Arturo E. Romo-Santillano
XOLOTL SOUP is in part a re-performance of Stations of the Cross, an homage and dedication to the original work
ADDITIONAL NOTES:
ASCO was virulent. Virulently funny, seriously nauseating. ASCO was also multivalent--depending on who you ask, Stations of the Cross was ASCO’s first performance; or was performed before ASCO existed. It was a protest against the Vietnam War; or was a performance designed to shock people who were doing their last minute Christmas shopping. It might have been related to Catholic processions common in East LA at the time, a pious updating of a traditional public form; or, it might have been an act of beautiful clowning. It was probably all of these things, multivalent identity meant that the group and its actions could attach themselves to multiple entry points of the body politic and infect it. Intention of re-performance as a tactic in XOLOTL SOUP: By re-performing and re-embodying the original work, the performers involved in XOLOTL SOUP address the temporal nature of performance and offer solutions to the inability of performance art to span generations and have physical presence beyond the brief period of the original performance. The goal of the artists was to re-perform Stations of the Cross as close to the original as possible, knowing full well that reproducing the work was impossible and would not be the intention or result of the re-performance; and that the inevitable differences between the original and the re-performance would be useful. Importance of re-performance: XOLOTL SOUP, insomuch as it is a re-performance of Stations of the Cross, is a homage, restatement and re-embodiment of the intention of the original work. It is also however, different than the original, especially in context. When both original and re-performance are considered side by side, a doubling takes place, through which comparisons between 1971 and 2011 can be made. XOLOTL SOUP suggests that this doubling and the resulting animating effect that it has on a static, historicized original is a valuable component to re-performance as a practice. This practice should be undertaken with other historic performance pieces.
Expanded Notes (from notebook): This should start by saying: “ASCO was virulent” Virulently funny, I tried on ASCO’s mask; This piece is about re-performance. Its purpose was to embody an image and an action that took place December 24th 1971/72. On that date, Willie Herron III, Harry Gamboa Jr. and Gronk dressed for disturbance and laughs (my take), and went walking on Whittier Blvd. “ASCO was multivalent” Depending on who you ask, Stations of the Cross, was ASCO’s first performance; or was performed before ASCO existed. It was a protest against the Vietnam War, or was a performance designed to shock people who were doing their last minute Christmas shopping, or, it might have been related to Catholic processions common in East LA at the time, a pious updating of a traditional public form, or it might have been related to clowns. It was probably all of these things, multivalent identity meant that the group and its actions could attach themselves to multiple entry points of the body politic and infect it. (I was startled because when I touched it, I thought it was still dead.) That being said, Re-enactment of past performances and actions conjures new meaning, conjures irony and disturbs established ideas about a given performance by adding secondary contexts to the history of that particular performance. By doubling the history of the performance by re-enactment, a past work can refract current concerns while maintaining a sort of oscillating attachment to its original, authentic manifestation. Retracing the path of an original performance serves a function that blurs a line; the three of us step in the footsteps of those three. Our conjuring doubles the vision of the viewer who might wonder if they are looking at contemporary performance or something from 1971. Which war is being protested? Which political oppression? Here’s this: Thing is, when we put on the image, we were echoes of the past, but through anachronism, we were also exceedingly more present and real than any photographic documentation of the long gone original performance. And through re-enactment, we speak to our own time directly while pulling the past into our speech. This reproduction, not mechanical but corporal, approximated the image of the original, but switched the context. Same street, same images, but different in motion, different when the animating questions, which war? which community? which economic collapse? which gutting and cutting? are applied, and the reproduced image begins to move laterally, or swerve, shiver and pivot along different axes or compress to different social contingencies or warp according to different contextual vectors. We sign this re-enactment with the signature of our living bodies—it belonged to us for the moment we embodied it. Now, the image is loose again and we claim no ownership over it. While re-performing, we can do some things with performance that we can’t do when reading about it or looking at documentation of the performance in a book or on a video; when our bodies are in the image, we become the image as we are being informed by the image as we interpret the image as we change the image while looking out through it. Embodiment is a type of empowerment. My relationship with the original is made dynamic by embodiment. 2011 |