Wu Tsang and The Mythologies of Mourning and Community

(I was invited to write a piece about the work of Wu Tsang to be included in the publication to accompany the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art’s exhibition Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects: Legends and Mythologies, which opens March 21, 2015, at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. Hope to see you there.)

“Communal mourning, by its very nature, is an immensely complicated text to read, for we do not mourn just one lost object or other, but we also mourn as a “whole”—or put another way, as a contingent and temporary collection of fragments that is experiencing a loss of its parts.”                                                                  -José E. Muñoz

Wu Tsang and R. J. Messineo, Approximate Alter (Life Chances), 2011, Wood, spray paint, photos, frames, plastic flowers, Rhinestone clutch, 44 x 36 x 13 3/4 inches

Wu Tsang and R. J. Messineo, Approximate Alter (Life Chances), 2011, Wood, spray paint, photos, frames, plastic flowers, Rhinestone clutch, 44 x 36 x 13 3/4 inches

The altar is red and we all have our dead. Blood, risk, passion and community histories rendered in three dimensions just as Wu Tsang invokes a soul-gutting statistic from the GLBT non-profit industrial complex’ quarry of data in his essay for the Whitney Biennial 2012: the average age of a trans person of color is 23 years old.

The altar, much like the Silver Platter and Wildness, maneuvers as a site where several mestizo spiritual practices are staged. These initial contended colonial encounters introduced the concept of altar as a marker of the new and prevailing spiritual logic in the Américas; aggregating syncretic affinities on top of each other performing a type of Catholic drag for indigenous polytheisms in response to a resilient formation that rarely ends with post- as the prefix. Oftentimes these practices flirt with the fraught settler colonialism we are all anxiously enacting in pursuit of queer utopian once-befores. What it once was before we arrived. Our altars call our ancestors, the ones who were here before and that survived well enough to be remembered.

What does the altar alluding to but having never lived inside Imprenta Transgender Law Project, the legal and social service-oriented drop-in center attending to trans women of color, and known as Wildness’ “mini-institutional appendage,” do? What function does it serve within its perpetual onus of remembering, honoring and more importantly—raging? And how can queer club nightlife continue to offer a temporary salve to the traumatic burden of remembering?

On first thought this work connects with a mythology of mourning as solely an act of private loss void of its attendant structural implications. The altar here triggers the collectivizing of righteous grief, a catalyst for movement towards a futurity that coalesces in the absence of violence; an animating force that advocates for the dead.

Our dead trans people of color. Never mind that it is we who belong to them even when “community” fails at being the apt receptacle for our desire to belong. Community fails the way that we fail each other and what we mourn is communal possibility of collective benefit foreclosed by the pragmatism of the non-profit industrial complex; a boring hierarchy where only few benefit and the rest experience trickle-down community engagement, creative place-making and other funder world buzzwords and phrases.

Wu Tsang’s work with Wildness and Imprenta compel us to consider the mythology of community. I call this a boon to our weary guilt complexes and non-profit day job enervation. It is this psychic exhaustion that requires us to question how exactly does community fit within the continuum of institutionality and philanthro-capitalism? And is this really the only way we can enact a fiscally sound community organization when trans people of color are rarely placed in positions of decision-making power but so deftly placed in the cross-hairs of non-profit fundraising campaigns?

As of this writing another trans woman of color was murdered a few days ago in San Francisco. Her name is Taja Gabrielle De Jesus. Her death occurred just as members of the LGBT non-profit arena converged in Denver for the Creating Change conference. At this conference an action led by trans women of color demanded that cisgender lesbians, gay men and bisexuals activate on behalf of trans women of color. They demanded that the more privileged members of the queer spectrum—economically and socially speaking—assume the mantle that brown and black trans lives matter.

The altar in trans centered community spaces produces a constellation of memory, and the living come together to tend to one another’s psychic wounds by changing the water, throwing out the flowers, and when payday allows there are luxurious offerings with the occasional shot of rum, a tube of lipstick. It is the earthly anchor; apart from being an unwelcome material signal that violence—the random and the institutional—is more than a spectral presence but a daily reminder. The altar is what remains.  And each year the altar will grow.

 

 

Nikki Darling : December 13, 2014 @ Human Resources Los Angeles

It’s my belief that we all have the need to feel special and it’s this need that can bring out the best in us and yet the worst in us. This need created the velvet rope.        - Janet Jackson

Nikki Darling catapulted a book called Pink Trumpet and the Purple Prose into our collective public via the chapbook press I began this year called Econo Textual Objects. It’s out and the only way to culminate the mid-wife duties is by being present for its opening performance. This is my eyewitness account.

Firstly, this is not a review but a critical beholding from a fairly well informed optique that was nonetheless stunned into submission because sometimes nervous energy and myth-making is shit-starting in its purest form.  
 

Like when a sticky sullen Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski tells a wide-eyed Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois that some people may rarely touch liquor but that liquor often touches them. This sweaty panty-splashy encounter tickled an audience sauced on acidic red wine and prefaced Nikki Darling’s December performance at Human Resources.

Darling, using her body, in dark sparkle motion, in mysterious transit, produced a series of powerfully linked spatial metaphors in a performance piece that began with a movement forward; a very momentary timorous amble to the left of center of the radical white boxiness. Movements culled from the democratic spaces of YouTube strip tease how-to’s. She owns us from the jump; a bow down to the generations of complicated femininities that came before her; ones badly comprehended, nevertheless rendered indomitable by limited temporalities. Mariah Carey Dream Lover is the honor salve Darling spreads with scissor kicks and sativa-heavy fatties that she lights up, one after the other (four total), puffs and passes into the audience that has been instructed to sit the fuck down. She takes her clothes off but the looming shadows of a feral giantess behind her is what you can’t tear your gaze from and you think you know where this is going to go. But a stripping is a freeing; Nikki Darling staged a radical deprivation of oxygen the toxic value statement needs to live. The maelstrom of shame, self-worth, radical empowerment, desire, the body, violence, and feminism in a misogynistic culture reveals itself through the MGD forty-ounce shower coming down on her face and bare breasts; an aroma of beer on cold concrete and the aftermath of gooseflesh skin bruised with Abramović-style auto-violence.

Photo credit thank you to Martabel Wasserman and Sam Cohen.

Photo credit thank you to Martabel Wasserman and Sam Cohen.

And in the starkest transparency so sharp you feel the shards, Darling sits her naked ass down and proceeds to read to us. Her poetry soothes in its compulsory anti-pacifism.

Soon I’ll clean out your psychic parking spot but first let me squeeze this dry for all it’s worth.
Don’t feel bad about having been an asshole, as you can see now,
I’m an asshole too.
(from Monster Ballads)

Pink Trumpet and the Purple Prose the textual object disavows itself as a book of fiction, of prose, of poetry, of philosophy, and of theory. There are allusions to love and longing as well as a critique of the gaze, of images, of radical empowerment and of self-definition. Darling says it’s not a call to apathy or arms. It is not these things because it is a Body; always changing, shifting, and eluding it’s descriptors. She proposes a radical model of co-authorship between she and her readers.

There is one call however and it’s for a femme fiery feminist ghosting of a Los Angeles that is big and intrepid. Darling puff-puff partakes in the capital of myth-making in the West and takes it to give it back to those whose lands have been stolen. Or at least that’s the utopian longing here.

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The chapbook and performance operate as the 2nd chapter of a three part performance/poetry/prose project that started with Pussy A Progression, last year, moved to Ascension, also last year, and ends with Pink Trumpet and the Purple Prose.

Nikki Darling is a student in the Creative Writing/Literature PhD program at USC. Her poetry and experimental essays center around subjectivity, persona, and post-structualist methods of deconstructing literary form and meaning. She is finishing her first novel, "Fade Into You," a memoir of mixed race identity in the San Gabriel Valley during the 1990's. Her criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Art Book Review, Tomorrow Magazine and Public Books, among others. Her essay Appropriate For Destruction was included in Best Music Writing 2010. Her new work Pink Trumpet and the Purple Prose can be purchased here.

On a Homeboy-centered Visual Vocabulary: the artwork of Hector Silva

            For the last decade, Hector Silva’s work has been seen in a range of galleries, museums, pop-up art happenings, as well as bus shelters, political campaign materials and movie posters. However, he amassed his earliest audience from the working class barrios he arrived in when he left Jalisco, Mexico over thirty years ago. It was they—though I mean we—that experienced his work for the first time on glossy paper. It was a flyer for Chico’s in Montebello, a gay Latino dive bar where go-go boys danced atop the pool table over a continuous loop of freestyle music, which introduced me to his work. These flyers would adorn the walls of Bienestar Human Services employee cubicles as if the men in Hector’s work were matinee idols. But you would never see the men in Hector’s in the movies—not unless they were extras in American Me or Blood In, Blood Out. Tough, hyper-masculine men, whom cultural theorist Richard T. Rodriguez calls the purveyors of “the homeboy aesthetic.”

            Present in Hector’s work is a re-mapping of an L.A.-specific erotic Latinidad that indexes prison ink art as much as it does the work of Touko Laaksonen, best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland. Most of the men in Hector’s work signals a Los Angeles-specific style vector—bald heads, Dodger caps, oversized white T-shirts and Nike Cortez sneakers—seen in both the cruising sites of Elysian Park and Whittier Boulevard over the course of the last forty years. Hector’s work on queering homeboys is part of a visual register, joined by Mexican artist Javier De La Garza whose work queers the Aztec warrior prince, Cuatémoc; Don Bachardy and his line-based impressions of gay men in a mid-20th century Los Angeles subaltern; Shizu Saldamando’s rendering of a youth subcultural underground filled with Morrissey-loving goth girls and punk boys; and his immediate contemporaries in the Queer Latino visual arena Tony De Carlo and Joey Terrill, the latter whose work was imperative in lifting awareness about HIV and AIDS in Latino communities through art with the advocacy group VIVA.

            Hector has had to become an impresario to make his work available to a public eager to obtain it. He has sold his own work, setting up posts and having a direct connection to his fans making collecting his work possible, which interrupts the way a public consumes art and calls into question current gallery systems as very few of them make his work accessible to communities of color. Relying on the swap meet model, he made his work accessible and affordable to people coming to Day of the Dead festivities in Hollywood and East Los Angeles; the same people who are dealing with keeping their families together in the face of xenophobic legislation. His artwork is accessible in a way that art has not been for a community composed of queer Latinos and the families who love them; Chicanos present for many generations as well as the recien llegados.

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            While Hector’s work was ubiquitous if you made the rounds at Club Tempo at the nexus of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue brought out the wiggle in the walks of macho vaqueros; the strut of the peacock boys at Arena and Circus. But his work spilled out of club spaces; parties where the persecuted danced into oblivion.  You often were able to assume a voyeur’s perspective into what happens after the club. Hector’s work alludes to a more sinister sexuality in his more personal work; an ecstatic pelón being urinated upon or the devilish smirk on the face of a knowing homeboy looking back at the spectator as he is about to dive in head first into a blossoming orgy.

            The men in Hector’s work, whether it’s one or two men standing side by side each other as the Virgen de Guadalupe hangs between them, are unapologetically rendered desiring one another. Hector creates the revelation and at times it is erotically sublime. And that desire, an ever-expansive visual vocabulary, is centered on being and remaining accessible to other young Gay Latino brown men. It is what makes Hector’s work so important.

Breaking Up With Los Angeles

Breaking Up With Los Angeles

February marks my Bay Area first year anniversary. How else to mark the occasion but to produce art? Breaking Up With Los Angeles is my new poetry chapbook. The title is excessive. It marks a leaving behind or the habitual haunting. I imagine my absence in the many faces of Los Angeles, as well as the many faces in Los Angeles.

I am hoping to move beyond the banality of crankiness; beyond not knowing what kind of neighborhood you live in or where to get the best tortillas and donuts and tire service. This is not a maudlin turn about the loss of creature comforts. This project is simply the receptacle for the ache alongside the rainbow of anxieties that are symptoms and by-products of leaving home. Loss, abandonment, and other ugly feelings have eclipsed most hangovers this past year and instead of taking it out on my loved ones or consuming my identity I turn to self-production.

Luckily, there is a place for these less than desirable inhabitable soul-crushers. That place is poetry. Poetry has always functioned as a site of no rules. It is the harm reduction that goes well with the abandonment of a lover; friendships; spatial identification. No permission. A small holder of my psychic messes. A document. A textual object.

Or an embrace for when all other embraces fail to keep me safe.

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What Is Revealed When You Sleep

This is my Catalog Essay for WHEN YOU SLEEP, Shizu Saldamando's new survey of work at the VIncent Price Art Museum in East Los Angeles. The show opened on September 21, 2013 and you should check it out if you're in LA.

 

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What Is Revealed When You Sleep

It is in this space of Shizu Saldamando’s When You Sleep where we hear the dissonance in our minds; of who we are in the sobering stirring of the morning after, where escapist strategies had uninhibitedly reigned supreme. Shizu presents a visual record that explores the nocturnal meanderings of youthful discrepancy; the social experiments gone sublimely awry. That is probably why you bob your head as the silent receivers of Shizu’s images; there is music there, of course, and recognition.

Whenever Shizu is out at a party in LA’s Highland Park or a fun karaoke night at a Little Tokyo bar, at least one of the night’s walking somnambulists will make it into her artwork. As someone who has been one of the many butches immortalized in her work, I have seen Shizu wielding the always present camera and snapping away capturing moments that seem like booze-fueled throwaway scenes that you’d hate to be tagged in the morning after on the social media against your will. Except when she renders the subject—or rather her friends or people she knows using a mix of materials within the process such as wood, bed sheets, color pencil, washi paper and ball point pen, to give nod to the varying contexts and situations she depicts—she strips the party/rock show/gallery/outdoor festival context and casts a wash of ontological purity that brings the deeper, darker serenity floating inside each person to the surface. And each person may not be aware of such forces at play, for this is what we the viewer—or rather the receiver—see When You Sleep.

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The bulk of Shizu’s work has focused on making youth cultures she has been a part of for the last twenty years visible in such a way that expresses an ontology of the ordinary; a visual murmur that reveals a lot without revealing the secrets of our complicated public identities and the scary abyss within our very private selves. That Shizu is still a part of these youth-oriented social spheres also puts forth the idea that youth can be extrapolated away from aging or demographic information. Youth in Shizu’s hands becomes an internalized endeavor.

Shizu’s project relies on magnifying her subjects by way of creating a negative space around the individual(s) that gleans more from the absence of spatialized context than the environment they occupy could ever reveal. Shizu creates an oblique portraiture that is about the people who surpass their contexts as an invitation to the viewer to activate their own queries and conjecture onto the subjects—maybe mutual friends—in the work. In conventional portraiture there is a direct and formal engagement with the subject’s deliberate self-fashioning. That formality is consistently avoided in Shizu’s haphazard snapshots. That gives way to Shizu fostering a found representation of her subjects creating an alternative formality where individuals are more complex than language and place and moreso when their choices reflect and betray those complexities. Or can at least be read that way in a work such as Carm’s Crew.

In Carm’s Crew, three distinct articulations of female gender are present in the bodies of three friends bound by a genre of affinity. The two young women flank another young woman wearing a black sweatshirt, with hoodie placed over her head and are ensconced deep in the corner of Shizu’s framing which creates (or complicates) an intimacy so powerful that Shizu hurls rays of goldleaf and glitter like outward halos that keeps predators, emotional vampires or other banal haters at arm’s length. The hoodie in Shizu’s hands becomes a feminist project; a tool against the patriarchy as it already creates a sense of gendered ambuguity. In relation to the triad of friends or sisters from other misters the hoodie creates the playful middle in the spectrum that disrupts the relation between and opposition with femininity and masculinity. Everyone in Carm’s Crew doesn’t trip on who’s sexually oriented to whom making loyalty a currency as valuable as gold.

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Over the course of her career, Shizu’s use of negative space is one that enables a radical speculative about the subjects in her images. Unlike the world-making that emerges in John Valadez’ Car Show (2001), where every bit of sky and peek of a car’s front hood is imagining and interconnecting with a complicated Chicano identity as much as the men and women that people that reality, we see the possibility for a different kind of subjective self-possession in Shizu’s work that is weighty in that it is not contingent on an expositional context.

However, the negative space is not always the whiteness of canvas or weighted paper. Bed sheets, for example, create a sense of superbly intimate settings for subjects intwined and engaged in amorous quietude. And Shizu renders another possibility of what happens When You Sleep, but others are wide awake.

Despite the hushed sweetness of the couples in Grandstar, Chinatown or Ripples, Long Beach one might not be able to resist projecting a set of narratives onto these images—perhaps the first couple met on Craigslist and after a series of successful and titillating G-chat sessions decided to take their virtual flirting into the material world. Or maybe at the Blur concert in 1996, except they were there with different partners. What if they are a few degrees removed from the same ex? To quote Blur’s popular genderqueer club anthem “Girls and Boys”: love in the nineties is paranoid.

However, what is so covetous is the lack of paranoia here, even as the couple is presented as pieces of an otherwise unseen public. One in which Shizu illustrates to a romantic degree a space that is often antagonistic. These moments on the bed sheet softly intimate that we adjust our way of seeing so that we can locate hope that the public space be not only merciful but kind towards the lovers we observe, who not so incidentally happen to inhabit vulnerable subjectivities in the social schema.

But let’s imagine going beyond the banality of intimacy here and offer another reading that brings intimacy to a rapturous register even when it is failure that acts as the anchor. Let’s bring it back to the state of fandom, of being fanatical, of being the #1 fan. That set of feelings that come with gushing, twitching and stalking the object of our admiration and affections. Have you ever seen early Morrissey live performance videos where fans bum rush the stage as though they were seeking absolution? Seeing the people in Shizu’s work makes one self-cognizant of how we make good, rabid fans, especially since as adolescents we tend to offset our outsider feelings of robust alienation with quiet, desperate longing.

A first foray into fandom takes place in private—by pushing play on the CD deck, the iPod, and even, the turntable. For many of us, this experience began in the bedroom with a Kenwood system and headphones handed down to us by older siblings. The bedroom has a bed and that bed has sheets that witness, enshroud, embody the most intimate of acts. 

Shizu’s use of the bed sheet transforms their function as they now operate as the placeholder of a secret affection transpiring between the couples in her work. She moves towards creating the bedroom as a site of connection instead of one of consumption, as seen in Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1865), whose female subject’s defiant stare was one of the first to trouble the social order in pre-La Belle Époque France. However, the impact in Olympia’s returning gaze is still tempered by her nude passivity which abounds for male gazing. The bedroom also poses an alternative to alienation; Chris Burden’s Bed Piece (1972), where he eschewed all human contact favoring lying nude in his bed for three weeks comes to mind as the artistic prototype for estrangement (Tilda Swinton having done the same for a mere twenty four hours earlier in 2013 at the MOMA in New York to some fanfare).

The private sphere of the bedroom is a place where many an awkward youth have reigned supreme be that with hairbrush in the mirror singing along to some stubborn torch song (like the young lad in Morrissey’s “Last of The Famous International Playboys” video) or making love to the mirror in Saturday Night Live-originated Superstar-style with the hopes of attracting a mate (just like the howling desire felt in “How Soon Is Now?”). Who of us that haven’t spent hours of practicing our Blue Steel gazes can cast the first stone?

Even through mere implication of its absence in her media, the bedroom is cast as the site of self-formational transgression as a private domain for youth; the last bastion before stepping into hostile domestic and public spaces shared by family members and ordinary citizens. It is the last over-the-shoulder peek at the mirror.

The private and the public meet in Shizu’s work—the imaginary longing finding its tangible parallel in public and challenging invisibility with a stolen kiss, a tender moment, an embrace kept intact, never broken by what public spatial implications tend to do to its wary young denizens.

We make good fans because we act out emotional misfires and general fuckery on those that we love and that do not love us back. Most of our unwilling receptacles of our adoration nary have good reason for such worship; these crushes don’t sing, dance, act or write but we deem them crushworthy nonetheless. Morrissey offers in the form of “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” (1986) a vehicle needed to indulge in the melancholic search for sweet oblivion.

Shizu captures that oblivion in When You Sleep. Even in the title alone, as evidenced in the piece Backyard Hardcore, sleep here becomes two sites of surrender in the post-haze of youthful revelry. But even with the people in these works, we get to experience a whole world of their making even when they themselves are not awake to be there. In Backyard Hardcore, we see the back of a punk passed out from a night of drinking but his waking chaos is nowhere to be found. Instead he lies nestled against what one can imagine to be a tree trunk or maybe a sand dune. His sleep catching him away from the comfort and familiarity of his bed, though we can imagine a sense of freedom that enshrouds the young person into feeling safe, even when he or she is vulnerable and subject to the laws that rule public space, under the stars.

Through Shizu’s work, we are given space to imagine the events that lead to oblivion (the search for music and people who are young and alive). The space has been as ample as Shizu’s artistic latitude and it give us the opening to project our own narratives onto the worlds she creates. These are worlds we imbue with a sense of our own curiousities, contradictions, and varying degrees of liberation that produce the dream of belonging even and especially when no one else is around.

 

 

El Danzante: on Rafa Esparza's ancestral nausea

El Danzante

In the fall of 2010 I encountered Rafa Esparza at work in a sage smoke-filled elementary school gymnasium in Pacoima, located in Los Angeles’ Northeast San Fernando Valley. I had expected it to be a practice, with a choreographer in the middle barking staccato-like numbered utterances to dancers finding their routinized footing. But, that does not transpire during a ceremony.

Walking in sounds like Niagara Falls. The chachayote rattles bound to ankles and wrists, made from the seed of the Ayoyote tree, echo the ribcage-rattling thunder under high ceilings and hardwood floors. It always is when you have scores of men, women, elders, adolescents and children dressed in ceremonial garb moving to the North, then the South. Followed by the East and then the west, the ground and finally, upwards towards the sky. It is here where the copal and sage smoke obscure my outsider gaze; interrupting my consumption of the mise-en-scene.

I feel the pangs of ambivalence rise to the surface of my psychic dermis. It is a familiar response to the spiritual community that reflects a Mexica indigenous worldview that permeates a certain politicized sect of L.A. Xicanos. I have only ever looked at this world through windows and being in that gymnasium that afternoon I felt voyeuristic. Danza and its concomitant practitioners and spirit workers have always signaled an authenticity that eludes me, but it still seduces me into wanting a comfortable, if not toxic, essentialism. I want it to be enough, but it’s not—and I want to be enough but I’m not. We’re like lovers, idealized in your mind but emotionally unavailable.

I see Rafa, well over six-foot-three, sweaty. His skin glistens the color of soft red dirt and he is breathtaking in his garb; his gilded loincloth, bandana fashioned with red hawk feathers. I am deeply aware of the problematic and dangerous cliché but I am letting this fantasy go to Disneyland because as Mexican poet María Rivera says la belleza cura. Since I’m usually so smugly critical about the white supremacist heteropatriarchy around me and having taken my fair share of Chicano Studies courses at Cal State Northridge, home of the most robust community-based Chicano Studies department in the country, I thought I could treat my criticality to some brain candy calorically anchored in brown pride.

Dark-skinned, statuesque, graceful and undeniably earnest—Rafa is royalty in my eyes because he is unabashed in this ritualized practice. There is nothing here to indicate that we are in on the same joke—no white people being led by collars and leashes, no fake North American tribal affiliations or sacrificial offerings covered in the little American flag toothpicks (like the ones I used to get atop my Bob’s Big Boy’s hamburgers in Downey, California). Of course I reference a significant portion of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s corpus of work where he has eschewed narratives of authenticity espoused by U.S-Latinos, particularly Chicanos who are more occupied with passing a particularly politicized brown-ness than their Mexican counterparts.[1] However, while Gómez-Peña and his collaborator Coco Fusco (1992-1994) work to subvert the fetishization of authentic brown subjectivities, they did so in the context of the museum and academic institutions, spaces that heretofore continue to feel hostile to low-income communities of color.

Rafa, in contrast, avoids presenting himself as a queer enfant terrible to unsuspecting compulsory hetero-dominant working class brown families and our otherwise straight and educated counterparts, allies not included. He engages in daylong prayer through movement in anticipation for the coming Day of the Dead—a durational meditation where danzantes move for hours, pushing the limits of where bone meets joint.   

Prior to that day, I had only known Rafa outside of his danza work as a young and aspiring performance artist on the threshold of his last year of a long undergraduate journey, culminating with a year of studio art training at UCLA. I found it profoundly refreshing to see someone actively pursuing a learning for the queer genealogical threading they belong, not looking around to see who was watching, allowing his transformation to begin through the spirit whilst engaging in a community without the suspicious turn into social practice. It was refreshing to see a young artist not enact the trappings of Oedipality. Rafa is a spirit dancer preparing to answer the call of performance art; to kiss the hand of fathers under a matriarchal rubric.

Rafa is among the danzantes, ranging in virtuosic skill and spatial awareness, rehearsing steps and spins, looking to the four directions in hopes of finding indigenous ancestral memory. We begin East where Rafa started doing danza in 2002 after being radically politicized by “the xikano/o (with an X) ambiente” when he was a community college student and part of its MEXA (also known as MEChA, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) student chapter. This was at the time when the ELAC chapter went unrecognized by MEChA’s statewide and national conferences and had zero voting rights at those gatherings. According to Rafa, MEXA’s agenda focused on bringing culture to folks still connected to community vis-à-vis pow-wows, concerts, protests, vigils, and art workshops to truly engage with neighbors and non-students, unlike more powerful chapters ensconced in flagship UC campuses that organized the default community of the student body incubated within the college.

I’ll never forget the first time I danced. The homie Geo invited me to come to danza with a group young danzantes in obregon park, in east l.a. There was no "head" no leader...it was mixture of danzantes that had grown tired with the politics of the danza world and wanted to create a new, more democratic space. It was a beautiful space. I came having no intentions of dancing. "I'll just sit and watch this first time"......" ah si, asi dicen todos..." I remember Sombra, an already very skilled dancer who taught me my first steps.....as if he knew that what would happen be the inevitable opposite. As soon as I heard the drum sounds vibrating throughout the gym I stood and joined the circle, it was irresistible.

Rafa looks back to his early college days admits to having a nostalgia for danza, especially as he confesses that while he was thankful for those spaces providing a chance at self-interrogation, he was avowedly closeted and could not bring himself to be an out queer man in a space of ceremony.

I remember being in the lodge once and when it came time for me to pray, I was silent...I didn't say a word instead I let all of my thoughts of longing and lusting over love making with men rush through me but never out vocally. I would have visions of myself fucking with men, having orgies, fucking just for the fuck of it. Fucking with abundance. Fucking with my ancestors, on beds of feathers, in jade rooms. It was like that for a long time for, nourishing my queerness quietly in secret.

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Rafa Esparza’s Time Traveler

One year later I make the drive from Huntington Park to Beverly Hills to see Rafa’s work at the Garboushian Gallery. Time Traveller is a part of Together, a night of performance art curated by Samuel White. The Garboushian Gallery is a small white box with large picture windows facing the eastern part of Beverly Hills, with a few pillars that re-frame the mini-panoramas for the spectators inside the space. There are a few rich art collector types among art students and practitioners.  

Stage-left sits a mattress-thick platform with black-brown garbage bags woven around it like a basket. In the center of the thick opaque plastic lies a large bump. Could it be? Could that vessel be large enough to contain Rafa?

I think no, but yes; Rafa Esparza is inside the womb of his mixed media sculptural piece, Time Traveler, a work he first performed as part of a final sculpture critique while he was still an undergrad at UCLA. Tonight he will restage the piece in homage to his paternal and maternal elders, all who died one after another. "Es como si se estuvieran jalando uno a otro,” he recalls his mother saying to him, (it’s as though one is pulling the other after him), as a way to make sense of the abundance of familial death in a short amount of time.

 

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Time Traveler is an embodied pondering beginning with darkness. Rafa tells me he is inside the woven sculpture for well over two hours before he begins his performance. He is inside a dark encasement that creates a site of mourning for his elders, a place to lodge himself firmly with nowhere to go. It is a scary place to inhabit physically and psychically. This is a grief for his abuelos, his people, his connection to another time and place he carries like the burden that transborder people do—that longing, ese aguanto of what never was lo que nunca pasó--that ties him down until he is ready to appear. 

The platform begins to stir. A sole arm suddenly shoots through the weaving and it is striking for its visual contrast against the gallery’s white wall. The arm begins to throw out rusted brown beer bottles, one by one, each carrying the weight of what is yet to come out of the sculpture. The rusted empty beer bottles still smelling acridly of booze. Next up are hawk feathers and chachayote rattles, traditionally sacred objects that are prayer carriers that fill his senses with both gratitude and nausea. Rafa’s body becomes another object among objects, living among each other creating preciousness and repulsion the way families do.

 

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Even with members whom we have never met, Time Traveler posits that a ghostly revulsion is present amongst the moments of sublime belonging; an ancestral nausea channeled through Rafa. Like the nausea channeled in the political critiques that East Los Angeles multimedia arts collective ASCO wielded against violence in their communities and young Chicanos coming back in body bags from Vietnam, the ancestors in Time Traveller become agitated at the lateness in honoring the genealogies we emerge from, or disapprove of the ways we fetishize and objectify our colonized skin hues in our Ethnic Studies class. They wait for us break ourselves open at the dinner table,  or eschew new bordered mindsets in hopes of reaching the moment we can recreate ourselves to be rapt receivers of ancestral integrity.

Once all the objects are out, Rafa pushes himself out of the broken vessel, dragging himself backwards and behind where most of the audience is sitting. He does not walk but moves in a manner that connotes that he is trying to throw himself far away, like an object. Time Traveler creates the break in the physical and emotional distances between transborder families of origin.

---

Was there a link between danza and performance for you? If so, what

does it look like?

Yes.  I invited my novio and a friend Kate Gilbert a couple of years ago to a danza practice. they had a great time and afterwards we had a lengthy conversation about the history of danza, and dance in general; but Kate asked me something that no one or I had ever asked myself. She asked me if I thought that danza was functional outside of the ceremonial space that I practice it in? I naively responded yes, because on a personal level  danza has provided me with so much than just spirituality However after thinking about it more for a while I started to think of her question in a less subjective manner, and that question is what ignited my interest in performing in art spaces. (tezcatlipoka memoirs is a direct result). I haven't answered that for myself yet, what that means  in more general terms about danza and the context for it, how that changes danza, does it, how does danza in return change the space, does it. Are both things impenetrable or porous? If so, why, when, how? I'd rather not answer the question/s instead I find wonder in swimming in the possibilities that the question arises. As much as I try to and compartmentalize these different facets of what I do, something like the often contact between danza and art is unavoidable, and inevitable, they can be very easily interchangeable.

 

You've involved your family in some of your performances--what is the comment you're making on kinships of origin?

I have, on a couple occasions brought in family into my work. I did a piece [called Tezcalipoca Dreams, performed in Blessed Is This Blood at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica curated by Raquel Gutiérrez] where I had my older brother help unravel a box where I was hidden in and tied for almost an hour. The box was covered in blankets, which eventually wove onto ropes, that where attached to brass coils pierced into my chest. The performance ended with my brother yanking the coils off my chest while they were still inserted in me.

It was important to have relatives activate some of the spaces that I was inhabiting, especially the males in my family because specifically in those pieces I am interrogating a particular structure of masculinity and I want them to understand how they are implicit, just as much as I am in how we’ve come to understand ourselves. We create the source of our masculinities as much as we feed it, abide by it; so rupturing from it had to be also a collaborative effort. My brother, an ex-felon, ex-cholo, ex-macho…well maybe still a little macho was more than “DOWN” to be in my piece, in spite of the fact that he had NEVER been in a room full of brown queers before that night. After my piece ended that evening I reached over to hug him and say good-bye, but instead he rejected my offer and said he wasn’t leaving and that he wanted to stay and see the rest of the acts. I realized first hand the value of sharing these experiences with my family and others whom otherwise would probably never step foot in a theatre, gallery, museum space.

Rafa Esparza performs el hoyo at Human Resources in Chinatown on Saturday, July 19th.

[1] In an interview with Bomb Magazine GGP claims that “this authentic Other has to be pre-industrial, has to be more tuned with their past, has to be less tainted by post-modernity, has to be more innocent and must not live with contemporary technology. And most importantly, must have a way of making art that fulfills their stereotypes…”

BAD GIRLS (Toot Toot, Beep Beep)

I performed a piece called BAD GIRLS (Toot Toot, Beep Beep) in January on Ear Meal Webcast with my friend Gabie Strong on guitar and feedback. ​Ear Meal is Alan Nakagawa's project that invites performance artists engaged in sound work to do longer work on camera and for an online audience. It was a bit of a challenge to wrap my head around performing for an absent audience, or to imagine a different way of giving my work and putting my faith out in that the reception of it would be as committed by anyone sitting on the other side of a computer screen.

​Anyway, the piece itself is a continuation piece I first did two years ago for the LA VS WAR event curated by several people. The performance component was curated by Amitis Motevalli. BAD GIRLS (Toot Toot, Beep Beep) of course is a reference to Donna Summer, but it's a song that carries a particular psychic load in that it is what LA Sheriff deputies would blast from their patrol cars at dawn as women were being released from the Sybil Brand Institute in City Terrace, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Sybil Brand isn't there anymore though, it had closed down due to earthquake damage from the quake centered in Northridge in 1994.

​BG (TT, BB) is also working for me as a meditation on maternity and the liminal space I inhabited as someone who got close to previously incarcerated women dealing with custody issues with family and the state and as someone who was seeing friends working with the state to foster children whose mothers were unable to care for them due to mental and addiction issues.

Yes, lots of issues, but this performance is not a news stand. I can assure you of that. Gabie Strong provides the dissonant soundscape for my 29minute stream-of-consciousness mantra making about the ambivalence that alternative motherhood produces within the confines of state-sanctioned structural violence.

I've never been a mother. I don't intend to become one though I think we're always in these loose networks of familial kinships without having to avow the hierarchical relation structures. ​

Ear Meal is a weekly webcast, documenting the experimental music and sound arts community in Los Angeles. www.collagecollage.com and www.laartstream.com

BRUTALITY AS RESEARCH (on preparing for a trip back to the fatherland)

"Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands." - Rosa Luxembourg

Have you read Horacio Castellanos Moya's book Senselessness? It’s about a writer  hired by the Catholic Church to edit a 1000-paged legal manuscript who slowly goes insane after reading hauntingly poetic testimonies of indigenous men and women from an unnamed Latin American country who survive a bloody genocidal campaign. After reading these frightening accounts of mass murder, gang rape and torture, the nameless narrator carries on in his non-working hours drinking in bars, chasing women of transnational global elite extractions and discovering his choices have led him into the belly of the beast’s favorite cosmopolitan party sites. He becomes incrementally paranoid with each passage he absorbs especially since those military generals are essentially still running the country.

I am reminded of HCM's narrator after spending these last few weeks reading El Narco by Ioan Grillo, a cultural history that charts the rise of the Mexican drug cartels with plenty of sobering accounts of violence on the border and both Mexican coasts. So sobering that I'll never want to light up a joint for as long as I live. The implication that we're all at fault is so obvious it doesn't even warrant mentioning. Or does it? El Narco is such brutal read that compels me to think beyond finger-wagging, or to at least put the finger-wagging on hold while I meditate on a different kind of implication that comes from being a citizen of the Global North who has spent a lot of time with genocide survivor testimonies I read for all the Central American studies classes I took back in undergrad. The privilege of being able to consume such testimonies from the comforts of my two-bedroom apartment in Silverlake I had in 2001 isn't lost on me.

However, this time the violent insurgencies aren’t ideological, they’re darkly and intentionally criminal and remind me of all the ways that capitalism has mutated to desperately sociopathic levels. Unlike the narrator in Senselessness though I don't feel paranoid about being persecuted, but I do feel like I'm going a little insane.

At first it was chilling, the hair on my head standing straight up and out at the banal depictions of violence. 100,000 deaths. One victim equaling a hundred bullets. And then something so typically American happened to me: I couldn't stop. I super-sized. I developed a low grade addiction and called it research. I kept reading and reading ever so voraciously, flirting with narco blogs, daring myself to look at the carnage. I felt my body drain of humanity in the presence of snuff films; real as  the threatening banners with succinct messages promising a fate worse than death to those who dare skim what is not rightly theirs off the top of the deadliest of trades. ​I did myself a raw and what Maggie Nelson's calls in The Art of Cruelty ​a "grave disservice by staying riveted by top-of-the-hour ad nauseum "proof" that [we] humans have always pursued...the bloody business of genocide, state-sponsored war, terror and individual acts of sadism across space and time."

Before it was easy to pretend I wasn't aware of it. If you've ever done drugs then you can understand how easy it gets to pretend stuff doesn't exist.  I avoided a lot of what was happening in Mexico in the last five years because I just didn't have the stomach to look at the real let alone the representations of violence in the eye. Why rehearse injurious terror I mused while smoking my little French Theory cigarettes. And I felt far removed from the cultural dynamics happening in the capital city of my father's homeland mostly because I was estranged from family and didn't feel connected to any of the queer or activist or organizing or artistic communities. I didn't have any friends in Mexico and so to speak truthfully yet brusquely I didn't have any investment.

Well now I want to connect.

I’ve been reading up on the Drug War to prepare for a trip to Mexico City with collaborator and friend Rubén Martinez, along with Los Angeles performance artist Rafa Esparza. We have planned to meet with various artists, writers, and cultural critics in Mexico engaged with the current social context of violence, drug economies and its concomitant artistic representations. These conversations will take place in museums and other intellectual holding spaces that offer a safety to them, one that will make it easy to talk about and defend certain representations. Discussing the ethical and challenging implications of artistic responsibility in representing the social milieu for the global spectator isn't new. The representation often comes through an American or European lens. But we'll be talking about the Mexican social context and for me, it is an opportunity to learn about the artist's role in preserving some semblance of humanity in those that arrive to the work in question.

In preparation for the trip though I wonder: does consuming range of high-middle-and-lowbrow narco related cultural productions like Tucanes De Tijuana, El Gallo De Oro, Miss Bala, El infierno, El Narco, ​and Reina Del Sur put me on the same plane as fans of the Saw franchise? The representations of violence might not be overt or avowed or as crass as Jigsaw's reign of terror, but isn't there a thread of prurience that places it all on similar terrain?

And then I think about authenticity, about origin. What gives me the right to talk about something I feel so distant from, whether it's a privileged disavowal or not. Could I write the next Salvador​ or The Tattooed Soldier​? I look at the work of Natalia Almada and Teresa Margolles​, both of whom are renown artists with roots in Culiacán, Sinaloa and understand the impetus, if not the divine right to tell the story of what is happening because of the connection. It makes sense that they get to and to do so and doing so in a way that doesn't rehearse a crude and cruel violent mise en scène but rather creates a poetics of aesthetically rigorous empathy. The creative impulse towards a politic of compassion and action is always the hope. But considering how enormous of a reach the drug trade has, that the goods reach as far as New York and London, the Bay Area and wherever there are nightclubs and pot bars and how defensive we get when our buzz is killed, does the structure of feeling surrounding the way we take in the works of Almada and Margolles already preclude a possible substantive and actionable compassion? 

Doesn't that mean that we all have a drug piece inside us all? And how to access that piece inside us all that connects us to the drug economy without creating a pornography of terror?

​


on parasitism and direct action

"Reading a book can help someone decide to take action but it is not the same thing as taking action. Writing a book is not the same as taking action. The responsibility of every writer is to take their place in the vibrant, creative activist movements along with everybody else. The image created by the male intellectual model of an enlightened elite who claims that their artwork is their political work is parasitic and useless for us."

- Sarah Schulman on the responsibility of the writer.

Against Nostalgia

It's the morning after the big event. Last night I was on a panel with folks connected to Jabberjaw. It was the opening keynote panel for the Los Angeles edition of the Experience Music Project conference that usually happens every year in Seattle.​ I submitted the panel proposal late last year when I saw that the call for papers had a distinctly Los Angeles bent centered on locality, organic musical community formations, identity and overall clique-y scenester-ness. I hit up Michelle Carr, co-proprietor of Jabberjaw slash archivist on Jabberjaw emphemera and now editor of the upcoming anthology It All Dies Anyway: LA, Jabberjaw, and the End of an Era because the book project was creating a flutter of excitement from previous patrons and members of the old Jabberjaw community. It seemed like a great way for all of us on the Jabberjaw Facebook group to take our communications, creative exchanges, tensions and other healthy beefs into the public.

I drove down from the Bay yesterday morning. I arrived to my parents' house in Huntington Park to basically put together a 100+ slide slow for the event. I arrived early enough to set up my tech stuff while greeting the who-was-who of Jabberjaw past. Time has been kind to us.

This was my first EMP contribution ever and the combination of caffeine and nerves was one thing but the feedback on the mics took me off balance and I probably didn't say as much as would have liked to. I was really happy to be on a panel with some of Jabberjaw's brightest stars, to be amongst friends from back then who I'd stand next to and be the most present I've ever been in my young life. Sure brightness can sometimes blind and as someone told me after the panel, this was the nicest and restraint I've ever been when it comes to discussing issues of race-class-gender-privilege. I woke up thinking about it this morning. I felt like I was trying to reference the teenage person inside of me that was a frequent patron and sometime performer at Jabberjaw and that person wasn't articulating the burden of identity during that period in the early 90s. The young person inside me saw the way Riot Grrl polarized people in the Jabberjaw community, the micro-aggressive iterations against feminists taking the space back, even if it was only psychic space, and it haunted me. If gender spooked folks into acting like their dads, I was not about to bring up race or ethnicity. Jabberjaw, for as much as it gave us all permission to imagine living our lives creatively and not starve, it was still kind of a nihilistic space. And that was the allure. It was so many things at once--dystopic and hopeful crawling with innocent Peter Pans and  intense addictive personalities.

Spot the little identitarian-in-process with the black cherry lips in front.

Spot the little identitarian-in-process with the black cherry lips in front.

Did it scare me? Maybe it did. Was it worth it to me to speak up even when deep down I knew Jabberjaw was as diverse space a space as it was ever going to get if I wanted to see bands I gave a shit about? I mean, even if Jeffrey, Sajay, Sisi, Adam, Jessie, or Gabe or any number of my friends of color didn't want to talk about it, make a big deal about being the brown and black faces in this sometimes sea of white, it was our prerogative. Were we all politicized? I surely wasn't at 17. I could barely swallow calling myself a feminist. It is hard dressing for battle. But even now it's not like I'm a very good at being a person of color, whatever that means. I'm reminded every day about structural racism and fall back all the things I had to do to be a good cockroach and survive all that symbolic ontological annihilation, even when it's coming from supposed allies. All I knew back then was that I loved shows and that sometimes things got awkward for brown kids. 

We do bring it up, however. We do it behind closed doors. Over telephone conversations. In a 'zine that will be distributed to maybe 5 people. And sometimes in documentaries like Martin Sorrendeguy's Mas Alla De Los Gritos/Beyond The Screams: A U.S. Latino Hardcore Punk Documentary or Kerri Koch's Don't Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl​ or James Spooner's Afro Punk...the other black experience.

​And even then those documents aren't enough. When you have three narratives, they become the GO-TO narrative for all things brown and punk, or female and punk and so on, so forth. Riot Grrrl gets cast time and time again as this white, privileged, educated space, when my time in Riot Grrrl was spent with bad ass Chicanas and Filipinas into punk and fucking shit up and being way too much for the white girls around us too conveniently clueless about their varying forms of privilege. The elision of Los Angeles Riot Grrrl is annoying mostly because I feel like this is the Riot Grrrl narrative you've been waiting and hoped to find in Sara Marcus' love letter to Bikini Kill otherwise known as Girls To The Front. But that elision just underscores the quandary of having a conversation about race in those circles--no one was ready. But those tensions gave way mostly because they had no choice and explode into new and exciting forms of identity-based spatial awareness. Like I said last night, if it weren't for Jabberjaw I'd not know the brilliant, liberatory genius of Vaginal Davis. Vag went on to create some of the most exciting performance venues for gender outlaws in Los Angeles, spaces where you could engage with the collision of sex, identity, practice and radical self-formation.

​Now twenty years after these creative movements, communities and eras there we are seeing the emergence of curators, editors, archivists and librarians coming forth with the ephemera they held onto carefully and sharing it with the rest of us. That's exciting to me because it is an opportunity to create new and counter-narratives to what we know about punk/indie/DIY culture. My main impetus in sending in the panel proposal was to bring attention to the care that Michelle Carr has taken with all of these historical materials and the vision she has to find a receptacle for these materials in the form of a coffee table book. She took care of Jabberjaw when it was a living space and continued to take care of Jabberjaw in its living death.

I am a fan, a champion of the organic archivist--those with personal libraries containing important ephemera like flyers, photographs, 'zines, cassette demos, compilation records and Xeroxed writings about DIY culture, 3rd wave feminism, hardcore post-punk, rock posters, Riot Grrrl, and all things Los Angeles in the 1990s. A few weeks ago I finally gave Lucretia Tye Jasmyne my Riot Grrrl Los Angeles oral history. I had been asked to give my oral history by a few other curators and scholars working on the Riot Grrrl movement and I either didn't have time to or just hadn't undone the knot of anxiety that kept me from wanting to relive that time in my life. Props to Chelsea Starr for being tenacious in broadening the dearth of voices of color in the RG discourse and to Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss who're busy working on curating an extensive exhibit on Riot Grrrl culture nationally. Astria has gone so deep into the archive she's unearthed my fanzine Soda Jerk (copies that Lucretia Tye still has and has promised to mail to me) and compilation cassette I put together called Fountain Of Youth. ​For more insight to Astria and Ceci's work, check out: http://riotgrrrlcensus.tumblr.com/

This is the work that is really thrilling to me. People not asking for permission to get our stories told, no matter how fraught and complicated and drowning in nostalgia they may be...​

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I wish we could've talked about how in the photos of the audience, nary a cell phone was visible. No one was looking down at the wretched pager going off in their jean pockets or busy capturing themselves by way of an Instagram selfie. I can't imagine a band like Low performing to utter quietude today.

Okay, I smell nostagia so I'll stop here.

* A note about the photographs: from the Jabberjaw Facebook Group Postings. My apologies that I don't have the photo credit, but please feel free to post who the photographers are. I believe the Bratmobile photo is by Ben Clark, but I am not entirely certain.​

FROM L.A. >>> THE BAY.

Well I didn't see this coming.​

​Or maybe I did. It's hard to say since I've spent the bulk of my adult life stuck in that hometown loyalty vortex that challenges the imagination and stuffs your brain with some things Dodger blue. It was just that I thought I'd always live, love, thrive and die in Los Angeles, except for those 14 months when I lived in New York.

But looky here, I ended up in the Bay Area, that place that weirdly became the gay Mecca I was ambivalently resentful towards for no apparent reason than a chip on my shoulder is just like my default mode sometimes. But I'm here. Now. Any why not? Love and career are some of the most compelling reasons to uproot yourself. And I did. And it's GOOD.

Like last weekend for instance, marked the end of my fourth week and San Francisco saw a hint of an early Spring. The sun was blooming. The sky was a bright cornflower blue. The clouds were few but powder white and succulent in the sky.​ I drove into the city (because I live in Oakland!) and arrived to a bagel brunch organized by Beth and Ali, held to welcome me, the new butch in town. Isn't that the nicest thing ever? 

I walked in, holding my sweetheart's hand and a canvas bag full of bubble water and sparkling wine giddy with anticipation. I've reached a point where I don't really get social anxiety or expect my fun to come from anywhere else other than my own guts and heart and brain meats. I'm optimistic to a fault so I was super eager to transfer my inner fun onto a new world peopled by beautiful, talented, generous artist/creative types. I can't help it. I'm just like a naturally curious sentient being and I ask questions and offer my own solicited intimacies in ways that enable me to continue being generous to humans. It was NICE. To get out of my head and into my body. To get out from under the burden of screenburn and amplified noise vis-a-vis social media and into the faces of strangers turning acquaintances turning friends.

For three hours and then some I was welcomed by a community. It's an idea I think we should all honor whenever the opportunity reveals itself. I admit that for the bulk of my life I fetishized the small town--mostly because I've longed for a sense of belonging. You think you might get that because the less-ness of bodies brings us closer together, hungry for warmth. Scarcity doesn't make a community.

I realized recently as I saw the constant thread in my life emerge, the thread of creating community. You work at it and then you work at it some more. And you see the fruit, the investment and you put some in the community bank and you see it grow and it's there and now there's so much of it wherever you go.

Whether it's goods to share, food to eat, tales and glory to gather around, the important part is doing.​

Connect.​