Tentacle Lecture 3 PDF

I. FRANCISCO de GOYA (1746-1828) and the Art of the Future Vision fantástica/Asmodea, 1819-1823 “[Iván] said that in the coming weeks they’d be studying Goya and would do an exercise at the end based on the work of the maestro The idea was to complicate the notion of from...

I. FRANCISCO de GOYA (1746-1828) and the Art of the Future Vision fantástica/Asmodea, 1819-1823 “[Iván] said that in the coming weeks they’d be studying Goya and would do an exercise at the end based on the work of the maestro The idea was to complicate the notion of from Aragón. contemporaneity in art and and analyze the ways in which Goya, two centuries ago, had articulated his philosophical and divorcing himself from the formal observations, expectations of the work he was commissioned to do and thus inaugurating modern art.” Goya the Court Painter, (c. 1786-1819) … “the work he was expected to do” Private/experimental work … Los Caprichos (The Caprices), 1797- “inaugurating 98 modern art” … but precisely by way of calling into question modernity’s self- image … THE ENLIGHTENMEN T Understood as the triumph of REASON, RATIONALITY, PROGRESS … over irrationality, “Iván turned on the projector and there on the wall superstition, was print number sixty-six from Los Caprichos…” barbarism, myth (57)  On the subject of “enlightenment” … “The lantern plays two roles. It is the source of the light by which the truth of these shootings can be seen and so implicitly supports the artist in his role as witness to the truth. But it is also the light that allows the French regiment to see their target.” -- Anthony J. Cascardi, Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique “The 3rd of May 1808,” Goya’s 1814 commemoration of Spanish resistance to Napoleon during the Penninsular War (1807- 1814) Goya, Los desastres de la guerra / The Disasters of War (1810-1820) - 82 print protest to the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain/Portugal - extremely graphic, proto-photographic, sometimes allegorical, with elliptical captions - document atrocities of war, including sexual violence, torture/mutilation, mass execution, famine and poverty - manage to avoid sensationalism, voyeurism, and pornography - not published until 1863, thirty-five years after the artist’s death   In Argenis’ hands, Goya’s searing social protest and act of historical witness is ARGENIS’ engravings, recovered from his 1610 reduced to a personal rape and revenge “treasure chest”: fantasy “The first seven engravings, all signed by a certain Côte de Fer, {His fragile “macho” masculinity showed buccaneer life in the seventeenth century. The technique externalizes its self-loathing in violent was impeccable, the documentation of the details of domestic racism, misogyny, and homophobia life, invaluable. The other engravings were an erotic series in which a woman, most likely a prostitute, was submitted to the … specifically, a jealous loathing of Linda, desires of a group of men who joyfully filled all her orifices. who gets to be with Giorgio, the one whom The images were extremely graphic and bore some relation to Argenis most desires the brutal aesthetic of Goya’s The Disasters of War. The poses … his own violent impulse were increasingly more violent until they reached the last one, in dissembled/projected through the old trope which a black man sodomized her while a one-armed man cut of the Black male threat to White femininity off her head with a scimitar. I should have killed him twice, thought Giorgio, who recognized the victim’s face as Linda’s.  Argenis’ artworks valuable as historical artifacts (documentation of buccaneer … ‘Imagine, an artist as great as Goya one hundred years life in the 17th century) – not in the 2001 earlier, in Hispaniola,’ Giorgio heard the Cuban say.” (127) show  Original “genius” only when transplanted into a time that precedes the artist of whom they are in fact derivative (Goya)  Do the other artists succeed at “complicating the The flyer for the event, designed by Elizabeth, notion of contemporaneity in art” à la Goya, featured Malagueta in a wig, wearing an inaugurating something new out of historical eighteenth-century Spanish suit and striking a trauma/witness? pose with the palette, paint, and brushes of The Goya photographed What kind of future worth living can be formed from [sic] by Vincente López. the histories of violence that the book has At the bottom of the flyer, documented? in Garamond font, was the name of the event,  Transphobic and misogynistic sexual violence and exploitation Caprichos. The white of  Spanish colonization, genocide of the Taíno the white of the wig  White supremacism via centuries of contrast/conflict with Haiti and the gray of the  Trujillo Dictatorship, political disappearances and construction Suit contrasted with the blackness of of misogynistic and anti-black machismo Malagueta’s hands and furrowed brow, which  The European Holocaust made for both a comic and sinister impression  Ecocide / climate change (111) Elizabeth’s DJ practice: Malagueta’s Performance Art: aural archaeology / remix history in the body “Her aural archaeology didn’t discriminate between “[Iván had] taught him to understand secret voices, use the genres. She’d learned from hip hop how to find nuggets invisible power of the history of his body, and plan a of gold in a Rocío Jurado ballad as well as in a song by strategic attack against the repulsive and cruel mouths on Bobby Timmons, pieces which, loose and looped, everyone …For his performance that night, he’d decided to created a new music, divorced from the original sources. continue using elements from baseball … [but] for the first She stole, without leaving a trace, whole blocks of songs time, he’d confront the theme of race and Dominican completely alien to one another, which she’d seamlessly masculinity head on; he wouldn’t be lacking much in the weave with minor chords from the synthesizers, and way of props.” (122) filled the air with the dark nostalgia of the blues and with Dominican-Haitian gagá, which she loved.” (112) But also, is there any way in which the other artists succeed at keeping alive the novel’s prophecy? - Do their projects in any way carry forward the abandoned Utopian promise of Acilde/Giorgio/Roque? - Do they incarnate a spirit capable of transmuting historical violence into a different(Domincan) future? MALAGUETA: “Every time somebody said [‘Black’] to mean poor, dirty, inferior, or criminal, the word grew; it must have been about to burst … His body was a vessel containing the word, inflated now and again by the odious stares from those others, the ones who thought they were white.” (120) Goku Super-Sayayín Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series, 1976Pedro Martínez, 1999 from Dragon Ball  “When he was little, every time somebody called him ‘monkey’ … he’d draw Goku kicking something or using one of his special powers. He’d filled whole notebooks trying to survive the words that would sometimes come out even from his mother’s mouth, or his brothers’, dreaming that, someday, after he’d found a teacher like Mr. Miyagi or Yoda, he’d acquire powers to beat the enemy, that big dirty mouth that hurt him and made him weak. Lacking a sensei, Malagueta had come up with another way out: the foul air of the insults would swell his muscles, pumping his arms endlessly with weights and becoming the gorilla no one dared defy – a batting machine. “The Susúa project had saved him. There he had found his teacher, that skinny Cuban who’d taught him to understand secret voices, use the invisible power of the history of his body, and plan a strategic attack against the repulsive and cruel mouths on everyone …For his performance that night, he’d decided to continue using elements from baseball … The accessories of the sport were beautiful and sterile and brought with a them a solid current of meaning. For the first time, he’d confront the theme of race and Dominican masculinity head on; he wouldn’t be lacking much in the way of props. … He looked at himself in the mirror one last time. He’d stopped drinking water two days ago so his muscles would be more defined. Now his skin was pure plastic.” (121-222)  Body as bursting “vessel” bearing every racializing, denigrating usage of “black,” a term that bears so much its verging on total incoherence, meaninglessness  A performance that will deploy the denigrated body against the violence of antiblack speech, transmuting its abuse into a super-power/“strategic attack” on the intersection of racism and masculinity  Activation of “secret voices,” “the invisible power of the history of his body”  Mendieta’s earth-art, Martinez’s athleticism, Goku’s monkey super-heroism ELIZABETH, inspiration & social conscience of her music: “While in Altos de Chavón, Elizabeth had visited friends who lived in La  Like Olukun Ceja, a batey [shanty town of migrant cane workers] near La Romana, where prophecy,a logic of every year during Holy Week, like in all the sugar towns on the island, they incarnation celebrated a fertility ritual. Under a canopy of branches, three long drums had kept the beat of an all-encompassing rhythm, unfurling hysteria in the  Afro-Caribbean music polyphonic horns that sought out a marching movement in everybody’s legs as a power that and bellies. With the full moon at its zenith, she’d seen the sacred purple of “lodges deities in the midnight sky over the sugar plantation and a firmament littered with stars. human bodies” An an old man possessed by Papá Candelo walked on coals toward her,  moves people, patiently picking one up to light his pipe. When he stood by her side, she felt possesses them, and infused by his presence and discovered, specifically and eloquently, the enables them to defy extreme poverty suffered by Haitian workers, the tragic ties with which this material constraint ancient ceremony held on to the present, the permanency of a kind of slavery and physical laws that now dressed itself up as paid labor, and the power of a music that lodged deities in human bodies, deities powerful enough to swallow the world.  An ancient/tragic “hold” on the present It had all left a huge mark on her soul. Now, its edges took a more tangible form, in the music she remixed so painstakingly, looking for the danceable  Power to “swallow the and mystical effects of that magic formula (112-113). world”  “The music for the party, a three-hour mix, would trace the flow line from Toña la Negra to the trance music of Goa, and would mine the threatening shadow path and delirious sweetness of minimal tech, deep house and drum ’n’ bass, Afro-Cuban prayers, voice samples from Héctor Lavoe, Martin Luther King Jr., Ed Wood, and Gertrude Stein. As a gift to Linda and Giorgio … during the third hour’s climax and before leaping from a hammering beat to the cyber-hippie ocean of repetitive trance, she’d throw in a little of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and Jacques Cousteau’s voice from the Haiti: Waters of Sorrow documentary. The effect would be tragic, inspiring, and contradictory: the French explorer’s predictions about the future of the islands marine life would hang in silence for a few seconds until the bass came down again, like a tsunami, over the dance floor.” (113)  “aural archaeology” weaves together different genres, places, peoples, times, transits, migrations, “shadow paths” into one irresistible song that invokes/incarnates these ancestral sources  Set conjoins novel’s core themes of sexuality/gender liberation, climate crisis, and Afro-diasporic culture, rewriting the history of violence in the key of love and desire  But Elizabeth’s “love and theft” (“she stole without leaving a trace…”) suggests a too-familiar history of white appropriation of Black cultural creativity, labor, and invention.  “Through Iván, Acilde had come to understand that an artist’s success is a combination of public relations, a bit of talent, and an extremely well-developed sense of opportunism” (105). ACILDE/GIORGIO’S VISION: “Linda danced in a corner of the terrace with a bottle of water in her hand … They exchanged a complicit look, like old friends. He loved her. She was his queen. Suddenly, the idea struck him as real: he was a king, the king of this world, the big head, the one who knew what was at the bottom of the sea. Generally speaking, he usually went on his way, not giving too much thought to any of that so he wouldn’t go crazy, pulling the strings on Giorgio and Roque from his cell in La Victoria as though he were playing a video game, accumulating goods, trophies, experiences, enjoying the view, inexistent in that future of acid rains and epidemics in which prison was preferable to the outside. Thanks to the establishment of this lab, he thought. Said’s government will have something to help regenerate part of what was lost. This lab is the altar I’m going to build for Olukun, in which I’ll turn Omincunlé’s Yoruba prayers into an environmental call to action. His work was finished. (128)” “It was precisely as Acilde watched [in 2027] the pathetic little group the president was celebrating that the bulb lit up. As Giorgio, he’d contact the younger Iván de la Barra to ‘discover’ and ‘promote’ the careers of various Dominican visual artists with whom they’d make a mint through their own art gallery… The project would kill several birds with one stone, especially now that he understood the mission for which he was destined was already aligned with his wife’s mission. With the money made by the art gallery they’d finally be able to make Linda’s dream come true: to build a laboratory at Playa Bo, equipped with all the latest technology, where they’d study and cultivate coral to replant it, whenever it was necessary, in its natural habitat” (105-106). TENTACLES OF INTERSECTIONALITY: The novel takes as its hero a transgender man, working in the service of the Afro-Caribbean orisha Olokun, sanctified and aided by indigenous Water Protectors, to save the Dominican Republic from a climate disaster. Gender expansion and affirmation, racial justice, and climate justice are key concepts animating the political left across the Americas. But what do you make of the novel’s conclusion? When Acilde decides not to prevent the bio-weapons accident that will decimate the Caribbean, when he chooses Giorgio’s life and love story, what happens to the novels intersectional utopianism? Where does the novel’s criticism fall? “Quickly and overwhelmingly, he had before him the real goal of his mission: to give Said Bona a message—as president, to avoid accepting biological weapons from Venezuela…Giorgio had to convince him. But just as quickly, he began to think about the other consequences of that decision…Would Giorgio disappear? He imagined Linda covering her head with her hands, out of her mind when her seas turned to a shit shake, while here, in the past of those seas destined to disappear, she was dancing happily with the prospect of the new lab next a young and charming Iván” (129). “Acilde swallows the last of the pills … the weight of his eyelids closes Giorgio’s access to the cell in which his original body has lived. He feels that someone very dear to him is dying and discovers tears in his eyes…The [Spanish] squad falls on Roque … [and] the shot that takes him down leaves Giorgio completely dark inside… He’d said goodbye to Said without a word about his future. He could sacrifice everything except this life, Giorgio Menicucci’s life, his wife’s company, the gallery, the lab. Linda rests her head on his lap, and with a finger, he moves a