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Adrift

Erica Moiah James

I always felt like an alien in Cuba. […] It felt ordinary to move away. Like another step. I was the first in the group to leave. But I did not feel as if I was losing anything. 

What I needed, all came with me.  (Ricardo Brey)

I

Contained within every Caribbean person is a universe. To be Caribbean is to understand your existence as fluid, unfixed, impure and constantly hybridizing, mobile and migratory, rhizomatic, particularized yet whole, material and metaphysical, secular and sacred, individual and connected, and infinitely human. Ricardo Brey’s work travels in this universe. The material and spiritual connection expressed in his paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, and mobile boxes puncture perceived boundaries between earth and flesh, nature and the man-made, through a concept of life and spirit that transcends space and time.

Here I specifically introduce the notion of the rhizome in relation to Brey’s work in order to reflect on the ways his oeuvre extends the current use of the term. In recent years the contemporary art world has expressed a substantial amount of interest in the work of Martiniquan poet, writer and philosopher, Edouard Glissant, and his concept of the rhizome within systems of relation. Art world luminaries such as Hans Ulrich Obrist claim to begin each day reading Glissant and there have also been countless art exhibitions, festivals, and symposia that have taken their titles and established their curatorial positions by drawing on Glissantian theory. I too have turned to his work many times in order to think through a philosophical or ethical knot, or to find the conceptual architecture needed to continually break the mirror of colonialism systemically embedded in double visions of the Caribbean. Glissant deserves this attention, but in my view,  something has been missing in much of this work, which Brey’s oeuvre, in concert with his artistic vision and practice, disassembles and reconfigures in deeply meaningful ways.

In this essay, I want to think about Ricardo Brey’s art both philosophically and formally as a rhizomatic plateau within the rhizomatic space of the global Caribbean. In the global Caribbean, to create art necessitates the development of a creolizing practice capable of participating in multiple conversations simultaneously. We see this ethos in the work of Nari Ward, Janine Antoni, Tavares Strachan, and Christopher Cozier, and we also see it in Brey. According to Glissant, creolization is an infinite process that accounts for movement and change as artists and individuals move in the world. It makes space for individualized artistry forged in the catalysis of contact. This is because Caribbean people live “in” creolization, where according to Glissant, “you can change, you can be with the Other, you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost because you are multiple. You are not broken apart because you are multiple”.[1] This poetic statement affirms a building block of Caribbean society and brings value to the heterogeneity often used to dismiss the region. However, unmoored from the specificities of the Caribbean, it may also appear romantic, forgetful of the histories and realities of violence in the region that migrants carry. It may also seem to ignore periods of rootlessness, depression and madness that often accompany dislocation, whether voluntary or involuntary. Brey is materially attendant to these forces in his work, philosophically moving with Glissant, without the romanticism that currently prevails in discussions of the global in the contemporary art world. This claim asks us to consider how he arrived at his assemblages, specifically the series of ‘boxes’ he has created over the past ten years and the manner in which they physically and theoretically embody Glissant’s concept of the rhizome, with all the historical, cultural and political dross of blackness, Cuban-ness, Caribbean-ness and more within its folds. Though Brey acknowledges that his life is the centre of his imaginary core, it is not in a way that seals his identity in indexical ways through form. Rather, in the spirit of Sylvia Wynter, the work signals the praxis of humanness, accumulating in ways that leave nothing of who we are behind.

II

It is difficult to recognize when one is making history. And Ricardo Brey’s life flows in and out of the historical arc of post-revolutionary Cuba. Born before the revolution, he grew up in an asymmetrical society caught between the hopeful ideology of the transformation revolutions can bring, and the lived realities of nuclear threat, scarcity and limited opportunity that they more often deliver. His formative growth as an artist came in a period now described by scholars as the Grey Years (1971–1976), a difficult time on the island brought on by ten years of an American-backed blockade, and additional damage to the economy as a result of a failed national campaign to reach 10 million tonnes in sugar production. In the interest of its own survival, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for support.[2] This turn had a wide-ranging impact, and in the arts it was felt through a severe, state-led crackdown on artists, many of whom were supportive of the revolution. Work by once-honoured Cuban artists was now reinterpreted in the current climate as being expressive of anti-revolutionary ideas. As ‘anti-revolutionaries’, artists were ostracized, prevented from showing work, denied travel, and forced out of teaching positions. Some chose to leave their career as artists behind as an aesthetically tropicalized form of social realism took hold, and still others pushed back in innovative ways.[3]

No period is pure, however, and it was at this very time that Ricardo Brey began to emerge as a key member of a rising generation of artists who had benefited from the revolution’s early approach to education. He recalls: “Our generation was a product of the educational system of the Revolution, a product of the Revolution’s ideals of inquiry, and we wanted to make something new.”[4] He and his cohort pointedly rejected state oppression of artistic freedom during this period and consciously worked in opposition to it. Perhaps buoyed by the change in leadership at the Ministry of Culture, in 1976, when it came under the direction of Armando Hart, the core group that comprised what become known as Volumen Uno began planning for an exhibition in Brey’s home as early as 1977. As Rachel Weiss has noted, Hart represented a sea change from the pavonato years.[5] He soon proved to have far more liberal views towards artists and for him the arts were pivotal to the creation of an atmosphere of freedom and creativity linking local practices to international contemporary art. As new pressures built on the Castro regime, in external discourses, much like the rest of the Caribbean, the island was infantilized and subdued in colonial terms that emphasized its temporal, intellectual and developmental distance and difference to ‘Western culture’. When concrete attempts were being made by the United States to facilitate this narrative, Hart responded powerfully: “They accuse us of ‘leaving’ Western culture. Mr. Reagan has said that we should rejoin the West. That’s really a serious problem, because we can’t return to where we already are. As far as I know, the island of Cuba has not moved. We are in the West, and our ideological, political and cultural debate takes place in our world, in the West.”[6] Unfortunately, though he was in charge of culture for the government when Brey’s group were seeking to mount their exhibition in 1977–78, Hart did not yet perhaps have the full control of his ministry required to enact his vision, because the intended show was suppressed by the state.

Though the situation suggested otherwise, Brey’s generation was positioned to shift contemporary Cuban art in a new direction. Revolutionary education meant that they were taught by several members of Los Once, whose vision for their work always carried a radical spirit in relation to the status quo. As art students, they also had unprecedented access to practising artists who held aesthetic and ethical positions that were somewhat aligned with their own. Brey recalls visiting Wifredo Lam with José Bedia, while Lam was in hospital in Havana. They went to see him uninvited, but the meeting had a significant impact on him because of the way Lam welcomed them and the degree of generosity he extended to them as he shared stories of his life and practice.[7] These personal milestones were experienced at the very same time that political disruptions were rocking the revolutionary government. On April Fool’s Day in 1980, just months before Volumen Uno opened, a dam broke when a group of Cubans crashed a bus into the Peruvian Embassy, requesting asylum. Their petition was granted, and the embassy went on to give asylum to more than ten thousand Cubans in the coming days. This spurred the United States to open the US borders to Cuban migrants, an invitation that rapidly evolved into what became known as the Mariel Boatlift; a pivotal voluntary and involuntary exodus of Cubans that would transform the island and cities like Miami for decades to come. There is an implicit, if not explicit connection between the events of January 1981 and this seismic shift in Cuban life that unfolded in the months leading up to the exhibition. Mariel provided a window in, but also a real and psychological doorway out of Cuba for everyday people. Always a migratory group, artists on the island no doubt recognized the wormhole that had opened, and decided to step through it – not into an unfamiliar place, or a new discursive arrangement, but one they knew intimately, though up to this point, one they had primarily observed from afar.

III

You can control reality, but you cannot control myth… Let it be that way. (Ricardo Brey)

Volumen Uno opened on 14 January 1981 and quickly gained mythic status. In Cuban art history, the line of development from modern to contemporary art is drawn from the Vanguardia Group, the concrete artists, Los Once, and Volumen Uno. Along with Brey, the exhibition included work by José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso, José Manuel Fors, Flavio Garciandía, Israel León, Rogelio López Marín (Gory),Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Tomás Sánchez, Leandro Soto, and Rubén Torres Llorca. In the famous photograph used for the exhibition poster that was never distributed, Brey stands third from the left, with his best friend, Juan Francisco Elso, on one side and José Manuel Fors on the other. It is a formal image, but materially elusive, as if silkscreened onto the paper with insufficient ink. The solidity of the pose becomes ambiguous through the dematerialized surface of the image. In a later street photograph featuring half of the group, Brey is the fifth from the left, standing in the back row. He is pictured to the left of Francisco Elso, to the right of Lucy Lippard, and behind Ana Mendieta and Garciandía. Though not all of the artists exhibiting in Volumen Uno were present, the image points to an important aspect of the show and its mythic place in history as the art-historical reset button for the island.

Volumen Uno represented a seismic generational shift away from the orthodox approaches of San Alejandro (the National School of Fine Arts) and the revolutionary cause. It had no theme. The artwork determined the conversation and it followed the expansive interest of the eleven artists that were included. The work was self-generating and self-determining. No rules or limits were followed. No obligations to utilize state imagery, or to elevate or engage in political ideology were entertained. The group expressed no need to speak in tepid genre-speak to notions of national identity, or shifting meanings of ‘Cubaneity’ or cubanía, except to pointedly reject it. There was no manifesto. Emphasis was placed on greater autonomy for artists and artwork. There was a simultaneous embracing and deployment of the local and the global, without marked boundaries. It was a show that also demonstrated an expansive use of materials and conceptual modes of expression through an emphasis on the ordinary, the quotidian. It demonstrated a more complicated approach to the commodification of art through aesthetic submersion into conceptual ideas. This was not a show of pretty paintings on a wall, or sculptures on plinths. The artists, perhaps spurred by youthful courage, were determined to do what they envisioned despite the potential consequences. Having been rejected by official gallery spaces during their first attempt in 1978, consideration was made to present the show in José Manuel Fors’ home on the outskirts of Havana, before it was mounted at the Centro de Arte International, when officials deemed it improper to stage a show outside of a gallery.[8]

In order to connect the artists to a specific trajectory in Western art, the art community used terms to describe the work, such as Pop Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism, conceptual art, and performance art, among others. This was the language of praise, but also critique. The artists and the work being exhibited were pilloried in terms familiar to any creative from the Caribbean – with accusations of the apish, gross mimicry of foreign movements, and of anachronistic, inauthentic, impure, and ersatz endeavour. Brey recalls this reality without nostalgia. Public interest was in a battle royale with intergenerational criticism meant to wound. And yet, like so many things in the Caribbean, there is never a single story. At the very same time, the Volumen Uno artists were buoyed by the presence and support of the artist Ana Mendieta, who had arrived the day before the exhibition opened with the art writer Lucy Lippard. Mendieta had returned to Cuba the year before, in a visit that had come nineteen years after her initial departure from the island in Operation Pedro Pan. She immediately connected with the local arts community, particularly the Volumen Uno group and Ricard Brey. Between 1980 and 1983, she would return to the island seven times.[9]

While all the artists participating in the exhibition demonstrated building blocks that would shape their individual practices in the years to come, for Brey and the others, Mendieta provided a living, breathing example of the ways in which one’s locality could powerfully translate through aesthetic forms in global arenas. Like Mendieta, many of the Volumen Uno artists were deeply interested in the conceptual possibilities of Taíno culture, and Afro-Cuban religious and cultural practices such as Santería, Palo Monte and Abakuá, and this became another point of connection between them. Though Bedia and Francisco Elso would later become Santería initiates, Brey, who had been raised in the traditions, never felt the need to take that step. He always felt intimately connected with these belief systems and free to deploy elements of them through artistic process and/or conceptual ideas in his work.

By 1978, when the first attempt to produce Volumen Uno was made, it was clear to Brey that he wanted to make art with the objects he had been collecting in the form of assemblage and installation. He has never sought to portray or represent people literally, but has focused on the human through special consideration of experiences, surfaces, textures, human touch, heat, evocations of force, or handiwork through natural and man-made objects.

After Volumen Uno’s success, there were talks about mounting Volumen Dos. Of that time, Brey recalls Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film, Memorias del Subdesarrollo/Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), in which a character notes that “the fruit in topical climes matures very quickly…” In other words, “in Cuba you can arrive in one second and in another second you are falling from the tree” – forced to ripen too quickly and finished. Rather than rush into Volumen Dos, Brey thought it best for him to slow down and allow himself the chance to mature artistically. “When you are young you have to prove you have the talent. When you are old you have to prove you are wise… For Volumen Uno I improvised, a few bones and stones in an installation. I needed to take time with my work. […] Fame is good for the moment, but not for long-term health. You can easily get caught in the work that fuelled the rise. But where do you go from there?”

Mendieta would play a pivotal role in Brey’s desire to grow as an artist. Wanting to give back to her now expanded community, Mendieta worked with Luis Caminitzer to arrange artist residencies for Brey, Bedia and Garciandía at SUNY Westbury, where Caminitzer taught. This  occurred in the spring of 1985 and the residency culminated in the artists’ first American exhibition, which proclaimed their work as representative of the “New Art” from Cuba. The show, was covered in an article by Lucy Lippard for Art in America, in April 1986.[10] In it, Lippard noted Brey’s concern with the “the structure of myths” – colonial, contemporary and Afro-Cuban”, his “Nigerian blood”, and use of “book-sized sheets and roughly tied bundles of handmade paper, covered with semi-legible handwriting and overprinted with images of the flora and fauna of Latin America”.[11] She cites his influences as “the voyages of the 16th-century Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano”, as well as “the diaries and notebooks of German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s five years in South America (1799–1804)”. At the time Brey described Humboldt as a metaphor, “a mythical figure more than an historical one, and I can manipulate that figure for my purposes”.[12] The composite character of the work reproduced in the article is a notable invocation to Brey’s past, present and future, and his concern with the particularity and power of materials – in this case, salt, ceramics, fire, and ash. If we think of assemblages as rhizomes in material form, at this point in his career, Brey is already feeling his way towards a mature practice that will take special form in his later boxes. French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posit that “an assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously”.[13] The manner in which Brey works with materials inhabits this flow, but it is further grounded in his innate interest to observe by collecting objects.

IV

When Ricardo Brey speaks of what has passed, what sent him adrift on the journey here, across waves of air, space, water, ideas, friendships, family ties, and inner worlds, one hears a mind excavating, turning and folding all elements encountered in wonder, as if to constantly occupy that thrilling moment when a heavy mist that surrounds a person begins to clear. It is a place where momentary disorientation enables the mind to open and become aware of new states of being in the imaginary. Everything is possible here. Rote relationships, binaries and organizational systems of the world move aside, making way for unexpected configurations using diverse materials and stimulating new symbolic relations, beyond boundaries of set thoughts, accepted ontologies and bodily limits. Here it is possible for an artist to take methods once used for producing knowledge of ‘Others’, methods once used to subdue, contain and commodify through classification systems, and turn them inside out to reveal the point of view of the former subject/specimen, and in the process, the chimeric character of ideology itself.

Brey has always gathered and collected things, not as a compulsion but as a way of knowing and relating through objects the place around him. As he moved in the world, the places and cultures in which he travelled also became known to him through things. While quite young he developed a sensitivity to objects, collecting items such as stones, bones, dried plants, flowers, and leaves. Later, as an artist, he would think through his relationship to objects with reference to Afro-Cuban spiritual practices, conditions of scarcity on the island, and as Lippard noted, the work of botanist Alexander Humboldt. However, unlike Humboldt, Brey’s relationship to objects was scientific, material, aesthetic, and discursive, but also metaphysical. He has never seen himself in a hierarchical relationship to things, but in a lateral one that tied him to objects in ways that were not always clear on first encounter, though intuitively recognized. Brey felt and feels “empathy towards those materials” and this empathy leads him to “question the inherent meanings of materials […] to develop new meanings” in his art.[14]

When Brey visits a new place, he doesn't rely on tours or visits to historic sites to get to know it. Instead he heads to local flea markets, or simply walks the streets in search of discarded things that have a life and history rooted there. For him it is through these ordinary objects, often encountered in a happenstance manner that more intimately and unexpectedly reveal the character and values of a place. These found objects may live with him for a while, sometimes years. This gives the objects time to settle in his head, allowing him to see more clearly what is happening and what they are saying to him, before they begin a second or third life as art objects. Brey recalls a West African saying: “If you want to know wisdom you have to get close to the old man who sweats.” When he connects to objects, this is what he is reaching for; objects with prior lives or history; objects that wear evidence of having lived; objects that sweat.

In 2013, in preparation for his retrospective exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Qué Le Importa Al Tigre Una Raya Más/ The Futility of Good Intentions, Brey was interviewed by the Cuban curator, art writer and editor Sandra Sosa Fernández. It was an enlightening and powerful conversation, particularly striking because of Brey’s refreshing forthrightness and what the conversation revealed about the richness of this thinking and approach to aesthetics and form:

My inner ethics transforms into aesthetics. The greatest divorce an artist can make is to forget that the aesthetic is marked by an ethic. Those two things have to coexist in you. If you throw out the ethics the aesthetics suffer. And I haven’t been able to divorce (separate) one from the other.[15] (Ricardo Brey)

This is a telling statement, emphasized in the way it guided his approach to this exhibition. Rather than bringing in work from Ghent, his current home, Brey decided to generate the exhibition primarily from within the island; to come to know Cuba again after his extended absence through objects. He recognized that the ethos undergirding objecthood in Cuba was very different from that in Europe. In Cuba, scarcity and poverty ensure that nothing ever gets old. What is considered disposable in Europe and America takes on multiple lives in Cuba, making it far more difficult to come to know the island again through discarded objects. To make work for the exhibition grounded in the history and life of Havana, Brey established a perimeter area around his mother-in-law’s house in the city. After a while, he managed to secure state-managed items that had been abandoned, specifically four electrical meters tied to a system that was no longer in use. They became the basic elements for the objects and ‘boxes’ he created to anchor the exhibition.

Brey’s ‘boxes’ are only boxes in a single sense. They appear ordinary and familiar from the outside, but at the point of contact, interaction or performance they begin to unfold. The material and situational complexity of works like Sutra (2010), The Black Cube (2012), Water (2013), The Uncanny (2015), and others, reveal themselves to be constellations within a Caribbean universe. Through them, Brey speaks to the infinity of the natural world, the sublime possibilities of one’s dreams and imagination. In part, these works also act as a psychological container of fractured history, and blurred and concise memories. Through material, form and experience, they enter the fifth dimension. 

A box has an extensive semiotic life. It is the ultimate tool for categorization and organization. It holds files, memories, specimens, things of value, archival objects, things that need to be hidden, protected or discarded. In Cuba, Eleguá, the god of the crossroads, the beginning and end of opportunities, of encounters and life itself, lives in a box, or clay bowl, behind doors. As with any orisha, Eleguá has specific attributes that affirm his presence, and requires specific offerings or materials to do his work. At times these tenets find their way into Brey’s work elementally, contributing to the meta-qualities of the boxes. An early version was made with the artist’s daughter in mind, and for it he drew on the Santerían belief and use of white cascarilla powder to heal, and to ward off evil spirits. In this box he included eggshells (a more readily available source of the white powder) in the configuration, in an abstract expression of his desire for his daughter’s ongoing protection in life. However, only rarely do elements of these works index so personally. And even here, such knowledge is discreet, but because the shells exist in multiplicity, like all the elements in these assemblages, they carry within them the potential to become one of a series of entrances into the work for the viewer.

Another entrance the artist provides centres on one’s physical experience or interaction with the boxes. During his early career in Cuba, Brey recalls installations, like altars, being placed in the corner of the gallery, or perpendicular to the side walls. As an artist working in this mode, the literal marginalization of the work in the space refracted through his body, as he was often the only black person in the room. In these works, Brey makes a conscious decision to move the boxes and through them, himself and his audience to the centre of the room. In the process, he changes one’s physical relationship to the work, but also the symbolic value of one’s experience with them. If we think of each box as a rhizome, arranged singularly and multiply in a room while offering almost infinite possibilities of arrangement, viewers formally occupy the interstitial space between them. This is where, Glissant argues, the catalysis through creolizing relations occurs; the place of possibility, encounter and change.

Rather than boxes, perhaps we can view these works as contemporary reliquary objects reminiscent of traditions practised by the Fang, Kota, Punu and Kongo peoples of West and Central Africa. As migratory peoples, the Fang, Kota and Punu developed traditions that allowed them to take the bones of deceased ancestors with them as they moved, in the form of reliquaries. These reliquaries were also assemblages consisting of sculptures and containers holding the relics believed to possess the power to bless or confer onto others a special ability that the ancestor demonstrated in life. For Kongo peoples, Minkisi objects were also assemblages, which, once activated, possessed the powers to heal an individual or community. The consciousness of the object these cultures expressed is refracted in Brey’s boxes and shared by numerous artists in the African diaspora from Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, and David Hammons to Chakaia Booker, Shanique Smith, and Nari Ward. But the sensibility reaches far beyond an artist’s direct connections to these cultures. Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Kleinholz also exhibited extensive interest in ordinary and found objects. Though the practice was formalized at the time using the term Arte Povera, as John Outterbridge observed, “Rauschenberg was inextricably influenced by southern vernacular culture while attending Black Mountain College from 1949 to 1952”,[16] a rhizomatic vernacular culture firmly tethered to the rhizome of Africa by the transatlantic slave trade. Though for Rauschenberg and Kleinholz, this practice was a phase, a medium and process to be explored for a time in the form of combines and assemblage paintings, for artists like Outterbridge, Hammons and Brey, the assemblage, the notion of bricolage, “was and is a way of articulating [their] worldview”. [It is the] “way (we) put our lives together”[17] at the crossroads of multiple historical, cultural, and aesthetic traditions. Therefore, when David Hammons collected bottles for Untitled (Night Train) (1989) he drew on their capacity as a contemporary reliquaries, capable of carrying the spirit of those whose hands and mouths had touched the bottles. The semiotic capacity of the bottle in American culture, as well as the completed sculpture’s philosophical and aesthetic challenge to the apolitical pretentions and conceptual claims of Minimalism became embedded in the work, thereby deepening its critical capacity. Brey shares Hammons’ belief in the spirit of things and in these three-dimensional works, he similarly attends to the manner in which this carries through into the creation of new objects and our experience of them.

V

As a Caribbean art historian, I was first introduced to the theoretical concept of the rhizome, not through Edouard Glissant, but through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At the time, I was engaged in a desperate search for methodologies that would help me mark the Caribbean outside of modern binaries that rendered it invisible in contemporary art. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari described rhizomes in ways familiar to those of us who grew up growing and/or eating cassava and yams, as a “subterranean stem […] absolutely different from roots and radicles”.[18] For them, this fundamental food system was the perfect metaphor for mechanisms of human activity and social machines:

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. […] A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive...[19] (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari)

These were all principles of relations I recognized in my world. I found this theorization beautiful, provocative, but at the very same time ahistorical, spatially and culturally unmoored, and troubling. It came to represent a kind of feedback loop describing one aspect of a principle of humanness I had always known, but had become estranged to.

Deleuze and Guattari, spoke of rhizomes as “a map” rather than a deep structure. I wondered: “Is there anything in the Caribbean one-dimensional?” They spoke of rhizomes as “a short-term memory or anti-memory”, but in the Caribbean, who can afford to forget, even if forgetting simultaneously exists as an impermanent strategy for survival? As I began to engage with Glissant, the Cuban cultural theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo clarified my ambivalence and ultimate discomfort, arguing that what Deleuze and Guattari offer is not fully applicable to the Caribbean; “the specifications of their model are clear and final: [but] here is a flow machine…” of multiple dimensions. He continues:

The Caribbean machine […] is something more; it is a technological-poetic machine, or, if you like, a metamachine of differences whose poetic mechanism cannot be diagrammed in conventional dimensions and whose user’s manual is found dispersed in a state of plasma within the chaos of its own network of codes and subcodes. […] polyrhythm (rhythms cut through by other rhythms, which are cut through by still other rhythms).[20] (Antonio Benítez-Rojo)

Benítez-Rojo did not reject the concept of rhizome, but like Glissant, saw Deleuze and Guattari’s machine-like approach as one that flattened relations, and foreclosed the imagination and the full possibilities of the creolization process into linear, one-dimensional space and time. In anticipation of Benítez-Rojo, Glissant moored rhizome theory as a specifically Caribbean reality. Without the Caribbean, rhizomatic, creolizing systems of relations can easily devolve into a de-historicized universality, divorced from the particularities of world-shattering forces like slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberalism, separating its ethics from its aesthetics and rewriting the concept as a romance for global art cosmopolitans to appropriate and consume.

This is what I see when I confront Ricardo Brey’s work. In the Caribbean, one of the most powerful creolizing rhizomes is language. We speak of Jamaican Patois, Haitian Kreyol, Papiamento, Cuban Spanish, and many other living forms. These creolizing languages carry in them traces of the past, even as they enunciate something completely new and whole. Through his own discreet material and aesthetic language, Brey’s contemporary reliquaries carry the dross of culture and context that is simultaneously rooted and migrant; continually expanding, as Brey’s own experience within the world grows. His work is aligned with Glissantian post-structural Caribbean philosophies, because it holds ethics and aesthetics together in such a way that the conceptual implications of rhizomes are not decultured, de-historicized, or in the parlance of curatorial practices, ‘white-cubed’. As Brey intuits the life of objects that comprise his works, they enter into new configurations without leaving their histories and cultures behind, mitigating against feelings of estrangement that Caribbean people, migrant people, oppressed people, marginalized people, and everyday people often experience in their worlds, pointedly, without the teleology of a transcendent narrative in them. Rather than offering the hope of post-revolutionary romances, and armchair activism, this work maps a kind of urgency that the artist carries within him. “I am a child of revolution”, he says. “I put a lot of hope in social change… And I believe that art can open our eyes and minds… But I know the house is on fire.”

Erica Moiah James is an art historian, curator and professor at The University of Miami. Her research centres on modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean, African, and African-American Diasporas. Recent publications include Charles White's J'Accuse! and the Limits of Universal Blackness (AAAJ, 2016); Every N* is a Star (1974): Re-Imaging Blackness from Post-Civil Rights America to the Post-Independence Caribbean (Black Camera, 2016); Caribbean Art in Space and Time (Barbados Museum, 2018), and Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art (NKA, May 2019). She is a 2019 fellow at the University of Miami's Humanities Center and a 2019–2022 Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg, S.A., a recipient of the Creative Time/Warhol Foundation Writers Grant and a 2020 Mellon Foundation Prroject Grant focused on the multimodal art practice of Geoffrey Holder. Her forthcoming book is entitled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary.

References:

[1] “Manthia Diawara in conversation with Edouard Glissant On Board the Queen Mary”, in the exhibition catalogue Afro-Modernisms: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic, edited by Tanya Barson (Tate Liverpool, 2014), p. 58-63

[2] Doreen Weppler-Grogan, “Cultural Policy, the Visual Arts, and the Advance of the Cuban Revolution in the Aftermath of the Gray Years”, Cuban Studies, Vol. 41 (2010), pp. 143–165.

[3] Ibid. Weppler-Grogan gives the example of unconventional pushback from the artist Servando Cabrera, who pushed back, engaging in subversive tactics in plain sight, by transferring his queer interest in musculature to paintings of buff campesinos, in keeping with the accepted aesthetics of Soviet-styled “realism”.

[4] Ricardo Brey and Sandra Sosa Fernandez, “Interview with Ricardo Brey conducted by Sandra Sosa Fernandez”, in the exhibition catalogue, Ricardo Brey: Qué Le Importa al Tigre una Raya Más/The Futility of Good Intentions (2014), p. 124.

[5] The process became known as pavonato, in (dis)honour of Luis Pavon Tamayo, who was the director of the National Cultural Council at the time and the programme’s main enforcer.

[6] Rachel Weiss, To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 5.

[7] During this meeting, Lam shared with Brey and Bedia that upon returning to Cuba in 1941, he had seen his old friend Victor Manuel and suggested they might get together to talk about art and life. Manuel rebuffed his attempts to reconnect, telling Lam that he needed to go drink his café con leche. This rejection apparently hurt Lam deeply and impacted his decision to leave Cuba and move on to New York.

[8] Weiss, To and From Utopia…, p. 7

[9] Laura Roulet, “Ana Mendieta as Cultural Connector with Cuba”, American Art, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 21–27.

[10] Lucy Lippard, “Made in America: New Art from Cuba”, Art in America, April 1986 pp. 27–35.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans., Brian Massumi

 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) pp. 22–23

[14] “Ricardo Brey in Conversation with Alex Santana”, in the exhibition catalogue, Ricardo Brey: Doble Existencia/Double Existence (NYC: Alexander Gray, 2019), p. 9.

[15] “Interview with Ricardo Brey conducted by Sandra Sosa Fernandez” in the exhibition catalogue, Ricardo Brey: Qué Le Importa al Tigre una Raya Más/The Futility of Good Intentions (2014), p. 165.

[16] A. M. Weaver, “Reflections on John Outterbridge”, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 35, Fall 2014, pp. 32–41.

[17] Weaver, Ibid.

[18] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus…, p. 6.

[19] Ibid, p. 7.

[20] Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd Edition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 18.