The Tropics are Everywhere
The Tropics are Everywhere
A certain irritation cannot be ignored when asked to comment on the artistic practice of your homeland. Cuban critic and researcher Rubén de la Nuez refuses to be qualified as marginal or to voluntarily define himself as ‘other’. The tropics are no longer a Latin American fixture, the tropics are everywhere. Tropicollage is the title of a tune that the Cuban songwriter Carlos Varela popularised during the late 1980s. The lyrics highlight the conflicts of self-consciousness and self-representation that arose as soon as the largest Caribbean island decided to reorient its economy through the tourist industry. Since then, there is a general concern about the gap between what is understood as cultural identity and an emerging ‘fast food’ repertoire meant for tourist consumption. In such a scenario, the word ‘tropical’ has been largely associated to the construction of an image for a foreign eye.As an art critic born and educated in Havana and currently living in Europe, I have been, on several occasions, expected to define art from my native region not according to the comprehensive aesthetic terms generally utilized by contemporary art criticism but by way of micro-cultural conceptual tools remaining from the Modern sciences of otherness. Those sciences, especially ecology, ethnology and anthropology have impacted the art field to such an extent that their otherising strength can still be strongly felt. Modern art discourse developed a double-layered analytical framework in which the counterpart of inclusive aesthetical notions such as cubism, expressionism or surrealism were constituted by exclusive cultural notions like africanism, orientalism or tropicalism. The aesthetic self and the cultural other have prevailed through time as a binary unit even when contemporary art has widened its nature from the aesthetic into the cultural. Today’s art praxis is conceptualised by notions like archivism, re-enactment or performativity, among others, with references all over the world. In the current state of globalisation, the still so-called peripheral art is attempting to raise a voice of its own. Within this framework, those concepts recall an external analytical inventory by which this emerging voice is placed again as a passive object rather than an active subject of contemporary cultural discourse. Globalisation has not overcome the historic dissociation between the ‘namer’ and the named of cultural geographies. Hence, the contentious aspect about restaging those concepts in today’s art scene is not whether the realities they describe are still in place but derives from the lack of recognition those concepts historically had within the cultural societies they referred to. One must bring to mind their genesis. According to Edward Said, orientalism originated from a ‘diffused notion of the Orient’ for which there is no counterpart within the Eastern cultural discourse.1 Africanism was constructed in the wake of the early-twentieth-century’s European fashion of l’art nègre and as a distinction to the Maghreby culture associated with the Orient. Therefore, a racial aspect was at the core of such definition.2 Yet, tropicalism seems to have a different history, if we are to take the late 1960s Brazilian Tropicália movement as its endemic source. Tropicália was a name for a short-lasting counter-cultural ambiance thought to address the stereotypes of ‘tropical cultures’ accented by nineteenth-century Romanticism.3 The idea of an ‘authentic’ culture, rooted, popular and far from the ‘contagious diseases’ of Western cultural establishment was challenged by an open and experimental practice that exposed all the features of a cosmopolitan sensitivity. Tropicália was also a satiric way to indicate a culture under dictatorship and suffering. That position confronted the general perception of tropical culture as ‘Dionysian, bright and cosy’.Caetano Veloso, one of the founders of this movement, was aware that Tropicália would gain international recognition only by reducing it to a category of an artistic –ism.4 From that time, the artist is conscious of the pros and cons of geo-cultural brands. S/he can use them as credentials to enter into a certain art circuit and once in, s/he struggles to surmount their limits.Nowadays modern disciplines of tropical studies are completing a cycle at the hands of contemporary art. These disciplines were implemented in the educational system of those tropical regions historically taken as case studies. A significant number of artists from these regions are devoted to the deconstruction of such scientific legacy. Some of them integrate the diaspora in Europe bringing their viewpoint on those disciplines back to their place of origin. Thus, the case study is speaking back by artistic means. An exemplar work is that of Ricardo Brey. This Cuban artist living in Ghent has scrutinised the scientific methods by Von Humboldt, Da Verrazano, Loefling and other explorers to detect the moment in which scientific passion becomes the seed of a myth. Morphologically speaking, his work belongs to this vast production that shows no geographical commodities.5 The tropic is everywhere and everything is in the tropic. There is no longer a ‘tropical’ distance. The spectator eager to recover lost paradises in Latin American art, would find himself like Lévi-Strauss in his philosophical travelogue of Brazil as ‘an archaeologist of space, trying in vain to restore the exotic’.6
Ruben de la Nuez
