(Anti-)Capitalist Weapons, Cuban Pop: Frémez and the Canción Americana

Abstract

(Anti-)Capitalist Weapons, Cuban Pop:Frémez and the Canción Americana Barry Oliver The mid-2010s marked a watershed moment in realising the art-historical global turn, as cultural institutions in the West redressed the discursive imbalance within an established narrative of pop art. The remit of the hegemonic term, pop art, was expanded through the revisionist scope of international and global pops, as proposed by two exhibition projects —International Pop at the Walker Art Center and The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern— beyond the movement's canonical Anglo-American axis. Notwithstanding that pop art had initially been mediated through a white, Western and male worldview, its global manifestations found footing in socio-economic and political conditions antithetical to the consumerist culture that the movement was identified with. Rather than merely expanding the canon of pop art, such incompatibilities prompted the organisers to revisit the conceptual grounds on which these alternative pops co-existed. Post-revolutionary Cuba of the 1960s offers one such context where two worlds collide insofar as the island-nation, and Latin America in general, could not relate to the high-capitalist experience or that which initially characterised pop art's negotiation of the "artificial cultural overlay" within a consumer society fuelled by the mass-production of commodities (Camnitzer 271). Moreover, the newly-founded communist state found itself ideologically opposed, yet within physical proximity, to the capitalist superpower whence pop art emitted, interpolated between the tenets of Marx and Coca Cola, to borrow the phrase of French film director Jean Luc Godard (Wilson 119). Instead of submitting to the Stalinist model of socialist realism, the revolutionary character of Cuba's cultural mandate was both expansive and internationalist as stressed in Fidel Castro's famous maxim, "Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing" (quoted in Camnitzer 129). Delivered in 1961, these words formed part of the speech titled "Words to the Intellectuals" and have unanimously been interpreted as official endorsement for subsuming avant-garde modes of expression, including pop art, within the revolutionary process. The political manoeuvres for reconfiguring Cuban society paralleled that of the island's artists who were free to repossess the international visual language of pop, just as the revolutionary government had nationalised all foreign-owned property. A case-in-point is signalled by the transformation of Alberto Korda's photograph of an Argentine revolutionary to the Guerrillero Heroico image. Since his death in 1967, the [End Page 104] "matrix" photograph, to use David Kunzle's term (1997, 58), of Che Guevara has been appropriated by artists in progressive contexts worldwide achieving the status of an icon, the pop subject par excellence. The Guerrillero Heroico image and its afterlives have been subject to several book-length studies, with the first graphic treatment of the Korda's photograph in Cuba traditionally attributed to the artist Ñiko dating to 1968. Lesser widely reported is the fact that it was Korda's close friend, José Gómez Fresquet —more commonly referred to by the self-styled mononym, "Frémez"— who produced the first poster by a Cuban based on the Guerrillero Heroico photograph upon hearing Castro affirm the news of Guevara's assassination (Fig. 1) (Crow 335-336; Ziff 19-22). Using the printing press of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (CNC), on the eve of October 15 1967, Frémez designed the commemorative poster destined to adorn the rally honouring the revolutionary's death on October 18 at the Plaza de la Revolución. Frémez reduced the Guerrillero Heroico portrait to a high-contrast outline laid atop a red-dot-screen, working within an internationally recognisable pop style, which he superimposed with Guevara's legendary motto and signature. By 1967, Frémez enjoyed mid-career success as a prolific graphic designer serving as artistic director for various Cuban periodicals and magazines. In an official capacity, he was tied to the CNC holding the title of director for the promotion of the plastic arts from 1967 until 1976. Contemporaneous with the translation of the Guerrilla Heroico to graphic poster form, Frémez had already embarked upon executing his series titled Canción Americana (American Song). Dated between 1967 to 1970, the album of silkscreen...