(ambient electronic music)
(Train rattling)
(group chattering)
TANIA BRUGUERA: The strategy of the Immigrant Movement project
is to open the door to things you already know.
So by you coming into something you already know,
you feel that you understand what's going on
and then, after, walk you towards other places you don't know.
(crowd chattering)
For me, the most important moment for an art piece
is when people are not sure if it's art or not,
and this is the most, for me, productive moment.
(lively traditional music)
I am an artist, and I need to defend that because I'm going beyond art,
because I'm trying to do things that are not being seen as art.
As a political artist, I always want my work to have real consequences.
The major goal of Immigrant Movement at the beginning
was to rethink the political representation of immigrants.
Why?
Because once you become an immigrant, the first thing that is taken from you
is the opportunity to talk about politics and to talk about yourself as a political
being.
(plucky string music)
I feel that I needed to do an immigrant movement in the United States because
when you say, "Where do you want to live?" to anybody in the world, they say, "United States."
(lively traditional music)
(singing in foreign language)
The people in Immigrant Movement are using art
to empower themselves and to change as people and to change as human beings.
I'd like to welcome you to this gathering
at the end of this cycle of Immigrant Movement.
We are very happy with everything
the teachers
the people that come here
who have made
Immigrant Movement their home.
(train rattles)
Immigrant Movement has been very different from other projects.
(horse hooves clopping)
For other pieces, I have opened different doors.
The whole idea of the series of Tatlin's Whisper came out of uncomfortable feeling I had with
the news,
the fact that, as viewers of the news, we are in a way anesthetized by some of the
issues.
I had other series, but the two pieces that survive
are Tatlin's Whisper 5 and Tatlin's Whisper 6,
and in the first one, I wanted to bring the mounted police
and ask them to do their normal job,
but instead of doing it with protestors, doing it with people in the museum.
[OFFICER] Are these your children?
[VISITOR] Yes.
Could they stand with dad or with mom?
That's it, so they're not too close.
That's lovely.
Well done.
Okay, the horse is now gonna walk forward.
Could you just stand aside, please?
That's lovely.
Thank you very much.
Just wait there.
[TANIA] I always felt it was too easy to look at the news of something happening
somewhere else
and just sit and change the channel.
And I wanted people to understand,
when you have the police coming with a horse towards you
and telling you, "Go there, go there," how that feels.
(horse hooves clopping)
So I think it was very interesting
when you stage repression, knowing that what you're doing
actually is protecting people.
The second one, Tatlin's Whisper #6,
is a piece where I use all the theatrics, the spectacle of a political event in Cuba,
which is mainly the podium and a very simple moment of the expectation
of a speech.
And also, it was interesting that at that point,
Fidel had disappeared from the news
but is somebody that we felt the emptiness of the leadership.
Even if the brother has came in, he had not done enough changes yet or enough
presence.
So the piece work in two way.
It can be a monument to the absence of a leader, or if people intervene,
it can be actually a performance piece where they exercise their right to say things.
You have the podium, the microphones, and you have two people dressed with military
outfits.
Once everybody was there, we gave 200 disposable cameras,
and we announced that anybody can say whatever they wanted for one minute.
[VISITOR 1] Millions of children are starving.
None of them are Cuban.
[VISITOR 2] Why do we need a podium to say what eats up our soul?
[VISITOR 3] I am 20 years old.
This is the first time I feel so free.
(VISITOR 4 Screaming)
After one minute passed, whatever was happening,
they removed the person.
[VISITOR 5] What
is more
important.
to talk
[TANIA] That piece I like a lot, in part because, for the first time, I was able to freeze power.
It was really satisfying to not having anybody after
being incarcerated, or there is always some repercussion.
They talk to me, whatever, but I feel like it was well done
in the sense of very controlled.
My childhood was a little different from other Cuban kids
because my father was a diplomat, so I was traveling around the world,
when in Cuba, I was not permitted to travel.
Because my parents represented the country, I was witnessing all this propaganda.
And when I was 12, everything changed
because my parent divorced and I started living the reality of Cuba.
I think once I had a normal life in the Cuban reality,
I started seeing the distance between the promises and the accomplishment.
I still believe in a dream.
And as an artist, I feel that everything that I have been trying to do
is trying to kind of force or redirect reality towards the dream,
but with the knowledge that propaganda
is different than reality, and trying to, in a way,
push people to be realistic about the goal
and about the political means instead of presenting us with just a dream.
I am committed to be a Cuban.
I am committed be in Cuba and to work in Cuba.
When I do work about Cuba, I do it in Cuba,
because this is whom I want to talk to about those issues.
Displacement.
It was a piece that was done originally the day of Fidel's birthday.
I decided to do this piece where I dress as a Nkisi Nkondi,
which is a figure from Congo.
People can ask for something, and each nail is one wish,
but you have to give something back.
Like, okay, if you if you give me this, I will do this for you.
I will bring flowers or cut my hair or whatever.
If you don't give back the promise to the Nkisi,
it will go after you and punish you severely,
so that's why people are afraid of it.
So what happened is I dress like that, and I was in as in a sculpture in the gallery,
and then I "woke up" and went to the streets.
And it was beautiful because it was the first time
I went out to the street as a performer,
and I was a little nervous because I was thinking,
"People might be, 'What the hell is this?
It's not carnival time.'"
The piece was about all the things that were promised during the revolution
that were not being fulfilled and that we're still waiting for them.
At one point, a policeman came and said, "What's going on?"
because we're not supposed to do that in the street that day, wherever for that
matter.
And then a kid was saying, "No, it is a art work,"
because he was hearing something people talking.
There were people from the arts as well.
And the policeman was quiet, and I couldn't see it,
but I could hear he was...
He was quiet, then he said, "Oh, okay, okay.
Proceed.
Proceed."
And that was the exact moment when I realized that art can go places other people cannot
go.
(train rattling)
We also have the meeting
for the selection of the Useful Art Committee that...
Something like this?
Yes, it's better.
I would like us both to present it so that you could
introduce me again and we can talk about...
I will introduce you, and you explain it.
Yes.
Perfect.
And what will you be explaining?
Just inviting them to the Useful Art Committee and...
Let's tell them that we will be having artists-in-residence
who are also immigrants.
Exactly.
So that it's all pertinent
and that it's all about Useful Art.
So the idea is that we will be having a meeting.
We'll be serving coffee and little cupcakes.
It will be very delicious.
Buying the public's vote, I see?
No, the idea is that it will be delicious!
It doesn't have to be all business!
It's like fun business, Tania!
I know.
I have to learn that part.
(relaxed music)
INSTRUCTOR: And remember you have those little wood chips, Brandon,
so you have to put a lot of pressure.
I see the role of the artist as somebody that can propose things,
whether that be creating an environment for something to happen,
or will that be giving the tools to people to do certain activities on their
own?
And that's the role I think we have now,
showing people this is what we can do, these are the tools.
Take it.
The Van Abbe Museum invited me to do a solo show.
And after thinking, I realized that it was the best place
to bring Arte Útil to a museum and use the opportunity
to be in a museum to do multiple things.
What is the use of a museum in the 21st century?
And challenge also the idea of a spectatorship.
How can you eliminate a spectator from a museum?
All of these ideas came together, and then I decided to create
what I call the Museum of Arte Útil.
We have so much to cover.
It was, like, impossible, so we decided to create a focus
on the idea of the archive.
[ANNIE] When Tania came up with this idea of making a Museum of Arte Útil
it immediately brought up the question, what do museums do?
Do they make history?
Do they brand a movement?
Are they the authoritative voice that says, "This is minimalism, this is performance art,
this is Arte Útil"?
So we thought, "Okay, how would we do that?
How would we gather together this archive?"
The fact that we call it Arte Útil, the intention was to be in Spanish.
The word "útil" in Spanish has two connotations, whereas in English it's only one.
The two connotations are the benefit you can get out of something,
something that can be useful to you.
"Útil" is also a tool.
"Un útil de trabajo" is a tool, a working tool.
[ANNIE] You saw that facade outside, and this wall cuts through all of the spaces.
It seemed necessary to us to break with the pattern of the white cube.
It's totally a theatrical device, contradiction number one in the show,
because we kind of really tried to avoid metaphor, symbols in our selection of works.
We tried to think about a practice of art history
that is not about the metaphor.
It's rather about generating a kind of engagement that needs a user and an initiator.
To do this project was a team effort.
I wanted the project to grow naturally.
I didn't want to come and impose an idea.
For me, it was very important from the beginning, as an artist,
I should not be the author of the project but the initiator,
which is one of the categories we use about Arte Útil.
[ANNIE] We had Laurie Jo Reynolds on a residency here with her cat, contained in the tents
most of the time.
But she is an extraordinary artist who campaigned for 10 years
to close down a high security supermax prison in the states.
Her work has been archived over the last six weeks here in the museum.
She just left yesterday.
The biggest project here is the Honest Shop.
This shop works in a really successful way in Britain.
The shop has nobody running it except for the participants.
Anybody who wants to contribute to the shop, there's a series of rules.
They have to be amateur, creative people,
so they can't be professional artists or professional designers,
things that you feel that are kind of creative and that you do as an amateur hobby
that you would like to sell.
♪ Green hills I like the firestone ♪
♪ I like to walk alone ♪
♪ do waka do waka do waka do waka ♪
♪ I like the flowers ♪
♪ I like the daffodils ♪
♪ I like the mountains ♪
♪ I like the green hills ♪
♪ I like the firestone ♪
♪ I like to walk alone ♪
(train rattling)
[TANIA] I'm very happy that an immigrant movement has happened
and is working very nicely.
I think the culture of the place have been established.
The principals of the project have been established.
[INSTRUCTOR] When we do this excercise our circulatory system gets activated
and we activate the entire body.
[TANIA] Once we gave the project to the community, the project doesn't need me, which I'm very
happy with,
because I think part of the homework that socially engaged art have to do
is try to rethink the way in which the project survive
beyond the artist's presence.
[INSTRUCTOR] Now we raise our arms, palms up.
This exercise helps us re-energize ourselves.
This excercise at the same time
stretches the organs.
The liver
the stomach
the intestines
They are all doing their own Zumba right now.
[TANIA] I don't see socially engaged art being preserved by three photos and a video
in a museum.
I see real good, socially engaged art and political art
live beyond the life that the artist has given it
by being taken by other people who are reproducing the models,
changing those models, being inspired by that.
(lively music) (singing in foreign language)
[TANIA] The art that we should be doing today in the
21st century is art that is not for the museum.
It's art for the street and people's life.
(lively music)
(ambient electronic music)
To learn more about "Art in the Twenty-First Century"
and it's educational resources,
please visit us online at PBS.org/Art21
"Art in the Twenty-First Century" is available on DVD
To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS
(ambient electronic music)