Iván de la Nuez

A fundamental dictionary against the noise and indigestion caused by the iconographic avalanche of contemporary culture. 

With phone cameras having become human appendages, we generate far more images than we can consume—images that subjugate us and sometimes compel us to rebel. Images that consume us, and that occasionally need to be consumed themselves. Images that, under the vast carpet of millions of reproductions, almost always conceal the imaginaries of this era. This era began with the new right-wing launching Lenin's headless body into the Berlin sky and extends to a present, where the new left has set Franco's headless body galloping across the ground in Barcelona. 

Essayist Iván de la Nuez defines this omnipresence as "iconocracy," a term that reinforces the tyranny of the image while also allowing us to counteract it. Indeed, without denying this oppressive ubiquity, the iconographic apotheosis can also be understood as an ecosystem of power and counterpower—a game of government and opposition that accommodates the radical purge of iconoclasm but also the critical digestion of "iconophagy." This concept, shared by Norval Baitello and Alfonso Morales, now lends its name to this dictionary, which presents itself as a single tapestry where voices and images shine with their own light in each chapter.

Memories from beyond the grave of a very much alive intellectual.

In 2015 Iván de la Nuez was astonished to discover that a Havana funeral parlour had issued his death certificate because of a bureaucratic error. In this new role of being officially certified as dead, Iván de la Nuez reviews his main intellectual concerns: current political affairs, Cuba, the confrontation between communism and capitalism, and the artistic avant-garde.

Likewise, with the irreverent spirit that comes with existing in the hereafter, he tackles many other issues imposed by the present, such as the vengeful act of urinating on other people's graves, the ever-increasing mumbo jumbo that surrounds the term "postmodernity", and the selfie as a cultural act.

In Posmo the reader will not only find Fidel Castro, Donald Trump and Andy Warhol but also a colourful mix of key figures, including Dakota Johnson, Rambo and the North Korean dictators, Pokémon, Julio Iglesias, Eric Cantona and Carles Puyol, Adam Curtis and Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas, plus a long list of other artists, creators, writers, intellectuals and politicians, all of them providing an extraordinary overview of today's world.

“When Iván de la Nuez was told that he was dead in Havana, he realised that it was time to resurrect himself and start writing one of his best collections of analyses of current reality – the reality of the living. Masterly in all respects; from the geopolitical to the artistic.” Agustín Fernández Mallo

"This is a spectral journey that goes from personal experiences to the cultural effects of a pandemic or the war in Ukraine, ending with that statute that De la Nuez calls the New Normal Order (...) Posmo is a revenge written with the freedom that only those who are already in the other world can achieve in this world." Zenda Libros

Cubantropía does not set out to explain Cuba to the world, but rather the other way around: it uses Cuba as a scale containing the world and its conflicts.

Written from the socialist perspective of the Cold War and the neoliberal perspective of subsequent years, Cubantropía is a harsh criticism of both that explores the connections between Cuban culture and geopolitics in the global era. Zigzagging its way from the Berlin Wall to Havana’s Malecón, this book examines recent clashes between the market and democracy, the digital era and post-colonialism, the centre and the periphery, utopia and tourism, the diaspora and the nation, racism and Big Data, Guantánamo and Reggaeton, soccer and baseball, Obama and the Rolling Stones, Europe and Donald Trump.

With his usual ironic, erudite style, Iván de la Nuez has written a sensational essay that can be read as an intellectual autobiography and map of the itineraries of the New Man born from the Revolution.

“Nothing explains our vexed world quite like Cuba and no one anywhere writes more brilliantly, more prophetically, more impossibly than Iván de la Nuez. As in all of his finest work, Cubanthropy delivers you beyond your old horizons into a realm of startling possibilities. Do not miss this extraordinary book or this extraordinary warlock of a writer.” —Junot Díaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her 

“Cubanthropy may just be the smartest writing on Cuba—and beyond—I’ve read in ages. Insightful, unsparing, funny, and with an unerring eye for the paradoxical, Iván de la Nuez has written the definitive compilation on 21st-century Cuba. Essential reading for all who care about how the past, present, and future are disturbingly converging on the island, and off.” —Cristina García, author of forthcoming Vanishing Maps
 

Four decades ago, Peter Burger published The Theory of the Avant-Garde. It was a cult book focused on the two main tasks that art demanded at the time: to break its representation and to destroy the barrier that separated it from life. To fail in this double task would have had supposed, according to Burger, the defeat of the Avant-Guarde and maybe something worse: its impossibility.

Forty years later, The Rearguard Theory is and ironic manifest that has emerged from that failure, even though he does not waste his time mourning it or disguising it. Primarily because in the book it is understood that our times are not characterized by the distance between art and life, but by a tension between art and survival, which is the continuation of life by any means necessary.

In the discomfort that emerges from that survival, The Rearguard Theory talks about an art that leaves splinters in politics, iconography or literature; fields from which he comes back more and more battered every time to his usual Ithaca: the museum. Ever since that round trip, this austere and sharp book—in which Duchamp stumbles upon Lupe, the revolution upon the museum, Paul Virilio upon Joan Fontcuberta or Fukuyama upon Michael Jackson—wonders if contemporary art will ever end. Because if it were mortal, then it would be necessary to write its ending.

“Iván de la Nuez  is one of the sharpest art critics that can be read today in Spanish.” El Confidencial 

“We have to read Iván de la Nuez to convince ourselves that art critic can be an essay nicely thought-out and well-written.” Letras Libres

'El arte de la contradicción', Babelia, El País

 “Iván de la Nuez is a sniper that has spent twenty years publishing books that are milestones of an original and coherent exploration of the contemporary symbolic environment […], and he does that with a rigorous but accessible and fun writing style.” César Rendueles. Babelia, El País

“Iván de la Nuez transforms art criticism in the art of criticism.” Rafael Rojas

Dos décadas después de finalizada la Guerra Fría, el fantasma del Comunismo ha renacido en el territorio de los vencedores, siempre preparados para cavar su tumba, pero no para lidiar con su vida de ultratumba. De esta ironía trata este libro; y de cómo la cultura occidental ha acabado reciclando, en una mezcla de fascinación y venganza, la iconografía del Imperio desplomado.

Un repaso a los grandes temas del arte contemporáneo desde 1989.

Veinte años de transformaciones políticas. Veinte años de arte contemporáneo. Solo veinte años van de la caída del muro al desmantelamiento de la prisión de Guantánamo. Del fin de la Guerra Fría a la confirmación de la impotencia estadounidense para controlar el mundo que surgió del colapso comunista. A modo de dietario, con un capítulo por cada uno de los 21 años transcurridos, Iván de la Nuez recorre, con su brillantez habitual, todos los recovecos de nuestra experiencia para iluminar el impacto del arte en la historia contemporánea, y de la historia contemporánea en el arte.

Un ensayo que demuestra la irremediable unión que existe entre arte, política y sociedad.

'Inundaciones y El mapa de sal de Iván de la Nuez', Javier Calvo, Letras Libres 

A sharp and intelligent review of the vision many European and American intellectuals have about Fidel Castro's government. 

What do Jean-Paul Sartre and Oliver Stone, Régis Debray and Sydney Pollack, the musician Ry Cooder, who introduced Buena Vista Social Club, and the film director Richard Lester, who directed the Beatles, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and Max Aub, Graham Greene and David Byrne have in common? 

In addition to being, each in their own way and condition, recognized intellectual icons of the Western left, these illustrious figures have shared their passion for the Cuban Revolution. To uncover the deep or trivial causes of this passion is the aim of Red Fantasy, a personal essay written with both conceptual depth and a sense of humour.

From philosophy to music, novels to film, fire and ruin, tourism and dilapidated Cadillacs, theory and street life, this study delves into the mysteries of this fantasy and proposes a debate on what could be expected from a renewed left for the 21st century.

First published twenty years ago, The Salt Map resurfaces today as a book of anticipation.

A critical text filled with verifiable predictions, The Salt Map addresses global paradoxes from a private geopolitics perspective, always in the first person. Hence, the autobiographical tone of this essay, which can be read as a foundational, key piece of the latest Spanish-language narrative. It is a cult book that connects Jean-Paul Sartre and Pedja Mijatovic, Sergéi Bubka and Jean-François Lyotard, Che Guevara and Orlan. In it, revolution and globalization are somatized in bodies that have lost their landscapes and placed in landscapes that have lost their bodies.

For the author, The Salt Map is what The Book of Sand is for Borges or The Territory of La Mancha for Carlos Fuentes, except that his map is not confined to a specific time or language. For Iván de la Nuez, between the sweet past of nostalgia and the sour, cynical present of globalization, there is a future that can be named at the tip of the tongue. A salty future.

“Texts like this encode the survival of thought.” El País

“The author constructs a map to navigate this society full of ex, neo, and post, where the boundaries, more suggested than explained, escape immutability: only the permeable can survive in a world forged by floods.” La Vanguardia

“A daring and brilliant attempt to provide a coherent explanation for the chaotic current reality of the Western world. (…) Suggestive and unsettling.” Mondosonoro

“Full of humour and at the same time with a startling seriousness, De la Nuez topples towers wherever he focuses, undermining situations that were once overvalued. (…) A fundamental essay in this time of ideological uncertainties, when it seems that everything has been erased and is beginning to be redrawn.” Canarias 7

Una interpretación de la cultura cubana ante la globalización, la posmodernidad y la caída del muro de Berlín.

Selección y edición a cargo de Iván de la Nuez.

Ivan de la Nuez fue el director de la antología, que incluye artículos de José Antonio Évora, Natalia Bolívar, Gerardo Mosquera, Raquel Carrió, Coco Fusco, Osvaldo Sánchez, Emma Álvarez Tabio, Antoni Benítez Rojo, Antonio Vera León, Madeline Cámara, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, José Triana, Rafael Rojas, Iván de la Nuez, Manuel Moreno Fraginals y  Bladimir Zamora Céspedes.