Original Text for 2nd Performance Art Book

 

1.    UNR Days, first performances, Cowboy attitude, Car Accident, Initial Ghosts and moving forward.

Flash back to the beginning of time.

Once, maybe twice, perhaps even three once-s upon a time, there was a group of apes trapped in a holographic projection of a multi-millennia-long game of Sid Meyer's “Civilization.” The rules of this game have always been relatively simple--stay alive long enough to procreate, try to come up with something-anything that will advance your people and don't let the vandals destroy everything you've built up. Don't get destroyed by a giant asteroid like the dinosaurs, don't fall into the ocean like the Atlanteans, don't fuck yourself out of existence like the Neanderthals and by any and all means don't end up as slaves to the fascists in the very matrix you are living in, filled with its agents in business suits and sunglasses--preparing you for a very short and brutal existence--all without single-payer healthcare. And finally, definitely don’t allow yourself to die when humanity yet again finds itself going through another world-wide Pandemic, wherein thousands upon thousands die and the only thing a person can do is get as much out of the way and pray that you are one of the lucky ones.

  This is, of course where we find ourselves as I write this--in a situation that appears to happen every hundred years or so and which, to be fair shouldn’t have come as a surprise as it has been foreshadowed for at least the last thirty years.  Further back, Giovanni Boccaccio’s libidinous, lustful celebration of the carnivalesque--The Decameron begins with a surprisingly modern description of the plague of 1348—The Black Plague.  His descriptions of the outbreak as his characters move out of the city to evade death captures the fear and terror that we as cool post-post moderns try very hard to suppress, but which leaks out through the cracks and fissures within the stories that we tell about ourselves. For “Boccace” those stories were libidinous, semi-morality tales and fractured fairy tales, full of the passions, weaknesses and the bawdy, tawdry excretions that humans are prone to.  Here is his description of the Bubonic Plague to which he was able to see firsthand.

“…it began to show itself in the spring of the aforesaid year, in a sad and wonderful manner. Unlike what had been seen in the east, where bleeding from the nose is the fatal prognostic, here there appeared certain tumors in the groin or under the arm-pits, some as big as a small apple, others as an egg; and afterwards purple spots in most parts of the body; in some cases large and but few in number, in others smaller and more numerous--both sorts the usual messengers of death. To the cure of this malady neither medical knowledge nor the power of drugs was of any effect”

This first-person conveyance of intimate, personal experience and information is always, in itself, a performative act, even when it is disguised in the passive attire of the written word and the passage of time.  However, whether sharing is accomplished via the expelling of air past vibrating vocal cords, pushing ink onto a blank page, the movement of microscopic waves of electricity through tiny tendrils of blood through the brain and body, the tapping of keys in front a pulsing computer screen or a performer moving from one point in space and time to another, the conveyance of information and performance are inextricably linked.

 In fact, the first person, singular (or even plural) is, in fact, the perfect metaphor for Performance.  As evidenced in Boccaccio’s description, by its very nature the first person imparts as much information about its author as it does through its description—it says clearly, in words and the documentation of those words through an impression left on paper, sand or tape, “I was here!  This is what I saw!” “This is what this meant to me.”  The first person, then, is also always about identity, as much as it is about identification--it is always both a performance and an artifact left after describing the events of a performance—that is why it is also art and not just a conversation.

Performance is also always an attempt to say something—but we will get to that and in fact that may be exactly what the rest of this book is about, figuring out exactly what it is that I have been attempting to communicate, what I am trying to say right now and what I might be moving toward in the future.

Over time, I have learned that whether my own performance work denies the body, celebrates my fat, unathletic, Latinx physique, whether the work is painfully honestly diaristic or secretive, masked and elusive—all the work is in fact about me and continues to be presented in the first-person—and likely will, until I shuffle off this mortal coil.  Herein, there is the least perceived distance between the author (me) and the audience (you).  Here, I speak directly to you, my body and my mind are present directly to you, whether I am masked or not, whether it is through text, live or on Youtube.  Here, I perform and communicate directly to you—though what and how much and what is actually communicated is dependent on both of us.  Sometimes.  

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Performance, the idea of performance as something more than television, movies or theater, for me, began long before I even knew what art was.  When I was still very young my parents would take us to the museums in Los Angeles and I was introduced to artists like Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, films showing Jackson Pollock splashing his paints onto canvases laying on his studio floors and Yoko Ono staring down her audiences as she experimented with the darkest sides of humanity.  It should not be surprising then that when I finally got to college I practically glommed onto Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, performative theory, queer and feminist theory--and scoffed openly at my pro-hegemonic "masculinities" professors at UC Davis with their simplistic, "Iron John" self-help psychologies.  I particularly derided Masculinities’ apparent inability to create a theoretical and conceptual basis for critique, unlike their more intellectual siblings.  I ate, drank and slept this "Postmodernist stuff", but only--If I'm honest, after a very strong--if short-lived period of mourning over the death of modernism.  For a time I was definitely in shock--who wouldn't be--artists before Postmodernity, were heroes, great big faux-masculine gods plowing their way through life by the power of their presumably oversized penises and their equally exaggerated imaginations--think of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman with raging hard, abstract expressionist erections and you get the picture--but do not think of artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning or Norman Lewis--as they were supposed to be relegated to the sidelines, the margins and we were told they had nothing to say.  As a child, of course, I didn’t realize that I felt into this “silenced minority.” 

Modernism and especially the Abstract Expressionist movement was the last collective gasp of western-humanity's ideal of "manifest destiny" and artists were its "chosen Zen warriors"--the Obi-Wan Kenobi's of that era-- the focal point of society's need for magic--these artists became a walking, talking Bakhtinian parade of jokers and clowns--and for one last moment I was sad to see that go away forever.  In fact, something similar is happening at a national level as I write this.

I remembered hearing about the Abstract Expressionists, and I remember watching an episode of the old “Batman” television show in which the Joker posed as an artist and bamboozled the dynamic duo–and I remember asking my father, who was working on a large painting at the time whether he was a good guy or a bad guy–he told me that it was much more complicated than that.  He also told me that only other artists truly understand what it really means to be an artist–that artists must think and paint with their eyes and with their minds.  He told me about Giorgio Vasari–the very first art critic and art biographer and gave me a copy of the book, “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”–and he told me that it was of the utmost importance that Vasari was also a very accomplished artist and worked alongside his peers–for he could truly understand every word that he wrote in a way that a mere watcher could not.  He taught me that artists have been arguing about art since the beginning of time–and the greatest artist of them all was a man named Marcel Duchamp--who I wouldn’t truly understand until college--because he took art out of the realm of the purely retinal and placed it firmly in the arena of the mind.  My Dad is a very wise man and his words still guide me in many ways.  But what did I know then, I was, what? Five? Six?  I knew so little about the shape and substance of the world I lived in.

​Fast Forward: Our story begins at UNR, the University of Nevada, Reno, it was my first year as an artist and everything was going gangbusters, I had just moved out of my parent's house, well more like I was thrown out of my parent's trailer and after a summer spent on several couches, I had finally moved in with my first, real girlfriend and her chain-smoking grandmother.

​At the University of Nevada, Reno Art School, where I met Laura Akers, who I would eventually marry, I was a bit of a Chicano art star. I had just been asked to be part of a three-person "Day of the Dudes" Show with two of my professors Ed Martinez and Michael Sarich--something that was a huge deal for a student, any student--as it was apparently the first time that anyone had been asked to join any of their professors in an art exhibition.

​A couple of months earlier, Professor Sarich had bought one of my artworks, a sculpture of a found Virgin Mary wired to a plank of found wood painted with the colors of the Italian flag because I had gotten the Mexican flag wrong. That year, I won a materials grant for my work and for showing great promise, but something was missing. All in all, I must have been in twenty "Day of the Dead" shows that year!

​There were no particularly discernible dinosaurs hanging around on campus on that certain blisteringly hot Nevada semester day and all the Neanderthals on the planet had long-since lost their sloping foreheads and could move about undetected--except under detailed genetic analysis and at UNR, at least, these particular "cavemen" preferred to couch their more primitive inclinations into more artistic activities and endless discussion on the finer points of deconstruction, rhetoric and irony and all-the-while things were always bit more rugged, a bit more seminal, a bit more cowboy, UNR never lost that primal edge--more than once I was almost shot--by one of my professors, but we'll get to that a bit later!

As I was attempting to explain, those were different times--and UNR had created its own insulated art culture--never losing a sense of hope and the idea that we would all become extremely important artists and that everything we made was instilled with a kind of magic. Years later, when I was accepted to UCDavis for grad school, one of the professors there confided to me that they had a great respect for the teachers and students at UNR.

​During this seemingly never-ending summer of my extended adolescence--four professors--especially, were very important to me--sculpture professor Robert Morrison, painting Professor Michael Sarich, performance artist and mistress feminist Joanna Frueh and photographer Peter Goin. They were the egos, superegos and ids to my artistic infancy.

​For a very glorious period of my undergraduate experience, in fact, every Friday we would head to one of the local bars with a few of these professors and we would get very drunk, smoke ourselves sore, and talk and talk and talk about philosophy, biography and all the while we would be thinking about how our art would change the world--just as it was changing our very souls and opening our imaginations in ways that even now I do not fully understand.

​It was during this period, too, that I was first introduced to the ideas of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, the mixed media of Matthew Barney--who was still climbing walls and restraining himself for all to see, and it was also then that I fell in love with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and came to worship Marcel Duchamp.  It was then that I first understood the power of noise with John Cage and danced with Merce Cunningham, ate my first helping of Naked Lunch, ran from Gargantua and Pantagruel, had Akira completely blow my mind, met (in the flesh) Allen Ginsberg, Graham Chapman, Terry Allen, Rachael Rosenthal, Alan Wilder, Paul Humphries and missed Andy Warhol by mere minutes--all the while having the time of my life and filling my head with the dreamy dreams of an aspiring artist.

But back to the amazing bacchanals that we were having--at those old-world "secret society" meetings. Here mystery women and mystery men told stories of New York gangsters and opium dens, of Montana artists in cowboy hats and chaps--crooning songs and setting up artistic boxing rings. We heard tales of professors who in their past lives broke people's fingers for money--and mangled hands in meat-grinders due to non-payment. I heard stories of a young Bruce Nauman and his performances on the Davis campus, tales of the "Hairy Who" and Robert Smithson, of Jackson Pollock and the invention of conceptual art and so much more.

​In time, word would come down from "the regents" or "whomever" that professors could not fraternize with their students like this--but for one long magic moment everything seemed possible.

​Back to the beginning and to my very first performance, it was unrecorded as we were too young and just didn't know any better. This was well-before we all carried cameras and we just had no clue about recording things for the future. Because of this, my very first performance at UNR is completely gone and undocumented--something I would never allow today! But as I said, we just didn't know, didn't understand the importance of documenting anything. We were just a bunch of artistic punk kids!

​At the time of this first performance, I had been making small box sculptures, with dioramas, a mixture of painted text and object, often with toys unceremoniously nailed outside of hastily put together frames or found boxes, standing in front of the artwork like tiny emcees, in other installations I would place customized "action figures" on small metal stands that were screwed to the wall, just standing there. At this time, I also created a metal mouse with a familiar shape that became a kind of hero for a series of wall-mounted sculptures, again standing against the wall—everything was a mixture of painting and sculpture.

​As part of my pre-planning for the performance, I drew many preliminary sketches, and began to fill sketchbooks with notes and ideas that would later become either sculptures or performances--something that I do to this very day! The "Dum Dum Boy" performance as it has come to be known, was based on many things including a conversation between myself and another sculptor named Heidi--who told me about a character that she was creating, something like the "Burning Girl" or something like that. That was the last bit of inspiration that I needed and the "Dum Dum Boy" was born.

​At the time, as well, I was quite worried that I was dyslexic, and I just couldn't understand any of my math classes--something which actually jeopardized my entrance into graduate school.  I felt very much like a dumb boy, even though I was also reading voraciously all things about art, philosophy and history and spent evenings at the library pouring over anything that I could get my hands on.

​The performance, itself was very simple, influenced by the work of Gilbert and George, the wall pieces and, well, everything that was going on at the time. I remember it clearly, it was, after all, the very first time I ever did a performance art piece. Not performance, like singing or dancing, but performance art, like Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono or Paul McCarthy.

​I was dressed in a clown mask, black shorts and Minnie Mouse ears, and I could barely see anything. In the background a loop tape played the “Bag of Laughs” audio 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 to the ground from sheer exhaustion.

​As I stood there, I remembered another inspiration for the 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 ever even begin to approach.

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

That was it—the performance itself lasted less than ten minutes, scared the hell out of me, but ended in enthusiastic applause and heaps of missed opportunities—but it was mine and it left me completely changed.  I was never the same and I could not wait to do this again.  I could not wait until I had the opportunity to do another performance and investigate this form of art and communication again!

Second Performance: 

I have always been amazed by the sheer, almost-infinite power of the black box of an empty stage to become the setting for anything that anyone can possibly imagine. As far back as I can remember I have always loved, needed and sought out the sense of verisimilitude that only exists in the make-believe world created by an artist attempting to fool us into believing. It is in fact, quite possible that every performative instinct in me was born on one fateful day when as children, my brother, sister and I went to a puppet show of Hansel and Gretel that I never wanted to leave.  I think something broke for me that day and the line between reality and fantasy was broken down. But that was a lifetime ago and the line between the real, reality and fantasy is very tenuous at that age. I was born in Southern California, half-way between Hollywood and Disneyland. My first memory is of the warmth of the California sun on my cheeks and visions of the bright blue sky overhead as the song "A Theme From a Summer Place" played all around me in the background of the car radio. From birth, when it came to telling the difference between what was real and what was make-believe--well, I never stood a chance!

I came from a family of three siblings and when we were kids, we used be left alone at the Hollywood Wax Museum and auto museum and would spend literally days staring at the Batmobile, Bat-cycle and full-sized wax models of old Hollywood stars. When we got home, we would make Batman and Robin costumes and fight invisible bad guys until sundown.

Disneyland, too, was such a prevalent part of my childhood that I actually recall nightmares of the Haunted Mansion before I even remember having been old enough to make sense of the ride. My father used to taunt us by saying, "You're nothing but a nothing, you're nothing but a nothing..." which was a song from some scary Disney cartoon about a mouse who wanted to be a bat. He would also take our stuffed animals and trick us into believing that they were alive--though my brother who was always much smarter than I, was never fooled.

​Flash forward back to UNR, a little later, in performance artist and writer Joanna Frueh’s performance course, I saw the same dark space of an emptied classroom become many things; a hospital room, the visceral, liquid spaces inside of a body, a madcap circus tent, a desert oasis--and even, just a generic, minimalist art space.

​I remember how amazingly excited I was on the day that I discovered that Dr. Frueh was going to be teaching a studio course on performance art. I just knew that no matter what, I needed to be in that class. I had no idea however, just how much my life would be changed by this class and I also had no idea how much my life would change before the first day of that class would come to pass. But in that moment before everything changed, Robert Morrison had brought me my very first Starbuck's ice-cold mocha latte and I was bouncing around like an extremely excited monkey-boy, spouting out all sorts of ideas, with a mind full of uninhibited possibilities!

​Only a very few weeks later, however, I would find myself laying out in the warm, morning sun of the Mojave Desert. In the background my ex-wife was screaming out in pain calling out for her mother, while my sister was keeping local Christian vultures from administering "Last Rights." For my part, I woke up on the scene, spoke incredulously the words, "I'm alive?" Then I blacked out again. I remember the dark ring of unconsciousness circling around me and reality closed up, going black once again.

​Of the actual car accident, I would later describe the incident to insurance reporters as feeling "as though we had been sucked through the back window" and as being thrown from the car and that this was the last thing I remembered. I didn't realize at the time that it was my brother's arm that had serendipitously broke the back window and saved our lives. An event that cost my brother the use of that arm. And something I never forgave myself for since I had had bribed everyone to come on that trip.

​The accident which happened on our way to the "Happiest Place on Earth" also caused the death of a dear friend and marked the end of an age of innocence by reminding all of us that death is very much always around waiting in the wings and that nothing is ever certain. Not love. Not friendship. Not anything. Not even life.

​After a month of recuperation and rehabilitation, I was able to return to UNR, just in time for my classes and especially in time for Joanna's performance art course!

​Fast forward to the day of my second performance.

​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 my name, age and vital statistics inscribed upon it.

Picture it in your head and you know exactly what this looked like.

Lying on a large, white, operating table which for no good reason had been left in one of the drawing classrooms and which I borrowed for the performance, I lay 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. Koeppel, Dr. Koeppel, Paging Dr. Koeppel! Chris Bordeaux 319!" repeated over and over as if on a loop--which of course, it was.

​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! That was my second performance and I can still remember every moment of it.

Looking back at Joanna Frueh's class and especially at Joanna Frueh herself, this amazing and powerful woman and professor at the University of Nevada-Reno has proven to be one of the most important people in my life. Someone who I hold in the highest esteem and whom I respect in the extreme and who has taught me several amazingly important and valuable lessons that I hold dear to this very day.

​Fast-forward a few months.

Dr. Frueh was working on her latest book dealing with women and aging and in association with the work that Dr. Frueh was doing, the amazing and imposing artist Rachel Rosenthal--gave an awesome presentation to a packed audience. Ms. Rosenthal was especially intriguing to me because I was (and am) such a huge fan of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Jasper Johns--who she used to hang out with--the only female in a very queer, very masculinist circle! Her talk that night was amazing, but it was also frightening as she was absolutely honest about the process of aging, something that almost no one ever is. She spoke of the shifting perception of time as you age, she told stories from her youth in the arts and she spoke about her relationship to many decisions she had made and how, while others always claim that they wouldn't change a thing--that that stance for her was far too simplistic--inauthentic and actually, often dishonest.

She stood in front of the audience--a true giant of a woman, bald and full of strength and told a crowd of students in their twenties that if they were doing things right their view of the world should change every ten years--that our relationship to the rules, our perception of right and wrong should be in constant change--that when we are faced with the same decisions, we should not be afraid to find new solutions. She also spoke of life in a way that kind of haunts me to this day. She spoke of history as existing on the threads of a screw--each point moving toward the end--the spirals becoming tighter, shorter and faster, toward the inevitable end--this was her reality--this was her addition to the game of civilization. This is what her years of life on the planet had added to the equation, and that, ultimately, is my point. It is a large part of human nature to make sense of things--to take stock of the meaning of existence. I have only ever met one human who had the gall to tell me to stop trying to understand the world, let others define history--to let it play out the way that it will and to play the dumb artist. But honestly, I believe that was merely self-serving tosh and I didn't spend those hours as a child sitting in a corner reading every encyclopedic dictionary I could get my hands on--to do that.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it means to be an artist, what it means to be a human being. I spend a lot of time attempting to make sense of this world in which we all live. And I believe we all seek to make sense of things--in essence, to find our own kind of enlightenment. I believe it is human nature. I have spent a great deal of time writing about the mechanics of power, the history of knowledge and the structure of intellectual and artistic revolutions.

_______________________________________________

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

University of Nevada, Reno. "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 Frueh’s first seminal performance art course at the University of Nevada, Reno. At the time I was heavily 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 many 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 Rauschenberg/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—my performance artwork of the time was fairly autobiographical, continues to be and always has been.  But we will get to more of that as I started graduate school and created Putoh and the Soft Cyborg.

 

 

 

 

2.    UCDavis: Katherine Adamenko and the Salons, Soft Cyborg and the invention of pre-Latinx Latinx Putoh, gender troubles. As a child, long before I even knew what art was, I would daydream about my future as I watched my father paint murals in the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement, while multi-media artists expressed what it meant to be Chicano.

 

​As a child of the seventies, in some of my earliest memories, I used to tag along to the Mechicano Art Centers with my father who was part of the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement of that era.  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 the day.

Long hours, days, weeks and months passed quickly as I watched my father paint murals, all the while, daydreaming of a seemingly forever-away distant future. On the weekends, my parents would take us up to La Brea and introduce 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, 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 sisters.

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 stole 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 began as the communication of our ideas—before language took away its function.  All art that has come after Duchamp has been inflected by Duchamp—signed by R. Mutt, so to speak. I would not be an artist without him. I could not be the artist that I am artist 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, a top five art school at the time that taught me critical theory and that changed 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 in the month of October.  

I rode high this way for a time, but I soon became dissatisfied, I wanted more, I wanted above all to explain myself.  I thought internally, unwilling to speak these thoughts 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 as revolutionaries that had to sublimate their own lives in favor of fighting for a corporate identity called race? Ultimately this would lead to the series entitled, “Just Being,” but for the moment it remained a question. Why did none of my friends have to worry about their “backgrounds?”  While I was expected to be obsessed with nothing else?

No one asked 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!  I searched unsuccessfully for proof that my work had a place, but there were no referents, 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 Latino, Hispano-American artists and aside from Gillermo 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, I focused on queer, feminist and gender studies and investigated Matthew Barney's lush, CIS, white male performances.

With these realizations, I decided that I had only one course of action, I decided to make 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.

​

As an undergraduate, I had already chosen personal, mundane, everyday materials, often manipulated into new forms or painted, a collage of sheets, 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 every 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 dares to say 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.

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

GSA Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium.

​Fast forward to 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 influence by several of my feminist classes, especially the work of Donna Haraway and 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 especially the classes on Critical and Linguistic theory and theater courses on Performativity. 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.

​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 Reconciliation 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 DADA--a movement that eschewed language and art as having no true, actual or cohesive meaning--so that it was a programme that 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 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 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 at one of the Salons

​Before and after our literary and performative presentations at the UCDavis Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium there was the “Salons” at Katherine Adamenko's Apartment about four blocks away from the UCDavis campus in a set of very house-like apartments. The Soft Cyborg and the Dada Dialectics were 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 laid 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, which we will talk about a little later, but before that we will talk about another important idea that invested my work of the time—The Soft Cyborg.

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 presidents.

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

 

There were three Salons in total—I think I actually missed out on one of them, or maybe there was one before I joined.  I’m not sure—I guess you’d have to ask Katherine or one of the lucky few who got to perform or watch. As for me, well 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 kitchenspace as she performed some of the earliest “Putoh” performances.    

For me, my entrance into the events began as the “Ghost Host" introduced the very first Soft Cyborg performances at Katherine Adamenko's Salons. The performances were filmed by Scott Hilton as the host came out, myself dressed in a clown mask found at a garage sale, gloves from Goodwill and a medical gown borrowed from a local hospital, laughing a broad, goofy laugh and introduced each performance section, A Big Bear painting a flower, the “Krazy Kat” who loved cereal and the Trix/Tryx Rabbit who failed to make 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 through the mind of the Soft Cyborg.   While the effect, I believe may have been more comedy than horror, this underscored an element that I had not been aware of, but which has been there since the very first of my performances.  This performance also points out that there has always been an underlying tension between the Real and reality in my work that reads as horror. In a similar way, 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 own 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 un-whole--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(but this is just speculation at this point.)

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 I used for the character was 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 have even 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 human-sized teddy bear, who mugged for the camera and elicited many oohs and ahs/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, reached in and pulled out chocolate icing and drew a big flower on the kitchen wall behind him. This act of creation is part of most of my performances and the flower has evolved and changed over and has even become an abstract pattern as in "Teaching a Hare to Tell Time," or become darker and more of a warning as the flower morphed into a painting of a nuclear explosion in "The Magician" segment of "When the Body Speaks” in 2017.

 

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/Tryx/Tricks Rabbit, a big, gray teddy bear, a ghostly clown creature and now we have the Krazy 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 physically a Mickey Mouse stuffed teddy bear bought at the park, which when turned inside out actually ended up looking more like the cat in the performance—something akin to our conceptual opposite of a mouse--possibly.

​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, hecubii, 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. They are immortality machines, hegemony in its furriest of forms.

Xavier Lopez Performance #5C: The Tryx Rabbit. Katherine Adamenko's Salons. 2001.

The Trix, Tricks or Tryx Rabbit continues the adventures of the Soft Cyborg as the ultimate consumer/emcee creature. In this performance, donning the head of a stuffed bunny and wearing a tank top, I proceeded to mix plaster and the fruit-loops from the earlier Krazy Cat performance in a failed attempt at making art.

​As emcees, by selling its animated soul to monopolies and mega-corporations the Soft Cyborg has become larger, longer-lasting, stronger, more powerful than the men that created them. The Soft Cyborg is immortal and can no longer die when its  creator/s die/s. They simply acquire a strange voice, a new stance, realistic shadowing and continue on. The soft Cyborg have become demi-hegemonic, that is, they continue as long as the product they speak for continues to sell. This sell/cell/cellular aspect of the soft cyborg is fascinating and puts our mortal bodies to shame.  In ​Roger Rabbit’s tale, who made those first tentative steps into our world in the thirties, only to find that he missed the comfort of his own world, we can find a system that has begun to invert itself. One in which it is humans who are attempting to enter the world of these cartoon characters, to trade in their flesh and blood for the promise of immortality.  That is the secret of the Soft Cyborg—this has always been about us—about saving ourselves from the artificial construcrs that we have created and which are killing us.

​The Impossibility

As a writer, artist and performance artist of color–I can’t help but think of the idea of the borderland, certainly of the borderland identity—the kind of identity that Guillermo Gomez-Peña invokes in his performances, more likely to read as true to us people of “colors”--as I like to refer to us. We who grew up drinking out of “tasas” and sleeping in the “sala” in front of reruns of Archie Bunker as our mothers would tell us that it is important to know our enemies, and all the while we could only think of how much that duet piano theme song sounded and felt just like home.

We are, of course, in fact, not only made up of borders, we are the borderlands, we grew up without a single, unitary identification, a simply defined identity—and because of this, we did not suffer the great shock and loss of this particular postmodern decentering bugaboo. I am not just speaking of people of color here–rather everyone of this generation--us–is a mixture of cultures, identities, ideologies–the era of essentialized identity is over and it is now time for an infinitude of alliances. What I am saying is that those like me–we exist, write and theorize from a position that has already always been post-modern—post identity, post singularity. We know inherently, what it means to walk among several spaces at the same time; we know what it means to wear many contradictory masks, to speak many accents and languages. We do not recreate a white male desire to reconstitute identity–because it is not--and never was--part of our history. We do not call for society to recreate a space of modernity to lie to ourselves so that we can move on. Instead, we claim a new, shifting, mobile space of many, even antagonistic identities—which we deploy when needed.

Trust me when I say that the future will have to create a new kind of multiculturalism, we will not be manipulated by infantile cries against "cultural appropriation"--and the calls for "cultural purity"–instead we will celebrate diversity, interdisciplinarity and shared, overlapping identities commemorating the differences that come from individual lives lived to the fullest–each of us fostering a multiplicity of entities–individual and shared--with the knowledge that no one is lessened by these differences, creating a system where no one is “othered”–because they have seen through the current ploys to divide us draped in the wolves clothing of a language that we have been speaking for so long that the enemy has learned to use it against us. We are instead, reclaiming something that we have already always known, something that was never a shock to our multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-vocal selves–we all are very different–just as we are all the same and we must celebrate both of these truths.

In the wintry month of November in 2017, 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. On this night, I returned to a hybrid artform that I created alongside the wonderfully Feminist performance artist and Butoh artist Katharine Adamenko, when we were both taking graduate courses at UC Davis. Named “Putoh,” it was 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 But also the Spanish-in this case-Mexican, gutter word Puto. 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.

Flashback to Katherine’s performances, it was the birth of both the Soft Cyborg and of “Putoh” and it was a heady time that stands in direct contrast to the zeitgeist of today where we felt as though we could accomplish anything–where we didn’t feel as though the world was always on the brink.

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. 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.

In her Salons, Adamenko created a safe space for experimentation and for "post-Avant Garde" performance. It was, as they say-- the best of times!  Katherine Adamenko and were  both students at UC Davis and we 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 film-making class.

​We quickly hit it off and invented "Putoh" together. Putoh is an irreverent hybrid of a Punk Chicano aesthetic and philosophy and the far more sedate, methodical and expressive Japanese Butoh.  Celebrating individuality and intersectionality. Invented a year earlier than the Salons 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 and philosophies and which will make more sense as we exit this current age of atavistic essentialism and collective intellectual ethnocentrism.

With both Putoh and the Soft Cyborg, I wanted to show how my practice could be seen to reflect my own ideals and that included point of view deeply influenced by gender studies, queer theory and feminism.  I was surprised to find that when I went to connect my theoretical and performative artistic praxis that incredible and unexpected happened.  My world shifted, my ideas and my ideals became more focused, clearer and sharper than they had been before this. As a poet friend of mine once said, quoting Bukowski’s Women, I believe– I stood stark-ravingly sane. During that  last year at UCDavis I had been reminded just how unimportant coursework, theorization and talk are without hands on, real, effective practice. The series of performances that both Katharine Adamenko and I had undertaken that quarter made it clear to me that I was much more than a student, I am and was an artist, writer and performer—but most importantly, and perhaps patently feminist—I was a practitioner. I realized then as I do now that neither my work, nor my theory is abstracted or cold and calculated, rather, I create and perform my ideals for those around me, not the least of which is a profound belief in the ideals and programs centered around gender studies, queer theory and Feminism.

I had always been proud of the fact that especially feminism has never forgotten the body, the mind and the space that each exists in, a space that as Carol Boyce Davies, bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins (as well as many others,) note is a complex one filled with inconsistencies, possibilities and mistakes. I have also always been proud of the fact that within feminism there has always been the idea that radical thought must be followed by action, as Davies points out when she notes that language is both a political act and one which is marked by the inflections of space and time.

For me this was a perfect blending and overcoming of the supposedly abstract nature of ideas and performance. It is commonly assumed that even the most abstract notions are made available to others in the performance of speech. Speech has come, through the works of Butler and others, to be seen as an inescapable and performative evidence of the body, evidence of thought as an act. For me the two are not separable, we are not Hegelian robots—split and separable from ourselves, this is evident all around us in performance art, in poetry, in lovemaking and life.

It became clear to me, that, in my performances, not in the research or the reconstructing of other’s thoughts and actions, which could be made to inadequately explain what I had been trying to say, that I had been able to find my own voice again. I was excited; lucky even, for having found my own voice and I was loath to give it up again. In performance, especially one performance that I will explain further, I had come to grips with several questions that had haunted me for a long time.

In the performance “Nightmare: Re: construction,” (Later, retitled “The Utter Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Position of the Other.”) I came to some answers and many more questions. Some of these include: what does it mean and why is it of utmost importance, now, for a male to recognize and reconsecrate his connection to feminism? Why do I feel that feminism is the most important critical, theoretic and performative movement undertaken by women and men? These questions had been brewing in my heart and mind for ages but came full-force to the surface over those last three quarters in which I had enrolled in three separate feminist courses, one of which was ironically entitled “Masculinities.” This was a time in which I had re-upped and re-recognized my inherent connections to feminism. I had stated in the past that I did and do not feel alien to the tendencies and practices of feminism. I do not feel as though they are not about me, perhaps this is queer, it certainly seems anti-masculinist, both of which I stand by gladly. It just seems as though my issues, issues of race, identity, gender all began as feminist issues. If one is honest, s/he will note that none of the spaces that we recognize now, none of the voices that we hear now could be recognized without feminism.

One of the most important achievements of feminism has been to open up spaces and allow those that had not been able to speak to hear their own voices and to share their dialogues with others. To speak about the history of silence, the silencing of voices and finally the reclaiming of those voices by taking words and feelings and making them into artwork, something tangible and beautiful stands as a model for me. The ability to speak and to be heard is something which all of us, me as an odd little boy, me as a young Hispanic male, me as a comic book fan and victim of the eighties, me as a melancholy lover of sad poems and British television-owes to feminism; the ability to share with pride even the most unique aspect of myself. Feminism has opened up the queerest spaces and like the speculum that Haraway theorized, it allows us to look inside and see the blossoming complexities within each of us.

THE PERFORMANCE OF GENDER

For me, even then one of the most important group of theorists, those dealing with the expansion of gender and those that have championed the idea that gender is performed was a huge basis for much of my writing and of my performayive work. These authors postulate that gender is created and cultivated and most especially how gender can be used as a space for resistance. Authors like, Haraway, Butler, Wilson and Silverman have further opened masculinity to a set of critiques that are to me of utmost importance. For me Butler’s words were nothing short of revolutionary. They made sense in the very core of my being and they have been used since then to show us a proper set of tools to deconstruct the very notions that have kept us all either quiet, marginalized or both. In my work I use those tools to create subversive spaces, subversive acts and subversive speech. It is, I feel, within these subversive margins that the most powerful forces of creativity and creation are to be found.

Let me look at that last sentence for a moment, I wrote the words “I feel,” and those words are very important, they scream through much of my work which exemplifies the ability to feel your way through a text-as-performance and a performance-as-text, to search for yourself and to find that you were there all along, complex and rich. It has always been in the best performances of others in which I find myself to be incredibly moved, I feel myself in their words, in their actions. I am in there. I exist in the hinterlands of several borders. It is an important realization, the fact that one cannot suppress feelings and be whole, perhaps however whole is the wrong word, for we are in fact a multiplicity of voices and a multiplicity of positionalities.

It is equally important to question the Western Tradition’s handling of emotions, of the irrational; to deconstruct the mind/body split that has been in effect throughout Western history. In performance, in my performances, this split is no longer possible—it is denied. Let me go into this further, perhaps it would be best for me to describe the performance and its genesis within this very class.

NIGHTMARE RE: CONSTRUCTION

The performance was originally titled “Nightmare Re: construction,” and was later changed when it became clear that the performance had chosen its own meaning. The performance "The Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Other;" exemplifies my process. The process began with a theoretical, pro-feminist idea, influenced by Judith Butler and other feminist writers, then moving into a more personal tone centering around everything my mother gave up as a Latina woman. My work is multi-vocal and Latinx, refusing essentialist identity, as Marvin Carlson describes 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.

 

The performance which among other things investigated Karma’s relationship to her mother. This made me think of my own relationship with/to my mother, one that has been inflected by history and biography. While listening to Karma’s words, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to cry, later that week I kept having nightmares, in these dreams I was filled with the feeling of loss, frustration and knowledge that my mother had given up so much to make her life here in the United States. I realized, too that she had given up a great deal to my father and to the three children that came out of her. In the dream, I was in her place, I was made to feel what it might feel to helplessly watch time pass as each of my dreams moved on without me.

Waking, I realized however, that this was not just my mother’s story, but also a story that has been implicit and explicit throughout history. This has been the story of many women, through many ages, who have watched their dreams through their lover’s eyes. I do not want to sound like I felt as though, through the presentation of my phallus that I alone could change that, for I do not believe that this is the case. We are all complicit in this history and none of us can call themselves untainted by it. But through performance, through my body and through my actions—I might be able to feel and make others feel a kind of triumph and perhaps show others how we are not so different, despite genitalia that is not the same.

I knew that I was supposed to have some kind of performance; I had the date, location, everything—thanks to Katharine—who gave up her space so willingly. Now I had an idea. I called my mother and had a long talk about dreams and her childhood, I asked her what she might have wanted to be, what she had wanted to be growing up. At first, she was unable to say, she had locked up that part of herself for a long time, she said, but she did remember wanting to be a singer and that she had always had a wonderful singing voice. There, I had it, that’s what I would do. I would sing for my mom, well not exactly sing–but I could at the very least, lip sync for my momma! I wasn’t aware at the time, just how much of a failure this was destined to become.

The day of the performance, I was ready to transform myself, to shave my legs, my beard, put on a wig, stockings and dress and sing. To sing a torch song, by Marlene Dietrich. At the end, after cutting my legs to shreds with a dull blade, failing to hide the shadow of my beard and at times coming across as a mere transvestite, I realized I had failed in what I sought to accomplish, I did not make others feel the pain of past sexisms—I had shown to myself just how little I understood them, how despite my desire to be a part of her suffering, I could not because it was not my own. I considered this a failure, for a long while, at least until I heard the words of the others who had seen the performance.

Before I go on, I do not believe that the reasons that the performance did not do exactly what I intended are because I believe that there is any inherent difference in the way that women and men think, believe and perceive the world, at least none that are not created by extensive cultural forces–As Harding and Longino suggest. What I do believe is that my emotions, the irrational, desire all got in the way of any clean reading of what I did.

When I spoke to the others, however, I was dumbfounded; definitions of the performance were so varied that few could agree with why I did what I did. What happened instead was that others began to tell me their stories, relating experiences with their mothers, sisters, their own desires to get in contact with the feminine or masculine, some felt that what I did was too much about personal narrative, others felt it was about culture. What I was moved by however, was the desire by so many people to tell me their stories. I wanted to hear them all, and they definitely wanted to share. It was a completely different reaction than the one I had intended, far more sharing, generative and personal—and it was great!

This reminded me of so many of the articles that we had read in that class almost twenty years earlier than 2017 of Torres and the ability to find oneself in our own stories, in your history–or herstory–as it were (interestingly, as I type this into “Word”, of course the word herstory is underlined in red, telling me that it is, not surprisingly, an unrecognized word). A sad realization, but a very important one.

This was a growth period for me, the last three months, in which I realized more fully my dissatisfaction with hegemonic, masculinist modes of thought and my acceptance of other ways of being and seeing. It has given shape and tools to what had been an awkward, undirected dislike of this hegemony. For me, the shape of that tool is ultimately performative—a space in which the rational and the irrational co-exist, in which the body is not denied, but is the main vehicle for expression. Performance Art, to me, at least, is a fundamentally feminist enterprise, because it does not disallow anything, it does not deny anything, but instead is open to all modes of expression and expressability.

I still wince, when I see my soft, fat body on a television screen, when I see myself revealed and naked for others to grade and gauge me in comparison to whatever models of the human body they have in mind. I still wince when I see a misstep in my performance, but perhaps a bit less often, now as I become accustomed to the shape and substance of my message.

Despite all of this, however, I have no intention to put aside the theoretical, even abstract tools of men, even though, like bell hooks, they will be inflected, interrogated by a new set of tools, that are less rational, at times, more rational at others. For it always strikes me just how reflexive the definitions of masculinity truly are in order to maintain the illusion that they are aloof and undefined/undefinable. They bounce back and forth, encompassing as many definitions as possible, for it is difficult to hit a moving target. At the same time, they are more than willing to deal with other groups as though they were simply defined, as irrational, as queer, etc. Masculinity has the privileged location of being all things to all men, the center—but as Yates has said, the center cannot hold.

CONCLUSION

I just got off the phone with Kath, and she reminded me that this is supposed to be a reflexive paper, about ourselves and how we feel, so I am gonna take a moment, here at the end to talk about things and how I feel. I am leaving for a year, going to England and France and well, though I know that this is supposed to be a great adventure, I am sad and really greatly depressed, I have made some incredible friends and I feel certain that I will see very few of them again. I feel as though a part of me is dying and it has really gotten in the way of me writing and I am sorry. It’s not easy having an artist’s temperament, I always feel things too deeply, irrationally. I am sad. But I do know that out of this period I have created some things that will stay and grow, that seems to be the metaphor for me right now, the flower, the plant that grows and becomes—it is a proper metaphor, it is a metaphor that is about life and about change, it has a place and can be uprooted to live in another spot.

This quarter, as I have said, I have reacquainted myself with some of the things that are most important to me—art and performance. Katharine and I have created a new movement—entitled Putóh, as she says, “con accento.” It is like the two of us a type of performance born of the borderlands, between Central and South America, Japan and the United States. Like us too, it comes from the margins and bursts forth with power and enthusiasm—the power and force of two people born on the very same day (both Kath and I were born on May 17).

I know that I may be depressed at the moment, but I also know that I am extremely lucky, the performances that I have done, and will do, the art I make and even the theses that I produce will continue to be influenced by the work of feminists. I forget, now who said that we can’t confuse feminism with the feminine. It is a program that is about much more than gender, much more than birthmarks. It is about life and it is like a flower, growing and changing, beautiful and unafraid, or when it is afraid, it is not afraid to share these fears.

I guess, finally, and I know this paper is coming up short and I apologize for that, in conclusion, what I wanted to say is that performance seems to be a very feminist space, filled with unabashed emotion—the irrationality that has the power to affect all texts, it is a generative thing. I will always take this class with me, the readings and especially the tools—never forgetting that feminism’s most powerful aspect is that it is always about action—it never separates the mind and body—and for that alone it is truly loving.

 

​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-postmodern 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.

 

Even in 2001, blocks away from the UCDavis campus, shaving my legs in front of an audience until they streamed blood in the pro-feminist, anti-gender-essentialist performance: "The Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Other;" it was clear that the seeds were already growing for a genre-breaking, anti-essentialist movement, as Marvin Carlson described it 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, clearly anticipated by artists like Fusco and Gómez-Peña... concern(ed) with developing more inclusive and flexible attitudes toward designations of gender, race, and ethnicity,...Latinx will doubtless be joined in the future by other...terms addressing this major reorientation of the field."

​My name is Xavier Lopez, I am a conceptual, mixed-media, Latinx, performance artist. I received my MFA from the University of California-Davis. Issues of gender, race and identity permeate my work. I am part of a new breed of Latinx artists intent on making our own way as individual artists--as humans navigating the world. This is an important shift that cannot be overstated, a stance of liberation, which in itself is powerful and revolutionary, problematizing racial, masculine and cultural essentialism in an intellectual investigation--we are not post-race and my work is not either.

Through my work, I see myself and other contemporary Latinx artists defining how our art is perceived, accepted and what form it will take in the future. I see Latinx art defined by complexity, criticality and biographical and theoretical strength creating a "Latinoism" based on alliances that owes more of its form to the Queer and Feminist programs that lead the way for identity movements than to an essentialized Latino-ness. 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.

 

Photograph taken during performance of “Nightmare: Re: construction,” (Later, retitled–“The Utter Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Position of the Other.”) (Full Title.) 2001. Katherine Adamenko's Closeted Salon.

​

​"What I am saying is that those like me–that we exist, write perform and theorize from a position that has already always been post-modern—post identity, post singularity. We know, inherently, what it means to walk through several spaces at the same time; we know what it means to wear many contradictory masks, to speak many strange accents and in multiple languages. We do not emulate a white, male desire to reconstitute identity–because it is not part of our history. We do not call for society to attempt to recreate a space of modernity—to lie to ourselves so that we can move on. Instead we claim a new, shifting, mobile space of many, even antagonistic identities—which we deploy when needed. Trust me when I say that the future will engender a new kind of multiculturalism, we will not be manipulated by those that cry “cultural appropriation” in an inauthentic, ignoble attempt to keep us in place–but we will celebrate diversity, interdisciplinarity and shared, overlapping identities and the differences that come from individual lives lived to the fullest–each of us engendering a multiplicity of identities–individual and shared with the knowledge that no one is lessened by celebrating difference–a space in which no one is “othered”–because we have seen through the current ploys to divide us draped in the wolves’ clothing of a language that we have been speaking for too long, one which the enemy has learned to use against us. We are instead, reclaiming something that we have already always known, something that was never a shock to our multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-vocal selves–we all are very different–just as we are all the same and we must celebrate it all–individual Lives Of Color–matter. That is to say that every moment, every dream, every hope and failure of every individual life in color–matters."

​I do suppose if you were told for millennia that your identity was fixed, that history was fixed, that you could drop your life into a construct made up out of generation upon generation of others who looked exactly like you, where civilization was coursing in a predictably positive way, whereupon each generation could applaud itself and ignore the bumps and fissures and massacres of others that did not fit into your cozy, neat narrative, which only included lives that you could pronounce, name and claim –that this loss would be pretty startling. But it is not, cannot be, if you never had those expectations in the first place.

​In the performance-“Nightmare: Re: construction,” (Later, retitled–“The Utter Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Position of the Other.”) I have come to some answers and many more questions. Some of these include: “what does it mean and why is it of utmost importance, now, for a male to recognize and reconsecrate his connection to feminism?” “Why do I feel that feminism is the most important critical, theoretic and performative movement undertaken by women and men?” These questions have been brewing in my heart and mind for ages, but have come full-force to the surface over the last three quarters in which I enrolled in three separate feminist courses, one of which was ironically entitled “Masculinities.” This has been a time for me in which I have re-upped and re-recognized my inherent connections to feminism–especially as a performance artist.

​I have stated in the past, in this class that I do not feel alien to the tendencies and practices of feminism. I do not feel as though they are not about me, perhaps this is queer, it certainly seems anti-masculinist, both of which I stand by gladly. It just seems as though my issues, issues of race, identity, gender all began as feminist issues. If one is honest, s/he will note that none of the spaces that we recognize now, none of the voices that we hear now could be recognized without feminism.

​One of the most important achievements of feminism has been to open up spaces and to allow those that had not been able to speak to hear their own voices and to share their dialogue with others. To a certain extent all of the authors have spoken about the history of silence, the silencing of voices and finally the reclaiming of those voices, certainly Hipple, hooks and others have pointed to the need for as many voices to be heard as possible. Hipple, especially, by taking words and feelings and making them into artwork, something tangible and beautiful stands as a model for me. The ability to speak and to be heard is something which all of us, me as a queer little boy, me as a young Hispanic male, me as a comic book fan and victim of the eighties, me as a melancholy lover of sad poems and British television-owes to feminism; the ability to share with pride even the most unique aspect of myself. Feminism has opened the queerest spaces and like the speculum that Haraway theorizes it allows us to look inside and see the blossoming complexities within each of us.

​Today, I still wince, when I see my soft, fat body on a television screen, when I see myself revealed and naked for others to grade and gauge me in comparison to whatever models of the human body they have in mind. I still wince when I see a misstep in my performance, but perhaps a bit less often, now as I become accustomed to the shape and substance of my message.

​"Now, in the present tense, at least one thing has been seen to be true–the form of a Latinx criticism is shaping up and it will be a far cry from what has come before. It will not be inflected by the crap of “magic realism,” or a masculinist parentage–but it will “come out” from the borders, for it is ultimately a criticism from outside the margins (in all of its myriad meanings: paper, maps, personalities, etc.) it will be a raucous, hearty, alien form of criticism patently outside of any of the historically “coded” binary positions, it will be neither black nor white, but at times it will be both, it will be both male and female–and at times it will be neither, it is queer and straight–though it is more queer and de-centered than many dare to realize–it does, definitely owe a great deal to Fusco and Gomez-Peña’s borderlands, but it is ultimately less essentialist and less interiorizing–it is a forward moving, active and ironic stance that replicates itself endlessly–and it is, ultimately, the future—all of our futures." --Happy Holidays–The Author Goes Back in Time to a Simpler Age and Graduate Paper’s Past! By xavier_lopez_jr on December 17, 2017 at 1:45 AM

​Even in 2001, blocks away from the UCDavis campus, shaving my legs in front of an audience until they streamed blood in the pro-feminist, anti-gender-essentialist performance: "The Impossibility of Truly Understanding the Other;" it was clear that the seeds were already growing for a genre-breaking, anti-essentialist movement, as Marvin Carlson described it 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, clearly anticipated by artists like Fusco and Gómez-Peña... concern(ed) with developing more inclusive and flexible attitudes toward designations of gender, race, and ethnicity,...Latinx will doubtless be joined in the future by other...terms addressing this major reorientation of the field."

 

 

 

3. Return to America. The imperfect body and the difference between performance art and ballet. From Blood Telling to the Diabetic Luchador. Your Blood will betray you. Possible DNA tie-in.

 

In the lifetimes of these artists (artists like Die Antwoord) they have witnessed humans doing the most horrible atrocities--under the guise and cover of society. They know how cheap and meaningless life can be. They understand in a way that we are only beginning to get a glimpse of--just how easily money trumps life. The baby talk they spew is deceptive of the most vile, evil shit that they are trying to warn us about. The simplism of their form is like stand-up comedy. It is like the bright, multicolored blotters that acid used to come on. A pretty, simple wrapping for something that takes away your innocence and imparts knowledge of the shape of the universe and gives you a taste of the darkest and brightest candy-colored parts of your mind. That is why I believe that bands like Die Antwoord are so important--they are the best example of what is created after we as humanity have lost our souls and after we have lost our faith in everything-- and believe me when I tell you that as a collective species--we have very definitely lost our souls and especially our faith. I thought it would have to wait until humanity realized that the universe was approaching its own heat death, for us to realize this--but at least in one way, we are a rather bright collection of animals. But, I will say this. That because we are humans--and because everything we do and say is always deconstructed and creates a universe in which its opposite is true--that this is also eventually about hope. I know this sounds like a contradiction and, in fact, it is--but it is also no less true.

The fact that we as humans need to have things wrapped in shiny, pretty plastic is why I also believe that something like Pop is the most perfect medium for conveying the things that art needs to say in this day and age. It, like the obscene, baby talk rap lyrics--is the perfect form for communicating the nature of the void--using baby talk expletives and candy-coated color-fields to convey their meanings--artists are all blind men and women describing their elephantine view of the universe.

I believe that everything evolves--different things make sense in different eras--in the era of the Pre-Raphaelites (which in itself was a conservative reaction [and you now have groups of artists seeking inspiration from a movement that was already retrospective in its original incarnation]) or the Mannerists, etc. the "Pretty Vacant" was invisible (just as there are forces that are at work now, that we can't see, because the connections are not yet visible)--it was there, but could not be comprehended--but like a monadic kernel it was there all the same waiting to come out as homunculoid whole--and as happens in any system--entropy increases and things that once did--no longer make sense. Today, we are beyond mere narrative; we are beyond mere representation, we are in an era of terrible beauty and pop conceptualism.

We live in an age of unprecedented change--things are dying off every day--not making it into the next era. 8-tracks, Xerox paper, the clicking sound of movie projectors, film-strips, forty-fives. If you see any of these it is only because nostalgic forces are in play. Last night I painted a landscape, it was a very nice landscape. But, I wanted it to be more--I decided that it just didn't have the gravitas that I wanted it to. So I decided to rectify that and I gave it a title that conjured up images of not just an overwhelming "sturm" but also the mightiest "drang" that anyone has ever experienced! In words, on the pulpy matt board of the title card, I threw in allusions to Herakles and Ovid, I forced everyone who read the title card to this supposed metaphorical masterpiece to ponder their own mortality and to question the meaning of not just their own, but everyone's existence. However, despite all of the poesy of my heroic words, despite the finest ink and most expensive acid-free paper, ultimately, what I had created was really just a fucking landscape. A very lovely landscape. But a landscape all the same. We live in an age of unprecedented change and there are definitely nostalgic forces in play.

Of Failed Interviews, Failed Landscapes, Die Antwoord and Nostalgia–We live in an era of terrible beauty and pop conceptualism.

By xavier_lopez_jr on July 1, 2014 at 4:22 AM

 

Flashback 2002, I had just moved to Seattle after living in Europe and teaching English at the University of Johannes Gutenberg—I had recently been separated from my ex-wife and I was looking for work at local art galleries and was consistently being told that either I was perfect, but that there were no positions available or that I was over-qualified—one person from a local museum even told me that if they hired me I’d me trying to get her job. It’s funny how little things change and as I find myself again looking for a job, I find myself reminiscing about a period in which I new must less about art in Seattle than I do now.

One rainy day, I walked into an a 3rd Avenue gallery to introduce myself to the director to see if I could get a job or a show or either—I got neither. But strangely, what I did get was a really good and really honest conversation with someone who will remain anonymous—but whose works have stayed with me to this very day.

Flash forward to this weekend, where I spend most of my time in Vancouver eating amazingly complex concoctions of Chinese tapas-like creations, watching obviously idle-rich, gangsta-rich and son-of rich Vancouverites go past conspicuously consuming everything they could get their fat, ringed fingers on. If you’ve ever been to Vancouver—then you know that in every way Vancouver is a big city—a huge city—in fact. As you walk through its city-streets—you experience the same Gothic sensation that Christians felt sitting in the imposing, towering churches that reminded worshippers daily of their mortality, their insignificance—it kept them praying and consuming.

I had hoped to find an amazingly vibrant art scene, something as big as the city itself—if there is one, I just didn’t find it—strangely, I didn’t even find the Vancouver Art Museum, but found the Vancouver Art Gallery instead. I saw lots of Northwest art, lots First Nation art. What I did not find was a terribly complex or complicated art scene. What I saw was safe, boring and well…just…really safe and boring.

Flash back to that rainy day in 2002 and the words of that local Gallery director. “Xavier,” he turned to me and sighed, “There is one big problem with the Seattle Artworld.” I looked at him with what must have been the dumbest, greenest, least understanding eyes in the planet and squeaked back at him, “What is that?” I returned. “Seattle is provincial. The artists, the galleries, the public—all of it—provincial.” “Do you understand me, Mr. Lopez? Provincial.”

I smiled back at him—no, I didn’t understand, how could I? I just got here. I didn’t know anybody. Seattle was alien to me—strange and unknown and I was just starting to make sense of it. All I knew was that I would be leaving there without a job and only a vague promise of the possibility of a future show. But those words—they stuck with me. As I get to know the Seattle Art World more and more—they still stick with me.

 

Xavier Lopez Performance #7: Tales of the Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard.

​After several years, after having lived in Europe, after having been married and gone to graduate school, I was single and ready to return to doing performance art, this time in Seattle, WA. After a devastating divorce that had left me demolished; I took a year off from everything and had just begun showing work again, especially sculpture and painting. At this time, as well, I began to write for the local online newspaper, the Post Intelligencer and became fast friends with local artist Ryan "Henry" Ward and a particular band of Street Artists. The "Soft Cyborg" had moved into the world of sculpture, including ghost sculptures and moving, flexible, latex sculptures.

​Soft Cyborg: Ghost Story: A mixed media audio/visual sculpture including the video Soft Cyborg: Brothers, which was played below the ghost forcing the viewer to look under the skirted folds of the ghost's sheet.

​Video of Soft Cyborg: Brothers from underneath the Ghost sheets.

​This is the video projection part of an installation I did at the Faire Gallery Cafe in Seattle Washington as part of the Soft Cyborg series.

​

During my time at the University of California, Davis, I had been working with latex and plaster making large sculptures with them.

​It was a logical next step for latex to find its way into the performance.

​The actual performance took place at the Anne Bonney, an antique shop that was next door to the Faire Gallery and Cafe, at which I often showed art. The Spaniard, the creature/protagonist/antagonist in this performance was very loosely based on the infamous shaving scene from the Melville tale, "Benito Cereno." More for the feeling than in any concrete way. but also possibly in the way that the scene depicts the consummate definition of an unreliable narrator.

​In fact, this entire performance is about telling stories, whether real or imagined, truth or lies. The performance begins with the Spaniard either speaking through or speaking to a stuffed monkey and ends with the Spaniard wearing a sailor's cap playing records telling war stories and painting pictures.

 

Cacophony Anodyne has so far been performed twice, once at the Greenwood Collective, where it had its inaugural performance in, I believe 2015 and later in August of 2016 as part of the opening performance at On the Edge: (First) Latinx Performance Festival. The idea behind this performance began from a simple drawing and was called either Easy Listening or Uneasy Listening--but later evolved in Cacophony Anodyne, for some reason, I'm not sure. The idea was simple--I had always wanted to fill a room with sound--a cacophony made out of something completely innocuous, something pretty and banal turned into something loud and raucous--even overwhelming, like when a band prepares for a concert.

​Another sound piece, this time sculptural was titled "Antigone and Creon: Angels and Beasts" and dealt with the impossibility of communication and how when the truth is spoken sometimes it is impossible for humans to understand as it is spoken in the language of angels and animals.

 

 

​

4. On the Edge: The Latinx Performance Art Festival. Returning to Putoh.

 

In 2016, I, alongside La Sala/La Cocina, with organizational assistance from Lauren Davis, created "On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art," the first all-Latinx performance art festival in Seattle. We came to understand how profoundly new this concept was-worldwide, when Marvin Carlson named our event in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction" becoming part of university curricula across the globe. We are working toward creating the second biennial event in 2021--moved forward due to the current pandemic.

​“La Cocina” was a series of summer events using the notion of ‘cooking’ as a creative metaphor for the development of new artistic work. Headlined by a month-long pop-up salon in Pioneer Square’s new “Good Arts” building, a cohort of curators (a multi-disciplinary group of professional Latino arts leaders and artists in visual, dance, theatrical, music, and literary arts) programmed each week with events and exhibitions mixing ‘ingredients’ from the diversity of Latino/a/x history and cultures. Coinciding with the Seattle Art Fair for visibility, the new visual and performing works created for “La Cocina” blended technology with heritage, as well as local and international flavors of ‘Latino Futurism’ and performance art to audiences and participants.

​The first On the Edge Festival was a one-night event, small but expansive, dedicated to serving Seattle and the Seattle Latinx community, giving voice to local Latinx Artists presenting work that is rarely seen in our communities.

​Xavier Lopez is a contemporary, Latinx/o 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." 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, I was asked to program an evening of performance art for La Sala Latinx Artists Network’s ‘La Cocina’ in Pioneer Square, which exceeded all our hopes."

​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.

​"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. Academic Marvin Carlson wrote in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction,” “There is a growing body of...artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by...Xavier Lopez...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...addressing this major reorientation of the field." --original wording about our event, which was later updated to include the creation of Putoh.

​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. 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.

​Vicente Montanez at the first Latinx Performance from On The Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival: This image spotlights Vicente Montanez performance from our first festival in 2016. The evening of August 5, 2016. On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art featured experimental performance art by contemporary Latino/a/x artists, featuring Xavier Lopez, Jr. and Vicente Montanez and coincided with the 2016 Seattle Art Fair and was part of the programming for the exhibit La Sala presents La Cocina.

​"On the Edge" is aptly named as it is all about the cutting edge, it 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, through performance, through our work, I and other contemporary Latinx artists are defining a term that is defined by complexity, criticality and biographical and theoretical strength creating a "Latinoism" based on alliances that owes more of its form to the Queer and Feminist programs that lead the way for identity movements than to an essentialized Latino-ness. This festival seeks 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" seeks to be a leading voice in this change.

​Hi, my name is Xavier Lopez--MFA graduate 1998-2001. I am pleased to be able to share some important news about my art/performance art career with you, specifically concerning the update for the final wording on the 3rd Edition of Marvin Carlson's Routledge Press publication: Performance: A Critical Introduction. The latest edition includes a paragraph mention of my performance artwork done in Seattle with a group called La Sala-- specifically, concerning putting on the very first Latinx Performance Art Festival in 2016 (On The Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival) and also mentions work that was done while I was a student in your MFA program.

This is the final wording for the book until then, straight from the pen of Marvin Carlson "...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."

Originally, the third edition had confused me and my work with that of a famous comedian and I am super-chuffed to see this correction, which will be included with all of the newest printings--they no longer have to create an entirely new edition for these things. In this update, I am also super-excited that Mr. Carlson has added the work that I have done and continue to do with Katherine Adamenko, specifically "Putoh," which "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."

​I am looking forward to seeing just what future forward motion this may lead to and I wanted to share this with my Alma Mater and I hope that you will join me on this amazing adventure!

 

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. Academic performance historian Marvin Carlson wrote in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction,” “There is a growing body of...artists who specifically identify themselves as Latinx, headed by...Xavier Lopez...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...addressing this major reorientation of the field."

​This is the final wording for the book until then, straight from the pen of Marvin Carlson "...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."

​As a child, before I even knew what art was, I would watch my father paint murals as part of the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement, where I would tag along to the Mechicano Art Center on Whittier Blvd mentally devouring the exciting scenes of Latino artists expressing what it meant to be Chicano back then! Days passed as I watched my father paint his expressionist, politically charged murals, day-dreaming of my own future. Every month my parents would take us to the LA Museums and galleries, where we would see Warhol's “Brillo Boxes,” conceptual sculptures and the films of Joseph Beuys and Gilbert and George.

​Later, in college, at the University of Nevada Reno and UCDavis, my mind was blown away by the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Dadas, who influenced my now, mixed media performances.

​It was also during this time that I began to perceived an unspoken difference between how my heroes made art and how I--as a young Latino artist--was expected to.

​Let me tell you a story. As a young artist, I searched everywhere for successful Chicano artists for a sense that my work had a place. When Duchamp or Beuys made their work it was about lives, their ideas, it reflected their view of the world. No one asked Marcel Duchamp to make work solely about his heritage—and he did not have to make artwork for the annual Halloween exhibition. I desperately wanted to make art that had meaning beyond other's expectations—art that reflected my own life and how I saw things? But I had no models, no history to fall back on. Because of this I did the only thing that I could, I decided that I would have to be my own model.

​Ultimately, At UCDavis, critical theory, personal history and personal artifacts began to infuse themselves into my work opening it up to incorporate queer, feminist and other identity discourses. I created two theoretical treatises, "The Soft Cyborg," a variation on Haraway's "Cyborg" and "Putoh"--melding Japanese Butoh and Latino identity performance. In 2016, I co-curated "On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival" the first all-Latinx performance art festival--apparently--ever. I did this with Lauren Davis, La Sala Collective member and Assistant Director at Art Exchange Gallery. This led to me becoming part of university curricula across the globe when Marvin Carlson mentioned our event in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction."

​Today, Issues of gender, race and identity permeate my work and it is through performance that 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. As a conceptual artist, I am confronted with the sense that "Conceptual Art" is often considered to be an elitist, hegemonic realm. It has become visibly and conceptually associated with purity, intellectualism, masculinity and hegemony. As a Latino Artist who works with many materials that have been pared down to their core elements, minimalized and purified so to speak--creating fiercely personal narratives--I have been forced to deal with oversimplified views of who can make what and what art can be made.

​I am part of a new breed 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, everyday materials, a collage of sheets, candy, fake flowers, 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 pushes the boundaries of 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.

​Perhaps the greatest engine that keeps me going is my over-developed desire to correct social injustices and my love for constant creation. Building community has always been one of my primary concerns; I have taught courses at UC Davis, UNR, Europe and art classes here in Seattle. I understand firsthand, the power of art to change a person and give their lives new meaning. Beginning at UNR, I have been in many art exhibitions, community events, auctions and live painting activities. In the last five years, I have been part of 8 teaching and artistic workshops with the Seattle Art Museum. In 2016, I was asked to put my dreams into action by programming an evening of performance art for La Sala Latinx Artists Network’s ‘La Cocina’ in Pioneer Square. This collaborative project entitled "On The Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival," was the first all Latinx night of performance art. Up to that point, apparently, there had never been an all Latinx night of performance art in the Pacific Northwest. I had been wanting to get back into that part of my oeuvre. Not performances--that happens all the time--performance art--in all of its difficult to classify, irreverent, problematic, transient, impossible to document glory. In less than a month, we put everything together from scratch. I worked very closely with Lauren Davis of ArtXchange Gallery and Miguel Guillén as well as the rest of the folks at La Sala and La Cocina and the other performers. The night itself was not just historic; it was an amazing success! This magical event exceeded all our hopes. The first On the Edge Festival was a one-night event, small but expansive, dedicated to serving Seattle and the Seattle Latinx community, giving voice to local Latinx Artists presenting work that is rarely seen in our communities. What we created with On the Edge is a sense of freedom and inclusion that I have always searched for in my journey as a performer exploring themes of Latino/x identity, gender and class privilege. We had a very nice crowd 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 Latina/o/x, and is 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 as we live at a time in which definitions of race, masculinity, gender and art are in flux.

 

In 2016, there were only a handful of us, each of us taking the stage one after the other. From spoken word poetry and more traditionally Latino performance. I was the last one that hot, August night and as a cacophony of layers and layers of looped recordings of the tune "Theme From A Summer Place" played while I, dressed as a ghost handed out flowers into the audience, later I painted in chocolate and strawberry syrup, and 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. We had no idea that this was the first all-Latinx performance art festival--in all of its difficult to classify, irreverent, problematic, transient glory. The night itself was wonderful; then we became part of university curricula across the globe when Marvin Carlson claimed us in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction."

​The first performance of the night began with me placing multiple "boom boxes" out throughout the room all playing the same track in a kind of staggered "row row row your boat” sort of way. Then I came out as a ghost and handed flowers to the audience.

​For the last twenty years I have been working with Sheet Ghost installations, performances and sculpture. Beginning first with my performance art in 1993, wherein I first used the "sheet ghost" in a significant way--I have found the ghost to be an amazingly expressive means of dealing with many issues ranging from the extremely personal to themes of isolation and even more abstract ideas as was the case in the most recent installation I did for the Seattle Office Arts & Culture's "Dialogues in Art" series, wherein I dealt with issues of homelessness. In Hope/Home, the first installation with multiple figures, the sheet ghosts became stand-ins for my family as we dealt with a period of homelessness that we experienced when I was still very young. Over the course of several installations I have seen my process become increasingly narrative and more and more theatrical.

 

​Xavier Lopez Performance #11B: On The Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival --Teaching A Hare to Tell Time. 2016

​"Dream of the Soft Cyborg (Performance Art) : "Explaining the world to a Hare," Pioneer Square, Seattle, WA . La Cocina. Rumor has it that this was the first night of all Latinx non-solo Performance Art in Seattle history--but who knows for certain. 2016.

​This performance, like the earlier Spaniard performance at Anne Bonney in Seattle and a lost performance that I did at UCDavis 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.

​If I was somehow given the opportunity, I would love to work on a performance with Joseph Beuys--of all the 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--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!

​As a child, before I even knew what art was, I would watch my father paint murals in the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement as I would tag along to the Mechicano Art Center on Whittier Blvd mentally devouring the exciting scenes of Latino artists expressing what it meant to be Chicano back then! Days passed as I watched my father paint his expressionist, politically charged murals, day-dreaming of my own future. Every month my parents would take us to the LA Museums and galleries, where we saw Warhol's “Brillo Boxes,” conceptual sculptures and the films of Joseph Beuys and Gilbert and George. Later, in college, at the University of Nevada Reno and UC Davis, my mind would be blown by the work of Marcel Duchamp and Dada, who influenced my now, mixed media performances.

 

​Xavier Lopez Performance #11C: On The Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival - Polymorfy "Super, Sugar Bear #2"

​"Dream of the Soft Cyborg (Performance Art) : Polymorfy: "Super, Sugar Bear (Performance,)" Pioneer Square, Seattle, WA. La Cocina. 2016.

Flashback:

The year is 1999 or was it 2000? Yeah, I think it was the millennium and I was in the last 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, Southern Californian sun. I was standing in front of the Art History class that I was "T.A.'ing" for Dr. Dianne Sachko Macleod; who was my advisor until I switched over from an emphasis in Victorian Studies to an emphasis on contemporary art and gender issues. I have been very lucky over the years to have studied with some of the most amazing and accomplished professors female and otherwise--and Dr. Macleod was no exception. She was always a remarkably badass professor and hard as nails. Her classes almost kicked my ass, but on many occasions she left me full of new insights and changed my view of the world, the structure of scientific revolutions, the archeology of knowledge and the dialectic of history!

In the background, a jet flew overhead. At some point, in every college class that I have ever taught, especially the ones where I felt a real connection to the students, I have tried to take one day to just communicate with them, to get a feeling for the world that they live in--a sense of how they view their lives. Add to that a love of Socratic Method and Platonic ideals and of course that meant that I had to teach a class beneath the eucalyptus trees just outside the UC Davis Art Department.

It was the last day of regular classes. The next one would be test preparation and then we would meet for finals, which I would then have to grade. In many ways I actually knew these students better than the professor did--but that was the nature of the University experience. We were the grunts, but because we cared so much about what we were doing, they kept piling more and more duties upon us. If you've ever seen Project Runway--imagine that times a hundred and you've still got no idea what grad school is like.

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' own 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 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.

Flashback further:

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. This fascination seemed like utter bliss to a young child, but, 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.

Think of cereal commercials with their animated emcees, those spokes-chickens, muscle-bound Tigers and Sugar-bears. Think of the Trix Rabbit, who is named after the product of his affection—one that according to the logic of his mythos, he can never attain, because when he does, if he is not stopped by the children around him--he goes insane. This is true also about Sonny, the Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs Crow, who wants nothing more than to be one with his General Mills cereal. But what drives these characters to be such all-consuming need machines?

It is interesting that one of the ways to see the evolution of our society is as one of an increasing alienation of mankind from the baser needs of the human as animal. This is evident in our language, in our supermarkets and oddly, it is evident in our media. Recently, I have had the pleasure of rediscovering another program of my childhood--the old "Our Gang" comedies--also known as the Little Rascals. In these comedies, aside from the casual racism of the age which is horrible and seeps into these epic, little stories--children of various ethnicities hang out together and have amazing adventures. But something else interesting occurs here--these children, the main protagonists-- are very poor, poor in the way that we simply do not see presented anywhere today, but they are proud, smart and damned clever. And there are several episodes that center around these children attempting to find--or rather, steal food.

Now this is something that we simply do not see anymore--it is not part of how we allow ourselves to be represented. Starving children, children fighting for their existence is simply not considered funny. In fact, there are very few instances in the popular media in which the food chain is ever dealt with--excepting two very notable areas. Firstly, television commercials--of course, deal with food and feeding in very abstract ways--but still, it is a component of many of their one-minute narratives. Secondly, however, many of the narratives of cartoons continue to deal with the intricacies of the food chain, animal against animal, hunter and hunted, cat and mouse, vulture and rabbit, wolf and roadrunner all with the frustrated intention of feeding (something, which I am just now realizing could be made to connect to the frustration machine that Marcel Duchamp created with his large glass. I will have to come back to this. 2020.) These dramas continue to this very day in new Warner Brothers Cartoons, Ren and Stimpy and even on the Simpsons with the Itchy and Scratchy Show.

It is with these cartoon characters that we have allowed a kind of Lacanian imaginary space to grow--one in which we safely and with a distance allow our baser needs to be represented. The need to feed, which includes the need to kill, which includes countless chicken-beaks, and which is not pretty, clever, comforting or kind--as Morrissey said ages ago--"it is the unholy stench of murder." However, again, we see a kind of sublimation--a fetishization which occurs and allows us to distance ourselves from the baseness of these dark, animalistic desires and which makes them palatable, which in turn allows us to deal with even deeper issues than mere feeding--issues of addiction and even of desire--again, from the safe distance of sublimation into the alien/alienation.

In fact because the text is opened to us by way of the distance that is allowed us through alienation and fetishization--it actually becomes easier to see why these cartoon spokes-creatures love these products so much—they are in fact addicted to them. Desire and addiction fuel these narratives. Cocoa Puffs and Trix are the drugs that they seek. They wrap their existences around these products; they promote them and thus they become part of each other. This is evident when we look closer at characters like Toucan Sam, and Sonny, the emcee for General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs, who are even the same color as the product that they promote. It is a part of their cellular makeup and especially Sonny seeks to return himself to his originary place of utter bliss, one in which he and cocoa puffs can become one.

If we imagine that Sonny is real, for a moment, we will discover that this is actually a very easy thing to do. In fact, if we look very closely at these commercials we will see that we have always been asked to imagine that they are indeed real beings--these cartoon emcees. These characters are seen to exist in a world that is very much like our own. Like Roger Rabbit, they interact freely with the humans they encounter. There is no barrier between the children and mothers in these commercials that the Trix Rabbit, for instance, must contend with.

And like Roger Rabbit, these commercial emcees, too, seem to exist via a set of defining rules, their existences calculated to make others happy, like Roger, they are also incapable of passing up the punch-line to a joke and they seem to exist as slaves to our, and especially their, own passions. Sonny, Toucan Sam and the Trix Rabbit may be cartoons, soft and furry and made of painted cells like Roger, but they are something more--they live in and effect our world.

This is an odd assertion to make about characters that are, in fact creations of corporate men and women—whose sole agenda is to sell a product. But if one looks around, she will see that these hybrid creatures are in fact everywhere, from Mickey Mouse, The Michelin Man, the Jolly Green Giant, talking and singing dogs on TV and at X-mas™, even Snuggles the living teddy-bear—we must admit that we are surrounded by these grotesqueries and I will make many more assertions before I am through.

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 grottoes 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, hecubii, 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 confabulations and 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, ad-monsters and film-stars.[1] But there is something more here, something that gives these beasties, 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.

Let's think for a moment about how stories and texts are subverted, often despite their original intentions and are opened up to new interpretations. Within Fantasyland attractions, for instance, little attention is given to the original, “authorized” narratives of the books and movies. Especially in rides like Alice or Pinocchio the narratives break down and are overturned, becoming new ride narratives. Because of this, often there is little chance for the rider to make sense of these rides in a traditional sense. At times, characters appear and disappear for no good reason, and events occur out of order. In Alice, for example, the White Rabbit appears at times when he is meant to be missing. The Queen of Hearts screams at riders unprovoked and the Madhatter’s Tea Party occurs at the end of the tale.

Pinocchio is one ride that especially contests the traditional narratives found in the Pinocchio book, film and the moralities of the park in favor of an amoral ambivalence. The savage interior of Pinocchio’s Daring Adventure is one of the many places in which Disneyland logic breaks down, and a cautionary tale transforms into a celebration of the vulgar and low. This “daring adventure” is a breakneck of Carnivalesque imagery, ultimately turning Disney’s own messages against him.

Several biographers have noted that Disney was very much in favor of the wild, adventurous, seeking, experimenting (male) child.[1] Film characters like Peter Pan, the Lost Boys, Pecos Bill, and even Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio, are to some extent--examples of this. But, if Disney in the movies questions the world of adulthood and its breaking of the child’s will through rules and procedure, in Disneyland he gives almost completely into the propriety of civilized mannered society. Pinocchio’s Daring Journey was originally meant (like Mr. Toad) to be an admonishment to children against the dangers of breaking the rules of society. This, however is not what occurs in the ride.

Throughout the ride, walls are painted with scenes of Pinocchio’s temptation. Disney is meticulous in showing the threat and punishment of desire. From the start, however, Disney’s intentions are thwarted. Riders begin at the gates to the puppet theatre, already mise-en-scene. Pinocchio is shown dancing on strings, already entrapped because he has succumbed to the temptations of sublimated sexual desire and the greed of fame. He has chosen an “actor’s life” (literally, he has chosen to be an actor,) to take active control of his life and environment, and is no longer the passive puppet that F.C. Sayers accuses Disney guests of becoming.

Like the civilized admonishment and implied threats throughout the park, this daring journey was also meant to be about the control of base emotions and the unregulated id (the child in us all.) In the adventure though, Pinocchio’s conscience, (Jiminy Cricket) is always shown attempting to catch up and only ever reaches the puppet at the end of the ride--when he has safely returned home. In this telling, Pinocchio never has to deal directly with his conscience.

Interestingly, this ride contains a Disney representation of a carnival. However, unlike the Bakhtin carnival, riders are not meant to enjoy the ironically named “Pleasure Island.” Very quickly, any implied pleasure turns into menace. This is a manic, malicious carnival that hurls riders through at a breakneck pace while a loud calliope organ plays atonally, in the background. As guests pass through a debaucherous orgy of smoking, gambling and sex, they are unnerved by the distant braying of donkeys--the threat of Pinocchio’s eventual transformation into beast. This is the ultimate fear of coupling with our own animal natures. To add to the threat, against the last wall before Pinocchio’s transformation can be seen a jumbled sexualized creature--a mixture of moving human and animal figures.

Once Pinocchio has finally and utterly succumbed to all sorts of debauchery and has become a jackass, he is almost immediately swallowed by “Monstro the whale.” The next scene immediately shows the “good fairy” returning Pinocchio home safely. Where Geppetto greets him with the words, “I’m so happy.” But something is amiss and the traditional story has been radically changed. Pinocchio has not renounced the ways of debauchery and sin. Within the ride, we do not see a moment in which the puppet has a change of heart. Any misgivings must be extrapolated from sources outside the ride—outside of this text. Instead, here Pinocchio has to be saved only when events would surely have destroyed him. This Pinocchio has unremorsefully enjoyed all that the carnival has to offer, and (just barely) survived. To further show the lack of his awareness, in the final scene of the ride--Pinocchio has not become a boy. He has chosen to stay in this imperfect state. The traditional Happy Ending has been thwarted. Here, the attraction itself has “overturned” the Disney’s narrative in favor of a new ambivalent one. Despite all of their scriptwriting, Imagineers have been incapable of controlling their own text.

Further thwarting any simple understanding of the assumed texts, as emcees, by selling their animated souls to monopolies and mega-corporations they have become larger, longer-lasting, stronger, more powerful than the men that have created them. They no longer die, when their creators die. They simply acquire a strange new voice, a new stance, chiaroscuro shadowing and continue on. They have become demi-hegemonic, that is, they continue as long as the product they speak for continues to sell. This sell/cell/cellular aspect of the soft-cyborg is fascinating and puts our mere mortal bodies to shame.

In opposition to Roger Rabbit, who according to his own mythology, made those first tentative steps into our world in the thirties, only to find that he missed the comfort of his own world, we can find a system that has begun to inverse itself. One in which it is humans who are attempting to enter the world of these cartoon characters, to trade in their flesh and blood for the promise of animated immortality.

What, then, exactly is the allure of the Soft Cyborg--what is the carrot that is dangled before us in order to make us even want to become soft in the first place? What desire can possibly be fulfilled by us becoming a cross between human and cartoon character? What do we gain from becoming soft? What happens when flesh becomes furry? What is the value of pliant flesh? Pliant, suppliant metal against flesh?

Let's start at a point that is more manageable and which seeks to be more descriptive. Going back to when I was a graduate student at UC Davis working on my second thesis paper, I read a few German magazines speaking of the birth of a new kind of Mannerism, pretty much going as far back as Matthew Barney's Cremaster series. For the sake of any easy to work with definition we will consider "Mannerism" to be a period that is a break of sorts from the traditional styles of a time, a break from the classical, but also a continuation of it and a growth from it, generating work that tends to be more stylistic and individual than it is about replicating the accepted rules of what is considered classic, rote, etc.. It is then, a kind of collecting, internalizing and understanding of the rules, elements and tropes of a previous period and taking that knowledge to play with these tropes.--In essence, a mannerist period is one in which artists take and make the tropes, styles, tricks, aesthetics, philosophies, limitations etc. and bend them to their will, making them their own. Essentially, it is play after the rules have been set and understood.

Let us look at what I will call the ill-mannered mannerists--because their desire was to remake the rules, remake art in their own image. Back when I was a child, the first exhibition I ever saw was an installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was an exhibition of mannerism in which all of the paintings were of women and men with the most translucent, white skin and the longest of all possible long necks. It was a group show, involving several mannerist artists and included paintings and sculpture of the period.. The artists had reworked anatomy to the point that it no longer had anything to do with reality--think of Ingres and his reclining nude with the extra bones in her back and really take that many steps further. When I first saw these paintings and sculptures, I thought that perhaps this meant there was another race of creatures on our planet, all of them with longer necks and perfect skin. I took these paintings at face value and I asked my mother if they were, in fact, aliens. She just smiled and said that that was the style of the time. I was about six--what did I know about style, history, anatomy or art.

My second point here is not merely aesthetic, but critical and theoretical--and more-so, it is actual. Going back to the story that I opened this dialectic with, the story of my students who could not describe what was happening to them.

The students, who had earlier become speechless, were alienated from their own place in history, waiting for something to change everything--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 did come in 2001, on my mother's birthday in September and it came 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.

This last part being one wherein there was an intrinsic desire to return to the roots of the modern and to regain the abstract and abstruse ideals of the early modern philosophers and through this conservative return to the roots of modernity to again deny any real, critical, theoretical or physical access/ability to and of the subaltern--and by extension all of us. For that was the secret of the subaltern; that, in the eyes of the institution, if you are not hegemonic, you simply have no meaning,- no reason, and you are speechless.

WE ARE TWINKIES

We are Twinkies in that we are ingesting, and here I am talking about a real scientific evolution—us becoming addicted at a cellular level to the products of our desire.

The value of course 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 cyborg bodies and hard-edged hegemonic minds.

If we are to survive, we must become like Roger Rabbit, we must become like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, our flesh must be 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.

We must be soft, but strong in order to get and be the good stuff. But what is this cool stuff, is it the desire to run fast, to be stronger, more agile than men, to live forever like advertisement emcees and cartoon characters? Perhaps the truth is ultimately less romantic and much more insidious. Perhaps the truth is one that we might actually prefer to keep hidden and mysterious, perhaps we would be better off to avert or even close our eyes to the answer, or answers. Perhaps, however, what I have spoken of is in fact a survival skill, perhaps our soft-cyborg skin, mutable and fluid like the skin of a cartoon, our addiction and slavery to our own creamy centers is what it takes to live in a world where we are mere mortals, slaves to forces that are much more powerful than we can ever hope to be, perhaps there is a silver-lining in a dialectic that places the human in a world in which large monopolies and lying presidents care more about money than the individuals that they are mutating into the soft-cyborg.

​Our bodies like Twinkies, Furries,

​We are soft cyborg—we eat, drink and even sleep for the machine etc.

​This is evolution. Period.

 

Xavier Lopez Performance #12: "Seance" at John Cage Musicircus. 2016.

​After On the Edge: Latinx Performance Art Festival, I became part of (the wonderful and personal high-point) the John Cage celebration that was put together to celebrate the work of John Cage.

​John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.

​In 2016, I was asked to take part in the John Cage Musicircus, a mixed-media performance festival held at Seattle's prestigious Town Hall. What follows is a mixed-media performance piece that I created for the event, perhaps one of strangest pieces I have created so far. Broken up into two pieces, this is the abstracted ghost piece.

​"Seance (Performance.) The John Cage Musicircus. Seattle, WA. 2016. 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." All sounds created by Xavier Lopez and the environment within the Town Hall John Cage Musiccircus Event. Many thanks to the folks who put on the event, especially Melanie Voytovich. Performed November 19th, 2016.

 

DOMESDAY BOOK

_________________

​"But the shrill shriek of doomsday and the threat of absolute destruction has been going on for the last forty years at least–and still we remain–forever at the brink of destruction. At some point art, philosophy, architecture, poetry, critical theory and yes, even politics has to stop looking back–has to decide that even if we are as they say–at the end of things (how many times have we read that art is dead, painting is dead, etc. and etc. and so on!)–even if the world is truly falling apart, even if the world economy is on the brink, even if civilization really is on the verge of collapse–we must stop making excuses and take a stand, now.

​We must realize that civilization is not going to go away this very minute, that society is not going to fall apart today and that the threat of our dissolution has been held over our heads for far too long. It is time for us to look forward and to begin a new kind of Renaissance–to shift our viewpoint and quit looking backward to what has been created in the past and to create our very own, brand-spanking new renaissance for a new age!

​Art at its very heart is hope–it fights for what it believes in and is an expression of humanity’s greatest desires, fears and aspirations. If we are, in fact going to be able to see our ways out of this era–if we are going to move out to the stars and preserve this planet’s ability to contain us–it will be artists who will have to envision these possibilities.

​Just as we were the ones who gave humans the first images of heaven and hell–just as we created angels and aliens and all manners of monsters that no human eye has ever seen–so will the tribes of poets, painters, sculptors, modelers, filmmakers, writers–creators all–so will they show us the way out of these turbulent times into the next great Renaissances of human development. So, let’s do it now! Change those chips that hold each of us back, fake it ’til we make it and start a brand new day and a brand-effing-new Renaissance!

​___________________________________________

​A New Renaissance–We’ll Have to Invent One–A New Renaissance For A New Age.

By xavier_lopez_jr on March 10, 2015 at 3:01 PM

 

The term subaltern is originally a military term, which identifies and describes the man, the woman, and the social group who is socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial mother country.

​In describing “history told from below”, the term subaltern derived from the cultural hegemonic work of Antonio Gramsci, who identified the social groups who are rendered speechless and invisible as they are excluded from society’s established structures for political representation, the means by which people have a voice in society.

​As I intimated earlier, in the last period of post-modernity, mostly western, white, male, conservative theorists sought to uproot all the work that had been done by theoretical movements such as feminism, queer theory, Chicano studies, as well as those of any antiestablishment movements, etc. Basically, these critics sought to overturn all identity theory with the exception of the inept, simplistic and acritical masculinist programs.) Essentially they sought to shift the argument just as these “othered” groups were finding their voices.

​Theory was now claiming that there was never any actual voice to be heard, no argument to be made nor tools to be used that could make any difference against those institutions that had achieved hegemonic status in the first place. In fact, Post Modernity at this stage began to metastasize and turn on its hosts (treating all identity criticisms as viruses to be done away with) seeking the dematerialization of identity politics, positionality and especially any form of meaningful protest--attempting to force these groups to fight for supposedly limited resources, to view freedom as a zero sum game and to engender as much in-fighting as possible. Something these groups took to like bees to honey.

________________________________________________________

​The Subaltern Has Teeth! A meditation on art, oppression, life, and post-modern modernity

Enzyme Magazine. 2016.

 

Xavier Lopez Jr. is candid about his experience with homelessness. He’s been homeless three times and that part of his life isn’t far from his recollection or artwork.

The first time he was only 10 years old. He recalled leaving his childhood home in Montclair, California, with vivid accuracy. His parents and two siblings took what they could and left the rest behind. Lopez was resolute in not parting with his beloved G.I. Joes.

“I grabbed all of my action figures and stuffed them into two boxes, put them in my lap,” Lopez said. “I was not going to let them go, even though I let everything else go. Our Star Wars sheets, basically everything. Everything that mattered to me at the age of 10.”

The contemporary mixed-media artist still has those action figures and used them in a prior art installation.

Lopez is one of four artists addressing homelessness in the space at Fifth Avenue and Columbia Street. It’s part of the “Dialogues in Art: Exhibitions on Homelessness” series created by the city of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Communications Manager Erika Lindsay said a panel selected Lopez because of his personal experience with homelessness.

Last year’s “Dialogues in Art” theme was ending racial injustice. Lindsay said this year they chose homelessness because Seattle is experiencing dramatic affordability issues.

“So many people are struggling to stay in their homes or have been homeless. The city hired a director of homelessness to work on the issues related to it,” Lindsay said. “The purpose of ‘Dialogues in Art’ is to be able to have a conversation around large systemic and structural issues through artists’ voices. The homeless crisis is something we wanted to have this conversation with artists about.”

Lopez and his family were homeless for about two months. They lived in their car for much of that time traveling from church to church looking for help. They weren’t always met with mercy and grace; Lopez explained some churches turned them away.

Initially, Lopez said, it felt like camping and it was somewhat exciting.

Xavier Lopez Jr. stands near the installation he calls “Hope/Home.” Photo by Jon Williams

“At first it was like, ‘Oh well, at least we’re all together and we’re in this. It won’t get so bad because we’re family.’ And there were times that were quite scary ultimately,” Lopez said. “We stayed in an abandoned shack for a little while that we found on this land that they were building on. We got kicked out in the middle of the night.”

The Lopez family was on the move again and eventually settled in Reno, Nevada. Once they were back in a home, getting their lives back on track didn’t happen overnight.

“Trying to get back to normalcy, that took a lot longer, until we were pretty much in high school. Even then we lived in trailers and at one point we had a kerosene heater and we were all huddled in one room because it was so cold in Reno,” Lopez said. “We had to use that one heating element to keep us all warm and we would end up with black soot in our noses when we woke up in the morning. It was pretty difficult.”

He created the installation, titled “Hope/Home,” for the Seattle Presents Gallery located at the Seattle Municipal Tower. It addresses this specific time in his life.

Inside the space are five “sheet ghosts” representing Lopez and his family. The sheets are held up by numerous strings attached to the walls of the gallery. They are shapeless figures and Mickey Mouse ears adorn the youngest member of the Lopez family. Dozens of framed drawings, portraits and artwork are on the wall. A still life portrait by his father is included as well as a painting of roses by his mother. Lopez said the exhibit is a Rorschach.

Mickey Mouse ears mark the smallest of Lopez’s family of ghosts. Photo by Jon Williams

“You see whatever is really driving you,” Lopez said. “I wanted to make sure that essentially what you have is a background, that while it’s filled with objects from home, specifically my home, it was also open-ended enough that someone could see part of themselves in it.”

The space has a Victorian feel to it, which is intentional. The sheet ghosts are a nod to a time when people would cover furniture in houses and castles to prevent them from getting dusty while no one was there.

Lopez said eventually the sheets became synonymous with ghosts. Last winter it all came together for Lopez, and it’s also a reminder of how he felt being homeless himself.

“I started seeing a lot of homeless people covering themselves and that’s when the whole connection to homelessness started really fitting. I started doing some of the sheet ghosts on the street, just leaving them there with a little tag letting people know it was an art piece,” Lopez said. “There was a sense of invisibility. The sense when my dad would take us out to ask for some money that most people didn’t want to look at you. Most people wanted to look past you or ignore you.”

He wants others to know that most of the homeless people he’s encountered have never given up hope. They want to change their circumstances, and being homeless is not their identity.

“Homelessness doesn’t just affect single people, it can affect entire families. You can find yourself in the situation very easily,” Lopez said. “The next time you see somebody who is homeless, just a simple nod, a simple bit of appreciation — even if you can’t afford to give them any money — can make all the difference in the world.”

“Hope/Home” shows any one of us can become anonymous sheet ghosts moving through the world. It’s an installation highlighting what is and what can be.

Lopez’s work will be on display until June 16.

 

Xavier Lopez Performance #13: "A Falling Piece" at Artist Up: Grant LAB Shout Out at Oxbow. 2017. Photography: Bruce Clayton Tom.

"A Falling Piece." Final Version. Artist Up: Grant LAB Shout Out at Oxbow. Original performance on 5/10/17. Photography: Bruce Clayton Tom.

​Influenced by the "Happenings" of Alan Kaprow and especially the "Dangerous" performances of Dick Higgens, when I was invited to Artist Up: Grant Lab Shout Out I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a performance "on the fly" as they call it and do a falling piece.

The performance itself was extremely simple. When I was called to give my presentation, I stumbled several times on my way to the top of the stairs where I was to speak about my artistic oeuvre and to describe my plans for what I would be doing with the grant later in the year.

​I energized the space and like Dick Higgins was dedicated to go all in with the performance.

​Stumbling...

and dragging myself up the stairs...

...and falling back down several times...

...refusing help...

Until I made it to the top.

Where I gave my presentation.

​In order a photo-documentation of the event, photographed by Bruce Clayton Tom. 2017.

 

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 gambler and drunk--but he was also one of the most wonderful people you could ever hope to meet. Back in the day, we used to get 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 miserable and unhappy people I have ever known have been comedians and some of the most angry 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. Short video shot from stage left. Part 2. When the Body Speaks. Full. A Night of Performance Art by Xavier Lopez. Cast: Xavier Lopez, Grace LaRenard, Basil Mayan, Girlgoth and Kaz. Supported by Artists Up - Grant Lab Award from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4 Culture and Artist Trust. Music changed to adhere to copyright laws. Performance Art. InArts NW. Seattle, WA. 2017. Filmed by Lily Munn. After singing as Gus the Ghost and tearing about the sheet ghost as the Diabetic Luchador, I meet...

​Up to this age, up to this period in time--children's book, horror stories, cartoons etc. have long told the same tale--the Pinocchio story of the artificial becoming real. Becoming "a real boy"-- has become a trope--a modern icon--according to Wikipedia, which also says that Pinocchio is one of the most adapted characters of all time.

​But recently something has changed, I first noticed it and wrote about it in a presentation I did at a conference at UCDavis, a couple of years ago. Ours is the first generation in which Pinocchio has lost interest in being a real boy and instead has decided that rather than going back to being anything as silly as wood, or staying flesh, it is time to turn to plastic, foam and rubber instead. And I suggest that this is not mere musing, something is going on here and it may be zeitgeist--the flesh made plastic.

​I would love to work on a performance with Joseph Beuys--of all the 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--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!

​Scene microphone and stand on stage outcropping. Stage right Grace La Renard is standing dressed as a ghost. On a table, also stage right is a blue cloth and a top hat filled with a glowing light. Further back-stage right is a male ghost. In the background stage right is an easel and white canvas and near that is a bucket filled with flour and a chair.

​From off stage I walk on stage dressed as a ghost carrying a plastic pumpkin filled with flowers. After a beat I begin to sing the Depeche Mode song "When the Body Speaks." As the song ends, I take off the headphones and phone and place them in the bucket, toss some flowers at the audience and place the pumpkin bucket stage left so that Lily can retrieve it.

​As the song ends the two other stage ghosts begin chanting "You're nothun' but a nothun'. You're nothun' but a nothun'."

​As this happens I begin dancing the dance of lonely ghost--as the dance reaches its crescendo I take off the cloak and reveal the "Diabetic Luchador," Who begins to dance the dance of the Diabetic Luchador, while the two dancers continue to chant. During this dance, I am looking like I suffer from vertigo and high and low blood sugar.

​At the end of it I grab the ghost sheet and begin to tear it apart. Then wrap it around my hands and barefoot legs. I move to the bucket and begin to put flower on my hands and draw a mushroom cloud on the ground before me. Taking my sweet time. At the end of this. I kneel down center stage. As soon as I kneel the Sorcerer's apprentice music should start.

​The two ghosts begin to chant "Your blood will show you the way." and "Magic is in your blood."

At this point Lily comes from off stage and paints my face and blows glitter on me.

​"The Dance of the Magician" Begins as the Sorcerer's apprentice plays. As I pull flowers then a rabbit out of a hat and then a ghost and then blood then paint a painting.

​Stage goes black as I turn to the audience then say "When the Body Speaks--all else is hollow."

​The end.

 

The Diabetic Luchador (Nothing but a Nothing.) Final Version. When the Body Speaks. Full. A Night of Performance Art by Xavier Lopez. Cast: Xavier Lopez, Grace Larenard, Basil Mayan, Girlgoth and Kaz. Supported by Artists Up - Grant Lab Award from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4 Culture and Artist Trust. Music changed to adhere to copyright laws. Performance Art. InArtsNW. Seattle, WA. 2017. Filmed by Loren Herrera.

​

The Diabetic Luchador was a new character created with this "night of performance, part of the "Putoh" night's events. In this part of the night's performances, the Diabetic Luchador tears apart the sheet ghost of the prior scene.

​Gus Was a Singing Ghost.

​Gus Was a singing Ghost. When the Body Speaks. Performance Art. InArtsNW. Seattle, WA. 2017. When the Body Speaks. A Night of Performance Art by Xavier Lopez. Cast: Xavier Lopez, Grace Larenard, Basil Mayan, Girlgoth and Kaz. Supported by Artists Up - Grant Lab Award from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4 Culture and Artist Trust. Music changed to adhere to copyright laws. Performance Art. InArtsNW. Seattle, WA. 2017. Documented by Loren Herrera.

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 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-synching to Depeche Mode songs for cash.

​In this performance, I sang in front a live audience for the very first time, a song entitled "When The Body Speaks," A Grabbing Hands Sonnet.

​Gus the Ghost is a continuing character throughout my sculpture and performance art. When we were children we had three "ghost" imaginary friends.

I had been working with the ideas of ghosts ever since I was an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno in 1990, where I did a performance titled: Poltergeist. This was part of a solo exhibition I did at the Faire Gallery Cafe. The piece included sound and a looping video that can be accessed here:

​Soft Cyborg Video: Ghost Story

​When the Body Speaks...All else is Hollow.

​What is beneath the sheet?

​In the end, after the song, I pulled off the sheet, thus beginning the second act.

​Gus the singing Ghost. When the Body Speaks. Performance Art. InArtsNW. Seattle, WA. 2017. A Night of Performance Art by Xavier Lopez. Cast: Xavier Lopez, Grace Larenard, Basil Mayan, Girlgoth and Kaz. Supported by Artists Up - Grant Lab Award from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4 Culture and Artist Trust. Music changed to adhere to copyright laws. Performance Art. InArtsNW. Seattle, WA. 2017. Filmed by Loren Herrera.

​Xavier Lopez Performance: When the Body Speaks Act 2: Performed on November 9th, 2017. Supported by an Artists Up / Grant LAB Award from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture & Artist Trust. When the Body Speaks Act 2: Sheet Ghost/The Diabetic Luchador (Nothing but a Nothing) finds the Diabetic Luchador confronting the ghosts of his past. Starring: Xavier Lopez, Grace LaRenard, Basil Mahan and Lily C. Munn as "The Guardian Angel." Live Music Editing by Kaz. Directed by Loren Herrera, originally edited by Loren Herrera, project by Xavier Lopez, Filmed on location at INARTSNW, November 9th 2017.

​I was to present a short "one-man performance" dealing with issues of "Latinoness," entitled "When The Body Speaks," it would be about Illness, specifically illnesses targeting Latinos and which run through my family tree, directly through my body and in my blood!

​Ultimately, I would craft a longer, more complex event than initially planned, enlisting five other artists--a first for me! I did a forty-five minute performance and I was extremely nervous because of my ailments. Would the nerve-endings in my feet flare up? Would I suffer from vertigo? Before this, my longest performance was 25 minutes and I was much younger then. But over the year of practice I brought my weight down by twenty pounds and when I hit the stage I was certain I could do it.

​The event, itself was part biography, part endurance and part conceptual art. I introduced Seattle to "Putoh" a mestizo hybrid of cultures and performance genres! On top of that, I did something I thought I never could have--I sang in front of a live audience! 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!

​​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 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, a Mexican American, one Jewish and one post catholic, two feminists, two performance artists, two university students, a painter, two sculptors and a science fiction fan. 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 ("on my dad’s side") 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. So sit back, relax and enjoy the "Return of the Putoh" and enter the Post-postmodern a world of intersectionality at every turn.

​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 is housing some of the most Avant Garde performance in the city.

​In this performance, I returned to an artform that I created alongside the wonderfully Feminist performance artist and Butoh artist Katharine Adamenko, when we were both taking graduate courses at UC Davis. Entitled "Putoh,"

​I'll say more about it in a bit, but November 9th's performance reminded me of a series of performances that we did together in the late, late nineties. It was the birth of the Soft Cyborg and of "Putoh" and it was a heady time that stands in direct contrast to today wherein we felt as though we could accomplish everything--where we didn't feel as though the world was on the brink and it is in that that spirit that I present you with the description that I wrote about one particular performance that I put on as part of a series of salons put together by my very dear friend Katharine Adamenko, what follows is the paper--the last paper I wrote for the last class I took at UC Davis, before embarking on a five year trip to Europe--modified only enough to keep it from sounding too strange.

​When the Body Speaks. (Augmented Mix.) Performance Art. InArtsNW.

 

For the last twenty years I have been working with Sheet Ghost installations, performances and sculpture. Beginning first with "performance art" in 1993, wherein I first used the "sheet ghost" in a significant way--I find the "ghost" to be an amazingly expressive means of dealing with many issues ranging from the extremely personal to themes of isolation and even more abstract ideas as was the case in the most recent installation I did for the Seattle Office Arts & Culture's "Dialogues in Art" series, wherein I dealt with issues of homelessness. In Hope/Home, the first installation with multiple figures, the sheet ghosts became stand-ins for my family as we dealt with a period of homelessness that we experienced when I was still very young. Over the course of several installations I have seen my process become increasingly narrative and more and more theatrical. Ghost Walk #1 was the first of these more cinematic performances.

 

Performance: Masking Tape (2019).

Making a mask out of masking tape, what could be more natural. This performance marks the beginning of the Dematerialization/Denial/Disintegration series of works. I am at the beginning of this series and excited to see as it progresses.

​I'M AFRAID

​I'm afraid

​I'm afraid that it is cancer. ​

I'm afraid this is a dream. ​

I'm afraid my teeth are rotting.​

I'm afraid I need to scream. ​

I'm afraid that it's not nice. ​

I'm afraid that it's no good. ​

I'm afraid the aliens are coming,​

I'm afraid we're all alone. ​

I'm afraid there is no heaven​

and we're never going home.

​

I'm afraid I have no money

and I'm lost in all this debt. ​

I'm afraid that we're all dying​

and it hasn't sunk in just yet.

​

I'm afraid this diabetes ​

will take my eyesight, legs and art.

I'm afraid there is no forever​

and no reason to even start.

​

I'm afraid of those who hate me​

and those that love me more. ​

I'm afraid of domestic terror, ​

airborne viruses, killer wasps and war.

​

I'm especially afraid of thermonuclear devices​

and I'm afraid of Russians, Arabs and the Chinese.

​

But then again, ​

I'm not half as afraid of them as I am of​

my own government, ​

and this American disease.

​

I'm afraid that this is all just a complex hologram.

​

I'm afraid of cosmic rays, solar flares and asteroids.​

of floods and hurricanes, earthquakes and famine. ​

and I'm afraid of the second coming,

my parents sure as damned hell made certain of that.

​

I'm afraid of getting old. ​

I'm afraid of being hit by a car.​

I'm afraid of flying in a plane. ​

And I'm too afraid to learn to drive.

​

I'm afraid that we're all in hell,​

I mean that this is actually hell, right here and now.

​

Not a personal hell, but a very real fear.

​

I'm afraid of all this honesty.​

I'm afraid of your lies as well.​

I'm afraid of the void ​

and of disintegration

​

of becoming nothingness.

​

And I guess, ​

I'm afraid of losing my mind,​

it seems ​

and forgetting all I've ever done,​

all I've ever created, dreamed and pined for,​

of losing all the things that matter at all to me, ​

the people,

the times ​

and the memories of making love​

to you.

​

Of having it all go away.

​

And it's a terror that I can't really understand,​

can't actually wrap my head around, ​

can't really imagine...

​

and the only thing that gets me through any of it​

the only thing that makes any of this at all... ​

bearable ​

is knowing that​

I am not the only one​

going through all of this...

​

That ​

I​

am not.

​

All…

 

Alone.

​

--Xavier Lopez 2018

 

 

5. A prayer for the world. The final performance before Covid. Ghosts, ghosting, memories of falling into an open, Mexican grave and tales of an Ensenada flood that brought out the dead.

 

Performance at King Street Station:

Oracion al Borde del Apocalipsis

Gus was a Mexican Ghost/Ghost Walk/Prayer at the Edge of the Apocalypse

December 5th, 2019

The performance “Oracion al Borde del Apocalipsis” ( Prayer at the Edge of the Apocalypse) begins with a pre-performance piece entitled “Gus Was a Mexican Ghost,” which is a children’s book from the 1970’s about a ghost, who goes to Mexico. The book was one of my favorites as a child. This performance is an extended prayer for all of those that have migrated to this country or whose descendants traveled to these lands from somewhere else, which is to say everyone but this land’s indigenous peoples—everyone else is a guest here. This is a performance that deals directly with the looming threat that many immigrants to our country and perhaps all “people of colors” (my term, chosen because it speaks to all the different colors that we are,) feel acutely, today, in the “land of the free.”

​Xavier Lopez is a contemporary, Latino/x, conceptual, mixed media artist. Lopez received his MFA from the University of California, Davis, where he created the theoretical/artistic thesis of the "Soft Cyborg" and the Latinx artistic form of “Putoh,” which takes Butoh as its inspiration. As a "Post-Pop Artist," he is part of a young group of artists who are seeking to move beyond contemporary mainstream 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. (The sequel is planned for June 2020, here at King Street Station.) In 2017, Xavier Lopez was cited in the Routledge critical theoretical textbook "Performance; A Critical Introduction--by Marvin Carlson, Third Edition, as a leading voice in the Latinx Performance Art movement, something for which he is extremely proud.

​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. 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 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, his first conceptual sculptures and Joseph Beuys’ performances.

​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 a 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.

​Xavier Lopez Jr. ​

Music by D. Alexis Lopez

​Featuring Christina Montilla

​Performance: December 5th 2019

​3:00 Xavier arrives at the space to make sure everything is fine, to do soundcheck, etc.

​5:00 Alexis and Christina arrive

​6:00 pre-show set-up begins—we bring out props, etc.

​6:45 Xavier and Christina walk to their stages, both dressed as ghosts. Christina is dressed as a pink ghost carrying the children’s book, “Gus was a Mexican Ghost.” She walks up very slowly to the chair/rocking chair and sits down and rocks slowly back and forth, whispering indiscernible words that sound like the remnants of memories gone by—every once in a while you can make out the words 'Angelito de mi guarda, de mi dulce compania.”

​At the same time, I walk up to the second stage space surrounded by luggage and begin to play with toys—the scene is very reminiscent of a mother and child enjoying time together.

​7:00-7:05 Alexis’ music begins and I put away the toys and tie the luggage together and carry them over my shoulder and Christina picks up the rocking chair and slowly walks toward the green room.

​7:05-7:12 The music changes and I kneel walk around the gallery space and head back to the space that was once occupied by Christina and the rocking chair—but they are gone. This whole time I have been whispering, “Angelito de mi guarda,”

​7:12-end: The music becomes a little faster, more like a chant as I pull out candles and place them in a circle around me, followed by the toys that I was playing with earlier and finally the circle/border is completed by flowers as I place each flower I am saying "Angelito de mi guarda” and slowly, more of the prayer comes out and I begin chanting it and Christina, now a part of the audience begins to chant it again and hopefully others will join us, as we approach a kind of crescendo, I begin to toss the flowers in the air, symbolically destroying the border, then collapse on the ground—the end of the performance.

​Performance at King Street Station:

​Oracion al Borde del Apocalipsis

​Gus/Ghost Walk/Prayer

​December 5th, 2019

​The performance “Oracion al Borde del Apocalipsis” ( Prayer at the Edge of the Apocalypse) begins with a pre-performance piece entitled “Gus Was a Mexican Ghost,” which is a children’s book from the 1970’s about a ghost in a sheet, who goes to Mexico and then believes that he can become a “Mexican Ghost” simply by adopting the clothes and customs of Mexico. The book was one of my favorites as a child, though, it is, of course a good-natured, liberal attempt at inclusivity, which fails due to unperceived biases and invisible assumptions arising from the author’s own position of privilege. But for this performance the audience need only understand that there is only one way for a Mexican to become a ghost. This is a piece that deals directly with the looming threat that many immigrants to our country and perhaps all people of colors (my term, chosen because it speaks to all the different colors that we are, and takes away the primacy of white vs. all else,) who live in America are being threatened with today in the “land of the free.”

​In this pre-performance—I walk out half-an-hour before the main performance to a pre-chosen spot of the KSS will already have a rocking chair and two pieces of luggage. I sit in the rocking chair reading the book until, the house lights go down…

​Ghost Walk:… and a musical piece created by my brother comes on, creating a theatrical space. I put down the book, pick up the two pieces of luggage and walk the perimeter of the space-this is the second part of the performance, entitled “Ghost Walk.” This segment is dedicated to and refers to all those that have come to our country, seeking the promise of safety, security and freedom, carrying everything they own with them, braving all of their fears, filled with hope and promise.

​The Prayer: At a predetermined spot, easily watched by everyone, the prayer begins. Symbolizing the prison that many have been placed into under the Trump administration, I, still dressed as a ghost, open up the two containers filled with candles, flowers and toys and create a border around me. The performance ends when I kneel in the middle of the circle and say a silent prayer based on the prayers that my mother taught me in Spanish and English when I was a small child.

​What I would need from KSS, is the two spaces that will be used for performance, the ability to have someone dim the house lights during performance, someone to play the pre-recorded music, created by my brother to be put on CD (either overhead through KSS speakers or I have stereo players) and the okay to light up 14 candles on bases to represent the 14 States in America that are holding 10,000 immigrant children in 100 shelters.

​For the pre

Description of entire :

Pre-performance: Gus was a Mexican Ghost

Materials

Ghost costume, 2 pieces of luggage

Performance at King Street Station:

​Oracion al Borde del Apocalipsis

​Gus was a Mexican Ghost/Ghost Walk/Prayer at the Edge of the Apocalypse

​December 5th, 2019

​Xavier Lopez, Oración al Borde del Apocalipsis, December 5, 2019, Seattle, Washington

December 7, 2019

Alum Xavier Lopez (MFA 1998) performed “Oración al Borde del Apocalipsis” (Prayer at the Edge of Apocalypse) in the exhibition ”Brighter Future: To be heard. To be seen. To be free” at the ARTS at King Street Station in Seattle on December 5.

Lopez, along with fellow artist Lauren Davis, is also collaborating on the Latinx Performance Art Festival in Seattle with La Sala, a Seattle based Latino Arts organization.

The performance was part of the three-month exhibition: Brighter Future--To be heard. To be seen. To be free. I had some paintings in the exhibition, but was much more excited to have been asked to do a performance. At this point, we did not yet know about Covid, and I do remember thinking at the time that the title that I gave to the performance seemed kind of over-the-top and yet. There was a feeling that something was happening. There was a feeling that something was coming and that it wasn't good.

I knew that this piece needed to be a prayer, my favorite prayer, one in Spanish that I was taught when I was very young by my mother and remember to this day. I have also been wanting to do a crawling ghost piece, originally planned to circle the Seattle Art Museum--I still hope to do a ghost performance there sometime this year.

Our team for the upcoming "On The Edge: Second Latinx [performance Art Festival, postponed, at this point, indefinitely, but actually 'til sometime in 2021.

 

 

6. Just being. The radical action of radically just being a person of color and presenting your life. If you learn nothing else from me, learn this, to thine own self be true.

When we were still young, my father delighted in telling us stories of Socrates and Plato and would often present us with one of life's big questions and ask us to argue from various philosophical/Greek positions.  To this day, I can still name about half of the letters of the Greek Alphabet and know enough to realize that Plato preferred policemen to artists.  During that time several guiding principles were born, primary among those being that our differences are merely skin deep—we are all humans and the differences that lay between any of us--none that actually matters.  There are no important differences between the races, sub-races, tribes, etc. etc. and so on--especially in the ways that truly make any difference. 

We all have the same capacities of feeling, we all have the same abilities to dream and we all hope for better lives and wish to see a better world.  Historically, all of our books have been filled with inventions and discoveries by people of every race, color and creed.  Humans of every kind have created all of our photographs, paintings, sculptures, cities, books, languages, romances, poems, movies, etc. and etc. and so on--and every single one of these is as real and as valid for each and every one of us and is enjoyed and understood with no difference that is affected by race, sex, gender, religion, etc.

 

Race, itself, has never been anything more than merely cosmetic--we wear a series of hues more likely having more to do with climatic effects and originary location than with any real, inherent differences in us as animals.  Race is merely skin deep.  And it is clear that we often confuse culture with race.  Ultimately, to me, over the years it has become clear that race is in fact phantasmatic--it simply does not exist, it is a ghost--an illusion--at best, it is an illusion hidden in the pigment of our skin.  One might as well separate those that have red hair or freckles--make them feel inferior or treat them as a group of personae non gratae.  Or segregate by height or hair color or eye color or penis-size.  Any of these would be silly right?  Unfair? Or just sheerly idiotic--right?    And yet, we do separate on the basis of skin color--to this day--we still assume that people see the world differently--that based on skin color that someone might not have a soul or the same intellect as others.  All of these things have been asserted at more than one time by men of intellect--in fact, damn you, Noah Webster for ensuring that the very language that I speak is rooted in racism.

 

 

Perhaps my darkest and most personal performance so far, resurrecting the DUM DUM BOY, a character from my very first performance done way back in the 90's during one of the presentation night of Robert Morrison's Sculpture Class at the University of Nevada, Reno. The Dum Dum Boy is pure ID with no superego to keep him in check. In this performance the Dum Dum Boy expresses the fear that we are all undergoing at this point in time.

​I know that I had been reading about Gilbert and George and I'm pretty sure that I had discovered Joseph Beuys by this point.

​Joseph Beuys inspired sculpture from this same period. Artistic theory, especially of those who were influenced by Marcel Duchamp was flowing through my work at this point, experimenting more and more with how to express my ideas through language, sculpture and performance!

​This sculpture, I think it was called St. George and the Dragon: Christ and Satan, included references to Disney films and a painting lifted from a Gilbert and George book I had at the time.

​This drawing showed plans I have since the 2000's to reintroduce the Dum Dum Boy into my performances. This one included trying to find a mask that approximated the one that I used at UNR, but which got destroyed making a sculpture in graduate school at UC Davis.

​The original mask from the Dum Dum Boy performance in 1991/2, was turned into this standing sculpture in graduate school.

​This proposal for an especially embarrassing moment for the Dum Dum Boy has yet to be performed.

​Like many performances this one ended up being a mix of more than one idea. In this case the Dum Dum Boy mixed with another performance "I'm Dying," in which I was to repeat those words over and over, but which initially had nothing to do with the Dum Dum Boy.

 

This Performance begins to answer the question "Can you have a performance with no body present," in this first answer to the question the camera--essentially the audience's eye is turned outward through a window, away from the artist, who in this first tentative step is still mostly present through a reflection, spoken description and presence behind the camera.

​As the Queen of Hearts attempted to teach a Modernist Alice--when Alice haughtily opined that one could not actually believe the impossible . "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen , "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Alice just hadn't had the proper practice, growing up in Victorian England as she did--but in the 100+ years since then, we have all had that practice. Modernism with its heavy reliance on "truth," the manifesto, the "universal," the phallus, masculinity, God, hegemony and so many "isms" "it would make a shy, bald, Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder," turned very quickly into absurdism, nihilism and went absolutely berserk when they discovered that God had died somewhere on the way to the forum.

​This was replaced by a football field of vying positions all questioning the supreme hegemony/ies, until it became necessary to bring out the phallus and take away the toys of identity before this post-modernist "play-time" could get out of hand and become a polymorphously perverse, identity orgy. Little did anyone know that when the phallus finally did blow that it would not be a fun, sexual or liberating event (I mean, Freud must have had a sense of that, though-- right?). -Instead, it erupted into a terrified/terrifying, manic, paranoid, madness--at least so it seems--these really are early days so far.

​Historically, even when post-modernism sought to deconstruct things, it was still with the faith that what would arise was some sort of deeper truth, even when that truth was ironic, or presented ironically, the result was still filled with hope and faith. There was still the idea that if you took the truth to the top of the mountain and shouted it to the people, that everyone would recognize it, act accordingly and do the right thing. Before this, the funny thing was that in the modern era, this same mountain was the space from which you received, interfaced and interacted with the "Kierkegaardian God " of Enlightenment, then tried to figure out how much of that truth you could keep in your unworthy, little head. Well, nowadays--that mountain has been blown up and strip-mined for the last bits of helium on the planet, no one believes in truth today. Even if you did receive any wisdom from the experience, as soon as you tweeted it you would get a thousand people all coming from so many different points of view that the original "truth" would be completely lost. Then scientists would tell you that we probably live in a giant hologram anyway, so what is the point?

​Perhaps this really is the Age of Nefarious--the culmination of DADA and the completion of its agenda. It is an era where reality has met "the Real" head on, and the only ones with any faith are the ones that are trying like crazy not to go completely, irreducibly insane. Luckily, however, this is all just theory and has no real basis in reality--Right? Right. Maybe. Because if it did, then that would be absolute madness, right? Right.

 

My current body of work is perhaps the most important and yet, most reductive I have ever done. Just Being: Latino is a series of unaltered documentary recorded moments. Scenes of me just sitting or making a cup of ramen or taking a pill, investigate and deconstruct the idea that art by artists of color must be made for a reason, that it must jump through programmatic hoops--defined by the expectations of others—that it must be revolutionary—this is art about Just Being—and it is sufficient. Though, in a turn laden with irony—merely existing ends up being the most revolutionary of acts—deconstructing the very idea that contemporary Latinx art deserves to exist, to be here at all and to tell its own individual stories. Through my performances, I seek to engender, enlarge and expand the conversation of what Latina/x/o art is and what it must be.

 

He writes a culture blog for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

He holds down a day job to pay the bills.

And “I’m a multi-media Latinx performance artist and conceptual sculptor.”

Before the pandemic, Lopez was in the midst of organizing a Seattle-based Latinx performance festival. Now that he and his girlfriend are self-isolating in their apartment, Lopez has turned his creative energy to videotaping solo performances in their bedroom. He calls the new series “Performances From the Foot of My Bed.”

“I noticed my open closet made a good backdrop,” Lopez jokes.

And the price is right.

“Venues for performance artists were actually difficult to come by in any event,” he says, even before the pandemic.

Seattle’s high-priced real estate put the squeeze on artists seeking studios, theaters or other dedicated work space. So performing for free in his bedroom is a no-brainer right now.

Lopez isn’t worried about his personal economic situation, but he is concerned about what will happen to Seattle’s once-vibrant cultural community, now shuttered in the wake of the public gathering restrictions. Many organizations and arts presenters don't have the resources to weather the pandemic, even with public and private relief money.

But Lopez says he and other artists he knows carry on, because he believes artists are more necessary than ever before, telling stories, making music, and reminding everyone in social distance mode that they're not alone.

“We need to focus on the things that matter when things are collapsing,” Lopez says. “I think that art is definitely part of that. The desire to know that other people are in this, too, that we’re not alone, I think that has a lot to do with what comes from art.”

Lopez and his girlfriend look forward to the time when they'll emerge from their self-quarantine and enjoy a meal at their favorite sushi restaurant.

“And hug each other,” Lopez adds.

They're also looking beyond the pandemic to what Lopez hopes will be a major shift in how Americans view each other.

“Because we’ve been through something major together. This virus doesn’t discriminate against race, color, creed,” Lopez says. “We’re going to see each other more as humans, I hope.”

Lopez plans to reschedule his Latinx performance festival for this fall.

Pandemic willing, of course.

 

 

could lead to the segue of working under the limitations of a pandemic and creating performances without an immediate audience—like the just being Latino/x series and how those have led to ideas of creating art about dematerialization—oh and making art when you are being hunted down by a dangerous virus—you begin to think about what the universe would be like without you.

 

Extra stuff:

 

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 failed that bar and had an entire class to reassure me of that failure. I never went back to that course.

It was clear that I was Chicano or Hispanic or what have you, the term 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."

 

​There have been several moments in which art has saved my life–in which it has reminded me that there never really was any other choice for me. Any true artist knows that they really can’t do anything else–I’m pretty much not good at anything else-really. As far as the first moment–it might have gone all the way back to watching my dad painting murals in Hollywood, standing atop a ladder with a crowd of people complaining that what he was painting wasn’t art. He looked down at them, paintbrush in hand and said in a very thick Chicano brogue– “Thees, thees is not just art–this is revolution!”