Metaphysical Jazz
It has been claimed that some writers and filmmakers write the same book or make the same film over and over throughout their entire lives. The subject matter with which they concern themselves represents such an inexhaustible source that they circle it from different and complementary angles. Each new work casts a different light on preceding works and enriches and deepens the total oeuvre. This is the opposite of repetition: at first glance the books or films do not resemble each other at all. For the Cuban-born artist Ricardo Brey the same holds true. With great consistency over almost thirty years he has created a body of work that comes together like a puzzle. Rather than linearly, his work develops centrifugally: expanding out from an imaginative core. Everything seems connected; older motifs acquire new relevance in later work. It is no accident that Brey often turns to literature and film when he has to explain his work: he cites Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner or points to films of Andrei Tarkovsky or Akira Kurosawa.
Remarkably, the work of Ricardo Brey has not previously been documented in its underlying consistency. It has come to the attention of the Western art public principally since his participation in Documenta 9 in 1992. However, Brey’s artistic roots lie in the 1970s and ’80s, although the work he created in Cuba in those decades has received no dissemination in the West. Take for example his 1985 work La estructura de los mitos (The structure of myths): a pile of frayed papers. The pages at first glance resemble historical documents. They are covered with elegant handwriting from an earlier time and illuminated with old-fashioned botanical and zoological drawings. The paper is yellowed, and with its holes and gouges seems to have been chewed by bookworms or other insects. The notched edges of the pages likewise seem to have been mangled by the elements and by time. In reality this antique manuscript is Brey’s creation. Using complicated stencil, copying and other transfer techniques he combined the historical texts and images with his own drawings. To make the paper appear old he colored it and went at it with scissors. Brey’s faux-historical manuscripts are a poetic reconstruction of diaries that the German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) kept during an expedition to Cuba in 1801. Because of this voyage Von Humboldt is considered by the Cubans to be the “second discoverer” of their country after Christopher Columbus. Brey was born in Havana and lived and worked there until he was 36 years old. By creating a fictitious logbook of Von Humboldt’s seven-week Cuban expedition and his other travels through Latin America Brey tried to fathom his own continent and his own identity through the viewpoint of a Westerner.
The structure of myths displays the most important ingredients of his work: a preoccupation with the relationship between man and nature, an interest in the interaction between different cultures and the tension between reality and imagination, doubts about uncontested (historical) truths and a critical attitude toward cultural identity and one’s own origins. Such a post-colonial thematic made Brey an artistic pioneer at that time, and that is one of the reasons why his work still is strikingly timely. From the end of the 1980s more and more non-Western art found its way to Western museums, and an increasing number of artists questioned in their work the hegemony of the West.
When he created The structure of myths in 1985 Brey had already been active as an artist for almost ten years. From 1970 to 1974 he had studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro and from 1974 to 1978 at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana, at the time the most important art school in Cuba, which emphasized the craft aspects of the profession. Brey began his artistic career as primarily an illustrator and graphic artist. He had been trained as a painter, but outside the academy the conditions were not very attractive for making paintings. There was a great shortage of materials—many of his colleagues resorted to using their bed linens—and Brey did not have access to a studio. Moreover, it was the heyday of conceptual art. Brey was also caught up in this movement and gave up his painting activities. However, he did produce occasional paintings during his stay in Cuba. The character of Brey’s work differed radically, however, from the cool, matter-of-fact expressions of the most important conceptual artists of that time: from the beginning his art was imbued with poetry, melancholy and mystery. His earliest drawings were a sort of lyrical collage of abstract elements, writing, frottages and citations especially from late-18th-century Spanish painting. These were not just exercises of artistic style: the painting elements referred in an unemphatic way to the historical period when the Spanish colonial oppression in Cuba came into effect. At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries the Cuban sugar industry experienced an enormous expansion, and to make this growth possible some hundreds of thousands of slaves were imported from Africa and Asia. From the beginning Brey used a transfer technique for images that he continues to use up to the present. His work had its first solo exhibition in 1980 at the Casa de la Cultura in Jaruco in a show entitled Full Moon.
Not long after that Brey took part in Volumen I (January 1981) in the Centro de Arte Internacional in Havana--a group show organized by the artists themselves which was wrapped in scandal and hit like a bombshell in the Cuban art world and beyond. The show drew 8000 visitors in two weeks. Volumen I became a synonym for the emergence of a new generation of avant-garde artists in Cuba after the Revolution—a development that is also known as the “Cuban Renaissance”. The group of 11 artists, who, supported by the art critic Gerardo Mosquera, presented in Volumen I, had no programmatic premises, let alone any common aesthetic program. The only things that brought the participating artists together were a deep aversion to official Cuban socialist-realism and a desire to develop new –both nationally and internationally oriented—art forms. In almost everything else they differed from each other—the group included hyperrealist painters from the older generation as well as students who had not yet completed their studies at the academy and were experimenting with sculpture. The fierce controversy caused by the exhibition had little to do with the—in the end quite innocent-- work that was exhibited but was rather the result of the rabidly positive and negative reactions expressed by the Cuban art world.
The exhibition was preceded by years of preparation: from 1977 the artists, friends with one another, had attempted to show together. Brey was involved from the beginning and would remain one of the leaders of the group. For a long time the group mainly served as a discussion platform and social association for young artists. After the renowned exhibition the artists suddenly found themselves the center of interest. Then that which already had been implied in the title Volumen I –which in fact meant “Part I”—took place: the exhibition was followed by more group shows in ever-changing conformations. Today the former pariahs of Volumen I are counted in the canon of Cuban art and serve as a reference point for younger generations of artists.
Until the mid-1980s Brey produced primarily works on paper. Around 1979-1980 the art historical quotations of his early work made way for cartographical fragments and images of plants, animals and landscapes. The themes had an undiminished romantic streak: the drawings now were dominated by voyages of discovery and natural history. This preoccupation didn’t appear out of the blue: Brey came from a family of fishermen and was from childhood obsessed with nature. Around the time that he made the drawings Brey also worked in the Casa de la Cultura in Jaruco: a sort of social-creative center under the inspired direction of his friend Gustavo Pérez Monzón. Often Brey took the children and elderly who came there outdoors with him to work together in nature. By having them, for example, paint with colored pigment in water he wanted them to experience the beauty of the landscape. For five years he worked full-time at the house of culture. Along with his interest in nature Brey became acquainted with the structuralist ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss. This French anthropologist, through research into kinship systems and myths of peoples, tried to fathom the underlying structures of cultures. In his methodology he sought to discern from art objects something of the basic characteristics of the culture that produced the artifact. People give the world meaning in dualistic structures, and the use of signs and symbols plays a crucial role in this, he argued. In Lévi-Strauss’s vision artists were through artistic selection processes engaged in charging things with meaning without thereby affecting the original object-value of the things. He believed that it was precisely in this loading of things with meaning that the essence of the transformation of nature into culture, or the process of culture-formation, lay. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas fit closely with Brey’s fascination with the relationship of man to nature and with the interaction between different cultures. The implications of the theories must have attracted Brey—as well as many others at the time. Lévi-Strauss raised the possibility of how through artistic—manipulative, in the positive sense--means transformations could be brought about in how certain cultural-societal structures are viewed. The writings of the French anthropologist remained for years Brey’s Bible.
With the ideas of Lévi-Strauss as point of departure, during the first half of the 1980s Brey created various series dealing with explorers and naturalists in Latin America. By “reconstructing” their expeditions in quasi-historical documents he wanted to reconsider the nature, history and cultural identity of his own continent through the gaze of an outsider. That effort was connected with Brey’s critical attitude toward the uncontested truths propagated, for example, by history books and the media. His preoccupation with Lévi-Strauss was also in part inspired by these continual doubts about the authenticity of documents and evidence: Brey got the idea for his falsified historical papers after reading a discussion between André Breton and Lévi-Strauss on the authenticity of documents. What Brey wanted to create was, freely adapted from Octavio Paz, “a system of transparencies to cause the appearance of the reality”: a sort of transparent film to be laid over the historical reality of the original documents about the exploration of South America in order to bring the true (natural)historical, sociological and ethnological structures of the continent to light. He himself remained within, not outside of, the constellation. On the one hand, as the “forger” of the historical documents he was present as the creative subject; on the other hand, he made himself the object of the study. “I try to discover my own continent and its history, and my self and my biography, and the exact link of both, where they connect”, Brey himself summarized in 1985.
In 1980 when he was confined to his house after injuring his foot during a speleological expedition in a grotto complex in Jaruco, Brey began a series of some one hundred drawings devoted to the biologist and explorer Charles Darwin. El origen de las especies (The origin of the species) formed a sort of mental map of what must have gone on in Darwin’s head when he was confronted with nature on the Galapagos Islands. Because of the free interpretation of the subject matter it is immediately clear that here we are not dealing with the “forgeries” of historical documents, as will be the case in Brey’s later work. The drawings show a mixture of a romantic approach toward nature and scientific observations. Maps and images of plants and animals are alternated with quasi-scientific cardiograms of Darwin’s heartbeat, cross-hatching and écriture automatique.
In the early 1980s through a gift from one of the founding fathers of modern art in Cuba, the charismatic pop artist Raúl Martínez, Brey had at his disposal a stencil machine with accessories. In the following years the machine with its new technical possibilities became his most important tool. Brey’s choice of a not very artistic, “ignoble” stencil technique suited the recalcitrant philosophy of Volumen I, which wanted to place a bomb under the complacent Cuban art establishment. Not long afterward Brey showed his stenciled works among the saccharine, respectable pictures in the Salon de Pequeño Formato (Salon of Small Format) (1981) and the Encuentro de Grabado (Graphics Salon) (1983) in Havana, the stomping grounds of the Cuban art establishment. Moreover, Brey often used the technique in a very unconventional manner. Thus the series of Darwin drawings was followed by a large, stenciled work on canvas with a faux travel journal of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America (Diario del almirante, 1983). Contrary to his hopes Brey could never use the stencil technique in large editions to disseminate his work among a broad public. At the time he worked with galleries and museums that did not constitute an appropriate context for “more democratic” art forms of this sort. Given the shortage of materials in Cuba and the laborious techniques that he chose—he often combined stenciled with hand-drawn and –painted elements—the sheets can usually be regarded as single copies.
Darwin soon made way for more sympathetic personages with whom Brey could more easily identify. In particular Alexander von Humboldt, the explorer who traveled in South America from 1799 to 1804, would become a favorite subject. In 1982 Brey produced Tomo I. Genera Plantarum: a quasi-scientific reconstruction of a rare book that Von Humboldt lost in the Orinoco River during an expedition. On his voyage Von Humboldt carried Part I of Genera Plantarum (General knowledge about plants) written by Johann Christian Daniel Von Schreber, a student of Linnaeus, to use in identifying plants. Brey presented his partial “reconstruction” of the lost book in the form of a quasi-educational display from an old-fashioned natural history or ethnographic museum. On large sheets of paper he combined illustrations of certain types of plants with fictional fragments from Von Schreber’s manuscript and a manually typed explanation of the use of the plant concerned. Tomo I. Genera Plantarum was stenciled by employing unconventional techniques. He gave the images the patina of age by treating the stencil plates with files, sandpaper, and etching needles. Brey’s “selection” from the first part of Genera Plantarum consisted of only seven types of plants: palms, coca, saffron, corn, cacao, tobacco and banana trees. Brey chose these plants because they all, in a nutshell, are interwoven with the history of (South) America in cultural, economic, political or social-societal aspects, and they correspond to Western stereotypical images of the continent.
In the first half of the 1980s Brey continued to work on various explorers and naturalists including the Swedish botanist and student of Linnaeus Peter Loefling (1729-1756), who spent the last two years of his life in Latin America. However, Brey kept returning to the colorful persona of Von Humboldt. “My work dealing with Baron Alexander von Humboldt is a way of observing who we are by means of history; it is a productive game to see ourselves through the eyes of the Other. Humboldt, a product of eighteenth-century humanism, had an enormous desire for knowledge and was one of those encyclopedists who connected armchair study with practical evaluation. An extraordinary traveler, he admired the substantial differences that would guide the future of the American continent at a time when its independence from Spain had not yet been achieved. Columbus discovered America, but not the New World. He found a place where the Greco-Latin and medieval myths actually existed; he saw sirens instead of sea cows, dragons in place of crocodiles, and interpreted American peoples as Amazons and governed by the Great Khan. A product of Rousseauian philosophy, Humboldt undertook his American research in a scientific frame of mind that did not lack passion. He discovered what was new and, from that point of view, we are all in his debt”, Brey later explained about his preoccupation. However, Von Humboldt was not in any sense a sacred cow to Brey who considered him rather a mythical more than historical personage, whom he could “manipulate” for his “purposes”.
Brey’s interest in Von Humboldt culminated finally in The structure of myths (1985) described above, another poetic reconstruction of the diaries that Von Humboldt kept during his expedition to Cuba and neighboring countries. This represented undoubtedly one of the most complex works in Brey’s series of fictional diaries. The title refers directly to Lévi-Strauss. The romantic, quasi-Western image of South America that emerges from Brey’s “corrections to history writing”, it appears, is as much a myth as the continent from Von Humboldt’s real diary entries. The Enlightenment thinker tried to describe nature in neutral, scientific terms, avoiding normative statements. But because he was so passionate he could not help expressing his amazement at what he came across on his trip. In spite of his good intentions—he wrote an anti-slavery pamphlet, for example—his gaze was unmistakably Eurocentric and his “objective” observations were as a result inevitably imbued with ideology. In Von Humboldt’s view Latin America remained a culturally underdeveloped continent. In his version of Von Humboldt’s diaries Brey tried in an analogous manner to find a balance between “cold, scientific analysis and the beauty of the object studied”. He made the distinction between natural reality and Von Humboldt’s description painfully tangible by giving the illustrations and the texts on the documents hardly any mutual connection—they overlap but elucidate nothing about each other. Furthermore, they seem to have nothing at all to do with the objective of the study.
With his faux-historical manuscripts Brey drew attention to the deceptive manner by which ideology continually seeps into communication- and representation-systems even in such ostensibly innocent areas as the describing of the natural phenomena of other countries. Even if the observations are not subject to cultural values, he seems to be saying, nature and other cultures in their complexity and impenetrability can scarcely be captured by systematic scientific description or classification. Brey was once criticized by the American art critic Benjamin Buchloh because he would idealize von Humboldt, a pioneer of Western colonization, by approaching him from a poetic rather than political standpoint. “The poetry you produce does not clarify the historical formation of colonialism and imperialism and its impact on Cuba”, Buchloh remonstrated. As Buchloh’s colleague David Craven later made clear, the position reflected mainly Buchloh’s own Eurocentric expectations about the “true nature” of political engagement, the assumed “correct” approach to colonialism and the idea that individual attitudes should play a central role in such engaged works of art. With his manuscripts Brey goes beyond the level of personal political statement and refrains from making easy reproaches toward individual historical explorers. Through emphasis on mutual cultural interaction and collective history and by problematizing the ideological structures that lie at the basis of representation and communication, he operates rather on a meta-political level. Drawing an analogy with Latin American literature Craven calls the stylistic device which Brey employed “collective anonymity”: a manner of interweaving one’s own experiences ideologically and historically with those of the majority of the population. In this way Cuban artists construct a new cultural language by which they can escape from colonial ideological contamination from the past and can “rename” themselves and the world from a collective perspective, argues Craven. It is not for nothing that Brey also maintained that he employed “nonorthodox conceptual tools, paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges rather than Joseph Kosuth”. Regardless of how much his work seems to have changed since the middle of the 1980s, Brey continued to work from the vantage point of “collective anonymity”.
Brey traveled to the United States for the first time in February 1985, a time when international travel to and from Cuba was tightly controlled. He, along with his Volumen-I colleagues José Bedia and Flavio Garciandía, had been invited by the Uruguayan artist and professor Luis Camnitzer to be artists in residence at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Westbury. During his four-month stay Brey produced art works, had a show at the Amelie Wallace Gallery of SUNY and exchanged experiences with fellow artists from New York. Although Brey was familiar with recent international developments through books and magazines and through his friendship with Ana Mendieta among others, now he became personally acquainted with the American art world. Those with whom he struck up friendships included Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham—a kindred spirit who was of great importance for his future work. On Durham’s initiative Bedia and Brey visited Indian reservations in South Dakota during this period. For a month on one reservation they became part of a Lakota community that was reduced in circumstances and nevertheless tried to maintain the tradition of Sitting Bull. The pair returned to New York depressed after experiencing firsthand the poverty and despair of the excluded people.
The stay in New York and his visits to the Indian reservations marked a turning point in Brey’s work. Initially in New York he created a follow-up piece to The structure of myths: a series of faux manuscripts describing how the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano would have explored the present-day Hudson River. Having been confronted with the hard reality under which the Indians lived, Brey initially found it almost inappropriate to continue to occupy himself with myths and a romantic approach to nature. It was also as a foreigner in New York that he came to see himself for the first time as part of an Afro-Cuban tradition. Brey has Nigerian ancestors and grew up in an environment where African customs originally from the Yoruba people were practiced. Out of fear of appearing exotic he had earlier avoided any references to religion or folklore, but now he became aware of the richness and singularity of his cultural background.
Cuba, just like the rest of the Caribbean region, is an outstanding example of a melting-pot of various cultures. As a result of historical circumstances in Cuba indigenous traditions mixed with dominant Spanish-European influences as well as with the African and Asian cultures that the imported slaves brought with them. One characteristic result of this cross-pollination was, for example, the presence of Santería: an important Afro-Cuban religious cult that represents a synthesis of African gods (orishas from Yoruba culture) and Catholic saints. By pretending to their colonial oppressors that they were worshipping Catholic saints the African slaves could secretly continue their Yoruba traditions. In a similar manner syncretism in all sorts of other areas served as a survival strategy for Africans and others to preserve their own cultural customs in the face of dominant Western influences. In a famous article the Cuban art critic Gerardo Mosquera tried to capture the specific cultural-societal conditions of the Caribbean: “In the Caribbean, not only races and ethnocultures were fused, but men and women from different stages of an historic-social evolution. The Caribbean was a kind of time-machine that united in the same environment people belonging to primitive communities, from the so-called Asian mode of production, from feudalism, and from the beginnings of capitalism. There they mixed. Each one brought not only the race and the mores associated with his or her ethnocultural identity, but the inherent consciousness belonging to his or her moment in historical evolution. That is the reason for the very natural presence of mythological forms of thought, alive and integrated with the ‘Western’ pragmatic rationality that corresponds to modern life”, wrote Mosquera. To an inhabitant of Latin America Western aspects are not foreign or adopted, he contended, but an integral and self-evident part of one’s own cultural tradition. And, by the same token, so-called “primitive” elements form an equally essential constituent part of the “mestizaje” of the Caribbean region, and for the inhabitant they hold nothing exotic or unknown. Brey’s work is marked by a similar paradox. He considers himself an “enlightened primitive”. Like other Cuban artists of his generation such as Bedia and Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, he creates work that, on the one hand, is meant to function in a Western-oriented art system but that at the same time is as hybridic as the cultural roots of his birthplace. In their “primitive” work Brey and his colleagues try to fathom their national identity and to investigate the relevance of these roots in a contemporary context. By loading everyday things with poetry, mythology and a certain drama Brey wants to restore amazement and connection with the world to the current materialistic society. He considers a purely physical, scientific approach to reality too cold and too one-sided. The result is, in Mosquera’s words, “an art genetically hybrid, allowing a disbelieved experience of the pure poetry of magic and rites as daily creative facts”.
In the two years following his stay in New York Brey produced little work. In 1986-1987 he stayed in Mexico for 11 months with his colleagues Bedia, Elso Padilla and Carlos Capelán. In 1987 in the Galeria Kahlo-Coronel in Mexico and the Centro Wifredo Lam in Havana under the ambiguous title Sobre la tierra—which can mean “on the ground” as well as “about the earth”— he showed drawings that he had produced in those years. The drawings show the changes that had taken place at that time in Brey’s work.
There remained no trace of the explorers from his earlier work. The illustrated and stenciled works display motifs connected with Yoruba culture which recognizes in the natural elements of stones, earth, water and fire manifestations of higher powers. The themes first introduced here continue to figure in Brey’s work to the present day. In particular, stones became a favorite motif. In Yoruba culture the most essential, contradictory powers are attributed to stones. They are an embodiment of the god Eleggua (Elegba), who makes things possible and determines the fate of humans. The drawings also show ropes (as connections between heaven and earth and as the “umbilical cord of the universe”), glasses with water (a symbol of the cosmos), archaic, smoking, iron cooking pots filled with different forces fighting with each other (another metaphor for the universe), decorative patterns of repeating plus- and minus-signs, plants, floods, drops of blood raining down, and written explanations. Such explicit references to Yoruba natural philosophy did not persist for long in Brey’s work. However, the idea of a pantheistic universe in which everything is part of a cosmic coherence, such as that which emerged from the drawings, would persist in his work. In line with this philosophy humans would never form the center of creation in his work but would be only a modest component part of nature.
Although drawing would remain a core aspect of his work, from the second half of the 1980s Brey became more involved in sculpture and installation art. In March 1981 in the exhibition Trece Artistas Jóvenes (Thirteen Young Artists) he had already presented a minimalist installation of bamboo stalks on which pieces of ropes and threads of wool hung. The installation with its weather-beaten aesthetic exuded an air of deep melancholy. As was the case with other artists in Volumen I who explored the third dimension, Brey at that time did not succeed in making a truly spatial work: the sculpture was fastened in a corner of the exhibition space and hardly stood out from the wall. Cuba lacked a sculptural tradition, and Cuban artists developed scarcely any spatial consciousness because their knowledge of sculpture was derived from –obviously two-dimensional—reproductions from Western books and magazines. The wall sculpture of 1981 was followed by The structure of myths (1985): an installation that Brey created at SUNY in New York with his Verrazano logbook as center piece. The fictional manuscripts were presented here as part of an offering in a Santería ritual. Dishes covered with a layer of soot or filled with oblations such as cowry shells, votive candles, wax, strings of white pearls and the Verrazano writings were set out on a carpet of salt.
Such excursions into sculpture were, however, up to this point, exceptions in Brey’s work. The material scarcity in Cuba had previously restrained him from producing sculpture. Moreover, he was initially afraid that his sculptures would resemble those of his friend Elso Padilla. After he overcame this fear, Brey began in the second half of the 1980s to make installations of carved wooden and other objects he made himself. In keeping with the friendly, generous manners that prevailed within the Volumen-I group, Elso, when he left for Mexico, had given Brey his woodworking tools as a stimulus. Brey continued the trend started in the installation The structure of myths and produced magical, charmed objects, mostly closely linked to Santería principles. Thus at the São Paulo Biennial of 1987 he presented a sculpture on the theme of Saint Lucy, the protector of eyes. He had a poignant Greek mask enlarged in rusted metal and in the pupils placed hummingbirds on bamboo stalks. The following year Brey produced the installation Un objeto inocente (An innocent object), one of his more complex installations from this period, in which he combined elements from The structure of myths—including a carpet of salt— with elements from Sobre la tierra. The title referred to a figure of a baby, carved from wood by Brey, on a chair at the center of the installation. The figure represented a fusion of African nail figures and the inevitable baby dolls which are found in Cuban living rooms intended to protect the house from evil spirits. Such dolls represent an embodiment of the Yoruba god Eleggua. The warding off of evil influences remained a recurrent theme in the “ritual” objects that Brey created at the end of the 1980s. For example, his contribution to the 1989 Havana Biennial was connected with occult ceremonies by which those suffering from psychological illnesses were freed from evil forces. On a long paper frieze on the wall Brey showed the repeating motif of a stylized bird—the animal that plays a crucial role in such rituals. Around the frieze Brey had hung duck heads carved in wood connected to each other by ropes in a rhythmic pattern. Brey borrowed the title of the exhibit Cada cosa sagrada debe estar en su lugar (Every holy thing must be in its place) from Lévi-Strauss.
On the strength of his presentation in Havana Brey was invited by Jan Hoet to participate in the exhibitions Ponton Temse (1990) and Documenta 9 in Kassel (1992). In order to prepare for Ponton Temse Brey moved temporarily to Ghent in 1990. In two adjoining rooms in an old water-mill in the Flemish village of Temse Brey combined various sculptural elements in an associative connection. In the first space that the visitor entered Brey showed a tilted ladder in front of a window which directed the gaze outside. On the rungs of the ladder he had installed razor-sharp knives. In Cuba Brey had already produced two earlier variations on the motif of a ladder as the connection between heaven and earth, including a ladder with the teeth of dogs and dolphins. While the first space was done in light colors, the second room was dominated by a wall painting in clay and chalk of a headless bird against a dark background. A frieze like the one from Cada cosa and a Cerberus-like door-guardian in the form of a dog with a wooden head and a drawn body served to connect the two rooms. Brey called this “pre-prepared myth” “Eskimo life”—a title that referred to the simple lifestyle of the Eskimos, who use few goods and waste nothing. The installation represented a sort of declaration of principles: just as among the Eskimos, recycling of objects was a condition of life in Cuba. Because of the shortage of materials Brey made almost everything in his installations himself: from the candles in The structure of myths to the knives in Temse. Brey used the rubbish that he found in the water-mill when making his installation as part of Eskimo life. In the installation a sober lifestyle in harmony with nature is contrasted with the wasteful and polluting Western consumer society. Because of the superficial formal and material relationship, Brey’s sculpture is sometimes associated with Arte Povera or with the work of Joseph Beuys. However much appreciation Brey had for their work, his choice to recycle “poor” materials was dictated in the first place by a shortage of materials, an aversion to wasting, and a preference for banal objects. Also the artist continued to recycle elements within his own work: parts of earlier installations frequently reappear years later in new works.
After waiting a year in Havana for a visa, Brey returned to Ghent in 1991, this time to settle provisionally. Whereas in Cuba he had produced almost everything himself, after he came to live in Ghent he increasingly introduced into his work more used objects as ready-mades. For example, in a solo exhibition later that year in the Galerie Albert Baronian in Brussels Brey showed a fan on a duvet stained with pigment together with equally dirty and slept-in-looking pillows. On the fan he had tied chicken feet and strips of cloth that swung to and fro with the turning machine and in the breeze it produced. In another part of the gallery he showed a light-hearted installation of tree trunks fitted with rear-view mirrors or stuck in mousetraps. A partially bandaged telescope was set up in front of one of the windows. The object bore the title Look at the corner—the slogan of a UNESCO campaign to combat AIDS in Africa—which in this case could be taken literally: using the telescope the visitor could follow what was going on at the corner of the street.
As was already apparent in his show at Baronian, in Brey’s new homeland the direct references to Afro-Cuban traditions were giving way to ambiguous references. Although the sources of his works from the previous years had not been purely Afro-Cuban nor had the objects been unambiguous in meaning—Un objeto inocente was also related to Roman Janus heads; the frieze from the Havana Biennial was also inspired by Egyptian art—now hybridity and ambiguity became the leading principles in his art. The use of ready-mades was part of the strategy. Through combining different objects that carried with them their own pasts and specific cultural references he created new narrative structures—or “myths”, to stay with Brey’s terminology—which were transcultural and susceptible to multiple interpretations. In La pensée sauvage (1962) Lévi-Strauss described this process of bricolage as a way of creating meaning. For this reason Brey sometimes called the bricolages he made “mythical ready-mades”. His handling of ready-mades was at the same time based as well on the principles of Santería. Just as in the cult he loaded everyday objects with meaning, or following the assemblage customs of Santería he created new objects by putting together existing and self-made materials. Increasingly Brey constructed his works around oppositions such as nature versus culture, life and death, masculine and feminine, organic against inorganic materials, Western as opposed to non-Western references. “My goal is to transmit - with my sculptures and installations - this hybrid nature, posing questions rather than answers to the problem that emerges through this centaur condition. (...) What is of foremost importance to me is to cause interpretation tensions to the individual or collective conscience”, he once remarked. With regard to the ambiguity in his work Brey often refers to the parable of the four blind men who try to describe how an elephant looks. Each one describes the animal differently because he had touched a different part of the elephant. The moral of the story is that reality is always more complex than we can grasp. Brey creates his assemblages from the same philosophy: by uniting extremes he hopes to create meaningful relations between things that at first glance have nothing to do with one another—an endeavor that is not so different from the integral world image in Sobre la tierra in which all the elements maintain a connection with each other in a complex manner.
The large-scale installation that Brey created for Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992 demonstrates the associative power of his bricolages. It looked as though a cyclone had passed through the space he had chosen in the Fridericianum. Sweeping and dripping he had applied an earth-brown mixture of Coca-cola and pigment on the floor and walls; large plates of glass stood higgledy-piggledy throughout the room and against the walls; battered luxaflex blinds hung from the ceiling; a mountain of ripped-open pillows and bird feathers stood in one corner. Two sculptural objects seemed to form the epicenter of the violence of nature that raged through the space. The room was dominated by a turning fan even larger than the one Brey had shown at the Baronian gallery. Once again piles of grimy sheets and pillows were draped around the fan. And just as in the “prototype” the appliance was crowned with swinging chicken feet that ended in flapping strips of cloth. The fan formed an absurd and animistic element in the space: the soft breeze that the machine produced functioned as a sort of breath that gave the parts of the installation a connection and breathed life into it. The space was equally under the sway of a larger-than-life-size archaic bird skull that had been carved out of wood by the artist. Brey further reinforced the narrative-mythical dimension of his installation by playing it off against a more physical-rational approach to reality in the form of “quasi-scientific” test tubes filled with brightly-colored pigment and bird feathers.
The Documenta installation with its strong psychological effect marked an important moment in the development and recognition of Brey’s work. While the fan at the Baronian show which stood completely free in the space was already a breakthrough—it was one of the first sculptures by a Cuban artist that stood free of the floor and the wall, his Documenta contribution was created as a coherent spatial structure. Brey compared the installation with a symphony that carried a multitude of themes and possibilities out of which new compositions could develop. In the succeeding years he would elaborate the achievements of his Kassel work into individual sculptures and smaller installations. Fans and various references to wind and air currents, for example, would continue to appear in his work. In 1993 he created a smaller installation called Nobody was seriously wounded, which included a fish trap filled with bird feathers. A fan lent drama to the object and in combination with the ironic title provoked the suggestion that we are dealing here with a snowstorm.
The many wind instruments that Brey introduced in his work may also be associated with his preoccupation with movements of air. In three sculptures called Charmeur de serpent, for example, he combined flutes with old-fashioned black rubber hoses that he had rolled up and tied together in rhythmic patterns. Thanks to his suggestive use of materials these are convincing snake-charmers. References to music are legion in Brey’s sculptures and installations. The structure of Cada cosa recalls a musical score; in Walkman (1994), an object that brings to mind African masks, he united an old ceremonial Shona thumb-piano with the contemporary Western street-culture of headphones; for an exhibition in Salzburg he created assemblages out of perforated piano rolls for antique player pianos which together formed “music for the eye” dozens of meters long. Brey frequently compares his improvised manner of working and the rhythmic construction of his installations to free jazz. He creates variations on certain motifs, builds in syncopation and continuously maneuvers between chaos and order. In his work in the 1990s, for example, he lets elephant feet dance on mountains of rags; he allows a pile of 1001 gloves to make a swinging organism; and he sets black umbrellas in a rhythmic pattern upside-down in trees so that when it rains they fill with water and open like flowers. There are also many literal references to jazz to be found in Brey’s work. For example, in a group of works called Birdland he combined among other things a nest with ostrich eggs and a saxophone as homage to the jazz musician Charlie (“Bird”) Parker.
Jazz music represents only one of the many references to Afro-American and Afro-Cuban culture in Brey’s work since the 1990s. Thus he placed contemporary African “masks” together with bunches of raffia and black baseball caps marked with the letter X to commemorate Malcolm X (Mask X, 1993). Just like his colleague David Hammons Brey takes necessary liberties in the ways in which he honors ancient Yoruba culture. Out of an awareness of being part of a living tradition that is lost when it becomes rigid, Brey wants to continue the Afro-Cuban culture in an ever-updated form, not as an unchangeable given. Moreover through its narrative, abstract structure the tradition itself leaves room for imagination and different interpretations. To take just a few examples: one of the Icaruses made by Brey rests on an automobile jack that in form bears a remarkable resemblance to crosses from the Kongo tradition. The cowry shells he so frequently employs he borrowed from African sculpture. Because of their resemblance to eyes and to the female sex organs they refer to introspection and fertility. The plants and animals Brey displays in his work often stand as symbols for the continent of Africa—for example, the elephant and the lion—or were chosen because a healing power is ascribed to them in Africa. And Yoruba deities continue to appear in various forms. For example, Eleggua, who earlier played an important role in Brey’s work, appears—just as in the myth—in ever-changing metamorphoses. Look at the corner (1991) points to this “god of the crossroads”, who opens or closes the roads and so determines the fate of men. Eleggua is represented by the colors red and black. Brey plays on this code in a 1994 wall sculpture of black caps wound around with a bright-red necktie. The object is called Le rouge et le noir—a title that playfully alludes to Stendhal’s book of the same name.
Brey’s preoccupation with Eleggua, who is so closely connected with man’s fate, is difficult to view apart from the existential dimension of his work. In the Dionysian installations that he made in the 1990s Brey created places where all the certainties disappear and everything is in flux. By transforming everyday objects and bringing them together in associative connection he calls forth in imagination a mythic, dream world where meanings keep shifting. Inanimate matter acquires animal traits, earth’s drudgery becomes relativized in cosmic perspective, chaos and order continually strive for predominance. “I work at the crossroads of construction and deconstruction,” further stated Brey, by which he apparently meant the manner in which he approached both meanings and forms. His installations are grimy and threatening—natural disasters and human suffering are never far away. His contribution to Documenta 9 and the floor sculpture Wild elephants that Brey produced for the 1996 exhibition De Rode Poort in Ghent are examples of such psychedelic installations. In the former casino in which S.M.A.K. is now housed, on a floor covered with mover’s cloths he presented mountains of automobile tire inner tubes, metal bed frames standing upright, small fans on bent-wire cubes, piles of gloves and an elephant foot. From the center of the installation a pillar of gloves rose like a lightening bolt.
Art critics compared this installation in its composition and themes with the romantic painting The raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault—a comparison that was not accidental. In Brey’s universe men and animals are continually adrift, if not to save their lives then because diaspora is their fate. One of his most compelling installations in this regard was one he created in the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (Association for the Museum of Contemporary Art) in Ghent in 1993. Only recently settled in Ghent himself, Brey created a temporary monument for the Jews who were deported from the city during the Second World War. In his installation he referred to the history of the building which housed the Vereniging: during the war years its functions included serving as a depot for the clothing of Jews who were deported. An empty (recovered) bird’s nest, fallen chandeliers, and a wall against which a bird seemed to have flown formed the dramatic nucleus of the installation.
That automobile tires are such favorite forms of material in Brey’s installations has everything to do with the permanent state of exile in which his subjects find themselves. It is from these rubber tires that Cuban refugees (“boat people”) build their shaky vessels in order to cross the Florida Straits. In addition to Wild elephants the artist made another installation in 1995-1996 in which automobile tires were an essential part: The thread of Ariadne. Two long parallel tracks of rubber tires and jute sacks led across the floor to a blank wall to which two buffalo horns had been affixed like crescent moons. He had hung a grey winter jacket from one horn; on the other he had affixed a small fan that set small strips of cloth in motion and dispersed the scent of cinnamon. In the installation Brey interwove the theme of the Cuban boat people with (among others) the Greek myth of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who helped her lover Theseus escape from the labyrinth of the Minotaur with the aid of a ball of thread. Brey had used the jacket to protect himself against the Belgian winters after his arrival in Ghent. As is frequently the case in his work, such playful, ironic elements as the jacket and the fan tone down the dramatic, almost sacred character of the installation.
Brey once said that he admired the German artist Joseph Beuys because he exposed the postwar traumas of his country. For his part Brey often retells the stirring history of Cuba and Latin America from the voyagers who explored the continent to the Cuban boat people. However, there is nothing of the solipsistic in his work because he always places human suffering and tragic national history in the perspective of the collective history of humanity and the world. That sounds perhaps more ponderous than it is. Often Brey will package his melodramatic themes simply and lightly in a way that makes them even more forceful. Shortly after he moved from Havana to Ghent in 1991 he began a series of drawings of animals that carry their houses with them. He showed some of them in his solo exhibition that same year at the Galerie Baronian. These are intense, basic line drawings in earth tones of turtles, crocodiles, and (horseshoe) crabs, among others. The sweeping use of pigment powder gives the creatures the suggestion of movement—they are ultimately continually adrift. Brey, moreover, furnished the feet of one of the turtles that he drew with strips of cloth that indicate the four points of the compass. Migrating animals in all forms would subsequently continue to recur in his work: he introduced shells from horseshoe crabs and turtles as ready-mades in his sculptures and made migratory birds an important motif in his drawings. A certain relativizing and acceptance also lurks behind the many references to migrating animals. Uprooting and displacement are unavoidable natural phenomena and are part of the human condition as well, Brey seems to be saying. We are not alone, and that is a comfort, however meager.
Meanwhile, a product of various cultures himself, Brey in different works explored the theme of the interaction between diverse civilizations. For example, in an installation at the Galleria Civica in Modena in 1996 he played his own mixed background off against the cultural traditions of his host country. In the installation he combined 250 kilos of chocolate with a saxophone and a rusty sewer pipe. The materials worked visually against one another in an amazing manner and pointed to a unique cross-pollination. The saxophone, for example, turns out to be a 19th-century invention of the instrument-maker of Belgian origin, Adolphe Sax. However, the instrument only much later achieved fame as part of the Afro-American jazz tradition. Until a few years ago Sax graced the 200-Belgian-frank banknote—along with Charlie Parker, who had no relation at all with that country. In a similar manner, cacao, the most important ingredient of the famous Belgian chocolate, appears not to have been discovered in Belgium but originally came from Central America.
The recalcitrant aesthetic of Brey’s work is directly connected with the existential choice of themes. All the objects that he employs in his sculptures and installations are soiled and carry the traces of human use or animal presence. The “remains of civilizations” look like they were gathered from the street and appear as if they had been used by vagabonds. Similarly, Brey’s drawings exude an air of decay. In his drawings he works with materials and techniques that are as fleeting and vulnerable as life itself. Thus he uses earth-colored pigment powder that he binds by dampening the paper. Creation and destruction, writing and erasing, go hand in hand in the drawings that Brey produced in the second half of the 1990s. In these drawings he was inspired by palimpsests: manuscripts from which the original writing has been erased in order that something new could be written. Brey created poetic as well as violent collages with delicate 17th-century Flemish manuscripts. He cut them up and covered them with drawing, over-painted them or made them damp so that the ink bled. Brey combined the manuscripts with delicate drawings of silver- and gold-colored fish which also imply transience. Like most of the other animals that Brey draws they often represent not much more than a shadow or skeleton, and are more spirit than flesh. X-rays, the shroud of Turin and fish and insect fossils served as inspiration for the work.
Transience also resounds in the title of an important sculpture from 2000: Signs in the dust. The title refers to a Yoruba ceremony in which the priests make fleeting signs with a magical substance on a plate. The sculpture marked a new development in Brey’s work: for the first time he used a vitrine to mark the borders of a spatial work. The choice of such an emphatic frame was a reaction against the “anarchistic” installations that he had created in the 1990s and which had run rampant through the whole space. These had inspired many among the younger generations of Western and non-Western artists. When such “wild” installations were threatening to become his trademark, Brey chose an ostensibly conventional manner of presentation in order to play with the expectations of the art public. In the vitrines he showed predominantly animal remains, and he parodied—just as he had done in his early faux manuscripts—the conventions of presentations in natural history and ethnographic museums. Unlike his earlier installations these presented an explicit slice of reality, a microcosm that recalled all of life. Signs in the dust consists of a large vitrine with a flayed skin of a male lion, that is laid “to sleep” by the artist on a pillow and covered by a duvet. A small fan that makes the whiskers of the lion tremble and a hole in the bottom of the vitrine through which the creature’s tale hangs down—a mild desecration of this king of beasts—represent typical Brey details. The sculpture is connected with a story by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who reflected on what it means to have a black skin. As a parable he posited that a lion doesn’t need to announce himself: “from his spoor men can recognize his presence.” Brey recognized himself in Soyinka’s argument. What interests him are questions of cultural origin and identity, not skin color.
Around the same time that Brey introduced vitrines, fundamental changes also occurred in his works on paper. What for more than a decade had remained subordinate to sculptures and installations now reclaimed a central place within his activities as an artist. Since the beginning of the 1990s Brey had drawn on the same kind of Fabriano paper with a format of 70 by 100 cm. To free himself from that pattern he began in 1999-2000 to vary the dimensions and weight of the paper. Finally he decided to work with the largest formats of cardboard he could find, and he returned to painting. He still considered painting on cloth to be “too artistic” and on cardboard he could work more directly with the material. The paintings that Brey then began to produce are also in a certain sense sculptural with their many collage elements and their thick layers of material. The rough collages are made out of large images of stones, bones and desert landscapes, taken from old travel journals and geological and paleontological essays. With drawn and painted additions such as Kongo crosses he gave the layered images extra depth and perspective. He mixed the paint into a thick mortar with volcanic- and desert-sand, small stones or horse- and wildebeest-hair. Gradually he filled almost the entire surface of his paintings with such muddy clods. One of the first occasions on which he showed his paintings was during the exhibition Terrestrial Impact Structures in the Lumen Travo gallery in Amsterdam. The title refers to geological jargon for the crashing of objects into the earth’s surface. That was no accident: in the paintings Brey performed a sort of artistic form of archeology. By mapping the earth in an associative manner he tried to gain knowledge of our common origins, our collective history and our place in the world. The works refer to various geological and natural-historical phenomena. Thus there are paintings about floods and the Flood, on meteorite strikes, on evolutionary stages of the earth and the extinction of species of animals, on scientific expeditions and crusades in the desert and even on the star of Bethlehem. In the series of works Brey combined the thematic from Sobre la tierra with his new interest in the ideas of such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin and Rupert Sheldrake, in which the underlying coherence among natural phenomena plays a central role. Just like in his installations, in his works on paper Brey began to create puzzle-like biotopes in which everything is mutually connected and is transient.
As a reaction to the large-size matter-paintings, the artist began a series of small-format drawings in December 2002. They varied in size from 3 by 5 to 30 by 40 cm.; most were no bigger than a human hand. Only six months later he completed the 1000th drawing in the series, the number he had set as a goal at the beginning. He gave the series the overarching title Universe. Together the drawings formed a universe with their own laws and their own plant- and animal-world. The idea for such a cosmos was inspired in part by Borges’ tale Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The protagonist in this story finds various indications that another universe parallel to ours exists. Paraphrasing Borges, Brey wrote: “My intention was to create a fragment of the history as big and methodic as possible of an imaginary place, with its architectures, its mythology, its oceans, minerals, birds, fishes and floods”. There was much irony present in Brey’s absurd, doomed-to-fail attempt to contain the universe in 1000 drawings. Already before he began his Sisyphean labor it was established that no matter how hard he worked he could never create an entire cosmos with all its details. Universe seems therefore, in the first place, to concern the impossibility of describing the world. In the miniature drawings Brey combined assemblage, drawing and painting in hybridic forms. Universe represents not only the description of a fictional cosmos but also an encyclopedia of the most diverse materials and techniques. Completely in accord with the natural-historical principles that drove his efforts, the artist initially arranged the drawings in a quasi-scientific way in 26 numbered and thematic archive boxes. Thus there are boxes devoted to birds, fish, and plants but also to floods and the Cambrian period. In due course the drawings will be shown in freer association in dozens of horizontal vitrines. Not resting on his laurels Brey again followed up his mega-project. In re-counting box 20 it turned out that a calculation error had been made and that his universe in actuality already contained more than 1000 drawings. In order not to violate the strict restrictions that he had set for himself and because there still remained unused possibilities, he began what he modestly called the Annex: a no less megalomaniacal “supplement” to the Universe. At the time of this writing the ensemble already numbers around 600 sheets and will finally probably consist of exactly 900 works on paper and a group of sculptures.
The Universe and the Annex represent complementary bodies, which at the same time can be considered independent units. In this regard Brey draws parallels from comparable examples in literature. For example, the Italian writer Umberto Eco added an essay as a postscript to his famous novel The Name of the Rose. Just like the Universe and the Annex, they can be read independently of each other but together they generate extra mutual meaning. Whereas the Universe provides a detailed description of an imaginary parallel universe, the Annex goes into the exemplary theme of flight. The constituent parts of this “supplement” vary more strongly among each other in terms of format, and unlike in the miniature universe they carry predominantly scientific texts about nature. The Annex shows chiefly birds, but there are also sections dedicated to dragonflies and angels. For Brey there is nothing mechanical or technological about flight. There are no references to airplanes; in one group of drawings he even has birds consciously pass over industrial areas. Completely in line with his previous work, flying is for Brey a mythic activity that is bound up with migration and existential questions about freedom and our origins. The Annex forces us to recall Brey’s sculptures on the theme of Icarus.
In addition to being projects in their own right, the Universe and the Annex function in Brey’s oeuvre as study objects, as a sort of Duchampian boîtes-en-valise to evaluate the previous work and to recalibrate it in new objects. Thus there arose new autonomous sculptures which are thematically related to the Annex, including a hat rack with an old African ritual garment (Hanging around, 2004). Moreover, Brey has recently begun to carve in wood again. As part of the Annex he produced mythic wooden birds’ heads, which are connected in form and theme to the drawings. In a similar fashion in 2003 the artist combined the achievements from the matter-paintings and the Universe together in a vitrine that refers to the legend of the unicorn. The dreamy title of the sculpture, Wrap your troubles in dreams, borrowed from a jazz song by Charles Mingus, is programmatic for Brey’s work as a whole. The vitrine contains a hundred painted collages with images of landscapes arranged in irregular piles. These are crowned by an oryx horn and small groups of dice. Two years earlier Brey had already made a tower of dice, which was also called Universe. The sculpture, like his large paintings on cardboard, was related to his new interest in quantum physics and chaos theories. In these theories the evolution of the cosmos represents the sum total of random factors. Chance as an ordering principle already long played a role in Brey’s work as a counterweight to artistic certainties.
Just as everything is mutually connected in the universe that Brey calls forth so does everything within his own work fit together like a puzzle. Recent works like the large paintings on cardboard, the Universe and the Annex are directly related to the faux manuscripts of some twenty years earlier, Sobre le tierra, the sculptures and the installations. They are all concerned with curiosity and the way in which we approach reality cognitively. Just like the explorers from his earlier works he is engaged in mapping the world. Natural-scientific and mythic thinking always go together for him. Neither one independently is in a position to describe reality conclusively, he seems to be suggesting. Scientific enterprise is in no way the value-free activity it pretends to be (Von Humboldt) and because of its complexity reality will always escape classification and remain a myth for us (Universe, Annex). In typical Latin American fashion he allows in his work apparently irreconcilable viewpoints on the world to exist next to each other—just as in his bricolages which allow for the most diverse associations and where meanings are constantly shifting in transcultural dialogues. Without denying the achievements of modern science Brey takes refuge in myths because they touch on the timeless vital questions about our origin, identity and destiny. He is an outstanding representative of a trend that the American art critic Suzi Gablik once characterized as “The Reenchantment of Art”: the restoring of amazement over everyday things and the mythologizing of things again in a time when a coolly mechanical, scientific approach to reality seems to provide the only remaining image of the world. And just as Gablik argues in her book of the same name, for Brey this process is accompanied by a new consciousness of community-feeling and ecology.
Brey continues to make use of the originally literary stylistic device of “collective anonymity” that he employed in his early work. Whereas in his early work he reflected on his own place in the history of the Caribbean, now he chooses a still broader perspective and studies nothing less than the manner by which we relate to each other and to the universe. “What fascinates me is the origin of the human race, our culture and our society. It is from the relationship between different life forms and between the communities of earlier and today that we can deduce the state of the present world. We can learn from our evolutionary past and thus consider our current condition critically. From a global approach man can emphasize the underlying connection between everything around us”, Brey stated in 2002. Paradoxically enough, he relativized all human pride with apparently megalomaniacal projects such as the Universe. By showing that we represent but a minuscule cog in the history of the earth not much more remains for us except the “consciousness of being a bread crumb on the skirt of the universe”, to quote the Dutch poet Lucebert. In this way Brey reaches a certain consciousness of connection to the world and among all mankind—we have a common evolutionary origin and are now all at the mercy of the natural elements and the gods. With this collective orientation Brey’s work is always “social sculpture”: with his art based on solidarity he builds bridges between people and cultures, and he calls to mind the troubled relationship between mankind and nature. From his work there speaks a compassion toward us wandering wretches in a universe full of uncertainties. Brey creates physical and mental worlds in which nothing is fixed, where introspection is encouraged and space left for imagination. There drama is alternated with irony, profundity with frivolity, culture with nature, science with myth, order with chaos, idyll with apocalypse. In short, a mythic universe that is just as strange as our everyday reality.
The metaphysical image of the world that emerges from Brey’s work is as vitalistic and melancholy as the jazz to which he so often refers. He called this book “Under the Leaves”, after the Hagakure, the 18th-century Japanese book that outlined the code of honor of the samurai. Brey creates visual poetry in order to capture existence in all its facets. His work, the sediment of the intensity of life, is fermenting, fertile humus for the spirit.
Roel Arkestijn
MEMORIA Y UTOPIA
THE STUDIO, A REBOURS
A very large room, connected directly to the flat in which he lives in Gent, in the heart of Belgium, in the heart of Europe: he moved here over a decade ago from his birthplace in Havana. Order and disorder within, like in his work: shreds of the world, scraps of its appearance and apparitions, tools which might be part of a work of art, tortoise shells and eagle feathers. There are two large tables, one covered in white cardboard boxes of various sizes yet laid out with care, the other with a stack of sheets of paper featuring large drawings, indecipherable but for the odd fragment: clearly drawings they are, but as of yet they remain unidentifiable. With the greatest of care, the boxes (numbered I to XXVI and entitled “El Universo”) are opened. Herein lies the last heroic toil and joy of Ricardo Brey: a thousand sheets of paper and card which bring together not only his entire poetics, but rather his entire approach to art as an ongoing process, a fluid relationship between himself and the world, between the individual and history, between the past and the future. Art is seen as an eternal present insofar as it stands witness to the relationships created between the artist and the collective/individual memory, in which the artist is par excellence the instrument through which memory is transformed into utopia, forever closing and reopening the circle of time. The artist is the means by which the thinking of the times is shaped and visualised in two apparently conflicting but, in actual fact, complementary ways. On one hand, the artist needs images from the world; on the other, s/he creates a language which adds other images to the world, continually juxtaposing, overlaying or simply alternating these two forms of expression as necessary as well as, in certain cases, the suggestions offered by the images or by plain experience. The paradox thus lies in pretending to impose order on all of this, as if it were possible to lay the world to order, to become living encyclopaedias, to know that after the last page, after the last drawing, we will have to add another one and then yet another and so on… This is the world and the infinite links to its images: the notion of putting an end to this chain is simply self-illusion yet, at the same time, it is that which sets apart the artist from the rest of the world.
The boxes are closed once more and set down next to the large table, which is now used to bear the weight of the other sheets so as to reveal exactly how Brey came to imagine the world on a thousand sheets of paper.
“With non-orthodox conceptual tools, paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges rather than Joseph Kosuth, I attempted the reconstruction of the pages of Humboldt’s diary, trying to find a balance between cold, scientific analysis and the beauty of the object studied”. With these words, in 1992, Ricardo Brey ended a brief description of his work: “Humboldt’s Diary” (1982). A seminal work in every sense, which goes some way to supporting what Bart De Baere stated with regard to his work several years ago: “The first impression might be that he is an installation maker. In fact the main reference for him might be drawing, and secondarily sculpture”. Being an artist who has always operated along the borderlines, on the outer boundaries of expressive languages, this characteristic of Brey’s has shown through right from the start. The work dedicated to Humboldt is at the same time installation and drawing; it interacts both with the surface space and real space. It thus cannot be pigeonholed under a ready-made technical definition, but overall it is clearly a work rooted for the most part in drawing or rather in a wider reflection on the themes of marking, writing, and describing things through images. And yet the very difficulties in classifying this work within a clearly structured technical framework highlight its expressive peculiarities and underline its poetic foundations since the entire work is basically an ongoing perpetual shift away from a thought, from a definition to its opposite. It is a work dedicated to a scientist, though interpreted as a work of art. It is a work dedicated to the Other, but the Other is represented both by the New World as described by the naturalist as much as by the naturalist interpreted by an inhabitant of the New World. It is a work based on writing although even this is contradicted by its cancellation or “another” form of writing. Hence, despite the very simplicity of the means and the language adopted (or perhaps by virtue of it), “Humboldt’s Diary” is the best representation of Brey’s approach to the mechanisms of artistic creation, which takes place on various levels contemporarily: that of the language, that of the image, that of the theoretical reflection and that of pure wonderment. Furthermore, at the same time it introduces two elements which are to prove constant in the successive development of his poetics: the first is the awareness of science, or rather, the study of nature, the variety of worldly forms in a logic that considers the life of nature, the life of man and the life of forms to be tightly and inseparably bound together in a ceaseless process of osmosis and – perhaps even more so – one of ceaseless metamorphosis. The second element is that of cataloguing as a cognitive method which, on one hand, provides Brey with the chance to impose order onto chaos, or rather to find his way towards a rational understanding of the links which exist between different things, between different worldly guises. On the other hand, it may be seen as a rhetorical device given that we are dealing with a procedure that envelops the contradiction of itself (and it is by no chance that Brey quotes Borges, who based the most part of his ingenious narrative intuitions on this principle). Like in an antique picture, the space and figures within it are identified and sketched in immediately, after which the details may be added and – perhaps – the clouds.
CADA COSA...THE BIRDS, FOR EXAMPLE
“The Structure of Myth” (1985) is also based on a similar form, but from the mid ‘80s onwards, Brey’s work started to undergo important developments which would lead the artist to work continuously and with greater conviction firmly in the field of installation art, involving even the surrounding space in the creation of and the thinking behind his works. These are the years in which Brey’s poetics would reach maturity: his drawing was to take on a new role, less central than before, yet more autonomous and thus destined to develop further in the coming years. The large-scale installation “Cada cosa sagrada...” (1989) is emblematic of this: together with the explicit references to the native culture and mythologies of Cuba (naturally with allusions to their African roots) as well as the use (destined to become a regular feature) of fragments of daily life - in turn interpreted as a potential source of inspiration. Yet a prominent role is also given to the work on paper, represented here by the long procession of birds cut into the strip of paper which occupies the entire exhibition space. Of course, in this case, the paper is folded to fit the installation space, and the constant repetition of the same image makes it clear that this is not a paper-based work with its own expressive features; the relationship between the painted (or rather, scored) surface and the objects, its function as a trait d’union between the various elements which make up the work clearly demonstrates not only how Brey places the notion of the work on paper in a central role within his poetics, but how he feels that it now requires a new approach, a new conceptual as well as functional formulation. As a matter of fact, if one looks carefully, there is even a formal hint in this direction which outlines the importance this piece has in the evolution of the artist’s work. The cords that run from the clump of bushes at the far-left end connecting all the different elements of the installation may be interpreted on one hand as signs traced physically in space (Brey always attributes a formal value to objects , they may be used as palette and brush as dictated by the work in question). On the other hand, these cords are to make their return (using a different material but with the same ultimate meaning) in a long series of works in the years to come from 1991 onwards (as may be seen, by way of historic documentation, in a photograph taken at the exhibition held at the Galerie Baronian in Brussels later that year). They are to make their final and in some ways conclusive appearance in the powerful yet highly delicate musical (in the broadest sense of the term) installation held at the Kunstverein in Salzburg in 1997 as a sort of decoration, imaginary staves running along the walls with a sense of continuity which derives from that very element repeated, as if the cords, the ribbons were symbolically freed of the task of binding, holding together which is in their nature, or at least, insofar as this is the use made of them in day to day life. Those first ropes, the paints invading the room at Kassel and the symbols which fill the papers during the ‘90s are in fact closer than they may appear at first sight.
LIKE AN BESTIARY
It was at the same time as Ricardo Brey uprooted to Europe that his drawing began to take on strong autonomous connotations which were to grow over the years to culminate in the “El Universo” project, the fruit of a decade of research and a warehouse of possible ideas and hypothetical projects for the future. These connotations went hand in hand with Brey’s heightened public recognition as one of the leading figures on the international artistic scene: recognition which came from the inclusion of his installations and sculptures in several of the most prestigious events and exhibition spaces, especially in Europe. Thus his works on paper constitute a kind of parallel activity, far less visible than his installations and sculptures, almost (as this means always has been throughout history) a field of private research in which ideas and forms mature at different, slower rates than those imposed by exhibition deadlines. The sheets produced by the artist roughly between ’91 and ’98 show a strong unity both in style and in images, and may generally be considered as a place of reflection, of musing over a specific part of his poetics: the antithesis of the immediacy, the expressive drive and the accumulation of suggestions and materials which characterised the great installations held in Kassel, Gent, Modena and Paris in the same period. It should be pointed out here that these are not outlines or sketches: his drawings are an end to themselves, and form the basis of his work not in the sense of the planning stage, but insofar as it constitutes the visualisation and solidification of a thought using a particular set of tools which, in order to be effective, needs to maintain close ties both with the technical side and the historical one. In fact drawing, paper-based works, clarifies a characteristic which in Brey’s space-based works can only be guessed at by analogy: the relationship between the present and the past, between current and historical events. And by bending this interpretation slightly, between the use of the culture, the images and the objects which belong to a fairly bland reality and the use of a series of models and techniques which belong to a more noble tradition. For simplicity’s sake, one might use the words “high” culture above or alongside a “low” culture, though well aware that such terms risk appearing obsolete due to the immoderate and irrelevant use that has been made of them. At any rate, there exists no drawing of any of the many sculptures and installations which Brey created throughout the ’90s (and this fact should also make us reflect on the very nature of these works). However, there are many sheets, generally 70cm by 100cm (that is, a standard measure) on which an extraordinarily skilled hand, clearly versed in the art of drawing in the most classical (though not academic) sense of the word, creates images, figures and signs which make up the creative universe of the artist and which take us back to the ideological basis of his work, which is not one of iconography, but one of thought. I believe it is by no chance, however, that the sheets chosen for this volume make up a sort of bestiary, an imaginary zoo in which technical skill, compositional ability and the power of imagination are brought together and expressed through an elementary and deliberately small number of instruments, honed down to the bare minimum. (Brey considers the space of the sheet as an absolute space: limited in its size but not in its sensory reach. From this point of view, it runs parallel to the “real” space which his installations inhabit, although in this case, it is a space which feels the effects not of an individual but of a collective history: that of all the white sheets that have been used over the centuries in order to give life to certain images through the use of certain instruments.) Fish and other sea creatures, birds appear mostly on a white background, often two at a time, like traces, shrouds of a presence which evoke memories of a distant past while, at the same time, embodying the persistence of that past, keeping it alive and, most importantly, loading it with meaning. The importance of the animal figure as the bearer of meaning within Brey’s works has already been commented on many times. In the folios from the ‘90s it goes as far as to become the poetic fulcrum, the raison d’être of the work itself, free from relationships with the rest of the world or with the other images of the world. Of course, there is still the ‘80s background of reflections on cataloguing, on the links between scientific and artistic methods: there is still Humboldt’s diary working below the surface. But what is most important and surprising about this series of works is that Brey sits down in front of a plain sheet (and in front of nature) with an attitude which seems to have swept away any need for intellectual or historical self-justification. With his bare hands (and a clear mind) Brey turns himself into an imaginary Humboldt, creator of a series of animal drawings each with a tale to tell insofar as they are fruit of journeys undertaken by the hand or the mind into the most diverse areas of knowledge and time. The reconstruction and reinvention of the world and of history are no longer notions which require a running commentary or even an intellectual elaboration (which has already taken place even before the paints or pencils come into contact with the sheet); it is proof of creation, the skill of the hand which shapes a thought so bound up in the world, its evolution and its images, that it no longer needs anything else. Up to the point in which the chimera is no longer an imaginary animal but one of the inhabitants of a world which exists insofar as it is a possible world: real by virtue of being imaginable, concrete by virtue of having been thought of and given form. It does not matter where or when – space and time are extremely relative concepts – since everything (reality and fiction, past and future, mind and hand) may now at last be held together.
ARCHEOLOGY AFTER THE FLOOD
The years 1999-2000 marked an important period in Brey’s creative career: his participation in the Venice Biennial in the exhibition “Trattenendosi”, the exhibition at the Paris Galerie Xippas, and his presence at “3 Raume 3 Flusse” in Germany helped to further define his role within the contemporary artistic panorama, yet at the same time, these events demonstrated the difficulties of the art world in accepting such a powerful personality so unwilling to go through the motions of the contemporary scene, to play the game of the endlessly vacuous passages from one fashion to the next without any reason but that of the functional visibility of the system itself and the tedious perpetuation of its own rites and myths. Testimony to this atypical situation is Brey’s almost total absence from the frequent exhibitions on the theme of “non-western” cultures, on the more or less speculatory third-worldists who have taken to the exhibition circuits over the last decade. His absence is a startling oversight if it is true that Brey was partly responsible for the rebirth of Cuban art nearly 20 years ago, and if it is true (which it is) that several of his poetic insights have benefited more than one of the (younger) protagonists of the very shows from which Brey himself is missing. On the other hand, the artist’s refusal to be “pigeonholed” in what is a fundamentally post-colonial logic (despite being carefully concealed behind a politically correct marketing campaign) demonstrates Brey’s level-headedness in his analysis of the environment he finds himself in and, at the same time, puts him in a position (paradoxically though not necessarily negatively) of extreme freedom, allowing him to carry out his research without external conditioning. This condition has spawned two series of paper-based works over the last few years: the first (roughly from 1999 to 2001) is characterised by iconography strongly linked to anthropology and archaeology; the second (started in 2001 and still at the development stage) offers a form of iconography more closely linked to the natural state – often an explicitly landscape vista. The trait d’union between the two series is clearly represented by the material which invades the surface, which alters the very sense of the paper, making it heavy, physically perceptible, almost as if an object. It also alters the sense of the image, hiding it, covering it, at times leaving only a few fragments in view; in other cases, it stresses its formal or evocative aspects, turning the sheet into a pulsating energy field, into a land (and there is a sense of earth in this work, the meaning of which cannot be missed) on which certain events happen or have already happened. Where the space was previously characterised by the white of the sheet of paper, now the dominating colours are tar black or muddy grey; where the clarity of the line turned the image into a stroke of magic, unbound by time and space, now the debris that settles on the surface give the image the look of the testimony of yesteryear, like a stubborn persistence of vision which refuses to disappear even after the flood, like a testimony of the past which opens in an extreme gesture of optimism onto the future. In these tables it is no longer a question of reconstruction or reinvention of the world; it is rather one of the existence of the world, of the search for a meaning which in danger of being lost forever, amongst the imaginary images and real tragedies. As usual in Brey’s works, both the choice of images and their reproduction are not governed by chance, but meet extremely precise requirements of communication and sense. The tables taken from scientific works of an archaeological or anthropological nature lead us back to the need for cataloguing, the need not only to come to terms with history, but to understand how much of the past belongs to an eternal human condition and is thus, in a certain sense, unchangeable; that is, how much certain forms (and the thought mechanisms behind them) belong to humanity independently from the times and places in which they were conceived. This is the moment of reflection, a further attempt to achieve mental order in the midst of the surrounding chaos, and which more than anything else, through this reflection on the past, lets us open our minds beyond the here and now, and stops us being overwhelmed by our obsession with the present which seems to dominate our current perception of reality. The photographs of the desert, on the other hand, call on the more lyrical aspects of Brey’s poetics, his unquenched and unquenchable thirst for dreams, his concept of artistic creation which feeds off the partial lack of consciousness, where reality and fantasy coexist and produce images featuring elements of both states: that of the dream world and that of the waking world, that of reason and that of reverie. Of course, it is the flood, but it is also Bethlehem; it’s a river of sludge which seems to wash away every possible hope. But there are also three bamboo leaves which appear as if by magic on the surface of one of the most lyrical and touching folios of this series. These are not simply symbolic shapes, but the very essence of an apparent fragility destined to resist any form of violence against them. In other words, it is a total immersion in nature over on the other side of history, but not the other side of the symbols, the figures, the utopias which man has built over the course of history. Everything in these folios rings out, shifts from one image to the next, from a flint stone to a laurel leaf, from the page of a scientific treatise to a photograph of an unknown place, from a stone to an ink stain, in a continuous flow of thoughts and gestures. Where the choice of an object entails the choice of a sign, neither of them are left to chance. But their relationship may give life to an unexpected form or a thought which perhaps existed somewhere else: in our mind or in our world, in our past or in our future. Images which give forth to sounds, sounds which give forth to words, words which give forth to thoughts, thoughts which give forth to dreams, even after the flood, from generation to generation…
THE STUDIO, A DEDICATION
This text is dedicated to Bianca and Paula, who laughed and played in Ricardo’s studio in Gent, January 2004.
Walter Guadagnini
