1.1. Neo-vanguard, inter-cultural issues and humanism: toward a pedagogic pragmatics. Lupe Álvarez.

Among the aspects that the specialized critic has considered as essential and defining of the new Cuban art, it has stood out for the modality that assumes in this movement, the understanding of the artistic activity as a complex of relationships that goes further beyond the work of art and the motivations and peculiarities of the creative subject, framed in the historical concept of artist. The irruption in the panorama of Cuban visual arts of the eighties’ decade, of a qualifying investigative will of any proposal and an intention of tuning with the contemporary situation of art from the necessities of our context, generated the coincidence of two ideo-aesthetic set of problems from whose synthesis has been born good part of the most excellent artistic events in this half decade: the critical assimilation of the results of the process of self-conscience of art, carried out by the Vanguards along the century and the restate of their social roles for our cultural situation.

The creative climate propitiated by the group Volume I, early in this decade, catalyzed novel artistic answers to the themes referring to the national and Latin American identity, to the emergency of dividing historical hierarchies between some and other inherited cultural means of a tradition marked by the hegemony of centers of material and symbolic power, to the search of a place in contemporary times, with its geography and its own profile, away from traditionalist rhetoric or obliging populisms.

These answers emitted from diverse ideo-aesthetic positions by different groups of artists, sought to overcome the antidemocrat tendency of important sectors of contemporary culture. Imbued of the emancipating desires of the old Vanguard and favored by a politics of insertion of art in the life and of socially significant distribution of the new cultural values formulated by the Cuban Revolution, the generation of visual artists of the decade of the eighties, tried as a goal to stabilize its codes in the aesthetic conscience of society as the only way of transforming the art into an irreplaceable means and of a great reach in the ideological and cultural debate.

For achieving such ends this movement looked for the theoretical tools of contemporary thought about culture. The answers, from art, to problems object of bloody polemic among studious of the manifestations of the current art; the ways in which novel focus of the cultural practice were retaken by the creators to base their proposals. They generated, around the visual arts of the eighties in Cuba, discussions, events and cultural operations of adaptation and insertion t in the cultural means, unprecedented in this sector of artistic culture.

As one of the codes of this promotion, it may be inferred, the coincidence that they sustained a new aesthetics. The suppositions that they made theirs, taken of a liberation of the artistic environment and of the deconstructive intention before the historical hierarchies of the cultural values, characteristic of the postmodern condition, activated notably the searches without pigeonholing artistic solutions to problems of our context.

This new aesthetics carried as one of its basic elements a revaluation of the traditional notions that the sociological focus of the artistic activity, very extended in our cultural thought, offered about the artist´s responsibility in society.

The interpretation of the creator´s activity began to displace its parameters of the actions characteristic of the generation process of artistic values, of the attainment of a transcendent work as purpose, to the conscience of the possibility and the necessity of conceiving actions to be affirmed as culture. This way, the maladjustment of the subject, the design of cultural operations, the investigation in ways of insertion of art in the vital practice and the formulation of alternative pedagogic projects - for the distribution of the new knowledge - among other qualities of an anti-emphatic aesthetics, encouraged the work of these artists, turned into critics, theorists, cultural researchers and promoters, according to the demands of the circumstances.

The cultural attitude, formed in the excitement of these creative assumptions, demanded the analysis of the apparatus in charge of distributing and inserting in society the values sustained by this advanced group. The necessity to speculate about their practice and that of their contemporaries as a way of legitimating their proposals, before the delay of theory and criticism in the codification and elucidation of the aesthetic dimensions of these practices, these artists gained experience in the approaches of the culture that transcended the aesthetic plane.

These approaches intensified the role of the institution as an authority capable of distinguishing the legitimate artistic discourses; an authority that formulates the paradigms of defining artistry, for a given situation, of the limits of art.

When entering these theoretical frames from the conviction of the artist´s role in the mobilization of socially significant ideas and when these creators placed in a context with possibilities of turning into reality the democratic vocation of a cultural project, stabilized as key attitude of their ideo-esthetic platforms the inclusion of insertion strategies and distribution of artistic values as a part of the operative of creation.

This attitude brought up the concept of assistance, as a way of overcoming the structural and functional limitations of the institution that blocked the circulation and the establishment of proposals synchronized with the changes in the contemporary situation of art.

The assistance option, thus named by their main promoters (1), tended to shorten the distance between the creation carrier of new values and the reception, basically mediated by very ingrained stereotypes in the artistic conscience that presents battle to the pretenses of socialization of the new tendencies. On the other hand, this alternative, inserted in the institutional channels, contributed to palliate the lacks of a cultural apparatus structured on traditional approaches. The cultural operations conceived from the notion of assistance, ascended to the neuralgic debate points of creation, the diffusion and the art consumption. The social transcendence of the same ones, served from motivation to discussions that forced, to each structural element, to participate of the new discourse and to generate actions that defined its position in front of the cultural fact.

As an important part of the structure that affirms and reproduces artistic values, art teaching was deeply involved in the renovation played by the visual arts of the eighties.

Key figures of the Volume I group and other continuators of the artistic orientation taught in the educational centers of more tradition and prestige (2) contributing to the circulation of renovating airs that were felt in the modeling of the pedagogic project. It has not still been deeply studied the role played by teaching in the appearance of the visual arts in the eighties´ decade, grosso modo, curricular modifications and sense reformulations of some disciplines can be pointed out (as it is the case of the workshops - so important for artistic teaching - through which more weight was granted to the development of the creative personality than to the execution of exercises linked to pre-established evaluative approaches) (3) and a restate - and from my point of view essential for the development of this vanguard tradition - of the role of the sciences of art and of other matters associated to the artist´s Cosmo vision. The removal of rhetoric of these sciences, the abandonment of dogmatic positions and of idealistic visions of the artistic culture, in short, the renouncement to an inheritance coming from noxious interpretations of the Marxist thought, together with the statement of this knowledge as a tool for creativity, factors became in favor of a major inclination of the artists to speculate about their practice and that of their contemporaries, to think art beyond the creative process itself.

Nevertheless, the profusion of tendencies, the extension of the field of the artists´ activities, the speed with which they became present in the cultural panorama, varied postures sharing a protagonist role that incorporated them more and more followers, created conditions that demanded an adaptation of the pedagogic project and a constant revision of its postulates, capacity not developed by educational institutions and that, in rigor, did not find answer in the structures approved as rectors of this social activity.

These circumstances, converted the teaching of art, in object of assistance. The emergent generation of artists, aware of the advantages of an academic formation, conceived starting from thought and cultural behavior, promoted by the new values, parallel to the insertion and distribution strategies of socio-cultural knowledge that generated, and elaborated a group of pedagogic projects. This projects were put into practice up to certain degree and of effectiveness, represented alternatives to solve limitations of the official education system. Among them were outstanding: ´Hacer´ by Abdel Hernández, the initiative of a special school directed by Aldito Menéndez, leader of the group of Arte Calle and Desde una pragmática pedagógica (´From a pedagogic pragmatics´), structured by René Francisco Rodriguez. All these projects found, in the idea-aesthetic context of the decade, a covering to be also assumed in a properly artistic dimension. From this last one they represented one of the most genuine manifestations of maladjustment of the subject and of an anti-emphatic aesthetics, assumed as a tool for socio-cultural insertion.

´From a pedagogic pragmatics´ was designed to be assimilated concretely by the Higher Institute of Art. (This option) represents an unprecedented pedagogic option in our superior art studies. Wisely structured to give answer to a group of emerging demands of the need of transforming teaching into a decolonizing strategy, conjugates a genuinely intercultural and humanist vocation with a profound understanding of the processing components of the artistic activity. Thus, it is able to be placed inside the best educational practices synchronized with a posture adapted to the dynamics of the situation of current art.

Its emancipating essence appears both from its intention of activating the traditional wealth in contemporary culture, (today´s desire of any context from the Third World) as well as from the psychological effects perceived by each one of the agents of this practice, conquered by the attitude that promotes.

The reflection of René Francisco, author of this project, moves around the nature of art, its historical dimension and its social insertion.

The intellectual assimilation of the operative of the self-conscience process of art coexists as motivation - in René´s discourse - with the intention of defining a Third World and Cuban cultural identity. His point of view is structured starting from a critic to the history of culture that establish its continuation and formulates its values, from the hegemony of certain centers of symbolic power. For this history, the traditional wealth is eternally relegated to the margins. According to the values that it holds, this tradition is considered residual. And it is only used eventually to oxygenate the dominant values, it is traumatized in the simulation and the contempt and it is condemned to the otherness.

On these assumptions, it generates a group of actions guided to the recovery of the place that that wealth has had in our cultures, actions endorsed by the presence of those traditions in the aesthetic conscience of our peoples.

To recover those traditions does not mean - for René - to know them but living them, to participate of them, to recognize them as inalienable part in our way of feeling and seeing life.

That is why teaching offers a favorable context to the realization of its postulates. The regularity of the educational process, the debate climate that can be generated inside a group of students receiving the same program and the socially significant possibilities of transmission of knowing that the educational activity represents, transform it into the privileged means to develop critical capacities and to promote a new cultural thought.

The proposal of René Francisco synthesizes a good part of the yearnings of an intellectual Vanguard that raises its voice in today´s Cuba. Its action is displaced toward less valuable atmospheres that hold a habitual marginality in our cultures, reproducers of the cultural hierarchies that the centers conform. The desire to include them, of saving its enriching presence, is also the will of overcoming a condition of perpetual periphery that subjects us.

Childbirth: A state of conscience.

To insert the tradition in the contemporary artistic conscience, to activate that wealth without discursive mediations, to value it in the experience, to participate in the socio-cultural representation of their objects and expressions, to feel their wealth, those are the concerns that incentives the search of mechanisms that make possible the organic insertion in the other means, that of a symbolic production condemned to an ambiguous, relegated, or even well-known destination, placed in a frontier of blurred limits, where non-identity is a constant presence.

It is also evident the consequences of the autonomy of art. Their separation of the vital practice deprives it of its ritual essence, of its link with the context that nurtures it, alienates him when concentrating the attention on the convention and the artifice. Of this separation ´the work´ arises, with the aura that allows it to wander unharmed through time, and the artist, with the master key to open the door to that that his light considers worthy of penetrating in its enclosed space.

The irreversibility of the autonomy blocks the socialization of the artistic culture. Spectators should access to it. To penetrate it means to know its laws, to be warned about its changes, to incorporate its codes as something special, to be prepared to consume what it is not seen, conceived from its necessities.

It is necessary to destroy these walls, to divide the historical hierarchies among the cultural values, to force the order that, on one hand omits and minimizes very rich zones in symbolic production and, on the other hand ´places´ part of the products of culture on a bench only reached by the experts.

Then, the aspiration that underlies in this expression is inclusion. The possibility of a point in which may coincide the past and the present of culture should exist, where nothing is forgotten. This is a point in which all the ways of doing are conjugated with those that the man responded to the challenge of the ambience.

How to reach that point?

From an understanding of the formation processes of knowledge and starting from the understanding of art nature and of its historical evolution, the possibility comes up:

- It is necessary to dismantle the conditions that favor the distancing derived from the institutional status of art.

What to do?

René Francisco knows he has the possibilities of operating with the place that, as an artist, the institution art grants him. He knows the artifices that grant artistry to objects, expressions and events. He moves in a creative context that favors any inclusive intention. The pragmatic posture before the Western hegemonic-tradition - assumed by the promotion of the eighties; the re-functionalism capacity of different set of problems and diverse artistic resources, developed by this generation of artists and the diffusion, in our circles, of neo-vanguard practices, offer to this creator the necessary conditions to carry out his endeavor.

- To return to the origins.

There´s a place in culture, a supposed ´zero degree´ in which everything is to be created. Nature is the challenge, and to survive, its every day reason. There´s no difference there, only the experience orders, gives sense to every thing. In that space the reason has not yet imposed its regency or legitimated its weapons.

In this way René Francisco draws the geography of culture, he directs his look to that primeval state, and he prepares a journey for discovering it and for conquering it.

The return.

In this hypothetical primeval state are located Ismael, the national house… Its place in culture is not ´a priori´, but in the borders. They stay free of legitimate discourses; they are not trapped in the conventions that preserve a status.

Reaching them means ´to forget everything´, to be located where they are ´putting aside´ the prerogatives that the artistic statute grants, accepting an unimportant destination to transcend their ´otherness´. Living with them means to feel their necessities, to participate of their codes, to incorporate with the experience the necessities that shape the codes of their culture.

Knowledge and experience exchange their resources, they overcome each other in this intention of deconstructing the arranging of the historical experience that rules the artistic-pedagogic practice of René Francisco.

To be located in the place of the desire generates a multiple exchange, the juxtaposition without violence, the horizontal crossing that inhibits the mockery. The conscious artist, armed with the concept to prepare for the return, when he assumes from experience, the primeval state, is inserted organically in him. Has created the conditions for that experience, but behaves at the same time as receiver of the codes of the ´cultural area´ where he is placed. The subjects that live in the space that wish to be conquered are also the object of a double action. When the promoter of this objective experience his necessities, produces (when) appropriating of their codes, when he reinterprets these last ones through the conscience of the cultural discourse, these subjects access to ideas and ways of doing that these promoters contribute. The other effect is caused by the necessity of transmitting the knowledge characteristic of the context of experience, pass it to the agent implies to order that knowledge, to find the resources to make it reach this point.

The return to the cultural state emerges full of new contents for any subject that participates in the experience. The original inclusive intention becomes true, by virtue of the orientation of the practice and of the elected conditions to carry it out.

When analyzing this proposal, it is very significant the combination of the reflections around the nature of art and its historical processes with an exaltation of that primeval phase.

The myth of the origin is treated with certain romantic load. This shade makes very suggestive the project. The same one is a sample of the popularity that an option not strictly rational wins to approach culture.

Today´s man needs to be conquered by something more than the certainty that he transforms the world, or that such possibility is forbidden to him by its limitations. The ´strictly rational´ attitude no longer marks definitively with positive sign the actions that leads.

The ´illumination,´ the way for rising to transcend daily life, are looked for. Relationships are attempted, whose organic flow is not only sustained by facts of conscience. Sensibility is the incentive to develop intuition, for the time being, maybe, the saving way.

To teach for the new. The pedagogic anti-discourse.

The desire to transform the teaching of art, to make it transmit in the same frequency that the new Cuban art, encouraged the thought of René Francisco and oriented his searches toward the deconstruction of the traditional pedagogic discourse.

To overflow the limits of the academic practice, give life to the pedagogic activity starting from the conversion of the educational fact in the creative environment that the immediate experience demands, to close the way to a verbalize learning, crammed by a priorities discursive limited and useless, shaped the directions in which Toward a Pedagogic Pragmatics chose its work tools to operate from and with the reality that selected as context for its practice.

The Cuban visual arts of the eighties offered enough examples of conscience levels, reached by the artists: on the contemporary status of art, their social operation, the logics of the cultural discourse and other many aspects that amplify the responsibility of each element of the culture system notably. The teaching of art, however, did not assume with the agility that the emergent art demanded. The transformations that activated their role, as reproduction instance of socio-cultural knowledge, still made too evident their limitations. While the artistic practice transformed into its object pressing problems of today´s world and of its knowledge, the study plans were meticulous in inoperative theoretical-historical references in the new cultural situation. In spite of the interdisciplinary will, explicit in the guiding objectives of the educational activity, the enriching articulation is not stabilized between theory and practice, indispensable for the teaching of today´s art.

The appearance of creativity and intellectual development that were noticed in the new generations of artists, should also subscribe, in outstanding form, the pedagogic project. The strategy headed then to try to superimpose the pedagogic and the artistic context.

Pedagogy should appear as a creative and discursive context in which, besides conforming and transmitting the new knowledge, were generated, for activity´s law, expressions and objects implied in an artistry situation.

René Francisco was right since the very first moment. He had to create a new pedagogic situation whose codes appeared since the basic formulations:

1st - Apprehend culture from experience, without discursive mediations. Be inserted organically through the experience in the relationships that rule each cultural means.

2nd -Select as environment of practice contexts minimized by the history of culture, contexts in turn, rich in active traditional wealth in today´s conscience.

3rd - Transforming the vital space into pedagogic space. Thus, the experience area becomes the transmission space of the new knowledge.

4th - Establish horizontal relationships that guarantee the existential communication of the agents of practice, communication sustained in the duality originator-receiver that each one of them shows.

5th - Depose the historical attributes of that ¨exceptional subjectivity¨ denominated artist, to become ¨art worker¨, placed, in relation to the vital practice in the place of any subject of human activity.

6th - Exclusion of the conditions that generate the teacher´s overestimation on the part of the students. The designed pedagogic situation, transforms the pedagogic project into collective strategy. The teacher becomes skilled speaker that intervenes in the modeling of the practice as a career adviser and a promoter of ideas.

7th - The theoretical formation should be articulated from a practice that claims conceptual handles and perspectives to be approached. Pedagogic project and project of socio-cultural insertion merge in ¨Toward a pedagogic pragmatics¨. The insertion of art in the vital practice, intention that prevails in the Cuban Vanguard, is carried out in the same pedagogic action. It is not the discourse about the social functions of art and its cultural dimension the one that shapes a mentality responsible for the action and the destination of the symbolic production. It is the experience of the operation of the cultural values what tunes the sensibility and opens unusual perspectives of activation of the role of this production.

The experience of culture favors its authentic appropriation, deprived of discursive mystifications. This type of experience comes true with the transformation of the vital space into educational space.

This last one will no longer be the area of the discourse, but the area of the experience that will formulate and will order the new values.

The event arises as a way in which the artistic-pedagogic objectives of René Francisco are summed up. This is conceived for a double role, as pedagogic action and as act from which is articulated an artistic proposal of great complexity for the diversity of processing components of the artistic activity that sets in motion.

The cultural phenomenon that the event allows to be experienced is selected according to which aspect of the cultural means is placed as the object of learning. In this way, the first stage of ¨Toward a pedagogic pragmatics¨ was developed with ¨The National House¨, ¨The region of Ismael¨, ¨Sobeida´s birthday¨, ¨The carpentry course, ¨Commissioned paintings¨, ¨The patriotic dinner of Juan de Dios¨ and ¨The artistic speech¨. Each one of them discovered an entire world of cultural relationships, ways of life, aspects of popular religiosity, attitudes in the face of the world, genuine ways of popular expression and an irreplaceable experience to win and to be won by those under valuated means and seemingly banal that proliferate in the margins announcing their force. As pedagogic space, the event propitiates the contact of the students with the atmosphere in which symbolic production of great socio-cultural representation is generated. Inserted in their routine character, they coexist with the necessities that are in the base of the culture. The educational effect of this insertion is multiple.

Each one of the agents of this practice is the carrier of a knowledge that is seeking to be transmitted. The students apprehend diverse ways of the existence of culture, they create starting from the needs of the other, they relegate their subjectivity to become carriers of those needs. The objectivity, by the student-artists, of the requests, contains the domain of the expressive means of art acquired in the academies.

The artistic conventions sustain, in this case, the popular expression, they set off it integrating it to recognizable artistic codes, but at the same time they incorporate all the forms and authentic codes of the symbolic production generated historically by those cultural means. The carriers of that ancestral-popular wisdom, by virtue of the relationship they establish with the agents of practice, receive and appropriate the ways in which these transmit those necessities in a sensorial way. At the same time, the contact forces these carriers to select, to order and to look for forms of transmitting the knowledge they possess. The non conventional relationship that mediates between them facilitates the entering in the world of the ¨other¨, the discovery of a reality that was of other people´s before.

Thus, this practice produces subjects, creator-receivers, prepared to assimilate the differences and the plurality of options, characteristic of any culture.

If it were just a small thing, the event becomes a privileged means of aesthetic education for all participant entity. The contact propitiates the organic assumption of codes of the cultural means of the other. The students-artists acquire the tools to operate ¨from inside¨, with popular cultures, they extract from the experience the theoretical conclusion, and they feel, in life, their truthfulness. Of the reflection that these conditions promote, the images arise, sensorial indicators of this special learning.

The knowledge carriers, in turn, when participating of representative artistic manifestations of new values, become natural receivers of these practices; they assimilate them without any prejudice, without conceptual mediations that fix a priori the limits of art. For these receivers, the inclusiveness and the alteration of hierarchies of cultural values, characteristic of the artistic situation marked by post-modernity, does not represent the outcome of the discovery of a logic that distinguishes the legitimacy or not of the cultural values, but rather constitutes a historical demand of recognition and cultural resistance.

Those carriers when experiencing the need for transmitting their knowledge, exercise the story-telling capacity, of narrating conquering, looking for an effect in the listener. This exercise, in the long run, actives their creativity, stimulates the coming up of the image.

All these effects are possible starting from the type of relationships that the conditions of the experience promote and that we have agreed in calling horizontal relationships. The exchange establishes annulling any position that places a person above the other voluntarily. Inside this practice, each agent has the transmitter-receiver role twice as much in equality of conditions. The deconstructive possibility that rule this type of relationship is carried out establishing some conditions.

1st - The artist, when being inserted in the other means, abandons the free expression of his activity intentionally, serves to that other using his ideas and abilities for the objectivity of the necessities that he indicates through the ordering. This strategy converts promoters (teacher, student-artists), and carriers (subject of the cultural means who are the object of the insertion), in accomplices. There is not goal-subject set aside by exceptional conditions here. There is a producer that satisfies vital necessities for the collective, practical, ritual or representative. The request restores the place of the symbolic production in the vital practice, necessities are summed up and codes are expressed in it that end up being common by force of carrying the consent of each one of the participants in the event.

2nd - The teacher, in this practice, places himself voluntarily in a position where he annuls ´all sense of imperative uprightness¨ (4). The conduction of the project and its concrete realization, become collective strategy, because the student-artists should interpret the given situation given in the event and generate initiatives.

This relationship student-professor, of new type, conditioned by the escalation of the student´s creativity, in the pedagogic practice, constitutes a qualifying element of the adaptation from this project to the development of the current art and its evaluative dynamics. The necessity of generating and solving the concrete situation outlined in the event, the requirement of working in its reality, with his very initiative, transforms the student -professor relationship in an inter-expressive relationship, motivator of the suggestion. Moving ideas and looking for the means, collectively, to make them work, define a more appropriate pedagogic behavior to the demands of the artistic teaching today.

These two basic conditions, factors of the horizontal position of interpersonal relationships begun in this educational option, foment a type of communication, through which, a highly positive psychological climate is guaranteed for the intellectual and creative exercise.

We have called this organic flow of feelings and ideas: existential communication.

It is distinguished by the deeply sensitive states of spirit and with intense disposition for the work, of any person implied in the practice. The inductor, René, senses a mysterious force that works as a guide (5), Ismael, inhabitant of an unusual region, liberates the word apprehending his religious condition, codifies his images to articulate an ancestral knowledge. (6)

Cohesion, solidarity, collective search of solutions, they are all resultants of the described communication type. René speaks of building the ¨objects¨ in which at the same time this link is guaranteed and recognized: (as) ´participation objects´ (7)

Another intensifying element of that existential communication is the ¨epistolary correspondence¨, (so called by René Francisco). They are the letters that in the course of the pedagogic experiment, the participants passed from hand to hand. Its objective, beyond reflecting any observation or idea suggested by the work, was to create an intimacy that annulled any type of institutional distancing. This epistolary exchange, with documental value and therefore, profitable as material to structure the artistic discourse, incentives the reflection on the experience, give value to their effects to arm itself as discursive fact, and conserves the enigma of the silent delivery of an information that will be received without the emergency of the live dialogue.

There is another distinctive aspect of this program that deserves special attention. It is the way in which is carried out the aspiration of forming an artist with an updated and active theoretical guarantee without force.

The pedagogic situation that the experiment propitiates makes evident to the student the necessity of the theoretical thought about society and culture. Notions, approaches and methods, clarify their instrumental nature. With them the student should operate, conceive strategies, and frame practices. They work as interpretations of culture and define the place that each activity has in the project, presupposing its functions. Such notions, acquired with the emergency of experience, not only act as knowledge that supports the inclusion of the experiment within art, they become supposed computers of this practice and are stimulated and modified by them. These considerations about the pedagogic option that the project defends, place it as one of the perspectives with more possibilities for an improvement of the higher studies of Visual Arts. Independently of their defined aesthetics, the basic guiding approaches of an attitude before creation, diffusion and consumption of art that conform it, can work, for all pedagogic postures with pretenses of present time.

The artifice or the evidence of art.

To promote ideas, not people or works, maybe stimulate the imagination - as René Francisco would say in a letter to his students -, to cause, with a legitimating artifice the inclusion of the undervalued cultural means, in order to be seen from that bench -mockery of art - and in this way use the autonomy to request attention for the other one, its authentic milieu, the one that gives it sense and life, they are the starting points to ¨Toward a pedagogic pragmatics¨, for its assessment, also, as artistic discourse.

Their aesthetics is that of the maladjustments, expressed in the will of relinquishment of the aura that the institution art grants to the artist and in an intentional abandonment, in the frames of the event, of the creative paradigms that sustain the historical definition of an art work. They are relegated in this way: the individual expression, the novelty and the originality as evaluative parameters; the self-significant reality that the tradition overestimates when trying with art works and that concentrate the look on the self-telic properties of the same art works. Everything indicates the abolition of the work as a purpose.

The ¨objects¨ produced right after the event do not represent aesthetic values for themselves, the fundamental thing is the experience, they are the means... ¨The work is the experience, an organic whole in which all that happens is art¨.

From this attitude, it is clear that the event pursues a purpose beyond the production of objects, or the intervention in the places chosen as areas of operations.

The purpose of the experiment moves away from any substantial notion of artistry. The double function: originator-receiver that each agent of the practice acquires, guarantees, for each one of them, a multiplication of contents when carrying out the experience, contents that acquired in the experience are affirmed as culture when stabilized.

With this proposal, we attend to an authentic project of socio-cultural insertion, endorsed as artistic event in its own development as expression or process practice, due to the artistic situation generated with the new Cuban vanguard.

But its distinguishing characteristic is not only the mutual enrichment of the participants, (student-artists and knowledge carriers) that are nurtured at the same time with the special contact propitiated by the experience of the cultural means ¨other¨. There is something more than a mutual amplification of aesthetic and socio-cultural horizons. A subterfuge for ¨validating¨ the inclusion of the ¨object of insertion¨, (undervalued means), in a ¨significant region¨ - the one that grants it a historical type dimension -, the cultural operation that allows its entrance to the art world. Paradox?.

René and his students suppose a ¨must be¨ of art, a hypothetical entity that they name Eugenia Proenza ode la Cruz. Her name implies to personalize a product, to work with the presupposition of the author guarantor of the singularity appreciated as work. This character contains them all, it participates of the ideas that they want to materialize. The artifice that presupposes is the means that closes the door to distrust. Its ¨personality¨ distinguishes the ideas that achieve sensorial concretion, it helps them, making them significant, but it is not enough, its signature doesn´t endorse a recognized work. Promoting those ideas requires working from a won bench, the one that makes us invest the look: instead of appreciating the work and then observe the name that is at his feet, we come from that name, coining and evaluating according to the status that such name holds. Then, Eugenia could be, for example a Hans Heronk that Stella painted and signed, of course, this would not be the ¨post-modern appropriation¨that conserved unharmed the personalities of Heronk and of Stella.

The situation might be:

Hans and Stella talk. Everybody knows Stella for what he painted and has desired to teach. Hans believes that Stella has better ideas, he wants that this Stella is not the Stella that everybody knows, but the one that creates better. Stella could not materialize those ideas, Hans knows it and pretends that the problem is art and not the individual. Seemingly Hans sacrifices one year for not being Hans and creates a Stella projected only by him. At the beginning everybody is confused and distrustful of Hans and of Stella, but the art coming from those pure ideas, this ¨art¨ remains crystallized.

The manipulation of the authorship, is used in this case to include it in the historical discourse of artistic culture, the same to the students still not recognized as creators of prestige, than to the characters extracted from the millieu object of the insertion. These last ones incorporate with the cultural values of this millieu. Also the place of cultural relevance, (the museum, the gallery), attract them as a way through which they are meant. Inside these spaces, them, or the objects produced due to their needs, ascend to the cultural scale, they come out of forgetfulness. It is for that reason that the activity is considered by its makers of an archaeological root. Carriers and participation objects acquire, in the significant region, discursive autonomy. Immerse in a cultural operation, (the collective exhibition ¨the sculptured object¨ was the frame for the exhibition of this project as artistic discourse), they express an ambiguous nature, not at all uncomfortable or degrading. They are placed in a context that legitimates them as art. From this situation they can be received as autonomous objects, or interpreted as indications of a project that is identified with diverse resources, or also seen from the invitation to a reading that the global operation bases with the appropriate means to promote certain artistic values.

With this maneuver, ¨pedagogic pragmatics¨, transforms the responsibility and the artist´s place into the cultural system, in operative to promote other values. The creator´s expression that points out, documents and articulates a discourse, conceived to be exhibited in the spaces of art, becomes strategy to insert those values in the structure of the ¨high culture¨.

The ¨significant region¨, carries out the inverse process to the event. The documented events get the attention from the sacred enclosure of autonomy. To separate them of the genetic context distinguishes them, without that bond they are seen with eyes prepared for the perception of something excellent, supported by a legitimant name and an institution. The mockery has been consummated. With the same conscience, the makers accept the laws of the game at the same time that cynically undress their artifice condition.

Thus, in this project are conjugated the novelty of a pedagogic option and the artistic discourse. Their harmonic synthesis points to a future for the teaching of art in the third world. Yet, there is not ingenuousness open to the utopia, neither a redeeming desire that for remiss puts aside the irreversibility of autonomy. There is elevation, mystic flare that builds up hopes to the spirit with the desired salvation, but there is a cynic salvage strategy, a supportive deceit of coexistence. Art and the otherness exchange their historical resources in the ¨mockery¨ that the artistic situation generates. They coexist ´friendly´ in its difference. The subterfuge of ¨the other¨ definitively save them.

Notes:

(1) Alexis Somoza and Félix Suazo: two artists in the wide sense proposed by the visual arts of the eighties articulated a speech about the conditions and the specificity, in our artistic culture, of the assistance option. On the foundations they elaborated, designed strategies of circulation of the new values that have transcended as very important events for the study and the historical interpretation of this cultural situation. A detailed explanation of the ´assistance´ notion, framed in the visual arts manifestations encouraged by an assistance attitude, can be found in ¨La obra no basta¨ Ensayos y comentarios sobre arte, cultura y sociedad cubana. (Art work is not enough: Essays and comments on art, culture and Cuban society, by Alexis Somoza, published in 1991 by the University of Carabobo, Valencia-Venezuela.

(2) From the Volume I group, Flavio Garciandia and Jose Bedia work as professors at the Superior Institute of Art of Havana (maximum educational institution in art studies in Cuba).

It should be pointed out that the fundamental remodeling of the study plans that conditions its adaptation to the contemporary situation of art is promoted and based by Flavio Garciandia and Consuelo Castañeda. Magdalena Campos was incorporated to this task after her graduation.

This reformation of the higher education of visual arts was carried out under the auspices of sculptor José Villa, Dean of the Faculty of Visual Arts of the ISA from 1986 to 1990 that contributed with his wise direction, to make prevail scientific approaches and to smooth things over these changes.

(3) Another contribution in this sense was the creation of optional workshops, eventually imported by national and international figures of renowned prestige in some facet of creativity. These shops supplemented lacks of the normal curriculum, or fulfilled expressive necessities that required of unusual means for the teaching of visual arts articulated according to a traditional paradigm of these types of art.

(4) ¨I asked myself on the functions of art and artists, founding myself on the works of the artists of my generation, and I directed them, from there, to the context of pedagogy. My idea was to superimpose these two contexts, (art and pedagogy) that were two separated things¨.

¨Pedagogy was presented to me replete of useless theoretical-historical references and that I could assume as contents the implicit attitude in the new works, which pointed directly toward historical-existential problems and the being´s relationships with a tradition that was only referred to in decorative terms¨.

¨ ...with respect to the students I had established a horizontal position that allowed me to work directly and in a correlative way in the course of the events ...This position substituted all sense of imperative uprightness without loosing my condition of inductor and transmitter. I turned to be a sort of an image or acoustic box, of significant region for the students. They addressed me, they demanded to know, and from there I could extract new significant, new contents.´

Taken from René Francisco´s unpublished texts.

(5) All these events are gathered in the basic document of ¨Toward a pedagogic pragmatics¨, named Occasional-Manifesto by its authors. There are videos that registered these experiences partially, and pictures of the places, that were objects of insertion.

(6) The discourse of Ismael about his beliefs and cultural attitude was registered in a document dated March 4, 1990. The entire text, without stylistic corrections, is part of the documentation of this experience.

(7) ¨I began to read the book on Russian Constructivism guided by you and for that mysterious and strange intuition that takes us to things we need. It seems as if somebody invisible was indicating us the elements and necessary tools for our endeavor.´

Excerpt of a letter sent by René Francisco to Dago.

(A student), December 22, 1989.