Cuban Art Happening

Rethinking a Cocktail Party


By Mike Fuller

Cubanow.net - Havana artist Adriana Arronte deconstructed a traditional human gathering by radically altering glass cups into sculptural forms, filling them with wine and inviting people to imbibe.
"Please, start drinking," she said into a microphone, encouraging participants at the invitation-only cocktail party to refill and interchange cups. As with all her work, there was crystal clear evidence of a passion for the medium, an obsession for detail that comes off with stunningly beautiful productions.
From her seductive photos of birth control paraphernalia at the Alamar Biennial last year, to the painstakingly wrought brass leaves she hung in a Havana gallery to her sculptural participation in the Havana Biennial this year, her commitment to theory is forever accompanied by a rich love for craft.
She is extremely formal, hyper-committed to repetitive visual display for carrying her messages, which shatter ritual and incite reflection in those who participate.
This intervention included physical intoxication, awkward positions, plenty of spilt wine and, miraculously, not one broken glass. The message is neither in the object nor the spectators, rather in the relationships they both form," she explains to Prensa Latina. Her objectives were to "take a common object, denaturalize it, subvert and pervert its typical action and create a new relation."
Mirta Ibarra, star of the film Strawberry and Chocolate, was part of those new ways of relating and posed for some shots with Adriana at the Institute of Cuban Film and Cinema Arts venue.
"Institutional anarchy, codified objects, eccentric abstraction, consumption of sensations, aesthetic obscenity, articulations of human behavior and detonation of process" are conversational terms for Arronte, who said she thought a great deal about using real alcohol in the piece. "As with the objects, I wanted to disinhibit the people and exaggerate their natural tendencies," she explains.
Citing works like Meret Oppenheim´s Fur-Lined Teacup, she says her ouevre proposes "active but morbid relations, deeply promiscuous, almost fetishistic."
There is nothing more agreeable than listening to an artworker who loves her material, and when Adriana Arronte speaks of glass blowing, it is enough to make one want to learn.
"I discovered how the air from my body gave body to the cups, passing through the glass, leaving its impression," she says, and mentions Marcel Duchamp´s glass bubble of Paris Air.
She explains the cups have not only been modeled by her own air, but are handed over to be breathed, sweated and salivated, which all makes up part of the piece.
This spectacle within a spectacle lasted less than two hours, consumed 24 bottles of red wine, and changed the way a significant group of people feel about art.

July 31, 2006