The Comprehension of Art in Posavantgarde

If any cultural experience in contemporary art is susceptible to anthropological analysis, it is Cuban art. Most Cuban artists who emerged since the 1980s have explored quests that require anthropology for their understanding. This involves the need for a semiotic analysis of signs, clues, symbols, metonymies, synecdoches, and other figures of speech. In this study, we understand that, both in terms of visual codes and in terms of the reader's heritage, a mere semiotic study, although necessary, is not sufficient. A semiotic and cultural anthropological analysis is required. Many of the visual explorations discussed here encompass much more complex quests that cannot be objectified either through the typical iconographic study, where the high level of mass codification of signs stems from their very collective emblematic nature, or, on the other hand, through the visual image, which is explained through the use of a textual epitaph that presupposes a narrative correlation in written texts or texts collected through oral tradition, as is usually the case with anthropology, which studies medieval or archaic religions in their visual expressions.
Unlike both extremes-the first symbolized in its clearest form by pop art, whose recourse to mass signs guarantees the mass explanation of the signs' well-known content; the second symbolized by medieval painting, where the image was almost a didactic explanation of textual content that could be sought in the Bible-Cuban artists work with visual conjugations that escape both parameters. This makes an interdisciplinary critique essential, comprehensive in the sense of phenomenological sociology, and anthropological in the postmodernist sense. leer todo...