Thursday, June 27, 2013

KUNG PO POLITICS

To the legendary Cuban artist Micah Carpentier, death was a matter of indifference. Bearing witness to what was arguably civilization's most violent century, to Carpentier personal agency, mortality and fate were at best peripheral to his avid and engaged imagination.

Micah Carpentier, Santiago de Cuba, 1971

What interested Carpentier above all else was poetry. A close confidante of Nicolás Guillén whose literary experiments with wordplay and collage closely paralleled his own explorations of pastiche and appropriation, Carpentier's stoic impassivity was a premeditated posture obviating his involvement with political controversy.

From Notebook 134.67, Micah Carpentier. (Courtesy of Universidad Combray, Las Palmas)

In an ironic twist of fate, it was precisely this lack of public engagement that brought his work to the attention of the Cuban political bureaucracy. 

In 1971, after returning to Havana after a short lecture tour in southern Spain, Carpentier was visited by the notorious Illyés twins, László and Guillermo. These justly feared functionaries of the Ministerio de la Cultura Cubano could ruin one's life with one quick phone call. They had never before taken an interest in Carpentier whose rarified aesthetics and conceptual convolutions were hardly seen as threatening to the Party apparatus and its interests. 

They came to warn him against publishing a European edition of his Diario de un Soñador sin Pagar, a collection of intimate pensées that were appearing regularly in the Cuban literary journal El Correo and had recently been anthologized by Prensa Revolucionaria.  


On the face of it, the demand seemed absurd since most of the columns were clever set pieces on subjects ranging from caring for house plants in tropical climates to interfamilial recipe disputes regarding dishes like trajaditas dulces de platano and boliche.

It turned out that he had run afoul of the State censors with a couple of essays included in a chapter called "Paucities" (Escasez). In them Carpentier made hilarious observations on the island's lack of operable door bells, the Cuban preference for Russian over Spanish baptismal names, and the coarse textures of the homeland's national toilet paper.   

It was said that Fidel himself, goosed into spasms of violent laughter would soil his fatigues and drool like an St. Bernard while reading Carperntier's work.

The twins put it to him this way:

"You write about our scarcities without complaint or gravitas. You accept our flaws and our shortcomings with gracious good humor. You who are an international intellectual celebrity and a glittering luminary among the educated elites. You travel widely and you live in a spacious flat. We would be much happier if you could pose as a degenerate dissident malcontent. If you wrote with greater bitterness and a stronger sense of grievance you would gain greater credibility among our enemies and we in turn could boast of our benevolence, our tolerance and our abundant personal freedoms." 

Maldito comunismo!

No wonder Carpentier spent the last decade of his life making simple sketches on Chinese take-out boxes.



 

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A MISSION I OWE TO MY FAMILY


Micah Carpentier spent the better part of his life "groping after meaning," or so I was told my old aunt Gisella. My aunt claims that she knew the great Cuban artist quite intimately, especially during the last decade of his life. This is a remarkable claim since as a family we are not particularly close seeing as history, calamity and subsequent migration have dispersed our clan into the farthest tributaries of the planet.

Micah Carpentier, 1964. Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City
The Cuban Carpentiers were originally from L'viv having emigrated well before the Soviets, with characteristic amnesia, snatched the city from the Poles and renamed it Lvov. Upon arriving in Latin America the family quickly rechristened themselves as Catholics and discarded their racially tainted cognomen (Mandelbrojt) for something they considered more neutral. That the Carpentiers exchanged one form of tragedy for another was a cruel irony that was rarely, if ever, discussed openly.

"We appear to possess a rare talent for violent death," my aunt Gisella once quipped while we sat together in her sun-drenched Caracas flat sipping strong Persian coffee and nibbling on her delicious pastelitos de guayaba. "I won't say Micah had it coming, but destiny is destiny and aché is aché." Gisella was fond of using the lexicon of Santería which she typically empowered to explain just about everything, both good and bad.  

And in fact upon looking back, the common thread of Micah Carpentier's oeuvre seems to be that of mortality. There is a gloomy, bereaved quality that hovers over the fugitive materials used in The Song of Degrees, Carpentier's capacious series of drawings on discarded paper bags. 

Details from The Song of Degrees, 1962 - 1973. Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City

Likewise the hauntingly obsessive Enteros Nómadas, a rough grid of integers crudely drawn on a 40 foot long sheet of laminated fiberglass.

detail from Enteros Nómadas, Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City
Poder Terrenal está Poseído por los Verdugos, another emblematic work whose chief virtue lies in its menacing title,  was famously described by the historian Orestia Shestov as "a fatalistic ballad of bleating pessimism and vanquished faith." Very loosely based on the bizzarre and defensive musings of 17th century mystic Jacopo di Candia, Carpentier tried to connect what he saw as the "universal death-wish"( la pulsión de muerte) common to music, painting and metaphysics.

Poder Terrenal está Poseído por los Verdugos, Micah Carpentier, 1971.

 Most would agree that the work, though highly ambitious, comically falls flat.

I have been spending the past two years researching the life and work of this singular artist. His short-lived marriage to my grandmother's half-sister makes our familial connection too convoluted to affix a stable term. This by no means diminishes the very real and visceral kinship that draws me toward him.

I am grateful to the Micah Carpentier Foundation in Mexico City for having made their archive available to me. I am especially indebted to Isak Chuetas, principle librarian of the archive for his tireless help, guidance and inspiration.

Friday, June 14, 2013

I PITTORI SONO FILOSFI E POETI (Giordano Bruno)


In addition to a vast catalog of paintings, drawings and sculptures, the great Cuban modernist, Micah Carpentier has left us with reams of unpublished experimental poetry. Post-revolutionary Cuba had little appetite for neither the typographical minimalism of the Concrete poets nor the syntactically evasiveness of the so-called Nueva Vanguardia and so Carpentier's far from insignificant linguistic ventures have gone virtually unnoticed. 
 
 
A corrective of sorts is underway in the form of a small exhibition at the Gran Salón de la Depravación Social in Camagüey. The fact that such an exhibition, sanctioned by the Ministry of Culture, is taking place in Cuba's third largest city is yet another sign of the political thaw that is slowly yet palpably evolving.

Carpentier would be pleased by this as well as some new legislation aimed at relaxing earlier prohibitions against ribald metaphor, double entendre and unmodified pronouns. He was a great champion of limited free speech, even among his rivals and it has been speculated that when he ran afoul of the authorities it was precisely because of his principled stance.