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“Seeing in the Dark”: The Aesthetics of Disappearance and Remembrance in the Work of Alberto Rey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2016

STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE
STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE*
Affiliation:
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article examines how contemporary Cuban American artists have experimented with visual languages of trauma to construct an intergenerational memory about the losses of exile and migration. It considers the work of artist Alberto Rey, and his layering of individual loss onto other, traumatic episodes in the history of the Cuban diaspora. In the series Las Balsas (The Rafts, 1995–99), Rey explores the impact of the balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994 by transforming objects left behind by Cuban rafters on their sometimes ill-fated journeys to the United States into commemorative relics. By playing on a memory of absence and the misplacement of objects found along the migration route of the Florida Straits, Rey's visual language transmits the memory of grief across time, space and generational divides. Rey's visual strategies are part of an “extended memory” tied to the aesthetics of disappearance and remembrance in contemporary Cuban American art. His use of objects as powerful memory texts that serve to bring fragmented autobiographical, family and intergenerational testimonies of loss together suggests how visual artists can provide us with more collective, participatory and redemptive models of memory work.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 591 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91–92.

2 Ibid., 7, 11; Bennett, Jill, “Art, Affect, and the ‘Bad Death’: Strategies for Communicating the Sense Memory of Loss,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28, 1 (2002), 333–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 339.

3 Alberto Rey, interview with Jorge J. E. Gracia, 21 May 2005, at www.buffalo.edu/cas/philosophy/faculty/faculty_directory/gracia/capen/CubanArt/_jcr_content/par/download_22/file.res/iRey.html, accessed 6 June 2014.

4 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

5 For example, see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993); Till, Karen E., “Artistic and Activist Memory-Work: Approaching Place-Based Practice,” Memory Studies, 1, 1 (2008), 99–113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

6 Bennett, “Art, Affect,” 347, 342–48.

7 Here I employ the term used by art historian Jane Blocker in connection with Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta. See Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 18.

8 Bennett, “Art, Affect,” 339–50; Bennett, Empathic Vision, 11.

9 For example, see “Appropriated Memories – A Conversation with Alberto Rey: Interview Conducted by Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, March 1997 and September 1998,” in Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, ed., ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 299–306; Herrera, “The Consciousness of Exile: Memory and Vicarious Imagination in Cuban-American Literature and Art,” Journal of West Indian Literature, 8, 1 (1998), 82–98 Google Scholar; Borland, Isabel Alvarez, “The Memories of Others: Ana Menéndez and Alberto Rey,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 42, 1 (2009), 11–20 Google Scholar; Alberto Rey, “Landscapes of the Mind,” in Jorge Gracia, Lynette Bosch and Isabel Alvarez Borland, eds., Identity, Memory, and Diaspora: Voices of Cuban-American Artists, Writers, and Philosophers (Albany: State University of New York Press), 91–101; Lynette Bosch and Marc Denaci, eds., Life Streams: Alberto Rey's Cuban and American Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014).

10 Román de la Campa, Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation (London: Verso, 2000), 80.

11 María de los Angeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001), 10.

12 Olga Viso, “Foreword and Acknowledgements,” in Transcending the Borders of Memory (West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Gallery of Art, 1994), 1–2.

13 Cris Hassold, accompanying essay in Shillard Smith Gallery, “Remnants: Installations by Five Cuban American Artists – María Brito, Pablo Cano, María Emilia Castagliola, María Elena González, Mario Petrirena,” exhibition catalogue, 10 Sept.–24 Oct. 1993, 1.

14 Ricardo L Ortíz, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 8.

15 Karen Dubinsky, “Cuba's Monumental Children: Operation Peter Pan and the Intimacies of Foreign Policy,” in Catherine Krull, ed., Cuba in a Global Context: International Relations, Internationalism and Transnationalism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 58–74, 59–60.

16 Ana Mendieta quoted in Charles Merewether, “From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on Expenditure in the Work of Ana Mendieta,” in Coco Fusco, ed., Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (London: Routledge, 2000), 122–39, 139.

17 Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? 18, 23, 30; Peggy Phelan quoted in ibid., 109.

18 Ana Mendieta, interview with Linda Montano, Sulfur, 22 (1988), 65–69, 66.

19 On Brito's work and these installations in particular see Juan A. Martínez, María Brito (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2009), 7, 25.

20 Brito quoted in ibid., 7.

21 Dubinsky, 59, 72.

22 Campa, Cuba on My Mind, 43. Also see Dubinsky, 66–69, 72.

23 María de los Angeles Torres, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US, and the Promise of a Better Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 10; Mendieta in conversation with Eva Cockcroft, in Eva Cockcroft, “Culture and Survival,” Art and Artists, 12, 3 (1983), 16–17, 16.

24 On this installation see Wood, Yolanda, “Metaphors of a Journey,” Third Text, 9, 31 (2008), 71–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Laura Roulet, Contemporary Puerto Rican Installation Art: The Guagua Aérea, the Trojan Horse, and the Termite (San Juan, PR: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2000), 14–15.

25 Ernesto Pujol, “The House Project,” in Kim Kanatani and Denise Gay, Public + Artist Program (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 6–7; Pujol, Ernesto quoted in “The Esthetics of Knowledge: A Conversation between David Henry and Ernesto Pujol,” RISD Museum Exhibition Notes, 9 (Fall 1999)Google Scholar, n.p., my emphasis, both in Ernesto Pujol files, vertical files, El Museo del Barrio, New York City.

26 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 281–83; Edward Casey quoted in Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 46.

27 Campa, 52–53.

28 Dubinsky, 69–71; Torres, The Lost Apple, 257; Eckstein, Susan and Barberia, Laura, “Grounding Immigrant Generations in History: Cuban Americans and Their Transnational Ties,” International Migration Review, 36, 3 (2002), 799–837 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Rey quoted in “Biographical Timeline,” in Bosch and Denaci, Life Streams, 207–28, 207–10.

30 “Appropriated Memories – A Conversation with Alberto Rey,” 300; Alberto Rey, “Biography,” Rey's homepage, at http://albertorey.com/bio, accessed 9 Jan. 2015; Rey quoted in “Biographical Timeline,” 210.

31 For example, see “Appropriated Memories – A Conversation,” 299–306; Rey, “Landscapes of the Mind,” 91–101; Bosch and Denaci.

32 Herrera, ReMembering Cuba, xxix–xxx; Herrera, “The Consciousness of Exile,” 82; Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 7, 12–13, 32; Borland, “The Memories of Others,” 11.

33 Alberto Rey, “Alberto Rey: Looking for a Home: 1985–2007,” lecture at Washington and Lee University, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOFvna4_jYM, accessed 29 Jan. 2015; Rey, “Autogeographical and Floating Series: Artist Statement,” Rey's homepage, http://albertorey.com/paintings/artist-statements-on-earlier-series/autogeographical-and-floating-series, accessed 15 Sept. 2015.

34 Alberto Rey, “Binary Forms: Artist Statement,” Rey's homepage, at http://albertorey.com/paintings/artist-statements-on-earlier-series/binary-forms-series, accessed 15 Sept. 2015; Rey, interview with Heather Gring, Burchfield Penney Art Center, State University of New York, Buffalo, for the Living Legacy Project, undated, at www.burchfieldpenney.org/artists/artist:alberto-rey, accessed 29 Jan. 2015.

35 Rey, “Binary Forms: Artist Statement”; Rey, interview with Gring.

36 Alberto Rey, “Appropriated Memories: Artist Statement,” Rey's homepage, at http://albertorey.com/paintings/artist-statements-on-earlier-series/appropriated-memories, accessed 9 Jan. 2015; Rey quoted in Herrera, “The Consciousness of Exile,” 95; Rey, interview with Gring, my emphasis.

37 Rey, “Appropriated Memories: Artist Statement”; Rey, interview with Gring.

38 Rey, “Alberto Rey: Looking for a Home”; Alberto Rey, “Madonnas in Time: Artist Statement,” Rey's homepage, at http://albertorey.com/paintings/artist-statements-on-earlier-series/madonnas-in-time-series, accessed 15 Sept. 2015.

39 Rey, interview with the author, 2 March 2015.

40 Borland, 15; Isabel Alvarez Borland, “Alberto Rey's Balsas Series in the Cuban American Imagination,” in Bosch and Denaci, 67–82, 72.

41 I employ Karen Till's phraseology here. See Till, “Artistic and Activist Memory-Work,” 103.

42 Felix Roberto Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the US, 1959–1995 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 136–39; Holly Ackerman, “The Balsero Phenomenon, 1991–1994,” Cuban Studies, 26 (1996), 169–200, 171, 179, 169.

43 Coco Fusco, “Bridge over Troubled Waters: And View from the Bridge Four Years On,” in Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (London: Routledge, 2001), 154–62, 162.

44 Lynette M. F. Bosch, Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity, and the Neo-baroque (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2004), 28; Campa, Cuba on my Mind, 50–52; Torres, The Lost Apple, 256–57.

45 Ackerman, “The Balsero Phenomenon,” 188–89; Guillermo Armas quoted in Daniel de Vise and Elane de Valle, “Cuban balseros Helped Change the Political Flavor of Florida,” Miami Herald, 3 Aug. 2004, at www.cubanet.org/htdocs/CNews/y04/sep04/03e12.htm, accessed 14 Sept. 2015.

46 For example, see “Beyond Fear: An Interview with Julio J. Guerra Molina, 1998,” in Herrera, ReMembering Cuba, 43–47, 45; Campisi, Elizabeth, “Guantánamo: Safe Haven or Traumatic Interlude?” Latino Studies, 3, 3 (2005), 375–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Rey quoted in “Biographical Timeline,” 208–13.

48 Rey, interview with Gracia; Rey, interview with author.

49 Lynette Bosch, “Introduction,” in Bosch and Denaci, 1–11; Borland, “Alberto Rey's Balsas Series.”.

50 Chon Noriega, “Foreword,” in Alejandro Anreus, Luis Cruz Azaceta (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2014), ix–xiii, x; Anreus, 65–69.

51 For these images see Anreus, 65–69. Also see Cruz Azaceta's webpage, “Selected Works,” at www.luiscruzazaceta.net/selected-works/category/76-prpints, and www.thefarbercollection.com/artists/luis_cruz_azaceta, accessed 5 March 2015.

52 Bennett, “Art, Affect,” 336.

53 George Sánchez-Calderón, “Museo de los Balseros,” at www.sanchezcalderon.com/GSC2012/Museo_Balseros.html, accessed 10 June 2014; Mary Staniszewsk, “Museo de los Balseros at Franklin Furnace,” Artnet Magazine, no date, at www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/stan/stan4-2-96.asp, accessed 10 June 2014.

54 “Cuban Exile History Museum, Planned Exhibits,” 2015, at http://cehmuseum.com/exhibits, accessed 30 Sept. 2015; Torres, The Lost Apple, 17, 216.

55 Ana Mendieta quoted in Olga Viso, Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2008), 293.

56 Rey quoted in “Biographical Timeline,” 211–13; Rey, “Seeing in the Dark (2001),” Rey's homepage, at http://albertorey.com/video-ar/seeing-in-the-dark, accessed 6 June 2014.

57 Rey, “Las Balsas: Artist Statement,” Rey's homepage, at http://albertorey.com/paintings/artist-statements-on-earlier-series/las-balsas-the-rafts, accessed 6 June 2014. Also see Rey, interview with Gracia; Herrera and Rey quoted in “Appropriated Memories,” in Herrera, ReMembering Cuba, 304.

58 Rey, interview with Gring; Rey, interview with author.

59 Silvia Spitta, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 17, 23, original emphasis.

60 Rey, interview with author.

61 Trigg, Dylan, “The Place of Trauma: Memory, Hauntings, and the Temporality of Ruins,” Memory Studies, 2, 1 (2009), 87–101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 88; Marc Denaci, “Absent Presences and the Living Dead: Alberto Rey's Haunted Aesthetics,” in Bosch and Denaci, 83–103.

62 Rey, interview with author. On the use of grisaille in Rey's work see Bosch, Cuban-American Art, 142.

63 Rey, “Seeing in the Dark.”

64 Rey, “Las Balsas: Artist Statement”; Rey, interview with Gracia.

65 Rey, “Studio Retablos: Artist Statement,” Rey's homepage, at http://albertorey.com/paintings/artist-statements-on-earlier-series/studio-retablos, accessed 6 June 2014.

66 Hirsch, Marianne, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 1 (2001), 5–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 9; Bennett, “Art, Affect,” 339, 347, 350.

67 Bennett, “Art, Affect,” 346–50.

68 Rey, interview with author.

69 Trigg, 88–89, 99; Rey, interview with Gracia.

70 Borland, “Alberto Rey's Balsas Series,” 71–72; Rey, interview with Gracia; Rey, interview with Gring.

71 Rey, interview with author.

72 Rey, interview with Gring.

73 Rey, “Alberto Rey: Looking for a Home”; Rey, interview with Gracia.

74 Rey, interview with author; Rey, interview with Gring; Rey, “Landscapes of the Mind,” 96.

75 The term “bridges to Cuba” also references Ruth Behar's influential edited collection of essays, testimonies, poetry and prose Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), which featured writings by Cubans from Cuba and the diaspora. Behar's collaborative online blog project with Richard Blanco also takes the title of her anthology, and uses storytelling to “lift the emotional embargo” during a new period of US–Cuban détente. See Bridges to / from Cuba, at http://bridgestocuba.com/about, accessed 4 April 2016.

76 Rey, interview with author.

77 Rey, interview with Gring; Bosch, Cuban-American Art, 145.

78 Borland, “Alberto Rey's Balsas Series,” 74, 81.

79 For these images see Martínez, María Brito, 48–50.

80 “Exodus: Alternate Documents,” n.d., at www.alunartfoundation.com/exodus-alternate-documents, accessed 10 March 2015; Coco Fusco, “Y entonces el mar te habla (2012),” at http://cocofusco.com, accessed 10 March 2015.

81 For a description of Fusco's film see Colin Perry, “Coco Fusco's And the Sea Will Talk to You,” at www.art-agenda.com/reviews/coco-fusco%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cand-the-sea-will-talk-to-you%E2%80%9D, accessed 24 Sept. 2015. During the writing of this piece, Fusco's installation travelled to London, where it was exhibited at Cecilia Brunson Projects and discussed in the context of the UK's own public debate about migrants who have arrived by sea.

82 Mendieta quoted in Viso, Unseen Mendieta, 199, 293.