ENGLISH

K'cho in the Eyes of History
by Laura Hoptman

I may not know many of the "issues" surrounding the recent emergence of K'cho, a cuban artist living and working in Havana and his work, but I can guess them. His Cuban nationality; his use of organic materials like sticks and branches; his subject matter, including boats, oars, and other objects emblematic of the recent Cuban evacuations; his youth (he is barely 26); his precipitous rise from a precocious student to a regular on the international biennial circuit; his recent representation by a handful of well-known galleries in the U.S. and in Europe - all form a matrix which converges under the rubric of "political" or "identity-based" art. Since all art can and does become politicized, I dismiss the notion of "political art" as simplistic. It is harder to dismiss the "identity" rubric although its frequent use as a more polite word for classification by race, gender and/or ethnicity, has often led to generalizations that border on stereotypes. My main problem with so-called issues of identity is that they concentrate less on where artists come from than on where we are as receivers in relation to them. From my own experience as a cultural tourist and an organizer of regionally-based exhibitions, I have learned that contemporary cultural overviews of geographic regions or individual countries speak more eloquently about the cultural proclivities of the presenters than of the presented.

Most of what I know about K'cho I know from a pair of big drawings he made as part of a series of works that play on the image of Vladimir Tatlin's model for his Monument to the Third International. Over the past few months I have had the chance to ponder one of these at some length, as it has recently joined the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. A mass of tough but graceful, swirling charcoal lines kept under control by the structure of the tower, K'cho's Monument is crowned by what is easily recognized as a filter heavy with ground coffee. The work is called A Las Ojos de la Historia (In the Eyes of History) and is one of 2 drawings, a print edition of 25 and a sculpture of the same title.

K'cho is hardly the first artist to have adopted the motif of Tatlin's tower - Alice Aycock is one obvious example - and will probably not be the last. A compelling graphic image, as well as one heavy with symbolism, the original Monument to the Third International was commissioned by the Department of Fine Arts of the Revolutionary government of the Soviet Union in 1919 to be erected in the center of Moscow. Originally planned to stand twice the height of the Empire State Building, its materials were to be iron and glass - modern, modernist, and almost impossible to find in the Soviet Union during those years of civil war. Tatlin designed the structure to be a tour-de-force both of engineering and artistic imagination at the service of the people. Three revolving floors were to house meeting halls, reading rooms, and even a radio station. Not surprisingly, the Monument was never built. A photograph of a wood and wire model has endured though, and through this, the Monument to the Third International has become an icon of Tatlin's functionalist beliefs, the Russian Constructivist aesthetic, and more generally, the Utopian spirit of culture in revolution.

K'cho only saw reproductions of Tatlin's Monument in 1992, although he has said that he remembers hearing about Russian Constructivism at the Academy in Havana. Shortly after seeing these reproductions while traveling in Europe, he began working with the motif in prints, drawings, and in a huge sculpture that, constructed out of leafy branches woven and tied together with iron wire, stands over eight feet tall. He was, by his own admission, drawn to Tatlin's aesthetics of usefulness, the vigor of the idea of art in the service of everyday life. Most importantly, he recalls, he was drawn to this artistic expression of the dream of The Great Utopia.(1)

This is not to say that K'cho's Monuments are all homage and no critique. Quite to the contrary. K'cho has of course picked up on the irony of the fact that - despite Tatlin's cry of "Art into Life!" - his tower never made it to the reality stage but endured as a symbol of all that is visionary and progressive. K'cho's sculptural version is an example of a mockingly "functional" use of branches and sticks. These materials, so close to those Tatlin originally used for his model, can only remind us that after 75 years of progress we are still reduced to building our Utopian projects out of ephemera. The addition of the coffee filter is a similar tongue-in-cheek nod to the aesthetics of usefulness. Using reasoning that might have come from Tatlin's himself, K'cho has made sure that his structure too serves as a resource to the general population - in lieu of news - coffee for all comers!

In this feat of distancing, through impertinent appropriation, K'cho's monument has the ironic humor of one of Duchamp's "assisted" Ready-Mades. As vulnerable as the Unhappy Ready-Made, a mathematics book hung out a window to be destroyed by the elements, A Las Ojos de la Historia also recalls Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder, a carefully rendered drawing of 1914 that absurdly lauds a silly little machine as both a work of art and an onanistic sex toy. In spirit, however, A Las Ojos might share more with Picabia's sly and satirical "machine portraits" produced sporadically in the late teens and early twenties. Whether it was Alfred Stieglitz as a (broken) camera focused on the word Utopia, or the artist's wife Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia as a windscreen, Picabia managed to make of each of his aggregations of cogs, wheels, lens and screws, the mechanical equivalent of a human essence. Maybe because the pitch of the tower makes it seem to be taking a long look back at those who look at it, maybe it's the two stolid feet built wobbly-looking sticks, but there is something undeniably anthropomorphic in aspect about K'cho's towers, something sohuman and vulnerable that it too has the air of a portrait, although not of a specific individual.
If A Las Ojos de la Historia can be considered a kind of portrait, its subject would be one that constantly changes, the monument reflecting like a mirror the likeness of everyone who stands in judgment of it. Considering this loaded image in this fashion allows us to deal with the problem of identity panoptically - in other words, in a way in that acknowledges that the eyes of history are gazing from all points. Who judges Tatlin's tower and ultimately, the Utopian expectations of the Socialist experiment? Whose history, after all, is K'cho referring to? Certainly ours, meaning perhaps those who have come to the conclusion that Socialism and Utopia have no place in life or for that matter, in art. Interestingly, also, probably theirs, by whom I refer to those who looked askance at Tatlin and his ilk shortly after the completion of the plans for the Monument--that is, the proponents of Socialist Realism. Most importantly perhaps, it is K'cho's history - that of an artist, a Cuban, a young man in a post-Soviet world which is also represented by, or in the tower. There is no doubt a critical sting in K'cho's message that to history, Tatlin's Monument - read Utopian Socialism, Art into Life - is as banal as a coffee maker (and not even an electric one). But there is something in the delicacy of the branch that resembles a jaunty little feather, or a flag atop a defiant citadel that is visible in K'cho's prints, drawings, and sculpture, that bespeaks perseverance in the face of formidable odds, belief after disenchantment, and humanity over technological progress. Used as a symbol of something that perhaps never existed except in a dream, K'cho's Monument is, at least from one angle - that of the artist - surprisingly free of the stink of cynicism. Not unlike K'cho himself, the tower in A Las Ojos de la Historia is unpretentious but ambitious, ironic, but full of hope. This perhaps explains its latest incarnation - it has been chosen to grace the front of a Christmas card.


(1) The Great Utopia is the name of the exhibition in which K'cho first saw Tatlin's work, including reproductions of the Monument to the Third International. K'cho reported this first sighting to me in a conversation we had in New York in early February, and also emphasized his attraction to the "dream" aspect of Tatlin's Monument.