Chapter 6: Toward a Dada Dialectic and the Soft Cyborg, and Putoh at UCDavis

 

Chapter 6: Toward a Dada Dialectic and the Soft Cyborg, and Putoh at UCDavis

Fast forward to the year 2000.  I was in graduate school, working toward my MFA in Studio Art: Sculpture, with a specialization in critical theory. I was a member of the UCDavis, Graduate Student Association and was working on a side project that had been influenced by several of my feminist classes, especially the work of Donna Haraway as well as the desire to take ideas and turn them into performance. I was especially influenced by the courses I was taking outside the art department and the classes on Critical and Linguistic Theory, plus Theater Courses on Performativity.  It was during this period and perhaps in one of these classes where I met the Jewish/Cuban, feminist, Butoh performance artist Katherine Adamenko, who would prove to be fundamental to the course of my future progress.

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THE SOFT CYBORG.

​That side project, The Soft Cyborg began as a paper that I knew I could never turn in for a grade because it was just too far out there for any of my art classes—too strange for art history and too literate for Studio/Fine Art. My only hope was to get it accepted to a conference as I had for two other papers, "Depeche Mode Ate My Balls," and "Longing for Reconciliation In The DC Comics Multi-Verse," which were both outside of the box.

​The Soft Cyborg's main premise, or goal was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to find or create a dialectic for DADA--a movement that eschewed language and art as having no true, actual or cohesive meaning--so it seemed as though my idea of creating meaning out of meaninglessness was meant for failure from the very beginning. But strangely, the satirical vehicle for this, which was never meant to be taken seriously, ended up making more sense and creating a generative, not-so-liminal space that tied Donna Haraway, Mikhail Bakhtin and his idea of the "Carnival," Mickey Mouse, Twinkie the Kid, cartoon emcees, Furries, art and even politics in a way that fit very well with the performances that I had been doing up to then, but which, at this point, I had not done for several years—but whose heredity could be traced all the way back to the DUM DUM Boy!

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THE SOFT CYBORG

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"We live in the “Age of Nefarious,” an age of puppet kings and idiot princes, a period in which politics has metastasized and turned on its own people. An age in which the special and the grandiose has been eschewed in favor of the mundane and the insipid and a lethargy has taken hold. A lethargy that has stemmed from the belief that we have discovered everything, that all we have left is recombination—an infinite helix of all that has gone before—in the hope that this will create the sense of the new that we so desperately desire—but, without any of its impulses.

​But this is far from the truth, instead, we have become arrogant enough to believe that we cannot be excited, that our blood has become stilled—that we have become blasé’. We have been told for far too long that the same impulses that made humans and beasts excited in the past do not and cannot thrill us. That we are too enthralled by irony and ennui to lift our jaded eyelids and actually see something new in this tired, weary world. We dress our men in baggy pants and baseball caps—celebrating the prisons that have broken our society’s spirits and which stand in stark contrast to the costumes of excitement and adventure that we should wish to reclaim.

​We live in the age of Nefarious, a bionic age when artists equipped with angel smiles and back-pack demolition preach their death-sentence prayers to zombified cartoon cutouts. This is an age in which we have become deaf and dumb, in which shellshock has stunned us into a stuporific stasis. We now live in an age that is more truly Dada than anything Marcel Duchamp or Andre Breton could have ever thought up, an age in which we are bombarded with the idiot atrocities and indecencies of life on a daily basis. But the questions of Post-modernism have been answered in blood; the waiting is over and the games have now begun (in fact Post-Modernism, itself is now long dead.) While pitiful professors stand shell-shocked and ready to place themselves into the machine—the rest of us have seen the ever-increasing cracks of hegemony and the lies of bookkeepers and presidents no longer convince even the “C” students among us-though they still become president.

​The age of the artist has passed and in its stead, we have a sea of castrated bald white men, spouting their lines as if it was enough to memorize them. We have forgotten the lessons 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 caustic 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 or worse—art critics and historians. It was never meant to be the tool for professionals to build their careers on. Criticism, theory, and thought has always been meant for the young, the artists, the poets and musicians—those who actually feel the age in which they live—in their inchoate, pulsing blood, in the music they listen to, in the alcohol they drink and in the hazy, thick air which they breathe.

​We need to rediscover our own arrogance, to become excited as we sup on the bones of the deadest of the dead, white, western men. In fact, Critical Theory, itself, has long since died, but it has refused to be buried–and most importantly, it has lost the one thing that is unforgivable–it has long lost its sense of humour.

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Toward a more Dada Dialectic – The Soft Cyborg Manifesto 2014. We are all Soft Cyborg.

By xavier_lopez_jr on November 28, 2013

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THE LOST PERFORMANCE.

​Prior to the performances at Katherine Adamenko's "Salons," that brought me back out of the closet, so to speak, my performances had mostly taken place at the University of Nevada, Reno, but during the second year of graduate school at UCDavis, during one of our studio visits, I decided to put on a performance for our graduate group.  I don't remember the details so much, except that it was very loosely a precursor to the Tales of "The Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard," which in turn owed a great deal to the work of Joseph Beuys. In this production, I walked up to my sculptures and berated them in German. The class clearly had no idea what to do with this, and as usual Lucy Puls was clearly unimpressed.

As for me, that night was important in that it exercised some long unused muscles and definitely reawakened the desire within me to do some more performance art.

​Katherine Adamenko & the Salons

​Back to the Soft Cyborg, ultimately, both Katherine Adamenko and I would present work at the Annual Graduate Student Association's Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium, she would wrap herself in words and present a mixed-media performance and I would present the Soft Cyborg paper. These were exciting times, indeed! Before and after our literary and performative presentations, however, there were the “Salons” at Katherine's Apartment, which was about four blocks away from the UCDavis campus in a set of very homey apartments.

​The Soft Cyborg and the Dada Dialectic were concepts that easily gave birth to many characters and continue to do so to this very day in my current performances. These performances came directly from my own theories, which like Putoh (which we will hear about in a moment,) also created during this time were directly resultant from classes and discussions that folks like Scott Hilton, Katherine Adamenko and myself were having at UCDavis while taking Art History and Theater classes.

Katherine's amazingly exciting and in-your-face feminist performances laid the groundwork and created a home for a group of artists, sculptors, photographers and performance artists to come together and experiment with their ideas for performance, without judgment and backed by their studies, they began to set their sights on the future of performance and its intrinsic connections to theory and identity and especially theories of identity. This would also be the perfect petri dish for Xavier Lopez and Katherine Adamenko, through our many conversations, to create the pre-LatinX, LatinX discourse, which we named Putoh.

​There were three Salons in total—I think I actually missed out on one of them, or maybe there was one before I even joined. I’m not completely sure—I guess you’d have to ask Katherine or one of the lucky few who got to perform or watch. Those were heady, exciting times—the kinds of times that pulse with energy and excitement, where you feel as though something important is happening—maybe how I imagine early Nirvana concerts must have felt. I remember watching Katherine Adamenko’s raucous, libidinous performances—all of us crammed into her tiny kitchen space as she performed some of the earliest “Putoh” performances.