Chapter 12: JUST BEING: Claiming Radical Presence (a postmodern, postmortem manifesto.)

 

Chapter 12: JUST BEING: Claiming Radical Presence (a postmodern, postmortem manifesto.)

​This body of work is perhaps the most important and yet, most reductive I have ever done. Just Being: LatinX is a series of unaltered documentary recorded moments. Scenes of me just sitting or making a cup of ramen or taking a pill, investigate and deconstruct the idea that art by artists of color must be made for a reason, that it must jump through programmatic hoops—hoops, defined by the expectations of others (or more precisely those that "other" us)—art, it is felt, that must be revolutionary.  But this art series is about Just Being—and it is sufficient and whole unto itself. Though, in a turn laden with irony—merely existing may end up being the most revolutionary act of all—deconstructing and ultimately reifying the very idea that contemporary Latinx art deserves to exist, to be here at all and to tell its own individual stories.

​Through performance, I seek to engender, enlarge and expand the conversation of what Latina/x/o art is and what it must be and in "Just Being" I investigate the (radical) idea of the (radical) act of (radically) just being a person of color and just presenting your life—not as a revolutionary act, but as is. 

In other words, if you learn nothing else from me, learn this, to thine own self be true. This series may very well be my most important and at the same time the most boring set of performances of all that I have ever done. In a way, the series is all found object and finds its power in its framing as art. As Duchamp does in his (possibly not his) "Fountain" I am putting my signature on the most mundane moments of my life and claiming them as art.

​"Just Being," is a series that presents this Latinx artist doing the most quotidian, most mundane things like sleeping, taking a shit or cooking an egg—and yet, this is a series that points to the fact that individual lives of color matter and that art made by a person of color can exist merely as a representation of self. 

This is an overturning. Just as I pointed out at the beginning of the book you are holding in your hands; when I was a little boy walking through the Chicano Art Center on Euclid Ave, I used to watch these artists "doing their own thing" as they called it, and in this case, during this time—doing your own thing," meant being a revolutionary, it meant fighting for recognition and telling the stories of your people. My Father during these years used to wear a beret angled "just right" as he stood with his fist pumped in the air above him exclaiming, "Chicano Power!"

​It was an exhilarating and pride making sight to see for a youngster like me. But looking back at those days, individuality as we understood it was completely different than it is today. Don't get me wrong, every one of those artists truly believed that they were doing their own individual work, speaking their own minds and following their own dreams—and they were—absolutely! 

But those dreams were absolutely transubstantiated through the collective and filtered through the sensibilities of the many. Everything was seen through the needs of the group—and the group was the individual. There was simply no separation between the two. That was the way that it was and there was nothing wrong with it—then.

​Which is all well-and-good, but for us to be making the same artwork from fifty years ago would be unconscionable, to make art guided by the same goals and sensibilities would be insane. Just as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns etc., made art that was a representation of their ideas, their hopes, and their fears--so must every artist of color speak their own names, without the guilt and pressure of a society that tells us that we must subsume our desires for the sake of the greater good—our work needs to represent our lives as we live them, to celebrate our ideas and our desires—yes, especially our ideas--our own autobiographical ideas.

​For many generations, society, culture and the hegemonies they have created have sought to make the artist of color into an artistic subaltern—always crying up to the hegemonic forces, begging for scraps, always kept busy running around in circles by a series of cultural Wizards of Oz—making us believe their lies and mesmerizing us. 

For too long, too many artistic lives of color have been lost to a continual hegemonic power-play that denies our own work, stunts our own evolutions and forces us to represent anything other than our own individual lives' work.

​Do not think that I say this without the knowledge that most of us are not there yet, that these words will be met with skepticism, anger and fear; but the truth is that the subaltern has learned to speak and now that the postmodern has been popped, stupefied and rendered ridiculous, now that the Age of Nefarious has taken hold and we have all gotten used to the water, nothing can ever be the same and we are beginning to hear and claim our own voices in the once chaotic din.

​What we need is a Cultural and Racial Bechdel test! What do I mean by a Racial Bechdel Test?' What is this Lopez Litmus? It is simply this, does a POC artwork pass the test of being made conceptually for oneself, individually and for one's chosen audience? Or is it being made for hegemony, the larger oppressive culture, in essence is it being made conceptually for people of no color? I don't care who buys it, but rather what does the artwork itself buy into, is it trying to explain itself to the hegemony or is it claiming its individuality for all to see. That is the Lopez Litmus. Plain and simple. And the art itself can be political. It can be activist, but it should begin by directing the artwork to our sisters and brothers and working out from there!

Through this particular body of work; I see myself and other contemporary Latinx artists defining how our art is to be perceived, and what form it will take in the future. I see a Latinx art defined by complexity, criticality and biographical and theoretical strength, creating a "Latinoism" based on alliances that owes more of its form to the Queer and Feminist programs that lead the way for identity movements than to an essentialized Latino-ness. I seek to engender, enlarge and expand the conversation of what Latina/x/o art is and what it can be. We live at a time in which definitions of race, masculinity, gender and art are changing, and through these and other performances I seek to be a voice in this change.

​Flash back to childhood. When we were still young, my father delighted in telling us stories of Socrates and Plato and would often present us with one of life's big questions and ask us to argue from various philosophical/Greek positions. To this day, I can still name about half of the letters of the Greek alphabet and know enough to realize that Plato preferred policemen to artists. During that time several guiding principles were born, primary among those being that our differences are merely skin deep—we are all humans and the differences that lay between any of us--none of that actually matters. There are no important differences between the races, sub-races, tribes, etc. etc. and so on—especially in the ways that truly make any difference.

​We all have the same capacities of feeling, we all have the same abilities to dream and we all hope for better lives and wish to see a better world. Historically, all of the books we read have been filled with inventions and discoveries by people of every race, color and creed. Humans of every kind have created all of our photographs, paintings, sculptures, cities, books, languages, romances, poems, movies, etc. and etc. and so on—and every single one of these is as real and as valid for each and every one of us and is enjoyed and understood with no difference that is affected by race, sex, gender, religion, etc.

​Wanting to Express your own life, then, to exercise your own individuality, share your own dreams and obsessions is not wanting to be white. It is, in fact, your right to claim this—all of it. As I have noted before in earlier chapters there have been many times when I was given messages that claimed the exact opposite, very often the message was quite clear, you have a Mexican last name--you must make Mexican artwork, and it came from every direction, even from those that look just like me. I have learned over and over again, that I don't want to look back on my life and realize that I wasted it playing a game that was always rigged against lives of color, stacked against us in a way that was always meant to waste our lives. 

No. Wanting to express your own life is not wanting to be white--in fact wanting to live and die in any other way would be insanity. Race, itself, has never been anything more than merely cosmetic—we wear a series of hues likely having more to do with climatic effects and our ancestors’ originary locations than with any real, inherent differences in us as animals. Race is merely skin deep, and it is clear that we often confuse culture with race. Ultimately, to me, over the years it has become clear that race is in fact phantasmatic—it simply does not exist, it is a ghost—an illusion—at best, it is an illusion hidden in the pigments of our skin—it is a ghost identity. One might as well separate those that have red hair or freckles—make them feel inferior or treat them as a group of personae non gratae. Or segregate by height or hair color or eye color or penis-size. Any of these would be silly right? Unfair? Or just sheerly idiotic—right? And yet, we do separate on the basis of skin color—to this day—we still assume that people see the world differently—that based on skin color that someone might not have a soul or the same intellect as others. All of these things have been asserted at more than one time by men of intellect.  In fact, damn you, Noah Webster for ensuring that even the very language that I speak is rooted in racism.

​In the "Just Being" series, we open the pages of our text to include things that have never been seen, documented, nor claimed as performance art. A Latinx documenting his own life, rather than what society has determined he should create. A Latinx recording and displaying his life without narrative, without poesy, without artifice. This is not the LatinX artist as societally approved revolutionary, as standardized stereotype, as a "Bandido with a heart of gold," etc., but rather being true to his own vision and for once, just being—perhaps the most revolutionary act that a person of "colors" can claim in this day and age.

​In this project I try to just do what I would naturally do, aside from the camera being there, unscripted, usually at the beginning of some simple act, though that may eventually change with both random starting and stopping points—the idea is not to achieve any level of vérité, or to even ignore the presence of the camera, but rather to just record and see what we get. In the videos, being aware of the camera or reacting to the camera is a valid part of "just being" as these aren't about pretending to emulate reality, rather they are a capturing of reality in, at least to the best of my knowledge, the best way that I know how to do that.

​Every act, creation etc, that has been recorded before and which has left a document, a story, a mark, by any Latino artist has been done so, in response to the power structures of oppression. Instead of, say, just breathing. Just being.

​This series, however, is an attempt at, to at least try to take things, not necessarily back, but to at least claim our presence and unwillingness to back away. This series is about radical presence--merely presenting yourself as a person of color, becomes, in fact, a wildly, radically activist act. 

It became clear to me one day, while writing my bio for a grant just how many lives of color have been erased because the only acceptable way to express yourself as a person of color is as a reaction to everything else—as a reflection of the power of hegemony. It became clear to me that artists like my heroes, artists like Marcel Duchamp or Jackson Pollock were never asked to make artwork that was about their heritage or about their people or culture. They were simply asked to make art, art that reflected their ideas and their beliefs--in fact, they were never asked--they just did it.

​My father created artwork that was about religion and the struggles of being a person of color, but I always wanted to create artwork that was about me. As an individual. My obsessions. My ideas. My life. In the First Person, so to speak! So to speak.

​In the "Just Being" series. You can't get more basic than "Sleep," or drinking a glass of water, and yet, as far as I know, I have never seen those documented before by a person of color--especially a Latina/o. It ends up becoming, radical, it ends up becoming revolutionary and possibly political. Perhaps, at some level it shows that in this monad of time, that it is impossible for people of colors to represent themselves without it being revolutionary, but along the way, almost as detritus I will also document myself, claiming my life as an artistic gesture. That is the most important part for me, and it is perhaps that, which is the most radical part—even just using my Latinx body to replicate Gilbert and George or Bruce Nauman.

​I want to add that this for most, should be seen as merely a goal--it is neither prescriptive nor proscriptive.  Any artist's work can say whatever the artist wants it to say, in fact, that is the point, not to judge yourself or others, but rather to release oneself and your praxis from a set of invisible confines that have been set in place by hegemony to systematically stop people of color from "singing" their own lives and instead subsuming them onto either a predetermined visual language like the "Day of the Dead," etc., that we forever regurgitate and which disengages us from evolving, creating art that is endlessly acceptable to the majority or to constantly explain ourselves to the hegemony and again to keep ourselves wearing their prison uniforms, even remaking the same music over and over again and telling the same stories once a year. When was the last time you saw someone take any of the Day of the Dead imagery and do something truly revolutionary with it? Probably never, instead it has become quotational, a Latino shorthand, as it were. We need to start to poke at our own clichés, we need to move forward with the knowledge that our own, individual lives are bigger than all of this and that we are not the by-products of a bunch of symbols and signs, no matter how comfortable those signs may feel. We must begin to create, write and perform work that is willing to say, "This isn't about you. Go away." We must not pander to anyone at the expense of our own stories. And to be completely fair, many of us are already doing this, some never will and that is okay too. The idea is to make work that is authentic to your own experience.

​At this point, I think that it is important to add that this is not a denial of history, of collective identity or collected symbology, “folklorico” or otherwise, rather this is in addition to it. It is about looking at our history not as it has been packaged and presented to us by Fritos, our parents, or even by what galleries expect and want to see from us, it is about looking back with a complex, critical eye and deconstructing everything, making sense of everything and visualizing the power dynamics of history. It is about applying feminist and queer principles and opening up history to a complex and rigorous examining eye. It is about figuring out how your story fits into the larger history/herstory/our story—it is not about changing yourself to better fit into an already posted history. It is also about a complex reimagining of our present and most of all it is about questioning everything and making something new and exciting and yes, even, at times, mundane and boring.

​Ultimately, this is about positionality, too, and it is fiercely critical, being strongly influenced by feminist and queer theories and especially gender theories that begin with the body and the individual as a primary locus. It is very Latinx and very much calls upon intersectionality as being foundational. Intersectionality requires a center and that is what this calls upon as well, that center being the individual identity; messy and misunderstandable, it is the vehicle through which all intersections are navigated, and choice and desire are two of its primary vehicles.

​To this day, I still wince, when I see my soft, fat, Latino body on a television screen, when I see myself revealed and naked for others to grade and gauge me in comparison to whatever models of the human body they have in their minds. I still wince when I see a misstep in the middle of one of my performances, or a stutter when I forget the lyrics to "Mad World," though perhaps the sting hurts a little a bit less and happens just a little less often, now as I become accustomed to the shape and substance of my body and more sure of my message. A message that has no intention to put aside the theoretical, even abstract tools of hegemony, even though, like bell hooks, they will be inflected, interrogated by a new set of tools, that are less rational, at times, more rational at others. For it always strikes me just how reflexive the definitions of hegemony truly are in order to maintain the illusion that they are aloof and undefined/undefinable/indefinable. They bounce back and forth, encompassing as many positions as possible, for it is difficult to hit a moving target. At the same time, their practitioners are more than willing to deal with other groups as though they were simply defined, as irrational, as queer, lazy, invisible, etc. Masculinity, especially, has the privileged location of being all things to all men, the center—but the center cannot hold.

​Art at its very heart is hope—it fights for what it believes in and is an expression of humanity’s greatest desires, fears and aspirations. If we are, in fact going to be able to see our ways out of this era–if we are going to move out to the stars and preserve this planet’s ability to contain us–it will be artists who will have to envision these possibilities.

​Just as we were the ones who gave humans the first images of heaven and hell—just as we created angels and aliens and all manners of monsters that no human eye has ever seen—so will the tribes of poets, painters, sculptors, modelers, filmmakers, writers–creators all–so will they show us the way out of these turbulent times into the next great Renaissances of human development. So, let’s do it now! Change those chips that hold each of us back, fake it ’til we make it and start a brand-new day and a brand-effing-new Renaissance!

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    Photo by Ray C. Freeman III, CoCA 2024. 

Chapter 11: WHEN THE BODY SPEAKS

 

Chapter 11: WHEN THE BODY SPEAKS

​In 2017, I was scheduled to present a short "one-man performance" dealing with issues of "Latinoness," entitled "When The Body Speaks," it was to be about illness, specifically illnesses targeting Latinos and which run through my family tree, directly through my body and in my blood.

​Ultimately, though, I would craft a longer, more complex event than I initially planned, enlisting five other artists—a first for me! In the end, I would put together a forty-five-minute multi-media performance, including over six separate characters and a dancing stuffed bunny!  I was extremely nervous throughout, but absolutely excited as well.

​

The event, itself would end up being part biography, part endurance and part conceptual art. Part of the plan was to re-introduce Seattle to "Putoh" and its mestizo hybrid of culture and Latinx performance genres, returning to the artform that I created alongside the wonderfully feminist performance, Butoh artist Katharine Adamenko, when we were both taking graduate courses at UC Davis, but I have already told you everything you need to know about that, so, as I told my audience in a handout pamphlet—"Sit back, relax and enjoy the "Return of the Putoh" and enter the Post-postmodern a world of complex intersectionality at every turn."

 

On top of all of that, for me personally, I was to do something I never thought I could have sung in front of a live audience! I had always wanted to do this, and had made several plans to do so, but always, I would back out and do something else instead.  My voice was thin and cracked with each verse of the Depeche Mode song I had chosen—entitled “When the Body Speaks.”  But the voice was real, authentic and like my ageing and obese body, it was all me up there on the underground stage and I beamed with pride.  That night I grew as an artist, possibly even extended the definition of Latinx art today and expressed the way that I see the world.  I was overjoyed, proud of what I had accomplished! I put together a night of Performance Art, presented by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4 Culture and ArtistTrust at the recently reconsecrated INARTS NW building—a place that was housing some of the most Avant Garde performances in the city.

​​At the beginning of the performance all three of us performers walked onto the small stage in front of a good-sized audience. I walked to centerstage and the microphone, wearing a pair of headphones and the shroud of the sheet ghost. Stage-right, Grace La Renard was standing dressed as a ghost bat, with an awesome oversized bat mask that they had brought especially for the occasion. On a table, also stage right was a blue cloth and a top hat filled with a bright, glowing light.  Further back-stage left stood Basil Mayhan, also dressed as a ghost—they both were to act as the Greek chorus for the night’s performance—a three act production with no breaks.  In the background stage-center was an easel and white canvas and near that was a bucket filled with flour set next to a chair.

​From off stage I walked on dressed as a ghost carrying a plastic pumpkin filled with flowers. After a beat I began to sing the Depeche Mode song, "When the Body Speaks." As the song ended, I took off the headphones and my cellphone and placed them in the pumpkin bucket, tossed flowers at the audience and placed the pumpkin bucket stage left.  The performance of myself dressed as a ghost and singing in front of a live audience, actually started as many of my performances do, by picking up the pieces of "discarded" performances--or I should say more specifically, performances that I haven't gotten around to yet and which have morphed and mutated in the time since their first imagining.

​In this case, “Gus” is a mixing of my continuing "Sheet Ghost" series of performances and a performance that I still intend to do some day, wherein I am dressed as the English band Depeche Mode's singer and songwriter Martin L. Gore, standing outside Seattle's Pike's Public Market or some similar spot lip-syncing to Depeche Mode songs for cash.

In this performance, however, I found myself standing in front a live audience, shivering and singing very atonally—even stumbling over some of the lyrics—for the very first time.  Gus the Ghost is a continuing character throughout my sculpture and performance art and in this moment, I was fulfilling a lifetime's dream. While my voice cracked and went off note several times in my mind's eye, I was a pop star.

From the very beginning of my art career, my artwork has been influenced by the music and energy of my own adolescence, in that space that we create for ourselves out of the detritus of the larger society that we all share.  I remember being a small child kneeling in front of the large black-and-white television set and trying to draw the cartoon characters in front of me as fast as possible hoping to capture a little bit of their magic before they disappeared.  I loved them, I loved every one of those creatures from the stop-motion adventures of Gumby and Pokey to the animated antics of Courageous Cat and Atom Ant.  They were mine, I owned them, I remember that in kindergarten, I actually thought nobody else knew anything about this little magical space that existed between me and the television set, until I heard some of the other kids talking about the “Banana Splits”—even singing the theme song.  For a moment, I felt a sense of betrayal, how much of what I considered to be mine, how much of what I had built my identity around had been shared with everyone else?  It was a definite moment of elementary school-age angst, up there with the end of the infinitude of childhood that came with learning to tell time and the end of the infinitude of life that came with learning that we all die.

From the beginning, Industrial, Goth, New Wave and Post Punk music was always in the background, watching and motivating, in a way all of my work has been, at some level, like a poltergeist attracted by this biographical energy.  In a way that mirrors the “Education of Henry Addams,” I have always been as much a watcher as a participant in my own life.

​

At university, for example, in my second solo exhibition after graduation, "Teenage Dream" was exactly that and it was here, that I began to use record albums, the detritus—artifacts—of my own existence to send/leave/write messages--essentially, to use the relics of my life and especially my own adolescence--music and record albums in order to voice my deepest desires/fears and hopes. Like backward masking, they were secret messages hidden in the music—my messages were always there, just waiting to be found and shared.  Sometimes.

​

Throughout history, as in life, I believe that things are in a state of constant evolution.  I believe that the same exact things may make different sense, take different meanings in different eras. Some things are even invisible until we are able to see them, just as there are forces that are at work now, that we can't see, because the connections are not yet visible—everything has always already been here, but could not be seen--because as happens in any system—entropy increases and things that once did—no longer make sense—or do not yet make sense to our neanderthal mentalities. Today, unlike the movements of the past, unlike say, the Mannerists and the Pre-Raphaelites, today we are beyond mere narrative; we are beyond mere representation, we are in an era of terrible beauty and pop conceptualism.

​Truth does not change, well, I mean, sort of—that is—that the kernel remains the same and we float around it, and it is our perception of what the truth is that changes over time. This sounds obvious, but I want you to bear with me for a moment. We perceive, naturally that the universe remains the same, (which is actually not true, stars die and we move around a stellar arm of the milky way, etc.) but, in essence much of what we call the universe, at least, what we perceive, appears mostly the same—except for one thing—truth, what we believe to be true now, looks nothing like it did to the first women and men who walked this planet. Contemporary women and men scoff at the logic systems of the earliest philosophers; we can't fathom that astronomers thought the earth was the center of the heavens and even the moderns seem outdated to our post-postmodern sensibilities. We very definitely understand that our sense of truth changes—we would never expect to agree with a caveperson on even the most fundamental of things—except, maybe on Pauly Shore—nobody likes him.

​I want us to focus for a moment, especially on our perception of things--the truth in things, right now the public at large, is being taken through a period in which we are being asked to look at everything that we held true just minutes ago and to rewrite it, to alienate ourselves from it and to look at it through new eyes—for better—at times, but more often—for worse. I tried to explain it to a friend thusly: Take a painting that was created by or for the priests at the Palais des Papes in Southern France—before the Renaissance, before paintings looked like reality-- a painting that was made as a pure celebration of the majesty of religion—that actual, physical painting is the same now as it was when it was painted hundreds of years ago, it is constituted of and by the same atoms that have made it up since its origin—it is a monadic whole—maybe some of the pigments and therefore the colors have broken down as they breathe in the oxygen of the ages and take in the light of candles and later, fluorescents—otherwise it has not changed in any significant way. But, what it means, what it signifies and how we perceive it, I guarantee you that that has changed. And I guarantee you that that can be said of everything, from the functional Ancient Greek objects that are now sitting in vitrines at the Smithsonian to the religious paintings of the past, etc., and this is especially true of any text that you might find, from a painting to a book or anything that works with signs and significators.

​The way these things are seen, understood and deconstructed, changes through the ages--their essential meanings have changed and yet the objects themselves have not. Now, let's put together a little mental exercise, if you were to go back in time, if you had a time machine and could actually do this and you stood in front of one of the paintings in the hallway at the Palais, you might have a moment of awe, you might feel the pangs of nostalgia for an earlier age, you might even have a religious moment, but I also guarantee that you would not see the artworks in the same way that the people of the 11th century saw them. You would not suddenly understand the meaning of that age as somehow inherent in the painting standing before you, you would not be able to even see what that truth was supposed to be. Just as you can only imagine now how that work was meant to be seen by the artist that originally painted it.

​But that truth is still there, it would still be there for those people, even if they were suddenly sent to the future in this thought experiment. Just as is the truth of the Renaissance painters who dissected the work and saw its limitations, just as is the truth of the Papists who saw it as sacrilegious, just as the Enlightenment saw it differently and just as those in the future will see the paintings, however they will see them. But the objects have not changed and those truths—all of them have always been there and always will be—waiting, blooming, then fading from memory—but always there. It becomes clear therefore that all truths that are applied to an object and even an age, whether it be classical, Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightened, Modern or otherwise, are all always inherently present in every object or indeed anything—all truths exist at once—simply waiting for us to discover it—like the skins of an onion, unwrapping over time. Truth is a monad—encapsulating all possible meanings all the time and all at once—truth is like a mirror—but not like a Rorschach—not exactly.

​In the same way, meaning changes throughout even our lives. Even nostalgia does not have the same meaning that it once did. We are constantly hammered by the nostalgia merchants—especially in politics and the media, but it is not the same. We no longer see nostalgia as unjaded, sweet or as lacking in manipulative urges. The song I sung that night, dressed as a ghost pulsed with meaning, desire and dire warning, but it did not have the same meaning and effect that it had when I first heard it, nor is it the same in recordings of the event. And one more thing! Nostalgia and her sister desire can kill you.

Flashing back to moments of nostalgic desire.  Ever since I was a small child, I asked myself just what is beneath the sheets of a ghost, just as I wondered what was under the folds of my godmother's skirt. It was a natural desire to understand the unknown and this performance gave us one possible answer to that question. At the end of the song, I pulled off the sheet, beginning the second act and introducing the Diabetic Luchador. As I did this the two other ghost characters onstage began chanting "You're nothun' but a nothun. You're nothun' but a nothun'." And as this happened I began to dance the dance of the lonely ghost--as the dance reached its crescendo I took off the cloak revealing the "Diabetic Luchador," who began to dance the dance of the Diabetic Luchador, while the two ghosts continue to chant their taunts.

​During this diabetic dance, I looked like I was suffering from vertigo and high and low blood sugar. At the end of this dervish, I grabbed the ghost sheet and began to tear it apart, piece-by-piece into strips, which I then wrapped around my hands and barefoot feet. The Diabetic Luchador was a new character created for this "Putoh" night's events. In this part of the night's performances, the Diabetic Luchador tears apart the sheet ghost of the prior scene. I move toward a large, empty, ice bucket and begin to put flour on my hands and draw a mushroom cloud on the ground before me in flour (flower.) Taking my sweet time, at the end of this I knelt down at center-stage as the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" composed by Paul Dukas began to play in the background.

​At this point the two ghosts began to chant "Your blood will show you the way" and "Magic is in your blood." Then Lily came from off stage, dressed as a kind of fairy godmother and painting my face in gold she blew glitter on me, signaling that the magic had begun and the apprentice had become the magician.

​"The Dance of the Magician" begins and by way of explanation, one of my ex-wife's big past loves was a magician--an honest-to-God maker of magic tricks—complete with top hat and bunny rabbit. This man always struck me as a beautiful, tragic, would-be poet-artist and an inveterate Peck’s Bad Boy—but he was also one of the most wonderful people you could ever hope to meet and someone who I consider a dear friend. Back in the day, we used to get pretty drunk and talk about life, death and what it meant to be a magician--why magicians do their tricks.

​On a similar, side note, some of the most sad and unhappy people I have ever known have been comedians and some of the most angry, abusive and just plain miserable jerks have been clowns—and I believe that this is all connected—that comedians take to the stage because they very desperately need to laugh--and that the most tragic—like Robin Williams are deeply, inconsolably depressed.

​Similarly, magicians spend their lives searching for real magic. But just as they say that if you love hot dogs—you should never see how they are made—if you love magic—don't ever become a magician. Especially if what you really want to do is trick yourself into believing that it truly exists.

The Magician in my event starts his adventure just as the classical music continues and I tap on the top hat once and reach in to pull a rabbit out and it begins to come to life before the audience's eyes, just like the alchemist of old, who claimed to have the ability to turn lead into gold and to animate artificial things with life.  When I was really young, so young that I didn’t yet know how to tell time, I remember how the Velveteen Rabbit terrified me to my very little core, and between the Velveteen Rabbit coming to life and the Pinocchio story of the artificial becoming real--becoming "a real boy"—these specific obsessions fueled many nightmares and dreams.  When I was a child—I am certain that I could not figure out what was alive and what wasn’t and what the hell that meant in the first place.  I became obsessed with that moment in Pinocchio when he went from being this little bundle of sticks to being a real boy.  In some ways it is the same question that Fundamentalist Christians seem to go haywire about—when does life begin—when does something go from being inanimate to animate.

After the rabbit, I returned to the hat and pulled out a tiny ghost that danced around me. I then walked back to the top hat and tap it once again and reach my hands in—only to find them covered with blood, after a moment of shock, I turned to a large white canvas and began to paint, first a flower, which then evolved into the shape of a mushroom cloud—the flower transubstantiated horribly by the spirit of this paranoid age.

The stage went black as I turned to the audience and whispered, "When the Body Speaks--all else is hollow."

​The end.

Chapter 10: On the Edge: The Latinx Performance Art Festival. Returning to Putoh

 

Chapter 10:  On the Edge: The Latinx Performance Art Festival. Returning to Putoh

In 2016, after several years, focusing on painting, sculpture and art criticism, I was more than ready to return to performance. I had become well-known as a Seattle pop artist and for covering the local art scene for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the online newspaper. In the heat of August, in conjunction with the local Latinx organization La Sala/La Cocina, with organizational assistance from Lauren Davis, we created "On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival" which we would later learn had been the first all-Latinx performance art festival in Seattle and quite possibly the world.

​That summer, when I was asked to program an evening of performance art for La Sala Latinx Artists Network’s ‘La Cocina’ in Pioneer Square, it ended up exceeding all of our hopes. The night itself was not just historic; it was an amazing success! The event itself was pure magic. The first On the Edge Festival was a one-night event, small but expansive, dedicated to serving Seattle and the Seattle Latino/X community, giving voice to local Latinx artists presenting work that is rarely seen in our communities and had never happened before in Seattle.

​We knew we were excited by what we had put together and felt as though it was an important and necessary event for our communities, but we came to understand just how profoundly new this concept was-worldwide, when Marvin Carlson named our event in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction" and we became part of university curricula across the globe. In 2017, I alongside Vicente Montañez were cited in the theoretical textbook—by Marvin Carlson in the third edition of his seminal work, as leading figures in the Latinx Performance Art movement, something that both of us realized was more dumb luck than anything else, but, which definitely made us feel proud of what we had put together.

​As a Latinx performance artist, I knew our 2016 event was unique and vital to the Seattle community, showcasing Latina/x/o artists' identity and genre-expanding work. But none of us could imagine that our event would become part of worldwide university curricula inspiring a new generation of Latina/x/o artists. But, as Academic, Marvin Carlson went on to describe our event:

​"The First Latinx performance venue was established in 2013, the Teatro Publico de Cleveland, and there is a growing body of theatre artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by Xavier Lopez Jr. and Vicente Montañez. Lopez created the first festival of Latinx performance, held at the Good Arts center for experimental theatre in Seattle in 2016, in which Montañez performed. Lopez is also co-creator, with performance artist Katherine Adamenko of New York City, of Putoh performance, a melding of Chicano performance art and contemporary art inspired by Butoh."

By this point, I identified myself as being part of a new group of Latinx artists for whom artmaking, while still personal and autobiographical in the broadest sense, eschewed the obvious tropes of masculinity, hegemony and race. As an at first, Chicano, then Hispanic and now Latinx artist, it had become clear to me over the course of my now thirty-plus year career that my work was focused on a more personal kind of conceptualism, centering on autobiography and my own set of obsessions, hopes and fears.

​The festival sought to engender, enlarge and expand the conversation of what Latina/x/o art is and what it can be. We live at a time in which definitions of race, masculinity, gender and art are changing and "On the Edge" sought to be a leading voice in this change. What had been created with On the Edge was a sense of freedom and inclusion that I had always searched for in my journey as an artist and performer exploring themes of Latino/x identity, gender and class privilege.

​"On the Edge" was aptly named as it was all about the cutting edge of Seattle's Latinx performance, it was and is about intersections and breaking the bounds and definitions of history. Latinx is, perhaps, the first movement of the twenty-first century and may, in fact be the first redefinition of the post-postmodern era. Latinx is a true reinvention and reinvesting of what it means to be Latino, in this case, through performance, through our work, I and other contemporary Latinx artists were defining a term that is guided by complexity, criticality and biographical and theoretical strength creating a "Latinoism" based on alliances that owes more of its form to Queer and Feminist programs that lead the way for identity movements than to an essentialized Latino-ness.

​On the night of the event. We had a very nice crowd, overstuffing the small venue and pouring out into the sidewalk. and at least once, I heard a very audible gasp as I was on stage. There is something very real and very magical about doing something as visceral and honest as performance art in front of a live audience—it is an amazing feeling for the audience as well as the performer. Our night of performance had something for everyone and at the same time, the whole event was fundamentally individual and Latinx. Our event earned its place as part of a larger conversation, working not only to continue and preserve a set of cultural traditions, but seeking to redefine the nature of these traditions moving forward, taking their place in an era of change and flux.

There were only a handful of us that night, each taking the stage one after the other. From spoken word poetry and more traditional Latino performance to more experimental work the entire event was fundamentally LatinX.

​I was the last one on that hot, August night, and as the audience rustled uncomfortably in their seats, I began to place multiple, cheap, JC Penney "boom boxes" throughout the small, sweaty, orange room. All of them were playing the same track in a kind of staggered "row row row your boat” sort of way. I came out dressed as a ghost and handed flowers into the audience, signaling that we were entering a magic space. The cacophony of layers and layers of looped recordings of the tune "Theme from A Summer Place" mingled with the ambiance of the audience and the sounds of cars passing on their way to historic Pioneer Square--literally the anodyne sounds of elevator music turned into noise!

​In front of the audience, I prepared to put together the set for the night's events, a small square stage upon the larger stage and a chair, upon which I placed an old leather backpack filled with chocolate, strawberry syrup and sugar sprinkles, I took my time, remembering something that Bob had told me years ago.

​Flash back to UNR, I was in my first sculpture course, and a "Daddy Long-legs" spider was crawling across the powder-white wooden tables in the large room that occasionally doubled as a classroom. This was only our second meeting ever and we had been asked to make an artwork based on something by another artist. We had been let loose at the library where we were introduced to the art section and told to find an artist to copy, but at the same time try to make something new.

​Somehow the topic of performance art came up and Bob was describing to us how audiences had a natural attention span of about three minutes, about the length of a long commercial or a cartoon, or something like that and that it was up to the artist to extend the amount of time that viewers spend with our work--because after an audience moves past interest it moves toward agitation and boredom and once you get past this—something magical happens and an audience moves into a state of hyper-awareness and receptibility that is the sweet spot for all artists--but especially for performance artists.

​After making this statement, Bob, who at this point didn't know me from Adam called on me to present my art-piece, which must have appeared, at first, to the other first year students be just a tape player, or that I was going to present a song or something. As was usual for me at that time, before I began to care about anything, I had left this assignment 'til the very last moment, but looking back, I guess I must have always been a conceptual artist. My piece called "8 Minutes 11 seconds" was an audio recording of the trip from my apartment to the sculpture room--it took 8 minutes to create, but really, it took an entire week to conceptualize what was a recording of an event. Which, I suppose, might have actually made this my first performance—oh well, I suppose history is full of mistakes, false starts and revisions. But at that moment, back then, in that dusty. old sculpture room—I was just surprised that this recording was being taken at all seriously—that I was actually being taken seriously for something I made.

​

Forward back to this hot August night, and the noise that began to die down while, I, dressed as a ghost handed out flowers into the audience. later, as I painted in chocolate and strawberry syrup, again, dressed as a giant teddy bear--none of us had any idea that we were the first ones to put together a festival of Performance Art that was brave enough to claim the term Latinx, but for now, I was a ghost and I was fully present.

For the last twenty years I have been working with Sheet Ghost installations, performances and sculpture. Beginning first with my performance art in 1993, when I first used the "sheet ghost" in a significant way—I have found the concept and form of a ghost to be an amazingly expressive means of dealing with many issues ranging from the extremely personal, themes of isolation to even more abstract ideas as was the case in a more recent installation I did for the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture's "Dialogues in Art" series, wherein I dealt with issues of homelessness, or in the solo exhibition I did at the Faire Gallery Cafe in 2010, which was based on the Soft Cyborg.

​The sheet ghosts are a nod to a time when people would cover furniture in their homes and castles to prevent them from getting dusty while no one was there. Mirroring the shrouds that were worn by mourners and the dead, eventually these sheets became synonymous with ghosts. As for my sculptural work, I started creating ghosts that were empty husks held up by strings, others were wall pieces circled by record albums. I began doing some of the sheet ghosts on the street, just leaving them there with a little tag letting people know they were art pieces. These ghosts are us. They are me. There is a sense of invisibility to them, a sense of alienation, isolation and loneliness. They show that any one of us can become anonymous sheet ghosts moving through the world.

The second of my performances of the night was named "Dream of the Soft Cyborg: Teaching a Hare to Tell Time, in this performance, like the earlier "Spaniard" performance at Anne Bonney in Seattle and a lost performance that I did at UC Davis, they all owed significantly to the performances of Joseph Beuys. Whether I was aware of it or not, his mythology and mine overlapped in some very significant ways.

​In fact, if I was somehow given the opportunity, I would love to work on a performance with Joseph Beuys—of all the performance artists throughout history—his is the one that I seem to come back to the most—visually, we share some striking similarities—which is odd—because for both of us the performance work is extremely personal, autobiographical and anecdotal. I'm sure that Beuys himself would say it has something to do with a kind of post-Jungian—artistic collective mind/consciousness—but all of that is just a little too new agey for me—though I love Beuys for being so out there and for being so willing to go out on a limb for what he believed—no matter what!

The night ended with the "Dream of the Soft Cyborg: Polymorfy (Super, Sugar Bear 2)," in which a human/teddy bear hybrid examines his love for chocolate milk and cocoa puffs by pouring them all over himself, in an attempt at becoming one with his true love. During the performance, I actually almost suffocated myself by covering the bear head in liquid. This performance is ultimately one of my favorites and was awesome to perform—even though I had to get home on the bus that night completely soaked, dragging my costumes behind me in a cart that was breaking apart all the way home!

​But such is the life of a poor artist!

​​Flashback: to the year 1999? Yeah, I think it was in the last year of the past millennium, and I was in the first year of my Art History program at UC Davis. I remember it like it was yesterday, so bright and vivid in David Hockney pastels, the weather was beautiful as it often is in the warm, Zephyrus, Central Californian sun.

We spoke of many things that day. We spoke of contemporary music, how things had changed since I was an undergraduate and we talked about just how crappy "Star Wars: A Phantom Menace" was. We talked about philosophy and the students' plans for the future—and I realized that it didn't look like they could truly articulate any. Then I asked them for their sense of the current state of the world, reality—life, the universe and everything—their sense of existence in 1999, or was it 2000.

​One person asked me if I had ever seen the video for "Numb" from the 1993 U2 album, Zooropa. Another said she felt as though she were trapped in plastic, wax, amber or "something like that." That's what she said..."or something like that." It was odd that I remember that so clearly—it wasn't even out of the ordinary, but then again, maybe life is actually made out of an ever increasing series of ordinary moments, moments of no apparent consequence that only become consequential upon reflection.

The next student said that it felt as though they were waiting for something, like they were locked in place, going through the motions—waiting for something.  I asked what they thought they were waiting for. The end of the world? The Second Coming? "Yeah," they said. They just didn't know, but they all agreed that they were waiting for something, something that would change everything and bring form and meaning to their lives.

These students had become speechless, they were alienated from their own place in history, waiting for something to change everything and bring with it some sort of a sign, which would give them direction or, at the very least, wake them from their slumber. They appeared to be in search of a break from what had gone before.

​In my estimation that horrible break actually would come for them, in 2001, on my mother's birthday in September and would come with a price tag that was to be amazingly terrible, but which created a very decisive, very definite cut-off date for the Post Modern—especially, the late, last part of the Post Modern (and by extension) the program of Modernism—and it took with it the idea of the imperviousness of hegemony and the impenetrable indestructibility of the structures of society. It was a day that was the kernel of everything that would come after it, like Duchamp or the comet that killed the dinosaurs, or the chemicals that first came together to create the first building blocks of life—it would change everything. Which brings us to the world we now live in, one where civilizations work to bring each other down from the inside, where computers are more deadly than bombs and people are the new weapons of choice and which are very easy to manipulate as it turns out!

The Story of the Soft Cyborg and its only true value then, is that it may be both our inevitable end and our only survival skill, if we imagine a world like the one in Max Headroom—a program that was simply too honest to last long on television—we can imagine a world that is owned part and parcel by large corporations—these corporations are viruses, in that they seek to live for as long as they can using the resources of their host body till the host is destroyed and empty. They are the viruses that we have created, hard-edged and machine-like they kill us with their mutagenic, cyborg bodies and hard-edged hegemonic minds.

​

If we are to survive the new millennia, we must become like Roger Rabbit, we must become like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, our flesh must become pliant and perfect—we must become the plastic and rubber that bounces back after being dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. We must discover the nirvana that occurs in those few moments when we are suspended in mid-air before we drop. Our skin must stretch like Plastic-man and allow the machine to pass through us effortlessly. We must never bleed and instead we must ooze. We must see through the wild, white lidless eyes that see all and know the rules of the mystery. If not, the Terminator 2000 will necessarily destroy us. In essence we must evolve, grow and become what we were always meant to be. Soft.

​

"Seance" at John Cage Musiccircus. 2016.

After "On the Edge: The First Latinx Performance Art Festival," I became part of a wonderful celebration that was put together to celebrate the work of John Cage, who was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher, as well as being one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His infamous piano piece 4'33" has always been a huge influence.

​The Musiccircus was a mixed-media performance festival held at Seattle's prestigious Town Hall. What I created for the event was up to then, perhaps one of most conceptual pieces of mine, which seems appropriate considering its inspiration. "Seance, originally titled, "I Always Cry at the Oscars. David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016.)" became the ghost piece ("Seance.") presented at John Cage Musiccircus.

​Later called, just "Cancer," this performance consisted of two mechanical voices, one male presenting and the other female presenting, using a text-to-voice reader, speaking the names of famous people who had passed during the years that Bowie was alive--originally, the idea started by asking the question whether only the famous had ever lived on this planet and mattered. Like 4'33" the performance was designed to exist in the space surrounding it, and was documented to record the main ghost performance, while the rest of the sounds recorded for the event were created in the environment within the Town Hall John Cage Musiccircus event.

 

​"A Falling Piece" at Artist Up: Grant LAB Shout Out at Oxbow. 2017

​

Influenced by the "Happenings" of Alan Kaprow and especially the "Dangerous" performances by Dick Higgens, when I was invited to Artist Up: Grant Lab Shout Out in 2017, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a performance "on the fly" as the “kids” call it and that is when I decided to do "A Falling Piece."

​The performance itself was absolutely minimalist. When I was called to give my presentation in front of my peers, I let them call my name a number of times before responding, signaling that something was wrong, then as I got up and began to walk through the crowd I stumbled and fell several times on my way through my fellow artists before getting to the bottom of the stairs. As I did so, I could feel the energy within the space, completely change and like Dick Higgins was in his outrageous performances, I was dedicated to go all in with my performance and to take as long as possible to get up to the top of the stairs, where we were meant to do our presentations. As I tumbled and crawled up I kept rebuffing each attempt to help me up, by saying, "I'm alright!" or "I can do this," while falling down yet again each time! When, after a long period of this, I finally got up to the top, I let the audience in on the performance and spoke about my artistic oeuvre and described my plans for what I would be doing with the grant later in the year.

​Stumbling...

​and dragging myself up the stairs...

​...and falling back down several times...

​...refusing help...

​Until I make it to the top.

​Where I will give the presentation.

(Rough notes for “A Falling Piece” 2017)

Chapter 9: Return to America. The imperfect body and the difference between performance art and ballet. From Blood Telling to the Diabetic Luchador. Your Blood will betray you. Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard.

 

Chapter 9: Return to America. The imperfect body and the difference between performance art and ballet. From Blood Telling to the Diabetic Luchador. Your Blood will betray you.  Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard.

Flash forward to 2004, I had just moved to Seattle after living in Europe and teaching English at the University of Johannes Gutenberg—I had recently been separated from my ex-wife and I was looking for work at local art galleries, consistently being told that either I was perfect, but that there were no positions available or that I was over-qualified—one person from a local museum even told me that if they hired me I’d me trying to get their job. I laughed but it was probably true.

​After several years, after having lived in Europe, after having been married and gone to graduate school, I was single again and ready to return to doing performance art, this time in Seattle, WA. After a devastating divorce that had left me demolished, I took a year off from everything and had just begun showing work again, especially sculpture and painting. I had recently moved into public housing at the Olive Tower on Boren and discovered the Faire Gallery Cafe, where I was to spend long hours talking about everything with Elisheba Johnson the owner, who became a dear friend and who gave me my first solo shows in Seattle.

​At this time, as well, I began to write for the local online newspaper, the Post Intelligencer and became fast friends with local artist Ryan "Henry" Ward and a particular band of Street Artists, known as the Predators of the Wild—a name chosen by Ward, himself.  The "Soft Cyborg" had moved into the world of sculpture, adding ghost sculptures and moving, flexible, latex sculptures to its expanding oeuvre.

 

Soft Cyborg: Ghost Story: A mixed media audio/visual sculpture included the video "Soft Cyborg: Brothers," which was played below a sheet ghost forcing the viewer to look under the skirted folds of the ghost's sheet. While latex covered Holiday toys became actual soft robots that moved at the push of a button. During my time at the University of California, Davis, I had been working with latex and plaster making large sculptures, so it was a logical next step for latex to find its way into my performance as well.

​"Soft Cyborg: The Tale of the Spaniard" took place at the Anne Bonney, an antique shop that was next door to the Faire Gallery Cafe.

​The Spaniard, the creature/protagonist/antagonist in this performance was very loosely based on the infamous shaving scene from the Melville tale, "Benito Cereno." More for the feeling than in any concrete way, but also especially for the way that the Melville story depicts the consummate definition of an unreliable narrator. This performance, too, is about narrative storytelling and how it cannot be taken at face value and is always based on point of view and self-protection.

​In this performance, I started by sitting on a chair, stage right that was situated on the second floor of the antique shop. Dressed in black wearing a mask that I had made by pouring latex over a mannequin head, which had the effect of looking like creamy fluid, as if my skin itself was melting away or perhaps like the face of a burn victim. The outfit was made complete by the inclusion of an antique sailor's cap that I found in the shop and a stuffed monkey that I also found there and should have purchased, but I was too poor at the time. As I sat there I began to motion to the monkey and like my father with our stuffed animals or the puppets that mesmerized me as a child, the stuffed creature came to life and the Spaniard, like a modern-day "Commander McBragg." started to recount his silent and dubious war stories.

​

In fact, this entire performance was about telling stories, whether real or imagined, truth or lies. The performance began with the Spaniard either speaking through or speaking to the stuffed monkey and ended with the Spaniard wearing a sailor's cap playing records, telling war stories and painting chocolate pictures—harkening back to Sugar Bear in the Salon performances. Telling my stories and his own—this was a collage of many of my earlier performances.