Chris E. Vargas, Video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

History, like most things, is subjective. What is culled from individual accounts is accepted as fact and eventually translates into some kind of truth. But truth can be different at any moment—past, present, and future. The events in London were either riots or long overdue, civil unrest. Depending on whom you ask, in 2005 the people of New Orleans were either looting or just surviving. This parsing of history renders “truth” and “fact” malleable, constituent materials for narrative and artistic practice. In his video work Liberaceón (2011), Bay Area artist Chris E. Vargas makes histories, meshing the life of the pianist Liberace, late-80s direct actions to end the AIDS crisis, and a nonapologetic use of green screening.

Vargas is best known for his collaborative, narrative videos and films. In Falling in Love…with Chris and Greg (2008–ongoing), we watch the dark satire of Vargas and his artistic/romantic partner Greg Younmans’s relationship. Through the structural lens of traditional sitcom, the couple questions notions of monogamy, marriage, and gender, while consistently establishing their own, not always hyper-radical or “appropriate,” notions of companionship.

Not unlike Falling in Love, in Liberaceón, Vargas inserts radical, queer rhetoric into the arguably apolitical, high zest that was Liberace. Liberaceón includes footage of the showman’s TV specials, Liberace’s nightly news obituary, and various ActUp protests beside Vargas’s molty wigs, camp, and classical, non-method forms of acting. True to Liberace’s mid-1980s opulence and Vegas styling, the video begins with Vargas-as-Liberace’s grand entrance, which includes a balloon ride over “the Strip,” a reclaimed parking lot with a sequined American flag and a Rolls Royce. The film quickly cuts to Liberace and lover Cary James’s visit to a doctor (Younmans), who has an unfortunate bedside manner and gives a dreadful—but at the time, not uncommon—diagnosis.

Inspired to make James feel better, Liberace takes to preparing some chicken soup (again, epic use of chroma key by Vargas). While watching the news in his decadent kitchen, Liberace becomes frustrated by the many AIDS-related deaths, President Regan’s continued silence and the US Congress’s conservative funding of AIDS research. The performer decides to take direct action by constructing a gift with his “special ingredient…to scare ole Ronnie.” What follows is the most compelling and sensual use of a double boiler, all in an attempt to make a Liberace-laced, bloodied chocolate piano.

Chris E. Vargas, video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

The glittering stone on this work’s bejeweled finger is the deathbed scene between Liberace and James. Vargas’s slow collapse, full of gasping and eye-flickering, is at once hilarious and disquieting. One knows that Liberace’s many requests not to be memorialized with sap, nor to reduce his or others’ experiences to melodrama, but to honor the experience of any person with AIDS, including himself, have gone largely unanswered. Yet, as the work closes with Liberace’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You” over the tense excitement of ActUp action footage—which includes his own disrupted, TV news obituary—one understands that these histories are strangely enmeshed, joined at the site of their presumed queerness or temporality by Vargas, where they transform one another. In Vargas’ telling, the closet Liberace comes out of is that of radical queerness. Although he calls himself “just an old queen,” Liberace’s anger speaks to the continued complexity of our histories and picturing of self.

Liberaceón (2011) was on exhibition most recently in San Francisco as part of ProArts Gallery’s Bay Area Currents 2011, curated by Julio César Morales. You can also find Vargas’s work at www.chrisevargas.com.

Show card for "Hybrid Narrative" at Mac Arthur B Arthur, in Oakland, CA, 2012.

Sight, acknowledgment, and shared experience all figure prominently in Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of Self and the Imagined Self, currently at Mac Arthur B Arthur in Oakland, CA. Artists Liz Rosenfeld, Chris E. Vargas, Sofia Cordova and Shana Moulton make themselves “seen” though video, film transfer, installation and performance.

Liz Rosenfeld, Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), 2005.

Rosenfeld’s Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), a 16mm film transfer to video, brings us to another time both via its material, and the performers themselves . A near-direct reenactment of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974), Rosenfeld’s work is non-narrative and lyrical. A small group paints their faces, necks and arms, and bind themselves with tape in what appears to be abandoned urban and industrial spaces. The short film is an analgesic; these desirable and compellingly filthy bodies lull and please, but also unabashedly idealize. Untitled recalls the ‘70s not just in its aesthetic but also in its evocation of community – Hammer’s original film sought to make visible the 1970s lesbian-feminist art coalescence. Rosenfeld’s work is decidedly queer and pictures a similar community present at the margins of the larger contemporary art market.

Chris Vargas, Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before?, 2010. Video still.

Chris Vargas uses his body comically in Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? (2010). The artist visits several photo-worthy locales, each with particular artistic or pop-culture significance: the LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City, the Las Vegas strip, the salt flats of Utah, a windmill noted as “Americana,” and – most notably – Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976). In each location, he asks the uninhabited space “have you ever seen a transsexual before?” – pulling up his shirt and exposing his chest. Vargas grows increasingly frustrated with the lack of response, dramatically flopping on a hotel bed or scurrying out of frame. Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? takes an unanticipated turn via the artist’s frequently used low-fi green screen technology, transporting Vargas to other, faraway locales as he searches out and finds a Painted Bunting, a bird native to the American Southeast. The brightly colored bird is, in this writer’s humble opinion, pretty gay.  They are also easily misread as exotic or distant by the untested eye, although they remain ubiquitous throughout much of North America – perhaps an interesting parallel for one’s sexual or gender orientation.

Whispering Pines 10 – Trailer from Shana Moulton on Vimeo.

Time and place are also critical to the show’s other two works, Sofia Cordova’s installation and video, Fiebre Fanta [Fanta Fever] (2011), and Shana Mouton’s series Whispering Pines (2004- 2011). Cordova’s installation includes black-and-white prints (including what might be a picture of the artist as a toddler), a video projection with stuttering images, an electric palm tree, and the sound of storms, running water, and club music. The jumble of media brings to mind how identity traverses time and place: the artist, as a baby, particularly butch in a white A-shirt, and then again, recognizable as her “self” in the ostensible present.  Moulton also splices time and fantasy with the early ‘90s splatter paint, faux marble madness that is Whispering Pines. The TBN-worthy soundtrack and ample use of clip art both critique and revel in technology, not to mention self-help literature from the recent past and notions of beauty.

In a recent BBC documentary on J Dilla, the deceased beatmaker’s family and fellow industry folk recount the seminal producer’s style, marked most notably by a counter-quantizing of his drum machine: a drunken mechanization, a meeting point of analog practices (the mythic process of searching through crates of records) and digitization that concurrently sounded ill-programmed (off-beat), yet intentional and on-point. This is man-made modernism, in contrast to the conventional image of crisp lines and sharp edges. So what would J Dilla’s sound look like? Jack White’s Neo-Totems, on display at the African American Art and Culture Center, come to mind.

White is a native of rural North Carolina and has taught in art programs in the American South and Northeast. He describes his work as “Abstract Impressionism”; still, much like underground or “backpack” hip hop, White’s sculptures imagine a future as much as they point to a past. In Neo Totem #11 (2009), discarded and weathered lumber lies next to mass-produced combs, nails and objects: an over four-foot piece of found wood, dusty and handled pieces of metal peeping through stains, and a not immediately visible hair pick. The objects come together, but they are slightly off, or not perfectly symmetrical. Although it might be predictable to state as much about such work, White’s sculptures are soulful.

In Neo Totem #11, the pick comb–traditionally used for black hairstyles, most notably the Afro–at once alludes to the past (the 1970s) while also making manifest the prognostic cultural phenomena of Afrocentricity and Afrofuturism. Although ancestral, the “neo” (or newness) of these sculpture are different, imagined futures. They are objects that long for an additional function, point to places outside the gallery, and make sound.

White’s drawings and sketches allude to such narratives. Framed and tucked away, Totem study I (2009) and Totem study II (2009) are the last thing one notices in the gallery space, they are so unassuming. Still, Totem study I speaks to process, chronology and place. The ink drawing includes White’s notes: “part of an old chair, found in 2008” and “from shield from Kenya.” Spiral binding ridges remain, and a sketch of a work to come. Much like his musical grandchildren, White’s Neo-Totems sample, cut, and connect.

Jack White: Neo-Totems and Other Works of Art–a Continuum is on display in the Sargent Johnson Gallery at the African American Art and Culture Center, in San Francisco, through January 12, 2012.

Fore’ n’ Aft Souvenir Book, May 21, 1943. Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

More a thoroughfare between the institutional offices and educational spaces than destinations, the second and third floor galleries at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) can be, at times, unforgiving display spaces. Nevertheless, as an institution, MoAD consistently presents exhibitions that expand one’s notions of race and identity. One need only to look at last year’s “African Continuum: Sacred Ceremonies and Rituals,” which contrasts with a more recent Richard Mayhew monograph: two exhibitions tenuously and productively held under the cultural umbrella of African Diaspora—or more pointedly, black visuality.

Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues," 1926. Illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

In promotional material, MoAD is described as “presenting the rich cultural products of the people of Africa and of African descendant cultures across the globe.”  To be clear, this includes all Lucy’s progeny. To drive this point home, guests are asked both in a digital tour and in the writing on the walls, “When did you discover you are African?” “Collected: Stories of Acquisition and Reclamation,” MoAD’s current exhibition, includes selections from three collections: the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art and the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Although each of these collections are distinct, much of what is displayed is Black Americana from the 19th and 20^th centuries, including movie posters, paintings, signed first editions, an antebellum estate mortgage and ragtime sheet music. A really exceptional Charles White drawing, The Open Gate (1948), depicts a young black man standing before an open-metal gate; true to White’s practice, the figure and entrance allude to America’s postwar atmosphere—longed for opportunity at the cusp of change. In the second floor gallery are several film posters from both lesser-known independent cinema—1948’s Miracle in Harlem—and the classics, such as Carmen Jones (1954) and St. Louis Blues (1958). Here, Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt hum, projected on a wall for a room of empty office chairs.

Charles Borel-Clerc, French (1879–1959). "Zambesi Dance," 1912. Arr. by Carl F. Williams. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Photo by Myles L. Collins, courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

“Collected” is an exceptional accumulation of objects, but the mandate to “better understand the cultural impact of these objects,” may have been missed. Curatorial consultant Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins based selections on the professed social or cultural significance of said objects without complicating questions of why, for whom, and what they might mean in contemporary communities—questions that are critical in a contemporary exhibition on collecting. Further, both what is seen as significant, and the collectors that shape the narratives around the objects in “Collected” smack a bit of dated class privilege (a nod to W.E.B. Du Bois, whose writings are included in the exhibition), which unfortunately goes unaddressed. Still, go see “Collected.”  The value of seeing a work by Bob Thompson, or the palpable excitement one feels finding Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, signed by the author nearly 240 years ago, are undeniable and well worth the visit—however uncomplicated.

Phillis Wheatley, "Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral," 1773. From the collection of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

Chris E. Vargas, Video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

History, like most things, is subjective. What is culled from individual accounts is accepted as fact and eventually translates into some kind of truth. But truth can be different at any moment—past, present, and future. The events in London were either riots or long overdue, civil unrest.  Depending on whom you ask, in 2005 the people of New Orleans were either looting or just surviving. This parsing of history renders “truth” and “fact” malleable, constituent materials for narrative and artistic practice. In his video work Liberaceón (2011), Bay Area artist Chris E. Vargas makes histories, meshing the life of the pianist Liberace, late-80s direct actions to end the AIDS crisis, and a nonapologetic use of green screening.

Vargas is best known for his collaborative, narrative videos and films.  In Falling in Love…with Chris and Greg (2008–ongoing), we watch the dark satire of Vargas and his artistic/romantic partner Greg Younmans’s relationship.  Through the structural lens of traditional sitcom, the couple questions notions of monogamy, marriage, and gender, while consistently establishing their own, not always hyper-radical or “appropriate,” notions of companionship.

Not unlike Falling in Love, in Liberaceón, Vargas inserts radical, queer rhetoric into the arguably apolitical, high zest that was Liberace. Liberaceón includes footage of the showman’s TV specials, Liberace’s nightly news obituary, and various ActUp protests beside Vargas’s molty wigs, camp, and classical, non-method forms of acting. True to Liberace’s mid-1980s opulence and Vegas styling, the video begins with Vargas-as-Liberace’s grand entrance, which includes a balloon ride over “the Strip,” a reclaimed parking lot with a sequined American flag and a Rolls Royce. The film quickly cuts to Liberace and lover Cary James’s visit to a doctor (Younmans), who has an unfortunate bedside manner and gives a dreadful—but at the time, not uncommon—diagnosis.

Inspired to make James feel better, Liberace takes to preparing some chicken soup (again, epic use of chroma key by Vargas). While watching the news in his decadent kitchen, Liberace becomes frustrated by the many AIDS-related deaths, President Regan’s continued silence and the US Congress’s conservative funding of AIDS research. The performer decides to take direct action by constructing a gift with his “special ingredient…to scare ole Ronnie.” What follows is the most compelling and sensual use of a double boiler, all in an attempt to make a Liberace-laced, bloodied chocolate piano.

Chris E. Vargas, video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

The glittering stone on this work’s bejeweled finger is the deathbed scene between Liberace and James. Vargas’s slow collapse, full of gasping and eye-flickering, is at once hilarious and disquieting. One knows that Liberace’s many requests not to be memorialized with sap, nor to reduce his or others’ experiences to melodrama, but to honor the experience of any person with AIDS, including himself, have gone largely unanswered. Yet, as the work closes with Liberace’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You” over the tense excitement of ActUp action footage—which includes his own disrupted, TV news obituary—one understands that these histories are strangely enmeshed, joined at the site of their presumed queerness or temporality by Vargas, where they transform one another.  In Vargas’ telling, the closet Liberace comes out of is that of radical queerness. Although he calls himself “just an old queen,” Liberace’s anger speaks to the continued complexity of our histories and picturing of self.

Liberaceón (2011) was on exhibition most recently in San Francisco as part of ProArts Gallery’s Bay Area Currents 2011, curated by Julio César Morales. You can also find Vargas’s work at www.chrisevargas.com.