1955 saw France enter a new age. The SNCF set a new world record for electric train speed (331km/h) and the Citroën DS was launched at the Paris motor show. That year marked the end of the allied occupation of West Germany and the restoration of Austrian sovereignty. In the arts, Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita was published in Paris by the Olympia Press and Notre Dame du Haut, a masterpiece of Le Corbusier’s late style, was dedicated in Ronchamp. And, towards the year’s end, the twenty-eight-year-old Cuban sculptor Agustín Cárdenas arrived in France on a scholarship, settling in Montparnasse, which had made itself the headquarters of the artistic avant-garde during the 1920s and 30s.
Cárdenas was born in 1927 in the port town of Mantanzas, on Cuba’s northern shoreline. During the early nineteenth century, the region had been a major centre for the sugar industry and consequently a significant destination for African slaves: by the middle of the nineteenth century slaves constituted more than 60 percent of the population. As a result of this process of forced migration, Mantanzas went on to emerge as a centre of Afro–Cuban culture (dance music such as the rumba, for example, which fuses African and Spanish influences, is generally said to have originated from the region). Cárdenas traces his own ancestry to slaves from Senegal and the Congo. The son of a renowned tailor, he studied art at Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, the oldest fine-art school in Latin America (founded in 1818 by the French painter Jean-Baptiste Vermay). Having enrolled at the age of sixteen, he studied under the celebrated Cuban sculptor Juan José Sicre, who, having trained in Madrid, had done much to bring the European modern style to Cuba, and graduated in 1949. In 1955 Cárdenas had a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana, before departing for France at Christmas, a little short of one year before the exiled Fidel Castro returned to Cuba to begin the final phase of his revolution against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista
1955 saw France enter a new age. The SNCF set a new world record for electric train speed (331km/h) and the Citroën DS was launched at the Paris motor show. That year marked the end of the allied occupation of West Germany and the restoration of Austrian sovereignty. In the arts, Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita was published in Paris by the Olympia Press and Notre Dame du Haut, a masterpiece of Le Corbusier’s late style, was dedicated in Ronchamp. And, towards the year’s end, the twenty-eight-year-old Cuban sculptor Agustín Cárdenas arrived in France on a scholarship, settling in Montparnasse, which had made itself the headquarters of the artistic avant-garde during the 1920s and 30s.
Cárdenas was born in 1927 in the port town of Mantanzas, on Cuba’s northern shoreline. During the early nineteenth century, the region had been a major centre for the sugar industry and consequently a significant destination for African slaves: by the middle of the nineteenth century slaves constituted more than 60 percent of the population. As a result of this process of forced migration, Mantanzas went on to emerge as a centre of Afro–Cuban culture (dance music such as the rumba, for example, which fuses African and Spanish influences, is generally said to have originated from the region). Cárdenas traces his own ancestry to slaves from Senegal and the Congo. The son of a renowned tailor, he studied art at Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, the oldest fine-art school in Latin America (founded in 1818 by the French painter Jean-Baptiste Vermay). Having enrolled at the age of sixteen, he studied under the celebrated Cuban sculptor Juan José Sicre, who, having trained in Madrid, had done much to bring the European modern style to Cuba, and graduated in 1949. In 1955 Cárdenas had a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana, before departing for France at Christmas, a little short of one year before the exiled Fidel Castro returned to Cuba to begin the final phase of his revolution against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista
All of which is to say that Cárdenas arrived in France not as some unformed, marginal or alien other (albeit his work was absolutely unknown in Europe at the time of his arrival in Paris), but as an artist who had already absorbed the influences of a wide-ranging collection of indigenous, colonial and colonised cultures: he was the prototype of today’s global citizen. And in this sense he was as modern as Notre Dame du Haut or the fastest electric train.
However, despite the mix of cultures to which the artist was exposed in Cuba, early works, such as the bronze sculpture La Negra (1947), created during the period of Cárdenas’s studies, demonstrate that the synthesis of ethnic subjectivities, classical form and more contemporary elastic lines was as much a struggle as it was harmonious: in La Negra each of these elements is distinguishable precisely because it is not completely (or, in aesthetic terms, invisibly) integrated with the others. In this way, the work can be seen to reveal the ways in which such a mix – a combination of aesthetics (classical pose, a physiognomy that was then celebrated for its connections to ‘primitive’ and African sculpture and flowing limbs suggestive of fluid form) that parallels the mixture of influences from which Cuban national identity was being assembled – is constructed rather than innate. Three years later, these tendencies would be more clearly revealed, and to some extent resolved, in the bronze La Femme au Chewing Gum, in which the more essentialised biomorphic forms that would characterise Cárdenas’s later work start to emerge. In La Femme au Chewing Gum a woman uses her body to sculpt the gum, just as her body has been formed by the body of the artist: she is at once subject and object. Her voluminous form is captured in an instant of extreme shapeliness and just as extreme shapelessness as she steps forward into a moment suggestive of self-consciousness, self-creation and self-identity: the gum that stretches from her hand to her mouth proposes the whole to be an ouroboros – a subject to which the artist returned in works such as Fer à repasser (1956) – constantly shaping and reshaping itself, consuming and excreting in a primal flow that is an endless loop of creation. In many ways, La Femme au Chewing Gum (whose form and flow would also find direct echoes in works such as the 1974 abstract bronze Bouba, for example, or the 1979 Fleur éveillée) sets out the series of material and intellectual concerns that Cárdenas would work with for the rest of his long career.
The Paris of which Cárdenas was now a part was one in which Pan-African, négritude1 and anticolonial movements were beginning to flourish. Indeed, despite the cosmopolitan influences of his formative years, Cárdenas would note that it was here that he first became truly conscious of his négritude. The First Conference of Negro Writers and Artists (staged to promote both the cultural independence of African cultures and their coexistence with the West) took place in Paris in September 1956 and resolved that ‘artists, writers, scholars, theologians, thinkers and technicians participate in the historic task of unearthing, rehabilitating and developing [Negro] cultures so as to facilitate their being integrated into the general body of world cultures’2. At the conference, the Martiniquais poet (and both theoriser of decolonisation and founding father of the négritude movement) Aimé Césaire imagined a ‘new civilization’ that would ‘owe something to Europe and to native civilization’3. To an extent, Cárdenas was the perfect embodiment of this vision, although ‘native civilisation’ should properly be pluralised in his case, to encompass both Native American and African influences. Given that, it is no surprise that Cárdenas’s contemporary and Césaire’s countryman, the poet Édouard Glissant (for whom Césaire had been an important inspiration) became one of the Cuban’s great champions. ‘It’s not enough to say that Cárdenas is Cuban, of American stock…’ Glissant wrote, attempting to parse the artist’s complex heritage, elsewhere asking viewers to marvel at ‘how he assembles the memory of the future’4.
Yet, however much Cárdenas was ahead of his time, it was a key figure from art’s recent past, André Breton, anticolonialist and celebrated founder of Surrealism, who became one of the Cuban’s most prominent champions. Shortly after the latter’s arrival in Paris, Breton invited Cárdenas to participate in a Surrealist exhibition (the first of several in which the artist took part) at L’Étoile scellée gallery in 1956. In the Cuban’s work, the Frenchman saw a reconnection between human hand and the ‘hand’ of nature in an age of increasing industrialisation and commercialisation, and he saw a relation between materials and ideas that allowed an almost animist magic to persist in a world of utility and functionality: an age dominated by what Breton described as ‘the monster of technological progress’5. There is a sense, of course, that Breton’s view of Cárdenas is encased within the Frenchman’s own agendas and cultural relativism, in which a sense of both the exotic and what was then called ‘the primitive’ (key to Cárdenas work is that there is no such dichotomy between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’, however much elements of both may be formally traceable) play a part. Equally, there is a sense that Breton was subject to a more widespread fetish for the anthropological and ethnographical that dominated artistic practice in Europe during the early years of the twentieth century and more particularly (and problematically) as its colonial empires began to fall apart. Yet Breton’s ability to connect in these ways to the work of the younger man is also testament to the openness and universal qualities of the Cuban’s oeuvre, which would lead in turn to his work being exhibited all over the world, and to the artist working in countries as varied as Canada, Austria, Japan, Israel and Korea.
That’s not to say, of course, that Cárdenas’s work is not in conscious dialogue with art from the past or his immediate surroundings. His sculpture offers a clear formal dialogue with generation of European sculptors that includes Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp and Henry Moore; just as much as it does with Dogon sculpture (most self-consciously in the black-marble totem Dogon, 1971) and various American traditions. The enduring interest of Cárdenas’s work is that it reflects all and none of those things at one and the same time. As José Pierre, the leading authority on Surrealism and a constant champion of Cárdenas’s work (Pierre was the first critic to write about it) wrote in 1962: 'Cárdenas, indeed, figures among the small number of modern sculptors who, at an equal distance from academic routine and from falling into line with contemporary pictorial upheavals, have elected to inscribe their work under the sign of a fully assumed lyric decision. With them – Brancusi, Pevsner, Arp, Giacometti, Calder and a very few others – sculpture truly invents its own answers'6.
Take the totemic bronze Mon Ombre après Minuit (1963), a work that from its title through to its black and white colouring plays with notions of projected image and self-image, natural creation and human construction. The work begins with a contradictory proposition: outside of urban areas, a shadow should not exist after midnight. Even when it is present, a shadow does not admit to race or skin colour. Here we are presented with an anthropomorphic abstraction in dark metal with white areas suggestive of eyes and teeth, the whole having the appearance of a cartoon monster. The flattened figure has a stretched and etiolated biomorphic form and betrays something of the influence of Dogon sculpture, as well as that fundamental play of sculptural form – between solid and void via material manipulation. The interaction as a whole self-evidently rests on the projections and prejudices that a viewer brings to the work and then see reflected in their reading of Cárdenas’s art.
In his own reading of Cárdenas’s work, Glissant figures the artist’s plays with light and dark, solid and void as a reflection of the natural landscape (Cárdenas was also celebrated for his mastery of a variety of materials, primarily wood, metal and marble, and for his ability to create work from whatever the landscape around him provided) and its elemental forces, primarily the sun7. There’s a sense in which rather than inventing something new (which is in any case impossible from a philosophical or mathematical point of view) Cárdenas maximises the essential nature of what’s already there, be it light and shade, solid and void, a piece of wood or a marble quarry8. Furthermore, Cardenas’s mastery of the natural qualities of his materials allows the intellectual content of his sculptures to flow, mix and interact with all the seamlessness of their admittedly sensual curves and lines.
Above all else, what makes Cardenas’s work as relevant today as it was when it was first shown is its dialectical method. In formal terms works as varied as the 1981 marble Le repos de l’oiseau, the 1975 bronze Naissance, the burnt-wood totem Blanc et noir (1965) or the bronze Le coq (1974), all feature paired entities that caress or entwine with each other in ways that generations of critics have simply celebrated as masterfully ‘erotic’ or otherwise sensual (there are long discourses about the artist’s evident celebration of the ‘female form’), but which also speak to Cardenas’s more general interest in embodying a range of perspectives and influences in his work while emphasising neither contradiction nor separation. This is the memory of the future. And it’s in this sense that Cárdenas, is even today, an artist for our own age. An age in which decolonisation has become a fetish, ideas of any form of universal or global culture anathema, and in which what divides rather than unites us has a tendency to prevail. For Cárdenas authenticity is something you work to create rather than simply inherit.
Mark Rappolt
1. Leymarie, Jean, ‘Cárdenas’, Agustin Cárdenas: Desire and Grace (exh. cat. New York, 2002)
2. Legum, Colin, Pan-Africanism: A short political guide (London, 1962), p.212
3. Quoted in King, Richard H., Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Baltimore, 2004), p.249
4. Quoted in Langui, Emile, ‘Cárdenas, sculpteur exceptionnel’, Cárdenas (exh. cat. Brussels, 1974)
5. Breton, André, untitled catalogue text from 1959, republished in Cárdenas: Sculture, 1947–1997 (Milan, 1997), p.45
6. Pierre, José, Cardenas, or Exactingness and Grace (Paris, 1962)
7. See Glissant, Edouard ‘Le monde Légendaire de Cárdenas’, 1961, republished in Cárdenas: Sculture, 1947–1997 (Milan, 1997), pp. 51-2
8. Glissant recounts the experience of watching Cárdenas creating sculpture from what he found on the ground in Martinique in Le Discours antillais (Paris, 1981), p. 448
奥古斯丁·卡德纳斯
2018年6月5日至7月28日
伦敦
尽管卡德纳斯刚到巴黎时,他的作品还尚未为欧洲人所熟知,但当时的他绝不是一个创作还未成熟、处于边缘地位或脱离了当时的艺术语境的艺术家。此时的他已经充分吸纳了本土的,及殖民主义所带来的和留下的多种文化元素。“世界公民”这个词用在他身上可以说当之无愧,他就跟法国的廊香教堂和高铁一样“现代化”。
尽管艺术家在古巴接受了多种文化的融合,但他早年求学期间的作品——如1947年创作的青铜雕塑《黑人女性》(La Negra)——尽管将多个种族的特性、古典主义形状以及当代艺术多变的线条同时呈现出来,但这些特质仍未和谐共存:在《黑人女性》中,正因为上述元素并没有被完全地(或者用美学的词汇:“无形地”)融合,我们可以轻松地将它们辨认出来。我们因此可以看出,卡德纳斯创作中融合不同的美学形式(经典主义造型、与“原始”及非洲雕塑颇具关联的面孔,以及呈现出流动形态的四肢)的方式,与古巴民族认同感的构建过程如出一辙:它们都是被组构的,而非与生俱来。三年后,这种创作趋势变得更加明显,也更加成熟。例如铜雕《口香糖女人》(La Femme au Chewing Gum)中呈现出的生物形态预示了卡德纳斯晚期作品的典型特征。作品中的女人用她的身体塑造着口香糖,就像她的身体也是被艺术家的身体塑造出来一样地:她既是塑造的主体,又是被塑造的对象。女人丰腴的身体在有形与无形之间游走,呈现出一种暗示了自我意识、自我塑造和自我认同的状态:从她手掌延伸至嘴部的口香糖,如同一条衔尾蛇(ouroboros)一样不断地自我重塑,并且在一种充满了原始力量的循环与往复中,永不停歇地创作,不断地摄入与排出。卡德纳斯后来也多次回归这一概念,例如1956年的作品《烫熨》(Fer à repasser)等。从许多方面而言,《口香糖女人》开启了卡德纳斯日后更成熟的系列创作,这件作品中的形式和韵律感可以在艺术家之后的一些作品中见到,例如1974年的抽象铜雕《布巴》(Bouba),和1979年的《醒来的花朵》( Fleur éveillée)等。卡德纳斯对于材质和智性的关注一直伴随了他之后的创作生涯。
那时候,卡德纳斯所看到的巴黎是一个泛非洲文化、黑人文化以及反殖民运动的中心。1 他在古巴长大的时候受到了来自世界各地的不同文化的影响,可以说直到搬到巴黎,他才第一次真正意识到自己的黑人身份。1956年9月,首次《黑人作家与艺术家会议》在巴黎举行,会议旨在推动非洲文化的独立以及与西方文化的共存,提出:“艺术家、作家、学者、神学家、思想家及技术研究者应当共同参与这个历史性的任务:挖掘、重现与发展(黑人)文化,以此强化这一群体的存在,并促进其融入世界文化2。”在此次会议上,马丁尼克裔诗人(同时也是反殖民的理论家,及黑人运动之父)艾梅·塞泽尔(Aimé Césaire)提出了一种同源于欧洲与原生文明的“新文明”。某种程度上,卡德纳斯完美地代表了这种“新文明”,虽然这其中的“原生文明”应该是复数——因为他的作品中既有美洲原始文化,还有非洲文化的影响3。因此,我们一点也不意外爱德华‧格里桑(Édouard Glissant)——这位与卡德纳斯同时代的、塞泽尔(Césaire)的同乡诗人——会成为古巴最重要和最受尊重的人物之一。“仅以“美洲血统的古巴人”这个说法来定义卡德纳斯并不足以说明他的文化本源......”,格里桑曾如此写道。他试图解析卡德纳斯的复杂文化,让读者认识到卡德纳斯能够在其作品中“聚集关于未来的回忆”4的能力是如此非凡。
然而,无论卡德纳斯如何领先于他的时代,近代艺坛的关键人物、反殖民主义者和著名的超现实主义创始人安德烈·布勒东(André Breton)先受到了古巴人民的推崇。在卡德纳斯抵达巴黎后不久,布勒东邀请他参加1956年在 L'Étoilescellée 画廊举办的超现实主义展览(卡德纳斯之后还受布勒东之邀参加了其他多个展览)。法国人布勒东在这位古巴艺术家的创作中,看到了人的手和自然的“手”之间的再一次结合。在那个日趋工业化和商业化、功能性优先的时代,那个被布勒东称为“技术进步的怪物”5的时代,卡德纳斯作品中物质和思想之间的联系以一种万物有灵似的魔力(animist magic)顽强地存在着。布勒东对卡德纳斯的看法当然与这个法国人自身的追求和文化相对性有关,尤其是“异国的”和当时所称的“原始的”这两个概念(而卡德纳斯作品的核心便是消除“原始”和“现代”的二元相对论,尽管这些元素可以被分别辨别出来。)20世纪初,各大殖民帝国逐渐瓦解,欧洲艺术圈风靡着对人类学和民族学元素近乎恋物癖式的狂热,而这也正是布勒东的思想源头之一。布勒东对于卡德纳斯——这个年轻的古巴艺术家的支持也证明了卡德纳斯作品的开放性与普世性:他的作品后来在世界各地展出,他还去到了加拿大、奥地利、日本、以色列和韩国等地生活和工作。
当然这并不是说卡德纳斯没有与过去的艺术和当时的生态产生对话。事实上,他的雕塑在形式上不仅让人联想到欧洲的雕塑大师们,如康斯坦丁·布朗库西(Constantin Brancusi)、让·阿尔普(Jean Arp)、亨利·摩尔(Henry Moore);还有非洲多贡雕塑(最典型的是他1971年创作的黑色大理石多贡图腾雕像)和多种美洲文化等。我们之所以对卡德纳斯的作品一直保持着浓厚的兴趣是因为它们既呈现了一切,又什么都没有表现。如同超现实主义的主要创始人之一——荷西·皮埃尔(José Pierre,皮埃尔是卡德纳斯的拥护者,也是第一位书写卡德纳斯的艺评家)在1962年写道:“说到卡德纳斯,确实,有一小群现代雕塑家们——他们对学院派和当代视觉艺术潮流都保持着一定的距离——都选择以一种抒情的方式进行创作。因为有布朗库西(Brancusi)、佩夫斯那(Pevsner)、阿尔普(Arp)、贾科梅蒂(Giacometti)和考尔德(Calder)等其他艺术前锋派雕塑家,雕塑才真正地发现了自己新的答案。”6
以《我午夜后的影子》(Mon Ombre après Minuit,1963年)这一图腾式铜雕作品为例,从作品名称到黑色与白色的运用,都体现了艺术家在外在施加的标签与自我认同、自然创造与人为建构等概念之间的探索。这件作品开始于一个矛盾的概念:在郊外,午夜之后应该是没有影子的。即使看见影子,它也不能反映种族或肤色。作品展现了一个拟人化的抽象形象,整体看来甚至有点像是卡通里的怪物:艺术家用黑色金属及白色区域暗示着眼睛与牙齿的存在,扁平化的身形像是一个被拉伸且低垂的生物型态——这一点背离了多贡人形雕塑的特点,以及雕塑创作中通过物质对有形与虚空的探索。整体来说,作品与观众的互动还是建立在观者以自己主观意识为基础的投射与偏见之上。
格里桑如此解读卡德纳斯的作品:他认为它们是光与影、坚实与虚空的游戏,建立在自然景观和大自然的力量,尤其是日光之上(卡德纳斯受人景仰的另一原因,除了他对各种材质的精通——例如木头、金属与大理石等主要媒材外——之外,还有他能将身边的景物化为作品的能力)7。卡德纳斯的目的不在于创新(从哲学上或数学上的观点来看,创新都是不可能的),而是将原先就存在的自然本质提升到最高点,不论它是光影、虚实、木片或一片大理石场8。此外,卡德纳斯精通于发挥材料的自然特性,让他的雕塑蕴含了更加丰富的智性,在性感的曲线之间天衣无缝地交融。
此外,卡德纳斯的作品,因其辩证精神,能够持续地和当代产生交流。从形式上来看,他的许多作品,例如1981年的大理石制雕塑《格罗夫纳山休息,鸟》(Le repos Grosvenor Hill, de l'oiseau)、1975年的铜雕《诞生》(Naissance)、1965年烧制的木头图腾作品《白与黑》(Blanc et noir),及1974年的铜雕《公鸡》(Le coq)等,都塑造了一对互相抚摸,缠绕在一起的形体,让历代的艺评家都简单地把精通“情色”或“肉欲”的表现作为卡德纳斯作品的标志(有许多当时的艺术评论,都关注于卡德纳斯对“女性身形”的颂扬),不过这也更广泛地对应了卡德纳斯的兴趣:即用作品体现不同观点及文化影响的融汇,不区分不同之处也不强调矛盾。这就是未来的记忆。也正是因此,卡德纳斯仍是属于我们时代的艺术家。在我们的这个时代,去殖民思想被恋物癖式地被崇拜,普世的、全球化的文化却似乎正让位于分裂主义。对卡德纳斯来说,“真实性”需要付诸行动去创造,而不是靠继承。
——Mark Rappolt
《艺术观察亚洲版》(ArtReview Asia)主编马克·瑞伯特
1. 约翰·莱马里(Jean Leymarie):展览画册《奥古斯丁·卡德纳斯:欲望与恩典》(Agustin Cárdenas: Desire and Grace,纽约,2002年)。
2. 科林·勒古姆(Colin Legum):《泛非主义:简要政治指南》(Pan-Africanism: A short political guide,伦敦,1962年),第212页。
3. 理查德·H·金(Richard H King):《种族、文化与知识份子,1940—1970》(Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970,巴尔的摩,2004),第249页。
4. 埃米尔·兰努伊(Emile Langui):展览画册《卡德纳斯,杰出的雕塑家》(Cárdenas, sculpteur exceptionnel,比利时,1974年)。
5. 安德烈·布勒东(André Breton):引自1959年一篇发表于《卡德纳斯:雕塑,1947—1997》(Cárdenas: Sculture, 1947–1997,米兰,1997年)的无题文章,第45页。
6. 何塞·皮埃尔(José Pierre):《卡德纳斯,或是严格要求和恩典》(Cardenas, or Exacting Ness and Grace,巴黎,1962年)。
7. 爱德华·格里桑特(Edouard Glissant):《卡德纳斯的传奇世界》(Le monde Légendaire de Cárdenas,1961年),发表于《卡德纳斯:雕塑,1947—1997》(Cárdenas: Sculture, 1947–1997,米兰,1997年),第51-2页。
8. 在《漫谈安的列斯》(Le Discours antillais,巴黎,1981年)中,爱德华·格里桑特(Edouard Glissant)讲诉他看到卡德纳斯如何用他在马提尼克(Martinique)的土地中找到的材料创作雕塑,第448页。