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)
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