Flyer for Oracion Al Borde del Apocalipsis (Prayer at the Edge of Apocalypse), front and back cover.
Flyer for Oracion Al Borde del Apocalipsis (Prayer at the Edge of Apocalypse), inside.
The performance was part of the three-month exhibition: Brighter Future--To be heard. To be seen. To be free. I had some paintings in the exhibition, but was much more excited to have been asked to do a performance. At this point, we did not yet know about Covid, and I do remember thinking at the time that the title that I gave to the performance seemed kind of over-the-top and yet. There was a feeling that something was happening. There was a feeling that something was coming and that it wasn't good.
I knew that this piece needed to be a prayer, my favorite prayer, one in Spanish that I was taught when I was very young by my mother and remember to this day. I have also been wanting to do a crawling ghost piece, originally planned to circle the Seattle Art Museum--I still hope to do a ghost performance there sometime this year.
List of artists who were part of this exhibition.
Our team for the upcoming "On The Edge: Second Latinx [erformance Art Festival, postponed, at this point, indefinitely, but actually 'til sometime in 2021.
Photo taken before the event at the historic King Street Station.
Announcement on the Arts & Culture, Seattle WA Gov page.
Ghost at the King Street Station.
Prayer at the Edge of Apocalypse is a continuation of the sheet ghost performances and sculptures that began in the 80's.
Making a mask out of masking tape, what could be more natural. This performance marks the beginning of the Dematerialization/Denial/Disintegration series of works. I am at the beginning of this series and excited to see as it progresses.
I'm afraid
I'm afraid
I'm afraid that it is cancer.
I'm afraid this is a dream.
I'm afraid my teeth are rotting
I'm afraid I need to scream.
I'm afraid that it's not nice.
I'm afraid that it's no good.
I'm afraid the aliens are coming,
I'm afraid we're all alone.
I'm afraid there is no heaven
and we're never going home.
I'm afraid I have no money
and I'm lost in all this debt.
I'm afraid that we're all dying
and it hasn't sunk in just yet.
I'm afraid this diabetes
will take my eyesight, legs and art.
I'm afraid there is no forever
and no reason to even start.
I'm afraid of those who hate me
and those that love me more.
I'm afraid of domestic terror,
airborne viruses, killer wasps and war.
I'm especially afraid of thermonuclear devices
and I'm afraid of Russians, Arabs and the Chinese.
But then again,
I'm not half as afraid of them as I am of
my own government,
and this American disease.
I'm afraid that this is all just a complex hologram.
I'm afraid of cosmic rays, solar flares and asteroids.
of floods and hurricanes, earthquakes and famine.
and I'm afraid of the second coming,
my parents sure as damned hell made certain of that.
I'm afraid of getting old.
I'm afraid of being hit by a car.
I'm afraid of flying in a plane.
And I'm too afraid to learn to drive.
I'm afraid that we're all in hell,
I mean that this is actually hell, right here and now.
Not a personal hell, but a very real fear.
I'm afraid of all this honesty.
I'm afraid of your lies as well.
I'm afraid of the void
and of disintegration
of becoming nothingness.
And I guess,
I'm afraid of losing my mind,
it seems
and forgetting all I've ever done,
all I've ever created, dreamed and pined for,
of losing all the things that matter at all to me,
Ghost Walk #1. Directed by Xavier Lopez Jr. Videography by Girlgoth. SOUNDTRACK: Cue 1a - Sad-Beautiful-Emotive-Echo-Ghostly guitar alone (Something Broken Somewhere-Ascendent Remix) Soularflair.
I love my ghosts!
Me too
Wait til you see the flying bear! He's huge! I feel like I am so on a roll!
What will you do with him?
Many, many things. One will be a performance called Jesus Christ Sugarbear! Where he sings I'm alive by ELO!
Yes!!
Another is called, I can fly and he'll be held up by strings, wearing a little red cape. That's next month. I'll wear him in a few performances. And he'll also be a freestanding sculpture with a microphone stand telling stories.
Funny! You've really got your creative juices flowing!
Basically, he's me. If I was cute and cuddly and everyone immediately loved me. Me if I was a teddy bear, or even a ghost! I love the fact that I am doing all the things I was always meant to do!
Yes. That's very important! Big thoughts! You have to follow your heart and dreams!
Yes ma'am! The coolest thing about conceptual art is envisioning it exactly how it turns out and purely making ideas concrete. It's closer to magic than painting.
Yeah. That's true!
And it confuses people because it looks so easy--and sometimes it is really easy to make, but it ies the processes of thinking that lays underneath.
You have alot of thoughts running around in that big brain
A bit like what lies underneath the sheet of a ghost.
It is the temptation of looking up a woman's skirt when you are a young boy, you don't know what's up in there, but you really want to find out.
Haha..good way to put it
That's the attraction of the ghost, a mystery, a terror and a desire at the same time.
It will be interesting to see people's reactions.
I wonder if they will give it the time, mentally, or whether they will just stay with their immediate reaction. I like the way that these sculptures are also truly pop. But also take things into conceptual territory. A mix of high and low. Like Banksy at his best.
I like that you are truly engaged with your pieces, and invoke responses.
Thank you, I really see them as forms of communication. But I have always hated just telling stories, I'm more interested in sharing ideas.
Mr Lopez, what do you feel are barriers to the type of art you like to make?
At this point I don't actually see any barriers, what do you mean?
I wasn't sure if you had any ideas floating around that you cannot make come to fruition at the moment.. Be it financial, or the Seattle Art scene, etc..
For the last twenty years I have been working with Sheet Ghost installations, performances and sculpture. Beginning first with "performance art" in 1993, wherein I first used the "sheet ghost" in a significant way--I find the "ghost" to be an amazingly expressive means of dealing with many issues ranging from the extremely personal to themes of isolation and even more abstract ideas as was the case in the most recent installation I did for the Seattle Office Arts & Culture's "Dialogues in Art" series, wherein I dealt with issues of homelessness. In Hope/Home, the first installation with multiple figures, the sheet ghosts became stand-ins for my family as we dealt with a period of homelessness that we experienced when I was still very young. Over the course of several installations I have seen my process become increasingly narrative and more and more theatrical.
Ghost Walk #1 was the first of these more cinematic performances.
A continuing series of performance sketches and ideas, pretty much to be used in full performances and testing ideas. In this case, "Gus was a Mexican Ghost," which would later become part of a performance at King Street Station in 2019.
"Flower Ghost." 2020. A sketch during the Pandemic, still looking for a ful performance.
Sheet Ghost for "Save the Show Box." Seattle. 2018.
Ghost at an exhibition. Seattle. 2019.
Ghost dancing at the Mercury, Goth Dance Club. Seattle. 2018.
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. Academic performance historian Marvin Carlson wrote in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction,” “There is a growing body of...artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by...Xavier Lopez...featured in the first festival of Latinx performance, held at the Good Arts center...in Seattle... Latinx represents an important orientation in modern performance... concern(ed) with developing more inclusive and flexible attitudes toward designations of gender, race, and ethnicity...addressing this major reorientation of the field."
This entry was later updated to:
This is the final wording for the book until then, straight from the pen of Marvin Carlson "...and there is a growing body of theatre artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by Xavier Lopez Jr. and Vicente Montanez. Lopez created the first festival of Latinx performance, held at the Good Arts center for experimental theatre in Seattle in 2016, in which Montanez 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."
As a child, before I even knew what art was, I would watch my father paint murals as part of the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement, where I would tag along to the Mechicano Art Center on Whittier Blvd mentally devouring the exciting scenes of Latino artists expressing what it meant to be Chicano back then! Days passed as I watched my father paint his expressionist, politically charged murals, day-dreaming of my own future. Every month my parents would take us to the LA Museums and galleries, where we would see Warhol's “Brillo Boxes,” conceptual sculptures and the films of Joseph Beuys and Gilbert and George.
Later, in college, at the University of Nevada Reno and UCDavis, my mind was blown away by the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Dadas, who influenced my now, mixed media performances.
It was also during this time that I began to perceived an unspoken difference between how my heroes made art and how I--as a young Latino artist--was expected to.
Let me tell you a story. As a young artist, I searched everywhere for successful Chicano artists for a sense that my work had a place. When Duchamp or Beuys made their work it was about lives, their ideas, it reflected their view of the world. No one asked Marcel Duchamp to make work solely about his heritage—and he did not have to make artwork for the annual Halloween exhibition. I desperately wanted to make art that had meaning beyond other's expectations—art that reflected my own life and how I saw things? But I had no models, no history to fall back on. Because of this I did the only thing that I could, I decided that I would have to be my own model.
Ultimately, At UCDavis, critical theory, personal history and personal artifacts began to infuse themselves into my work opening it up to incorporate queer, feminist and other identity discourses. I created two theoretical treatises, "The Soft Cyborg," a variation on Haraway's "Cyborg" and "Putoh"--melding Japanese Butoh and Latino identity performance. In 2016, I co-curated "On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival" the first all-Latinx performance art festival--apparantly--ever. I did this with Lauren Davis, La Sala Collective member and Assistant Director at Art Exchange Gallery. This led to me becoming part of university curricula across the globe when Marvin Carlson mentioned our event in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction."
Today, Issues of gender, race and identity permeate my work and it is through performance that I seek to push the boundaries of how we perceive the essence of ethnic/cultural/Latinx performance, to give voice to underrepresented groups and, moreover, to expand the language of marginalized performance and even to broaden access through guerrilla and drop-in performances. As a conceptual artist, I am confronted with the sense that "Conceptual Art" is often considered to be an elitist, hegemonic realm. It has become visibly and conceptually associated with purity, intellectualism, masculinity and hegemony. As a Latino Artist who works with many materials that have been pared down to their core elements, minimalized and purified so to speak--creating fiercely personal narratives--I have been forced to deal with oversimplified views of who can make what and what art can be made.
I am part of a new breed of Latinx artists intent on expanding the themes and expectations available to minority artists--making art that is individual--defying traditional expectations of collective identity. I choose personal, everyday materials, a collage of sheets, candy, fake flowers, tin foil and personal items in order to tell my stories. This is an important conceptual, performative and material shift that cannot be overstated. It is a stance of liberation, which pushes the boundaries of expectations and dares to say that individual lives of color matter; which, in itself, is powerful and revolutionary, problematizing racial, masculine, cultural and identity essentialism in an intellectual investigation which is in no way post-race.
"Dada Death 2.0." Performance Art. Echo Echo Gallery. Greenwood Collective. Greenwood, Seattle, WA. 2017. Final Version.
We live in the age of Nefarious, an age of puppet kings and a lethargy that stems from the belief that we have discovered everything. But this is far from the truth, the truth is that we have become arrogant enough to believe that we cannot be excited, we believe that the same impulses that made us excited in the past do not and cannot thrill us. We live in an age that is more truly Dada than Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton could have ever thought up, an age in which we are bombarded with the idiocies and indecencies of life on a daily basis. Perhaps shell-shocked is a better word, and waiting, we have become ossified and are ready to place ourselves into the machine. Even the smartest of us will sell his soul so he can eat. The age of the artist has passed and in its stead we have a sea of castrated bald white men, spouting the lines as if it was enough to memorize what Hegel or Jameson or even hooks said. We have forgotten the lessons of the first truly Post-Modern philosophers the Dadas had to teach us—we have forgotten how to fight, to kick each other in the eye, how a baritone belly-laugh feels and we have held our piss for far too long
Critical Theory, or rather philosophy was never meant to be the domain of School Teachers. It was never meant to be the tool for professionals to build their careers on. Criticism was always meant for the young, the artists, the poets and musicians the so-called practitioners—to feel the age they live in. Critical theory has become ossified and fat. It has lost the one thing that is unforgivable--a sense of humour.
We are filled with candy and all sorts of preservatives. Our houses and cupboards are brimming over with purple plastic-coated soft drinks and Twinkies. We are what we eat and from here that doesn’t look too good. Let us take a moment and look at the metaphor of eating, of what we eat. Let us take a moment to look at the Twinkies, Chicken McNuggets, and Coca Cola that we ingest. It has been said that the Twinkie is known to have a shelf life of many, many years. Open a Twinkie and you will find that it is an odd little thing—unexpectedly perhaps it is a moist even wet affair, it is a soft cylinder of unnatural yellow. Wrapped within this manufactured cake is a creamy filling of vanilla. Beneath the perfectly flat, flaky-golden brown base of each Twinkie there are three small perfect oblong holes. It is these small holes, the same on each cake through which the cream surprise has been injected. These holes are perfect, the same from one Twinkie to the next. It is their perfection, which we have come to expect in our enjoyment of each Twinkie. It is this perfect cake that we ingest, with the promise that the next one will be exactly the same.
Awhile back, I lived in Germany for a year. It was very interesting. I had a couple of art shows there and I made many friends there as well. The Germans are the kindest, sweetest people–especially the youth–at least they were when I was there. I hope that they have not been poisoned like Eastern Europe has.
However, my friend’s hearts were broken when I told them that, as Americans, often we synechdochically use the word “German” to mean Nazi in many cases. Especially in the movies.
The Germans are a beautiful people, but they were broken by their own history. Their psyches were shattered and now they suffer from amazing self-hatred and collective embarrassment for what they cannot escape as being part of them. Part of their story. Part of their skin.
There are no flags in Germany, very little examples of patriotism-especially on the boorish level that we might be used to.
One day, I was on the bus and this old guy wanted to apologize to me personally for what the Nazis did. It was a very uncomfortable experience. It was amazingly poignant and by the time I was getting off the bus, I realized that he wanted me to absolve him of the guilt of a child who ha seen the Nazis as heroes. Just as we are now taught as children to admire our policing agencies–as agents of order. This now, grandfather was forced to view the gypsies, Jews and queers as agents of decay, as the very rats that they had been told to see them as.
In Germany, this constant self-loathing is everywhere, but it is very subtle and no one ever really acknowledges it, not to each other, not in the open–perhaps to strangers, but in a very real way as a nation they have lost their sense of identity as purely good human beings. Initially, this was forced upon them from without, but ultimately it has become a part of them, but this happened long enough ago that now, many of the kids are running around in Nazi bike gangs. I saw those as well, in Frankfurt. They are kind of scary.
Borrowing a term, though not the same idea–from Friedrich Nietzsche, this move toward agency can be seen as being “Beyond Good and Evil.” It just is. In a way that is neither good nor evil–they have begun to take that anger and self-loathing and have started to make something out of it.
In the lifetimes of these artists (the artists of Die Antwoord) they have witnessed humans doing the most horrible atrocities–under the guise of society. They know how cheap and meaningless life is or can be. They understand in a way that we are only beginning to get a glimpse of–just how easily money trumps life.
The baby talk they spew is deceptive of the most vile, evil, shit that they are trying to warn us all about.
The simplism of their form is like standup comedy. It is like the bright, multicolored blotters that acid used to come on. A pretty, simple, wrapping for something that takes away your innocence and imparts knowledge of the shape of the universe and gives you a taste of the darkest and brightest candy-colored parts of your mind.
That is why I believe that Die Antwoord is so important–they are the best example of what is created after we as humanity have lost our souls and after we have lost our faith in everything– and believe me when I tell you that as a collective species–we have very definitely lost our souls. I thought it would have to wait until humanity realized that the universe was approaching heat death, for us to realize this–but at least in one way, we are a rather bright collection of animals.
But, I will say this. That because we are humans–and because everything we do and say is always deconstructed and creates a universe in which its opposite is true–that Die Antwoord is also a band that is equally about hope. I know it sounds like a contradiction and, in fact, it is–but it is just as true.
The fact that we as humans need to have things wrapped in shiny, plastic is why I also believe that something like Pop is the most perfect medium for conveying the things that art needs to say in this day and age. It, like the obscene, baby talk rap lyrics–it is the perfect form for communicating the nature of the void. In baby talk expletives and candy-coated color-fields. To answer your earlier question, though–yes, artists need to live–but artists also really need to be able to convey their meaning–they are all blind men and women describing an elephant view of the universe.
I think that things evolve–different things make sense in different eras–in the era of the Pre-Raphaelites (which in itself was a conservative reaction [alors--you now have groups of artists seeking inspiration from a movement that was already retrospective in its original incarnation]) or the Mannerists, etc. the “Pretty Vacant” was invisible (just as there are forces that are at work now, that we can’t see, because the connections are not yet visible)–it was there, but could not be seen–meaning then was conveyed in purely narrative forms and by way of symbolism–but as happens in any system–entropy increases and things that once did–no longer make sense. 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, that is the kernals remain the same and we float around them and it is our perception of what the truth is changes over time. That sounds obvious, but I want you to bear with me for a moment. We perceive, naturally that he universe remains the same, which is actually not true, stars die and we move around the stellar arm of the milky way, bu, in essence much of what we call the universe, at least, appears mostly the same--but truth now looks nothing like it did to the first women and men. We scoff at the logic systems of the earliest philsophers, can't believe that astronomers thought the earth was the center of the heavens and even the moderns seem outdated to our post-postmodern sensibilities, so we understand that our sense of truth changes--we could not expect to agree with a cave-person on even the most fundamental of things.
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 and often for worse. I tried to explain this to a friend like this. Take a painting that was created by or for the priests at the Palais des Papes in Southern France--before the Renaissance, 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 by essentially 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, flourescents--but otherwise they have not changed in any significant way. But, what they mean, what they signify and how we perceive them, I guarantee you that, that has changed. And I guarantee you 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, 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 change 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 it. 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 painted it originally.
But that truth is still there, would still be there for those people, even if they were suddenly sent to the future now. As is the truth of the Renaissance painters, who dissected the work and saw its limitations, just as the Papists who saw it as sacrilegious, just as the Enlightenment saw it different and just as those tin the future will see those paintings, however they see them. But the objects have not changed and those truths--all of them have always been there. It becomes clear therefore that all truths that are applied to an object and even an age are all always inherently present in an object or indeed anything--all truth exists at once--simply waiting for us to discover it. Truth, all truths are always there, waiting to be discovered--like the skins of an onion, unwrapping over time.
We live in an age of unprecedented change–things are dying off every day–not making it to the next era.
8-tracks, Xerox paper, the clicking sound of movie projectors, film-strips, forty-fives.
If you see any of these it is because nostalgic forces are in play.
Last night I painted a landscape, it was a very nice landscape. But, I wanted it to be more–I decided that it just didn’t have the gravitas that I wanted it to. So I decided to rectify that and I gave it a title that conjured up images of not just “sturm” but also the mightiest “drang” that anyone has ever experienced! In words, I threw in allusions to Herakles and Ovid, I forced everyone who read the title-card of this piece to ponder their own mortality and question the meaning of not just their own, but everyone’s existence. However, despite all of the poesy of my heroic words, despite the finest ink and most expensive acid-free paper, ultimately, what I had created was really just a fucking landscape. A very lovely landscape. But a landscape all the same.
We live in an age of unprecedented change and there are nostalgic forces in play.
The Magician. Short video shot from stage left. Part 2. When the Body Speaks. Full. A Night of Performance Art by Xavier Lopez. Cast: Xavier Lopez, Grace Larenard, Basil Mayan, Girlgoth and Kaz. Supported by Artists Up - Grant Lab Award from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4 Culture and Artist Trust. Music changed to adhere to copyright laws. Performance Art. InArtsNW. Seattle, WA. 2017. Filmed by Lily Munn.
After singing as Gus the Ghost and tearing about the sheet ghost as the Diabetic Luchador, I meet
Up to this age, up to this period in time--children's book, horror stories, cartoons etc. have long told the same tale--the Pinnocchio story of the artificial becoming real. Becoming "a real boy"-- has become a trope--a modern icon--according to Wikipedia, which also says that Pinocchio is one of the most adapted characters of all time.
But recently something has changed, I first noticed it and wrote about it in a presentation I did at a conference at UCDavis, a couple of years ago. Ours is the first generation in which Pinocchio has lost interest in being a real boy and instead has decided that rather than going back to being anything as silly as wood, or staying flesh, it is time to turn to plastic, foam and rubber instead. And I suggest that this is not mere musing, something is going on here and it may be zeitgeist--the flesh made plastic.
I would love to work on a performance with Joseph Beuys--of all the 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--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!
When the Body Speaks (Performance in three parts):
Scene microphone and stand on stage outcropping. Stage right Grace La Renard is standing dressed as a ghost. On a table, also stage right is a blue cloth and a top hat filled with a glowing light. Further back stage right is a male ghost. In the background stage right is an easel and white canvas and near that is a bucket filled with flour and a chair.
From off stage I walk on stage dressed as a ghost carrying a plastic pumpkin filled with flowers. After a beat I begin to sing the Depeche Mode song "When the Body Speaks." As the song ends, I take off the headphones and phone and place them in the bucket, toss some flowers at the audience and place the pumpkin bucket stage left so that Lily can retrieve it.
As the song ends the two other stage ghosts begin chanting "You're nothun' but a nothun'. You're nothun' but a nothun'."
As this happens I begin dancing the dance of lonely ghost--as the dance reaches its crescendo I take off the cloak and reveal the "Diabetic Luchador," Who begins to dance the dance of the Diabetic Luchador, while the two dancers continue to chant. During this dance, I am looking like I suffer from vertigo and high and low blood sugar.
At the end of it I grab the ghost sheet and begin to tear it apart. Then wrap it around my hands and barefoot legs. I move to the bucket and begin to put flower on my hands and draw a mushroom cloud on the ground before me. Taking my sweet time. At the end of this. I kneel down center stage. As soon as I kneel the Sorcerer's apprentice music should start.
The two ghosts begin to chant "Your blood will show you the way." and "Magic is in your blood."
At this point Lily comes from off stage and paints my face and blows glitter on me.
"The Dance of the Magician" Begins as the Sorcerer's apprentice plays. As I pull flowers then a rabbit out of a hat and then a ghost and then blood then paint a painting.
Stage goes black as I turn to the audience then say "When the Body Speaks--all else is hollow."
