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New Cuban Art
Unleashed in the late 1970s and consolidated throughout the 1980s, the movement to renew the plastic arts in Cuba became a phenomenon known as “New Cuban Art.” This “aesthetic revolution” was shown in the field of artistic creation as an enterprising cultural project of a new desire for self-awareness, whose aim was to integrate art into the dynamics of society and the democratization of culture, from a vision Away from the stereotypes proposed by socialist realism. Rent casa particular Cuba with us and discover the cuban art as a local.
Towards the Eighties, emerging in our country a new promotion of artists educated within the system of teaching of art created by the revolution, with ideas that were manifested in favor of the legitimation of the budgets esthetical that proposed the culture Western, whose art was labeled bourgeois, dehumanized and decadent, by coming from a political system of capitalist essence.
The first manifestation of this renewal arises in the context of the crisis of the dominant discourse on art and its basic assumptions: the so-called postmodern condition. This was embodied by the Volumen I group, which brought together the protagonists of the first visible attempt to transgress the foundations of a culturally biased behavior oriented towards social commissions and the stereotypical, romantically idealized representation of heroes, achievements, history, and so on. Its foundations, therefore, were the demand for artistic autonomy, the stabilization of new artistic codes in aesthetic consciousness, and the deretorization of a set of means for the production of ideology.
From the postmodernist sphere, framed within an evident crisis of values, a series of positions emerge that rethink the need for a culture of resistance, which manifests itself in an overvaluation of “the native,” “as an uncontaminated past where identity rests.” In the case of the Nuevo Arte Cubano, the transgressive spirit of the post-avant-garde is resumed, which stands “as a strategy in the certainty of the social constitution of artistic value.”
The undeniable merit of these artists from Volumen I lies in overcoming the stereotypes that had governed the symbolic representation of identity during the previous decade, shifting the gaze towards the traditional heritage in contemporary culture, the ancestral practices that persist in shaping the imaginaries that characterize our culture. Rent a private house in Cuba and look to the past with the help of our specialized team. These new proposals owe to the contributions of conceptualism the vindication of artistic research as the foundation for creation, “the supremacy of the idea over form.”
In this way, the Nuevo Arte Cubano surpassed the need for constant updating with the international artistic panorama, which had previously been expressed in the search for new codes of representation to appropriate the prevailing trends.
The art institution, on its part, questioned its functional correspondence with the new artistic situation. In this sense, it carried out important work in the recognition and legitimization of the works produced by the emerging generation. There was an effervescence of discourses on art and projects of socio-cultural integration.
In this way, the Nuevo Arte Cubano established itself in the national culture with a disconcerting and explosive force. It transcended functionally in the aesthetic realm and appropriated fundamental areas of social praxis, pushing the permissibility of the cultural sphere to its limits and necessitating a reconsideration of state control over symbolic production. Nevertheless, its legacy remains an undeniable fact today.
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