For and Against America

John Haber
in New York City

Juan Francisco Elso and An Emphasis on Resistance

Carlos Martiel: Cuerpo

When Juan Francisco Elso calls a work Por América, it may sound like a celebration or a warning. It unsettled many a viewer in 1986 expecting either one. Now it lends its name to a survey of his work, with contributions by more than thirty others as well.

El Museo del Barrio sees it as a touchstone not just for him, but for art of the Americas. Born in 1956, in the very midst of the Cuban revolution, Elso grew up with revolutionary fervor and high expectations. Yet that underestimates the pain he willingly accepted in his work. He must, he felt, to maintain what an earlier show at the museum called "An Emphasis on Resistance." As a postscript, Carlos Martiel takes resistance personally, with the weight and pain of his body.

This could be the most difficult review that I shall ever write—not because the art is all that hard to explain, but because it is so painful to try. To describe a performance by Martiel is to relive the terror, disgust, and shame that he hopes to produce. I can only imagine the pain for him. Not that he is present in performance at a survey of twenty years of work apart from photographs, occasional video on small screens, and titles that are painful enough in themselves. It is still his "Cuerpo," or body. Is it good or bad if he causes you to turn away?

Blood and sand

Por América depicts José Martí, a writer and revolutionary so revered that his bust all but litters Havana. Also at the museum, Reynier Leyva Novo mounts copies of his own, bleached and impassive in a covering of white gesso. He means to spread the word, and he tracks a butterfly as well on its long migration north and south. For black artists, too, the Afro-Caribbean diaspora runs both ways, so that they can claims their place in both African and Western art. Yet Novo's virtual reality is going nowhere fast. The butterfly hovers awkwardly over a bust of Martí, as Methuselah, for as long as a 3D headset will permit.

Juan Francisco Elso takes more risks, like Martí in the nineteenth-century—including the risk of aiming too high and the risk of rejection. He turns Martí into a martyr, while making clear that martyrdom is none too pretty. His sculpture in wood is painfully smaller than life and ineffectual in its violence. Martí holds a machete and poses as Saint Sebastian, the first Christian martyr. What might be painted arrowheads or fleurs de lis pierce his flesh and spill out to new life on the gallery floor, like airplanes for Michael Richards. Elso's art is all about the body, as symbolically larger than life but close to the soil.

He builds with meaningful but fragile materials. Branches and sand go into sculpture of animals and trees, but also The Heart of America, The Hand of the Creator, and The Face of God. Who can see the face of God, and who is born in God's image? For Elso, the revolution itself, with uncertain outcomes. His claims are large but his sculptures few and his drawings negligible. He was only starting to live up to more when he died of cancer at age thirty-two.

Just weeks before, the museum looked at Raphael Montañez Ortiz and his impact on Latin American art and at Amalia Mesa-Bains in Mexico, while MoMA continues the story of Latin American art with the gift of a collection. It sees Elso as important, too—to so many artists that his own work can be hard to pick out apart from its sheer size. The curators, Olga Viso and Susanna V. Temkin, take his career in no particular order, and they insist on his concern for everything from Afro-Cuban to Native American art. Just how much did he influence? Hard to say, but he tapped into widely shared concerns for today. A knife sticks up from a silvered box by Papo Colo, as threatening as Martí's blade. And then comes the immersion of artist after artist in branches, blood, and sand.

Much of it comes in performance. Ana Mendieta takes pride in her body in nature, set against the trunk of a tree. Senga Nengudi weighs down her stocking-like body bag, while Tania Bruguera covers herself in Cuban soil and human hair, as Burden of Guilt. Silvia Gruner alternates guilt and pride as she crawls and somersaults across the earth. Not in video, Scherezade García places the female body in a Garden of Dictators, while Gabriel Orozco has his patterns of decay. Belkis Ayón, who died the same age as Elso, victim of a crumbling revolution, gives bodies the support of angels.

African Americans turn up often, against all odds but fitting right in. Melvin Edwards has his welded shackles, Alison Saar her marks of violence, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden her plea for protection against it—in the figure of a girl or woman dressed in a golden coat of mail. A tree leans over in a photo by Lorraine O'Grady, as if offering itself for Elso's branches. In place of the hand of God, Glenn Ligon has the neon outlines of his own. Has inclusiveness become a fiction or a burden? Karlo Andrei Ibarra welcomes visitors into the act, with globes awaiting your chalk marks or erasures, but Martí, God, and Elso are watching.

Path of least resistance

A woman stands in a doorway to "An Emphasis on Resistance," in only the first of the exhibition's acts of resistance. She seems all the more confident and comforting thanks to the tropical sunlight behind her and the shadow to either side, barely deepening the entrance gallery's low, soft light. Could she be Susana Pilar Delahante, the artist, and could she be welcoming rather than barring the way? No doubt—except when she vanishes, leaving a view onto water. Delahante, a young black woman and a Cuban, thinks of her video projection as a metaphor for the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, but it could just as well stand for art as a doorway onto personhood, politics, the natural world, and the imagination. It introduces a show of nine artists from throughout the Caribbean and South America, six of them women.

They have all won awards from CIFO, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami and have responded with commissioned work. Only one award, for Cecilia Vicuña, celebrates a lifetime of achievement, and their very prospect is off-putting. Sure, another group show—and another anointing of emerging and midcareer artists. The museum Web site has photos of them all but not a single work. Sure, too, to judge by the show's title, an obvious message. Yet the handful of works respond to one another, and the artists wear their resistance lightly.

They are not quite as apolitical as another Cuban artist, Zilia Sánchez with shaped canvas in the exhibition next door. Still, the glaring conflicts between refugees, regimes, Gulf artists, and the Trump administration remain implicit. Claudia Martínez Garay bases her graphic design on propaganda posters to attest (she swears) to oppression, insurrection, dictatorship, and rebellion, but she carries them in low relief into the third dimension. Yucef Merhi papers the walls with declassified documents, names from the official "no fly list" glaringly blacked out. Yet their tilted, overlapping display becomes something of a carnival, and the marks of censorship become a medium for individual protection. The no fly list takes flight.

Besides, that doorway opens onto a choice. One can pass through an actual door right next to it, for Merhi—or one can enter the nest of rooms through a wider opening to the right. There another tall, narrow projection picks up where Delahante left off, although Leyla Cárdenas makes hers freestanding. On one side, a classical column looks as spectral as lost memories. On the other, it seems composed of discrete threads, "unweaving the grid" (Cárdenas explains) of humanity, archaeology, and architecture. Further inside, Vicuña's cuts and knots in unspun wool stop just short of weaving it back together.

The connections and disconnections keep coming. That classical column shares a room with María José Machado, whose photographs continue its emphasis on public spaces. She pictures herself in performance, dressed in the reddish orange of an emergency or construction worker as their one spot of color. She also squeezes tightly into the space between rocks and other barriers, as a further warning. Vicuña anticipates the fashion for hangings and weavings, to honor the Andean concept of quipu—a merging of the body and the cosmos. Machado prefers the urgent or the comic to the spiritual.

Vicuña thinks of a loom as a recording device. Ana Linnemann delivers one, too, with makeshift machines on a shop table along with a pile of books. Nicolas Paris assembles his modular art from tubes like towel racks, only more colorful. How does it reflect his personal experience as a schoolteacher, and how does it serve as a classroom? I have no idea, but Oscar Abraham Pabón may supply the schoolhouse. His Resonance House, or closed shed of corrugated steel, opens at the back for piano keys, in a show open to unheard melodies and the path of least resistance.

Body art

Carlos Martiel is, somehow, still going in a line of performance art that includes Chris Burden, who dragged himself across broken glass, and Pope.L, who crawled the twenty-two miles of Broadway in New York. Not for nothing did ExitArt, the former nonprofit, call a group show "Endurance." Still, their work can come across as a stunt, and Martiel is all the more vulnerable at thirty-five in remaining stock still. In that he is an heir to Yoko Ono, with Cut Piece, but the scissors that cut away her clothing never touch her for all their threat. He may be closer yet to Marina Abramovic, impassive and unmovingon a gallery shelf. Her work, though, is one long ego trip, while he harps on, let us say, serious matters.

Born in Havana, Martiel may come closest of all to another Cuban artist, Elso himself. Did Elso give pride of place to Por América, that man in wood pierced by arrowheads many times over, like Saint Sebastian. And still the sculpture, modeled after a revolutionary, Joé Martí, wields a machete. Martí's near namesake, too, fights back, but with his body on the line. Martiel has no time for epic heroes, the first Christian martyr, or fine art. He is a gay Cuban American in the real world, now.

I have put off saying more as long as I could. This is his body and his show, although Por América could make a fine alternative title. In its very first work, not arrows but a flagpole pierces his skin, leaving the Stars and Stripes to drape from his chest. He has become a human flagpole, the very symbol of America, but an America that will never acknowledge him. Another flag hangs from above, with the red and blue turned to black and the white stained with blood. Let the blood be on your hands.

At the very least, it is all over his feet. They appear coarse and discolored in another performance. Blood is fresher still in another photo, where he holds a creature to his chest like a child or a pet. He might comforting it or taking comfort from it, but the seeming animal is only a loose collection of vital organs. It could make anyone who stares too long a vegetarian. What, though, does it say about gender, America, or him?

That can be a problem. Martiel can seem a one-note artist, but the note can ring all too clearly or hardly at all. He can also turn you away.That can be a strength, too, and critics must have brought the same complaints to Burden long ago. Martiel addresses Cuba's repressive state honestly as well. He pins three of its medals directly to his chest—medals awarded to his father before him.

Still, it can fail. At his best, performance engages the viewer, daring one to turn away. He stands on a block in the Guggenheim's rotunda, hands cuffed behind his back, like a slave at auction. He asks only for recognition, as a step toward freedom. In the show's title work, he relies on others to save his life, with his neck in a noose as in a lynching waiting for him to fall. It is safe to say that enough people came through.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Juan Francisco Elso ran at El Museo del Barrio through March 26, 2023, "An Emphasis on Resistance" through February 2, 2020, and Carlos Martiel through September 1, 2024.