Xavier Lopez Performance #5C: The Krazy Cat. Katherine Adamenko's Salons. 2001.

At just under an hour, the first, Soft Cyborg "variety show" introduced us to a whole menagerie of characters from a giant "Trix" Rabbit, a big, gray teddy bear, a ghostly clown creature and now we have the Kazy Cat.

My work and writing, including "Toward a Dada Dialectic and the Soft Cyborg," which I had just presented at the 2001 UCDavis Graduate Student Association Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium, was influenced by the idea of the "Carnivalesque" as described by Mikhail Bakhtin.  "The Krazy Cat" is actually a Mickey Mouse stuffed critter bought from the park, which when turned inside out actually looked more like the cat in the performance.

When I was a child I remember a cartoon dog that used to float up in the air in a state of what has to be described as orgasmic bliss, when he was given a doggie treat.  I loved this doggie and was fascinated by how happy he could become when he received the object of his affection.  Of course, I don’t have to reach so far back to find his contemporaries.  Scooby Doo, for one will do anything to get his “Scooby Snacks.”  He will easily apprehend the same villain that had eluded the Scooby’s for the first half of the cartoon.  He will happily overcome his own fears and attempt all sorts of inexplicable super-heroic feats for the promise of these snacks.  He too becomes orgasmic and ecstatic in the presence of his main addiction. 

Let’s look at perhaps, the most well known of these creations, better known than even Bugs Bunny, I am of course speaking of Mickey Mouse.  A moment ago, I spoke of a Bakhtinian idea that comes from the caves and grottos of the mythic world, images that have come to be called grotesque.  In these ancient drawings and carvings animals and humans were seen to be interacting, often in vulgar and obscene ways, at other times and throughout history we have seen fantastic images of men and women who may have been the offspring of these grotesque carnivals.  Mythology is filled with Minotaurs, hecubi, etc. those creatures, which are a mixture of man and animal.

However, now these creatures have lost their connections to the real animals, they once mimicked, they are fabrications instead of having connections to their real counterparts.  These are creatures like Mickey Mouse, who wear pants and shoes, who live in 50’s houses and who own other animals, speak openly and who’s jobs seemingly are to act as spokes-creatures and film-stars.  But there is something more here, something that gives these creatures, perhaps, an even greater claim to being real than you and I.  No longer happy with Pinocchio’s simple desire to be a boy, to be human, to enter our world and be one of us.  These Soft-Cyborgs are claiming immortality.

Xavier Lopez Performance #5B. The Soft Cyborg: Super Sugar Bear.

At the same performance of the Soft Cyborg, The Super Sugar Bear is an exemplification of the Soft Cyborg and how this manifesto was turned into performance.  In this performance, I dressed up in a giant grey teddy bear, from which I had taken out all the stuffing.  The name taken from a friend of my father's when I was growing up, who was part of the Chicano Art movement in California, he was called "Sugar Bear," and if I remember correctly, he might even have been my godfather!  I actually remember asking my parents what this meant and being worried that he was going to take me away! 

In the actual performance, I dressed as a cute bear, who mugged for the camera and elicited many awes, much like a real teddy bear would.  The bear then reached into an opening in the "bottom" of his bear suit and mirroring the first art act for many of us, reaches in and pulls out chocolate icing and draws a big flower for the audience.  This act of creation is part of most of my performances and the flower has been abstract as in "Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard," and "Teaching a Hare to Tell Time,"  to a flower that blooms into a nuclear explosion in "The Magician" segment of  "When the Body Speaks."

Xavier Lopez Performance #5A. The Soft Cyborg: The Ghost Host

"The Ghost Host" Introduced the very first Soft Cyborg performances at Katherine Adamenko's Salons.  These performances were filmed by Scott Hilton, but have currently been misplaced, for now these images are all that we have of these performances, but hopefully that will change in the future.  The Host came out, myself dressed in a clown mask found at a garage sale, gloves from Goodwill and medical gown, laughed a goofy laugh and introduced each performance section, A Big Bear painting a flower, The Krazy Kat who loved cereal and the Trix Rabbit who made a sculpture.

While "The Ghost Host" was named after the disembodied voice at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, the character and his behavior was completely different than the Paul Frees voice-track, except, perhaps in that they both took their participants on a kind of voyage. 

The effect, I believe was more comedy than horror, but there has always been an underlying tension between the Real and reality in my work that reads as horror.  Similarly, as influential painter Lisa Yuskavage describes her work in a way that is applicable to some of this menagerie of creatures that I have created for my performances: 

"I like to think of my characters as “The Brood”… have you seen that movie? It is by Cronenberg. It is about a woman who is the main suspect in a series of brutal murders, but her perfect alibi is that she is locked up in a mental hospital, so (she) couldn’t have done the deeds… Then you find out that her...therapy is producing these creatures, which are manifestations or personifications of her different neurosis… They then go out and “heal” her by killing the responsible parties.  Cool, huh?[14]" While I don't like to think of my own work in such simple terms, nor as a kind of therapy, the idea that I am creating these characters, half-beings, mutations--all broken--seems to me to be a fertile space that may gain power as I move into the next phase in my work, most likely mixing my ghosts with pantomime.  As I do move forward, I would not be surprised if many of my characters might often be presented to us as armless, leg-less, blind or otherwise unwhole--especially as I grow older, I think and it becomes clear that one cannot always count on the body to do what it is supposed to. 

   

Xavier Lopez Performance Art #5 Overview-- Soft Cyborg: Katherine Adamenko, The Salons and the birth of Putoh.

Katherine Adamenko at one of the Salons

Following our presentation at the UCDavis Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium was a set of performances at Katherine Adamenko's Apartment about four blocks away from the campus in a set of very houselike apartments.  The Soft Cyborg and the Dada Dialectic wer concepts that easily gave birth to many characters and continues to do so to this very day in my current performances.  These performances came directly from my own theories and, which like Putoh, 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 performative classes there.   

Katherine's amazingly exciting and in-your-face feminist performances layed the groundwork for a group of artists, sculptors, photographers and performance artists to come together and experiment with their ideas for performance, without judgement 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 the theories of identity.  This would also be the perfect petri dish for Xavier Lopez and Katherine Adamenko, through their many conversations, to create the pre-latinx, latinx discourse Putoh! 

What exactly is "Putoh?"

The Salons in 2001, between February and June--were the most exciting of times, the "Salons" at Katherine Adamenko's Apartment in 2001 included the first performances of the "Soft Cyborg," as well as the creation of "Putoh," which was/is an ahead of its time mixing of Japanese "Butoh" and a Latinx sensibility with a personal irreverence holding it all together.  Adamenko created a safe space for experimentation and for "post-avant garde" performance. It was, as they say-- the best of times!

With "Putoh" and the search for a Dada Dialectic and the Soft Cyborg Manifesto my performances took a turn for the theoretical when I went to Graduate School at UCDavis. 

Fellow student Katherine Adamenko and I met, if I remember correctly, either at a Butoh training in which we were asked to go through the life cycle of a flower or it was in a Performative Theory course in which we studied the work of Guillermo Gomez Pena, who I had met a few years earlier, as an undergraduate, either in one of Joanna Frueh's courses or Peter Goin's filmmaking class.

We quickly hit it off and invented "Putoh" together. Putoh is an irreverant mix of a Punk Chicano aesthetic and philosophy and the far more sedate, methodical and expressive Japanese Butoh.

But, What exactly is "Putoh?" 

"Putoh" is a hybrid in every sense of the word. Putoh celebrates individuality and intersectionality. Invented in the year 2000 at the University of California Davis, it is a portmanteau of ideas, vision and philosophies. Linguistically, the term "Putoh" is a fusion of two languages and two words.

Of course there is the Japanese Butoh, meaning, literally "Dance."  Mesh that with the Spanish-in this case-Mexican, gutter word "Puto."  Which has many harsh and vulgar meanings, but which has a very similar etymological history to the word "Punk" and it is in that spirit that the two words were married.

The performance form itself was created by two very different, yet very similar people, one Chicano--the other Cubana, pre-Latino, pre-Latinx, both feminists, both performance artists, both graduate students at the university of California, Davis.  Katherine Adamenko and Xavier Lopez came from very different backgrounds Xavier, a California, Mexican-American, complete with a Valley girl brogue and Katherine Adamenko a New York City, Jewish and Cuban/Spanish feminist, performance artist with a huge personality, were destined to create something that the world was not prepared for--something that refused to be categorized and which meshes many forms and many cultures, genders, philosophies and which will make more sense as we exit this age of atavistic essentialism and collective intellectual ethnocentrism.

Katherine as La Guapa Gorging Geisha in Tango with my fridge 1

Link to Katherine's website: 

Xavier Lopez Performance Art #4: Soft Cyborg Presentation at UCDavis Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium.

Xavier Lopez presenting: "Toward a Dada Dialectic and the Soft Cyborg," at UCDavis

GSA Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium.

In 2001, 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 influence by several of my feminist classes, by the work of Donna Haraway and especially by the concept of taking ideas and turning them into performance.  I was also highly influenced by the courses that I was taking outside the art department and especially the classes on Critical and Linguitic theory and the theater courses on Peformativity.  It was during this period and perhaps in one of these classes in which I met the Jewish/Cuban, feminist, Butoh performance artist Katherine Adamenko, who would prove to be fundamental to the course of my progress--but we will talk more about her in the next section. 

The Soft Cyborg.

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 Reconcilliation In The DC Comics Multi-Verse," which were both outside of the box.  Soft Cyborg's main premise, or goal was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to find or create a dialectic for a movement that eschewed language and art as having any true, actual or cohesive meaning--so that was a programme that was meant for failure from the very beginning.  But strangely, the saritical vehicle for this, which was never meant to be taken seriously, ended up making more sense and being a generative, not-so-liminal space that tied to Donna Haraway, Mikhail Bakhtin, the 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. 

The Lost performance. 

Prior to the performances at Katherine Adamenko's "Salons," 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 precurser to 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 excercised some long unused muscles and definitely reawakened the desire whithin me to do some more performance art.   

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Soft Cyborg paper Presentation and Putoh at UCDavis. Putoh, co-created by Xavier Lopez and Katherine Adamenko. 2001. Musical composition "Song of the Cyborg" by me.

Xavier Lopez Performance Art: Performance #3 - Honest as Hell: Poltergeist.

University of Nevada, Reno. Version 2. "Night of Performance," "Honest as Hell II: Poltergeist." University of Nevada, Reno. A group show of solo performances with five others. Poltergeist was a performance mixing sound and action before an audience. 1993.

In 1993, I was asked to be a part a night of performance, which was, I believe made up of a bunch of us that had been in Joanna Freuh's first seminal performance art course at the University of Nevada, Reno. Influenced by ideas of ephemera and especially the "Happenings" of Alan Kaprow, Dick Higgens, George Brecht and The New School, which brought a kind of individualistic, "Mannerist" approach to performance art, it's narrative, symbology and approach.

  

This was also the first of my art pieces, aside from a few drawings and any preliminary sketches, that dealt with the idea of the sheet ghost/ghost. Ghosts, at this point were one of the few, truly biographical objects that I allowed myself at the time, though, I still believed in the Rauchenberg/Johnsian ideal of denying the artist's presence in their own work. This is something that I continue to back and forth with, never settling on a single position of comfort. Though, it's interesting to note that the drawing I ever turned in for an art class at UNR, was entitled ,"The Fan/Fanatic" Something that I would come back to once I was at UCDavis, several years later and which would lead me to far more autobiographical work. I suppose that, if I'm honest with myself--the work is fairly autobiographical and always has been.

Xavier Lopez Jr.: Performance Art #2 - Exquisite Corpse

"Exquisite Corpse." Performance Art. Originally performed in Joanna Freuh's Performance Art Course. This reconstruction documents my second performance. 1992. Images and photography by Krista Lee Wolfe. Music by Haunted Me -- Pleasure.

Beads of sweat were pouring down my forehead onto my ears and down the sides of my face. With my eyes wide open, I could only see the white of the sheet-become-shroud that was covering me from head to ankles—leaving my toes exposed. 

On my big toe hung a tag with a big X and on the opposite side, my name, age and vital statistics. Picture it in your head and you know exactly what this looked like. Lying on a large, white, operating table, I was perfectly still. In the background I could hear and was vaguely aware that there was an audience forming in the dark room. 

Around me rose the scent of Lysol, bleach and rubbing alcohol—definitely a heady mix, which in conjunction with my current situation was filling me with nerves and making me kind of dizzy at the same time. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest shaking the void of the space that held me trapped in its wombic, membranous cavern. Ambient noises started to creep in, “Dr. Koeple, Dr. Koeple, Paging Dr. Koeple! Chris Bordeaux 319!” repeated over and over as if on a loop--which of course, it was. As I lay there, I remembered the first time that I ever did a performance art piece. Not performance, like singing or dancing, but performance art, like Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, and Paul McCarthy. 

I was dressed in a clown mask, black shorts and Minnie Mouse ears. I could barely see anything. In the background a loop tape played the “Bag of Laughs” from the death of the Joker in the first Batman movie. I was propped up against a wall, as Robert Morrison’s sculpture class walked in, all of them watching me as I stood there, loop after loop playing endlessly, until my shaking legs gave way and I dropped from sheer exhaustion. As I stood there, I remembered the inspiration for this piece. I was walking through Toys R Us in Reno one day, when I passed a wall of laughing bags and, just as I did so, Reno had its largest earthquake up to that date. 

Bag after bag began to laugh, loudly, maniacally--the moment was terrifying--it sliced deep into the heart of me. It meant so much, it meant so many things all at once--eviscerating the seriousness of life and opening death up to the ironic, sarcastic meaninglessness that only a mechanical, mindless wall full of novelty gags could begin to approach. A memory within a memory. A dream within a dream. I snapped back into reality. That’s when the lights went up and the performance began. As I began to speak, telling stories and recounting all the times that death had crossed my path, trying to make sense of each and every one of these abstracted moments, I felt as though the sheet over my head was bobbing back and forth frantically. 

I was certain that the effect was being ruined, that I was moving and rattling beneath the sheet and that what should have been a very serious piece about life and death was turning, instead, into a comical scene, ruined by my inability to lie perfectly still. However, immediately afterward, when the class met to discuss the performance--the other students in Joanna Frueh’s Performance Art Class, raved and celebrated the performance, telling me that it didn’t look like the sheet was moving at all and some even wondered if my voice had been piped in, which it had not. 

A perfect effect. A perfect performance. 

A perfect moment.

Everyone was fooled.

I was beaming with pride!

 The Subaltern Has Teeth! A meditation on art, oppression, life, and post-modern modernity Enzyme Magazine. 2016.

Begin the Beguine: Xavier Lopez Performance #1 - The Dum-Dum Boy @ UNR Art Department. CA 1991/2.

This was my very first Performance, it was unrecorded as we were too young and just didn't know any better. This was before we all carried cameras and we just didn't know, didn't understand the importance of documenting things.

"Preliminary Sketch for "Dum Dum Boy" Performance. This performance was very simple, influenced by the work of Gilbert and George. 1991/1992."

From my upcoming biography: "I remember the first time that I ever did a performance art piece. Not performance, like singing or dancing, but performance art, like Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, and Paul McCarthy.

I was dressed in a clown mask, black shorts and Minnie Mouse ears. I could barely see anything. In the background a loop tape played the “Bag of Laughs” from the death of the Joker in the first Batman movie.

I was propped up against a wall, as Robert Morrison’s sculpture class walked in, all of them watching me as I stood there, loop after loop playing endlessly, until my shaking legs gave way and I dropped from sheer exhaustion.

As I stood there, I remembered the inspiration for this piece. I was walking through Toys R Us in Reno one day, when I passed a wall of laughing bags and, just as I did so, Reno had its largest earthquake up to that date.

Bag after bag began to laugh, loudly, maniacally--the moment was terrifying--it sliced deep into the heart of me. It meant so much, it meant so many things all at once--eviscerating the seriousness of life and opening death up to the ironic, sarcastic meaninglessness that only a mechanical, mindless wall full of novelty gags or a rampaging virus could begin to approach.

A memory within a memory. A dream within a dream. I snapped back into reality."

Preliminary Poster for On the Edge: 2nd International Latinx Performance Art Festival in 2021! This one will be bigger and better than before!

Preliminary Poster for On the Edge: 2nd International Latinx Performance Art Festival!  This one will be bigger and better than before!

Updated!  Due to the Pandemic our Festival is being moved to possibly Spring 2021!

Performance Art Luchador!

Performance Art

Performance Art Images!

Here are some more screenshots from my performance Art!

Ending From When the Body Speaks Performance!

Addendum to Latinx Chapter of Marvin Carlson's Performance: A Critical Introduction Re: performance artist Xavier Lopez and Putoh performance. Please pass this information along to your Art Studio and Art History departments/Professors and especially any performance art professors or Latinx Art professors.

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In 2016, I alongside a handful of others put on the very first Latinx Performance Art Festival--ever.  In 2017, this was included in the latest edition of the book Performance: A Critical Introduction-- recent editions include me and the "Putoh Performance" art form that I created.  I am sending out additional information to graduate programs that they may use in their classes.

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Who is Xavier Lopez?

Xavier Lopez is a contemporary, Latino, conceptual, mixed media and performance artist.  Lopez received his MFA from the University of California, Davis, where he created the theoretical/artistic thesis of the "Soft Cyborg."  As a "Post-Pop Artist,"  he is part of a young group of artists who are seeking to move beyond contemporary mainstream art ideas, becoming post genre, mixing sculpture, performance art, theory, painting and anything else they can get their hands on to create something exciting and new.   In 2016, allied with La Sala--a leading Latino Arts organization in Seattle, Washington, Xavier Lopez and Lauren Davis put together the very first Latinx Performance Art Festival.  (They are currently planning more in the series.)  Then in 2017, Xavier Lopez alongside Vicente Montanez were cited in the Routledge critical theoretical textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction"--by Marvin Carlson in the third edition of his seminal work, as leading figures in the Latinx Performance Art movement, something for which they are extremely proud.  This acts as supplemental material to the Routledge book and all material herein is verified and suitable to be used for course studies. 

This, then is the final wording for the book "Performance: A Critical Introduction" straight from the pen of Marvin Carlson:

"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 Montanez. Lopez created the first festival of Latinx performance, held at the Good Arts center for experimental theatre in Seattle in 2016, in which Montanez 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."

Lopez is part of a new breed of Latinx artists for whom art-making, while still personal and autobiographical in the broadest sense, eschews the obvious tropes of masculinity, hegemony and race with very little regard for the overbearing visual, cultural history that has proven to be overpowering for so many artists of this age--especially artists of color.  Instead, as an Hispanic artist, it has become clear to Lopez over the course of his thirty-plus year career that his work has focused on a more personal kind of conceptualism, centering on autobiography and his own set of obsessions, hopes and fears.  

Lopez has shown artwork on both American coasts as well as in Germany, England and France, and he has come to be known for his own brand of lush, conceptual, post post-modern sculpture, especially his "sheet ghost" installations, flower Rorschachs, tin foil mountains, and, of course, his performance art.

As a child in the seventies, before Lopez even knew what art was, his father was in the Chicano Art Movement in Los Angeles and the younger Lopez would tag along to the "Mechicano" Art Centers of Southern California mentally devouring the exciting scenes of Chicano artists making political and historical work, expressing first-hand what it meant to be a "Chicano" in the seventies.  Days would pass as he watched his father paint murals, all the while, day-dreaming of his own future.  Lopez' parents often took their three children to the Los Angeles Museum of Art, where he saw Warhol's Brillo Boxes and his first conceptual sculptures.

Later, in college, his mind would be blown by the work of Marcel Duchamp and the later neoDadas.  He has had many mentorships, receiving advice and encouragement from feminist Lynn Hershman, taking performance art classes from theorist Joanna Frueh, creating the "Putoh" art form with Katharine Adamenko, sneaking into Wayne Thiebaud's classes at UC Davis and arguing about art with critic Dave Hickey, but his biggest mentor of them all has been his sculpture instructor at the University of Nevada Reno, Robert Morrison, who taught him how to think for himself, how to weld and to work with his hands.

 It was also at university that he began to notice a big difference between how his heroes made art and how he was expected to make art.  When a Duchamp or a Beuys made their work it was about ideas, it was about their ideas and it reflected the way that they saw the world.  With this realization, Lopez decided that he would take an oppositional stand and make art that came from his own personal experiences, that he would make work that was unique to his own, singular viewpoint and that above all else it would be art that was about ideas.  From then on Lopez sought to make his own way as an individual artist, seeking to express his own view of the universe and to speak of his own personal issues, obsessions and desires.  This has become a very important stance of liberation, which in and of itself is powerful and revolutionary.

 Lopez career is a journey and a complex intellectual investigation--at the same time, however,  it is not a refutation of difference, history or culture--as that is also a very important part of Lopez' (hi(s)tory--rather, Lopez work is about those areas where we come together, aware that we are not post-race and that his work is not either.

As an artist, Lopez' career has been multivalent, mixing sculpture, performance art, theory and painting, creating a body of work that is experimental and fierce--with the power of a slap to the back of the head.  Lopez has been part of several high-profile art events at the Seattle Art Museum, 4Culture, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts & Culture and most recently he has worked with the Seattle Latinx organization "La Sala" for their "La Cocina" project where he put together and performed in the first ever night of all-Latinx performance art.  He is a recipient of the prestigious 2016 Artist Up Grant Lab Award as well as several other grants, fellowships and commissions from various American cities.

Lopez is continually, growing and evolving.  Fans of his work can always expect a sense of wonder, innocence and experience, but mostly a celebration of imagination and discovery that keeps drawing more and more viewers to play in the “Deep End” of his imagination.  “I want viewers of my work to feel as they do just before going over the cliff at Splash Mountain, that feeling of elation, terror, excitement--all of it!”--he has said.

Biographical Statement:

"My father was a muralist in the 1970's Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement, where amazing Mexican painters expressed what it meant to be "Chicano," in the museums I watched "European" artists sculpt and create performance art; both inspired me.  As an undergraduate, Marcel Duchamp, influenced my now, mixed-media performances.  At UCDavis, critical theory opened me up to incorporate queer, feminist and other identity discourses.  There, I created two theoretical treatises, "Soft Cyborg," a variation on Haraway's "Cyborg" and "Putoh"--melding Japanese Butoh and Latino identity performance.  In 2016, I created "On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art" the first all-Latinx performance art festival in Seattle, with organizational assistance from Lauren Davis (La Sala and Art Exchange Gallery.)  I came to understand how profoundly new this concept was-worldwide, when Marvin Carlson named me and our event in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction" becoming part of university curricula across the globe.

I am a conceptual, Latinx, performance artist, receiving my MFA from the University of California-Davis.  Through performance I seek to push the boundaries of how we perceive the essence of ethnic/cultural/Latinx performance, to give voice to underrepresented groups and, moreover, to expand the language of marginalized performance and even to broaden access through guerrilla and drop-in performances.   I am part of a new wave of Latinx artists intent on expanding the themes and expectations available to minority artists--making art that is individual--defying traditional expectations of collective identity.  I choose personal materials, a collage of bed-sheets, tin foil and personal items in order to tell my stories.  This is an important conceptual, performative and material shift that cannot be overstated.  It is a stance of liberation, which defies traditional expectations and dares to say that individual lives of color matter; which in itself is powerful and revolutionary, problematizing racial, masculine, cultural and identity essentialism in an intellectual investigation which is in no way post-race.

As an example of my process, the performance "The Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Other;" exemplifies my praxis and my theories of what a Latinx theoretical movement would entail.  Beginning with a theoretical, pro-feminist idea, influenced by Judith Butler and other feminist writers, my process then moves into a more personal tone centering around everything my mother gave up as a Latina woman.  My work is multi-vocal and purely Latinx, refusing essentialist identity, as Marvin Carlson describes in his first description of our work before the most recent update 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 exactly is Putoh?

Putoh is a hybrid in every sense of the word.  Putoh celebrates individuality and intersectionality.  Invented in the year 2000 at the University of California Davis, it is a portmanteau of ideas, vision and philosophies.  It is pre-Latinx and yet very much presages the current movement in many ways and Putoh may in fact be the first truly post-post modern movement of the new millennium.  Linguistically, the term "Putoh" is a fusion of two languages, two words, but many ideas.  Of course there is the Japanese Butoh, meaning, literally Dance, but also the Spanish-in this case-Mexican, gutter word Putoh, which has many meanings, but which has a very similar etymological history to the word "Punk" and it is in that spirit that the two words were married. 

The performance form itself was created by a Chicano, pre-Latino, pre-Latinx, Mexican American and a Jewish Cuban woman.  These two bringing their experiences and ideals to the artistic form.  Both feminists, performance artists, university students and multimedia artists, Katherine Adamenko and Xavier Lopez came from very different backgrounds Xavier, a California Mexican American complete with a "Valley Girl" brogue and Katherine Adamenko New  York City Jewish and Cuban/Spanish feminist performance artist with a huge personality were destined to create something that the world was not prepared for--something that refuses to be categorized, meshes forms and cultures, creating a Post-postmodern world of intersectionality  and a multidisciplinary melding of art and performance.

Links:

Xavier Lopez' Website:     https://xavierlopezjr.wixsite.com/into-the-deep-end

Video documentary overview of Xavier Lopez' performance art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0MJ1azq19c&feature=youtu.be

Katherine Adamenko's Website:  https://www.ladypants.com/

Googlebooks: https://books.google.com/books?id=Szg7DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT449&lpg=PT449&dq=xavier+lopez+performance+latinx&source=bl&ots=vP4Vc2S8Rn&sig=LT3LzqFj45qSwb0BKseSXYaceV8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjVwubwrdXfAhWmIjQIHRHkCDsQ6AEwB3oECF0QAQ#v=onepage&q=xavier%20lopez%20performance%20latinx&f=false

Article:  https://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlearts/2017/12/17/memories-of-christmas-past-the-author-goes-back-in-time-to-a-simpler-age-and-graduate-papers-past/

Attachments: Video Documentary overview of Xavier Lopez' Performance Art (Suitable for presentation in whole or in part and suitable for screen grabs.)

Various images of Xavier and Putoh performance

Xavier Lopez is available for interview, presentation, etc.,via his website at: https://xavierlopezjr.wixsite.com/into-the-deep-end/contact

Proposal for EHAG Gallery in January!

An American Horror Storror

American Dream. 2018. Mixed media, Record Albums.

White as a Sheet. 2018. Mixed media. Sheets, string,

When the Body Speaks: A Prayer in 3 Parts - Night of performance

My first book available now! Get yours

After the Facts: Two career changing Installations - Message in a Bottle and Hope/Home. Seattle Center and Seattle Municipal Tower

Message in a Bottle...yeah! 

This three month installation in the Poetry Garden at the Seattle Central was a hit from the first moment to the last!  In this inatallation visitors were asked to leave anonymous messages to the future and place them in bottles that were hung from wires.  Over the course of the installation, over three-thousand messages were left.

Xavier Lopez At Heritage Gallery - Processing: Artists Face Administrative Change!

Some Paintings for your enjoyment!

ICON: Acrylic on Canvas 8 x 5'

Cloudbusting: Acrylic on Canvas 4 x 5'

Twisted Love: Acryliv on Canvas 3 x 4'

Unclear: Acrylic on Canvas 12 x 12"

Self-Portrait: 7 x 5'