies through Neo-Baroque literature and critical theory, while more recent iterations—in the work of Garaicoa, for example—enable 14 Rachel C arley, Cuba: 400 Years of Architectural Heritage (New York: Whitney Library of Des ign, 1997). 15 Kerry O liver-Smith, “Globalization and the V anguard,” in Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection (Gainesville: Samuel P. Harn Museum of A rt, University of Florida), 21-23. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 7 9 J o d i K o v a c h C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 the subversive critique of the official culture and politics of Cuba. 16 Neo-Baroque literary theory composed in these decades by Cuban writers and scholars José Lezama Lima (1910- 76), Alejo Carpentier (1904-80), and Severo Sarduy (1936-93) spearheaded notions of the New World Baroque as evidence of a period of artistic “invigoration” in Cuba, and of the origins of peculiarly Latin American and Cuban modernist sensibilities. As scholar of Spanish literature César Augusto Salgado has demonstrated, the positive formulation of the New World Baroque as a regeneration of the European aesthetic model was augmented by Neo - Baroque theorists in considering how this mutation functioned as a form of resistance within the oppressive regimes of colonialism.17 In the 1950s, Lezama Lima wrote about the broader significance of the New World Baroque and its revival to a pan-Latin American modernism. According to Lezama Lima, baroque expressions created in Latin America represented a form of resistance—a counter- conquest culture that signaled the onset of a new modern sensibility. In other words, the New World Baroque was a collection of cultures operating outside of tradition, and which was concerned with the secular and the present, rather than with the theatrical styles and mystical content that characterize Spanish Baroque art. The New World Baroque aesthetics of rupture that Lezama Lima identified could then be used as a springboard for formulating a peculiarly Latin American modernist expression. According to Lezama Lima in his essay “La curiosidad barroca,” the “barroco americano” is underscored by plutonismo, which he defined as an eruption of a deep-seated, subterranean creative impulse within an assimilated European style. The metaphor of a volcanic eruption, evoked to describe the productive, as opposed to the destructive, power of the baroque, connotes a resurgence of hidden grotesque impulses that break apart a unified, closed, balanced aesthetic and give way to open and inclusive forms.18 Alejo Carpentier saw the radical aesthetic qualities of the Cuban baroque in temporal terms: he discovered the modern baroque expression in the rhythms of New World 16 O n this topic , Monika Kaup argues for a transhistorical and transnational conception of the baroque, sugges ting that “we need to replace the notion of a s ingle baroque—usually identified with the European baroque of the C ounter-Reformation and absolutism, masterfully analyzed in José Antonio Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque—with that of multiple baroques.” See Kaup, “‘The Future is Entirely Fabulous’: The Baroque Genealogy of Latin A merica’s Modernity,” in “Globalism on the Move,” ed. Marshall Brown, spec ial is sue, MLQ 68 , no. 2 (June 2007): 233. 17 C esar Augusto Salgado, “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory,” in “Theorizing the Hybrid,” eds . Deborah A . Kapchan and P auline Turner Strong, special issue, The Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (Summer, 1999): 316-331. Salgado notes that although New World baroque “often s tands as a formula for a utopian ethnic integration, the neobaroque theoris t also reminds us that this ‘pos itive’ mongrelization of European high s tyles resulted from the painful and incongruous overlapping of foreign and native morphologies in conflict.” 18 José Lezama Lima, “La C uriosidad Barroca,” en La Expres ion Americana (Santiago de C hile: Talleres de Editorial Universitaria, S. A ., 1969), 34 . Lezama Lima portrayed the Baroque era as the explosive origination of modern Latin A merican culture, having s tated that, “…we can say that among us the Baroque was an art of counter-conquest.” He described the Baroque expression as “el fuego originario,” or the c reative force that dismantled decadent European traditions and opened art to c reative input from many different cultural backgrounds. Lezama Lima ’s essay La curios idad barroca, which he presented at the National Institute at Havana in January 1957 and published in his book of essays entitled La expres ión americana that same year, desc ribes the impac t of Baroque culture on Latin American modernism. H is theses on Neo-Baroque aesthetics explore how rupture within an ass imilated European artistic language was expressed through heteroglossic forms and poverty, means that opened onto new opportunities for artis tic invention. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 8 0 U r b a n I m a g i n a r ie s C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 improvisational forms like jazz. He believed that jazz gave form to variegated temporalities, which undercut the universal concept of time that buttressed power relations between the Old and New Worlds. As scholar Monica Kaup has discussed, Carpentier focused on a specifically Cuban Baroque that exemplified the dynamic processes observed by Lezama Lima in his theorizing of a broader, New World Baroque.19 Carpentier’s version of an improvised, adaptive art form created by colonized subjects figures in Havana’s unwie ldy urbanscape in his 1964 text “La ciudad de las columnas” (“City of Columns”), in which he vividly describes an unsystematic, profuse accumulation of eclectic columns that line the streets of the city.20 The spontaneous character of Old Havana’s vernacular architecture that intrigued Carpentier also captivates Garaicoa. The artist’s decision to include in the compositions of both photographs for Sin título (Hotel San Carlos), the Mudéjar-style façade of the building next to the hotel points to the conspicuous presence of Moorish influences in Havana’s colonial architecture which contributed to the unwieldy eclecticism of the C uban Baroque style. Complete with trefoil window arches and elaborate geometric-patterned carvings, this building, juxtaposed with the less-embellished façade of the hotel, the street light, and the layers of sagging structures with arched porticos and awnings, hints at the multifariousness of Cuban vernacular architecture that resonates in the diverse architectural styles brought together in Havana’s contemporary urban landscape. In photographs such as these, Garaicoa reveals Havana’s architectural vista as the product of an erratic outgrowth of disparate stylistic fragments that have been modified, adapted, and cobbled together. In his images of architecture, baroque elements, as popular expressions of the Cuban people, reside within and beneath the ostentatious, yet crumbling, symbols of the colonial and communist authorities.21 Neo-Baroque theorists qualified Cuban Baroque forms as the subversive, creative means for breaking through the voice of authority to express multiple, marginalized perspectives. They developed a concept of the baroque expression in New World contexts to encompass new models of temporality and spatiality in order to represent modern experience in frameworks pertinent to everyday, vernacular experience. Severo Sarduy expanded on these notions in the 1970s when he conceived the Neo-Baroque modality as a de-centering force in art and literature that served to critique modernist spatial organizations based on unity and centrality.22 In Sarduy’s work, the Neo-Baroque expression is a form of postmodern intertextuality that cuts through unitary languages. Inspired by what he identified in New World Baroque art as modalities of cultural assimilation, transformation, and demystification, 19 Monika Kaup, “‘¡ V aya P apaya!’: C uban Baroque and V isual Culture in A lejo C arpentier, Ricardo Porro, and Ramón A lejandro,” PMLA 124, no. 1 (Jan. 2009):156-171. 20 See A lejo C arpentier, “La c iudad de las columnas,” in Tientos y diferencias y otro ensayos (Barcelona: P laza, [1964] 1987), 40 -48. See also Kaup, “‘¡ V aya P apaya!,’” 159. 21 “However, he does not view the phenomenon of abandonment of the old and the enthus iasm provoked by the new soc ialist form as separate entities…[He analyzes] how the architecture of the pas t and that of the present are both symbols of the imagination of other empire-builders at the expense of the C uban people.” Enwezor, 18 . 22 Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos A ires: Sudamericana, c . 1974). See also Sarduy “Dispersión (Falsas notas/Homenaje a Lezama Lima),” and “Sobre Góngora: la metáfora al cuadrado,” in Escrito sobre un cuerpo:Ensayos de critica (Buenos A ires: Sudamericana, 1969). Sarduy draws influence from Hispanic Baroque literature and neo-Baroque tendencies in Latin A merican pos t-Boom literature. Sarduy’s novels are labeled pos tmodernist, while his c ritical writings fit into discussions on pos tstructuralism. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 8 1 J o d i K o v a c h C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 Sarduy sought to destabilize authoritative meaning in literature. This, in theory, could open a space for writers and readers to dissent from the patriarchal tone that the Cuban Revolution was taking on in the seventies.23 Garaicoa taps into the insurgent strategies of the Neo-Baroque, but moves beyond these authors’ de-colonizing objectives.24 His ruin-gazing complicates a stereotypically baroque fascination with decay and destruction, along with a fragmented version of history and temporality, and with this he confronts Cuba’s incapacity to realize its revolutionary goals for social progress by incorporating this history, through images of the ruination of its urban landscape, into depictions of Cuba’s current reality. In this way he eclipses the utopian visions of the Cuban Revolution by refusing to look directly to the future and leave his country’s current state of socio-economic crisis behind. With the image of the ruin, as Walter Benjamin explained, “History merges into the setting…history is scattered like seeds over the ground.”25 More precisely, the thread drawings Garaicoa adds overtop the photographs frame a history lying in rubble.26 The building’s destruction is transformed in his work—it becomes the impetus to rebuild. Still, the architectural plans merely repeat the form of the pre - existing structure, and thereby serve as a bleak reminder of this part of the c ity that was destroyed. Garaicoa’s architectural imaginaries focus on an absence that, for him, provides a possible framework for invention—yet one that must account for previous attempts at modernization and the problematic outcomes.27 Garaicoa explained that the juxtaposition of ruin/utopia in his art should “be understood not as a dream for the future but rather as an immediate action on reality—a lucid and conscious gesture concerning the collapsed present and the urban and po litical fabric of contemporary society.”28 His work shifts between depictions of presence and absence, decay and regeneration, making the concepts of ruin and utopia a provocative pair: because they are intertwined, the images of decay and the architectural plans for the future always beg for more description, complicating notions of real and imaginary, as well as how the city ex ists in the past, present, and future. As a result, ruin/utopia becomes a format for thinking of the city historically, and for inspiring the imagination to explore ways of changing what exists — not for envisioning what lies beyond it. Garaicoa’s imaginary of ruins therefore opens onto a revolutionary way of thinking about the present historically; in other words, of thinking of the present as part of a continuum of social, political, and cultural change. His historical perspective reflects on Cuba’s position in 23 C arlos Garaicoa quoted in Inge Ruigrok “C uba: C ultural P olicy of Non-Western C ountries,” The P ower of C ulture, June 2006, http://www.krachtvancultuur.nl/en/policy/cuba.html. 24 Severo Sarduy and Roberto González Echevarría, “Interview: Severo Sarduy,” trans . Jane E . French, Diacritics 2 , no. 2 (Summer 1972), 41 -45. 25 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 92 . 26 P revious exhibitions of Garaicoa’s work have addressed the inc ipient utopian dimensions of his representations of Havana’s visual decline, in which are also embedded dreams of trans forma tion and redemption. See Carlos Garaicoa: Overlapping (Dublin: I rish Museum of Modern A rt, 2010); Carlos Garaicoa: Capablanca’s Real Pass ion (P rato: Gli O ri, 2005); and Carlos Garaicoa: La ruina la utopia (Bronx Museum of A rt Bogota: Biblioteca Luis Ángel A rango Casa de Moneda, 2000). 27 A ndreas Huyssen, “A uthentic Ruins: P roducts of Modernity,” in Ruins of Modernity, 17-28. Huyssen discusses “absence” as understood by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Theodor A dorno, and A lbert Speer. 28 Garaicoa in “C arlos Garaicoa by Holly Block.” http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 8 2 U r b a n I m a g i n a r ie s C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 the postmodern world: Cuba is slowly emerging from what was formerly known as the Third World—the underdeveloped regions of the world that today produce political voices and cultural expressions that stand outside of, and contradict, what are often perceived as the homogenizing processes of globalization. Literary critic and Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson, in considering the continued discrepancies of uneven development around the world, proposed that late capitalism could only come into being fully with the disappearance of the Third World. Within his theory, however, the Third World also prov ides a histor ica l lens, or a chance to gain a historical foothold in the drive for attaining global modernization. Without this foothold we lose the capability to understand the conditions that have created real economic disparities, and therefore are unable to bring about susta inable social and economic development on a global scale.29 Garaicoa provides this historical lens when he focuses on isolated areas of major cities in the United States that remind him of Havana’s decay. In fact, he admits he is incapable of seeing the world through any lens other than that of his lived experience in Havana. 30 For example, a work he created similar to Sin título (Hotel San Carlos), entitled Sin título, L.A. (Untitled, L.A.) from 2004 is a diptych of a condemned office building in Los Angeles pictured before and after its demolition (fig. 3). Figure 3 C arlos Garaicoa, Sin título, L.A. [Untitled, L.A.], 2004. Diptych. P hotographs and drawing with thread, mounted and laminated on black gator board. 125 x 175 cm each. C opyright Carlos Garaicoa. In reference to his earlier photographs of the Cuban hotel, Garaicoa shot the black-and- white photographs for this diptych from a low vantage point and filled the frame with, f irst, the structure, and in the second image, nearly the exact same s ite where it once stood. Also, he once again included signs of waning urban life: vacant lots, debris like ly le ft from other demolition projects, and street lamps and telephone poles, anchoring electr ical wires that indiscriminately traverse the space around the office building. Both photos show the site to be virtually uninhabited, with the exception of a few cars passing at the lower edge of the frame. Similar to Garaicoa’s representation of the San Carlos Hotel, the Lyon building shown 29 For more on this topic , see Santiago C olás, “The Third World in Jameson’s Pos tmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in “Third World and P os t-Colonial Issues,” special issue, Social Text, no. 31/32 (1992): 258-270. 30 See Lorenzo Fus i, “A C onversation with C arlos Garaicoa,” in Carlos Garaicoa: Capablanca’s real pass ion (P rato, I taly: Gli Ori, 2005), 106. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 8 3 J o d i K o v a c h C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 here was ultimately demolished, and the artist resurrects its image through a thread drawing. Furthermore, by exhibiting the two photographs of the L.A. site s ide-by-side, he makes it appear as if this building—and all of the stories contained within it—continues to haunt the city block on which it once stood. Garaicoa does not forsake the disparities of modernity and inequities of globalization when using the same visual and conceptual strategies to represent Havana and Los Angeles in ruin/reconstruction.31 The ideological underpinnings of the ruinous site in L.A., however, are more ambiguous than those in his Havana diptych, and the convolution of history/present/future is more disorienting. The viewer, therefore, must interpret this work in dialogue with the artist’s representations of sites in Havana. When comparing the two sets, the emptiness of these sites becomes apparent: closely framed and largely decontextualized from surroundings, and with little indication of human presence, Garaicoa directs our attention to the symbolic relationships among the urban architecture, in spite of their different social, political, and economic histories. Garaicoa employs the same visual vocabulary for both diptychs, presenting both structures in a perpetual cycle of ruin/re - imagination, apparently mirroring Cuba’s decline in his response to L.A.’s urban landscape. With this in mind, could these diptychs serve to challenge ideological assumptions about capitalist progress and communist stagnancy that bolstered the U.S. assertion of power and authority during the Cold War and have continued, until very recently, to help justify the U.S. embargo on Cuba? Perhaps Garaicoa’s representation of the L.A. ruins therefore suggests an effort to expose and undermine what art historian Okwui Enwezor describes as the “opposed logics of contemporaneity,” or in other words, the illusion of capitalism’s presumed benefits in contrast to the deficiencies of Cuban communism.32According to these images, the legacy of the Cold War, underpinned by conflicting myths of progress, afflicts both countr ies—two countries that have only recently begun to normalize diplomatic relations.33 Garaicoa reflects upon the ruins of his city as a starting point for envisioning societal renewal. His diptychs are not entirely dystopian; rather, in his work ruin is set against utopia, presence against absence, in ways that offer a layered conception of history. The concept of the ruin on which he expounds appropriates specifically baroque notions about time as a layered process, thus giving history an involuted rather than evolutionary movement. This historical perspective guides viewers to think critically about the economic, 31To nuance this relationship between the local and global, I am extrapolating from Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, P articularism, and the Q uestion of Identity,” October vol. 61 (Summer 1992): 89. A s Laclau says , “[t]he universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying and explaining it, but as an incomplete horizon suturing a dis located particular identity…the universal is the symbol of a miss ing fullness , and the particular exists only in the contradictory movement of asserting a differential identity and s imultaneously canceling it through its subsumption into a nondifferential medium.” 32 Enwezor, 16 . 33 See David Hart, Ins ide/Outs ide: Contemporary Cuban Art (Wins ton-Salem, NC : C harlotte and Philip Hanes A rt Gallery, Wake Forest University, 2003). See also William M. Leogrande and Julie M . Thomas, “C uba’s Q uest for Economic Independence,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34 , no. 2 (May 2002): 325- 363. C uba’s alterity to global power operations is unique, particularly within the varied geography of Latin A merican economic activity. O ver the course of the pas t two and a half decades, global economic activity has trans formed power s truc tures and polarized national economies within Latin America, causing, in recent years, for example, São P aulo to emerge as major center of global finance while countries such as Bolivia and V enezuela continue to reinforce national boundaries and identities to protect their economies from liberalization. See also H. M ichael E risman and John M . Kirk, ed., Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the “Special Period” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006). http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ 8 4 U r b a n I m a g i n a r ie s C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu V ol 5 , No 1 “A gency in Motion” (2016) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DO I 10.5195/contemp.2016.130 social, and ideological circumstances that put societies in ruin. Rather than simply forgetting the past to imagine utopias of the future, Garaicoa cast architectural plans and designs for urban living through the ruins of Havana to ground his visions for the city’s regeneration in a concrete history and present socio-economic reality. Moreover, the fact that his sketches are easily modified, thus open to creative interpretation, may also suggest the potential to move beyond both the state of ruin and empty utopian promises. 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