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Arizona State University Performance ARt

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  • Performing Art and Research | The Voice of MLK Jr. | Mystery in the Stacks

    Performing Art and Research in the Humanities: Focus on Ron Broglio

    and Cristbal Martnez

    This spring, Accents on English features two scholars whose art installations and performances lie at the heart of their scholarship. In

    individual interviews conducted in April, the artists each share some insights on the broader significance of their work. Associate Professor

    Ron Broglio discusses his passion for and perspective on a recent performancethe Digital Tabernacle performed at ASUs Emerge

    2014: A Carnival of the Future. Cristbal Martnez, doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition, talks about his dissertation as well

    as a new project with Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective. Together, these scholars advance a vision of art that allows

    viewers to contemplate contemporary existential and political concerns in the humanities.

    Upon entering the performance space, patrons attending

    the Digital Tabernacle faced two men dressed as ministers

    demanding that they surrender their mobile phones. In this

    performance, Ron Broglio collaborated with Marcel

    OGorman of the University of Waterloo, who wrote an

    article for Slate.com last March covering the performance.

    Broglio explains that that the performance asks people to

    interrupt their digital habits in order to reflect on how they

    immerse themselves in the world and how they use their

    technology. The artists draw on applied media theory and

    continental philosophy and argue that technology is an

    apparatus of prosthetic memory. Cell phones, Broglio

    points out, serve as an extension of our social memory.

    Thus, the implications of asking people to surrender their

    phones might include that they are now required to give

    their full attention to a conversation instead of

    communicating with distant others, that they must change

    their spatial awareness while traveling because they can no

    longer rely on GPS, or even that they might have to plan

    ahead to arrange meetings because they cannot rely on texting to get together with others at a moments notice. For Broglio, the goal of

    this performance is to transform the audience: When you return to the technology, you see it differently and you perhaps use it

    differently.

    Broglio, referring to OGormans forthcoming book Necromedia, states that people use technology to ward off mortality because

    technology is so easy to use that it dissipates the friction of the world around us. However, he counters, what makes us human is the

    ability to contemplate existential questions and ultimately to embrace our mortality. In the performance, Broglio and OGorman take on

    the roles of the ministers of the tabernacle, deliberately drawing on the cultural trope of the street preacher to engage the audience.

    Broglio explains that street preachers talk about good and bad habits, immortality or another life, so the artists leveraged that knowledge

    in their performance to interrupt the impulse to hold mortality at bay through technology. Their ultimate purpose is to provoke the

    audience to examine rituals performed around technology with the hope that they will perhaps see something new.

    Like the Digital Tabernacle, reframing cultural symbols to

    engage in alternative discourse is also a key feature of

    Cristbal Martnezs work. Martnez, who has earned a

    Bachelor of Art in painting and performance art and a

    Master of Art in computational media, is now completing his

    doctoral dissertation in rhetoric and composition. While at

    first glance these three degrees might seem unrelated,

    Martnez argues that they all function as tools that have

    helped him craft a Native theory of media. As a Mestizo

    from northern New Mexico, Martnez draws on indigenous

    knowledge systems as frameworks for designing media. In

    his dissertation, he looks to indigenous artists to examine

    the ways in which indigenous entrepreneurship, cultural

    sovereignty, and rhetorical sovereignty come together with

    media for the purpose of self-determination and

    Home :: About Us :: Department Newsletter :: Accents Spring 2014

    Performance & Discovery in English Studies: Performance

    Art & Research in the HumanitiesDepartment of

    English

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    Page 1 of 2Performance & Discovery in English Studies: Performance Art & Res...

    1/1/2015http://english.clas.asu.edu/accents2014/performance-art-research

  • Department of English

    Language & Literature, 851 S. Cady Mall Room 542 | P.O. Box 870302, Tempe, AZ 85287-0302

    Phone: 480-965-3168 | Fax: 480-965-3451 | Contact Us

    sovereignty. He is particularly interested in how sovereignty

    might be enacted in virtual space through media.

    Martnez is also a member of Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective. The group is currently working on constructing an

    ephemeral monument titled The Repellent Fence, which will vertically intersect the US/Mexico border fence for 2 miles on either side.

    This repellent fence will be made of scare eye balloonsbeach ball sized balloons painted with a graphic symbol of concentric circles

    representing an eye, typically used as a bird repellentplaced in 200 meter increments along the 4 miles. The art collective frequently

    uses this symbol in their installations because of its obsolescenceas a bird repellent, the product is only temporarily effectiveand

    because the graphic symbol of the eye evokes multiple culturally embedded narratives that change depending on the context. For

    instance, Martnez explains, the concentric circles also function as spiritual mediators that have shared meanings across various

    indigenous cultures throughout the Western hemisphere.

    One of the purposes of the Repellent Fence is to ground the

    discourse of immigration in an indigenous perspective in a

    way that complicates and reframes understandings of the

    US/Mexico border fence. Martnez argues that the border

    fence bisects indigenous nations and fails to recognize the

    experiential and lived complexities of tribes geographically

    located in these places, including interrupting those who

    continue to follow ancient trade routes that have afforded

    economic opportunities historically for such groups. The

    artist explains that the Repellent Fence functions as an

    artifact of diplomacy because constructing it requires

    conversations and collaborations between various local

    communities such as indigenous nations, ranchers, recently

    deported and recently arrived immigrants, as well as the

    border patrol. Ultimately, the Repellent Fence appropriates

    and re-imagines media such as the ineffective scare eye

    balloons to highlight the ephemeral nature of the border

    fence and to support indigenous self-determination and

    sovereignty.

    In these reflections on their work, Broglio and Martnez each make compelling arguments for the powerful role performance art and art

    installations can play in provoking alternative considerations of contemporary discourses.

    Sybil Durand

    Photo 1: Ron Broglio (right) gestures as collaborator Marcel O'Gorman looks on during their "Digital Tabernacle" performance at ASU Emerge 2014 (photo by Nina Miller).

    Photo 2: The members of Postcommodity, from L to R: Raven Chacon, Cristbal Martnez, Kade L. Twist, and Nathan Young (photo courtesy Cristbal Martnez).

    Photo 3: "Repellent Eye Over Phoenix - 2008," an earlier work by Postcommodity (photo courtesy Cristbal Martnez).

    Header background image: "Speak Not Against the Sun" and "Do Not Make Water Facing the Sun" [fol. 39 recto] (c. 1512/1515), French early 16th century. Pen and brown ink with watercolor and

    stylus on laid paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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