Chapter 5: UCDavis, Katherine Adamenko, The Salons, A Soft Cyborg and the invention of pre-Latinx Latinx Putoh

 

Chapter 5:  UCDavis, Katherine Adamenko, The Salons, A Soft Cyborg and the invention of pre-Latinx Latinx Putoh.

 

​As a child, I used to daydream about my future as I watched my father paint murals as part of the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement.  In some of my earliest memories, I used to tag along to the Mechicano Art Centers where I spent entire days mentally devouring the exciting scenes of young, brown artists—men and women, both—working together, each one with the single-minded desire of expressing what it meant to be a Chicano back in those heady days.

​Long hours, days, weeks and months passed lazily as I watched my father paint murals, all the while, daydreaming of a seemingly forever-away distant future. On many weekends, my parents would take us up to La Brea and introduced us to the Los Angeles Museum of Art where I first saw Warhol's Brillo Boxes, Rauschenberg's combines and my first performance artists. Later on, in college at the University of Nevada, Reno and even later at UCDavis my mind would be blown away by the work of Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton and the Surrealists, Joseph Beuys and the Neo-Dada’s, the minimalists, conceptualists and many many postmodern philosophers and their critical theoretical brethren and sistren.

​I do not speak lightly when I say that my favorite artist has always been Marcel Duchamp, the great, white hegemony-buster with the wicked profile and the ideas that he might or might not have stolen for us, not the man, really, but his mind and what came out of it–he took art out of the realm of the purely retinal into the conceptual. He ended the thousand-year primacy of the eye and handed it over, or rather, returned it to the mind—where art had begun as the communication of our ideas—before language took away its original function. All art that has come after Duchamp has been inflected by him—signed by R. Mutt, so to speak.

​I would not be an artist without him. I could not be the artist that I am without him.

 

As I was saying before, while UNR introduced me to a pantheon of artists and philosophers and taught me how to think like an artist, it was at UCDavis, still a top five art school at the time that I was there, that taught me critical theory and ultimately, it was this that would change everything.

​It was also at university that I began to perceive a very big difference between how my heroes made art and how I--as a young Latino artist--was expected to make art. When a Duchamp or a Beuys made their work it was about ideas, more specifically, it was about their ideas and it reflected the way that they saw the world. But when anyone saw my last name, it appeared that they only wanted to see work that met a very limited scope or it would not get shown, funded or promoted—could get ridiculed and even worse defaced or destroyed in the name of decency. As long as work was "Day of the Dead" and dealt with Latino issues it was safe and I could expect to get tons of exposure--at least once a year--in the month of October.  A person could die from that kind of exposure, I thought to myself.

​Flashing back to UNR—I rode high this way for a time, but I soon became dissatisfied, I wanted more, I wanted above all to understand myself and to be given the opportunity to explain myself through my artwork. These were the words that I thought internally, unwilling to speak these words aloud to anyone else, "Why does no one expect Western, European artists to make work about their heritage? Why were they celebrated for their individuality? Why were they expected to create work out of their individual experiences instead of being perceived of and being forced to behave as cultural revolutionaries that had to sublimate their own lives in favor of fighting for a corporate identity called race?”

​The complete denial and rebuke of these expectations would one day, ultimately lead to the series entitled, “Just Being,” but for the moment it remained a question—a very painful question. Why did none of my friends have to worry about their “ethnic backgrounds?”  While I was expected to be obsessed with nothing else? Why did even my fellow artists of color not recognize that they were being corralled and coerced, if not controlled by their ethnicities--or question whether this was even a problem?

No one ever asked Marcel Duchamp to make work about his "heritage"—or to wait for the annual Halloween exhibition in order to show it. I desperately wanted to make art that had meaning beyond the expectations of others—art that reflected my individual life! Yes, that is what it was coming down to, would I leave this planet having made artwork about my own individual life or create an oeuvre based on a collective ideal? Whose body would I leave behind!?!

​I searched unsuccessfully for proof that my work had a place, but there were no referents, was no history to fall back on. I asked myself, just how many individual lives of color have been erased, lost and ignored due to these same cultural expectations?  It was as if a veil had been lifted and I could see something that had previously been invisible.

While Davis, opened my mind it also taught me to question the many hegemonies that control us, even as it was clear that conservatives were beginning to take control of the academy and masculinities courses were picking up steam. It became obvious to me that something was missing from my schooling, aside from a small handful of artists there were huge lacunae in my studies. Where were the contemporary Latino, Hispano-American artists and aside from Guillermo Gomez-Pena and his associates, where were the performance artists, I asked myself? Where were my role models and especially where were any postmodern brown people? That was the question that I often asked throughout my graduate studies, so, instead, for too long, I focused on Queer, Feminist and Gender Studies courses and investigated Matthew Barney's lush, CIS, white, male performances. But that was about to change and none too soon!

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At this same time, on the other hand, in at least one "Chicano Studies," course it became clear, well actually I was told point blank that I was not Chicano enough, that my experiences were not typical of what was reflective of the norm for a Mexican American. I had somehow failed that bar and had an entire class to reassure me of that failure. I got up from my desk on the last day that I could and just walked out in the middle of a lesson and I never went back to that course.

​It was clear that I was Chicano or Hispanic or what have you, the term and its definition had just not yet been expanded to include me, while people still felt as though there was a right way to be a proper "Mexican." This, was, of course, before LatinX and other ideas of intersectionality—of complexity—not just the legal negatives of multiple identities—but also the liberating, inclusivity of an identity opened up to difference/differance and could even include me, but that too, would come in the near future. Though, in our performances of this era, through Putoh and in my queer, intersectional body it was always already there!

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With all of these realizations, I decided that I had only one course of action left to me! I decided to make and claim art that came from my own individual experiences. I decided that I would be my own referent and create my own history and that I would make work that was unique to my own view and that above all else it would be art that was about ideas—my ideas.

​From then on, I sought to make my own way as an individual artist, seeking to express my own view of the universe, my own personal issues, obsessions and desires. This was a very important stance of liberation, which in and of itself was powerful and revolutionary, and it would prove to engender a lifetime’s journey—a complex intellectual investigation—with guitars—as the Clash would say!

As an undergraduate, in my performances and my sculptures, I had already chosen personal, mundane, everyday materials, often manipulated into new forms or painted—a collage of sheets, books, candy, fake flowers, tin foil and other personal items in order to tell my story. This was an important conceptual, performative and material shift that cannot be overstated and it brought everything together—as the Beatles would say, Over me!

​As I said before, this was indeed a stance of liberation, pushing the boundaries of expectation that dared to enunciate that an individual life of color matters, which, in itself, was powerful and revolutionary, problematizing racial, masculine, cultural and identity essentialism in an intellectual investigation that is in no way post-race.