art proposal

Please Don’t Bury Me Alive!

Key Terms: Robert Smithson, Modernism, Colonialism, Latin America, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, La Migra, Immigration, Modernisms, Borderland, Mythohistorical, Imaginary, Speculative, US-Mexico, Play, Theater, Performance, Art, Hotel Palenque, Critical Pedagogy, Performance Lecture, Salvador Roberto Torres, Chicano Park

Abstract: “There is something about Mexico. An overall hidden concealed violence about the landscape itself. Many artists and writers have gone to Mexico and been completely destroyed, you know . . . So you have to be very careful when you go to Mexico so that you are not caught up in this—in any of this kind of unconscious, dangerous violence that is really lurking in every patch of earth” —Robert Smithson, 1970

“Please Don’t Bury Me Alive!” is a performative lecture that investigates how Latin America has figured into the construction of various western art-historical narratives. The performance lecture, which is suitable for an academic conference setting, moves back and forth between two readers. The first reader re-presents Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque artist talk, initially delivered to graduate students at the University of Utah in 1970. Smithson’s ruminations about art, architecture, and Mexico are paired with historical photographs of San Diego’s Chicano Park. The discord and resonance between the two mirror the fractured associations between modernity and coloniality. The second reader performs an abridged and rewritten version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In an attempt to complicate the social implications of waiting, the re-written play is set in an unnamed detention center along the US-Mexico border. Throughout the monologue the main character contemplates the nature of confinement, the immanence of torture, and the effects of delay on the racialized subject. Over the course of “Please Don’t Bury Me Alive!” both the restaged artist lecture and the modified play cross paths in unlikely ways drawing attention to the role movement, migrations, Mexico, colonialism, and imaginative mythohistorical interventions play in the Othering and rethinking of Modernsim’s legacies.

Biography: Anthony Romero and Josh Rios are educators, artists, and cultural critics. Over the past several years they have been developing various performances, 2 and 3 dimensional works, curatorial projects, installations, writings, and screenings that deal with the key experiences of being US citizens of Mexican origin. Broadly speaking, their projects center on contemporary Chicana/o aesthetics, the elided histories of the Chicana/o struggle, and the larger themes of US-Mexico relations. In November they will be artists in residence at Harold Washington College. In December they will be participants in Chicago’s Poet’s Theater Festival. Their performances and projects have been most recently featured at the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Texas State University, Art in these Times, Andrea Meislin Gallery, and Sector 2337.

Anthony Romero / Joshua Rios Performance Lecture Proposal