“Salsa is the Manifestation of Our Own Modernity”

C&AL: Your artistic practice is anchored in drawing, which implies concentrating on careful and attentive observation. Your project La llave / La clave (The Key) wants to do precisely that, namely pay attention to and decipher the multiple components of the world we call “salsa”. Can you tell us a little bit about how this project developed?

Tony Cruz Pabón: La llave / La clave (The Key) starts out as an investigation which tends to take plastic shape, since my point of departure is the gaze of the artist. It initially seems different from my drawings, but in reality, it is in dialogue with my other projects, such as the cloud drawings containing a music playlist.

Several years ago, I began collecting images of salsa album covers and their precursive musical genres, mainly from the 50s to the 80s. This impulse started as an aesthetic indulgence in which I began to see references to the art world. I then started showing them to friends and students – I was still a professor at the School of Fine Arts and Design of Puerto Rico at the time – and these informal presentations ended up shaping the content into that of a talk. Simultaneously to the analysis of the covers, I do the same with the music, and so this eclectic approach is the same for both the music and the images.

La llave / La clave has been expressed through various types of media such as talk, video, sculpture and different types of publications and, as you can see in the exhibition at the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art, they are all in dialogue with each other.

C&AL: That combination is quite explicit in the sculpture.

TCP: Yes, that piece of furniture is a collection of records which I have been acquiring little by little. And by way of publication I made record sleeves with a version of the topics of my research and the talk. This offers the audience a possibility to generate an analog and live playlist.

C&AL: What are some of the topics of the publication?

TCP: Religion and Afro-Caribbean syncretism. Here, the image itself becomes a container, and in the case of the album covers I see it the same way: the original content is discharged and others are applied to it. These are layers in code, or interconnections. This happens all the time with music too, when different rhythms interchange and complement each other, just like in the lyrics of salsa songs; you go from a neighborhood in New York, over rural Puerto Rico and to the beach, interchanging historical periods and religious references etc.

There is an album by Maelo [Puerto Rican singer Ismael Rivera] with the orchestra of Rafael Cortijo, Con todos los hierros, and on the cover you see both musicians behind a bunch of metal tools, saws, picks, shovels, hammers. What I see on that cover is the Cauldron of Ogún [deity of the Yoruba religion, patron of blacksmiths, wars and technology] with all its different metals and irons. Add to this the fact that Maelo was a carpenter; all those references converge in that image. Within this idea of syncretism, there is also the incorporation of references to the countercultures of that time. We see how elements of psychedelia, pop art, and the reaffirmation of both black American culture and Afro-Caribbean culture intermingle.

I am interested in how these images and songs – which represent our particular modernity – are constructed. Within the context of that era there are many allusions to moon and space travel, and I interpret that journey as a general metaphor. A key element is the references to art history, particularly the historical avant-garde. My parents and I first came across Man Ray on the cover of a Bobby Valentine record.

C&AL: Let’s talk a little about the impact of salsa in Puerto Rico.

TCP: Salsa and music in general is our most powerful cultural manifestation. It influences all Puerto Rican thinking and aesthetics, and in reality, it’s in the machinery of our operating system. As I mentioned before, this is where our own modernity manifests itself.

C&AL: New York is key to salsa – after all, this was where it emerged in the 1970s – but in Puerto Rico it was a revolution.

TCP: There is a feeling outside Puerto Rico that the U.S. record label and orchestra Fania is everything in salsa, and it is even associated almost exclusively as the only catalyst for this genre. While you can’t deny the impact of that label, salsa is definitely more than that. With regards to Fania, I am very interested in the figures of Izzy Sanabria and Jorge Vargas. In the 1970s they created a company from which they developed the image of many of these musicians. Music and aesthetics were in dialogue, and the images they created corresponded with what was happening in New York City.

Another thing to keep in mind is that salsa is not a rhythm; it is just the way a lot of Caribbean rhythms were labeled in that decade. This also happened with the other elements surrounding the music.

C&AL: For several years now, you and I have shared interests relating to the Caribbean and we both understand our artistic practice in Puerto Rico as a Caribbean practice. What is your impression of the Caribbean art scene?

TCP: Unfortunately, I don’t see it, or we don’t see it as we would like to. We want to interact but it doesn’t happen. In the Caribbean, our respective political realities make dialogue almost impossible. In music however, exchanges are more evident although there are always efforts to make them happen in other areas as well like art, literature, dance or theater.

Still, there are points of convergence. In spite of working in similar but different contexts, I see the idea of the trace or trail manifesting itself in many artworks made in the Caribbean or by artists from the region – it is all being pulled into the way we create art.

C&AL: What are you working on these days?

TCP: As I mentioned at the beginning, my practice is based on drawing. Right now, I’m working on a series of objects/drawings, to which I apply layers of graphite or use graphite as a material, treating it as another object. The structures are fragile and unstable, and together, these exercises form an ephemeral drawing in space. As with La llave / La Clave, these works need time and require one to pay attention to their subtleties.

Tony Cruz Pabón  was born in Puerto Rico in 1977 and still lives and works on the island. He studied at the School of Fine Arts and Design of Puerto Rico and did a PhD at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain. In 2009 he helped create Beta-Local, an organization dedicated to promoting the arts and critical dialogue in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work has been exhibited in galleries around the world: Glasgow, São Paulo, London, Bogota, as well as at the X Berlin Biennale in 2018.

Pablo Guardiola lives and works as an artist in San Juan. He studied on the island and in the United States. His work refers to everyday poetic language and the power of context in artistic creation. He is a co-director of Beta-Local.

Translation from Spanish by Zarifa Mohamad Petersen