Grupo ABTV (ABTV Group) was the name given to the artistic collaboration between Cuban artists Tanya Angulo (1968), Juan Ballester Carmenates (1966), José Toirac (1966) and Ileana Villazón (1969) by the Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer.
The beginning of the Group Camnitzer created the acronym with the surnames of its members during his research on Cuban art that he would later publish as New Art of Cuba. In his book Camnitzer refers to ABTV work as “possibly the most rigorous group in Cuba today (…) Though they occasionally produce individual work, the group as such applies itself to appropriating other artists’ work to make theoretical criticism about culture and society. The team started with Ballester and Villazón, with Toirac joining a little later, and them Angulo. By 1989 they decided to split up again, although temporarily. They regrouped in 1991. Ballester and Villazón set the direction of the group with a team project realized while they were studying in the ISA”. Juan Ballester Carmenates and Ileana Villazón used quotation and Appropriation (art) as a creative procedure as well as the use of curatorship as a critical structure in their exhibition El que imita fracasa (He Who Imitates Fails) that they presented in 1988 at Galería L in Havana.
The artist Ballester and Villazón acted as curators of their exhibition He Who Imitates Fails while at the same time dividing themselves into many other successful Cuban artists while inventing their new work, appropriating their formal solutions to polemicize the contents, thematic and stylistic, of the parodied artists. The exhibition worked “as a critic, bringing to the fore the stylistic miseries of appropriation. The works magnified those telltale effects of a constant search for prestige in the use and abuse of metropolitan models”. Ballester and Villazón questioned controversial local issues such as the relationship between mainstream and periphery, cultural policy and national identity, international Avant-garde and local adaptations, Art market and notion of style, original and aura vs. copy.
The use of strategies such as quote and appropriation, as well as manipulation through exhibition curation, simulating institutional mechanisms capable of altering the functionality of each work, would be incorporated to a greater or lesser extent in all ABTV projects.
In 1989, while studying at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) (The University of Arts of Cuba), Juan Ballester Carmenates, José Toirac and Ileana Villazón were invited to participate in Young Cuban Artist, an exhibition curated by Rachel Weiss for the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Ballester, Toirac and Villazón carried out a team work in which they rephotographed reproductions of the famous appropriationist Sherrie Levine, the gesture of appropriation of their reproductions in books and art magazines critically pointed to the only way in which international art could be consumed in Cuba, deprived of direct experience through its massive reproduction. Parodying the titles of the famous North American artist the work was called After Sherrie Levine.
This strategy of manipulating through the curatorship of exhibitions and simulating the institutional mechanisms capable of altering the functionality of each work, would be incorporated to a greater or lesser extent in all ABTV projects.
For Luis Camnitzer “What is interesting in the work of this group is that they do not use the appropriation process like a recipe. Instead, each project has its own distinct structure and point, all carefully researched. The ABTV team can be better understood, in their present work, as a counterpart to the U.S. Group Material than as followers of Sherrie Levine (…) ABTV works with appropriation, or with the appropriation of appropriation, but there is always an ethical component in the work, an element of social criticism. The reference to art becomes a metaphor, not an end in itself, at least not in formalistic terms. A particular tension is created by the use of a procedure traditionally considered unethical, as plagiarism would be, to transmit messages based on moral indignation".
ABTV’s Projects "Nosotros": Exposición antológica de la obra de Raúl Martínez (“We": Anthological Exhibition of Raúl Martínez's Work) (1989), Provincial Center for Plastic Arts and Design, Havana, Cuba. In 1990 ABTV received the Special Prize of the Cuban Section of International Association of Art Critics (IAAC) for this exhibition.
From July to December 1988, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana ((MNBAC) (National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba) presented a major exhibition of the work of Raúl Martínez (artist) under the “museological conception” of Corina Matamoros, specialist from the Museum.
For young Cuban artists, Raul Martinez's work was a point of reference in the problem of recontextualizing international artistic trends within the rigid official discourse of national identity.
For ABTV the National Museum presented the work of Raúl Martínez (artist) as a great socialist, colorful and pop propaganda billboard, which celebrated the social achievements of the Revolution while hiding the complex scaffolding of contradictions of a complex, at times violent, revolutionary process that the same artist had suffered and was somehow implicit in the author's representative irony. The Museum exhibition focused on formal analysis that presented him as a successful artist, while displacing or omitting the contents of his complicated relationship between personal life and artistic production in relation to the social and historical context and its institutions.
A few days after the closing of Nosotros (We) at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana (MNBAC) (National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba), ABTV inaugurated its alternative anthological exhibition at the Provincial Center for Plastic Arts and Design in Havana in January 1989. “We": Anthological Exhibition of the Work of Raúl Martínez parodied the title of the Museum exhibition and criticized it by emphasizing the problematic contents that the official exhibition avoided. For this ABTV selected six works not included in the official exhibition and accompanied them with factual documentation. One of these works was made by ABTV in collaboration with Raúl Martínez (artist) as a nod of complicity between the artist and the alternative rereading that the new generations made of the work of the established artist.
Homenaje a Hans Haacke (Homage to Hans Haacke) (1989), Castle of The Force Project, Castle of The Real Force, Havana, Cuba.
It is impossible to understand this project without an introduction to the context.
The Proyecto Castillo de la Fuerza (Castle of The Force Project) In the late 1980s, the cultural life of Havana was shaken by a wave of young art critical of the tightness of the structures of the Cuban government. These projects were developed in galleries with high visibility and others were carried out directly in public spaces. Following the controversy, Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture, published an article in the official Granma (newspaper) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. In his article, the Minister of Culture did not hide his concern about how the new critical audiovisual production, which was exhibited in some state galleries not suitable for the content of the works, could be received by the Communist Party of Cuba and interpreted by a society without rights to spaces for exercise institutional criticism and without cultural education in Contemporary art.
In this context, the Castle of The Force Project arises. Taking as a frame of reference the concerns of the Minister of Culture, its organizers, Félix Suazo, Alexis Somoza and Alejandro Aguilera, conceived it as “a project that would make it possible to carry out critical artistic proposals in a space for debate that would lay the foundations for later circulation broader social ”, they were assisted by the former Vice Minister of Culture Marcia Leiseca who then chaired the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (CNAP) (National Council of Visual Arts). With irony, the Project took as its name the name of the building where it would be developed, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (Castle of the Royal Force) of Havana, an old Spanish military fortress that, after having been the headquarters of different cultural institutions by then, functioned as an exhibition space attached to the National Museum of Fine Arts.
The production process of the Project included several meetings between the organizers, the invited artists and the National Council of Visual Arts subordinated to the Ministry of Culture, the meetings should guarantee the control of the contents as well as an assessment of their possible repercussion in context. The Homage to Hans Haacke exhibition was scheduled as the fifth exhibition and should have opened in late September 1989. ABTV presented their project as a tribute to German conceptual artist Hans Haacke, the parody and quote of "political seriousness and professional rigor" of the German author's methodology was again used as a resource for a deep critique of institutions and official cultural policy. The exhibition overcame the initial control mechanisms and came to be installed in the Castle, but hours before the opening the alarm went off, the National Council of Visual Arts called an urgent meeting with Omar González where the contents of some works were questioned because the Ministry of Culture found it problematic. The officials of the Council demanded to suppress information that the artists considered essential for the understanding of their works. Consistent with Haacke's methodology, ABTV refused to meet the Council's demand, them the exhibition was "canceled" not without the Council first demanding that the content of the meeting not be unveiled in order to prevent the “failed negotiation” from being construed as official censorship. Tanya Angulo and José Toirac did not agree to release a note that Juan Ballester Carmenates and Ileana Villazón wrote detailing the details of the censorship. Ballester and Ileana printed hundreds of copies that they distributed themselves the night Homage to Hans Haacke was due to open. The Ministry of Culture deleted all information related to the censorship of Homage to Hans Haacke. In 1990 the Kuba o.k. exhibition was opened at the Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The project, which was curated by Jurgen Harten and advised for the Ministry of Culture by the artist Antonio Eligio Tonel, included in the catalog an Osvaldo Sánchez text on ABTV, as the text provided information on Homage to Hans Haacke, the Ministry of Culture pressured Harten to suppress the Osvaldo Sánchez text from the catalog. Harten had no choice but to yield to official pressure but finally he published the text as an annex to the catalog, distributing it within him. When the catalog arrived in Cuba, the Ministry of Culture kidnapped all annexes. In 1991, Art collector Peter Ludwig expressed interest in buying the controversial The Smile of Truth, but the National Museum of Fine Arts declared it of heritage interest and acquired it for his collection even though the Museum has never allowed its public display. ABTV was dissolved after the censorship of Homage to Hans Haacke. In 1991 Ileana Villazón went into exile in Mexico and in 1992 Juan Pablo Ballester went into exile in Spain.