Christina León's article, "Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra's Corpus," examines Xandra Ibarra's trajectory as a performance artist and her attempts to "illuminate how performing racially perverse material often fails because it is read and embodied as reality by my [her] (white) audiences" (Ibarra in León 370, emphasis mine). A week after reading this piece, I am still hung up on the idea of failure in/as performance: what does it take for a performance to fail? Who determines the failure and who becomes responsible for it? And, more importantly, what are the stakes of failure in performance, especially when the distinction between performance as art and everyday performance is no longer clear?
Xandra Ibarra became known through her performances as La Chica Boom, a project in which she played with hegemonic ideas of Mexicanidad and their possible intersections with sexual and religious representations in the context of burlesque performance. In this code, she developed and performed several alter egos: Dominatriz del Barrio, Tortillera, and Virgensota Jota. In her website, Ibarra describes her project as "a performance of Mexican/Mexican-American myths and narratives that render the colonial gaze/relationship laughable; a masterful exhibition of spichood that interrogates modes of sub/objectification." Rather than making her audiences feel interpellated, spectators commonly received La Chica Boom's performances as an invitation to let lose their racist and sexist impulses. After about a decade performing as La Chica Boom, Ibarra decided to "kill the project" in FML, a final performance that culminates with La Chica Boom's transfiguration into La Cucarachica, a cockroach that would come to crawl her way into Ibarra's multimedia projects. In this post, I am interested in putting La Chica Boom's failure and her metamorphosis into La Cucarachica in conversation with Kara Walker's A Subtlety, another failed (?) performative project we have been reading about and discussing in class. My aim in doing this is to flesh out some ideas about failure, anticipation, opacity, and mediation in performance.
When does a performance fail? If we turn to La Chica Boom's performances, the answer would be at the point when audiences' "betray" the performer's trust and respond in ways that are too violating and unbearable to them. Ibarra wrongly trusted in "the audience reading the comedic as well as the critical into the performance" (León 375). The encounters between Ibarra and La Chica Boom's spectators unfolded very differently than the artist intended. Her audiences were consistently unable to think critically about their role as consumers and let Ibarra gaze back at them. As a result, spectators often smacked La Chica Boom's hyperracial and hypersexual performances with their phobic reactions. "FML," is her response to the situation of "being stuck" in colonial readings–a feeling by now too familiar to her. If the exposure, openness, and relationality that characterize performance art are the same elements that render minoritized performers especially vulnerable, how do they partake in this form while dealing with the possibility or the event of failure?
In her essay, Christina León discusses mediation as a strategy performance artists use to guarantee their own safety. In a way, Ibarra's development of several alter egos for La Chica Boom is a form of mediation in itself. Ibarra resorts to camp performance to create "a buffer" between her and her spectators (Muñoz in León). After a decade of performing as La Chica Boom, Ibarra's alter egos prove to be too weak of a shield for her. The sustained aggressions directed at La Chica Boom evince "…an audience's refusal to recognize an artist's engagement with questions of aesthetics and form because they cannot see beyond the work's sociopolitical message" (León 377). La Chica Boom's failure signals the limits of camp and the fact that not all forms of mediation are equally effective for all performers.
When does a performance fail? I ask again. The answer provided by Kara Walker's A Subtlety might be less straightforward. In this highly performative installation, Walker anticipates some of her audiences' responses (the inappropriate selfies, the consumption of black pain, etc.) and plans for them adhere to the piece in a way that they amplify its meaning. A Subtlety is a highly performative but also a highly mediated piece; the Sugar Baby and the blackamoors (and some audience members, as Musser's chapter on Kara Walker's installation shows) are the ones taking the blow. In A Subtlety, spectators' responses and interactions (with the piece and among them) become the performance. When performances incorporate audiences' failure to account for themselves, are they still failed performances?
At this point, I want to consider yet another way in which mediation can provide protection from failure in performance. In "Forms of Opacity," Christina León emphasizes the importance of minoritized performers to find ways "to exist outside of the paranoid structures that not only wish harm upon such practitioners, but also ask them to bear the impossible task of correcting the past and paving the way for the future." (León 391) If reality is the space of colonial legibility, escaping it (another form of mediation) becomes a viable alternative that forecloses the possibility of failure altogether. In becoming a cockroach, La Chica Boom gives up in her efforts to be acknowledged as subject in favor of remaining "reviled, untamable, and always pregnant with yet another disciplined reality" (León 371). This act of remediation, this "abstraction," as León identifies it, resonates in some ways with Nyong'o's notions of fabulation.
I want to end this brief rumination about failure in/as performance by posing the question of how might this idea of mediation as protective strategy apply or not to the performances of everyday life–especially when talking about minorities. For FML, Xandra Ibarra's took inspiration from the legendary Lupe Velez, the original Mexican spitfire. While La Chica Boom was able to escape reality by becoming a critter, Velez did so by ending her life. In our class meeting, I am interested in discussing forms of mediation as well as their opportunities and their limits in dealing with failure as it relates to performance.
References:
Ibarra, Xandra. "Blog Salon #3 'Stuck with This.'" The *ff Center, 6 Dec. 2012, http://theoffcenter.org/2012/12/06/blog-salon-3-stuck-with-this-by-xandra-ibarra/.
León, Christina A. "Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra's Corpus." Asap/journal, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, pp. 369-394.
Musser, Amber J. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. New York University Press, New York, 2018.
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