Born in Havana
by DAN CARVILLE
Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door
Art Institute of Chicago
The things afforded him by Castro were not many. It was better for Abelardo's father to try to flee Cuba. He went by plane, with his entire family, to visit a distant country.
First, there was Miami, then New Orleans. Abelardo Morell's father worked at a building superintendent on West 69th Street. Abelardo Morell, a mere 13 years old, did not return to Cuba for forty years.
Here was an alien new space for a teenager who barely spoke English. It's not difficult to understand why photography appealed far more to the boy than painting or sculpture. By merely tilting his head he saw a foreign slice of earth, even in the darkest room. Inventing and designing new spaces could come later.
His uncle Jose lent him a variety of books about art and architecture. "Somehow, the conflicts of cultures, languages and places that I felt didn't just scare me, these things also gave me a sense of exhilaration, a feeling that things out there were wild and surreal," Elizabeth Siegel finds Morell saying. When you get on a plane, and it's your first time being there, it's hard to believe you might never come back.
In Cuba, Castro replaced all money with his own currency. The new stuff felt like play money. For an adult, this kind of exchange might seem strange or even bizarre, but for a child it was frightening.
Morell's examinations of basic household objects hold the same kind of power. We do live in a world that is fundamentally foreign to us, but this fact can only be suggested to us through art, which possesses the only reality with which we need concern ourselves.
Morell had dropped out of Bowdoin by then, during his senior year. (His parents had to look up where the school was in an atlas.) He had struggled in some of his required classes, and would not return to finish his degree until 1976.
The music of John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass infused his ideas about the diverse elements that could be represented in a singular composition. What started out as observational street art became that and more in his early photographs.
Eventually Morell did see Cuba again, visiting the places he remembered from his childhood. By then he had married and had a son of his own. Cuba was barely been altered from what he remembered; his old places were still there, preserved in time like flies in amber. What would happen to him now?
A succession of preposterous places is the only thing left.
Dan Carville is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about his trip to San Francisco.
"Almost Home" - Moby w/Damien Jurado (mp3)
