The Outer Limits: Latinx Art History's Resident Alien(ation)

Abstract

The Outer Limits:Latinx Art History's Resident Alien(ation) Robb Hernández (bio) In the exhibition Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, the contemporary, new, and now frequently conflicted with the virtual, as yet, and to be seen.1 As co-curator, my studio visits with artists from ten U.S. cities and six Latin American nations challenged the familiar terms of art fieldwork in the present by revealing creative processes committed to the speculative and fantastic. By expanding the terms of "science fiction art," these artists rehearsed anachronic detours, futuristic investigation, and slipstreams of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls "alien consciousness." "The secret I tried to conceal," writes Anzaldúa, "was that I was not normal, that I was not like the others. I felt alien, I knew I was alien."2 Building off what Dan Byrne-Smith loosely defines as science fiction's "forms of practice, complex networks, or a set of sensibilities" in the arts, these Latinx creatives and their eclectic drives were akin to resident aliens of art history.3 Here I second Jennifer A. González's assessment that the critical vocabularies emerging around the field of Chicano and Chicana art introduced "new linguistic and conceptual discourse," which would "appear purposefully alien."4 Although her turn of phrase would seem more metaphoric than literal, her double-speak refortifies Anzaldúan thought. There is something alien about Latinx visuality seated at the outer limits of formal art historical methodologies, defamiliarizing familiar space-time synchronicities and circumventing nation-period paradigms. For traditional object-oriented and linear-minded art historians, "despite their interest in and engagement with contemporary art, most … have trouble evaluating art that is being created in their own time, art that points the way, i.e. the way to the future," Armen Avanessian argues.5 It is perhaps because of Latinidad's resident alien(ation) that art history has much to learn from its utopian, speculative, and world-making potentialities. How Latinx art and performance conveys speculatively directed [End Page 279] image-making focuses the remainder of my comments, which highlight works by Beatriz Cortez, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Beta-Local from the 2019 iteration of Mundos Alternos at the Queens Museum in New York. "What if ?," "what could be?," and "what will be?" guide creative practices and artistic interrogations at the "outer limits" of the observable external world. Alien being and being alien are matters of empire, social (dis)location, migratory displacement, and bendable uses and senses of space-time. These vectors combine in Beatriz Cortez's The Cosmos (Spaceship), a mirrored cosmic domicile suffusing the geodesic dome structures of Indigenous architecture with countercultural commune shelters and the architectural imprint of NASA space modules. Her mirrored hexagonal tiles cast luminous light fields across the gallery, perhaps adding a recognizable schema of shine and metallic tones on par with "science-fiction modernity," which colors Western imaginaries of space science.6 However, what sounds in the ambient noise of the museum are the words of Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi First Nation people in Native California. His testimony reverberates from a 1911 wax cylinder recording, bringing archaic technologies of the past to reckon with the privileged space of spaceflight technology. Like a time machine, The Cosmos (Spaceship) refuses the closures of dead languages, temporal linearity, and Western scales of time. Ishi is no longer abandoned in the past. He belongs to today and tomorrow. Ancient knowledges, conquered people, and the genocidal disappeared Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Beatriz Cortez, The Cosmos (Spaceship) (2015). Wood, acrylic mirrors, zip ties, and found audio recording on a loop. Image courtesy of Hai Zhang/Queens Museum and the artist. [End Page 280] return for an out of time conversation with an Anthropocene in crisis and an extinct language transmitted through the cosmos. Cortez's sculpture broadcasts Yahi sounds filling the art environment with messages in tune with another time, another Earth. Certainly, where there are languages, there are other worlds. Artist Guadalupe Maravilla's performance in which personal testimonio takes alien form is no exception. In Walk on Water, beast, coyote, and extraterrestrial populate the collaborative promenade staged on the...