AWKWARD INTIMACIES: SOME NOTES ON MY WORK

Yo, MCs better start chatting about what's really happening

Because if you ain't chatting about what's happening

Where you living? What you talking about?

                                                - Dizzee Rascal, “Brand New Day,” Boy in da Corner

While I don’t know that I would necessarily apply the bravado of Mr. Rascal’s lyrics to my own work, this quote popped into my head recently upon realizing that dialectical materialism is sort of Marx (& crew)’s “real talk” moment. That led me to the importance of naming, of “chatting about what’s really happening,” but also chatting about what has happened, which is more precisely where my work fits into this equation.

The way that I consider the past from the standpoint of the present can best be understood through “hauntology,” a term used by Jacques Derrida in his Spectres of Marx. This idea, this word, is a no-brainer to the type of person I embody - female, Mexican-American, a victim of sexual and physical violence, someone who is stared at or commented on for reasons ranging from my tendency to wear black to my large ass. The space I inhabit, particularly in public, is constantly being considered as a potential past, current, or future site of trauma. Also inherent in traversing public space, particularly urban public space, for someone who occupies a body, existence, and/or mindset of an “other” is the very real presence of the lack of my history, of the places and memories important to me that will be torn down or forgotten without remorse or even a measly gold plaque. The (big A) Archive, as it turns out, is just another MC not “chatting about what’s really happening” or what really has happened to a significant number of people.

It is within these hidden histories of spaces and the people who use them that I literally and figuratively produce work. My process is research-heavy and interdisciplinary (mostly because I’m a massive nerd). It certainly has strong ties to anthropological and experimental archaeological investigation, but the type of investigation I engage in does not end when the piece is performed or even after its documentation has been edited down to a 2 minute Quicktime file prepared for Internet streaming. Much of what excites me about performance as an art and as a means of research is its potential for embodied transmission of knowledge and memory, an idea I discovered a language for in Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire. So I tend to repeat specific actions in specific places for a specific amount of time to try to, I don’t know, utilize the liminal nature of durational work to get some sort of sense for the story or idea I encountered that led me to create something for and about it, which of course, means that the performance itself isn’t usually the end of the work. After falling in love with an idea and discovering something new about it, it’s difficult to relegate it to the existence of a spectre. Works literally create other works or I make works about old works or old ideas. Or I just change my mind. I have a lot of issues with framing anything.

Which then brings me to the idea of object agency in the materials and general aesthetic logics my work engages. One of the more important media I use is my body, which certainly is able to assert itself either over or in a different way than my brain. I feel like it’s pretty obvious that bodies have methods of learning and stored knowledge independent from the brain, otherwise a lot of things about being a human amongst other humans would be a lot easier. So the other media I use are just as banal and every day as one’s own body. I am actively lo-fi in my performance documentation, and in 2D work, I have most prominently used things like 8 ½ x 11 sheets of printer paper, used biore strips, partially-erased notebook pages, and accidental photographs. In How to Make an Art, Jayson Musson, as his alter-ego Hennessey Youngman, advises the Internet “Make sure you say [your art is] exploring something or challenging or investigating, but don’t say it’s solving anything, all right?” Though Musson is clearly using the character of Youngman as a means for institutional critique, this is very essentially how I feel about a lot of my work. Real talk. The agency of the objects I use exists in that they aren’t elevated above what they are. They’re simple, small, and a little bit boring, but I sort of like that. In trying to “[chat] about what’s really happening,” using the aesthetic of the everyday makes sense, I think. I also generally don’t respond too well to the big, bright, glossy stuff.