AMATEUR
Dermis Perez Leon

“Amateur” is Cuban artist Diango Hernández’s first individual show in Cologne, Germany. An active member of Gabinete Ordo Amoris,1 Hernández presents an impressive group of more than 2,000 drawings from the last seven years created on different kinds of paper, and some notebooks with sketches. Simultaneously, several “artifacts” were placed in the gallery space as object-sculptures that gave form to some of the ideas sketched in the drawings on view. In a kind of chronicle of memorabilia, the artist covered the gallery walls with many drawings, comments, and schematic designs, all of them supported only by pins.

The exhibition worked visually as an extended collage of ideas and notes arbitrarily organized in the gallery space. It is a record from the artist’s personal perspective of everyday life in a country where socio political reality traverses all spheres of existence; the private intermingles with the public, and art itself is part of that same everyday life. Drawings of imagined or referential architecture, containers, self-port raits, planes, designs for artifacts, and graffiti-like writings show a complex and surprising world that t ranscends the initial immediacy of the arbitrary and the seemingly improvised. “Amateur,” as its title implies, is based on a humorous, playful attitude, an ironic commentary on the very condition of art, and of the artist in this context.

Art, like life, shares a kind of temporal precariousness, where what is ephemeral becomes a provisional gesture, the “ingenuity” necessary for survival. Its entire aesthetics, whose justification is a state of need, makes art a participant in a certain attitude I would call the “emerging” and “provisional guerrilla,” where it doesn’t really matter what is used: whatever is at hand is valid. This idea informs each one of the 2,000 drawings on display. For the artist, any available piece of paper or material becomes the vehicle for immediate expression in sketching a desire, comment, doubt, and criticism, as well as the question of what art is, and what is it for.

This need to use, to express freely in any “style,” mark, or design, and to try everything, is rooted in a reflexive attitude in which play is justified by the provisional state of the “amateur,” who is not interested even in signing or dating the work. The work is unusually fresh thanks to the unprejudiced attitude assumed by the artist. Gabinete Ordo Amoris appropriated the concept of the provisional, of provisionality as part of an aesthetics or attitude reflecting “Cuban behavior in times of crisis.”2

It is the aesthetic of popular culture of a country in state of emergency. Television antennae, radio receivers and communication devices, transportation solutions such as the “taxi-limousine,” and objects and toys created with the refuse of a new Cuban consumerism became part of the group’s iconography. More than ready-mades, their appropriation went beyond bringing assorted objects into an artistic context. The object was not only assumed without reversion (in the sense of Duchamp’s inversion), but its functionality and creativity principles also were incorporated. Objects with a receptive function—antennae, for example— related to television and radio transmissions from Miami of advertisements promising the “other side,” and an illusion built on the foundation of fictive desires became true “machines” set up to communicate a different message in the gallery and museum space. In these objects that, from the perspective of the developed world are “folkloric,” are we faced with the interplay of an aesthetic of poverty? I would say that Diango Hernández has extended the aesthetics of the emergent and the provisional.

These artifacts that were drawn and later built do not carry the promise of a desire or the fulfillment of a function, but revert into objects of cultural analysis. With discarded fragments and materials whose original use cannot be determined, the artist has built a machine made of cardboard, wood, and a metal cylinder that would seem to suggest a phallic movie camera, or a war machine. Here the chai r is here a multi-use object with its transmitter-amplifier, as is the pair of shoes with transmitters, antennae, and headphones.

The work manifests an obsession with transmission and communication, which, in an isolated country such as Cuba, become immediate necessities. In the context of the art gallery, transmission moves to the plane of semantics and transcends chronicling and social critique, although these are implicit in the object’s very condition. However, it must be noted that the approach is not anthropological, nor does it constitute a reinterpretation of Arte Povera; what we have in front of us is a cultural and aesthetic proposition: the provisional object created in an emerging society and used in the aforementioned sense of “guerrilla” within the circuits of institutionalized art events. In this case, “Amateur” is a production conceived from the margins —without manifesting an aesthetics of the marginal— to be prescribed in a center.

From that perspective, seven years of experimentation validate an amateur attitude. For Diango Hernández this exhibition is a moment of closure and a point of departure, and occurs at a crucial moment when Gabinete Ordo Amoris finds itself in a state of dissolution and both members have begun to work outside the Cuban context.

Good-bye my friends I am going to Capitalism, a comment (in English) found on one of the walls, compels me to ask how Hernández’s work will be validated after it enters this competitive world where the amateur attitude is not justified as such. Will it be necessary to re-contextualize or reinvent what has been created as the aesthetics of a marginal place in order for it to be institutionalized at the center? The question is and will be open for Cuban artists who are approved outside the context in which their work is produced, and who for better or worse, in order to be understood, have been pigeonholed into the aesthetics of poverty, or the promised utopia.


Notes
1. Gabinete Ordo Amoris was established in 1994 on the basis of an invitation made by Diango Hernández to his friends, and sought to establish an artistic collaboration without reference to individual names.
2. Diango Hernández, email to the author, December 29, 2003, in response to a question about the idea of the provisional.



Diango Hernández "AMATEUR"
Freherking Wiesehöfer, 2003

Following our first exhibition with Diango Hernandez, 1970 in 2001 (together with his partner Francis Acea as Ordo Amoris Cabinet), we are now presenting the comprehensive, hitherto unexhibited drawings by the Cuban artist, who now lives in Italy. We are also showing a number of new works. “Mama could you give me birth again, I make a mistake” is written in ink on one sheet, on another a man is throwing up at the computer: “My race is sick” is written there. Again and again you recognize Hernandez’ face integrated into objects and events in his surroundings, in dreamt-up situations and absurd relationships. The artist himself, with a shark’s fin, stands at the window smoking, or has his hands and feet in buckets of water. Personal slogans such as “Art disappoint us” appear alongside weighty German terms such as “Kernlosigkeit” or “Geist/Masse” from books by Karl Marx.

These are followed by a hand-made cannon, then a hand, whose shadow can be seen to resemble a devil, then some underwear. And so on. Diango Hernandez took his time to discover drawing: at first, in particular, there were sketches for objects and installations on which he worked together with Francis Acea as OAC – for example the hand-made antennas shown here two years ago. Gradually drawing developed into Hernandez’ independent, everyday work, increasingly mirroring the artist’s personal realm of thoughts. Sometimes two, sometimes fifty sheets a day. Not a single one was destroyed. “Every day they became a larger part of me and I am sure they are a kind of extension of my body.” Simple project sketches, comic-like episodes, impressionist dots of colour, texts.

With a simple, yet exact line Hernandez ventures into the cast-off existence in a world whose banality and brutality seems to disturb, but also to amuse him. He uses every kind of paper available and permits crude combinations of techniques and materials; water color, ballpoint pen, ink, oil, found and glued-on elements – everything is possible. The involvement with drawing takes place in full view on the pages themselves, taken as a whole they are a very personal studio for dealing with life, whether it takes place beyond the artist’s window or in his head. Diango Hernandez, as in the installations by OAC, is searching for the sincerely-felt beauty of the imperfect, the improvised, or put abstractly, the crisis. Known as a Cuban permanent state of affairs, but familiar to everyone else in the comparatively perfect Western world, this kind of recognition is a means to live with the constantly unfulfilled promise of a better future, to which they react with obsession, humour and subversion. In this light in particular, those drawings which Diango Hernandez was forced to either tear out or blacken any ambiguous elements or texts on leaving Cuba, stand out as authentic testimonies. New, recently-completed works supplement the exhibition and transpose some of Diango Hernandez’ ideas into a three-dimensional world.



Democracy
DH. 2003
"The concept of democracy is used to legitimize governance; calling a government undemocratic implies it shouldn't exist"
Wikipedia

The ideas of freedom, independence and liberation have been used as political tools, as flags to make people died for, to build new nations and to destroy cultures. Democracy is added to this list of political instrumentalized concepts. In the last decades the fundaments of the democracy have mutated into one the most manipulating contemporary political terms of the western world.

“Democracy” Is pointing out the concept of democracy as a cacophony (Discordant sounds in the jarring juxtaposition of harsh letters or syllables, sometimes inadvertent, but often deliberately used in poetry for effect). The show presents a group of confusing and suspicious objects and historical documents.

“Speeches” is an arrange of six record player playing different president speeches at the same time, the are played with the same level of loudness inside a small room. As a result we hear entropy; the spectator is confused by multiple ovations, political hysteria and exited presidents.

There is a noise on the air while in the first room we can see a wall made out of A4 white paper sheets signed by different presidents. Are this signatures fake or real? No one knows and no one can really tell because we don't know how those important signatures look like, signatures that can decide for instance if we wether go to war or if we stay home watching TV.



The Museum of Capitalism
Dr. Doris Krystof, 2005

Ich freue mich sehr über die Einladung von Susanne Titz und Hubertus Wunschik, zur Eröffnung des „Museum of Capitalism“ zu sprechen, das der aus Kuba stammende Künstler Diango Hernandez im alten Museum von Mönchengladbach eingerichtet hat.

Diango Hernandez hält sich zur Zeit im Rahmen des durch die Josef und Hilde Wilberz – Stiftung geförderten städtischen Stipendiums in Mönchengladbach auf. Er ist einer jener jungen Künstler, die ständig unterwegs sind, permanent die Orte wechseln, die „zwischen den Welten“ unterwegs sind. „Zwischen den Welten“, im Falle von Diango Hernandez kann man das mit Fug und Recht sagen, denn seit mehreren Jahren pendelt er zwischen Kuba und Europa. Im Sozialismus der Karibikinsel aufgewachsen, hat er in den letzten Jahren bei seinem Bruder im italienischen Trento gelebt, dann mehrere Monate in Spanien verbracht, und nun, hier im Rheinland schliessen sich gewissermaßen die Kreise. Denn Diango Hernandez ist als Künstler im Rheinland bei weitem kein Unbekannter: 1998 realisierte er eine aufsehenerregnde Installation aus hängenden Antennen und einer aus vier polnischen Ladas zusammengebauten kubanischen Stretch-Limousine im Ludwigforum in Aachen, im Anschluss daran war er mehrfach – mit hinreißenden Zeichnungen oder einer wüsten Installation aus banalen weißen Plastikstühlen - in der Kölner Galerie Frehrking Wiesehöfer zu sehen, und im vergangenen Jahr war Diango Hernandez an der um die Musik von Mouse on Mars konzipierten Ausstellung „doku/fiction“ in der Kunsthalle Düsseldorf beteiligt.

Manch einer mag sich aktuell aber auch an Diango Hernandez‘ Beitrag für die diesjährige Biennale in Venedig erinnern: die Soundinstallation „Palabras“ („Worte“), die in der ehemaligen Seilerei im Arsenal im Rahmen der von Rosa Martinez kuratierten Ausstellung „Sempre un piu lontano“ – „Immer ein bißchen weiter“ gezeigt wird. „Palabras“ besteht aus der Installation von sechs umgekippten, hölzernen Strommasten, die noch mit diesen altertümlichen Porzellanköpfen versehen sind. Die abgelösten Stromkabel ragen dabei frei in den Raum, sehen aus wie in die Luft gezeichnete Kringel oder Schleifen. Dazu erscheint auf der dahinterliegenden Ziegelwand eine Text-Projektion: Einem Film-Abspann im Kino vergleichbar, läuft eine Liste mit den Amtszeiten sämtlicher kommunistischer Machthaber. Bei vielen Namen der neueren Geschichte liest man „( xy -1989)“, nur als die Reihe an Fidel Castro kommt, erscheint da: „(1959-...)“. Das Ensemble aus gefällten Strommasten und Filmprojektion wird von einer herzergreifenden italienischen Schlagermusik aus den 60er Jahren begleitet. Politik und Poesie gehen in dieser eindrucksvollen Arbeit eine ganz besondere, für Diango Hernandez typische Mischung eingehen. Es ist eine politische künstlerische Haltung, die aufklärerisch agiert und zugleich mit eminenter Leichtigkeit das Rätselhafte und Mysteriöse berührt.

Die für Mönchengladbach entstandene Ausstellung schließt in mehrfacher Hinsicht an die Biennale-Arbeit an. Auch hier im alten Museum verbindet sich das starke politische Interesse des Künstlers mit einer ausgesprochen poetischen Haltung und einer großen Sensibilität gegenüber dem Ort. Vielleicht ist es bereits diese Verbindung, die an Marcel Broodthaers denken lässt, dessen Verständnis von „Poesie als Störung von Weltordnung“, von „Poesie als indirekte politische Frage“ Grundlage seines bildkünstlerischen Werks gewesen ist. Der Gedanke an Broodthaers liegt aber auch deswegen nahe, weil er genau hier in diesen Räumen unter Johannes Cladders eine wichtige Ausstellung gehabt hat, die auch um das Thema Museum kreiste.

„Poesie als Störung von Weltordnung“, „Poesie als indirekte politische Frage“ - Auch in den Arbeiten von Diango Hernandez geht es vielfach um Worte, um Sprache als Kommunikationsmittel, um Musik zur Übermittlung von Stimmungen, und um die verschiedensten technischen Hilfen bei der Vermittlung von Kommunikation. So spielen immer wieder das Radio eine Rolle, der Plattenspieler, Lautsprecher und Verstärker, und immer wieder taucht die Antenne als Zeichen für das Senden und Empfangen von Botschaften auf. Dabei hat die Ambivalenz von Glaube an die emanzipative Kraft von Sprache einerseits und die Skepsis gegenüber der verführerischen Rhetorik der Macht andererseits die künstlerische Arbeit von Diango Hernandez stark geprägt. Diese Ambivalenz kommt auch in dieser Ausstellung deutlich zum Ausdruck: so etwa am Beispiel einer der neuesten Kommunikationsmedien, dem Internet.

Diango Hernandez‘ „Museum of Capitalism“ ist ein Projekt für, mit und über das Internet. Gibt man www.museumofcapitalism.com ein, gelangt man auf eine Seite, die der Startseite der Suchmaschine Google nachempfunden ist, genau gesagt der US-amerikanischen Google-Seite. Dort hat Diango Hernandez als Suchbegriff das Wort „Freedom“ (Freiheit) eingegeben und das absurde Ergebnis von 136 Millionen Treffern erzielt. Unterschiedslos rubriziert die Suchmaschine Seiten mit hoch politischen Inhalten neben Inseraten für Freeclimbing oder Surfclubs. Unter der Option „pictures“ hat Diango Hernandez schließlich unterschiedlichste Bilder zum Suchbegriff Freiheit versammelt und damit eine Zuordnung von Bild und Begriff mit beinahe Magritte’schem Anstrich zu Wege gebracht. Zusammen mit den Ausdrucken der Freedom-Übersichtsseiten wurden die gegoogelten Freiheitsbilder in dem gerade erschienenen Buch „Museum of Capitalism“ publiziert. Ein Teil der Ausdrucke der Übersichtsseiten findet sich hier im Treppenhaus an der Wand installiert und markiert damit den Auftakt zu der nach diesem Netz-Projekt benannten Ausstellung „Museum of Capitalism“.

In der schieren Menge der Einträge des Internets wölbt sich der Begriff „Freiheit“ zu einem nicht mehr zu bewältigenden Berg an Information auf. Inkomensurabel damit ist die subjektive Erfahrung von Unfreiheit, wie sie etwa im nahezu vollständigen Verbot des Internets in Kuba zum Ausdruck kommt und die scheinbare Grenzenlosigkeit des Netzes relativiert. Wenn das Internet als Inbegriff der globalen Vernetzung nichts anderes als eine chaotische Fülle der Information generiert, steht dem eine durch individuelle Vernunft geregelte Ordnung der Dinge gegenüber, die allerdings neu zu verhandeln ist. Stichwort: „Poesie als Störung der Weltordnung“, um noch einmal auf Broodthaers zurückzukommen. Und wie Broodthaers greift Diango Hernandez auf die Vorstellung vom Museum als eine der ältesten Ordnungsmaschinerien unserer Kultur zurück und spielt noch einmal durch, was es zu bewahren, zu betrachten und zu vermitteln gilt. Hilfestellung dabei gibt eine gewisse Guerillataktik, die ins Museum Dinge einschleust, die an Kunst erinnern, aber doch etwas anderes meinen.

Gleich zu Beginn im ersten Raum eine skulpturale Installation aus Tischen mit dem Titel „Amplified Secret“ – Vergrößertes Geheimnis (das klingt schon wieder nach René Magritte, diesem Taktiker der Verstörung!). Eine Reihe umgestürzter und auf einer diagonal durch den Raum verlaufenden Linie arrangierter Schultische bildet eine halbhohe Wand. Die Tische stammen aus Mönchengladbach und Umgebung, weisen Gebrauchsspuren auf, an den Unterseiten kleben die obligatorischen, im Unterricht klammheimlich entsorgten Kaugummis. Die Reihe der hochkant gestellten Tische versteckt notdürftig die Quelle des den Raum erfüllenden Geräuschs, ein Mix aus verschiedenen männlichen Stimmen. Erst hinter den Tischen, in der hintersten Ecke des Raumes entdeckt man drei Kassetten-Recorder, die auf dem Boden stehen. Aus ihnen tönen englischsprachige Worte, deren Sinn man allenfalls bei genauestem Hinhören versteht. Es handelt sich um historische Telefongespräche unterschiedlicher amerikanischer Präsidenten, die aufgezeichnet wurden und nun über Forschungsinstitute in den USA wie die Kennedy Library als Kassetten für 6 Dollar pro Stüpck verkauft werden. So hört man hier etwa Nixon, der mit McNamara telefoniert, oder Ausschnitte eines Kennedy-Telefonats aus der Zeit der Kubakrisa. Diango Hernandez hat sich diese Kassetten besorgt und in Erfahrung gebracht, dass im Sekretariat des Weißen Hauses per Knopfdruck wichtig scheinende Telefonate stets mitgeschnitten werden. Die Veröffentlichung solchen Materials entspricht einer urdemokratischen Haltung, die in der Öffentlichkeit ein wirksames Korrektiv politischen Handelns sieht. Dass entsprechende Stellen in den mitgeschnittenen Telefonaten durch ein „beep“ unkenntlich gemacht sind, ist Teil solcher Informationspolitik. (Größere Offenheit bedingt die Vergrößerung der Geheimnisse.) Vor diesem Hintergrund sieht die Wand aus Schultischen plötzlich gar nicht mehr nur wie eine raumgreifende skulpturale Geste kollektiver Erinnerungskultur aus, sondern die improvisiert aufgebaute Trennwand behauptet sich in einem fast wörtlich zu nehmenden Sinne als Schutzschild, hinter der sich geheime Informationen verbarrikadieren. Mögen manche Telefonate der amerikanischen Präsidenten auch publiziert sein, das wirkliche Spiel der Mächtigen bleibt hinter unterschiedlichsten Fassaden verborgen.

Diango Hernandez‘ „Museum of Capitalism“ beruht auf einer ganzen Reihe von Nachforschungen, von Recherchen in Politik, Gesellschaft und Geschichte, die auf unterschiedlichste Weise Eingang in die Erscheinungsweise der gefundenen und zusammengebastelten Exponate gefunden haben. Die in dem Museum ausgestellten Artefakte, auch die Gemälde und Zeichnungen an den Wänden, sind in hohem Maße imprägniert von Informationen und Geschichten. Eine rein formale Betrachtung vermag ihnen nicht gerecht zu werden. Man muss sich schon involvieren lassen, in die Inhalte hineinziehen lassen. Eine eindeutige Position, etwa für oder gegen eine bestimmte politische Ordnung, wird indes nicht geboten. Diango Hernandez entwickelt in seinem „Museum of Capitalism“ skizzenhaft seine Sprache der Dinge, es ist eine Sprache der Dinge, die auf die subversive Energie von Poesie baut, auf Improvisation (das ist vielleicht das ureigentlich kubanische an dieser Kunst) und damit höchst produktiv eine Störung der Weltordnung betreibt.



Revantgarde
Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery. 2005

Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery a Rovereto di Trento presenta "Revantgarde" dal 28 maggio al 10 settembre 2005, prima mostra personale in Italia dell'artista di origine cubana Diango Hernández - invitato a La Biennale di Venezia 2005, Arsenale.

Attraverso un percorso rappresentativo della versatilità dei vari mezzi e linguaggi espressivi che sono parte essenziale della pratica quotidiana dell'artista - disegni, dipinti, installazioni, sculture e video - la mostra "Revantgarde" propone diverse riflessioni che scaturiscono dalle relazioni tra bellezza-politica e tra individualità-collettività.

Hernández si considera ormai un mezzo della costellazione politica che lo circonda e per lui diventa altrettanto importante rappresentare la sua posizione individuale e la propria emozionalità esattamente al centro del piccolo universo che ha creato attraverso la serie di disegni da lui realizzati in modo ossessivo e automatistico. In realtà lui definisce tutta la sua attività "disegnare", che si tratti di una struttura complessa, di una scultura o di un tratto accidentale su un foglio di carta.

Pagine
Centosettanta disegni formano una "parete utopica" appesa al muro dello spazio espositivo, dove è possibile leggere idee, disegni, riflessioni, commenti e progetti. Tali "documenti" del processo creativo dell'artista diventano insieme un'opera singola che testimonia la sua ossessione e volontà di creare un altro universo.

Inside the closet
Essere "inside the closet" significa essere represso, repressione che può sussistere per diverse ragioni: sociali, morali, politiche o anche personali. In quest'opera l'artista parla degli "insiders" - coloro che stanno nascosti - e anche dei diversi spazi interiori, come possibili posti nei quali potere abitare.

Enlightenment
L'Illuminismo è spesso visto oggi come un'anomalia storica, un periodo breve dove un numero di pensatori ricercavano una società perfetta, basata su buon senso e tolleranza. Religione, politica e pensiero sociale hanno al tempo criticato aspramente la validità degli ideali di un movimento che invece ha generato le principali nozioni di tolleranza, diritto umanio, fratellanza e libertà, sulle quali si fondano i diritti degli stati moderni. Nella sua pratica pittorica, Diango Hernández si ispira spesso ai valori del pensiero illuminista che ripropone come "unica possibilità". Questi dipinti che derivano da un'urgenza espressiva, appaiono incompleti, carenti e drammaticamente frettolosi, dove il tutto diventa utopico e irreale.

Revantgarde
In galleria verrà presentato il libro "Revantgarde" - 172 pagine a colori, testi di Anke Kempkes, distribuzione Lukas & Sternberg, New York - che raggruppa un'ampia selezione dei disegni presentati in mostra e che l'artista ha in gran parte realizzato a Trento negli ultimi due anni.



Revantgarde
Anke Kempkes, 2005

MOM
DEMOCRACY
IS A LIE

In the 1990s Diango Hernández started an extended series of drawings which processed the political and economical crisis of Cuba after the collapse of the socialist systems in Eastern Europe.

„We lost the last support of the Sowiet Union, which meant confronting a big crisis. We knew about Perestroika and everyone was concerned: What was the political mistake? But the big confusion over the rising ecomomical crisis was soon predominanting. And then, inevetably, the daily life was taken over by the struggle for survival. (...) At the same time I began to make this big mass of drawings out of what was my personal point of view of the crisis. I did self-portraits, illusionary architectures and cities, projects which are never going to be realised.“

Coming from a backgorund of industrial design Diango Hernández formed the collaboration Gabinete Ordo Amoris with his friend Francis Acea. The artists collected everyday objects which were provisionally produced out the last resources people could get hold of. These objects were astonishing creations and they were the manifestation of a highly independent and individual reaction towards the broad circumstances of devastating poverty.

IF THEY
TAKE THE
LIGHT
AWAY
I’ LL INVENT
SOMETHING
TO LIGHT MY
HOUSE

These objects, pragmatic and strangely sculptural, had a special melancholic beauty, - they were products of a moment of dramatic transition. Diango Hernández recognised their importance documenting a very particular chapter in Cuban social history. But the cheer anthropological activity of collecting seemed not to be satisfactory for his artistic sensibility and his understanding of the role an artists could take in this process.
In his eyes a far more adequate tool, the activity of drawing functioned for Hernández as a political diary and positioned the artist in accordance with the new urban productivity which grew out of the daily needs. His artistic practice resonnated the perception of the crisis.

„I was acting artistically out of a collective consciousness. Havana was a backdrop,
a big landscape of mistakes. (...) I did it at home late at night and of course I could not tell this to anybody. In a modest and quiet way I began to comment on circumstances, places, opinions that poeple have. (...)
They were hidden in my place without exposure which was actually in a way also a living condition of each of us. You can see some flashes from outside but what is really counting is what is happening inside. And it was happening in every family in every place. My practice was a document - writing, commenting, drawing -, the most sophisticated strategy for me.“

ARTE ES
REVOLUCION

In his drawings Hernández transformed the objects from the street into utopian configurations. They gain a new life of their own, morphing into numerous possibilities of self-structuring. Often these biting sceneries imply a self-portrait. Depicted in deliberately naive ways which remind of Chagall or Picasso, the face of the artist is suddenly attached to the body of a horse or another creature of a kind, chimeras carrying a mission, using the disguise of the animal as a subversive strategy. Hernández regarded himself at this point as a medium of the political constellation surrounding him, while it became equally important to him to stage his individual position and emotionality right in the center of the little universe he created in his obsessive ‚automatistically’ produced body of drawings. In actual fact he started to call his entire practise „drawing“, be it a complex installation, a sculpture or an accidental trace on a piece of paper.

PASSION IS THE MOST SUBVERSIVE BEHAVIOR IN CAPITALISM

BE SURE BEFORE BEING SURE
BE LOST BEFORE BEING LOST
BE IN LOVE BEFORE BEI IN LOVE

„After a while I had thousands of drawings in my house and I decided to come to Europe. Now I had something to say about what is a circumstance. It was a big testing to present them in the European context. They were not exotic items, no phantasy, rather they belong to a specific social history.“

However politically invested these drawings are, there is always this other phantastic side to them. Hernández’ iconography subtly relates here back to the narrative inventions of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. In his manifesto on The Marvelous Real (Lo real maravilloso) from 1949 Carpentier rejected the ‚pointless’ imagination of the Surrealists for not being rooted enough in reality. For him the tropics with all there exotism, erotism and anti-colonial struggles constitute the ideal surreal imagination.

MORE TROPI
CALS
REVOLUTIONS

In his novel The Kingdom of This World Carpentier re-enacts the time of Haiti’s liberation from French colonialist rule, a period of unsurpassed brutality, horror, and superstition. The ancient slave Ti-Noel becomes the key-figure, the leader of an a new type of guerrilla, escaping his prosecution by transforming with the help of voodoo into the bodies of different animals.

HOW COULD EXIST DEMOCRACY
IF WE ARE SLAVES

Diango Hernández’ use of romantic and phantastic motifs in his drawings is an attempt to formulate and enable a new position in contemporary art which owes a lot to the specific political and historical background he comes from. The disturbing presence of the conventional, icons of beauty and desire in his works are propositions for a future which is open to a strong imagination also in the realm of the political.

“These works are subversive in a subtle way, because there is beauty implied in each of them. And I really like to keep it as a key for making communication possible through them. I am not interested in inventing something new, in pursuing a style or trend. I use the existing languages of art, through which something can then be read. In my opinion it does not make sense anymore to work in avantgardist categories. Particularly when it comes to architecture and urban structures artists tend to take it on as a language of the contemporary. I once choose the term ‚revantgarde’ to define my practice. Of course, it's a risk for me to exhibit these works in the West. There is a constant misunderstanding and incomplete reading built into their reception.”



Revolution – An interview with Diango Hernández.
Simone Neuenschwander, 2006

“I want to play with the word “art”, I want to seduce, get the people close to ideas, so that they realise that these could be terrible ideas – even though they are beautiful.” Diango Hernández

SN: The title of your exhibition is “Revolution”. You created a painting for the poster, in which you show this word in a way that is related to the typical aesthetic of socialist propaganda posters of the 1970s from Cuba. This promises a lot… how important will this term be for your show?

DH: Usually when I build exhibitions the first step is to create different stories. It is not about choosing works and putting them in a context. It is more like making little comments or phrases which will create many layers of understanding that give shape to an open structure that will tell the whole story I’m interested in. So I chose the title “Revolution” as a starting point for the show. This word has many different meanings above all for those who are not Cubans… but also for the younger Cuban generations. When the economic crisis started in the 1990s – when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost its support – it was important for me not to see the revolution as a social and political breaking point anymore. I was born when the revolution had already happened, but I experienced then the impact of the revolution and the effort of the system to keep the concept of the revolution intact without any changes: as a result the revolution became something regular. I always wondered how such a word with such a precise meaning could become so abstract… how the revolution became ordinary.

I started to study the Cuban posters and the propaganda icons from the early 1960s. I liked one of the posters published in the 1970s a lot. It was made after the collapse of one of the first big plans in post-revolution Cuba. The idea was to collect 10 million tons of sugar. The state of Cuba wanted to prove its economic power to the US, sending a clear massage to them: we will produce more sugar than ever under a socialist economy. But this wasn’t possible finally, because the country wasn’t able to afford this economically at the time. After the collapse of this venture the state printed the poster, which showed the Spanish word “reves”, which means literally “failure”. The “V” of the word was illustrated in such a way that it became a symbol of victory. This meant that the system would turn this collapse into a victory. My drawing uses this image, but instead of the word “reves”, I used “Revolution”. The “V” of the revolution is shown in the same way as in the original poster: this produces confusion and you can read it in different ways – my drawing is like a personal thought which changes the meaning of the propaganda that wants to give only one clear message.

SN: You will show, among other works, drawings which refer to works by the still littleknown polish artist Andrzej Wróblewski (1927 – 1957). What interested you most about him and how have you got to know him?

DH: An important experience for my generation was the presence of the Eastern Bloc and the other socialist countries in Cuba – it became a fundamental part of our culture. The socialist ideas and ideals were in the beginning something completely new; it started with a new political and economic programme, and with time grew and touched every place, every house, every individual; almost everything. I thought about developing works that are related to this thought, about how a political situation could change your world. When I came here in the autumn, Adam Szymczyk showed me a book about Andrzej Wróblewski and I was really fascinated by his position. I looked at the images and then I found many things that are really close to me. He shared the same things with me for the same reasons. He started to develop his work from 1945 until 1957 in Poland, and it came from all the enthusiasm that brings radical social change. He was involved in social realism, which made a group of artists believe that ordinary socialist life should be presented as a beautiful and glorious thing. Coming from this social-realistic background, he suddenly got inside the different problems of the individual living under a socialist regime. His point of view was a very personal and independent way of saying things, something that obviously wasn’t so important in a socialist country. So I decided to study his work as a way of coming back to that time, seeing my own things. And in this process, I recognised that I was compressing his experiences and transforming them into my own, and then finding a way to talk about the individual: what is the role of the individual in a society like that? What happens so that the voice of the individual is no longer a secret… so that it is not something you have to hide anymore, because the voice of the masses is always more important than yours?

SN: What exactly shows the reflection of yourself that you recognize in Wróblewski work? You come from the Cuban generation who grew up during the failure of the revolution in the 1990s. What are your experiences of growing up in a socialist society like this and how important have they become for your work?

DH: The reflection I recognize shows a person confused and affected by a political system: confused because I no longer know how to judge the system that formed me, but at the same time deformed me. Affected because my sustained and traumatic social experiences damaged something that until now nothing can repair, not even art. The 1990s crisis affected me a lot as it did all Cubans, I guess. Even though the crisis was the starting point for my art and my main research issue for years, it wasn’t the thing that formed the basis of my ideas and artistic language: it was just a climax that became the right tool of my language.

What really had a big impact, not only on me but on my whole generation, were the countryside schools, called “La Beca” – a programme developed by the revolution in the early 1960s. This “innovative” educational system was based on a former Marxist idea of combining study with work and was developed and actually implemented by Fidel Castro. This premise should be shared by hundreds of kids of different ages, living all together without privacy in the strictest collectiveness and very far away from their families and cities. The years I spent there (from age 13 to 18), marked and changed everything in my life. What I saw and experienced during those six years was similar to that in many other life situations, but with the difference that we were kids and had no chance to change the situation. I am still wondering if I will one day be able to leave these stories behind me, or whether they will leave me behind instead. What I am doing as art is not about the history of art or about what I should study. Above all I look for a way to use those personal stories for my art, which were real once, but have been growing so much that I no longer know if they really happened to me – at least I prefer to think in that way.

SN: Which images of the individual in Wróblewski’s work have impressed you the most?

DH: Wróblewski often worked within a structure, which you can see above all in his images of families. He was doing this series of paintings where people are standing in front of walls or facades, they are obviously outside their homes and they are waiting for something, but you never know exactly for what. Wróblewski was also working with the subject of the chair. I was fascinated by how he revealed the idea of “enchairment”, as he called it, an empty chair that is a substitute for the human being, becoming a symbol of hope and loneliness. The waiting is something that really belongs to the nature of socialism. It is something that is supposed to get better and makes you believe that it certainly will. In Wróblewski’s late work you can see a certain kind of study, in which he is drawing just one individual or self-portraits. Basically I will refer to one of his drawings that shows a man who is twisted, and instead of having only two hands he has a third, which is coming out of his back and disturbing him. He is desperately trying to avoid it because this unknown hand is touching him, beating him. For me this is an impressive image, because how can you have somebody else’s hand in your back, against which you can’t even fight? It belongs to something that is breaking your peace and you can’t avoid it. Is it the hand of the government, of official structures? Or is it a hand implanted by your own fears – an expression of paranoia? I decided to do a handmade “mass production” of this drawing. But each drawing will be different because each will be affected by water drops that will dissolve different parts of the drawing.

SN: In your installation you will show a water system: there are arrangements of household objects that are in a way “penetrated” with pipes. I see there a connection to this third hand of Wróblewski’s drawings…

DH: The installation refers to a specific real context: when the infrastructure of a city is unable to supply things like water or gas – the official and institutional, public structures which collapse – then you have to build your own system, you have to build your own gas, water or electricity system. This is something we all have in our places in Havana. It is an alternative, provisional system that is there because you do not have water or electricity every day. The infrastructure that is supposed to be conceived by the government is built by an individual. Thereby the failure of the system becomes a possibility to create that part of your everyday life individually and to develop creative, innovative forces. I will show a tube that goes from a couple of tanks and passes through many pieces of furniture and objects from a flat. This structure is like somebody looking at everything you have, your personal things in your intimate room. It is like a control, an observation, which runs through everything, but at the same time it gives the things a fixed structure, so you can’t move the objects anymore.

SN: In the second room of the show you will present a chair, fixed with wires, which is almost falling. How will this piece close and open at the same time the story of the individual you would like to tell?

DH: This piece is a good image to explain the concept of the show. It is a chair that is almost falling, but is not falling because it is in a perfect balance, because it is tied by many telephone cables that stop it from falling. In front of the chair there is a provisional and chaotic structure. This is for me the image of the future, which is a complex word with many different meanings. If you start to cut the threads, the chair will fall back. If you decide to leave the threads you will be in a perfect balance, almost falling back but still standing. You have to decide whether you want to cut the threads or to leave them. It is always in this suspended state of falling. “Can we cut the threads?” The balance is a fake, produced by a number of commitments, things that hold and keep you within it, and when you start cutting the threads it is because you want to be yourself. The most important question for me since I have been here in Europe has been: what is going to happen after the revolution in Cuba, especially when Fidel Castro dies? Because obviously everything seems as if it is held together by tiny things that are really fragile. I wonder especially what will happen to the good things we have done during all these years, the good things that have made us believe that we are no longer just a big tropical casino. I don't wonder what will happen to the political mistakes, because the mistakes are obviously mistakes that are always ready to recur again and again in different guises. The big challenge for each one of us in any case will be to become single drops.



Traidores
DH, 2005

Hoy soy traidor, mañana seré héroe y el día después, las piedras no alcanzarán para monumentos o para ser lanzadas sobre mi cuerpo. Quién ha sido el maestro que ha creado todo este plan? Quién me ha partido en dos? Quién a convertido el mar en lava? Traidor él, traidor su plan y sus cómplices. La muestra “Traitors-Traidores” en Galería Pepe Cobo explora la fragilidad política del concepto Traidor y presenta el intelectual como un traidor por principio, un individuo comprometido con un grupo de verdades personales que no abandonara hasta las últimas consecuencias, el enfrentamiento con el poder y los poderosos nos convierte irremediablemente en instrumentos políticos listos para ser usados y juzgados, mas allá del perdón existe una recompensa mayor, el olvido.

Living room partido
Un grupo de muebles pertenecientes a un living room (mesa, sillas, espejo, butaca, etc.) están todos cortados a la mitad, ambas mitades se encuentran sostenidas por cables eléctricos que penden del techo, entre ambas mitades hay un espacio por la cual el espectador podrá caminar, la instalación estará acompañada por un grupo de dibujos donde se podrá ver “Techos flotantes” de diferentes casas. Esta pieza en su totalidad reflexiona acerca de la separación, el exilio, la fragmentación de el todo en partes que aún se sostienen pero que incompletas no pueden funcionar en su totalidad.

Bebe de mis rosas
Una escribanía vacía, sobre ella una chimenea metálica se erige precariamente convirtiendo la escribanía en un objeto absurdo pero con un significado preciso (una pequeña fabrica), la chimenea esta sostenida por cuatro cables que van desde ella hasta cuatro puntos del espacio, dividiéndolo racionalmente. En este espacio y perteneciente a la pieza antes descrita habrá una video protección que presenta “La rosa de la canción protesta” (la misma de la invitación, pero fiel al original) que constantemente gotea “sangre” desde la espina, la acompaña “Bebe de mis rosas” pieza musical al piano compuesta por el compositor cubano Ernesto Lecuona. Sobre la escribanía hay una nota que dice, “nosotros producimos mas traidores que rosas”.



Diango Hernandez. El artista demediado
Mariano Navarro, 2006

Diango Hernández nació en la ciudad de Sancti Spiritus, en Cuba, en 1970, el mismo año que Castro lanzó dos de las más desastrosas aventuras de su ya interminable mandato: la siembra de café, “que haría que la isla fuese tan cafetera como Colombia”, y la zafra de los diez millones de toneladas de azúcar, que concluyó con el hundimiento de la ya muy castigada economía nacional. El 26 de julio de aquel año propuso a sus adeptos reunidos en la Plaza de la Revolución su cese como primer ministro, pero le gritaron ¡No renuncies!, y ahí sigue, treinta y seis años después, sometiendo al país a la dictadura de la carencia absoluta de lo imprescindible, sea esto libertad o sea alimento.

Comprometido civil y políticamente, Hernández desempeña su trabajo en Düsseldorf, en Trento y en La Habana, y, tanto en las obras firmadas por el Gabinete Ordo Amoris –formado por Hernández y Francis Acea (La Habana, 1967), del que tuvimos noticia en 2002, en la muestra Atravesados de la Fundación Telefónica– como individualmente, uno de sus objetivos prioritarios y fundamentales es afrontar, desde un mismo plano ético y desde una distancia equiparable, la situación histórica del presente cubano y el presente, también, de las situaciones generadas por la historia reciente del capitalismo globalizado.

La mera descripción de sus piezas remite de inmediato a la idea que las convoca. La Taxi-limosina, fabricada con tres coches Lada rusos que compraron en Polonia, para unirlos y construir una limusina de más de seis metros de longitud, convertida en taxi colectivo de lujo, en cuyo techo se colocan bultos y maletas atados con una cuerda, expuesta en Atravesados. La instalación en el Project Rooms de su galería en ARCO 2005, Palabras –incluido por Rosa Martínez en el Aperto de la Bienal de ese mismo año–, que aborda las tensas relaciones cubano-norteamericanas, desde la metáfora del poste eléctrico derribado (“la electrificación fue el más importante de los planes económico-estratégicos de Lenin para los países socialistas, tenía una misión importante, llevar a los lugares más lejanos la industria de la propaganda”, dice Hernández), y los símbolos de las banderas y los himnos nacionales, los monumentos y sus transformaciones ideológicas, hasta su dilución vertiginosa en un tráfago que es una mezcla de tragedia y demagogia. Y ahora, las dos instalaciones que muestra, Living room partido y Bebe de mis rosas, especialmente la primera, una habitación partida en dos, mesas, sillas, lámparas, un televisor, etc. cortados, y dos viejas máquinas de escribir, cuyas teclas componen en una la palabra “traido – es”; mientras la otra presenta en una hoja el sustantivo escrito y en las paredes cuelgan, en papeles sajados, dibujos de extraños artilugios que pensamos domésticos.

Cuarenta y cinco años antes de que naciese Diango lo hizo, en Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, el escritor Italo Calvino, autor de un cuento, incluido en la trilogía Nuestros antepasados, cuyo protagonista, Medardo de Terralba, fue partido en dos por un cañonazo de los turcos, llevando, desde entonces, sus dos partes vida independiente. Buena hasta lo insoportable la una, mala hasta la exasperación la otra, no hayan satisfacción, ni tampoco el lector, hasta que la fuerza del amor vuelve a unirlas y Medardo conoce la sabiduría que proporciona la extraña reunión del bien y el mal sin que ninguno sea más identificable que el otro. “¿Quién me ha partido en dos? –se pregunta Diango Hernández–, Traidor él, traidor su plan y sus cómplices?”
El vizconde demediado quizás tenga su reflejo o su doble final en Bebe de mis rosas, en la que sobre una escribanía vacía, alumbrada por una solitaria bombilla y de la que emerge una chimenea, y contra el fondo de la canción del maestro Lecuona del mismo título, sangra la rosa de la canción protesta y aparece una nota: “Nosotros producimos más traidores que rosas”.



Spies
Alexander and Bonin, 2006

Diango Hernández’ first exhibition in North America will open at Alexander and Bonin on April 15, 2006. Spies will be shown concurrently with Traitors at Galería Pepe Cobo in Madrid. Born in 1970 in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, the artist has lived in Europe since 2003. The work in both exhibitions reflect his analysis of the iconography and rhetoric of the Cuban revolution and the tensions and absurdities of the North American-Cuban relationship since the 1960`s. The exhibition is a group of “reports to the enemy” that reflects the relationship between an artist and a spy.

For his exhibition at Alexander and Bonin, the artist has created works incorporating found objects such as record players, speakers and domestic furniture as well as language and sound. Drawing (Presidents' secrets), upside down lamps project transcriptions of secret phone conversations between Kennedy, Rusk, McNamara, Johnson and others onto an installation of record players set on coffee tables. Drawing (living inside my drawers) is a small cabinet on whose open drawers two texts are projected: speeches given by John Kennedy at the time of the missile crisis in 1962 and by Fidel Castro concerning the US spy flights over Cuba. This work also includes a piano composition by the Cuban composer, Ernesto Lecuona. Wake me up is a series of ten drawings in which inkjet images of the ten American presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush are combined with an ink self-portrait of the artist asleep on their shoulders. Rather than an ‘iron’ or a ‘bamboo’ curtain, Hernández will exhibit Paper Curtain in which partially burned holes reveal small drawings and the text, “After some time, democracy is just another utopia, but I have already a better utopia to dream with”.

In 1994, Diango Hernández began his artistic practice in Cuba as a co-founder of Ordo Amoris Cabinet, a group of artists and designers who focused on invented solutions for home design objects by Cuban citizens compensating for a permanent shortage of materials and goods.

Diango Hernández lives and works in Düsseldorf. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Städtischen Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and Kunsthalle, Basel. A video and sound installation was included in Always a little Further at the 2005 Venice Biennale and he will exhibit in the forthcoming Biennale of Sydney (June) and São Paulo Biennial (October).



Dictators (Varadero beach and Guantánamo bay)
DH, 2006

Domestic objects twisted by political slogans, so twisted that they decided to become art pieces. Dictators sometimes make us happy and sometimes very sad. They produce anthems, huge monuments, walls and wars, they have the power to become our only god and they last longer than marble. This exhibition presents a group of “phrases and drawings” that talk about the relationship between the dictators and the hope of the victims; showing the art field as a space where personal testimonies can be revealed and can be as effectives as they are on my notebook.

In 1990’s during a trip to Varadero Beach on the 21st of June I saw a “permanent sunset”; the sun stayed longer than usual on the horizon, it was stuck there, half of it was under the water and the other half was burning in the sky, transforming the whole beach into a red place. The sun wasn’t moving but we were. Sunsets are always romantic (see Glen Rubsamen paintings); for some reason sunsets come in the same package as love does, no matter if the love is real or paid. The 21st of June is also the longest day in Cuba and is usually a very beautiful summer day and if you go to Varadero you will see how the blue sky becomes beach and how the beach becomes a place without Cubans.

Guantánamo bay and Varadero beach, for completely different reasons, are the only two pieces of Cuban land that Cubans are not allow to step on. We never went to Guantánamo City, it always was, and it still is today, too faraway from my home town. I got to know about the Guantánamo’s American military base from books at school, but somehow neither books or teachers seduced me enough to travel there; nevertheless I knew about the 2 meter high fence that surrounds the occupied area and I knew also that people living in the villages around the base can reach American television channels using ordinary antennas but can’t get closer to its perimeter because it is covered by anti-personnel landmines.

One day reading a Cuban magazine from the 70’s, I discovered a full page picture of an American soldier showing his ass to a Cuban coastguard who was standing just behind the fence; the article talked about a series of provocations by American soldiers towards Cuban coastguards, provocations that ended up with the death of a Cuban coastguard shot by an American sniper. I cut out the picture of the American soldier’s ass and I glued it into my songbook beside the lyric of Guantanamera. Guajira Guantanamera (1928, "Countryside girl from Guantánamo") is perhaps the best known Cuban song and it tells the story of a beautiful girl born in Guantánamo. This song has a very particular structure and history, it doesn’t just have one composer, it has been modified over time; neither its rhythm or its melody has changed so much but its lyric, in the internationally known version the song includes the first poem in the collection Simple Verses by Cuban poet and National hero José Martí, also known as “El apostol” (The apostle). José Martí has a monument in the Central Park in Havana as well as in Central Park in New York.

In the evening of the 3rd of March of 1949 three drunk Americans marines climbed up and pissed on the José Martí’s Havana monument. The next morning after the incident, the picture of the three white uniformed American marines on top of the white marble monument was the highlight of couple of national newspapers. If you have a closer look at that picture you will recognize how bizarre it is, the marines look like three monkeys on top of a white tree, but the most amazing thing about it is how the marines became part of the monument and as a result part of our daily life. Since I glued the picture of the American solder’s ass into my songbook next to the Guantanamera lyrics I always have fantasized what this beautiful girl from Guantánamo and José Martí would think about the American soldier’s ass, and I am quite sure that they would have a very different opinion about it.



Swans Without a Lake
Melanie Bono, 2007

The starting-point for the exhibition Swans without a lake is a story by Diango Hernández, which tells of a subversive action in which Hernández took part in 1991 at the Cine Yara, a cinema in Havana. The experience in the cinema becomes the seed from which all those aspects and themes develop which Hernández artistically confronts in his works for the NAK. The focus of events is formed by the scenery of the dark cinema auditorium, in which a note-book is passed around in order to gather the 15,000 signatures required by the constitution if new elections are to be held. The actual theme of the story, though, is personal experience, inner conflict: personal fear, and the inability to publicly acknowledge with logical consistency that the revolution has failed, become descriptive of the state of the collective, a pointer to an inability on the part of the whole of society to overcome its own stasis, the weight of history. The notion of a successful revolution, cherished over many years, had largely blurred the recognition of a creeping transformation towards a totalitarian system.

The realization of one’s own paralysis opens up further questions: to what extent is one rooted in one’s background, can one change without risking one’s identity, without detaching oneself from one’s own certainties? This ambivalence also marks specific aspects of the biography of Diango Hernández, who has always understood his voluntary exile as the opportunity to use communication to overcome his own country’s isolation. Metaphorically therefore the title of the exhibition should be understood thus: the swans without a lake are separated from something to which they actually belong.

In the lower exhibition room of the NAK Diango Hernández presents such a lake in the installation Word dissolved into water. It consists of four irregularly shaped rusty steel basins filled with turbid water. Individual typewriter-keyboard letters float on the surface. The shape of these basins recalls the Fuente de la Juventud, a public fountain which was built on Havana’s prestige boulevard Malecón in the immediate vicinity of the open sea. At the NAK this revolutionary symbol of the young socialists has now become a swanless lake, a dilapidated and worn-out wishing-well, a receptacle for forgotten utopias, dreams and yearnings, in whose fulfilment no one any longer believes. Like the coins in the fountain, each representing a wish, the letters of the oft-written What if? are slowly dissolving in the water.

The second work in the lower exhibition room, entitled Wet Wall, fits seamlessly into the picture. The rows of empty paper pages have warped unevenly under the influence of the water, they are curling and opening at the edges and corners. Associations are awakened with the peeling façades of Cuban buildings, and we are reminded of the high waves of the sea that frequently flood the roads near the coast. Where the land meets the sea, Cuba’s extreme isolation takes on concrete form, it becomes inescapable and palpable. The isolation of a Cuba marked by the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union, a Cuba forced into worldwide isolation in the early 1990s by the disappearance of her most important trading partner and financier, and by the ongoing United States embargo, is not just economic. The sea also stands for isolation from independent information, from worldwide communication and from a free exchange of ideas unimpeded by censorship. It is this communication isolation in particular that is often focused upon in the works of Diango Hernández as a painfully felt deficit, and can be seen in his works also in the form of a socialist product-aesthetic that clearly marks the post-revolutionary stasis.

The helplessness generated when communication is thus interrupted is physically palpable in the upper exhibition room of the NAK. The room-filling installation The broken cinema relates immediately to the events of the story. In the twilight is the eponymous broken cinema whose seats of bent reinforcing-steel stand as fragile drawings in the room, albeit now useless for sitting on. The tightrope walk between revelation and anonymity created by one’s own presence in the murky atmosphere of conspiracy becomes manifest in the three seats clearly exposed by a round arch. The curious isolation from mutual exchange, thematized in the story as the fear of recognizing the face of the person sitting next to you, is reflected in the loudspeakers attached to the undersides of the seats. The cables, cut and waving free, quickly make it clear that they no longer have any function whatever. Although the auditorium would like to articulate a common concern, direct transmission is prevented and everyone is thrown back on his or her own painful silence.

The room is illuminated by a flickering abstract black-and-white projection and accompanied by atmospheric piano music. The picture material used for the projection derives from a set of slides designed to provide a lively illustration of the history of the Soviet Union for Cuban schoolchildren. From this set, Diango Hernández has selected pictures that depict the first living being to be sent into space, the dog Laika. If Laika had not died relatively quickly, she would have circled the earth alone for a long time, as there had never been any plan to bring her back.

Diango Hernández’ exhibition at the NAK represents a new departure in his artistic œuvre. For the first time, he is staging an exhibition whose main installations have been specially created as new productions. Starting from the original and artistic recycling and improvisation measures employed by Cubans in an attempt to compensate for the shortage of new everyday goods, Diango Hernández has hitherto used mainly objets trouvés for his works, which he then arranges as installations accompanied by videos and drawings. In spite of this, they retain characteristic aspects of his working method, to which his drawings make a particular contribution. The block of 28 drawings, which Hernández is also displaying here, use different associations to act out, so to speak, the themes of the exhibition in a whole variety of ways, and can be understood as a visual “stream of consciousness”, which, like the well-known literary technique, communicates subjective perceptions, thoughts, feelings and reflections to the outside, directly from the inner consciousness and without further comment. This characteristic entanglement in Diango Hernández’ work of associative individual experience and the objective state of society as a whole comes across as the logical reworking of the foundations of historical materialism: being determines consciousness and social relationships also determine individual experience and perception.




Cine Yara: Stones and Signatures
DH, 2007
“Democracy can be built neither with ink nor with light”

I guess there are many relations between cinemas, stones and signatures, but what follows is just one of them. In June 1991 Alicia en el pueblo de maravillas (Alicia in the country of wonders) by Daniel Diaz Torres (1990) was screened for the first and only time at the Cine Yara, Vedado, Havana.

I was there, in front of the cinema, in the long line of people who were waiting for hours under the spell of the Cuban sun. We were there just to see a movie, or better, to play in a movie. While I was waiting, I wasn’t sure if I would be transformed into a stone, a signature, or if I would be brave enough after going out of the cinema to continue being myself. Only in this particular case, the cinema was a kind of a magic box that would be able to change my life in a very fundamental way. After seeing the movie, I would have had two possible destinies. I could either have gone home or to jail. Just to tell you in advance, I didn’t go to jail, but nor did I go home, I didn’t become a stone, nor a signature, but when I left the Cinema I wasn’t myself anymore either.

Alamar is an east Havana suburb that looks the same as any socialist Soviet concrete suburb, the only difference being that it has a charming view of the Caribbean Sea. As a matter of fact, the Neighbourhood was built following Soviet construction models. Indeed, there were many Soviets engineers and technicians living in Alamar during 70s and 80s, but also many Cubans. Already in the 90s there were only a few Russians left, and while it had once been a sort of Soviet colony, it now quickly became a big satellite city where the only remaining utopia was the sea.

I left Alamar really early that morning to go to the cinema, and on the way to the bus stop I almost fell over a huge pile of stones that was recently dropped on the middle of the street just around my block. The pile of shining little white “stars” was there as if someone had started to build a monument that morning. I didn’t pay so much attention to it because I was already having hallucinations about the long line of people waiting in front of the cinema.

The Cine Yara takes its name from “The Cry of Yara”. On October 10, 1868, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes made the Grito de Yara (Cry of Yara), declaring Cuban independence, which began the "Ten Years' War". That morning, after sounding the slave bell indicating to his slaves that it was time for work, they stood before him waiting for orders, and Céspedes announced that they were all free men. It is hard not to remember this episode every time I am inside the Yara, but I can’t hear the bell anymore.

There was no air conditioning inside the cinema, no searchlights, and I could swear for a few moments that I was the only one in the cinema, until I bumped into someone who was standing in front of me. There was such a dark silence that I refused to call it silence, because it was loud, massive, heavy and smelt like a dead and sultry giant rose. I sat down very slowly without even turning my face to see who was the silhouette seated beside me. The film had started, and if you were to ask me now what happened in it I couldn’t tell you. Because the film I was interested in wasn’t happening on the big screen, instead it was a film that was being screened onto that black silence, and it was amplified by the collective breathing of a packed cinema full of fear.

Even knowing that I was part of a spontaneous, real-time movie, I was pretty sure that my role was about to start, when something that felt like a piece of paper was placed on my lap as only a butterfly knows how to do it. It was a notebook that smelt like a bottle of fresh ink. I was freezing, as I guess actors are when they have to perform for first time in a full theatre. The light reflected from the screen got brighter and I realized what was in the notebook. Undefined signatures, but in a kind of martial order; some of them were still wet. Attached by a thread to the notebook was a black pen that I wasn’t able to touch because I was scared to death, in a delirium, and the pen seemed to me to be full of contagious diseases. It was a shining snake ready to bite. I don’t really know for how long the notebook stayed on my knees, until all of the sudden I passed it on.

The two films were over at the same time. Just when the cinema lights were about to be switched on, a group of people in the back of the cinema screamed as only a very trained church choir could have: “VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN”, “VIVA FIDEL”, “PATRIA O MUERTE, VENCEREMOS!!!” (Long live the revolution; Long live Fidel, Homeland or Death, We Will Win!!!). These same slogans can also be found (made out of single white stones) at the entrance to towns all over the country.

The pile of stones that was arranged this morning in the middle of the street around my corner wasn’t there anymore. Now! Now! Now! The stones were overwhelming the apartment next to them. The stones (thousands of them, all white and ready to build something) had been thrown from the street into that apartment with hate and without compassion, and all of its windows and its front door were broken, and a couple of wooden rocking chairs standing at its entrance were almost covered by the stones. The flat inside looked like a construction site after the passing of a wild tropical hurricane.

The unfinished and provisional monument was created by a group of no more than 20 people “to honour”- which in this case means to destroy the life of - a woman who came up with the idea of making a notebook filled with dissatisfied signatures to fight for democracy and freedom.

Why were those stones dropped in the early morning in front of that flat? Who had thrown the first stone? And why? I guess all these question have a very obvious answer: We all did it, including the ones who had signed the notebook, including the ones who were at home that day and all these days in the last 40 years, and including myself and of course the owner of the signed notebook, and we all did it because after living a “Stationary Revolution” for many years nobody here knows anymore what is the meaning of freedom, and because none of us has been able to see how a beautiful dream has mutated into a tropical nightmare to convert us into forgotten wet pages that have been inundated by thousand of stones plus thousands of tonnes of blue and salty water. Blue and deep are our golden years, and they join generations of fantasies that are now sharing the same sea which unknown pirates’ treasures and mercenaries’ secret weapons have occupied for centuries.

Mother, could you imagine the lake without the swan? Could you imagine a country without palm trees? Could you imagine a president without a microphone? We were in the first row of seats at the National Theatre in Havana waiting to see the National Ballet performing Swan Lake. The theatre lights were slowly fading, and right then we were all transformed in beautiful swans, but without a lake.



Remembering Cuba
Ing. Luiggi Meneghelli, 2007

In Cuba the myths fades in the reality, dream in poverty and violence in sensuality. The Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano once wrote: Cuba "is an island, which lightly lays on the water": it is surrounded more by light than sea. In a drawing by Diango Hermandez, it even appears as a mounting floating on the paper-ocean and watching towards the astral space. This almost seems to resemble the unusual religious mixture which blends the Spanish rooted Catholicism with syncretistic cults of Afro Cuban origins.

But in Cuba this happens; everything mixes together and everything influences everything. The Cuban soul is creolized, both on a essential, vital, historical and cultural level. Alex Fleites and Padura Fuentes in their unforgettable “Cuba's Paths” write:” Watching a popular dance with a likely Nordic blond girl or listening to a symphonic concert where a black plays one of the first violins, taking part in a Catholic mass or the drums parade of the "santerìa", watching a baseball match at the corner of a suburb or in Havana’s bid stadium, doing shopping at the market or gaining something thanks to the black stock exchange....are all interchangeable actions."

Diango Hermandez himself, recollecting his Cuban years, sees the Havana centre as an "unbelievable blend of races, smells, styles, sounds and fears. At every corner - he goes on - there was a policeman bus also a lot of junk which was going to be collected only at midday.

All this to say that Cuba is first of all its people and there are as many Cubas as its inhabitants. It is an attempt of appropriation, of collective invention, superstition, where the language itself is product of the imagination, in which the Castilian root is enriched with terms from African tongues, English and French. But above all is the cult of the body that gives a magic note to the Cuban way of being: the gestures, the walking with a rhythm similar to the dance, the touching while speaking, without which the conversation appears cut off. Also Diango Hermandez recollects with pleasure his strolling among the people to catch behaviors, moods and opinions to transfer then on his drawing papers.

And in his going around, he also meets that incredible architecture, glorified by the visionary writer Alejo Carpentier:" an emporium of columns" where "the style of the things without style" rules. A baroque considered as a mass and a continuous mixture of Moresque and colonial classicism, art nouveau and art déco. Cuba is at the same time a "European and Caraibic, cosmopolitan and isolated, cheerful and melancholic, dynamic and hopeless" country.

Maybe Hermandez takes right from here his way of drawing, where objects disappear and reappear, go and come. Maybe his inconstant mark grows from the wavy, instable and widespread lines of the cathedrals and castles, producing a space where every reality begins when you don't understand any longer what you are doing. (Matisse) But Hermandez cannot either forget he "had to keep his works hidden" and had to draw almost in the dark. This is to say that he fights against a government that used to consider illegal every idea and act not in line with its ideology.

He knows by all means that most Cubans is not against the system, but agrees that fighting to change it will only lead to jail and disgracefulness. And again, he knows how the population of the island is proud of its values, its culture but above all of the real miracle of having coped with the US embargo, etc.

Notwithstanding, he cannot avoid to see the excesses of Castro's regime, the fact that the Lìder Maximo confuses war with economy, society with life. In this context, he uses the drawing as means of expression and chance to meditation. Even so, he never came to make accusation or fight openly against it.

His drawing remains essential, fragile, and secret. "Mine are subversive works, but in a subtle way" says the artist. They are little stones thrown into a pond, of which you can see just the first circles; you need to keep you eyes open to be able to see it...
Despite all this, when Hermandez leaves Cuba, the police stops him at the airport and ...the luggage containing more than five thousands drawings ("My treasure, my diary of years"). They ask him to rub all the writing, in many cases just drafted or linked to the image. "Beauty, above all, is a means of seduction but also a provoker idea" goes on Hermandez. And the rubbings become open wounds ...traces of a system, side signals of a mistake.


POWER PENCIL

Twelve light poles found in Primiero Valley: old poles looking like relics of a devastated and wiped out past. They still have their insulators and their electrical wires, but they are all twisted, as if they were worn remains, waste or mere spoils. Diango Hernandez scatters them around the gallery with apparent careless, careful not to make them look like historical evidences, precious ruins, or wreck to keep with special attention. On the contrary he performs on them a careful action of counterfeit, to say it better, a literal alteration of vision and senses by transforming them into huge master builder pencils with their tips painted in black.

It is evident that we are facing a sort of metamorphose. It is a question which we address to the object (though finished, dead), to the instability of classifications, to the roles exchange. Yet, it is a matter of transformation in progress, of a progressive change. The light poles have not lost their identifiably, only they put their existence at the disposal of another existence, of another hypothetical functionality. Only children imagination can picture a twofold reality, a fantastical one. For a child a box can be a train, a couple of bricks can be a house, a broom can be a horse or an airplane. Through the symbolic game he can transform reality into appearance and vice versa. And Diango Hernandez himself said once “I am looking for a fire exit from this world...The real power is the possibility to build your own universe”.

Thus, the installation “Power Pencil” can not be assimilated to Duchamp’s act of putting an object outside its context, to superimpose it with new thoughts and new names, where the object is still identical to itself, within the fundamental law of identity. Neither it can be put in relation with the “as if” aesthetic by Magritte, a true hunter of dead relations and apparently casual encounters. He wanted to underline the deception of the images and the short-circuit of buildings surrounding that all representations hold within themselves. That of Duchamp and Magritte was a conceptual discourse. That of Hernandez is once again a political one. The former two wanted to produce linguistic investigations; the latter wanted to sound out the power strategies.

Power: “It is what is beyond our existence, which can give life both to peace and economy as to mistakes and failures in the same way. It changes our way of being by its choices. Being more and more dependent on the sources of energy, it plays a passive role, forced to follow that technical progress, which it can not either control or lead, but only guarantees”. So says Diango Hernandez, underling the importance of alternative energies, able to obviate a development (but also its immediate obsolescence) invading without notice the context of an unprepared society. Pencil: “The pencil at the power” or “The power of pencil”. It is the utopist fire exit, an impossible bet on freedom. It is the symbol of the art that can put down barriers, impositions, ideologies. The possibility of tracing a line, drawing, scribbling makes the artist the creator of his owns life, more and more social and less and less private. Again the artist says: “The light poles cut of and transformed into pencils are public acts, subversive actions, aren’t they?” They represent the overthrow of a surpassed system, the creation of new forms, and the birth of new worlds. In the same way my drawings on the wall, where only the pencil stroke leaps into the foreground, seem to express the same idea: they are scanned and enlarged from normal size, so that the sign can gain a more physical dimension and become matter, almost a project plan, a house plan (even when it is reduced to ruins). As Thomas Eliot said: “From these ruins I will build my cathedrals”.

TALKING ABOUT DRAWING

Diango Hernandez seems to live in drawing and through drawing. He is like a player obsessed by the combinations of matches, hunted at night by the ghosts of the chessboard or the cards spread over the card mat. Persecuted by images of strategies and by solutions that are more visionary than realistic, his action is always “a insane action devouring itself, nourishing itself, accelerating, self exasperated, hurrying towards the enjoyment and the possession of all we want to see”. Valery said so about Degas’s drawing. Yet, Hernandez has not intention whatsoever to create a form (not even a way to see the form) by catching the figure of a dancer in her overflowing acrobatics. His urge of tracing lines comes from the need of creating another universe, a different figure of the world. Those images escape an immediate understanding. Often, they seem to be involved, incomplete, overwhelmed by their same expressive drive, almost abandoned to the freedom and lightness of the first idea, the flash of inspiration.

L. M. -There is something clandestine in these drawings, or else, something potential, hypothetical. Something whose signs we follow, loosing track of them all the time. Yet, those that look like shortenings and visual savings do not reveal a lack of the image, but rather a phase of concealment and secrecy. Your use of water, to give an example, to alter the ink colour stroke and transform it into something different (stains, flaws and shadows) is an act of crossing out and rebirth. The stroke becomes one and numerous, always the same and at the same time different. Was that a way to cherish the mystery of the creative process, the fable of creation or was it, at the beginning at least, a strategy to escape the watches, the repressions of a more and more suspicious and mistrustful regime like the Cuban one?

D. H.- To be honest, I have never expressed a contentious position, but I have rather been a witness of the system. In my drawings one could find the representations of my view point over the crisis. Before the fall of the Revolution (which came together with that of the Soviet system in 1989), Cubans had learned to speak in a low voice, so that nobody that would not live in the island would hear them. They had invented a popular jargon made of broken sentences and absurd gestures. After the fall, we started thinking again. The first indications of freedom were the freedom of thought, and then came the freedom of word and finally that of opinion. Every day life was an adventure again, though carried out through ruins, misery and illusions. In those years we became aware that the Revolution had been a failure. In those same years, I started (together with my mates from the “Gabinete Ordo Amoris”) to collect all those weird objects made by people, full of a grieving beauty. We wanted to build a kind of museum of the crisis and show things nobody would have ever shown. Few years of that bleak high spirit and the power system was back to the most absolute centralism, to the elimination of the smallest space of autonomy. My studio room is in a small apartment on the Calle Esapada in Havana. It is a dark and almost suffocating space that used to be a house for prostitutes. There - in that bunker like refuge, protecting me by any censure - I gave life to my never ending drawing activity, which wanted to be a triumph of the imagination over propaganda, a manipulation of what was manipulating us. The expression of “the desire to see the realities hidden beyond the realities” as the great writer Alejo Carpenter would say.

L. M. – Yet, the peculiarity of your drawing lays in its capacity of eschewing everything: it remains, waves and goes adrift between the desire subtly leading your hand and the leave-taking from all desires of possessing and seizing a sense of reality, though hidden. Even when some projects for architectural structures or hydraulic devices pop out of your notebooks, one has the unmistakable feeling to be in front of impossible, useless, incomprehensible and raving machines, “bachelor machines”, which are not defined by their functioning dynamic but - on the contrary - by their non sense and breaking process. One just needs to look at the draft of “Il mio parco” (My park), winner of the 2007 Verona Art “Icona” award: an old light pole on which are placed some chairs without legs. At the back a screen with the writing “Aspettare” (Waiting) made of the electric wires coming out of the pole itself. It is the breaking of every kind of logics. The every day object, mutilated of any chances of being used, transfers to the writing the information on its usability (that of waiting, in fact).

D.H. – Carpentier meant exactly that, when talking about seeing the usual as stranger, unknown and remote. He was not referring to the act of looking for what is alien within the exotic, but to the impossibility of seizing it within our familiar space. In his manifesto in fact, “Il real meravilloso”, he would say that walking around the streets of a popular quarter of Cuba was sufficient to discover that those poetical, casual, fabulous encounters so long searched by the surrealists can take place in a window-shop. Only, in that same street, one could also experience un unbroken check, a Revolution that had destroyed all sense of history and nation, a dream that had become a nightmare and a present that seemed to become eternal and immutable. I have translated the word present with the word “aspettare” (waiting), containing the idea of desencanto but also that of laziness, sluggishness, fatalism, typical of Latin American people. Still, all my drawings, full of imperfections and mistakes as they can be, want to be a “promise for a future”, a potential project, a kind of resistance, like that of Cubans, who from one day to another had to re-invent themselves and rebuild their life.

L.M. – Thus, do you rely on drawing as if it was reality; even more than reality, as something that would transcend it, becoming a source of meditation, research and imagination?

D.H. – Drawing in its abstraction is more fertile than a real thing. It transforms itself every day, it develops, grows, converts itself in a field of undecided forces. Every drawing takes you to the following one, not through the artist’s imagination but through the drawing’s own imagination. There is always to learn from that congestion of suspended, slander or frayed lines, which replaces it. Somehow, it sets free the creativity that the observer cherishes within himself.

L.M. – Thus, the fragility of the materials (water colours, pencil or ink) does not imply a fragility of expression in your work. Your drawing has lost all characteristics of a transitory image, of a pure meditation on a will-be work of art. It is no longer planning but it is rather investigative and speculative, displaced next to the tensions inherent the reality and the language.

D. H. – Surely my drawing is not a mere support base, a note pad (though it is really a pad or a small diary), or a small piece of paper for scribbling some measures or sums.
I do have a model to achieve. My models are my ideas. Their transfer on the surface is careful, well thought ought. In my last works I have introduced a kind of experimentation on the drawing itself. I start from a form, from an idea. Then I destroy it by the water that same idea. I started developing that kind of intervention for the show “Revolution” (2006) in Basil, by presenting a set of identical drawings, whose unique singularity was that of having been deformed in a different way. To me it is like producing a linguistic swerve, a very strong critical category: that of the disorientation and mistake. By depriving a clear-cut stroke of its rooting, I make it both alien and recognizable. I do not destroy the stroke, I subvert it and make it visually multiple.

L.M. – Do the tools you use influence your discipline and the way you create the image?

D. H – The only thing that matters is that my tool allows me certain speediness, maintaining the dynamicity of the idea. I only avoid the use of the biro as the outcome is too recognizable. It is good for writing, thank to its instantaneous read, while I like to touch the poetic puzzle of the metaphor, the parable and the absurd. I have to confess that I like the blank paper, because it makes me think. When I see it I feel more like a child than an artist. It gives me the impression to be facing the symbol of the artistic making in itself, in both its sense of final and extreme achievement and of insurmountable obstacle: Absence. Perhaps the creative activity is nothing more than controlling and managing the blank.

L.M. – We keep on talking about drawings, chasing their matter, dimensions, meaning. Yet your name is strictly linked to big installation (from the uprooted light poles in “Palambras” at the 2005 Venice Biennale, to the plate roofs transformed into walls in “Cri(is)home” at the 2006 Sidney Biennale or to “We are unfinished drawings” at the 2006 Saint Paul Biennale, and so forth..)

D. H. – Installations are made in the same way than drawings - that is the thing. I do not proceed according to a project. It is all a matter of improvising and verifying how an idea becomes reality. By drawing you can give shape to what is unattainable and inconceivable, to what would never be concrete. Well, I want to do the same with real objects: producing reversals and swerve of meaning able to question the contours of habits and to transform the ordinary profile of things. It is pretty much what I am trying to do in this exhibition called “Power Pencil”. I recycle, as if they were lost objects and mere archeological items, twelve light poles with their broken electric wires and I make them into huge paradoxical pencils. You can see very well that it is not about making an inventory of the déjà vu, opening up a collective memory. It is more about recovering from the mines of waste some out of fashion things, a kind of sign from beyond. Even when an object is deprived of its functional characteristics and it is out of its context of use, it can still send signs of its subversive potentialities. W. Benjamin said that we have to be aware of the revolutionary energies inherent to old things. I want to bring to the territory of art the reality, though with unusual and unexpected valences, I want to make the silence of history speak and reverse all its codified charters.

I had done a similar operation with the installation “As a drop I am going out of my home (at the Kunsthalle in Basil 2006): a space made up of everyday objects (televisions, tables or armchairs) crossed by an hydraulic system starting from a tap and finishing in two tanks. It was clear that those objects were broken down and became part of that nonsense pipe system. It was an unstable and paradoxical structure, with reference also to the social and political situation in Cuba, where industries are rare, the hydraulic system is destroyed, sewers and waterworks are dismissed and where the individual has invent some emergency solutions. It is a bit like showing “the power of imagination”, the revenge of impossible situations. Yet, every time I had finished a work, I take my pencil and draw it again and again, to understand it better, to investigate all its angles, to receive confirmation of the departing point.

L.M – You often do that with the paper as well. I have got here under my eyes a kind of illogic labyrinth, with no entry or exit apparently, but only a slow and progressive of plans. “You get lost, and it is not because you can not find your way. It is because that place gives you the feeling to be defined by a load of interventions, until it becomes a small autarchic universe, a fortress built by the constant returns on the motive.

D.H. – I often go back on a drawing, especially if I perceive that there is something beyond its first appearance, if I perceive that it could be transformed into a different shape. Sometimes they are only scribbles, fragments. Sometimes I like to leave the drawing as it is, like a draft, a starter, thus demolishing its possible future. Yet, I never follow an identical modality ore gesture. I do not have rules on how I can use my hands. In fact most of my drawings are without title or signature; following the idea that we do not need necessarily to finish things and that we can set the paper free from forced spins.

L.M – Still you often insert some very incisive words, such as “mistake”, “ruin”, “goodbye”. In Twombly for instance you let the writing drag, run or rest lazily at the side of the drawing. Similarly, in other drawings you mix a kind of verbal mishmash: English, Spanish, and Italian. Still some verbal splinters manage to escape and make itself heard not only seen.

D.H – Sure, they are not just observations over the images. They are not preaches, rather they are mental speeches. They are “hypothetical” writings, to say it better, they are denied writings. Denied with the regret of those who know that they are important, who do not know what is beyond, who can not set themselves free from them, and like a drug addict who has experiences the pleasure and can not give it up. They are denied with that love and hate struggle belonging to our deepest thoughts.

L.M – in 2003 you left Cuba. Have you been drawing those painting inspired by the street world, like interpretation of that utopist struggle for survival, after you arrival in Europe?

D. H - In Cuba they had more of a documentary character. They were observations on what I could see and hear. Now my drawings can enjoys a larger autonomy. It is not dependant on the comprehension of a given economical and social context. It can express itself in a different way. Still I can not detach myself from my past. On the contrary, the past has become like a wardrobe from where I can take out memories and experiences to re-analyze or re-elaborate. Like Joseph Beuys after his tragic accident: all his operations and objects come from this trauma.

L.M.-Why didn’t you try to get politically involved like other artists did after the failure of the Revolution? You have been saying that the real revolution is art, and that the artist is the true revolutionary. Why not lifting up the heroic and romantic shield of art against those who are destroying Cuba?

D. H – I left because I wanted to know more, learn and do more. I believe our own freedom is more important that any other kind of freedom. Then, I was never interested into political struggle: revolutions do not exist, as they originate from destruction rather than change drive. I will never be away from my homeland. She is in my art, in the draw of memory with which I produce my works.

Perhaps in the end, Diango will repeat the prophetic words of the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. “Cuba, that gloom, unhappy and noble island will still be there after the last native and after the last Spanish, and after the last African and the last Russian, and after the last American and the last Cuban. Surrounded to all the wrecks and for ever lashed by the Gulf current: beautiful and verdant, eternal and everlasting”. A tragic and mysterious vision is that, like every drawing made by Diango Hernandez.




Diango Hernandez: Education, Wealth and Revolution
Lisette Lagnado, 2008

And who will even attempt to deal with young people by giving them the benefit of their experience?
“Experience and Poverty,” 1933, Walter Benjamin

Whether from sub-Saharan Africa headed toward the Spain-governed Canary Islands, or from China and headed toward the Taiwanese coast, the scenes of the boat people are repeated in the seas, with or without survivors, but always demonstrating the power of borders – one either belongs, or is an “other.” If there is no legal way to leave, an alternative method is invented. Reports like the following one are no longer uncommon in the news, appearing in different versions and settings, involving people whose lives and nationalities embody the spectacle of global reality: “A group of 12 Cubans modified a 1951 Chevrolet pickup, transforming it into a boat, in an attempt to use the vehicle to immigrate illegally to the United States. The pickup was tied to empty barrels for flotation, and equipped with an outboard motor allowing it to travel through the ocean at around 13 kilometers per hour. Using this watercraft, the Cubans made it more than halfway across the ocean from Cuba to the American coastline, coming to within 65 kilometers of the continent. But the US Coast Guard intercepted the craft and repatriated the Cubans: nine men, two women and one child.” Yesterday’s fringe is today’s clandestine border crosser.

Creative imagination is at the basis of the concept of gambiarra, as associated to the image of a pickup truck strapped to barrels for flotation. Now – five years after the text in which I sought to explain the link between artistic manifestations and empirical phenomena of a social nature – I meet up with someone actually born on that island wedged in the Caribbean like a Solaris out of reach of its base, an artist whose discourse on the revolution reminds me that “a man loves what he could lose.” Diango Hernandez (1970) thus obliges me to undertake a hazard-fraught analysis of current perspectives in light of my own previous writing. Were it not for the origins of his artistic path, there would be no sense in once again resorting to the device of gambiarra. Frustrated System (2006) articulates disparate elements atop a table, where the faucet does not open to a sink, but to the floor (just one example of the paradoxical situations created by the artist). One should always be aware that the “system” that Diango Hernandez seeks to shed light on is not only the political regime that rules the island, but, obviously, the art circuit as well.

Quite apart from its graceful surrealist composition, his work involves the issue of immigration and the urgency of measures for ensuring a homeland. In 2006, the artist was deeply immersed in this problematics, as evinced by the titles of his artworks: Home is Anywhere and If I could Fly I would build a House up there. It is interesting to draw an analogy between “house” and “home,” taking “home” in its association with “homeland,” just as in Homeland or Death or, in a more subtle way, in Please Take me there. This condition can be extended to other fields of existence, the active renouncement of one’s country of birth perhaps being one of the most critical situations faced by humankind today. Anthems elevate one’s country to the status of an inaccessible lover; but what defines the portrait of a nation, what distinguishes a refugee from an exile, how to compensate generations bereft of the fantasy of a birthplace?

This ocean which buoys the current dissidents to other shores is the same as that plied in colonial times by the slave ships, bringing over from Africa the culture that would gave rise to the Afro-Cuban religions. We thus see a miscegenation of cultures, each with its own degree of truth, constituted as a result of maritime translocations guided by geography. The Cuban Revolution (1959) was the pivotal moment in the definition of the island’s national character, rooted in colonial and neocolonial times dominated by international forces – Spanish, North American and Soviet. In an editorial in the supplement Lunes de Revolución, it was established very early on that leftist intellectuals, artists and writers were situated further to the left [italics ours] than communism itself. That is, the political vocation of artists is an intrinsic part of their nature. There is no higher aspiration than the recognition of creative potential as critical consciousness, as set forth by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in the text “The Author As Producer” (1934): “I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency.”

But this intriguing narrative became more complicated after the installment of the Cuban Revolution. It must be noted that Gerardo Mosquera represents a Cuban modernism bereft of “manifestoes” or “consciously structured schools,” giving rise to a “new art” also characterized by an “absence of proclamations.” It seems almost paradoxical that the foremost socialist nation in Latin America has not managed to organize an artistic vanguard. How should one approach an understanding of this group of factors?

In the present series, Diamonds and Stones: My Education (2008), Diango Hernandez lends continuity to his project of exposing the contradictions and paradoxes of the Castro regime’s persistence in power. This time, he literally places education on the defendant’s bench. This would not work so well if he had chosen another emblem of the Revolution, for example, the health system or agrarian reform – the two other top priorities for the committee that advises Fidel on strategic subjects. Numbers can be very effective for showcasing national progress – for example, the striking decrease in Cuba’s infant mortality due to congenital malformations (which dropped from 3.8 to 1.3 for every 1000 live births, a better rate than that of some European programs). Measuring freedom of expression is much more complex, in light of the fact that already at the 1st Congress of Education and Culture, homosexual intellectuals became the new “target of persecution.” The cause became notorious due to its violent methods, even though it cannot be said that the so-called democratic countries have solved this question in their own internal affairs. As early as Cris(is)Home (2005), Diango Hernandez had already written on the how education is defined in the absence of freedom of expression: “Cris(is)Home explores the surviving of the individual freedom in certain kinds of political crisis and presents education as a process of indoctrination...”.

It is interesting to investigate how the artist adds complexity to a country’s educational mission, overlaying the further level of culture. The series presents images of the revolutionary ideology, which made education the apple of its eye. Without “education,” the masses would remain subject to manipulation. That, at least, is the official version. Strictly speaking, education – which figures among the basic rights set forth in the United Nation’s 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” – involves the question of schooling, and this is accessible and free to the island’s inhabitants. Its success can be measured by way of a quick look at the literacy rates, even though there are exiled Cubans, speaking from the bull pulpit of committees organized in universities situated mainly in Miami, who complain about the payment demanded in the form of “social services” (notably, work on farms) This presents a difficult task – the balance between the objective achievements and the limitations imposed by popular power, but here there also enters an official state propaganda and, outside the trenches, a neoliberal rhetoric of empire. Education without freedom is a recurring theme well known to Latin Americans, and Diango Hernandez intones: “The government has kept the whole educational system under strict security.”

In this sense, the question of schooling is only a part of what is understood by “education.” The artist sets up a kind of documental biography; because he adds the voice of “his” own experience, we should understand that it is the education of the individual which is at issue – which is consequently a bourgeois value, even if it is a mere mention of the unavoidable learning that takes place within the family setting. “My mother is more avant-garde than me, she gave her life to build a new society, I am just doing art.” The possessive pronoun “my” preceding the word “education” suggests an ideological claim for a right also announced in the first person. Contrary to the doctrine spread by totalitarian regimes, the emphasis on the individual maintains a parallel concern for the public sphere. These images presented to us are not depictions of intimacy, but rather of the development of marches and collective manifestations: the construction of a sovereignty as a historical goal.

As he has been living since 2005 in Düsseldorf, the capital of the painting academies, it is natural that the artist from the island has incorporated some resonance of Germanic tradition into his work. There would be no use in dwelling on the wide chasm separating the political and collective ideals of the Cuban Revolution from the markedly subjective reflection of the Bildung process. It is obvious that the past being re-elaborated is not German romanticism, but youth. The shift to the heightened patriotic feeling of a people is ultimately justified by the fact that the Revolution became stagnated in its heroic features. In Bild (of the image), we have three paradigms of revolution: the French, the Russian and the Cuban. However, Diango Hernandez, without a trace of nostalgia, multiplies the relations of ambiguity with the model (Vorbild) and the archetype (Urbild) furnished by “his” island. Here, a proviso may be introduced in regard to the artist’s condition on the European continent. It is known that his move to Europe was due to a personal choice, linked to a desire to make contact with art collections inexistent in his country of origin. It can be stated that, in a certain way, his move was motivated by the search for a certain notion of “education.” It was therefore not due to political persecution. None of this, however, precludes a person from harboring a feeling of exile. From the moment the possibility of emancipation lies outside, a sense of separation and distance sets in.

It is necessary to return to the standpoint of “my education.” Like the entire population of Cuba, the artist extracts energy from fragments or things that have fallen into disuse. We have seen previously how, unlike what happens in disposable culture, a piece of scrap can one day be placed once again into use. Unlike Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) renunciation of manual intervention on the artist’s part, gambiarra implies intelligent manipulation. Gambiarra therefore operates at the border renounced by the readymade – the large crypt into which nearly all the noteworthy 20th-century artistic initiatives were eventually committed – in structural, cultural and sociopolitical terms. I suggest suspending the automatic application of the readymade concept in countries that attempted to link up at the border of capitalism and its market economy. Strictly speaking, we are so far removed from the aesthetic “neutral” espoused by the French artist, and the speed of the artwork’s institutionalization is such that little meaning subsists beyond the appropriation of an industrialized object. Dawn Ades referred to a relevant fact: “collage and montage, the always potentially subversive use of real objects and materials, have been used to expose the structural relation between the poverty of the ‘Third World’ and the technology of the ‘First World.’”

The problem of this type of reading lies in defining the procedure based on an “outside,” as though there were a constituent internal logic that the word “poverty” does not capture, and which the “diamonds” make infinitely more rich. This Diango Hernandez is no longer the same as that of Ordo Amoris Cabinet, having perhaps perceived the equivocation that arises when precariousness becomes an aestheticization (and not a criticism). The stone’s cut and polished form evinces the artist’s view concerning “...how our future in Latin America is always linked to a form of the past, and this circle of history is describing a precise geometry that maybe will also be applied soon to Cuba and its tropical utopia. Because they are pictures that live inside a complex geometry, a crystal prism that also transforms the light into color.”

Struggling against the systematization of all objects within the category of the readymade helps toward a better understanding of the partial and transitory combinations among affective links and the absence of a terra firma where they can be consolidated. Mosquera points out that the “acceptance of collage” is the “decisive result for our Continent.” At this point it is best to split the analysis along two paths, diminishing the effect of stylistic influences. When, for example, Diango Hernandez and his colleagues founded the Gabinete Ordo Amoris (1994–2003), the imaginary museum was a museum of crisis (“to collect all those weird objects made by people, full of grieving beauty”). The wide range of materials allows for a decomposition of three-dimensional space, whose central critical thrust is concerned with the Cuban nation: “You have to build your own system, you have to build your own gas, water or electricity system. This is something we all have in our places in Havana. It is an alternative, provisional system that is there because you do not have water or electricity every day. The infrastructure that is supposed to be conceived by the government is built by our individual.” The glaringly obvious similarity with Hélio Oiticica’s (1937–1980) lemma da adversidade vivemos!”[we live by adversity!] makes it seem as though history is frozen in time.

According to a rather combative perspective, Diango Hernandez’s installations – and, especially, his drawings with their masterfully expressive lines – offer simultaneously poetic and conflicting, optimistic and brash views of a place that knows the weight of frustrated liberations (the “betrayals”...). Certain analogies remain despite their belonging to a bygone era: music is a weapon, drawing is an incomplete though vital project, by a person or by a government. The edges of the pages in the progressive manual are smudged by water, socialism and democracy do not rhyme; words overflow from notebooks filled with an adolescent’s feverish writings. A notable characteristic in Diango Hernandez’s oeuvre is how the title generally complements the artwork (even the “untitled” works are generally accompanied by a lateral comment). A prime example of this practice is a previous artwork entitled Drawing (living inside my drawers) (2006), which directly refers to the artist’s house and activity, thus infusing the notion of homeland. It often seems that the artist favors Spanish – his mother tongue, and possessing a musicality more suited for the expression of feeling – for statements concerning the ideals of equality, while more violent statements are often expressed in the language of the enemy (“stop mother fuckers,” “spies,” “traitors,” “guns,” “ruin makers,” “underdevelopment”). An element of one of Fidel’s most celebrated sentences, “waiting” symbolizes the Cuban condition: “history will absolve me.” This phrase dates from 1953, yet it continues in effect even though the winds have inverted sky and earth. “The waiting” becomes an experience akin to a play by Beckett, embodying the Revolution’s existential wear and tear, indicating successively postponed, constantly renewed and forever unfulfilled deadlines. There will always be a counter-revolutionary élan to be repressed in anticipation of the arrival – of light, of development, of the present.

The series Diamonds and Stones sets up an opposition between the moral instincts of the Revolution and stored-up material goods (which are also connotative of exchange). While these goods fluctuate aimlessly before returning to circulate among people, the diamond, the symbol of timelessness, aims to be “forever,” like the sole political party governing Cuba. It just so happens that the scenario of diamond mining involves entirely artificial campaigns aimed at the formation of cartels. Reality cut in the shape of a faceted gemstone is no different from the type of material used in the electoral propaganda, but then the artist’s self-irony sets up a sort of smokescreen: “It is maybe a ‘bridge project,’ an attempt to link societies, to ‘visit’ different scales of diamonds. I have followed a line of research since I have started working and this line guides us through many reflections about strategies of validation of ‘our beauty’ or the beauty that emerges from permanent crisis situations like the one we have had in Cuba for almost 20 years now. In the diamonds this is very present because I am using the diamond as an icon that again will be used in a transaction, but this time as an art transaction.”

The “diamond” is able to embody the entire list of myths relative to destruction, by way of fabricated truths. “Ruin makers” are part of the landscape of various drawings, but what are they? The valorization of “creative” work is a fetish difficult to overcome. Increasingly aligned with the status of artists, the conscience of the workers tends to reproduce a similar model: the social division of work is being gradually diluted and allowing for hours defined by the individual’s own time management. In contemporary society, the combination of various temporary services (another meaning for gambiarra) attests to a means of survival well known to illegal immigrants, together with a lack of professional training and under-the-table employer/employee relations. Diango Hernandez’s education strays from the orthodox agenda. This generation which grew up amid rumors of plans by the CIA to kill a president, came to doubt the humanist purport of the historical left. There is a thin line separating the ode to the Marxist attempts and the criticism of the Castrist revolution.

Nearly completing a half-century in power, Fidel Castro personified the melancholy of the “ideology-less” people, of contrary but not mutually exclusive tendencies. The feeling of a lack of utopia was widespread in post-1960 youth culture. In Brazil, Cazuza (1958–1990) and Roberto Frejat synthesized this feeling in a pop song: “meu heróis/ morreram de overdose/ meus inimigos/ estão no poder” [my heroes/ died of an overdose/ my enemies/ are in power] (Ideologia [Ideology], 1988). This reference illustrates unfoldings unthinkable by part of the mythological figures. Distressing examples have appeared everywhere, notably in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). Indeed, it was from Eastern Europe that Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov raised the question that chafes all forms of government: Are the artists the “spies”? The artists whose “education” was fed by “leftist” thought (note that the word “leftist” is currently losing its original meaning) have a huge responsibility in relation to the achievements. If the files were opened...



1 In Portuguese, a gambiarra is literally a fraudulent electrical installation, made with only a light bulb and a wire, generally tapping into a neighboring electrical power line. In colloquial usage, the meaning of this term has been extended to any work done by an unauthorized technician – its meaning is therefore akin to the English term “jury-rigged” or “makeshift.” Developed based on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s reports in La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind] (1962), the concept of gambiarra – in the sense of conserving (in a latent state) a stock of leftovers from previous constructions – has already provided the basis for other essays on contemporary art. Far from commending laziness or something done sloppily, the notion is predicated on a keen grasp of the issues involved, though it should be made clear: conciliating precariousness with sophistication is not an aesthetic operation. Ideas developed based on correspondence between Rivane Neuenschwander and the author on 27 July 2003. “O malabarista e a gambiarra,” [The Juggler and the Use of Gambiarra] online magazine Trópico, www.uol.com.br/tropico, São Paulo, 3 October 2003.
2 Solaris, Tarkovski, 1972.
2 “House” and “Home” are the central questions in the work of Palestinian artist Ahlam Shibli, who participated with Diango Hernandez in the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, under my general curatorship, co-curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Cristina Freire, Rosa Martínez and José Roca.
3 Cf. Publicações 27a Bienal de São Paulo [Publications of the 27th Bienal de São Paulo], 2006, “Como Viver Junto” [How to Live Together] and “Seminários” [Seminaries]: the Bienal Foundation has not yet published these two books at the moment the present essay is being completed (March 2008).
4 Cf. Lunes de Revolución, encarte semanal [weekly supplement] n. 3, Jornal Revolución, Havana, 06/04/1959. Editorial “Una posición. Haciendo lo que es necesario hacer” [A Position. Doing What Needs to Be Done.] p. 3. The sad end of this publication is analyzed and documented by Sílica Cezar Miskulin in Cultura Ilhada: Imprensa e Revolução Cubana (1959–1961) [Island Culture: The Press and the Cuban Revolution (1959–1961)] (São Paulo: Editora Xamã, 2003).
5 Translated from Portuguese by John Heckman.
5 Cf. “El nuevo arte cubano” [The New Cuban Art], in Arte y Política, Pablo Oyarzun, Nelly Richard, Claudia Zaldívar (eds.), (Santiago: Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, 2005). Notwithstanding the interpretation by Luis Camnitzer, who considers that oil-on-canvas painting cannot be unlinked from colonial ideology, many authors refer to a “Havana School” in pictorial terms (early 1940s). The graphic arts stand out in the 1960s, giving voice to an essentially popular support.
7 Statement by the artist, 2005.
8 Artist’s correspondence with the author, 24 December 2007.
9 Artist’s correspondence with the author, 1 January 2008.
10 In 2003, Diango Hernandez went to Trento (Italy) and, the following year, to Seville (Spain), before moving to Düsseldorf (Germany).
11 Cf. Dawn Ades, “História e Identidade” [History and Identity], in Arte na América Latina. A Era Moderna, 1820–1980 [Art in Latin America. The Modern Era, 1820–1980] (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 1997), p. 285, concerning the work by Antonio Berni (1905–1981). Later on, however, the author discovers the need to resort to the concept of the readymade in connection with the “refusal of the pre-Colombian civilizations to develop the technology of the wheel.”
12 Letter to the author, 28 February 2008.
13 Cf. Gerardo Mosquera, Cozido e Cru [The Cooked and the Raw] (São Paulo: Fundação Memorial da América Latina, 1996). The title of this article refers to the book by Claude Lévi-Strauss Le Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964).
14 The members of the Gabinete Ordo Amoris: Ernesto Oroza and Juan Bernal (until 1996), Francis Acea and Diango Hernandez. Cf. Power Pencil, book accompanying the artist’s exhibition, conversation with Luigi Meneghelli, Ed. Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, 2007.
15 Cf. Power Pencil, Diango Hernandez. Trento, Italy: Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, 2007.
16 Cf. “Esquema geral da Nova Objetividade,” Rio de Janeiro, 17 December 1966, at Programa HO, www.itaucultural.org.br.
17 Cf. Fidel Castro, speech offered in self-defense, 16 October 1953. The first clandestine editions began circulating in 1954.
18 Artist’s correspondence with the author, 24 December 2007.
19 Cf. Lunes de Revolución, encarte semanal [weekly supplement] n. 3, Jornal Revolución, Havana, 06/04/1959. Editorial “Una posición. Haciendo lo que es necesario hacer” [A Position. Doing What Needs to Be Done.] p. 3. The sad end of this publication is analyzed and documented by Sílica Cezar Miskulin in Cultura Ilhada: Imprensa e Revolução Cubana (1959–1961) [Island Culture: The Press and the Cuban Revolution (1959–1961)] (São Paulo: Editora Xamã, 2003).
20 For more information, see Métamorphoses du travail. Critique de la raison économique [The Metamorphosis of Work: A Critique of Economic Rationality], André Gorz (Paris: Galilée, 1988).



Objects of Redicule
Alexander and Bonin, 2008

An exhibition of new work by Diango Hernández will open on December 1st at Alexander and Bonin. This will be the artist’s second one-person exhibition at the gallery.

Hernández’s new work addresses conflict as a mirror reflection of political objectives onto historical surfaces. The distortions created by the reflected images of tangible examples such as borders, oil, and bombs onto the non-tangible language of prejudice, political slogans, and ideologies become, in the artist’s words, ‘objects of ridicule.’

“…Objects of Ridicule” will consist of two sculptural installations: My Symmetry and waves inside my room. My Symmetry, a series of window frames with louvers, will divide the main space into two equal parts. Each louver will be engraved ‘PATRIA O MUERTE’ on one side and ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ on the other. The louvers can be rotated individually to create either a consistent wall of one motto or a mixed wall of both the Cuban and U.S. national maxims, allowing for different interpretations of the ideological role of this installation.

waves inside my room is a suspended ceiling made of 280 wooden, 1950s-style radio backs. This work also acts as a division of space, but in this case, the mirrored image on the opposite side is hidden. waves inside my room reflects the complicated relationship created by the exertion of dominance by the Northern Hemisphere over the Southern Hemisphere. This installation allows the visitor to become the vehicle through which news, opinions, and propaganda are communicated.



Inspire me, again
Stella Lohaus, 2008

The artistic research carried out by Diango Hernández (born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba in 1970, living and working in Düsseldorf, Germany since 2003) shows close ties with Havana, the city he grew up in. His paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures incorporate themes such as democracy (and its feasibility), communication and the idea of individual freedom.

Inspire me, again is about Hernández’s research into the nature of his home country, Cuba. The title is about change, but also about someone who was important and has turned into an icon. But it also means: what happens now? Hernández sees political ideas as an important inspiration for life, rather than as concrete systems needed to organise society. Logically, the revolution plays an important role in this. However, it also acquires universal significance in that it expresses the longing for a new beginning, a birth. The illustration on the invitation shows the image of a nursing mother, whose head has been replaced by that of Fidel Castro. The image is unambiguous: for the Cuban people Fidel is the ideological mother, the leader who feeds his children (and the future).

For his first exhibition in the Stella Lohaus Gallery Diango Hernández created five installations, in which the voice is transformed into energy. The sound recording media transmit the speech ‘The Second Declaration of Havana’, given by Fidel Castro in February 1962. In this speech Castro divulges to the people that Cuba is about to distance itself from the United States and that the country will pursue a communist course. Fidel’s voice and the words from his speech are translated into electric pulses, which then form the power that drives the objects. The rhythm of the machine is synchronised with the rhythm, the intensity and the silences of the speech.

The five objects were chosen very carefully. They are all normal household appliances, but for Hernández they have a strong symbolic meaning: the blender mixes, pulverizes and uniformizes. The vacuum cleaner tidies and cleans and ‘sucks up’, makes disappear. The radio connects us with the outside world, the fan puts the air in motion and refreshes. Lastly, the globe is isolated, but its power comes from within. The objects are being displayed on a naked brick ‘stage’. It reminds of a deconstructed wall, the unity is gone, the connection is unstable and vulnerable. They have become islands, loose relics from a past. The second-hand shirts suggest bodies, that could contain new or old leaders. The checked pattern is as a code to the Cubans: employees of the Department of the Interior or the secret police wore checked shirts. It was a kind of uniform. Now they just lie next to the objects, they are ‘off-duty’, the working day is over.

The painting Ultrasound to my mother history, We got twins conveys, in a very direct way, the paradoxical relationship between the US and Cuba that established itself when Kennedy came to power. The ultrasound shows twins in the mother’s belly. Again, this is about sound and vibrations, here transformed into a visual image.
In addition, Hernández dwells on the Kennedy murder in the collages alongside the objects. Puzzle-like pieces resembling the murder itself. The stone ‘socles’ resemble puzzle-like items, strange shapes of countries, or different provinces, states, maybe torn-apart continents. Traces of a cohesion that no longer exists.


out-of-place artifacts (OOPArt)
Nuno Faria, 2008

Galerie Barbara Thumm is pleased to present its first solo show “out-of-place artifacts (OOPArt)” on Diango Hernández. The exhibition is taking place in cooperation with the Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer in Cologne, which will be opening its third solo exhibition on the Cuban artist concurrently with the Berlin show. On the occasion of these exhibitions, an artist’s book will be published with collages by Hernández and a text (Guerrilla Warfare) by Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Diango Hernández's solo shows at Galerie Barbara Thumm and Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer not only share the same title - “out-of-place artifacts (OOPArt)” - but are also inextricably interlinked, in the way that they constitute a continuous, both conceptually and material lycontinuous space. Both shows offer a complete impression and understanding of Diango Hernández's project complexity. Forming a social revolution projection, together they are a powerful and metaphorical reflection on both, social and artistic contexts.

The central piece at Galerie Barbara Thumm is “Shooting the Light”, an installation belonging to a series of three works dedicated to the theme of light. The two other works, “The Bay of Pigs” and “And the light had disappeared”, were shown at the group exhibition “Articulations” in Faro, Portugal this summer. Diango Hernández is above all primarily interested in scrutinising the relationship between light and the history of power, two aspects which are quite often intimately linked. Thus the works refer metaphorically to the memory of concrete events: in “The Bay of Pigs“, the figure on the wall, traversed by several editions of the “Life Magazine“, functions as a tenuous physical and mental frontier between two realities, two sides of the same coin. “Might the light be an ephemeral error of darkness?”, asks Diango Hernández. In “And the light had disappeared” – an immense drawing in which the white of the paper represents the light and the black of the pencil the darkness – Hernández refers to the founding and clarifying gesture of the artist, who is a privileged witness to darkness and obscurity. In “Shooting the Light”, the third – and arguably the most powerful – piece in this light trilogy, the spectator participates actively in the construction or, perhaps more appropriately, the “destruction” of the installation. Once again working with the subject theme of boundaries, Diango Hernández invites whoever enters the gallery space to “switch off” light bulbs by throwing stones. The most direct and enigmatic consequence of this act is to conceal the collages hanging on the wall. And the light had disappeared...

The key word to access Diango Hernández's artistic thought is “drawing”. In the work “We are unfinished drawings”, presented at the São Paulo Biennial, Hernández uses the subject theme of the drawing as a space of frustration and of utopia that never truly fulfills his high expectations. Indeed, drawing – as a metaphor for the most inner individual expression – has been a particularly productive field of reflection and expression for the artist, in a “dialogue of the deaf” that he conducts with memory and the effects of the failed collective utopia that was the Communist revolution in Cuba. The two exhibitions share a series of collages of catalogue pages from illustrations of historic and valuable eighteenth-century European porcelain, depicting the aristocratic life and the exotic fantasies of the aristocracy of that time. “I have intervened in these pages in a very fundamental way: I have used pieces of cut-outs from porno magazines pages and I have glued them on top of the porcelain objects as a means of mocking them, adhering to one of the most important principles of a social revolution – to deconstruct the idea of the bourgeoisie, using for this purpose any kind of dirty strategy”.

At Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Diango Hernández presents the installation “The Only Book“ a stylized iron bookshelf, holding a single but highly symbolical book, the first edition of Ernesto (Che) Guevara's famous treaty “La guerra de Guerrillas” (1960), as well as the comprehensive space installation “Cabin of Cutted Desires”, composed of a table converted in a ceiling lamp, 15 collages and a velvet curtain, which closures the room to obstruct the daylight.

It is curious to note how drawing has been understood and used as a tool for thinking and as well as for inventing new forms of living and of conceiving reality in determined specific contexts. To draw is to project, to project ourselves imaginarily and materially into a given place, or feeling, or language, whatever… ; that will to experience the future is clearly linked to the secret and intimate exercise of drawing. In Hernández's work, everything is to be understood as projection, as a desire for transformation, social transformation.




MIT STEINEN AUF KONVENTIONEN
Ludwig Seyfarth, 2008 

Wo viel Licht, ist auch viel Schatten. Dieses geflügelte, metaphorisch auf die Dialektik und die Kehrseiten der Aufklärung bezogene, in vielen Varianten überlieferte Wort könnte als Motto der aktuellen Ausstellung von Diango Hernández dienen, deren komplexe Struktur sich schon darin andeutet, dass sie sich auf zwei Galerien in zwei Städten verteilt – auf Hernández’ deutsche Stammgalerie Michael Wiesehöfer in Köln und Barbara Thumms Dependance in der Berliner Markgrafenstraße. Dabei wird das metaphorische Licht der Aufklärung in zahlreichen Abstufungen auf die Zeichnungen, Collagen und Installationen projiziert und wirft ebenso viele Schatten, die das Publikum im Berliner Ausstellungsteil sogar bis zur Grabesschwärze abdunkeln kann. Dort steht Shooting the light, eine raumfüllende Installation aus rostigen Metallplatten, im Mittelpunkt.

Die Platten verkleiden einen Großteil des Raumes wie eine Bühne, in deren Mitte aufgereiht sieben nackte Glühbirnen an Kabeln hängen. Die kleinen Steine, die vor allem den hinteren Teil der Installation übersähen, stammen von einem Haufen im vorderen Teil des Raumes, jeder einzelne von ihnen die Folge eines Gewaltaktes der Ausstellungsbesucher. Diese nämlich sind aufgefordert, mit Steinen auf die Glühbirnen zu werfen, wovon schon am Eröffnungsabend so reichlich Gebrauch gemacht wurde, das die Galerie in einer pragmatischen Interpretation des Konzepts einige Sätze neue Leuchtkörper beschafft hat, um dann und wann einen wiedererleuchtenden Reset einzuläuten und neue Lampen in die Fassungen zu schrauben.

Je nachdem nämlich, wie viele Steine das Ziel erreichen, wird es naturgemäß immer dunkler in der Installation, nur eine Birne ist aus polierter Bronze und hat von vornherein nicht zur Erhellung beigetragen. Je dunkler der Raum wird, desto weniger Licht fällt auf eine Reihe gerahmter Collagen, in denen Hernández Schwarzweißabbildungen historischer Produkte der berühmten Meißener Porzellanmanufaktur aus Bestandskatalogen von DDR-Museen mit farbigen Ausschnitten aus Pornomagazinen versieht. Wie Hernández selbst äußerte, bezieht er sich damit auf einen der wichtigsten Grundsätze einer sozialen Revolution, der darin bestehe, die Idee der Bourgeoisie zu dekonstruieren und dafür jede denkbare schmutzige Strategie zu nutzen. Die politische Botschaft der Collagen besteht also weniger in einer Art Antipropaganda oder ironischen Verkehrung direkter Inhalte. Hernández knüpft eher an die Collagen der Surrealisten an und nimmt ihre oft verschlüsselten und symbolträchtigen Verweise auf verborgene Begierden auf.

Diese Auseinandersetzung mit verdrängter Sexualität drückt sich schon im Titel des Cabin of Cutted Desires im Kellerraum der Galerie Wiesehöfer aus. In einem abgedunkelten Raum hängen 15 weitere Collagen aus der Serie. Das spärliche Licht kommt von einer verhängten Deckenlampe, die aus einem umfunktionierten, auf den Kopf gestellten hölzernen Esstisch besteht. Die Verwendung und Umfunktionierung vorgefundener Materialien und Abfallprodukte bildet wie die politische Lichtmetaphorik einen sich ebenso durch Hernández’ Werk ziehenden roten Faden. Was in der jüngeren europäischen und US-amerikanischen Kunstgeschichte vor allem als Verweis auf die Überflussproduktion der hochkapitalistischen Gesellschaften zu lesen wäre, versteht sich bei Hernández auch aus seiner Sozialisation in einem Land, das bis heute von Konsumgütern nicht eben überschwemmt wird und wo Gebrauchsgegenstände des Alltags häufig recycelt werden müssen.

Dadurch wird vielleicht doppelt interessant, dass Hernández künstlerische Methode eine ganz konkrete handwerkliche Basis hat. Trotz der unterschiedlichen zum Einsatz kommenden Medien ist es das tägliche und tagebuchartige Zeichnen, aus dem alle seine Ideen erwachsen. Und ist nicht das große, leere, eiserne Bücherregal mit seinen schmalen Stangen, in dem in Köln nur The Only Book steht – die Erstausgabe von Che Guevaras La guerra de Guerillas (1960) – eine Art Zeichnung im Raum? Und damit auch eine kunsthistorische Erinnerung an die Metallskulpturen von Julio Gonzales oder die Displays der dürren Figuren von Alberto Giacometti?

Letztlich führt Hernández uns in eine Echokammer der Kunst- und Kulturhistorie, aber auch der politischen Geschichte, in der unversehens Reminiszenzen an verschiedene Kunstrichtungen des 20. Jahrhunderts wie die surrealistische Collage  oder die Minimal Art mit Erinnerungen an politische Ereignisse in Kuba verbunden werden. So bezieht sich Happy Birthday Dear President, das Anfang dieses Jahres in der Schau „Wessen Geschichte“ im Kunstverein in Hamburg zu sehen war, auf das weltweit größte öffentliche Schachspiel, das die kubanische Regierung am 7. Dezember 2002 als Massenspektakel inszenierte. In einem anderen Fall, in einer Einzelausstellung 2007 im Neuen Aachener Kunstverein, bildete eine subversive Aktion 1991 in einem Kino in Havanna, an der Hernández selbst teilgenommen hatte, den Referenzpunkt. Dort war heimlich ein Notizbuch in Umlauf gebracht worden, um 15.000 Unterschriften für verfassungsmäßige Neuwahlen zu sammeln.

Wie aber ist ein künstlerisches Werk einzuordnen, dass sich ästhetisch auf verschlungene postkonzeptuelle Pfade begibt, um eine doppelte ironische Kritik sowohl am Sozialismus in Hernández’ kubanischer Heimat als auch an den Auswüchsen des fortgeschrittenen Kapitalismus auszuüben, dessen Produkte er zudem in einem an Marcel Broodthaers’ gemahnenden Museum of Capitalism archiviert? Was hat es zu bedeuten, dass die Arbeit sich einerseits der Metaphorik von Licht und Schatten bedient, anderseits aber mögliche Bedeutungen auf der metonymischen Ebene immer wieder verschiebt? Vielleicht ist das, was wir hier mit Mitteln der Zeichnung, Collage, Skulptur und Installation vorgeführt bekommen, eine Art literarischer Essay über das Scheitern von Utopien. Und ein Appell an die individuelle Wahrnehmung und Denkfähigkeit, sich gegen oktroyierte Interpretationen der Welt und der Dinge zu wenden und einfach etwas anderes mit ihnen zu tun, als Regierungen und Nachbarn, die Gesellschaft und ihre Konventionen es uns abfordern. So kann es passieren, dass in einer Galerie einfach mal das Licht ausgeschossen wird.



FLESH AT WAR WITH ENIGMA, Notes for a interview
Anke Kempkes 2004

AK: Your grew up as the „lost generation“ of Cuba?

DH: Yes, when we started studying we were told that the system is going to collaps in future by the threat of capitalism. And this was projected on 2000...

AK: It was so precisely dated?

DH: Yes,...and they started an educational program for the young poeple in new boarding schools on the country-side. They were re-structuring the system and preparing for what they called „the new man“, ready for a future society with a re-enforced sense of collectiveness and solidarity, In 1989 everybody felt the big changes going on. We lost the last support of the Soviet Union, which meant confronting a big crisis. We knew about Perestroika and everyone was concerned: What was the political mistake? Why did they collapse? But the big confusion over the rising economical crisis was soon predominating. That process happened really fast. And then, inevitably, the daily life was taken over by the struggle for survival. It started in the early 90s and the climax was in 1994. As a consequence people began to install their own structures. They created objects for the needs of daily life, using materials which were left-over and recycled them.

That was the point when we initiated the History...project. We were five in the beginning coming from different backgrounds, especially from the design school in Havana. We became interested in these new variety of objects, which were products of the crisis. It was the first time that Cuban individuals had the opportunity to produce privately for themselves, for their homes. Ironically this improvised craft-work was at this point officially supported because the state had no supply to respond to the huge command of products. They opened the big spaces of manufacture for the most skilful crafts-men to produce and sell that stuff. It was the first time that a free trade of that kind was legalised. But at the same time the officials did not approve on this phenomenon at all, because it exposed the failure of the system. But at that time they had no other option.

AK: What kind of objects were produced?

DH: There was a wide range of very simple objects like cookers, lighters, lamps, toys for kids.... Made in a genius way. The people who produced them were experienced industrial workers going back to these hand-craft skills. The public sphere was highly affected by this aesthetic. The new practice grew into a big system and by that also forming a new communication system. People were going back and forth in time, re-inventing things. As an artist it was difficult to refer to a process, which emerges right out of the centre of a crisis. But for us it was a wonderful moment to understand that these seemingly poor objects had a value, that they were part of the culture, because they were a proof of the creativity and inventiveness of the whole country. And the products were not intended for the market but for surviving. We were very much into this kind of anthropological study and started to collect and buy thousands of these objects. We validated them in our art practice because we knew from the beginning that they were going to disappear. They existed because of mistake. And there was obviously no intention to keep them.

AK: How was the reaction when you showed these objects?

DH: Indeed we decided to introduce them into a museum context. We wanted them to become part of art history, because we knew that otherwise this practice would never be regarded as such. The Ludwig-Foundation, which started to work in Havana in 1994, got interested in our project and supported it. But when the exhibition came to the Contemporary Art Museum... Costa Rica we had some problems. Cuban representatives were there and they interpreted the project as an act against the system. And at this point it became clear that we do not want to fight with them. We wanted to present these objects as a result of the inventiveness of the people trying to survive. But the spectators refused the idea that these things form an utopian moment. We were trying to open the mentality of the Cuban art scene to a new sensitivity, that there is more to it than following international trends: Here, this is what we have. It is important to validate these things and to develop an understanding of what is happening in our reality. We touched fragments of Cuban society with dedication while nobody was talking about them. They documented what people are doing when they suffer. So in art you can not simply take them as a new standard of beauty when in actual fact they emerged in order to resolve a state of pain and shortage. This difficult condition we tried to take on, and we were embracing the dilemma and kept talking about it. It opened to us a new understanding of process. You cannot experience these objects as something, which is permanent, a cultural result. The way they are produced gives them an unfinished and decadent character. (...)

At the same time I began to make this big mass of drawings out of what was my personal point of view of the crisis. I did it at home late at night and of course I could not tell this to anybody. In a modest and quiet way I began to comment on circumstances, places, opinions that people have. Of course I was very influenced by the aesthetic of the everyday we investigated before. Particularly one object I was fascinated by: it was a cup developed finely by one guy made out of a milk bottle. Actually cups are not much used in Cuban reality because we do not have a wine culture. But this guy created this object out of his longing for another reality. It becomes somehow a platonic object, the ideal object of an ideal society. So you can see how twisted a real object can become. (...)

I developed a special speed in my work, not giving much intentional commitment, but acting artistically out of a collective consciousness. Havana was a backdrop; a big landscape of mistake and you could trace it back in every drawing. I did self-portraits, illusionary architectures and cities, projects which are never going to be realised. In the first two years I was using an accidental mode of drawing, but then I got lost, because it became a habit. They were hidden in my place without exposure which was actually in a way also a living condition of each of us. You can see some flashes from outside but what it really counting is what is happening inside. And it’s happening in every family in every place. My practice was a document - writing, commenting, drawing -, the most sophisticated strategy for me. After a while I had thousands of drawings in my house and I decided to come to Europe. Now I had something to say about what is a circumstance. It was a big testing to present them in the European context. They were not exotic items, no fantasy, rather they belong to a specific social history.

AK: You were interested in Alina Szapocznikow’s series of photos on show at Kunsthalle Basel. She transformed a chewing gum here into a variety of absurd abstract sculptures. I see a parallel here to your works in the fascination for ordinary objects treated in a visionary way. In the show there is this umbrella you constructed out of newspaper also called Drawing...

DH: Yes, the umbrella.I wanted for the first time to shape an object. I was ‚drawing’ a sculpture with provisional materials, the staging of an ad hoc solving of a need. The umbrella was done in the same speed like the drawings, like: oh, shit, its raining. This gesture has also ideological implications. The umbrella is a normal fact in reality. When it starts to rain people use newspaper when they do not have an umbrella to shelter them. And I linked this motive with an image I saw from the time during the Vietnam war. At a big manifestation in New York the demonstrators were using umbrellas. On top of them they wrote statements against the system because the powerful people were on top of the buildings looking down and reading. (...) I was imaging a world without planning, a big mess. In an almost unfiltered way I was applying what I experienced in my everyday life onto art. I did works in five seconds. In the end it does not matter if object or a drawing, they are projects without any base.

AK: In surrealism this technique was called ‚automatism’, but it was more related to the individual sub consciousness, a subjective technique filtered prominently through the mind of an artist. In your practice it seems much more related to a real need, to a collective social-political situation you shared?

DH: This link is really interesting, especially because you do not know what going to happen in terms of a collective phantasy. Most of the drawings were not signed because at that time I even did not conceive them as art. I was not anymore a witness, a tourist in my city. I was included in its special dynamic producing an equivalent in my artwork. The Flamingo for example was a motive I was really interested in. I was living for four years in a region in Cuba hosting a big population of Flamingos. In communist time they represented the bourgeoisie idea of beauty, aristocracy and prestige, which of course was suspect. I used the decadent icon in contradiction to the fact that they are living in big communities. And I kept using it in this really naive way and put it in a political context. The first flamingo-drawing was called Exited Beauty. I wanted to talk about a longing for beauty coming out of the crisis, a standard sense of beauty which can be clichéd and kitschy and which could rise again. I presented this animal as ‚exited’ because it is anticipating the future. The bird is equipped with this immense erected penis is also in a way hinting towards the earlier ideal of progression in Cuban history, the revolution with all its machismo.

AK: Its a funny and generous image in terms of the associations it allows...

DH: Yes, the drawings are generally very open to many interpretations. At the same time ideological and political issues are behind them. The fleshy watercolours of the spine, the chest and the hand on show in Basel, are like wounds affected by the structure of society. I told you about the vitamin pills which were given out to the families in Cuba at the high peak of the crisis because they had not enough to eat. This story shows how a political mistake can effect your body and you as a person. The works expose this absolute nakedness, symbolising the failure of a system becoming transparent, as well as to how the body can be brutally exposed to the forces of a political situation. These works are subversive in a subtle way because there is beauty implied in each of them. And I really like to keep it as a key for making communication possible through them. I am not interested in inventing something new, in pushing a style or trend. I am using pre-existing languages of art and then something can read through, sometimes not. Of course its a risk for me to expose these works in the West. There is a constant misunderstanding and incomplete reading inbuilt into the reception.

AK: Coming back to the umbrella, it plays also a strong role in Surrealist iconography. You were mentioning René Magritte in this context. In his paintings it functions like a shelting mediator between a person’s imagination and the surrounding world, or a ‚kidnapper’ with the umbrella becoming a device for flying away. You were talking about the manifesto of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier on „Magic Realism“...
....


DH:... (Where he is confronting the Surrealists with their pointlessly excessive imagination not rooted anymore in any kind of reality....) Wilfredo Lam?



Diango Hernandez
Pierre Tillet, 2008

The link between art and merchandise explored by John Miller. The microstate created in Rotterdam by the Atelier Van Lieshout. The memorial to the victims of Guantanamo by Gianni Motti. World Trade Monopoly by Öyvind Fahlström. Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features by Adrian Piper. The re-enactment of the bloody miners’ strike against the iron policy of Margaret Thatcher orchestrated by Jeremy Deller and filmed by Mike Figgis. The relationship of contemporary artists to politics has been much commented upon. The emphasis has thus been placed on the critical dimension of art (towards capitalism, imperialism, ideologies, history written by the victors, the system of art itself, etc.), its utopian aspect (for example, in the “Utopia Station” project by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Molly Nesbit) or its ties to activism (art and feminist and antiracist demands, the questioning of the notion of community).
With Diango Hernández, the relationship between art and politics is not the result of a theoretical position or activism. It refers to a real-life experience, to a specific form of bios politikos. “I grew up as a political being,” explains the Cuban artist, who lives and works in Düsseldorf. “Like many children of my generation, every day I was urged to subscribe to the political process the country was pursuing. All the education that I received was filtered through this. Politics is not an artistic theme that I chose; it is not the product of a strategy. It is like an inseparable friend imposed upon me.”

Rebel Deluxe
Born after the coming to power of Fidel Castro (in 1959), Hernández observed the efforts of the socialist government “to keep the concept of revolution intact”. The result, he reckons, was that “revolution became ordinary” (1), a concept emptied of its meaning. But the decadence of the revolutionary idea (2) does not prevent a certain romanticism from lingering, as cynically demonstrated in a 2005 drawing in which the sun stands out against a red background. In the centre of the radiating star, the inscription “Rebel Deluxe” sounds like a laughable slogan, almost an oxymoron. Likewise, Hernández produced a film in which the word “¡ Victoria !” appearing on a billboard fades away letter by letter. Here, the Che Guevara motto to which it refers (“¡ Hasta la victoria siempre !”) is nothing more than a slogan drained of its substance.
In another vein, the artist is being ironic when he writes, “The underdevelopment is a long game, do you want to play?” on a water (or gas) main surrounded by the tracks of a child’s train set. Hernández also mocks certain historical events – for example, when he leaves a message on an old radio with the words: “The missiles are in my backyard” (a reference to the 1962 missile crisis). But the critique of political reason that he makes does not concern only Cuba: Speeches is an installation comprising six turntables placed on speakers simultaneously playing the political speeches of six presidents (including Castro and Kennedy), producing a cacophony. For another work, Diango Hernández removed all the keys of a computer keyboard with the exception of those that spell out the word “democracy” (with the “€” sign visible below the letter “e”). A way of demanding the advent of a real democracy? Not really: the artist thinks that the term “democracy” is one of the political concepts that has been the most overused in the course of the last few decades to the extent that it has lost its legitimacy.

For the 21st edition of the International Workshops organised by the Frac des Pays de la Loire, Hernández has produced two works. The first, entitled My Facade, comprises political propaganda posters from the 1960s splattered with gold paint. The black-and-white images come from the Cuban ministry of education, which used them in schools during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to teach the history of communism and extol its social ideals. In the tradition of socialist realism, they depict enthusiastic youths at work or united in fraternal fervour, as well as views of harbours and photographs of electricity pylons, cranes and paddle wheels embodying Cuban industrial progress. The individual presence is systematically played down in comparison with that of the group, of the masses. Each photograph is repeated to highlight its propagandist function. Finally, the empty space in the centre of this vast wall of images gives it the appearance of an arch, of a monument.

Eternal Flame
My Facade refers to the 1980s, when increasing numbers of Cubans left the country for the United States. “The government and the Communist Party [the only party in Cuba] organised groups to humiliate those who left,” says Hernández. “These groups threw eggs, tomatoes and stones at the facades of the houses of the exiled to humiliate them. Every day, the stains left on the facades reminded those who saw them of this humiliation. I took an interest in this subject and particularly the fact that, at the same time that they were destroying the memory of the exiles, these people were building a monument to hate and intolerance.” In My Facade, the artist replays these gestures by changing their purpose, since it is the propaganda images that are spattered and no longer the homes of social-traitors (3). The unreal images depict “that which the government wanted us to believe in, the best and the worst of a dream”, comments Hernández.
The second work presented at the Frac des Pays de la Loire is entitled Domestic Monument: The Eternal Flame. It comprises a hotplate placed in the centre of a wooden plank painted to imitate marble (as in a shrine), upon which a drop of water falls steadily and is immediately transformed into steam. The work refers to the monument to the martyrs of the revolution located at the Museo de la Revolución in Havana: a stone slab with a star in the centre of which burns an “eternal flame”. Hernández thus transforms an existing image: the supposedly permanent flame of a monument to martyrs becomes a drop of water that is instantly transformed into steam – a metaphor for freedom on contact with power, according to the artist. This deliberately cheap-looking installation (as opposed to the grandiloquence of the Havana monument to martyrs, in front of which a guard is permanently posted) was exhibited in one of the buildings of the Frac artists’ residence and was therefore visible only from the outside. “I wanted to domesticate the idea of the monument by bringing inside a house something that belongs to the public space,” concludes Hernández. “Thus, the monument can be discussed and questioned, which is impossible to do from the outside.” In a way (4), Domestic Monument: The Eternal Flame is an anti-monument. What it has gained in democratic terms (being able to be discussed), it has lost from a political point of view, since it was no longer aimed at a collective. Or only from a distance.

(1) Remarks from “Simone Neuenschwander in conversation with Diango Hernández”, January 2005, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland. Hernández also talks of a “Stationary Revolution”.
(Author’s note: with the exception of this quotation, all the remarks by Hernández come from an e-mail interview with the artist carried out in December 2007).
(2) “I am attracted to the idea of decadence and particularly the decadence of political doctrines, which implies not only relief for some, but also a crisis situation for many,” says Hernández. “Decadence is a marvellous phenomenon, a situation in which the pre-established future no longer exists.”
(3) The figure of the traitor is, moreover, the subject of other works by Hernández. The series Drawing: Wake Me Up depicts the artist sleeping on the shoulders of all the American presidents – from Eisenhower to George W. Bush – since the Castrist revolution. According to Hernández, “The artist must be a traitor, that is, someone who always goes against the social rules, the political expectations of power and the aesthetic convictions of the viewer.”
(4) In the same way as Jimmie Durham’s Arc de Triomphe for Personal Use.



Happy Birthday Dear President
DH, 2008

On the 7th of December 2002 a particular event happened in the Revolution Square in Havana, this time it wasn't a Fidel Castro’s speech or a military parade, it was a massive chess game that was intended to be the largest world’s simultaneous chess game of the chess history. This massive popular manifestation organized by the Cuban government it was broadcasted by all the national television channels plus followed by all the national radio stations. Again as many other times the mechanism of propaganda implemented by the officials in Cuba has worked. People forgot at least for one day how dramatic is their economic and political situation and the most important thing, people was glad that we could make the messiest chess game of all times. I only went there in the late evening when the game was over and you could only see a colossal amount of tables and chairs making endless lines in front of the monument that has witnessed almost everything in Cuba in the last 50 years. The square was empty and the empty chairs where transforming the monument into something else, into a stage for an abandoned game.

I ask to myself if is possible to abandon a doctrine that has formed you. If there will be the possibility of building a memorial for those who has failed, for the dissidents, for the unhappy friends in Cuba that haven't left the country but have abandoned the game.