Chicago, IL

The Misadventures of the Propagandist

TERRAIN BIENNIAL 2019

“El Arresto del propagandistas” Requer (2019), Havana, Cuba

“El Arresto del propagandistas” (The Arrest of the Propaganists, Requer, 2019) takes its title and point of origin from an 1880/1882 painting by the Russian artist Ilya Repin.  Repin’s realist painting documents the intrusion of the Czarist state apparatus into the humble domestic space of a revolutionary activist, depicting the heavy boots and the heavy hands of state intervention marshaled against the lone, courageous propagandist.  Requer’s version is a graphic mural/collage that was installed in a house in the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago as part of the 2019 Terrain Biennial. In Requer’s re-working of Repin’s painting, the aggregation of Soviet, Cuban and US popular images form a bracing and vivid narrative of repression and liberation. Instead of a clear binary of sympathetic activist and abusive state power, Requer instead flaunts an array of visual propaganda, suggesting that citizens (especially Cubans) are barraged by forms of visual address coming from a wide range of ideological positions. 

In his work, Requer draws from his fascination with graphics and popular images from Soviet and Cuban magazine layouts, films, comics, ads and American movies as source material for drawings, posters, graphic novel, mural and installation work. His social as well as artistic formation during the 1990s and 2000s in Cuba informs his aesthetic sensibility and his compositions.  

After decades of Soviet support, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 initiated a wave effect felt throughout the Soviet world; in Cuba, the withdrawal of Russian subsidies inaugurated a period of extreme austerity known as the “Special Period”.  Throughout the island, shortages of food, electricity and materials necessitated creative adaptations collectively known as “resolver”, or making do.  Coming of age in this radically destabilized economic landscape, Requer and other artists were still being exposed to canonical Soviet influenced art education, but outmoded forms of socialist realism no longer lined up with either the reality on the ground or international art movements.  Cuban artists eagerly sought and embraced discourses of structuralism, postcolonial critique, and postmodernism that were then circulating around the globalizing art world.  Using principles of “resolviendo”, Cuban artists adapted these discourses and strategies to their context, mining the troves of periodical and visual sources found stored in family homes and archives- Cuban, Russian, Spanish and American magazines, found films, propaganda posters to critique narratives of history and reconfigure hegemonic imagery to problematize and liberate it. 

In “El Arresto del propagandistas”, Requer deploys a wide range of graphic media, from Soviet-era graphic design and forms of visual propaganda, to sci-fi and speculative popular culture, including images from Hollywood films.  Requer comments, “graffiti, military propaganda, graphics, logos, sci-fi films, slogans, images drawn from popular culture, and more have become effective tools that both translate and subvert the repressive operations of the state.” Requer reassembles the ideas and material of propaganda into a graphic essay that seeks to reveal and explode the visual apparatus of ideology and state authority. “El Arresto” recreates and transforms images of a Soviet cosmonaut; graphics from revolutionary poster art of the 1970s; editorial art from defunct Cuban magazines; a shot from the Hollywood film “Transformers”; publicity from a mentalist; non-specific revolutionary political slogans

The story of Requer’s “The Arrest of the Propagandists” at the Terrain Biennial follows its own curious trail of censorship and (non) state intervention.  The installation was initially proposed for the glass front windows of a residential condo building in Chinatown; this site would bring serious contemporary art to a neighborhood that has yet to become integrated into Chicago’s vibrant art scene.  However, the HOA Board of the building rejected the proposal over concerns about the ideological content of a work that deploys the imagery of propaganda.  They were unreceptive to the notion that the work was about the critique of propaganda, and not an endorsement.  Then, the façade of an unoccupied building in Chinatown was considered as a guerilla installation.  However, Chicago enforces it’s felony anti-graffiti laws, and the immigration status of one of the installers was a consideration, so that site was abandoned.

Next, the project was proposed for installation at a house in Oak Park, (epicenter of the Terrain Biennial); while the homeowner was an enthusiastic host who had participated in previous iterations of the Biennial, she was not comfortable with exhibiting images of guns, which an earlier version of “El Arresto” includes.  Requer was amenable to removing that image, but overall, the idea of censoring an artwork about censorship seemed counter-intuitive and contrary to the spirit of the work. 

Finally, the work found a home in the windows and façade of a house in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, a neighborhood that includes a core of long-term Latinx residents, artists, hipsters and gentrifiers.  In many ways this location was a good fit; the hosts welcomed the work and had no trouble with any of the images; the Latinx community has a deep history with propaganda and state power, and the art-conscious newer residents had an intuitive understanding of a commentary on the power of images. Yet, this project, too, was ultimately thwarted. The building’s owner claimed that posting on the façade of the building was prohibited by city ordinance, and requested that the parts of the work installed on the front door and wall be removed.  The imagery in the windows could remain; but this would destroy the piece in its original design, and it was at this point that the curator, the host and the artist decided that the fraught narrative of censorship that intervened in the installation and exhibition of the work had at this point become part of the project.

- Alison Fraunhar, October 2019