The past is a dream; the future, a vision, and the present, a cloud that goes by.
Buddha

Lázaro Saavedra, one of the survivors of the mass exodus of the promotion of the eighties in Cuban visual arts, was also one of the young leading figures of that decade. I still remember him in the presentation of A Retrospective Glance (1989) at the Provincial Center of Visual Arts and Design, in Luz y Oficios. He was dressed as the worker of a metallurgical plant, the head stuck between the shoulders and almost dumb. It was a bi-personal exhibition together with the former member of Volume I, Rubén Torres Llorca (1957), who conducted the debate on the curatorial purpose, where the temporary game provoked serious indications that nothing will change for man and his sociopolitical environment. As if today’s “pure fiction” were the magnificent illusion of tomorrow.

There “I met” the “shy” 25-yearold artist, and since then I have tried to follow his steps.

One half of the polemic eighties went by, and one day I decided to consult his graduation thesis at the Higher Institute of Art (1988). I immediately realized that Lázaro was no protégé or faithful disciple of Torres Llorca, who could wage by himself the war of art and was certain in his pretensions of melting art with life. In the humble print of his thesis notebook he revealed: “I live in two spatial dimensions: one, the world of the street, and the other, the world of art.

Conceptually and formally I have always hovered between finding the street within art and art within the street”. Concentrated here are the genes of a poetics that aims at mixing cultured and popular in order to go from earnest to laughable without appealing to the epical melodrama or to cheap humor.

Toward the end of the decade, Saavedra attained every artist’s dream: to have an emblematic work. A chimera that did not boost him in the market but registered him in the history of Cuban art. The piece Detector of Ideologies (1989) was a small apparatus conceived to measure t he level of obedience or heresy of the individual. Thus, the clock needle could recognize those suspicious of ideological diversion, an “epidemics” capable of appearing easily in whose who do not abide by the dogmatic canon of socialism as if it were a religion.

Almost invisible in the gallery, the artifact of Caribe cardboard suggested an “archaeological reconstruction” of the totalitarian aberrations anticipated by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

Another absurdly real fiction when political persecution is justified in the name of the ideological struggle. Apparently caricatural, ephemeral or circumstantial, the essence of this idea derives in a loud secret: there are nightmares that invade both body and mind of the human being for his entire life.

Enough with the adding of lies— would say the Nietzsche of The Cheerful Science—“because only he who forgot is healthy”.

The decade of the nineties not only caused a radical turn in the scene of the art produced in Cuba, but an ethical and aesthetic challenge for the irreverent from the eighties that refused to leave their country in spite of the strategic changes in the cultural policy regarding visual arts and the rigors of the “special period in times of peace”. We suppose that once that period ended with the “suicidal unauthorized action” by Ángel Delgado (he defecated on the Granma newspaper without consulting the curators of The Sculptured Object, 1990), Lázaro Saavedra must have felt very lonely. Almost all his friends or accomplices had left or were about to leave.

Why didn’t he profit from the boom of the eighties to try to obtain acknowledgment in other contexts and enjoy the advances of the first world? What tied him to face the claim of the aesthetic paradigm or return to the art craft as model to be followed, in an attempt to penetrate the market and end with the direct confrontation of the artists with the art institution? Wasn’t he seduced by the “velvet exile” chosen by the less resentful, and thus continue exhibiting in Cuba (even in biennials) without becoming extremely political?

Finding an answer to such questions requires deciphering an intricate labyrinth: the loneliness of the conscience of a personality as colloquial as enigmatic.

During the so-called generation of caution, Lázaro did not cease to produce without using the poetical trope as ideal resource to light the flame without burning. His ingeniousness enabled him to remain alive without agreeing to play with the chain and not with the monkey, a strategic pretext that softened the relations between the artists and the official nomenclature. In spite of Saavedra’s evident playful imagery, the dramatic solemnity has an important weight in one who has humor running through his veins. It is no coincidence that in two of his key pieces from the nineties, comedy reverts to tragedy.

We refer to Buried by Oblivion, an installation presented at the Sixth Havana Biennial (1997) that began in a garden with white unnamed gravestones and ended in a galley of Morro Castle. As well as Dying Free, exhibited that same year in a solo show presented in the alternative space Diverse Works in Houston, USA. These works seem conceived by another Lázaro in full pain that ignores the pleasure of smiling.

Dying Free is a performance installation where the artist cut the threads of wooden puppets hanging from the ceiling.

However, the simple action conveys a complexity that brings to light the cruel maneuvers of the hegemonic brains. Those puppets lying on the floor “personify” the trustable mediators who are manipulated and allegedly protected as long as they are needed and fulfill their work efficiently squandering great effort. Because responding to a power demands sacrificing your tiny bit of freedom if you wish to remain as a false indispensable who never dares to walk alone. Those free but dead puppets represent the ones buried by oblivion, eternal victims of that history written over and over again.

Simple and complex, cold and warm, visceral and lover of the street language, joker and questioner, Lázaro Saavedra has faced a challenge rejected by the racially ambitious: the recklessness of rejecting the glamorous option of asking a group of assistants to make objects designed to decorate the mansions of rich collectors. It is no coincidence that this kind of visual serial producers prefer to remain very distant from the critics. It is harder to strike down the mental laziness of obviating the mutation than to dream with the frivolousness of being interviewed for a frivolous magazine.

Neither is he a dexterous strategist who machinates works to illustrate the theory of an acknowledged mainstream curator or to make a big scandal where political dissidence implies a media profit. Anyone would say he was born to generate art and not to sell it.

Nowadays, artists must negotiate all sorts of concessions in order to reach far and earn much money.

Conceptualism is a reaction against the culture of the image: the visual massage. This maxim incarnates the stubbornness of his creative process, although it does not hinder Saavedra from liking to sell and sell well.

Following his experience with the defected members of Group Puré (1986-1987), his work as a professor at the Higher Institute of Art granted him a comforting surprise. Early in 2000, Lázaro found some students with whom it would be worthwhile to work.

In this way emerged the Group Enema, whose most experienced member was Saavedra. An artist who normally speaks little said that art is not to be taught. Perhaps for that reason, the future friends of this creator discarded the quotations of a learned parrot and follower of the hard theory, to live art from the individual experience in interaction with the group experience.

Enema appropriated classic body art performances (Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Linda Montano or Vito Acconci, among others) to reconstruct the act of one or two persons in a peculiar remake: to concrete a “new work” with no authorship that would belong to one and to all. A challenge that demanded accepting and overcoming the imperatives of human coexistence or resistance as visible experiment.

A test was made with Human Resources (2002), when they remained one week in Galería Habana, each one performing the work of each artist until reaching the Work they attempted to record in the memory of those who everyday visited this gallery, of experimental nature at that time.

What surprised me from Group Enema was to sense from near how the personal empathy defeated the mean actions of art ambition. To think and enjoy art was the form of exorcizing the urge of leadership that distorts the competitive showing-off trend of contemporary art.

Lázaro Saavedra succeeded in infecting his colleague-disciples with a fidelity to themselves without teaching them how to make a dossier. Following the brief but intense trajectory of Enema, each one embarked upon his career in solitary.

Although they are still good friends (a miracle in the space of art), it will be somewhat difficult to bring them together again, because many of them decided to try their luck in other lands.

Lázaro Saavedra is an artist of attitude and not of conduct. His conduct is too dissolute to ensure a trustable loyalty or safe propaganda. On the other hand, his rock-line attitude enduring the swaying or the charge of the waves drove him to found I-MEIL Gallery in 2006. The creation of this independent space brought up that graphic humorist vocation latent in one who is gifted with scheming reflections in which no on knows where mass resignation ends or power abuse begins.

Using resources from the comics, texts, photographic images or the recycling of old or new slogans, he attempts (once more) to make the dream of his early years become true: finding the street within art and art within the street. Irrespective of greater of lesser achievements, Saavedra again used art as a struggle weapon from a trench armed with imagination and boldness.

The I-MEIL Gallery boosted on the basis of an alleged “new Pavón era” and after the first impact. It all began with a TV program dedicated to acknowledge the careers of cultural officials who carried out that cleaning process—dirtying their conscience with it—against “deviations” that would hinder the correct path of the Cuban revolution, absorbed in the fullness of its conquests. That late rectification of errors intended by the program unleashed a rage that ended in the so-called e-mail war.

Saavedra was the only visual artist who took part in the cathartic electronic relief.

That tragicomic feeling that overflows this virtual gallery does not fear the elitist consensus of underestimating graphic humor as a small genre excluded with reason from the “fine arts”. Why can’t draftsmen as conceptual as Chago Armada, Ajubel or Ares be included in the elite of contemporary art, where big foolish ideas are admitted in the form of jokes that are not even funny? Let us not forget that the best truths are said joking, and the best lies are proclaimed in earnest.

The existence and permanence of the I-MEIL Gallery depends only of what validates every art expression strange to all political hegemony: the power of imagination as daily exercise of free will.

Texts have played a role (at times determinant) in the work by L.S. Whether as integral part of the piece, the speech balloons of comic strips, statements of principles and even words to the catalogue of an exhibition.

Perhaps it was for that reason that curator and critic Píter Ortega asked him to write the words for a media divertimento presented in Servando Gallery: The Revenge (The Cuban Critics Devote Themselves to Art) in March and April of 2008. More delirious than hilarious, Lázaro here let himself loose without fear of words (including obscene or censurable ones), without flattering the most influential critic and curator by making believe he was an artist.

In spite of writing a text with the necessary ingredients to praise or reject him, he could not help our evoking, after reading it, an essential axiom by José Lezama Lima: “playful is agonic”. That merge of indisputable certainties and nice or crude fantasies articulates the core of Lázaro Saavedra’s deceitful jokes. It is not in vain that we read in a segment of this free of charge commission: “Only my present exists, in the mind, based on which I edit the past and invent for myself the future. Every future is pure invention, an inventory of the lacks and items missing from the warehouse of the present. The present, and not man, is the measure of all things”.

Why haven’t you left? (2007) is the title of a piece exhibited during the group exhibition DNA in Villa Manuela Gallery (2011).

Said question involves a meaning where the individual interweaves with the drama of a nomad country in constant migration. It is a video solved by a Cuban flag fluttering in space that suddenly covers the screen and does not allow you to see anything but that striking emblem of the national identity.

The sound is a romantic ballad by Spanish singer Raphael, one of whose kitsch verses says: / I bet you don’t leave, I bet you remain by my side like a dog / I bet you don’t leave, although you know what I do /.

In that sarcastic appropriation, the humiliated woman of the song adopts the silhouette of a crocodile and transforms into that question so often been posed to the same artist. An answer in which we must only perceive the restlessness of the young people (even of those not so young ones) in order to understand its meaning. Why haven’t you left? is a work to which that the passing of our historical time predicts an extended and regrettable validity.

The variable proposed by this video recalls an anecdote of writer Dulce María Loynaz after being awarded in Spain with the Cervantes Prize in 1992. At a press conference, a provocative gossip columnist asked the already aged poet and novelist: “And why haven’t you left Cuba?” But she, giving evidence of a startling ironical vitality for her age, answered: “Why should I, if I was the first to arrive”.

Everything seems to indicate that Dulce María immediately recalled Heredia’s or Martí’s banishment, and affirmed her negative to the fate that neither the big nor the small inhabitants of her Island in permanent dispersion deserve.

In the summer of 2011, a Cuban artist living in Miami who frequently visits Havana repeated the same old question to Saavedra: “Why haven’t you left?” which he refuted: “I would say better: why did you leave?”

To abandon the fight is a terror where fleeing is the ideal solution to end it.

This artist’s satirical obsession reaches the point of being ironic using himself as support of the idea and the image. In another of his tragicomic videos, one Lázaro asks the other Lázaro: have you sold works to the MOMA? Have you been at the Venice Biennial? Have you been invited to the Kassel Documenta? After the repeated NO of the other, the curious interrogator answers categorically: “I’m going”, and leaves him alone, sitting on a couch, since, according to the Machiavellian principles of contemporary art: “It’s not convenient for me to go around with this guy”.

Decade after decade, L.S.

continues to be visible without the urgency of unconditional godfathers or excessive institutional spoiling. Marcel Duchamp, who felt great respect for humor, declared: “Art is a question of personality”. It seems that the last Lázaro Saavedra who already knows the world is incapable of abandoning the first Lázaro Saavedra with his glance bumping into the horizon line while he repeated to himself: “Let me see what I can invent to enter into the history of art”.

A wise man once said that “patience is the key that opens the last door”. An illuminated skeptic presented a doubt: “Is there a last door?” Another equally wise man answered: “More important than to defeat a thousand warriors in a thousand different battles is to defeat oneself”. It may be that these maxims contain the true Lázaro Saavedra that simulates to divide himself into the great actor he is not and, paradoxically, seeks to be, in case the longing persists of climbing the diving board that all wish to jump from, until touching the sky with the hands to dive afterwards and emerge happily in a clean and huge swimming pool.