Photograph taken during performance of “Nightmare: Re: construction,” (Later, retitled–“The Utter Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Position of the Other.”) (Full Title.) 2001. Katherine Adamenko's Closeted Salon.
The performance "The Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Other;" exemplifies my process. The process began with a theoretical, pro-feminist idea, influenced by Judith Butler and other feminist writers, then moving into a more personal tone centering around everything my mother gave up as a Latina woman. My work is multi-vocal and Latinx, refusing essentialist identity, as Marvin Carlson describes in "Performance: A Critical Introduction," "There is a growing body of...artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by...Xavier Lopez...These and others were 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."
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 my performance I seek to be a voice in this change and to translate this mission into a body of work that is consistent with these goals.
"What I am saying is that those like me–that we exist, write perform and theorize from a position that has already always been post-modern—post identity, post singularity. We know, inherently, what it means to walk through several spaces at the same time; we know what it means to wear many contradictory masks, to speak many strange accents and in multiple languages. We do not emulate a white, male desire to reconstitute identity–because it is not part of our history. We do not call for society to attempt to recreate a space of modernity—to lie to ourselves so that we can move on. Instead we claim a new, shifting, mobile space of many, even antagonistic identities—which we deploy when needed. Trust me when I say that the future will engender a new kind of multiculturalism, we will not be manipulated by those that cry “cultural appropriation” in an inauthentic, ignoble attempt to keep us in place–but we will celebrate diversity, interdisciplinarity and shared, overlapping identities and the differences that come from individual lives lived to the fullest–each of us engendering a multiplicity of identities–individual and shared with the knowledge that no one is lessened by celebrating difference–a space in which no one is “othered”–because we have seen through the current ploys to divide us draped in the wolves’ clothing of a language that we have been speaking for too long, one which the enemy has learned to use against us. We are instead, reclaiming something that we have already always known, something that was never a shock to our multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-vocal selves–we all are very different–just as we are all the same and we must celebrate it all–individual Lives Of Color–matter. That is to say that every moment, every dream, every hope and failure of every individual life in color–matters."
I do suppose if you were told for millennia that your identity was fixed, that history was fixed, that you could drop your life into a construct made up out of generation upon generation of others who looked exactly like you, where civilization was coursing in a predictably positive way, whereupon each generation could applaud itself and ignore the bumps and fissures and massacres of others that did not fit into your cozy, neat narrative, which only included lives that you could pronounce, name and claim –that this loss would be pretty startling. But it is not, cannot be, if you never had those expectations in the first place.
In the performance-“Nightmare: Re: construction,” (Later, retitled–“The Utter Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Position of the Other.”) I have come to some answers and many more questions. Some of these include: “what does it mean and why is it of utmost importance, now, for a male to recognize and reconsecrate his connection to feminism?” “Why do I feel that feminism is the most important critical, theoretic and performative movement undertaken by women and men?” These questions have been brewing in my heart and mind for ages, but have come full-force to the surface over the last three quarters in which I enrolled in three separate feminist courses, one of which was ironically entitled “Masculinities.” This has been a time for me in which I have re-upped and re-recognized my inherent connections to feminism–especially as a performance artist.
I have stated in the past, in this class that I do not feel alien to the tendencies and practices of feminism. I do not feel as though they are not about me, perhaps this is queer, it certainly seems anti-masculinist, both of which I stand by gladly. It just seems as though my issues, issues of race, identity, gender all began as feminist issues. If one is honest, s/he will note that none of the spaces that we recognize now, none of the voices that we hear now could be recognized without feminism.
One of the most important achievements of feminism has been to open up spaces and to allow those that had not been able to speak to hear their own voices and to share their dialogue with others. To a certain extent all of the authors have spoken about the history of silence, the silencing of voices and finally the reclaiming of those voices, certainly Hipple, hooks and others have pointed to the need for as many voices to be heard as possible. Hipple, especially, by taking words and feelings and making them into artwork, something tangible and beautiful stands as a model for me. The ability to speak and to be heard is something which all of us, me as a queer little boy, me as a young Hispanic male, me as a comic book fan and victim of the eighties, me as a melancholy lover of sad poems and British television-owes to feminism; the ability to share with pride even the most unique aspect of myself. Feminism has opened up the queerest spaces and like the speculum that Haraway theorizes it allows us to look inside and see the blossoming complexities within each of us.
Today, I still wince, when I see my soft, fat 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 mind. I still wince when I see a misstep in my performance, but perhaps a bit less often, now as I become accustomed to the shape and substance of my message.
"Now, in the present tense, at least one thing has been seen to be true–the form of a Latinx criticism is shaping up and it will be a far cry from what has come before. It will not be inflected by the crap of “magic realism,” or a masculinist parentage–but it will “come out” from the borders, for it is ultimately a criticism from outside the margins (in all of its myriad meanings: paper, maps, personalities, etc.) it will be a raucous, hearty, alien form of criticism patently outside of any of the historically “coded” binary positions, it will be neither black nor white, but at times it will be both, it will be both male and female–and at times it will be neither, it is queer and straight–though it is more queer and de-centered than many dare to realize–it does, definitely owe a great deal to Fusco and Gomez-Peńa’s borderlands, but it is ultimately less essentialist and less interiorizing–it is a forward moving, active and ironic stance that replicates itself endlessly–and it is, ultimately, the future—all of our futures." --Happy Holidays–The Author Goes Back in Time to a Simpler Age and Graduate Paper’s Past! By xavier_lopez_jr on December 17, 2017 at 1:45 AM
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 my performance I seek to be a voice in this change and to translate this mission into a body of work that is consistent with these goals.
"What I am saying is that those like me–that we exist, write perform and theorize from a position that has already always been post-modern—post identity, post singularity. We know, inherently, what it means to walk through several spaces at the same time; we know what it means to wear many contradictory masks, to speak many strange accents and in multiple languages. We do not emulate a white, male desire to reconstitute identity–because it is not part of our history. We do not call for society to attempt to recreate a space of modernity—to lie to ourselves so that we can move on. Instead we claim a new, shifting, mobile space of many, even antagonistic identities—which we deploy when needed. Trust me when I say that the future will engender a new kind of multiculturalism, we will not be manipulated by those that cry “cultural appropriation” in an inauthentic, ignoble attempt to keep us in place–but we will celebrate diversity, interdisciplinarity and shared, overlapping identities and the differences that come from individual lives lived to the fullest–each of us engendering a multiplicity of identities–individual and shared with the knowledge that no one is lessened by celebrating difference–a space in which no one is “othered”–because we have seen through the current ploys to divide us draped in the wolves’ clothing of a language that we have been speaking for too long, one which the enemy has learned to use against us. We are instead, reclaiming something that we have already always known, something that was never a shock to our multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-vocal selves–we all are very different–just as we are all the same and we must celebrate it all–individual Lives Of Color–matter. That is to say that every moment, every dream, every hope and failure of every individual life in color–matters."
I do suppose if you were told for millennia that your identity was fixed, that history was fixed, that you could drop your life into a construct made up out of generation upon generation of others who looked exactly like you, where civilization was coursing in a predictably positive way, whereupon each generation could applaud itself and ignore the bumps and fissures and massacres of others that did not fit into your cozy, neat narrative, which only included lives that you could pronounce, name and claim –that this loss would be pretty startling. But it is not, cannot be, if you never had those expectations in the first place.
In the performance-“Nightmare: Re: construction,” (Later, retitled–“The Utter Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Position of the Other.”) I have come to some answers and many more questions. Some of these include: “what does it mean and why is it of utmost importance, now, for a male to recognize and reconsecrate his connection to feminism?” “Why do I feel that feminism is the most important critical, theoretic and performative movement undertaken by women and men?” These questions have been brewing in my heart and mind for ages, but have come full-force to the surface over the last three quarters in which I enrolled in three separate feminist courses, one of which was ironically entitled “Masculinities.” This has been a time for me in which I have re-upped and re-recognized my inherent connections to feminism–especially as a performance artist.
I have stated in the past, in this class that I do not feel alien to the tendencies and practices of feminism. I do not feel as though they are not about me, perhaps this is queer, it certainly seems anti-masculinist, both of which I stand by gladly. It just seems as though my issues, issues of race, identity, gender all began as feminist issues. If one is honest, s/he will note that none of the spaces that we recognize now, none of the voices that we hear now could be recognized without feminism.
One of the most important achievements of feminism has been to open up spaces and to allow those that had not been able to speak to hear their own voices and to share their dialogue with others. To a certain extent all of the authors have spoken about the history of silence, the silencing of voices and finally the reclaiming of those voices, certainly Hipple, hooks and others have pointed to the need for as many voices to be heard as possible. Hipple, especially, by taking words and feelings and making them into artwork, something tangible and beautiful stands as a model for me. The ability to speak and to be heard is something which all of us, me as a queer little boy, me as a young Hispanic male, me as a comic book fan and victim of the eighties, me as a melancholy lover of sad poems and British television-owes to feminism; the ability to share with pride even the most unique aspect of myself. Feminism has opened up the queerest spaces and like the speculum that Haraway theorizes it allows us to look inside and see the blossoming complexities within each of us.
Today, I still wince, when I see my soft, fat 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 mind. I still wince when I see a misstep in my performance, but perhaps a bit less often, now as I become accustomed to the shape and substance of my message.
"Now, in the present tense, at least one thing has been seen to be true–the form of a Latinx criticism is shaping up and it will be a far cry from what has come before. It will not be inflected by the crap of “magic realism,” or a masculinist parentage–but it will “come out” from the borders, for it is ultimately a criticism from outside the margins (in all of its myriad meanings: paper, maps, personalities, etc.) it will be a raucous, hearty, alien form of criticism patently outside of any of the historically “coded” binary positions, it will be neither black nor white, but at times it will be both, it will be both male and female–and at times it will be neither, it is queer and straight–though it is more queer and de-centered than many dare to realize–it does, definitely owe a great deal to Fusco and Gomez-Peńa’s borderlands, but it is ultimately less essentialist and less interiorizing–it is a forward moving, active and ironic stance that replicates itself endlessly–and it is, ultimately, the future—all of our futures." --Happy Holidays–The Author Goes Back in Time to a Simpler Age and Graduate Paper’s Past! By xavier_lopez_jr on December 17, 2017 at 1:45 AM
Even in 2001, blocks away from the UCDavis campus, shaving my legs in front of an audience until they streamed blood in the pro-feminist, anti-gender-essentialist performance: "The Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Other;" it was clear that the seeds were already growing for a genre-breaking, anti-essentialist movement, as Marvin Carlson described it in "Performance: A Critical Introduction," "There is a growing body of...artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by...Xavier Lopez...These and others were featured in the first festival of Latinx performance, held at the Good Arts center...in Seattle... Latinx represents an important orientation in modern performance, clearly anticipated by artists like Fusco and Gómez-Peña... concern(ed) with developing more inclusive and flexible attitudes toward designations of gender, race, and ethnicity,...Latinx will doubtless be joined in the future by other...terms addressing this major reorientation of the field."
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