Xavier Lopez presenting: "Toward a Dada Dialectic and the Soft Cyborg," at UCDavis
GSA Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium.
In 2001, I was in graduate school, working toward my MFA in Studio Art: Sculpture, with a specialization in critical theory. I was a member of the UCDavis, Graduate Student Association and was working on a side project that had been influence by several of my feminist classes, by the work of Donna Haraway and especially by the concept of taking ideas and turning them into performance. I was also highly influenced by the courses that I was taking outside the art department and especially the classes on Critical and Linguitic theory and the theater courses on Peformativity. It was during this period and perhaps in one of these classes in which I met the Jewish/Cuban, feminist, Butoh performance artist Katherine Adamenko, who would prove to be fundamental to the course of my progress--but we will talk more about her in the next section.
The Soft Cyborg.
The Soft Cyborg began as a paper that I knew I could never turn in for a grade because it was just too far out there for any of my art classes--too strange for art history and too literate for Studio/Fine Art. My only hope was to get it accepted to a conference as I had for two other papers, "Depeche Mode Ate My Balls," and "Longing For Reconcilliation In The DC Comics Multi-Verse," which were both outside of the box. Soft Cyborg's main premise, or goal was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to find or create a dialectic for a movement that eschewed language and art as having any true, actual or cohesive meaning--so that was a programme that was meant for failure from the very beginning. But strangely, the saritical vehicle for this, which was never meant to be taken seriously, ended up making more sense and being a generative, not-so-liminal space that tied to Donna Haraway, Mikhail Bakhtin, the idea of the "Carnival," Mickey Mouse, Twinkie the Kid, cartoon emcees, Furries art and even politics in a way that fit very well with the performances that I had been doing up to then.
The Lost performance.
Prior to the performances at Katherine Adamenko's "Salons," my performances had mostly taken place at the University of Nevada, Reno, but during the second year of graduate school at UCDavis, during one of our studio visits, I decided to put on a performance for our graduate group. I don't remember the details so much, except that it was very loosely a precurser to Tales of "The Soft Cyborg: The Spaniard," which in turn owed a great deal to the work of Joseph Beuys. In this production, I walked up to my sculptures and berated them in German. The class clearly had no idea what to do with this, and as usual Lucy Puls was clearly unimpressed.
As for me, that night was important in that it excercised some long unused muscles and definitely reawakened the desire whithin me to do some more performance art.
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