Fuster's Pro-Community Aspect. Dr. Arq. Raúl Navarro Padrón. December, 2006.

Environmental design, in its best known aspect, includes the architectonic as well as the urban spectrum. It is the scale of design that involves and integrates almost every creative expression associated to the material objects that conform a given space, together with what has been termed works of art, so as to guarantee the emergence of coherent links with respect to the context in which they operate. This can only be achieved if a close collaboration exists between the authors and the citizens who live there, in an attempt to locate an inter-relationship and a demand of greater consequences in the aesthetic as well as in the cultural realms than what is usually provided by conventional galleries and museums in private spaces.

When speaking of the design of the environment in its widest sense, reference is generally made to the specific design of a public space that suffers, regardless of its dimensions –be it an open, a closed, a natural or an urban space— modifications through the concrete actions of design that not only imply it as such, but also the large field that surrounds it and to which it belongs.
Although differences might exist in the treatment and in the goals to be achieved, interventions in such spaces should bear as a common feature the fact of conforming what we call today a visual culture. They should thus exhibit an organic correspondence and harmony with respect to the global interests of the public that will be a part of them and will be enjoying them: therefore, they must have, above all other things, a cultural, spiritual and affective meaning for said public. That is why when artistic-environmental activities are carried out in the midst of a given community, they become a very important factor in the enhancement of its people’s quality of life. The fact that these actions are constituted by objects the temporary permanence of which is guaranteed through the support created by its town-planning/architectonic structure, in a visual expression related to the identity signs instituted and acknowledged by its inhabitants, confronts us to a cultural manifestation that, in its expression as public art, reasserts itself in the role of a social expediter vis-à-vis that community.

The Eastern boundaries of the town of Jaimanitas, where Fuster’s Workshop stands, are marked by the river that bears the same name, and confronts the Strait of Florida as its Northern limits. In the times prior to Columbus it extended to approximately comprise the territories of the present-day neighbourhoods of Siboney and Atabey, in which, according to the archaeological objects found there, a community that belonged to the pre-agriculturalist and pre-potter culture mentioned in the XVI century Chapter Transactions. This territory later evolved to its present-day dimensions of approximately 11 Km², with a population of almost 18 000 inhabitants.
José Antonio Rodríguez Fuster moved to this beach community in 1974, the year in which he created, in his own home, the ceramics workshop where today he continues to pursue his artistic work that already enjoyed, at the time, national acknowledgement and renown.

The increasing national acceptance of his work attracted international attention and therefore required an extension of the workshop’s initial capacities and goals in order to adequately respond to the new demands of the market as well as of the growing number of individuals interested in his creative endeavours.
Fuster’s artistic projects have been growing not only from a quantitative but also from a qualitative viewpoint. He has been evolving from an initially egocentric praxis –in the sense of an artistic-personal self-complacency— until he reached the point of developing the artistic-pro-community self-complacency expressed in the work that he has been carrying out for several years in the surroundings of Fuster’s Workshop, that nowadays receives requests from various art galleries throughout the world.

The civil concerns of this creator have been historically expressed ever since he began to build “his own cities”, starting out from models of popular individual homes with which the artist as well as the public attending the exhibit were able to conform –each of them according to their personal tastes and the available spaces— their own cities in an artistic-performative way of acting that anticipated the visual actions that would later on be pursued in our countries through what was termed the contemporary art activities.

From Fuster’s viewpoint, the performative exercise is a concept that goes beyond the artist’s own way of acting when he creates an artefact. He conceives that the artist as well as the users, in a joint way, construct a sort of participation in which the former, through a pristine idea, establishes the general parameters through which the latter directly take part –with their actions— or indirectly –with their ideas— in the elaboration of a work that, ever since that moment, becomes collective, thus transcending the scant temporal space of all things ephemeral in order to establish itself as a heritage of a group of people.

The “Fusterian construction of ideal cities” has evolved, from the spatial and contained dimensions of the hall in an art gallery, and has achieved a scale in which the work of art overflows the narrow frame of an exclusive site, visited by a select public, knowledgeable of its contents, in order to invade the space of the community and convey its message of culture and aesthetic education that will then coexist within a work of art that they conceive as being theirs.
Fuster’s work deceives those that will only see in it a representational populism and ignore that, endowed as it is with a plural language, its creation institutes a direct type of communication with the community to which it is addressed. It maintains the essential plurality of meanings proper to all works of art and makes it available to all those who, even if they are not specialists, are capable of developing a sensitivity vis-à-vis the work of art while at the same time providing the conditions for the creation of an artistic-aesthetic perceptibility in those who are lacking it.

If an in-depth analysis is made of Fuster’s environmental works of art incorporated to the community, we can reach the conclusion that these all comply, in every sense –in the Fusterian way— with the functions assigned to public art. This is because those that are commemorative works of art (Cinco Palmas –Five Palm Trees—, Los gallos –The Roosters— Sierra Maestra, etc.), seen through the popular eyes, keep their meanings alive; those that are ornamental works, evident in his neighbours’ façades and walls; those that are experimental works (both the experimental ones properly speaking in the sense of the techniques applied –ceramics, ferro-cement, concrete— as well as the ones related to games (Parque del ajedrez –Chess Park); the integrating function with respect to the inter-disciplinary fact (Muro de los artistas –Artists’ Wall), as well as the participational one vis-a-vis the population, and the signalling function in its symbolic sense, both from the neighbours’ personal viewpoint (Villa , la Casa del mexicano –The Mexican’s House—, etc.) as well as those that are marked by the community’s social services (The family doctor’s office), are all works that express not only the artist’s mastery (obvious in itself), but also his concerns for a higher objective, that becomes his raison d’être as a human being and as an artist, which is serving, with his actions, the goal of enhancing the aesthetic and civic education of the population among which he pursues his daily life.

Research work undertaken on art and the criticism of actions that predate contemporary art, as well as undertakings pursued in this field in the past decades, have shown that the isolated work of art is no more than an object within a world of objects and only acquires a sense when it is inserted in a space in which it interacts with the environment with a view to alter its structure and to create a new dimension in said environment, in a way that users are induced to reconsider its structures.

From all that has been previously argued here, several things obviously stand out: the sense of belonging, the acceptance and recognition awarded by the community to Fuster’s work, a work that is already inserted, as an unprecedented fact, in the history of Cuba’s visual arts.