As new possibilities for change emerge out of the current uprisings for racial justice, people have been questioning our status quo—namely, its roots in white supremacy, colonialism, and militarism. Such questions are new for some veteran artists; for others, they are rooted in their practice.
One artist who has continuously questioned the status quo, while encouraging others to do the same, is Carlos Sirah. Sirah curated the performance program Return to the Body for the first Veteran Art Summit & Triennial, held in 2019. In order to lift up the powerful and inspiring work featured in Return to the Body, the emerging Veteran Art Movement is republishing Sirah’s essay “Reflections On Return to the Body”. In the essay, Sirah reviews the performance program, which featured Kiam Marcelo Junio, Joseph Lefthand, Nicole Goodwin, Willyum LaBeija, Jefferson Pinder, and the Combat Hippies (Hipólito Arriaga and Anthony Torres).
This is the second essay republished by the emerging Veteran Art Movement, pulled from the National Veterans Art Museum Triennial & Veteran Art Summit Resource Guide.
Kiam Marcelo Junio, Ascensum from Procession: Return to the Body, 2019.
REFLECTIONS ON RETURN TO THE BODY
By Carlos Sirah, May 2019
Throughout U.S. history, veterans returning home from war and military service have extended their bodies with intentional strategies of creating new spaces — new possibilities — for themselves and broader society. These new folds in the societal fabric challenge the status quo’s relationship to understandings of race, class, and gender in the context of war and military service. Because of these veterans, the broader society (non-veterans & veterans alike) have had to contend with historical legacies of settler-colonialism and its vast consequences: the genocide of Native Americans, chattel slavery, U.S. imperialism and, of course, war and the many deaths that follow U.S. interventions.
The NVAM Triennial’s performance program Return to the Body (which happened at the Veteran Art Summit, May 3 - 5, 2019) was guided by themes of relation, both as a curatorial and analytical posture/performance. “Relation,” in this context, was informed by Caribbean theorist Edouárd Glissant, whose work Poetics of Relation critiques territory (ontological, spiritual, political), and considers Le Tout-Monde (“The All-World”), the only world we share, the only world we inherit. In the spirit of Glissant, Return to the Body put into direct relation a set of bodies, peoples, and histories: Black, Red, Yellow, and Brown. Separately, these histories often contend with global power — whiteness — by centering that power. Return to the Body offered artists a framework by which to re-orient relation, in turn re-orienting ideas of possibility.
The veteran artists in this performance program include former service-people from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines who, by way of performance and embodiment, continue to negotiate and revise many of the same strategies of creation utilized by veterans before them. They look to the past, as a way to interpret the present, as a mechanism and strategy to theorize futures.
PROCESSION
Kiam Marcelo Junio, Joseph Lefthand, and Nicole Goodwin opened the performance program (and the broader Summit) with a multi-modal landscape procession. The hour-long Procession: Return to the Body was a deeply relational work that utilized Butoh, Objective Actions, and Public Intervention as strategies of performance in the institutional setting of the Chicago Cultural Center. The cohort of artists met for the first time in a virtual space, sharing ideas in a Google Hangout every week for three months before the opening of the NVAM Triennial and Veteran Art Summit weekend. Interestingly, the virtual space would mutate and manifest itself during the conversations, unintentionally offering a species of consideration and structures relation, even representing the interrogation of histories of war and imperialism.
Joseph Lefthand, Things are Certainly Beautiful to Behold, but to Be Them is Something Quite Different, from Procession: Return to the Body, 2019.
With collective and solo moments built into the structure of Procession, the artists invited participant-witnesses to proceed through the Chicago Cultural Center to view the performances. In Ascensum, Kiam Marcelo Junio crawled, tip-toed, marched, danced, swayed and stumbled, ascending the Center’s north stairway. Rose petals fell from above. Junio, a ghost-like entity, painted in white, at times appeared as an ashen Statue of Liberty, as a nymphic trickster, other times as the embodiment of grief. Junio’s primary (but not only) performative mode is Butoh, a Japanese form, which emerged in the aftermath of the United States’ deployment of the atomic bombs, annihilating the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a catastrophic coda to the close of the Second World War. In this context, Junio’s performance invited a consideration of space, broadly asking who inhabits space? Similar to the bombs’ effects, this work also collapsed and reconfigured time.
Performed by former marine Joseph Lefthand, Things are Certainly Beautiful to Behold, but to Be Them is Something Quite Different activated objects in the Grand Army of the Republic Rotunda. Nine doors flank this room, which is just off the north stairway, where Junio simultaneously performed Ascensum. In the rotunda, natural light filters through a Tiffany dome, spilling in from above, while artificial light emanates from nine square glass panels set in the floor. These panels served as “activators” for Lefthand’s objects: a rope, a ladder, a wood stump, a green apple, and gas masks. Between this artificial and natural light, Lefthand created a shamanic logic of absurdity.
At one moment in his performance, Lefthand, wearing a gas mask and dressed in all-white, interacted with witness-participants to reconstruct a nuclear family. He donned a gasmask on his son, as well as two adults from the audience, and placed this “family” upon one of the artificial light squares. He made adjustments to the family’s pose, then snapped a selfie using an iPhone taken from another audience member. In this liminal space between different species of light, between past and future, Lefthand, with trickster conviction, invited consideration of family, destruction, and war. Lefthand challenged notions of presence and participation, recalling the work of action-artists like Joseph Beuys, a former-Nazi turned anti-Nazi, whose alchemical work turned objects into rarefied opportunities for encounter and humanism in public spaces.
Nicole Goodwin, My Body Tells a Story, My Body Yells a Story, I Am a Story Growing on Repeat, from Procession: Return to the Body, 2019.
In Nicole Goodwin’s My Body Tells a Story, My Body Yells a Story, I Am a Story Growing on Repeat, the performance artist (Goodwin) lay on the floor sheathed behind white opaque fabric, which was suspended from the ceiling of the Yates Gallery. A portal-opening in the fabric presented possibilities: Goodwin might leave at any time, or witness-participants might enter. Each happened only once. An audio track, a recording of Goodwin reading her poetry, filled the room. During her performance, Goodwin’s plaintive and probing voice cut and echoed through the large space, with moans, yells, history. My Body Tells a Story ultimately conjured and declared presence.
Goodwin’s piece riffed on her previous performance, Ain’t I a Woman?, which shares its title with a 1851 speech by African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Goodwin created Ain’t I a Woman to represent “…the alienation that I experience as a black woman and mother daily.” The appearance (or non-appearance) of the self is critical to understanding Goodwin’s work, which echoes the legibility and erasure of Black women’s labor. These concerns have remained constant throughout the last century, with origins in American chattel slavery, when Black women’s bodies were simultaneously seen and not seen. According to Glissant, it is a project of empire to render the world transparent according to empire’s demands: to name it or not, to forget it or not, to lay waste to it or not, to erase it or not. In this work, Goodwin enacts a strategy of refusal: she refuses the transparency rendered by the state, thereby claiming her right to opacity. Goodwin’s use of a space that challenged how people see (her), is a process which restores her agency, or at least mitigates the viewer’s ability to process (her) body through empire’s lens.
Nicole Goodwin, Kiam Marcelo Junio, & Joseph Lefthand, Procession: Return to the Body, 2019.
Through performance, this cohort of three artists — Junio, Lefthand and Goodwin — situated themselves both at (inside the Chicago Cultural Center) and as (embodiments and Actions of History) “sites of encounter.” They offered new, ephemeral spaces where ontological categories dissolve: e.g. human and animal, matter and spirit, secular and sacred, object and subject. These artists oriented themselves towards an aesthetic which engages cross-cultural and trans-racial analyses of war and empire.
PERFORMANCE LAB
The Performance Lab and performance-focused Presentations at the Summit were conceived as a way to support the development of artists’ new or existing work, putting into relation all of the veteran artists in the performance program. Chicago-based dancer and choreographer Willyum LaBeija was awarded a residency to develop work at the Chicago Cultural Center prior to the Triennial and Summit. Artists Kiam Marcelo Junio, Joseph Lefthand, Nicole Goodwin, Hipólito Arriaga, and Anthony Torres gave fifteen-minute artist talks situating their work in the contexts of their respective disciplines and fields: spoken-word-theater, performance art, installation, and dance.
During the residency, LaBeija developed his work I Don’t Consent, a dance piece that utilized spoken-word and music to explore themes of service, reparations, refusal, and trauma. At the Summit, LaBeija performed excerpts from this new work. LaBeija, a U.S. Army veteran, toured as a dance captain with the MWR (Morale, Welfare and Recreation) Soldier Show for two years during his service. His training includes classical and urban genres of dance, with an emphasis in vogue performance, a highly stylized dance form born out of Black Queer ball culture (rooted in themes of necessity, defiance, and survival). His aesthetic synthesizes experiences of injury and anxiety related to military service, while incorporating his post-service interest in vogue. Since 2011, Willlyum is a current member of the Royal House of LaBeija.
Willyum LaBeija, I Don’t Consent, 2019.
KEYNOTE PERFORMANCES
Amal
Hipólito Arriaga and Anthony Torres of the Combat Hippies performed excerpts from their work AMAL, which “delves into the impact of war on people of color who serve, as well as that of civilians from war-torn countries.” The Combat Hippies believe that “[through] exploring the commonalities experienced in war, we can find common ground, build empathy, and foster a better sense of community.” AMAL (which means “hope” in Arabic) is ambitious in its scope and its articulation of relation. The project considers the U.S. bombing of Puerto Rico in the 1950s, detention in Abu-Ghraib Prison, interviews with Syrian refugees, failure of U.S. policy in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and the reckoning of Puerto Rican soldiers fighting in the United States military.
Their primary mode is spoken-word-theater, following the lineage of Puerto Rican and Black artists in New York in the late 1960s and 1970s, during and after the Vietnam War. In 1965, men of draft age in Puerto Rico were subject to the Selective Service Act. These men were called to fight in the U.S. military, although they had no representation in Congress. According to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, “numbers show 48,000 Puerto Ricans participated in [the Vietnam War].” Catastrophe often reveals power relations, and much like the crisis and disaster of the Vietnam War, hurricane Maria revealed the disparate power relations between the U.S. and its island colony.
AMAL is meant to be experienced as a theater in the round performance, that sacred shape recalling not only Taíno and African histories, but also the radial motion of a hurricane. Performing excerpts from AMAL on the north staircase of the Center, the Combat Hippies brought humor and heartbreak to the venue, as a large audience gathered around them to watch.
Anthony Torres of Combat Hippies, AMAL, 2019.
This Is not a Drill
This Is not a Drill is one part of a suite of performances created by former marine Jefferson Pinder. In This Is not a Drill, Pinder and his ensemble isolate, slow down, abstract, revise and repurpose gesture and action. Pinder prepares Black bodies for attack and ambush, striving to develop visual power. Pinder builds a militia as a strategy for Black defense and survival, utilizing repurposing as a conceptual, methodological, and epistemological tool for liberation.
From Jefferson Pinder’s website: “In the late summer and early autumn of 1919, violence and uprising erupted across the United States. Hundreds of Black lives were lost amid a transitory period of unrest and hostility that was named The Red Summer. As the nation marks a full century since then, we are in a new era of unrest. This summer [2019], Pinder is embarking on a classic American journey: a road trip to visit major sites of The Red Summer. He intends to bring into focus how much has changed since that summer — and how much has not.”
After World War I, over 100,000 Black veterans moved north, where they still encountered segregation, racism, and inequality — like 22-year-old veteran Randall Neal in Washington D.C., one of the first victims of The Red Summer violence. After the Great War, Black veterans formed unions, lodges, and mutual aid societies. In the wake of enduring tremendous violence in the Great War, at home they were also forced to use military training to defend their communities. Pinder researched Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Panther footage, as well as studying the co-relation of veteran identity with (and through) the Black Panthers and The Deacons of Defense. Historically, and presently, the U.S. has had a morbid fascination with the Black body as a site of death. Pinder reframes the Black body — or rather the ensemble of bodies — as a site of collective power, rather than reifying the besieged body as the primary site of consideration. He introduces strategies to see the other (or oneself) outside of powerless constructions.
Pindar’s performance took place in Yates Gallery, which during the time of the performance was the dedicated home of a series of performances inspired by The Goat Island Collective. The performance space was a reconstitution of the church gymnasium in which Goat Island’s performances originally happened. The ritualized performance of This Is not a Drill is a live continuation of its own training: with each performance, the militia members (ensemble) become more martially proficient. The ongoing performances are part of the Red Summer Road Trip, travelling throughout the south during the summer of 2019. The performances will end in Chicago in a public performance on Lake Michigan, one hundred years after the death of Eugene Williams, who was stoned and drowned by white teenagers (the refusal of police authorities to investigate Williams’ death ultimately prompted the 1919 riots in Chicago).
Performer from This Is not a Drill by Jefferson Pinder, 2019.
CLOSING PERFORMANCE
The performers of Return to the Body reimagined and redefined their own existences, along with the broader society’s relationship to their existences. Re-contextualizing the body and its uses, Return to the Body manifested itself by isolating military gestures through sound, embodiment and other forms. In presenting their art, the performers operated within (and upon) a field of complex and shifting narratives and relationships, personal and collective histories.
At the end of the Veteran Art Summit, a large circle of chairs occupied half of the Grand Army of the Republic Hall. Summit participants sat reflecting on the new folds, contours, processions, and shapes they encountered in the exhibitions: those things that disturbed, that enlivened, that re-visioned the future. Based on the work of John O’Neil, founder of the Free Southern Theater, participants created a story circle, tying together experiences and themes from the Summit. Participants considered how veteran artist experiences and practices shared at the Summit have opened new possibilities for further veteran art discourses and future practices.
Performance Program cohort at the Performance Lab, May 4, 2019.
This summer marks one year since the first ever Veteran Art Summit & Triennial. Many artists in the emerging Veteran Art Movement network were featured in the Triennial’s exhibitions (which ran from May through July 2019). Many also attended the Summit (May 3rd through 5th, 2019). Throughout summer 2020, as a way to acknowledge this historic event and celebrate its success, the emerging Veteran Art Movement will be republishing essays from the National Veterans Art Museum Triennial & Veteran Art Summit Resource Guide.
Learn more about the Triennial and Veteran Art Summit here.
Download the National Veterans Art Museum Triennial & Veteran Art Summit Resource Guide here.