X-TRA’s Artists and Rights is a conversation series exploring what art can do at the intersection of Los Angeles’s most urgent issues and artistic practice. Each session brings four artists together around a table.
Episode 5:
The Brown Ceiling and Possible Futures
with Arshia Haq, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Latipa, and Mario Ybarra, Jr.
Moderated by Mario Ontiveros
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The artists gathered around the table today take up the artist’s role in relation to institutions; and how they are shaped by these institutions and they work to re-shape institutions. The talk about alternative pedagogical structures, and what is lost and gained as they operate within or outside of different kinds of spaces.
This episode was recorded in December 2019. One of the ways we feel this conversation connects to the present moment is through their discussion of the Brown Ceiling, a term introduced by Mario Ybarra, Jr. The artists discuss how representation of Black and Brown people in the media gets internalized and needs to be dismantled in order to break through the ceiling.
This gets pushed further when Latipa points to ways that imperialist dynamics are still underlying even well-intentioned discourses, like that of human rights and social justice. A re-orientation of these discourses, interrogating the violence of whiteness and white supremacy, is a key to breaking out of the cycles of oppression. She asks, “How we can think about possible futures that don’t reproduce the violence is of the present?”
Note: The artist Latipa was previously known as Michelle Dizon, and in this episode, she refers to herself as Michelle.
Keywords
decolonization, white gaze, representation, ethics, alternative education models, visibility, intimacy, tourist economy
Reference Links
**Scroll down for full transcript**
(L-R) Mario Ybarra Jr., Arshia Haq, Mario Ontiveros, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Latipa (née Michelle Dizon)
Mario Ybarra Jr.
Latipa
Latipa and Arshia Haq
(L-R) Mario Ybarra Jr., Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Arshia Haq, Latipa (née Michelle Dizon)
Acknowledgements
Executive Producers: Shana Lutker and Mario Ontiveros.
Recorded at Catasonic Studios in Echo Park by Mark Wheaton.
Production and editorial assistance from Sara Ellen Fowler and Theo Greenly.
This series was made possible by generous support from California Arts Council Art and Public Media Grant, the Michael Asher Foundation, and KCET’s Artbound.
Thanks to all who contributed to the development of this series, including Ellen Birrell, Andrea Bowers, Ian Chillag, Neha Choksi, Poppy Coles, Justin Cram, Gilda Davidian, Juan Devis, Sara Ellen Fowler, Harry Gamboa Jr., Theo Greenly, Kara Hart, Carren Jao, Anuradha Vikram, Brica Wilcox, Matty Wilder, and Lindsay Preston Zappas.
Transcript
(Session Recorded December 19, 2019)
Mario Ontiveros: Alright, so if we could go around and introduce ourselves.
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario: Hello Marcus Kuiland-Nazario: Artist, producer, curator, man about town.
Latipa: Michelle Dizon. Artist, filmmaker, writer, educator, theorist.
Arshia Haq: Arshia Fatima Haq. Artist, curator, informal archivist, and DJ.
Mario Ybarra Jr.: My name is Mario Ybarra, Jr. I’m an artist, co-founder of Slanguage Studio, and I trying to start up an archive called the “Ybarrchive.”
MO: So I’d like to welcome everyone. Part of what I hope today is that we can have more of a discussion rather than a Q&A sort of environment. But if there’s ever a moment where you would like to jump in and lead a discussion or facilitate or moderate, please feel free to do that. One of the things that in the general framework questions that we sent out, one of the most important ones was: what’s most urgent for you today? And how does that urgency connect to the ways of working with your ways of working with others, and building solidarity and collaboration? And I think one of the things that we’ve also been talking about is that that sense of what’s urgent can be very open-ended. And so it doesn’t necessarily need to be politically-oriented or about political obligation. One of the things we learned in an earlier discussion was that self care was really urgent for many of the cultural workers and artists and curators. And that opened up a really good discussion. So just as a general opening thing: What are some of the urgencies that you’ve been dealing with?
MYJ: Well, for me, this is Mario Ybarra, Jr. For me one of the essential things that in the point that I’m at right now, not only as an artist, but in my career is a notion of revaluing or understanding or reconsidering what value is. So that I can also create a space for assessment. Because assessment I feel now in this kind of wave, this epidemic shift that we have gone through over the past, let’s say, you know, last decade at least or two decades–it’s kind of interesting to see like how we could reframe into the future, a notion of Los Angeles. Because I’m here in Echo Park today. I haven’t been here for a while. I just haven’t crossed paths with Echo Park. And, and I hear all the notion of like, you know, gentrification and all that I do see that, but it’s still ugly as fuck. Like Echo Park is ugly, like, it’s not very pretty. It doesn’t look like Hawaii. It doesn’t look like any kind of tropical, you know, destination where I would want a vacation. It looks ugly, like there’s still dollar stores and blighted-out places next to, you know, coffee shops. So it’s not like some kind of magic wand obliterated its ugliness. So, like, what does it mean when we’re going into this future time or this new 2020 this kind of hindsight perspective year? Where can we assess, where can we read, ascribe value to things. And then as artists and cultural producers, how do we recognize the value that we contribute? Not only that, we contribute to communities, but that we contribute to artistic community which is also in need of our contributions.
MKN: I think it’s beautiful here. I love Echo Park. I love the hills here. One of my first apartments was on Fairbanks and Scott on the hillside courtyard complex. And I love this neighborhood and I love me a 99 Cent Store. And most of this damn city is like sun blighted and strange. But I think Echo Park still a really magical place for me.
MYJ: No, I think that’s great. And it’s described, and we could talk to that point in relationship to like: How you hold value here. That’s like the other point of my story is like, if you don’t hold value in relationship to a place and prescribed memory or experiences or how do we go forward into a dollar store next to, like, a little cafe coffee shop that is obviously, you know, transplanted here. How can we, my memory of here maybe my memory of Echo Park is that I got one of my wisdom teeth pulled here. So like, I think that Sunset Boulevard, maybe like that’s why I have prescribed pain to my memory here. Like I wasn’t thinking about a bungalow I was thinking about getting my teeth pulled.
MKN: LA’s a complicated place. Yeah, you know, complicated history. And that’s what’s beautiful about it here. I think, you know, this is Marcus. But back to your question about urgency. I’m like 55 years old now. And I feel the clock ticking. And so for me the urgency now as an artist is: I have only X number of years left on this body, and what am I going to do with it and how can I do less better? And how can I make better, stronger work slower and better, but with the less time that I have alive because I’m not. I’m not 45 but I’m not 65. So to me it is a real issue. I’m always really aware of time now in a different way that that I wasn’t before. So that’s what I think about a lot. And then: How do I sort of narrow my focus? I’ve done a lot of work with other artists and supporting other artists and other people and other places. And so now I’m thinking about, who is it that I really want to support? How can I support them better? So I’m trying to do less, but more and better. And that’s kind of been weighing on my mind.
AH: I think one of the things that I think about quite often in my own practice, which has had a lot of strange paths and forms that it’s taken over the years and a lot of it has been kind of working completely outside of institutional settings, deliberately. And now, and Marcus, we were talking about this a bit earlier, but just this idea of having done so many things and worn so many hats and, and that kind of being an acceptable thing to do now, whereas before it was seen as unfocused or scattered. Just, kind of, now having some access to institutions for me in the last couple of years and sitting with the discomfort of that actually. Now having this legitimacy or agency recognition and then feeling like: How do I keep staying true? In a way it was easier to stay truer to a voice without having that big… Because whether you realize it or not, you start to mold yourself to the shape of an institution. And so just thinking a lot about that and working inside or outside and how to balance those things or not balance and then just choose to go outside the building and continue to break things apart.
MKN: I’ve worked a lot inside of institutions, and inside and outside, and it does shape how you think even though you don’t want it to, you can’t help but let it rub off on you, the systems and sort of how they think it’s good things. Also, a lot of good things come out of knowing how to look at a spreadsheet and how to deal with all those, you know, admin sorts of things. But it can be really dispiriting and sort of spirit breaking, working within institutions.
AH: How we start to compare ourselves to it [institutions] becomes comparative and competitive. I find that’s really disheartening sometimes or I find my desires or my aspirations shifting. And so sometimes I have to really step back and kind of think about what my original intention was.
L: I was able to, I think, put my finger on three urgencies for me at the moment. The first is just desiring complexity.I think so much of the way the world works is about simplifying matters at every turn, and so I think that that deep desire for complexity has been a really driving force for me. I mean, especially because, you know, the people I love and care about are those whose histories are silenced or erased all together. And so for me the task of that listening isn’t as simple as just, you know, recording a story in part and parcel, because I think that every part of the ways in which we’ve learned how to do these things is broken. And so, I think a lot of the work that I’ve been doing has been invested in considering how it is that one can do that kind of memory work, you know, from from the very beginning to the end of the project–from the very conceptualization of the the grammars of documentation up to, you know, the ways in which the afterlives of that quote-unquote document or whatever it might be. The second urgency that I thought I could put my finger on in my own practices, really shifting the conversation away from representation and toward ethics. And I think that so much of discussions around, quote-unquote, marginalized groups becoming visible, really involve ideas of, you know, representation, which can more often than not get caught up in good or bad, you know, are accurate or not accurate. And so, a lot of my more recent work has really been trying to think about the ways in which, for example, imperialist dynamics continue into the present in forms that seem very well-intentioned, such as human rights discourse, but in fact, reproduce a lot of the positions in the field that are from that colonial legacy. And the third urgency that I could pinpoint is: A struggle from memory. And, you know, I think that when we discuss politics, we often get caught up in ideas of the now. You know, and for me, really breaking open ideas of temporality to think about how our present is so layered with the past and the future is integral to understanding how we can think about possible futures that don’t reproduce the violence is of the present.
MO: But how do you think you enact that shift from representation to ethics? Like, what’s the strategy that you use to do that?
L: For example, so I just published a book with a Viêt Lê called White Gaze and you know, the book is pretty simple at its core, it’s dealing with an archive of National Geographic magazines and I set certain limits to myself in dealing with these magazines. In so far as you know, I was just working with the page, pages that I selected and those pages that I selected were really, you know, ones that I was gravitating toward where there was a either a really white subject, I mean, a white photographer or white researcher looking at their quote-unquote “other” but then also, you know, I think National Geographic is so much also a history of photography itself. So whereas the apparatus, you know, with a times be, you know, related to a gun or there was a kind of like fetishization of this technology, you know, a bunch of these images… but at any rate there were these pages that I selected from magazines and then just started kind of doing poetic subtraction so that I would basically re-write the text in relation to the images, you know, obviously kind of playing with the power dynamics that are always present between text and image, the way in which, you know, images can really mean infinite things and the text ideologically grounds that image, depending on whatever, you know, wants to be said by power, usually, but, you know, with that publication, I think that it was I say, it’s too easy and too difficult. You know, it’s, it’s too easy. Because on the one hand, I think everyone wants to distance themselves from the racist representations of, you know, that in the past, you know, I think white folks might want to be like: Oh, you know, like, I don’t think that way. No, I’ve never thought that way. Or folks of color might be like: you know, I think, you know, that doesn’t exist anymore, thank goodness. But I think the more difficult part is really seeing the ways in which, you know, these positions in the field, continue into the present in ways that don’t necessarily look like, you know, these kind of blatant racist representations, but that, in fact, are kind of passing, because they reinstall certain understandings of where we are, where we position ourselves in the world. So I mean, just to make that long story short, you know, where that has taken me is just in asserting that that work in White Gaze is not just about the past, but very much about the present. And that’s led me into all kinds of terrain that I never thought I would get into, for example, National Geographic came after us for licensing. You know, that got us into, you know, arguing for our fair use and actually getting into a whole realm of intellectual property…
MKN: I was going to ask you how it is that you come to complicate things. Because you said you like to complicate things, right? And you just answered that…
L: A whole realm of intellectual property issues, which are, in fact, you know, again from that whole legacy of colonial regimes of property. And I think that that has taken us into really… I mean, it’s hard for me to kind of parse out because I’ve so many different aspects of this that I’m working on right now. But really thinking about these questions of intellectual property for the present and how that’s very much linked again to a question of ethics, as opposed to representation.
AH: That’s so interesting, because you said on the one hand, you know, especially for people of color, we can see kind of that very superficial level of problematic representation is it has been removed from the public eye, but then at the structural level of who actually owns these archives and the fact that they’re fighting back, it’s just being perpetuated right at almost a more endemic or insidious level. So that’s interesting to think about.
L: Yeah. And I mean, it’s all of the ways in which I would say whiteness lives in ways that are, and it lives in ourselves, in ways that we’re sometimes blind to.
MYJ: I have been calling that kind of self eating of those models or representation, the brown ceiling, because there’s like we’re talking about, like the structure of– this is Mario Ybarra, Jr. again, so like, the notions that the structural supports are still there, like the girders and everything, the scaffolds that have built up representation of POC throughout the years and all those things within media and representation that we’ve then like internalized and but as we’re kind of unpacking these things, as in groups like this, and like what it sounds like in your book, we fight, we hit the internalized what I call the brown ceiling, which is pretty much made up of bullshit that we placed on top of ourselves. Like, it’s like, it’s not necessarily the glass ceiling, or we could see through to like something else. It’s like our own bullshit that we’ve put on top of our own selves because we’ve internalized all these structures of racisms and stereotypical images, etc. So like, for example, being like, a Latino male in the United States for a long time, like with my generation, the only representation that we saw of ourselves in popular culture and media was criminalized, right, so like, and within the prison industrial complex, so like, popular films in the early 90s were like prison based films like those were the only films where we saw like Latino male representation at all. And so then on the streets or in neighborhoods, young men internalize these notions of like, Oh, yeah, like that’s the MO:del of like Latino male existence in the United States is that this rite of passage and it normalized the prison industrial complex. And then the internal politics that happened within the prison industrial complex then spilled over out into the street. So not only were we looking at like internalized racism or literal racism in terms of power structures, like the LAPD, like the white LAPD or whatever, but also within the race relations that happened within prison where they self segregate because of whatever politics or like, you know, everybody was separated in relationship to race and something like we were just talking about earlier, like the race riot or the riot at 92 could happen because everybody was so compartmentalised in terms of their sections that people had internalized in prison industrial complex, so like, one one thing is to like kind of dismantle the white gaze in relationship to how it is structurally but then the MO:re the MO:re complicated part or where I feel like my work lies is like how do you We start dismantling that, what I’m calling the brown ceiling, within ourselves so that we can see ourselves in other lights and be able to MO:ve in other realms that we might have not had. You know, we ran a program, my wife and I founded a space called slanguage studio running, we run spaces for young artists. And a few years ago, we were running a program called YouGotta See it to Be It, because we hadn’t seen other MO:dels, you know, getting their PhDs or working in museums or whatever, you know, artists and expressing themselves. I feel like there are a lot of examples of people that want to express themselves, but within those structural supports that kind of build the infrastructure of culture and allow platforms for us to be in there weren’t so many MO:dels, so we needed to kind of see that. And so, just to kind of break through those things, we need to see these things and if we don’t have the words for them, like within our own pantheon of language, if we don’t have the words to describe those things, then we can’t see it. We can’t get to it because we don’t know the word to type into our Google Map. We don’t, we don’t have that address. So being able to buffer and, and kind of build language within POC’s communities is really important. And I feel that that what you’re talking about in relationship to like your book, or what you were saying you do with the radio and the clubs and with all of our kind of cultural work is about trying to propagate, propagate and create platforms so that this language can be distributed and seen and shared. But it isn’t so much that we can because the white power structure why young people are so adamant or these white young people are adamant about saying that there is no white privilege in the classrooms. I was just hearing my friend talk about that. He was teaching in a college and the kids were really upset when the notion of white privilege came up the white kids, but then in reading like the New York Times and 1619 project, you understand that like white privilege isn’t just this thing that’s happening right now and and this condition, but it is this condition that was begun here in the United States, at least with the buying and selling of slaves, right? And then how that led to a kind of handicap for a POC to acquire wealth. And then post World War Two, when the United States wasn’t bombed our infrastructure wasn’t annihilated, like it was in Europe or abroad in Asia. That allowed us to have this like other headstart in relationship to like post war and industrial projects, right. So we have like this white privilege that is engaged for like this period of time, that’s like, really is so like, if you so people just see it as the now so what you’re saying in relationship to like, and what I heard you say like: we’re not just looking at the like MO:st recent past or like we’re looking at, like the future and like, we’re looking at, like, fat past present future tenses simultaneously. I think that that’s a interesting way to look at it and so that we can have, you know, MO:re of a broader spectrum of like, what it is our proposal could be for, you know, 2020 I’m really into this 2020 thing. I’m really excited about it, because it’s like 2020. And I saw this meme the other day that said that barbara walters should announce the ball drop in New York City, because she was like, I am barbara walters. And this is 2020. Right, like, really want to see what the excitement in fashion and music and culture and ideas can kind of bring to the table because I’m kind of bored like that, like we’ve been using a kind of platform that I feel like, like I’m familiar with, I know that in teaching and in academia like there, there should be like a kind of that that still needs to be Like put out there. But like, for me personally, I’m like, Oh, what is this thing that I don’t know yet? What is it gonna look like? And how is culture going to look like and how it will be MO:deled and who will be driving it. And it’s interesting to hear what you all do, because I see that I could see that within you. But in my everyday life, I’m just like, oh, like, we need MO:re of you, right? We need MO:re of us in the driver’s seat so that we’re MO:deling this, this kind of experience and these kind of thoughts.
MO: Now, I was curious, because all of you have also talked about, I mean, part of the modeling, I think, maybe as a sort of segue that each of you talked about working within institutions, but at some moments, there was a deficit or a lack that you felt needed to be addressed and you created something or enacted something to me. Those needs that built different communities and set up different frameworks, which required… I’m just thinking of Michelle and the work that you started: at land’s edge, and thinking about, like the amount of work that you were doing, and teaching at the same time and doing an artistic career in order to meet those needs, those urgencies. Can you talk a little bit about that all of you have in various ways done that.
L: Yeah, so, between 2015 and 2018, I founded and co-organized, autonomous pedagogical platform called at land’s edge. And you know, it arose for me out of very real life circumstances. I don’t know if any of you know this story: I’d been teaching at CalArts for many, many years, seven, and you know, I was in a program where the only women of color were the two adjuncts, basically, we call them visitors. But we were like perpetual visitors. And, you know, this is a situation that’s so typical for academia, but I think it’s particularly within art, which is that when, you know, two hires finally came up, both of those hires went to white women. And, you know, I think that for myself, it was a moment of really understanding the world that I was in. You know, I think I still had some internalized idea that if I worked hard enough, and did my job well enough, that good things would happen. And you know, I had already had, like, you know, four years of student petitions and you know, really, really strong student support….
MYJ: I was telling my students: they have to have a hunger strike if they want me to come back next term. Have a hunger strike.
L: So, for me, it was unfathomable and for me like, just for me to say that it’s already kind of breaking my brown ceiling. Because I have been conditioned in my life to understand that, you know, I know what my dad told me when I was young: you have to work twice as hard. Okay, I understood from the circumstance, okay, yeah, I do have to work twice as hard, but none of the benefits were reaped. And I had internalized that idea that you know, if I worked hard enough I could get it so that kind of shattered any idea that there was a place for me in institutions and really set the fire under my ass to try to organize something different and that’s where at land’s edge came from, you know. Mario and I, taught together at a place called the Vermont College of Fine Art. was the first low residency MFA program. And that was another exploitative labor condition. Because basically, it’s a whole school with no full time faculty and no benefits for anybody. It’s so the basically the college is getting away with not having to do that expense while still getting income from a student body in a low residency program where basically students come for, you know, one week out of every semester and do their work back home, you know, with a mentor, but I thought, okay, there are all these exploitative situations happening. But, you know, there’s a way in which that whole model of Vermont can happen at a grassroots level, it already is kind of grassroots. So I basically, you know, borrowed that model and tried to implement it in Los Angeles. Really focusing our energies, a co-organized space of women and queers of color for the most part. And you know, setting up a basically a fellowship program for 15 individuals who wanted to, you know, be a part of this conversation could be paired with a mentor and then have, you know, weekly discussions of sorts, kind of like school.
MKN: Alternative forms of education are really, really important. I mean, I only have a high school degree, I didn’t attend university. And I feel like I’m an alumni of, you know, the 18th Street Art Center and Highways Performance space where I received my art education was like literally doing it and building it with, you know, all of our two hands together as a team. Having now worked inside of graduate programs. I can see what they’re not teaching and these grad programs based on like what I’ve learned, starting these different arts organizations. And there’s a need for that, especially among artists of color, like it’s surprising to me, some of the artists, younger artists of color that I’ve met sort of the holes in their education when they come out of these institutions, then it’s kind of surprising to me. Right, but I love these artist-led initiatives that are happening right now. There’s so many now. In Los Angeles.
L: Yeah. And we were certainly inspired by slanguage and trying to just think about the necessity of intergenerational spaces. And, you know, I mean, it was a huge feat. And, you know, so many amazing folks involved, and I wish I had the list.
MKN: You launched so many careers.
L: But you know, it was also a huge amount of energy that at the end of the day was, I think, for the most part, unsustainable by those who are doing some of the core organizing. So I mean, that’s, you know, the kind of wall I think continually facing when we try to do things differently, right? Like, because it takes that fire under your ass, to get that energy out of nowhere to do it. And then you could, you know, start to partner with institutions, but you understand that there’s something that you’re always losing when you do so. So it’s like that constant negotiation at all levels.
MKN: Yeah, every dollar has a string.
MO: Can you talk about that sort of criss crossing that you like, what’s one of the key differences in say, in relationship to organizing communities or building something working inside and outside because you had talked about that? A little hesitancy or, or at least self critiquing, self analyzing, self assessing?
AH: So this is Arshia here. And I think before I answer your question, because we were talking earlier kind of about the project is so we’re referring I think, specifically to Discostan, which is one lens of my practice. And that kind of started really from a very personal place of being here in the US as an immigrant coming from a very specific family having a sort of an exile from them. And going to art school, leaving, I was an experimental filmmaker, that’s kind of where I began. And then kind of taking a break from that and really trying to be outside of kind of the economy of at that time, it was film festivals, and working in the industry in the film industry, and at the same time dealing with this kind of delayed separation from from my history, from my family history, and I kind of became an accidental archivist through that process of really gathering materials from, especially music and all this stuff from what I had grown up with and really playing it to myself in my living room and feeling sad about, you know, Where am I from and where, where do I belong, and then building up this huge archive and starting to kind of slowly play it out and share it. And I didn’t realize that there would be a community for this and or that anyone else would have an interest and it turned out that there were people that wanted this access to this. This music and media and stuff that had kind of gotten, you know, that wasn’t necessarily like was in between kind of institutional recognition and exported pop culture, and specifically from the regions of South Asia and the Middle East. And that turned into Discostan, which really functioned outside of and still does outside of institutional support for the most part. And I was interested in Michelle what you were saying about memory because for me it really did start from a place of nostalgia and really kind of trying to look back to this past and especially for what I can speak to, which is South Asia or India specifically where I was born and the colonial history there. There’s a tendency to kind of, especially in this moment to look at colonization and the internalization of that. And look at the time before that as a kind of this Eden, you know, the time when there is no wrong or a time when queerness was accepted, or, you know, all of these kinds of dialogues and, and really kind of thinking about, well, is that true? And does that serve us to kind of look back to that golden time? And I think what you’re talking about is complicating that idea as well. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about, about those things and how, rather than looking back to the past is the golden time. It can be looked at as a way, as you said, to think about building ideas of the future. So, in terms of the question about community and, and working within institutions and outside of institutions– there’s different narratives that you build, you know, to be honest, in order to be within the institution and there’s different narrative that we have within our community. So there are certain spaces. For example, an offshoot of you know, with some collaborators that have been part of Discostan is a group called the Moozis which is a group of queer Muslim people of Muslim origin that are looking at our own cultural histories outside of the lens of Orthodoxy and outside of the Western gaze, and a lot of our events have been closed to the public, you know, they’re there, and some of them are open and some of them are closed, and some of them are, you know, sharing knowledge amongst ourselves and, and so that’s one one strategy that that we’ve used to kind of be both, you know, true to our community While, you know, still having it be accessible.
MO: Marcus, what about that you’d mentioned earlier about doing less and better. And I know that in interviews and what I’ve read about your interest in creating support for others, can you talk a little bit about that…
MKN: Well, I like what Arshia was saying about the sort of closed circle, I guess an enclosed community, like my current project, it’s in progress is called Macho Stereo. And it’s very much inspired by music, hence the name Macho Stereo, and, but loosely based on and inspired by the wonderful book, Pedro Paramo: by Juan Rulfo. I wanted to talk to men about their fathers. Like I was really interested in this idea of just having these private conversations with men. I was in residency at the LA Public Library, I was talking to my colleagues and I learned so much. I could do more by one person at a time, I felt like I had more of an impact, my art did, as a performance artist, with a one-person collaboration slash audience member than doing a larger work in front of a lot of people. And I felt it was a really enriching thing in a way where I could do less, but do more. And I’m still working on that. I’m still interviewing men, about their fathers, which was we’ll call it that was even complicated because of all the issues that were not issues but like how we look at gender today, and now things are a little different, or not different, just coming to light. It was interesting, how it was an education for me. But, but yeah, I like this notion of sort of stepping away and not part of this larger narrative, but really just kind of closing the door, and just having a private conversation and a discussion around whatever the issue, you know, it is either me and men have their fathers or are you and the people of Muslim origin. I think we all walk away from that. It’s kind of like the pond like ripple in the pond effect, I think, where, where I can be a better artist from these individual interactions than had I done just one larger. I mean, I did end up doing one larger performance in collaboration with the team. But that all that came from all these smaller, intimate conversations.
MYJ: The way I learned that lesson that y’all are talking about was from Carla and I were in Mexico and we’re we’re at some place and this man from the Museum of Anthropology was talking to us and he was telling us how he his job was to go into Indigenous communities around Mexico and like help facilitate projects with them. And he was saying this the saddest part that, uh, one of the one of the I want to call it I don’t want to one of his projects he did with the group was that there was this little community way up in the mountains and there were buses that were coming up to visit them of tourists. And so they would only don their traditional costumes and do their dances, like it evolved to where they only did their dances for the tourists. And they were like and when he was working with him was like, that’s horrible that you guys have come up with all these beautiful dances and costumes like you need to still continue doing them for yourself like to dance for yourself like with their traditional costumes and things not for an audience not for the tourists that give you tip money or whatever before yourselves and I think that’s what you’re talking about is like stepping out of like, because we we we are always in this kind of state of like playing and acting and becoming for some Somebody else to view us and see how we are being perceived and all this stuff. But once we make a transition from becoming into being, then we don’t need to worry about an audience. And I think that is where like we can transition from like dancing for tourists and for tips to dancing for ourselves again, which both of the Moozis, and the Macho Stereo project, when you bring it into like a kind of dancing for ourselves, position, that’s where the real stuff comes out. Because it’s a state of being it’s not in a state of doing things for an audience. And I think that those moments are super important and where all the real bubbly stuff comes up. Because you’re not worried about an audience anymore. You’re just worried about like, oh, how are we being with each other? How are we communicating? How are we sharing?
MKN: But it’s still a commodity. Like the tourist dances have to happen. I lived in Puerto Vallarta. And like the like the those tourist dancers unfortunately it’s how people put food on the table.
MYJ: But you can’t stop, you can’t stop the ones for yourself either upsetting balance I guess, I guess it because you’re not stopping you know doing work that you’re gonna probably collect that and turn that…
MKN: but I’m still trying to figure out how to commodity and monetize what it is that I’m making, I still have to…
MYJ: You have been able to be in this kind of closed assessment time back to what I was talking about in terms of urgency like from that when you asked about the urgency like we need to be in this kind of assessment time with each other so that we can come out and have access right? Like, if you think of it like if you went to a mechanic and you pulled up into their shop and they didn’t give you a free estimate like they didn’t open the hood and look under the car and and tell you that hey, this is this how do you need to fix this this if they just if you just pull them in They’re like 800 bucks, you’d be like, for what? You didn’t even open the hood, you didn’t even look under there. You didn’t even check the tires. How do you know it’s 800 bucks, like you’re just throwing this number at me. And that, but if they tell you like, hey, they put the little machine on it and do that stuff, then you’re like, Okay, there’s that and they break it down, and they have that assessment time for you, then you will give them access to your wallet and to the car to fix it. Right. But if you don’t have that assessment time, and I feel like that’s what I was saying that urgency is, for me is like being able to spend what I think both of y’all are talking about with the closed group and the one on one meetings is like, how do you how do we place value on that assessment time as being just as equal to like, whatever it’s going to come out to be whatever that monetized commodity thing is gonna be at the end of the day for an audience when you step back into the, you know, that realm. But how do we give ourselves, a lot ourselves, give ourselves the benefit and the grace of having that assessment time, which it sounds like y’all are doing with your projects. And that’s how I’m feeling that we need that urgency now, because we are in, the Los Angeles art community has changed. You know, the landscape has changed, you know, we have, you know, the gallery system is definitely in play here. And when I hear younger artists talk, they’re not talking about like, the, you know, the performances so much that they’re going to go see at a nonprofit space or be working with a nonprofit space, but they talk about like which entities they’re going to work with in relationship to commercial galleries. So it’s kind of more akin to the conversations that will happen with young students in New York than what it was when I was talking. When I was a student here in Los Angeles. Like, I didn’t even know what commercial galleries did, I just was at lace. I was so happy to have my first show at lace and I was like, that was my place and, like, I still have like a bucket list thing that I want to check off to do an edition with LACE, like if I get to do that, that’s like on my, my bucket list right. because I remember seeing all the artists that did those and I was so inspired by them. So yeah, like, how do we give ourself which is what you’re talking about in relationship to post colonial theory is like the third space, right? Like, what happens between like, what you’re talking about the romantic time of like, pre colonialism, like, and then the British soldiers come and they bring this and that and this and that and then then the revolution happens and then there’s the British soldiers go home. It’s like, what is like a kind of, again, this future past, past, future present tenses can we pluck and pull from to create our future to create it, but it needs that assessment time that you’re talking about that?
MKN: Like, I feel like it is a tourist economy, like there’s a lot of parallels between the tourist economy and the art world? Because I feel like we have to really do a lot of things to make MO:ney in order to really do our practice. Yeah, like a lot of my practice. consist of things that I really can’t even sell, or sometimes can’t even show with a lot of people, but I have to find a way to do my little tourist dance. You know, me and my MO:nkey can dance, you know, so that I can pay my rent
MYJ: you need the Willy Wonka golden ticket. I love that.
MKN: I love fucking that notion of what is the tourist dance? And how do we reshape that tourist dance. You see that happening. Like I’ve been in and out of Mexico City a lot lately. And you kind of do see this subversion of, of like, sort of this idea of traditional things, where now you kind of see things like a little shifting a little bit. And I think that that, that we need to just fuck it all up.
MYJ: But can I ask you a question though, Mark is like when you’re seeing the things from the shift like this is one thing that I’m always concerned about like if it shifts too much and doesn’t hold anything to like the language that is communicable and just becomes this whole like other abstract thing that is there. an audience that can engage that or is there something like within like Santeria culture.
MKN: Santaria has a tradition born from need, from syncretism. And it’s an amalgam of all the different religions in West Africa, and it’s a result of the slave trade. And so I think that that syncretism, and that fluidity needs to continue now into the 21st century. And I think that things need to shift and move and I think that a lot of what we see a lot of practitioners and gatekeepers of more traditional forms, you know, really get upset when those of us come in, and kind of modify it or abstract it or reinterpret it. And I feel like that, to me, that’s where the interesting things are as those risky vulnerable things that people try to kind of evolve the form forward especially when things were born out of a need for syncretism. Why does it have to freeze in time? Why can’t it continue to be liquid and syncretic into the future?
MYJ: Yeah, that’s what you’re talking about. Because you don’t want it to be frozen in that romantic time.
AH: Yeah, I mean, so I was also reminded of this saying, I’m from Hyderabad which is in South India and there’s a saying about people from that city that they spend half the time regretting something that they didn’t do and then the other half the time talking about that regret and so it’s just like culture that is so invested in this romanticism you know, of the past. There’s so many things, you know, here that I’ve just been kind of thinking about when you were talking about the tourist dance and I was thinking immediately in relation to what you were saying Marcus about artists having this tourist kind of economy, yeah, that word dancing for institutions, you know. And right now there’s this kind of focus and interest on research-based work and especially, you know, funding being given to lots of artists of color and, you know, the diversity checkbox and then that leads to alMO:st this performance of ourselves. that’s starting to feel dangerous. Because there is this, you know, and that’s, I mean, the Moozis again, and movies comes from Moozis, which is a derogatory term used for Muslims and we, we being it’s a collaborative project took that and kind of like made a playful spin on it, but really thinking about that, for example, I think the idea of closing or having closed sessions came up because there’s a tradition of magic in Islam and and you know, we all kind of know it from My grandmother’s and our, you know, chapters in the Quran and, and things that have been exchanged, we were given a residency at the Women’s Center for Creative Work, and you know, with all of kind of the interest in astrology and, and all these things is a perfect fit right let’s have a session on magic and Islam and we’re like, wait, we don’t this is not a teach-in session we don’t want to open this up to everyone this is actually sacred knowledge that we don’t talk about amongst ourselves. Because there’s also been this very sanitized orthodox version of Islam that’s been propagated through the Gulf through missionaries that have been sent and because it is often a women’s realm as well, that’s been an indigenous knowledge that’s been kind of suppressed from both sides. And so we actually want to get together and talk about what we know and, you know, share stories. But it’s not to be performed for outside audiences or granting institutions, and but I do think there is definitely, like it’s very sexy, you know, to share that knowledge and it does get you funding and so. I don’t know there’s this kind of, I mean, I’m starting to kind of retract from that and from that performance of those things, you know?
L: Yeah, I’m actually in the process of co-editing an issue of Art Practical with Yusef who is director of the Southern California Library and it’s all about the about violence of inclusion. And this whole kind of terrain that we’re on right now of, of the sexiness of our brown, black, queer, indigenous, disabled, undocumented immigrant bodies in these spaces that at one point never saw us but now want us so badly.
MKN: They want us how they want us though.