VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

The “Monument to the Third International,” commonly known as Tatlin’s Tower (1919-1920), is still seen as a paradigm of social commitment blended with artistic form. It epitomizes the utopianism ingrained in the Russian avant-garde and in the communist credo that motivated and followed the October Revolution in 1917. In 1992 a young Cuban artist named Alexis Leyva Machado (Kcho) began a series of sketches of Tatlin’s Tower titled “A los ojos de la historia” (To the Eyes of History) that would result in his own sculptural version of the monument, pointedly constructed with only twigs and plant fibers found on the island. He shrewdly crowned the piece with a fabric coffee cone filter, a reference to the most popular beverage for the people of Cuba. That a Cuban artist, trapped in the sea of skepticism verging on hopelessness, became obsessed with the Russian monument seventy-two years after Tatlin’s idea is not a coincidence. The aftermath of the collapse of the Eastern bloc of communist governments in the early 1990s meant the withdrawal of most Soviet support for the small island nation of Cuba, provoking severe shortages of goods and the near-failure of the country’s infrastructure. To the Eyes of History embodies Kcho’s response to Tatlin’s ambition to fuse art with ideology and ultimately exposes the failures of the imposition of the Soviet socialist model in Cuba.