By Ismael Gonzáles Castañar
Location
Popular music is our true representation before the world, not literature or art; “No se puede tapar/ el sol con un dedo/ la verdá(d) es la verdá(d) / mala-cara no quiero”, by N(ew) G(eneration) the Band, inaugurates the not only aesthetic Cuba of the 90s.
The postmodern is also defined as the conjunction of Tradition and Vanguard; the intertextuality (previous reference in the present) seems to carry all its weight: look how the “simple verses” of the Apostle -not his face or his image, which Ernesto Benítez does not need to paint- turned into song by Joseíto Fernández become valid in the events ‘disembocated/ disembarked’ in the Guantánamo Naval Base.
Regression
A-historical, the call for a “provincial” Salon last year (95) did not admit (as I heard on the Radio / “Long live National Radio, Long live National Radio!” patio guaracha) performances I think… Then, we apply the variant: “narrate” what Ernesto Benitez wants to “not-paint” (something that, by the way, Kosuth did not invent).
I don’t know why other artists (fools that they are) just want to paint if they sustain ideas that could turn us into total performers: “there is only aesthetic fact when one does or reads that doing” (Borges and I) if (as Duchamp pretended) art in Sanskrit really meant doing.
-It was everything- concluded Rito Ramón (Aroche).
Recurrence. Each piece in Ernesto’s Guantanamera would seem to contain a Movement that already was – tense Academia with Pop, Bad Painting, “gestures” (Octavio Paz), Installations and Conceptualism (translation of x’s leading to yé, yé being of course the painting).
“Eyes that saw you go” (song title) for example is a key recurrence to study this “expo”: see the blindness of Christ in his previous expo called Evangelios: without eyes. Besides, it shows how nowadays not even a naïf can be “naïve” (Caridad Atencio) because he knows that setting himself up as a maker means “selling” (please: not only “commercial”) the “civilist” objective of a whole people who only want to “work well, eat and drink with the family, and… make lots and lots of love” (Hemingway, Led Zeppelin).
(Hemingway, Led Zepp’ and this author).