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.

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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.

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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.

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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.