admin, autor en Dago Rodriguez

31/10/18

Los Emblemas

Interview

DAGOBERTO RODRIGUEZ interviewed by Jérôme Sans

What is the meaning of Los Emblemas series as a whole?

In conjunction, the emblems contain two completely different ways of seeing the world in one single object. These two points of view of reality come together in Cuba, but they are totally antagonistic. The first one (the American cars), is related to the growth of consumer products that have been sublimated to categories which are almost religious. The second one is a collection of words which have been most often spoken in Cuba, or by its revolution, over the past 60 years.

How long did you work on this project, how did you proceed?

The project began two years ago, with the death of Fidel. Western newspapers had their eye on Cuba again. The majority of his speeches were published online, so I revisited them in order to find a hierarchy within the words. The words that Fidel said most frequently are the same words that the revolution has used most in political propaganda. The whole staging of the “revolutionary gospel” has had a mistaken typography based on the typography “Impact”, which is the most used in Cuban media. However, if we are going to be consistent with the time in which Cuban revolutionary philosophy was crystalized, we would have to borrow from other sources that were more popular at the time, such as the Art Deco typography of North American cars.

Can you explain the relationship between art deco style and Cuba? The art deco style comes directly from France. The Americans then intensively appropriated this iconic style. And finally, the art deco style has been assimilated by Cuban culture, while many French we represent in Cuba in those years. Why did you choose to take inspiration from the art deco style for your typography and can you explain this progressive assimilation of a distinctive style in such different cultures and contexts?

Art Deco and Art Nouveau arrived late to Cuba, such as the Bacardi building, 1930. At the time, Cuba was in the midst of a revolution against the dictator Machado. For the first time, a united front was created that brought together the Left and the Communists. The rise and development of Art Deco and Art Nouveau in Cuban culture coincided with the spread of leftist ideas in Cuba. One must keep in mind that in the year 1940, a new constitution was formed for the republic and the Communist party (PSP) was legalized. This set of ideas which helped shape Cuban Socialism was formed in a period of national Art Deco and Art Nouveau postulates, which is the typography of North American cars at the end of 1940-1959.

How do you conceive the coherence of this series facing all of your work? To which works do you connect it in particular?

This series stems from an interest in the language of consumer products; the idea that any object is a vessel of a message that goes further than just its use. Our past work has always been very object-based, with text playing a background role. The text in this in case however, constitutes 50% of the meaning of the work.

How did you come to this selection of 12 slogans, from what source of information precisely?

The revolution has many other words. I only chose the 12 words that Fidel used most to give the project a biblical connotation; that of the 12 apostles who spread the word of Jesus. The revolution used this theme a lot after the first battle with the government of Batista, when only 12 combatants were left next to Fidel in the mountains.

Can you list these twelve words in the order of the hierarchy you have made?

1. People
2. Revolution
3. Democracy
4. Worm
5. Enemy
6. Injustice
7. Betrayal
8. We will defeat
9. Homeland or death
10. Counterevolution
11. Liberty
12. Work

Can you explain more precisely how do you proceed to make this hierarchy, with which kind of historic sources? Is it an exact process or more an interpretation?

A Cuban newspaper conducted a study on the words most used by Fidel in his speeches from 1958 until 2008. The word most spoken by Fidel in all of his discourses was the word “People”. I selected the 12 primary words, however there were many more.

Why did you choose the number 12 for the number of sentences and slogans most often spoken of the Cuban revolution?

The number 12 has a biblical significance: it was the 12 apostles that disseminated Christianity. In the “revolutionary epic” the number 12 is important as there were 12 combatants who survived the first combat against the dictatorship of Batista in the “Alegria de Pio” 5/Dec/1956 battle.

What is your relationship to these expressions, how do you interpret them? What do they express as a whole?

Cuba is not a rich country; the Cuban revolution was not in a country with large economic resources. The Cuban revolution was made, and continues to be carried out, with words. Words have historically been the revolutionary active principle. Those words spoken by its most important leaders have changed the course of developments in Cuba, they have decided the politics and they have marked the lives of Cubans during all these years. Cubans have a special relationship with the “words of the revolution”, because not only do they carry a message of identity, but they also constitute a moral guide which society supposedly runs on.

Why did you choose the car brand model to translate these slogans? How do you connect these two elements in your work?

The car models that were selected range from the end of the 40s until late 1959. The Castro regime is a conjunction of leftist ideas mixed with nationalism. These ideas started forming in this same period of time. My work is related to artisanal work as a symbolic source of value. The cars fabricated during this period, although they were fruits of a great industrial process, somewhat retain a sense of being “unique pieces”.

Do you consider it more as sculptural or as graphic work?

The emblems are more graphic works.

How do you explain that Cuba is the last country fascinated by this type of car of the 50s, true icons of America’s consumption society, even though the relations between Cuba and the United States have long been very stormy? They come from the United States but Cubans cannot get rid of them as much as they are intimate with these objects.

This is the great paradox of this project: an authentically North American product that survived in an ideologically hostile and anti-North-American world. More than that, North American cars in Cuba are more typically Cuban than the artisan is Mexican for Mexico. The Cuban revolution did not provide a defined aesthetic identity. What occurred in Eastern Europe did not transpire in Cuba: where Socialist Realism filled the museums and plazas. The case of the North American cars is simply a visual error of the revolution. A conversation about North American cars in Cuba is always a conversation about freedom.

Does the car still represent the revolution in Cuba today?

Yankee cars represent Cuba in that Cuba’s social project is delayed and impossible, both in time and technologically, it is almost a failed utopia. These cars were never nationalized like other property expropriated by the revolution. Cuba stopped importing American cars in the early 60’s. During the revolution the majority of cars came from the Soviet Union, but these socialist cars could not be sold or purchased in the same way as antique North American cars. These vintage cars therefore turned into a refuge from the free enterprise and the free market. Vintage cars became an expression of individualism in a collectivist country.

Why car represent freedom in a country where you are not allowed to circulate freely outside?

American cars are the last stronghold of privae property in Cuba. For years they could be sold and bought, and also reformed. Having a vintage car in Cuba is like having a piece of freedom.

Cars are normally for the West, like bubble for individuals and their relatives, while in Cuba, cars like taxis are collective. Can you explain this contradiction?

Although they are collective cars, in Cuba American cars are still an expression of individualism.

What fascinates you so much in these cars? They are flamboyant, pampered, customized.They seem to be really the emblem of Cuba and at the same time they relate their relationship with the outside world. Does not their presence reflect a part of archaeology of a past world?

The most fascinating thing about these cars is that they suggest a lifestyle where the past is part of the present. The emblems project will also include furniture and objects such as refrigerators. In a general sense, these recreate the atmosphere of past-present that Cuba has been living in over the past 60 years. It is an archaeological work; however, the slogans and cars also define Cuba’s present.

These cars have gone through so many DIY, repair and transformation phases that they no longer match the original version. Do you think we can consider that they have becomes imulacra of the original model?

Not really. The biggest transformations to American cars occurred in the engines, keeping the rest of the car intact. In Cuba there is a whole industry dedicated to recycling modern engines in order to use them on vintage North American chassis. However, these interventions are not as invasive as one would think. Generally, the owners of North American cars practice “reconstructive archeology” with a standard that is very close to the original.

Objects are eternal in Cuba, since the West doesn’t exist, objects have no limits of life. There are always remixed. Do you think it is a model of ecology to fight against consumerism and planned obsolescence?

Consumerism does not exist in Cuba in the same way that we are used to seeing in Europe. In Cuba, we have recycling and it is common for someone young to be fascinated by a vintage North American car with the technology of a Toyota. The interesting thing about this is that an idea which is completely novel and modern looks out of place and contaminated. At the same time, lack of development has obligated us to establish some different parameters which could also be valid and “modern”, very close to the parameters of the recycling of Western modernity. For example, in Europe it is increasingly unpopular to use gasoline cars because it contaminates the environment.

These cars are always customized, and tinkered. In your works, you often hijack and transform things. Is that why you have retained this mode of artistic expression?

Yes, the emblems are also customized. They have all been fabricated from zero based on archives, using 3D printers. They all measure 70cm, the originals are slightly smaller.

Can you tell us about this work and its relation to the culture of the city, to the urban world?

The project is related to the city in terms of recycling. The process of symbolic recycling that an artist performs is a daily process of life in Cuba. It should be highlighted that Cuba is not at all a country with a consumer culture. On the contrary, we have an extensive culture of recycling, all objects are recycled. The lifetime of anything in Cuba is eternal, objects are repurposed constantly, even buildings.

How would you like to present the piece as a whole? Have you imagined scenography?

As I said before, the project mostly includes furniture and objects from daily life such as refrigerators etc. It is a great scenography where repurposed objects are mixed with the philosophies of the revolution.

How did you proceed to make this series? You drew the emblems and then you made them realize with a specialized craftsman? Have you collaborated with other people?

Yes, the work is made from a computer drawing. Bearing in mind that everything needs to be fabricated from scratch, the type of text has to be reconstructed. The typography of American cars no longer exists, so from the existing texts I have reconstructed the letters of each of the logos. The drawings are made into objects by a 3D printer. After, the piece is cast in bronze, then copper and chrome plated. Finally, it is painted if applicable. It is a collaboration where many disciplines intervene.

Have you done yourself the typographic work? Each piece has a different typography.

Yes, the typographies have been constructed with the old logos in mind, each emblem has a different kind of text. For the longer texts Cadillac’s typography has been used.

What place do words and forms have in this series. How do you think of their interrelation?

Yes, they are related. The V symbol signified that the car’s motor had 8 pistons in a V shape (all a symbol of power at the time). It is present in many of the phrases as a demonstration of political power and horsepower. It also makes reference to speed. The word “betrayal” appears associated with the symbol of the planet of Oldsmobile, this is also repeated in the case of “we will defeat” and ‘enemies’. The combinations can vary infinitely.

Do you prefer to talk about replicas or pastiches of emblems in your series? What is the relationship to the notion of originality?

The emblems are inverted “ready mades”. They have been fabricated from scratch, which makes them originals, however they have a narrative which is completely separate to the notion of originality. In a way, this is similar to what the revolution has done for years: “erase and retell”.

For the Injusticia tiembla you associate the slogan to an Indian head, why?

“La injusticia tiembla” is just a fragment of a longer phrase that Fidel said at the funeral of the victims of the bombing of a Cuban aircraft in Barbados in 1976. The complete phrase is: “When an energetic and virile people cries, injustice trembles”. The attack in Barbados was part of the cold war, the conflict between Cuba and the revolutionaries in Miami. It has always been said that the bombing was organized and implemented by Luis Posada Carriles. The Pontiac logo also has its story, it recalls the conflict between Europeans and Native Americans. Pontiac is the name of the Ottawa leader that faced the British in 1763.

What were your sources of graphic inspiration precisely to draw this series, in particular?

The inspiration for this series was the almost-lost world of American cars; the history of these cars and their relationship with Cuba.

It is possible to perceive in your work a DIY strategy, as if you were trying to remix the codes and forms of modernity. What do you think?

In a way yes. All of my work is an invitation to do it yourself (although many times I do not make it myself). The works are an invitation to become involved and make it a part of your home, to actively participate.

How do you imagine continuing this series?

The series should continue and include many consumer goods from the 50’s that still function. It is a work that is dedicated to resistance and memory. It also should include furniture that in some way retains the standards of commodity and glamour of the period. It is a project that can develop through design as the source of the narrative.

Does it mark an evolution in your work?

Definitely, it is not exactly a look to the future, but it is a way of finding answers and identities through investigating the past.

Does your series present the new emblems of a past revolution that you seek to endow with a graphic design or are they the emblems of today’s revolution?

It is fascinating because Cuba is a country that lives in the past, the present does not exist and nor does the future.

Do you think revolution in Cuba is over or still has a meaning?

The revolution is not dead. It is impossible to separate Cuba from its revolution, it still carries weight in the lives of Cubans.

10/10/18

Jerome Sans: FROM DYSTOPIA TO UTOPIA

Curator Text

Emblems of the Relationship Between Cuba and the United States

Initiated shortly after Fidel Castro’s death on November 25, 2016, in La Habana, the series Los Emblemas explores in all its complexity and its duality the notion of the emblem, under the prism of the Cuban historic, social and political reality. Metaphor of the relationship between revolutionary Cuba and the United States, Los Emblemas forms a cohesive ensemble of graphic works parodying logos of American cars from the 1940s until 1959, a vibrating echo of an almost disappeared world whose last traces of existence still remain in Cuba. Cuba’s love for American cars expressed itself in the maintenance and survival of these old-fashioned vehicles thanks to ingenuity of local artisans. Since 1959, Fidel Castro has prohibited the importation of foreign vehicles to Cuba or mechanical pieces to repair them, a manifestation of the United States’ embargo. Cuba has thus developed a unique and island culture, marked by great creativity. Instead of the famous motto that accompanies the logo of any car brand and connects the values and identity of the firm, the artist has chosen to place fake replicas of car logos by associating them with the twelve most quoted words of the Cuban Revolution. This collection of words is embodied in a rich set of popular typographies reworked by the artist, who came to constitute the meaning of the work. The resulting paradoxical meaning causes a real visual word game. Reflecting a strong antagonism between two visions of the world contained in a single object, each emblem offers a dual point of view on the conflicting reality that has passed through Cuban society in the last sixty years.

Los Emblemas’s Historical Matrix: An Entanglement of Meanings

Dagoberto Rodríguez had examined press news and the burst of Western newspapers that once again watched Cuba after the death of Fidel Castro. At this time, most of the dictator’s speeches were published online. The artist, mimicking the posture of the archivist, plunged into these discourses to draw up a hierarchy of the words the mostoften spoken during the revolution. He noticed that the words stated by Fidel Castro were the ones at the same time the most used in the revolutionary propaganda. Fascinated by the imagery of this “Revolutionary Gospel”, mistakenly strung from the Impact typography, originally used by the Cuban media, he extended his typographic research by borrowing from various popular sources to translate the Cuban revolutionary philosophy, crystallized in these archival documents and the design of the 1950s. This is the way Rodriguez brought to light the iconic Art deco typography. Iconic style of the inter-war period born in Paris and quickly spread to the United States, the Art Deco style appeared in 1930 in Cuba through historic buildings like the Bacardi building, colonial-era churches and hotels built up until the revolution in La Habana. Unfolding in all areas of visual arts, architecture, design and typography, this aesthetic movement was appropriated by Cuban culture with a pure lylocal Afro-Cuban influence under Batista as a political statement of “modernity”.

As for the American cars, the impregnation of the Art Deco style in Cuban architectural and decorative language attests Cuba’s unique position as the crossroads of different cultures, and its ability to assimilate and to mix these external influences into a fundamentally original style thanks to the skills of Cuban architects and craftsmen. Los Emblemas is a history of remixes.

Drawing by number 12

Historically, the Cuban revolution took place in a climate of great precariousness, in a country devoid of important economic resources. The revolution was done primarily by and through words. Rodriguez emphasizes the symbolic charge of language and its ability to become a true revolutionary weapon. Pronounced by Cuban leaders, they have turned the tide of events in Cuba, asserting the enforcement policy that has definitely rocked the fate of the Cuban people. Moreover, by choosing only twelve words, he encodes Los Emblemas series by superposing different meanings. The choice of the number twelve is a biblical connotation, that of the twelve apostles who spread Christianity. Rodriguez relates this religious allusion to the historical narrative of the Cuban revolutionary epic that intensely speculated on this biblical theme by relating it to the heroic figures of the twelve fighters who survived the first fight against the dictatorship of Batista during the Alegria battle of Pio,on December 5, 1956, alongside Fidel Castro. Beyond the fact, the number 12 is also a symbol of cosmic order, the number of space and time. It refers to an infinite and immutable time, where things arerepeated cyclically. The number 12 is an allusion to the division of time, in 12 months during one year, in two groups of twelve hours perday. It also refers to the number of zodiac signs in different cosmogonies.

Emblems as political weapon, emblems of consumption

The historical matrix of Los Emblemas istreated in a semantic perspective that emphasizes the dissonances between the signifier and the signified through an extensive research on language and typography and in favor of confusing linguistic operations.

Etymologically, but currently unusual, an emblem designates a work of marquetry ormosaic. This original sense denotes an immediate association with the craft sphere, as well as the decorative and ornamental dimension of the emblem. Currently, the term refers to “a visible symbol that represents an abstract idea”, associated with a motto, supposing a connection of more or less sensitive ideas and a certain system of values. Initially associated with the insignia of power – an obvious political connotation –, the emblem in the era of consumption becomes a visible support publicly enhancing the identity of a brand, a sign of social belonging and a decorative motif. Yet the work on the notion of the emblem, which has the peculiarity to associate a significant to a signifier, a word or a slogan with an image, which embodies it, has nothing harmless. Playing on the paradoxes inherent to the polysemy of this notion, Rodriguez recreates true conceptual images with a strong symbolic charge, by the confrontation in a single object of antagonistic values. Thus, the symbol V which unfolds in most emblems, was originally associated with the shape of the 8-piston engine of American cars, a symbol of power and strength. It becomes in Los Emblemas a reference to the political power. Behind each sign, each symbol conceals a deeper and more paradoxical political meaning.

Between Propaganda and Advertising

Finally, by questioning the constitution of the public media space and its system of values through the association of the marketing and consumption’s spheres with the one of politics, he proves to us that media and propaganda strategies are intimately linked to obtain adhesion or to support individual desire. The notions of propaganda and communication refer to realities of a similar nature, relating to the dissemination of information and the strategies that underlie it. The emblem became a vessel for cultural, social or political representations. By merging into a single object, hybrid and duel by nature, political and market values, he confronts Cuban identity from a cultural and political point of view by synthesizing two symbols of Cuban identity that are inherently antagonistic. While the American cars, symptomatic of the growth of consumer goods became the sacred icons of Cuban culture, he reveals the fascination of Cubans for a North American product. The words of the Cuban Revolution, a veritable moral guide of Cuban identity, are expressed in a radically inappropriate form, that of the North American car logos, by the recreation of absurd and antithetical emblems to the extent that they associate values apriori irreconcilable. Subverted by irrationality, logos became slogans in a game about the linguistic value of propaganda and advertising. The taxonomic order of Los Emblemas bypasses the viewer’s reason, perplexed by the irreconcilability of these encrypted works. This original approach evokes structuralism and its interest in the structures of language as well as conceptualism, parasitized by a political charge, emptied of its self-referential concerns in favor of a deep reflection on society, ideology and conflicts of power.

Reimagining Cuban Revolution’s Visual Identity

Icons of value, Americans cars were the result of a great industrial process, although they remain to be “unique pieces” for Cuban society that continues to customize them. These cars suggest a lifestyle where the past is a part of the present. They are associated in the Cuban culture with the pursuit of the freedom and define a real lifestyle in a country where the society cannot circulate freely. Paradoxically, the Cuban revolution did not seek to provide a definite aesthetic identity, and was never known for industrial or graphic design work, unlike the Russian Soviet regime imbued with socialist realism. As if to fill this gap in history, Rodriguez reinvents in a radically critical, ironic and subversive manner the design of everyday life that could have generated this revolution to support a new way of life and the advent of a new society. He highlights “this visual error of the Cuban revolution”, which did not prevent the advent of these luxury products from North America, in an ideologically hostile and anti-North American climate. These cars have survived as real cultural icons, typically Cuban. By conceptually linking the leftist and nationalist values of the Franco regime’s with the icon of American culture of the 1950s, they emphasize the historical contradictions experienced by Cuban culture. Not limited to cars of the revolution, Los Emblemas series will extend to furniture and objects of everyday life, to consumer goods inherited from the 1950s that still work today, including a series of refrigerators. The challenge of Rodriguez is to recreate, through a work on the border between conceptual art and design, this Cuban atmosphere so special where the past and the present are superimposed, by mixing the aesthetics of these reused objects with the philosophical ideas inherited from Cuban revolution.

Resistance and Memory: A Tribute to Cuban Recycling Praxis

In the words of Rodriguez, Los Emblemas is a work related to “resistance and memory” that unfolds as part of a narrative based on a rewriting of the history of design. Immersing into archives, he has designed this series of emblems integrally, inspiring from heterogeneous typographies and historical sources, hybridizing forms and updating them in a series of drawings executed on computer and then printing in 3D. Each piece is cast in bronze, copper then chromed, and sometimes painted. This interdisciplinary manufacturing process reflects a certain interest for the praxis and the know-how, by Rodriguez, who continue to claim the eminently artisanal character of his art. Starting from nothing, he builds step by step the artisanal pieces accompanying the entire production process. Material availability defines the manufacturing process and the shapes of the constructed object, hybridizing low-tech and high-tech technologies, harmoniously melt with various craft skills. He undertook to resuscitate the typography of American cars that had been lost by recreating it entirely, from coherent visual and typographical sources, playing on this state of confusion by a plastic work of pastiche and replica of a past time, revealing the stylistic typographical richness of this period of history. If this work could be qualified at first sight as archaeological and obsolete, the artist undertakes a real process of updating the slogans in our present time. He insists on the intensive practice of recycling which characterizes in depth the Cuban culture. Recycling is a daily process of life in Cuba that does not have a culture of consumption, but on the contrary an extensive culture of re-use, DIY, recovery and transformation of objects and buildings, constantly reused or reassigned, a phenomenon whose American cars are the perfect incarnation. In contrast to neocapitalist strategies of planned obsolescence, the process of symbolic recycling by the artist contradicts the consumerist paradigm associated with the West. He argues that in Cuba, everything is essentially eternal while questioning the notion of originality and simulacrum. Cuba is an ecosystem where everything is permanently recycled. In a way, Cuba has developed the absolute ecology of a world that no longer throws anything but that would begin to think that objects have a longer life than elsewhere. The lack of access to some food products, and the experience of daily energy shortages in Cuba partly explain this economy of recycling, improvisation and precariousness. However, this partially reductive explanation is underlined more subtly by Rodriguez with the springs of irony when he studies the unacknowledged fantasies associated with consumption in Cuban socialist society, subject to rationing and extreme control. For Rodriguez, craftsmanship is the symbolic source of the value of the work produced and recycling factor of the valuation of the object and its sacralization to the rank of a masterpiece.

By tracing the path of contamination of the visual repertory of Cuba inthe 1960s, the trans-historical issue proposed by Rodriguez in Los Emblemas takes place in the public space, through the confrontation of value systems, representations, ideologies, political models and social issues. The archaeological exploration of the textual and media strata becomes an unprecedented way to excavate answers about the complex identity of Cuba. Emblems of power, power to the people.

Jérôme Sans