Byline: Yxta Maya Murray

Summer festivities abound in the warmer weather. There’s New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, and Cinespia Cemetery Screenings at LA’s own Hollywood Forever. Museums are no exceptions putting on events. LACMA used to host summer jazz fests. The Hammer hosts dance parties. In the last few years, The Broad took advantage of this beach-season custom. From 2016 to 2018, director of audience engagement Ed Patuto, along with curators such as James Spooner and Brandon Stosuy, allowed a host of iconoclastic artists to run wild through the museum’s pristine halls. These events were deemed “(Non)objective Summer Happenings.”

“Happenings” first appeared on the art scene in 1963, when Allan Kaprow held an anarchic New Jersey–based “Tree Happening” that he hoped would abolish the “artist-audience” divide. The Broad’s update of this fest worked to dismantle gender barriers through the inclusion of queer and nonbinary artists. Still, it didn’t seem likely that the Broad could achieve its radical goals, since the museum is a luxury behemoth riddled with disciplinary mandates. Happeners would arrive at the Broad’s scary, Death Star-esque building knowing that if they crossed the artist-audience divide by hugging a Murakami they would be arrested.

But Ed Patuto pulled off great shows. When reached by telephone, he explained that the Happenings were inspired by his life in New York circa 1970s and 1980s. “Back then you’d go to gallery shows and performances in lofts and then go hear music,” he said. “It’s not like any of these things were separated from each other, and the core of [the Broad’s] collection is a lot of art from the ’80s created in LA and New York. I wanted to give people a flavor of what was the environment that helped produce all of that artwork that they’re seeing on the walls of the museum.”

One of the finest examples of Broad hybridization occurred in June 2016, when the LA-based Mutant Salon collective occupied its Oculus Gallery. Here, Happeners encountered a beauty parlor filled with gender “mutants” who fashioned themselves out of merkins, makeup and pantyhose play. Just as fantastic was Brontez Purnell’s August, 2016 action, when Purnell skateboarded around the Broad’s foyer dressed in BVDs and threw toilet paper rolls at the audience while accompanied by a Ronald Reagan soundtrack.

But could anything have been more fun than the Kembra Phaler’s concert the following year? In June, 2017, members of Phaler’s art band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, jammed around the Broad dressed like troll dolls, while inserting reversed crucifixes into their orifices and screaming tunes like “Ghost Boyfriend.” Later that August, radical Catholic Linda Mary Monsato appeared in the lobby dressed like Mother Teresa. Happeners approached Monsato looking for blessings, which she administered by yanking them back and forth by the neck while singing “Lullaby and Goodnight.”

“I think that what it did is it put LA artists in a context with other artists from here in the U.S. but also internationally,” Patuto said. “I also think that it showed that LA is a place where the community supports greatly innovative programming.”

The Broad continues to host vivid summer programs, and this year expanded its repertoire to harmonize with its blockbuster show Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983. It held a series of jazz concerts (one of them curated by Quincy Jones) meant to complement the thrilling range of artists featured in the exhibit. Music had always been part of the Broad’s summer scene, and the Soul concerts upped the ante with galvanic performances by artists such as saxophonist Roscoe Mitchel, pianist Brett Carson, and the galactically talented vocalist and dancer Eryn Allen Kane. With its burgeoning tradition of hot-weather entertainments that merge politics, song, movement, sculpture, video and painting, we will be excited to see what the Broad plans next summer.

In her Culver City studio on a late summer afternoon, encaustic painter, printmaker and educator Pamela Smith Hudson revealed the origins of her vocation as a “materials artist” dedicated to exploring the potentials of paint, clay, print and wax: “My dad was a cement mason,” she said, while surrounded by her liquid-looking charcoal, teal, rose and cream-white canvases. “Dad worked on the federal building,” she emphasized. “So cement, plaster and wood were always around the house. Also, my mom was an artist, or had been.”

With a landscape-oriented show that stretched from early spring through the waning days of summer at the California African American Museum (the exquisitely curated Charting the Terrain, which also featured works by Eric Mack), and a swiftly mounting reputation for taking encaustic painting to new heights, Hudson has become a new luminary on the Los Angeles arts circuit. For most of her adult life, though, she has produced work quietly in her studio when able to find the time. Until recently, she juggled painting, raising her children with her husband, working as an arts supplies representative for major companies, and teaching at Otis College of Art and Design and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But three years ago, Hudson’s mother grew ill and Hudson realized that she wanted to bring her art out into the world.

“My mom stopped painting to take care of the children, and I never knew she was a painter until we went to a Lee Krasner [show]. We were looking at the paintings, and she told me that she had been an artist. Later, after she got sick, there was a connection between her being in hospice and making this journey of leaving her body that made it okay [for me to focus more on my art]. I realized I had been of service to my family—family’s first—but I decided to have an exhibiting career.”

While Hudson only began showing in earnest in 2015, she has worked in encaustic since the 1990s: That’s when she met Daniel Freeman, the printer at the Gemini G.E.L. print shop and publishing house. Freeman noted a resemblance between Hudson’s practice and that of Jasper Johns, with whom he had collaborated. Freeman encouraged Hudson to study Johns’ methods: a direction that led to her immersion in the ancient practice of mixing pigments with hot beeswax to create a variety of effects. Used by artisans since the era of ancient Egypt (important examples include the Fayum mummy portraits, c. 100–300 CE), encaustic can be carved, smoothed like lacquer, or built up like putty. Johns reinvigorated the method with his famous painting Flag (1954–55), mixing wax with strips of newspaper to create an uncanny and iconic image. Hudson found herself inspired by his example.

“Wax dries so fast,” Hudson said, showing a visitor a radiant and rippling graphite panel. “That’s why you can get layers in between layers, and you can see between the translucency. It’s like in music, that silence that’s in between the notes, in between spaces, that you want to capture. A lot of my work is about revealing and unrevealing, and then covering up again. It’s a back and forth.”

As Hudson talks about her practice, she often circles back to the revelations that occur in music. Her longtime passion for jazz inspired one of the pieces that starred in the CAAM show: Eric Dolphy’s House 1/2 (2010) is a beautiful burned-brown mixed-media diptych with a strip of fire-engine red cutting through a charred-looking landscape. This work is a meditation on the Los Angeles home of American jazz great Dolphy, which Dolphy had used as a studio. It was turned into a community center after his death, but the house then burned in the 1992 uprisings triggered by the acquittal of four police officers filmed brutally beating Rodney King.

“It was such an important historical site,” Hudson said. “[John] Coltrane recorded there, and so did [Charles] Mingus, and Miles Davis was coming by. And then after Dolphy died [the house was destroyed]. So the painting’s a memorial piece.”

In the studio, the LA sunlight glimmered across gray-black panels that looked like the roiling ocean and a lichen-dappled forest floor. A pink canvas revealed a mottled rose that resembled tender flesh. One round painting glowed cerulean, like an unharmed planet. In all of these works, materiality becomes a strategy for cementing life and history into durable forms, even as they slip away on account of catastrophes both natural and human-made.

Hudson reached down and grazed her fingers gently over the circular blue painting.

“The translucent layers of encaustic investigate these systems of things that were there before, and things that will exist, and things that keep moving forward,” she said, smilingly slightly. “There’s a philosophical aspect as well.”

When is a painting high art, and when is it just nice wallpaper?

On May 10, I learned the answer to this question when attending ARTXFOOD’s inaugural art-themed dinner, Hallowed Ground. ARTXFOOD is produced by ArtCubed Los Angeles, which hosted a “part salon, part summit happening” at Goya Studios. The event involved eating a fancy dinner designed by celebrity chef Richard Blais while surrounded by the luminous paintings and sculptures of LA-based artist Greg Ito.

Art dinners, as it so happens, are a thing—though in a weird, half-formed way. If readers do a Google search, they will discover similar centaurs in the forms of “Transparent Platform,” a production company that in 2016 held “a live art dining soirée” at London’s L’Escargot Members’ Club, inviting consumers to eat while watching artists paint a nude transgender model. And in Moss, Norway, one may nibble asparagus salad while staring at some of Edvard Munch’s metaphysical horrors at Refsnes Gods, an “art hotel” filled with Munchalia.

ARTXFOOD’s ambiance held up well to the international food-art world’s freewheeling mise-en-scène. Goya’s tasteful space was irradiated by Ito’s pop-colored show, which touched on fairy tales, family communion, and time: On the floor gleamed a big ceramic prince-frog and a parade of bright black-and-white swans. One wall featured a painting that was bifurcated into black-and-pink sections, revealing graceful hands caressing themselves amidst treetops. A triptych showed one pink hand and one brown hand reaching for the other, and two superimposed faces leaning in for a kiss.

After allowing for about 20 art-appreciation minutes, however, it was time to eat. Amiable docents led guests into an inner sanctum, the “ArtCube:” This little house held more of Ito’s art, as well as dinner tables. My favorite of Ito’s paintings presented a view through a window that revealed a striking strip of turquoise and a sparkly flame flickering among shadows… but I sort of forgot the artwork because I was eating bourbon-soaked cherries, and then came some weird-tasting Hawaiian bread doused in tepid bone marrow, and then a nice mash of chicken oysters folded in a Yuzu leaf. An insanely sweet “unicorn soup” followed, blending together sea urchin, corn and a pun. Next came black duck and onyx carrots glazed with pomegranate syrup and… charcoal dust? The latter dish excitingly recalled the noir libido-mourning feast in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours (1884); but the duck was overcooked. For dessert I despairingly licked a plate of purple ice cream, white icing, white bread and an intentional smattering of ants.

The goal of this hybrid spectacle appeared initially to hearken back to older, even ancient, synesthetic practices. High points in this history were reached by former painter and Provençal cuisine maître Richard Olney, and the dinners conjured by Alice B. Toklas for Gertrude Stein and friends. Though perhaps even these heroes were mere epigones of the ancient Romans: The 1st-century Pompeiian Villa of Mysteries was a safe house where elite women were trained in ecstatic Dionysian arts, and rested their orgy-exhausted limbs in a dining room (the triclinium) surrounded by ravishing frescoes of Bacchae submitting to the lash.

Dreaming of Bacchae noshing on Toklas’ pot brownies, I regret that in today’s consumerist climate a food-art event inevitably creates a fatal contest, where food will always win. Our culture has cultivated our habits of admiring and critiquing meals. But these practices are not as well supported for the arts. Does one stand before a sculpture for 30 seconds or an hour? Do we like Manet and/or Gronk? With art, there is no bitter, salty, sour or sweet—we have to access mysterious hierarchies to develop our tastes. 

Thus, I would rather study Greg Ito’s work without the distractions of antsy ice cream, which nearly converted his great art into the above-mentioned wallpaper. Much depends upon dinner, and, at ARTXFOOD, its undue influence threatened to transform me into a frenzied satyr like George Costanza.

Some readers may recall George Costanza. He is the rotund enraged one, from Seinfeld. There’s that episode where Costanza gets in trouble with a woman because he tries to multi-platform his senses. Costanza doesn’t try to host a Pompeiian “art dinner” exactly; he wants to have sex and eat a sandwich at the same time. But when he attempts to give his lady deli-pleasure, the lunchmeat gabbles out of his mouth as if he were a zombie. His girlfriend objects by screeching and running away. 

The next day, Costanza tells Jerry that he and his girlfriend broke up because he “flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami”—as did I at ARTXFOOD, though my crashing juggernaut was made of mad aspirations weighed down by fatty bread and sugary soup.

On the evening of June 25, 2016, a group of gorgeous mutants rushed out of The Broad museum and began loving themselves and each other on South Grand Avenue. This band of performers, known collectively as Mutant Salon, is run by the LA-based visionary artist Young Joon Kwak. The collective had assembled at the beginning of the evening inside the Broad’s tiny Oculus Hall, as a part of the summer Happening series. But Kwak and her renegades could not abide by their confinement. Mutant Salon streamed out of the dark, broody Oculus, dashed through the museum’s blue-chip galleries, and ran into the lamplit dazzle of Downtown LA. Wearing little more than makeup, gold boots, wedding veils and bikini tops, the seraphs charged around the entrance of Eli Broad’s luxury spaceship, engaged in a performance that they called “We Make Each Other Beautiful.”

“[Working with the Broad] was a learning experience for us,” explained Kwak, who is not only Mutant Salon’s co-organizer (with Marvin Astorga, Sarah Gail Armstrong, Project Rage Queen, and Alli Miller), but also its founder. A Korean-American trans performance artist, rock star and ceramicist, Kwak chatted about the Salon and the rest of her work on a recent Monday afternoon in her Eagle Rock studio, while also allowing a visitor to cuddle her biomorphic sculptures, epoxy paintings and 14-year-old Yorkie named Ms. Tina. Wearing a bronze necklace in the pussy-friendly shape of Baubo, the Greek goddess Demeter’s jester, as well as a fetching military jacket with the words “Rest In Power” embroidered on the back, she described the cognitive dissonance of installing Mutant Salon at the Broad, a site of extreme cultural power and seemingly endless money.

When contemplating Mutant Salon’s election to transgress the borders of the Broad and move into the city streets, it’s critical to remember, “how important [our] community is to the project,” Kwak said, specifying that she works with queer, trans, woman and “POC” [people of color] folks. “We didn’t know that [the Broad’s Happening] would be a $35 event, and that stings, because a lot of us are poor, so we just wanted to make sure the people in our community would be able to come out and participate. We didn’t just want to have the Salon in the Oculus, which is a weird anus of the museum. We wanted to put on the performance for free, too.”

Kwak, who just won a Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant and is represented by Commonwealth and Council, initiated Mutant Salon as an itinerant piece of relational and performance art. Mutant Salon is a moveable beauty salon, filled with comfy chairs, dress-up clothes, makeup, soothing unguents, handmade porcelain combs. It is enlivened by a changing cast of performers who interact with each other while applying mascara, donning merkins or braiding their hair in a protest-cum-love-in that exorcises the oppressions of mainstream beauty standards.

The Salon had its genesis in 2012, when Kwak moved to Los Angeles from Chicago to attend USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. Born in Queens, NY, in 1984, and educated in Chicago, Kwak rented an apartment on Olympic and Vermont, but did not feel “safe to get dressed and do makeup” around that area. She began to use her USC studio for self-care, and in the process discovered that she was creating a “safe space” for liberatory dressing. Friends and acquaintances began dropping by and participating, and thus the first stages of Mutant Salon were born.

The frontier-crossing “mutant,” whom Kwak defines as a person who is “mutable, transformative and hybrid,” is an apt icon for Kwak’s larger oeuvre, which has long challenged binary gender and thinking by adapting materials and ideas into unexpected forms.

In 2010, after receiving her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Humanities MA at the University of Chicago, she combined the elements of yoga, oil, fire, emotional submission, resurrection and ornithology to make (with Anneka Herre) the video Transgenesis II: Dead of Dawn, in which she is cast as an oil-drowned baby bird who is washed clean by a loving if over-controlling mommy. Kwak’s gifts for transformation later found expression in 2013’s Excreted Venus, a photograph that shows her bound, doused in potter’s clay, and posed (it seems to this observer) like the goddess Lakshmi. Was this sculpture? Performance? Her challenges to art categories continued with her handcrafts—as in 2014’s Mutating Stakes, multi-colored and drippingly anthropomorphic painted sculptures made out of steel, plaster, silicone rubber body molds, a wig head, epoxy resin and facial cosmetics. Then in October, 2017, she put on a performance, with Kim Ye, titled Where I Am My Own Other, Where My Mother Is Me, wherein another loving but disturbing mother-lover figure feeds Kwak’s persona a large, deeply pigmented pink cake, which later gets smeared all around her body and onto the floor, in a gesture that seems related to Jackson Pollock’s action paintings as well as Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks) (1979).

Performance is where Kwak brings her mixed mediums and her message of unity most intimately together. Her life as a rock star began with Xina Xurner, the initially Chicago-based band that she started with her partner, Marvin Astorga, in 2011. Xina Xurner, whose name plays on the specter of the diva-hero Tina Turner, set out to deliver “cunty noise-diva-dance anthems that ooze sex, death and decay.” It got its start in underground Windy City clubs, which Kwak notes were most noteworthy for a “punk scene which is also noise-bro-dominated,” but which quickly made space for Xina Xurner’s music. “It was like, we’re doing it for Chicago!” Kwak exclaimed in her studio, describing how the audience would dance and identify along. As Xina Xurner, Kwak wore evening gowns and paraded glorious grooming, and also morphed her voice with the aid of transformers. “I can shift my voice from sounding like a woman to sounding like a little baby, or go really deep, like a man, or more robotic—it’s vocal drag vocal mutation,” she explained, while fiddling with her computer, which soon began emitting operatic disco tunes.

Mutant Salon developed in tandem with Xina Xurner and shares its ethos of civic chaos and love. (As Kwak played songs from Xina’s upcoming album, Queens of the Night, she sang to her interviewer, who began dancing in the studio along with Ms. Tina.) “There’s a lot of dress up and costume [in my work],” Kwak laughed, bouncing to the music. “And we can be covered in trash and look like monsters, but we’re still beautiful, because we make each other beautiful.” She paused for a second, and grew thoughtful, as the February winter light made her Baubo necklace sparkle. “There’s an idea that my friend Gordon Hall—an artist and writer—taught me about. Gordon has this idea about what he calls reparative objectification. We look at each other as objects in profound affirmation, and kind of apart from how objectification is typically dehumanizing. We twist that into something reparative, affirming.” She smiled as Queens of the Night blasted through the studio. “I want the work to be inviting and welcoming, you know? It’s about finding that balance of strangeness, and the ugly, and the monstrous, and the messy.”

 

EXCLUSIVE Premiere of Xina Xurner’s New Music Video, Gentle.

Gentle is a track from the second full length LP Queens Of The Night, by Xina Xurner (collaboration between Los Angeles-based artist/performer Young Joon Kwak & musician Marvin Astorga), released in April of 2018. Queens Of The Night is a battlecry for the femme destruction of the patriarchy through collective resistance, rage, affirmation, and transformation.

 

In ancient days of strife and warfare, a death squad of bird-women used the strategies of sound and seduction to destroy their enemies. Homer gave the Sirens a starring role in book 12 of The Odyssey, where they attempt to divert Odysseus from his returning home to Ithaca and cleansing his castle of enemies. The Sirens approach Odysseus’s black ship as it sails the western sea, and tempt him with the promise of omniscience: “We know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth,” they claim. The only way that Odysseus can fight off their temptation is to tie himself to his ship’s mast so that he doesn’t jump into the deadly waters. And so he passes them by, surviving their threat but also remaining ignorant of all the marvelous things they would teach him.

The Sirens have updated their strategy since the 8^th century B.C.E., apparently shifting from vocal homicide to the nonviolent protocols of feminism, Dada, and relational aesthetics. One of their human descendants, the performance artist Carmina Escobar, appeared in Echo Park last Saturday, and mesmerized a crowd of onlookers with a series of esoteric songs. Her strange and perfect messages, titled Fiesta Perpetua!, were accompanied by the 40-member Oaxacan youth brass band Maqueos Music, conducted by Yulissa Maqueos.

Escobar is a sound artist from Mexico, currently based in Los Angeles. In 2014, she executed Massagem Sonora, which involved standing outside of LA’s Korean Bell of Friendship and singing multi-octave scales into the bodies of strangers. Hers was a curiously intimate version of sound-bathing and water-witching: Escobar had to test out various parts of the initiate’s frame—a portion of the chest, an arm, the middle of the back—in order to find the place of resonance. Then she would cup her hands around her mouth and sing a wordless aria into the place where flesh met bone in harmony. That same year, she also appeared on Ear Meal, articulating answerless Gnostic chants while pressing her lips to the stuffed bodies of sparrows.

Fiesta Perpetua!, organized by REDCAT as part of its PST Live Art LA/LA festival (Jan 11–21), constituted a leap forward in terms of physical reach, if not audacity (for her work has been fearless from the start). Escobar was slated to appear at 1 p.m. on the lake, and deliver a “community ritual of manifestation” that followed “a mystical algorithmic schedule.” This expectation created a sort of halo of creativity around the park: Arriving at 1 o’clock sharp, I wandered about the lake looking for manifestations and mysticism—and they abounded: Here were shaved-ice sellers with their polychrome umbrellas, magical-looking joggers, signs made of occult graffiti, and two teenagers fishing in the lake for what they said were “rainbow trout.”

But then I heard a sharp, coyote-like howl, and I knew that the performance had begun.

 I ran to the west side of the lake, aiming for a small crowd of Angelenos wearing geometric spectacles and an air of lujo, calma y voluptuosidad. Their allegiance to REDCAT’s programming was also made visible by their wearing of bizarre little buttons that had been supplied by LA/LA organizers: There will be a porcelain bullfight, read one. There will be cutout carpet creeping up the walls, said another.

 

To everybody’s delight, Escobar suddenly appeared on the lake on a small raft, which was outfitted with three wooden megaphones.   She resembled a priestess in her yellow-and-white tabard, long purple skirt, turquoise earrings, pink pashmina, and glitter-gold boots. Half-vanishing inside of one of the bullhorns, she began singing a high-pitched series of notes. Her song bore a delirious, if wilder, resemblance to the enchantment wailed by the evil Siren seen on Charmed in 2002, and also recalled the great diva Leonie Rysanek’s Salome from the 1970s.

 

But whereas those two monsters had murder in mind, Escobar delivered love-struck revelations that were only barely comprehensible in her yawps and glissandos. Maqueos Music marched over to the opposite side of the lake, blazing their tenor horns and bass trombones. In a series of call-and-responses, the band would swing into parade music, prompting Escobar to hoot out like an owl and cry like a wolf, before melting into a soprano’s coloratura.

Escobar’s election to forego language in favor of unlettered voice allowed her to express some of the secrets that the Sirens offered to Odysseus so many centuries ago. What did she urge us onto? Create community might have been one lesson. Or, Remember that you are alive could have been another. These axioms, however, seem poor and paltry when spelled out, at least in comparison to the extremity of Escobar’s singing. The gulf between words and voice probably signals how difficult it is to impart the true wisdom buried in her music. Likewise, if Odysseus had to take a lesson from the Sirens, he probably wouldn’t have been able to explain their knowledge, which covered “all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.” There will be a porcelain bullfight, he might have said to friend at a local bar afterwards. Or maybe he’d mutter something about carpet creeping up the walls.

Fiesta Perpetua! extended similar profound graces, and left me hungry for more unknowing: Escobar’s work is important, beautiful, and untranslatable.

 

On Thursday evening, when performance artist Astrid Hadad began telling a glitter-bombed, sombrero-wearing rubber chicken that everything would be okay, I remembered that there was still good in the world. The day’s news had been completely crappy, and I had ridden into the Mayan Theater on a toxic tide of gloom. I arrived to see Hadad’s show, I Am Made in Mexico, which kicks off REDCAT’S  Live Art LA/LA series. Taking my place in line next to a gentle-eyed Cal State LA Critical Masculinities professor, I started grumbling that I couldn’t take three more years of this presidency.

“It’s okay,” the professor said. “There’s still art.”

“I don’t know,” I gibbered. “Art can’t save us. We haven’t hit the bottom. There’s a nuke at the bottom.”

 “All right, all right,” they soothed.

We went inside. The Mayan was packed with Latinx folks wearing buzzcuts, cats-eye glasses, and pretty freakum dresses. An Anglo person with wild silver hair and harem pants declaimed about aesthetics to a crowd of black-clad philosophers. Genderqueer heartbreakers in pompadours and cap-toes flirted with the girlz in the freakums. The DTLA cocktail of dragon sleeve tats and 40’s-style wiggle skirts, muscle shirts and mascara, began to heal hurt nerves like the balm of Gilead.  

Then Astrid Hadad exploded onto the stage, which was lit up with a pink pyramid and huge blue hearts.

Wearing a crown of two-foot pheasant feathers and a solid-gold onesie, Hadad wasted no time breaking out into a song-and-dance number about ancient Tenochtitlán, mother city of Mexico. Hadad is famous for her zanily liberationist cabaret shows, which are inspired by Bertolt Brecht and the Afro-Caribbean—themed Rumberas films of mid-20^th c. Mexico. She channeled an ancient Mexica priestess as she sang about Mother Moon, whom our ancestors once gazed at before they were exterminated by the conquerors. Hadad then began to free associate about how, in the 16^th century, the Spaniards were the “gringo imperialists of their time” who capitalized upon the exploitation and submission of other countries. “When the Spaniards saw the Aztecs committing human sacrifice and a little bit of cannibalism, they thought the Mexican people were savages,” she said, shimmying her shoulders. “But they weren’t—they were poets and sculptors and scientists and warriors.” She shrugged, trying to reconcile the complicated attributes of Latino forebears. “Also, you know, they recycled.”

Upon this observation came a rapid costume change: With the aid of burly assistants, Hadad slipped into a massive headdress made of masks and a huge pink dress with heads on its skirt. “My outfit is like the wall the Aztecs built with the skulls of sacrificed people!” she explained. This transition led into a routine about Montezuma’s irreversible blunder of submitting to Hernán Cortés c. 1519: “When the bearded men of prophecy arrived,” she sang, from the perspective of a cinquecento cacique, “the King said that they were gods. The white soldiers rode huge beasts, with fire in their hands, and their bodies covered in metal. And in that mistake we surrendered our history and remained enslaved for 300 years!” Hadad did a can-can kick and made a moue. “But there is no use in crying!”

The crowd yelled and cheered, agreeing. I looked around but couldn’t find the Critical Masculinities professor anywhere. Meanwhile, Hadad executed another swift wardrobe switcheroo into a wide-skirted silver wedding dress, as a huge disco ball dropped from the ceiling. She began singing a jingle that resembled the groovy soundtrack of The Pink Panther. “Refugees are dying!” she hollered. She opened up a hidden panel on her skirt and unfolded it as if it were a pop-up book, revealing a black-and-white mural of a graveyard, with skeletons littered upon the ground. “A lot of people suffer for the ambition of the few! Powerful people say, ‘Give me your silver and I’ll drink your blood!’” All the while Hadad pranced back and forth with her arms outstretched: “La la la la la la la!!!!”

People were boogying in the audience. Two women, close to the stage, gyrated with their hands held high and huge smiles on their faces. What is this? I wondered. A political rally? A party? A particularly fun anti-government conspiracy? As I, too, swiveled my hips, I suddenly remembered a 2011 UCLA study finding that political oppressed minorities suffering depression could heal themselves by “actively engaged in learning, talking, and praying about [discriminatory] legislation as well as protesting it.”

I resolved that “attending an Astrid Hadad concert” should be added to that Rx. It felt way better to exult as Hadad crooned her indictments for genocide than to impotently brood at home about pass-through tax deductions and de-escalation with North Korea. The crowd boiled with excitement as she changed into a blue and yellow gown with a red tree embroidered onto it. Resplendent, she brought out the glittery rubber chicken, and began to serenade it with the classic ditty known as Cucurrucucú Paloma:

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú, Hadad sang in a high, warbly voice.

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,

Cucurrucucú, dove, don’t cry anymore

She looked at the audience, gave them a wink, and threw the wobble-headed chicken across the stage. And then she just kept dancing, because even though Hadad’s work is soaked through to the bone with tears, despair, and grief for the dispossessed, she knew what the Critical Masculinities professor had reminded me of—and what I had almost forgotten.

 

Courtesy REDCAT; All photos by Vanessa Crocini
For info on more upcoming performances:  Live Art LA/LA series