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Lot Essay
“We were not only recycling wood. We recycled a conception of the past in Cuba.”
- Dagoberto Rodríguez
“I think our first piece was the collaboration itself,” reflects Marco Castillo, one of the three founding members of the collective Los Carpinteros, with Dagoberto Rodríguez and (until 2003) Alexandre Arrechea (quoted in E. Mara de Wachter, “Los Carpinteros,” Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration, New York, 2017, p. 40). Students of René Francisco Rodríguez at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, they met in 1990 and soon began to collaborate. “Los Carpinteros seemed perfect for us because we wanted to investigate issues of the way art is made, the way that an object is fabricated,” Castillo explains of the group’s name. “To speak of a carpenter is to speak of the way something is made.” Their identification with makers “implied a sort of guild affiliation,” adds Arrechea. “The idea of being a carpenter, that is a common person, without great pretensions of other sorts, reduced the notion of the artist to something simpler,” he continues. “The concept of ‘a carpenter’ was a form of subterfuge for us; it gave us something to hide behind and therefore to circumvent the prevailing climate of vigilance” (quoted in R. Lowinger, “The Object as Protagonist: An Interview with Los Carpinteros,” Sculpture 18, no. 10, December 1999, pp. 25-6). For twenty-six years, from their acclaimed debut at the Fifth Havana Bienal in 1994 to their decision to dissolve the partnership in 2018, Los Carpinteros honed their craft of chicanery in a body of work that grew from painting and appropriation to furniture, architecture, and site-specific projects installed around the world.
“We started making furniture, that is, we concentrated on the idea of a piece of furniture, the metaphor of things—of thought, but all through the means of furniture and design,” recalls Castillo (quoted in ibid., p. 27). Vanite belongs to a series of five works, adapted in part from found wooden furniture and called Interior Habanero, that they showed at the Bienal in 1994. A riff on vanitas paintings, traditionally a 17th-century Dutch genre of still-life painting that meditates on mortality and the mutability of life, Vanite takes the form of an elaborately carved dressing table (a “vanity”) with a green marble top and feet in the shape of a lion’s paw. In place of the traditional mirror is a portrait of the group: Arrechea holds a candle in his right hand, illuminating Rodríguez as he carves MAD—the original name of Los Carpinteros, derived from the first name of each member—onto Castillo’s back. “Although the scene also alludes to the scarce materials for art then available in Cuba,” art historian Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano observes, “it more importantly serves as an embodiment of the sacrifice of individuality for the sake of the collective, not only in Los Carpinteros but in revolutionary Cuba as well (“From Molten Plastic to Polished Mahogany: Bricolage and Scarcity in 1990s Cuban Art,” eds. A. Black and N. Burisch, The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design, New York, 2021, p. 159).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
- Dagoberto Rodríguez
“I think our first piece was the collaboration itself,” reflects Marco Castillo, one of the three founding members of the collective Los Carpinteros, with Dagoberto Rodríguez and (until 2003) Alexandre Arrechea (quoted in E. Mara de Wachter, “Los Carpinteros,” Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration, New York, 2017, p. 40). Students of René Francisco Rodríguez at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, they met in 1990 and soon began to collaborate. “Los Carpinteros seemed perfect for us because we wanted to investigate issues of the way art is made, the way that an object is fabricated,” Castillo explains of the group’s name. “To speak of a carpenter is to speak of the way something is made.” Their identification with makers “implied a sort of guild affiliation,” adds Arrechea. “The idea of being a carpenter, that is a common person, without great pretensions of other sorts, reduced the notion of the artist to something simpler,” he continues. “The concept of ‘a carpenter’ was a form of subterfuge for us; it gave us something to hide behind and therefore to circumvent the prevailing climate of vigilance” (quoted in R. Lowinger, “The Object as Protagonist: An Interview with Los Carpinteros,” Sculpture 18, no. 10, December 1999, pp. 25-6). For twenty-six years, from their acclaimed debut at the Fifth Havana Bienal in 1994 to their decision to dissolve the partnership in 2018, Los Carpinteros honed their craft of chicanery in a body of work that grew from painting and appropriation to furniture, architecture, and site-specific projects installed around the world.
“We started making furniture, that is, we concentrated on the idea of a piece of furniture, the metaphor of things—of thought, but all through the means of furniture and design,” recalls Castillo (quoted in ibid., p. 27). Vanite belongs to a series of five works, adapted in part from found wooden furniture and called Interior Habanero, that they showed at the Bienal in 1994. A riff on vanitas paintings, traditionally a 17th-century Dutch genre of still-life painting that meditates on mortality and the mutability of life, Vanite takes the form of an elaborately carved dressing table (a “vanity”) with a green marble top and feet in the shape of a lion’s paw. In place of the traditional mirror is a portrait of the group: Arrechea holds a candle in his right hand, illuminating Rodríguez as he carves MAD—the original name of Los Carpinteros, derived from the first name of each member—onto Castillo’s back. “Although the scene also alludes to the scarce materials for art then available in Cuba,” art historian Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano observes, “it more importantly serves as an embodiment of the sacrifice of individuality for the sake of the collective, not only in Los Carpinteros but in revolutionary Cuba as well (“From Molten Plastic to Polished Mahogany: Bricolage and Scarcity in 1990s Cuban Art,” eds. A. Black and N. Burisch, The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design, New York, 2021, p. 159).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park