ARTICLE / INVENTING THE WORLD

by Corina Matamoros Tuma

In 1917, after paying the six- dollar fee for entering an open sculpture salon in New York, Mr. Mutt submits a fountain that is rejected by the organizers as vulgar and suspected of plagiarism. In his appeal, Mr. Mutt argued that his fountain was not at all immoral, considering that urinals – as that was his piece – like any bathroom fixture, could be easily viewed in store windows. And as for plagiarism, he explains that making an object with his own hands has no importance; that what is really valuable is choosing an everyday item, altering its utilitarian value and bestowing upon it a new meaning.

After this Dadaist “low blow,” objects were never the same. Later on, in 1924, Breton proposed the oneiric object and, in 1930, Dali the object of symbolic function. With the unfolding of Surrealist poetics, objects revealed themselves carriers of unusual meanings not perceived until then. Abstract expressionism, Pop art, and almost all of contemporary art would have been inconceivable without this new dimension in thinking brought on by the Surrealist revolution.

But here we have Los Carpinteros, a trio of Cuban sculptors, who are bent on accomplishing the titanic task of filling the worlds with other objects and their consequent other explanations. In a manner of speaking, inventing the world.

Los Carpinteros emerge in the early ‘90’s during very special times for the Cuban nation. On the one hand a period of great socioeconomic contraction was beginning, and on the other, in light of the departure of many creators to Mexico, the United States and Europe, a new generation of very young artists – most of them students – began to fill already established artistic spaces or to demand new ones.

Before they became Los Carpinteros, the pedagogical guidance of Rene Francisco Rodriguez at the Superior Institute of Arts was very important. Their La casa nacional (The National House) project, 1990, created under his auspices, brought them close to the ongoing reassessment of the craftsmanship of colonial architecture at a time when Old Havana’s restoration revival was at its peak. Two elements mark their beginning: one, the emphatic foray into the processes of woodwork and carpentry, once known for their dazzling splendor; and two, the pictorial documentation of their work.

In the show Pintura de caballete (Easel Painting) held at Centro de Arte 23 y 12, Havana, in 1992, Los Carpinteros found their own method and their poetic direction. For several years they decided to focus on the conceptualization of construction itself, turning it into the actual subject of their work. And they achieved it by interdisciplinary collaboration, taking advantage of the imprecise borders between art and the crafts tradition of old while placing themselves in a highly ambiguous terrain. Let us say, for the moment, that they discovered a truly singular artistic realm, and uncharted territory. With the exhibition Interior habanero (Havana Interior) in 1994, they took advantage of the poetics and went public with a level of artistic skill that was and is very much appreciated in our context. That made them very popular. Pieces such as Marquilla cigarrera cubana (Cuban Cigar Label), Ventana holandesa (Dutch Window), Quemando arboles (burning trees), among others, showed innovative skill. Fully plunging themselves into the popular tradition of the fabulous Cuban cigar labels; taking texts from those same labels which they later reproduced for their portrait scenes; questioning the past from the vantage of the present; and evading the issue of whether the final product was art or craft, the trio elliptically took on social issues. They shielded themselves behind the alleged non-political nature of craft processes, and constructed sumptuous representations in precious woods that left us breathless. A true bridge over troubled waters in the Cuban nineties.

As time goes on, the work of Los Carpinteros seems more cerebral, as if proceeding from linguistic absurdities or literal equivocations. Around the leap that Ciudad transportable (Transporatble City) – made for the 2000 Havana Bienal – seems to represent, the majority of the works confronts us with the paradox of improbable ideas incarnated as perfect objects: tables whose tops contain water; a metal file cabinet with an enormous wooden drawer that will never fit into its intended space; a famous Havana building converted into a chest of drawers; an impeccable staircase on whose steps are embedded electric stove coils; some fragile and graceful watchtowers, where people climb in order to chat; a coffee plantation where the crops are coffeepots. Their most recent devices have been the visual shock, the irrational correlation of materials or very dissimilar elements, the surprise of iconographic suggestion, the naturalism of an everyday object intercepted by an off the wall use or attribution, the humor provoked by the absurd, the preference for disturbing the functions of an object.

Fluido (Fluid), the project that we present in the National Museum, is a disturbing vision of what we tend to think of as a road. Departing from a paradoxical meaning, almost a visual wordplay, Los Carpinteros have made a synthesis of a highway and its opposite in a single structural element. This is so because the first thing we think of when we say the words way, road, trail, track, is a flat and smooth surface, something that allows us to glide along as easily as possible, be it via horse hooves, cart wheels or rubber tires. But it happens that this highway is both road and tire: a support that does not enable sliding and an object incapable of rolling. Impracticable transit, forbidden road, unity of opposites, visual irony, a demand that the streets be paved?

The highway is a puddle of giant drops, huge drops of rubber that will never roll. Instead, they resemble the natural way in which footpaths and puddles of water form in our landscapes: that is, under men’s heavy boots, with people’s footsteps, by the thickness of mud, even with rainfall. But this is an asphalt rain, shaking down from the sky, impossible to placate. An action that signals a contradiction, a reality that appeals to another logic, an image that suggests a different order. Los Carpinteros use the fluid highway (or the water-filled table, or the coffeepot plantation) to opt for a philosophical and critical commentary of things, slowly pushing their works toward a realm of visual entrapments. With overflowing ingeniousness they crumble absurdities, explore discords, test incompatibilities, rebuff arguments, suggest antipodes, and dispense multiple explanations. In every human act, in every corner of nature, there is a paradox susceptible to analysis. The moral of Los Carpinteros is confined to a sketch note, to an outline of the contradictory nature of things, to engaging the viewers as they pass. With their proverbial ambiguity (perhaps the resulting equation of the tree personalities that make up the group, or perhaps from poetic cynicism) they have left us alone to fish, smiling at us and watching suspiciously to see what we catch in the waters that have spilled for a century from Mr. Mutt’s fountain.

A product of their time, their work has also been influenced by powerful conceptual currents. The translocation of art practice towards the terrain of linguistics opened one of the most fertile changes to take place since the mid-twentieth century, particularly in Latin America. Conceptualism hit the streets, distancing itself from the principally self-referential preoccupations of art, and poured itself unto society, ideology, institutional conflicts and power. It also separated itself from the orthodox dematerialization of the object and proceeded to confer to it socio-political connotations relevant to the ups and downs of life on the continent, and to enrich it, insisting on its sensory qualities with the sole intention of connecting [the object] to the viewer in a more grounded manner and drawing it closer to a fervent commitment.

Without a doubt, one can feel all this when viewing Los Carpinteros’ work. But when you walk with difficulty on (or rather in between) this “road,” remember that we are in Cuba. Imagine for a moment ‘50s Chevrolets and Plymouths with Russian Lada engines; Russian washing machines cut in half to get rid of the permanently broken dryers; the implausible raised water tanks placed anywhere on the houses; half a century-old refrigerators repaired into infinity; rubber tops from Chinese penicillin vials serving as pressure cooker valves; industrial plastic boxes made into children’s bicycle seats; the very camello, fishing lines used to repair worn-out toilet parts… These could be the real rivals of the works of Los Carpinteros, their secret inspiration, their harshest judges, or, at the very least, their spiritual fathers.

Ever faster, in recent years, Los Carpinteros invent new objects to populate the world. Like lunatic builders, they make a beautiful hot sofa, with real stove elements, or a wheelbarrow that serves as a bathtub. And solemnly, as if redefining things, as if weighing all the variables, they deliver to us these goods, these new utensils, precious tools for thinking. Firmly settled in the realm of the domestic, they have decided to design a new universe, starting with something simple, like a table or a file cabinet, to a transportable city; from a pool to the inflatable highway. It is said that man can order everything, and like neighborhood da Vincis, their six hands are inventing a world lived in another way. Are they playing God? Will they make a galaxy of polished metal or of fine cotton tomorrow? Their projects have increasingly expanded the scale of intervention and perhaps they have a surprise for us: the likes of a different sky. Perhaps when we wake up tomorrow we’ll find another horizon earnestly constructed with the ingenuity of a vintage-car mechanic.

Make no mistake about it: they are magnificent operators; they are conscientious builders. To flesh out their resumes, they have been masons, woodworkers, tokers, farm hands, librarians, engineers, blacksmiths… Every new object requires that they master a new profession. For every new material, they must experiment with a new trade: for every manufacturing challenge, they must understand a specific technology. And as talented inventors, they have applied themselves to the task with a startlingly nomadic range of skills.

I have seen them breaking their backs in the rubber factory at El Cotorro, trying to tame rubber, that mysterious and intractable material with which they made the preliminary studies for the construction of Fluido. There, with the help of the workers, in one of the tall and solitary warehouses they have tried every possible method of dealing with that material, of understanding its reactions, of guessing the effects of the toluene or the autoclave chamber. True technicians of rubber, delving into the secrets of chemistry!

They have gone where design does not. They have gone where function and comfort are affected by the satisfaction of desires; where craftsmanship seems to stop, in solitude, after crossing the line of folklore. They have gone where architecture is benumbed by its parameters of service, requirements, and public vanity. Although they are kind of sculptors, they don’t have much relationship to Cuban sculpture. They are draftsmen of terrific objects, and yet they don’t belong to the world of high design. Magnificent craftsmen that they are, they’re neither traditional nor autochthonous.

And for what purpose? Reading a lot of design magazines, getting hooked on Popular Mechanics, going through tons of architecture books, immersing themselves in furniture catalogs, in interior design. All for what/

Los Carpinteros are constructing another world as a paraphrase of the world. They are making shrewd commentary about our lives through the utensils, architecture, engineering and crafts that define and denote us.

They have erected the domestic object as paraphrase of the universe. They have turned the exaltation of inventiveness into a recourse of daily resistance, the new logic of the artifact into illuminator of the surroundings, sculpture into social allegory.

Yes, remember with these inflatable highways that we are in Cuba and that the thought of building highways takes us back into history to the promises made by republican administrations during the first half of the twentieth century, when “water, roads and schools” were symbols of progress, the most hackneyed lure staged from the seats of the power, and a great way to get rich from the public treasury. A national way of “inflating a balloon” that Los Carpinteros seem to have taken literally, transforming the wise popular metaphor into a disconcerting reality. Don’t let yourself be pressured by the artists (eventually, the works of art belong to us, the viewers). Think, think while you walk on this asphalt; imagine the thousand things in your life or your neighbor’s life that are as contradictory as this so called highway… This curator only asks that you think about inventing the world, as you learn to inflate balloons (or highways) with Los Carpinteros.

Corina Matamoros Tuma, Havana, March-May 2003