Tania Bruguera - Rebel With a Cause

Tania Bruguera: Rebel With a Cause
For the cuban artist Tania Bruguera, free expression comes at a price.
December 2, 2015 12:15 PM | by Linda Yablonsky

As an artist of conscience, Tania Bruguera speaks truth to power in
unforgettably visceral terms. For a performance at the 1997 Havana
Biennial, she addressed the collective suicides of indigenous Cubans
during the Spanish conquest by strapping the carcass of a goat to her
naked body and eating dirt, seasoned with salt, for nearly an hour. In
2008, at Tate Modern, in London, she illustrated the issues of police
conduct by having officers on horseback herd museumgoers into the center
of the vast Turbine Hall. And during a 2009 lecture at Paris's Jeu de
Paume, she played Russian roulette with a loaded gun to underscore her
practice of arte de conducta (behavior art), which she defines as "art
with consequences." But last December, after Bruguera landed in jail in
her native Cuba for attempting to stage a performance calling for free
speech, she clammed up.
President Obama's December 17 speech, which began the normalization of
relations between the United States and Cuba, generated enormous
optimism among Cubans—Bruguera included. And yet, just before dawn on
December 30, when the artist was paying her annual New Year's visit to
her mother, Argelia Fernández, in Havana, state security officers
surrounded their house and pounded on the door, shouting for Bruguera to
open it. She refused. During the next five hours, she showered, dressed,
and tried to call her younger sister, Deborah, who lives in Italy, while
calmly watching the scene outside her window. "I counted more than 20
people," said Bruguera, who ultimately submitted to arrest. "Like I'm
bin Laden, a big terrorist."
At the police station, after she was put in prison grays and her
passport was revoked, agents interrogated her for 26 hours-—two more
than is legal, she pointed out. "I wasn't going to resist," Bruguera
said. "I just would not eat and not talk. I wanted to maintain a sense
of dignity." The police branded her a counter-revolutionary and accused
her of working for the CIA. "I was named for Tania!" Bruguera protested,
referring to Che Guevara's guerrilla companion. "I am a revolutionary."
No charges were filed, but the government blocked her phone and hacked
her website. And during the eight months that Bruguera was detained in
Cuba awaiting the return of her passport, she was arrested twice
again—once after a 100-hour reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism,
by Hannah Arendt, during this year's Havana Biennial; and then in June,
at a protest by the dissident group Ladies in White. Bruguera recounted
the whole story to me in September, shortly after arriving at Yale
University, where she is one of 16 candidates in its prestigious World
Fellows Program. "It feels so good when you're free!" she exclaimed. "It
feels so good."
Since 1998, Bruguera, who has resident alien status in the U.S., has
been living between Havana, New York, and Chicago, teaching and making
art. She represents a rare case of an art star who achieved wide renown
via such international platforms as the Venice, Istanbul, and Shanghai
biennials, as well as Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, without being
represented by a commercial gallery. In 2010, the Neuberger Museum of
Art, in Purchase, New York, mounted her first career survey, following
high-profile commissions Bruguera had created for Art Basel Miami Beach
and the public art organization Creative Time.
Given Bruguera's history, her acute sense of moral outrage, and the
combination of human frailty and cruelty she builds into her art, this
latest confrontation with Cuban authorities was probably inevitable.
Both of her parents fought for Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. From 1973
to 1976, when the Lebanese civil war broke out, Bruguera's father,
Miguel, was the Cuban ambassador to Beirut, where she attended a French
school and learned Arabic. Her sister was born there, but Bruguera
remembers spending most of her time alone. "That's how I started drawing
and writing," she said. Her father, who moved on to posts in Manuel
Noriega–era Panama, then Argentina during the Dirty War, remained loyal
to Fidel until his death, in 2006. Her mother, a translator who once
lived in New York, did not. They divorced when Bruguera was still a girl.
Those experiences may have shaped her worldview, but it was the
televised 1989 trial and execution of a national hero, General Arnaldo
Ochoa, who was convicted for drug trafficking, that pointed to her
future as an artist. "It was intense," Bruguera said. The word "intense"
comes up frequently in her conversation. She used it again to describe
the Mariel boatlift, in 1994, when Cubans took to the Malecón, Havana's
seaside boulevard, shouting, "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" "That was the
first and only time I saw a popular demonstration in Cuba," Bruguera
recalled. "It was very intense, because I saw truckloads of workers
beating other Cubans."
More positive was the hiccup of free expression that artists in Cuba
enjoyed in the 1980s. Bruguera, then in her late teens, joined Paideia,
an interdisciplinary group that strove to establish an alternative to
state-sponsored culture. "Art became part of the political conversation,
even shaping policies," she explained. Her first political work was
Postwar Memory, a newspaper she created with other artists in 1993—they
were promptly censored. "To do a print newspaper is still illegal. Was
it a newspaper or was it art? I really like it when you can't tell."
If her politics suggest that Bruguera lives on anger, in person she is
an effervescent, considerate, stubbornly optimistic woman with flowing
brown hair and appealing brown eyes. Her wardrobe consists of plain
dresses and shawls, and she happily gets by with just two pairs of
shoes. Her commitment to social justice through art is so total that
it's been three years since her last relationship. "All of this is so
intense," she admitted, "that nobody can handle it."
While stuck in Cuba this year, Bruguera lost her rental apartment in New
York, where she'd spent five years teaching art and activism to Latinos
out of a storefront in Queens with backing from the Queens Museum of Art
and Creative Time. The workshop was an example of her arte útil (useful
art), which she had developed with students at her alma mater, Havana's
Instituto Superior de Arte, to help the disenfranchised achieve a better
life. Her main solace has been the still-growing force of followers she
gained via Yo También Exijo (I Also Demand), a Facebook page her sister
helped create under Tania's name. Bruguera had used the phrase
repeatedly in a letter she wrote to President Raúl Castro after Obama's
speech. "My sister called to tell me about what Obama had said," she
recalled. "And I was, like, 'What? The United States and Cuba are going
to get together?' For 50 years, Cubans have defined themselves by their
relationship to Americans. To wake up and hear we're friends—that was a
shock." Bruguera was in favor of that decision, she said, "but I
demanded that Raúl tell us what it meant. Were we going to have free
elections? I was trying to say, 'Listen, let the people talk to power
instead of only the other way around.'  "
On December 26, she arrived in Havana and applied for permission to
restage Tatlin's Whisper #6, a 2009 Havana Biennial performance that
invited Cuban citizens to speak their mind in public—for one minute—this
time in politically charged Revolution Square. Despite recent reforms,
the prospect of even 60 seconds of free speech didn't go down well.
After two days of negotiations, her request for a permit was denied.
Four days later, she was arrested. "They used to censor you for
something you did," Bruguera said. "Now, they stop you before you do it."
In July, with Bruguera still unable to leave the country, New York's
Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired her piece Untitled
(Havana, 2000). This site-specific work, which Bruguera created for La
Cabaña, a former military fortress overlooking the city, marked her
transition from performing with her own body to environments involving
an audience. Visitors entering a long, dark tunnel walked on a carpet of
dried sugarcane husks, breathing in the sweet aroma as they felt their
way toward a light that turned out to be a television monitor playing
news and family footage of Fidel Castro. At that moment, they became
aware of four nude men rubbing and slapping themselves. The performance
was shut down after one day.
Stuart Comer, MoMA's chief curator of media and performance art, was
still in art school when he witnessed that piece, and said he never
forgot it. "The site, the darkness, and the naked men enacting gestures
of humiliation and solitude, the references to the violence of the past
and the slave trade, made the experience very powerful," he said, adding
that the acquisition process had started more than a year ago and was
unrelated to Bruguera's arrest. But on the day of MoMA's announcement
came another bombshell: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
let it be known that Bruguera would be the first artist-in-residence for
the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. During this one-year
appointment, Bruguera will help to raise awareness of the city's IDNYC
program, which gives undocumented immigrants access to legal and social
services without fear of deportation.
Bruguera got her passport back this summer, and has since been
shortlisted for the Hugo Boss prize, but she wasn't done with Cuba just
yet. She may never be done with Cuba. With the ball back in her court,
she only agreed to leave under two conditions: that dissidents who were
arrested after showing up for her aborted performance in Revolution
Square be released and that the government give her a signed and stamped
letter guaranteeing that she could return to Cuba next New Year's, and
leave. She got it.
"They couldn't wait to get rid of me!" she said, laughing. "But I have
to go back. I want to create an institute for art and activism in my
house in Havana, so people can see the power of art to speak when
there's no other way to be heard."

Source: Cuban Artist Tania Bruguera Speaks the Truth | W Magazine -
http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/art-and-design/2015/12/tania-bruguera-cuban-artist/photos/