1980 / Performance /Artist: Carlos Villa / The Farm, San Francisco, California

Peering into Carlos Villa’s performative work in many ways gives the viewer an idea of the journey not a few Filipinos experience as they try to find a sense of self and place in another country that eventually becomes domicile. As an aggressive cultural organizer-curator-researcher, Villa worked with several succeeding generations of diasporic and/or mixed-ancestry Filipinos, including Eliza Barrios, Reanne Estrada, Manuel Ocampo, Stephanie Syjuco, and Jenifer Wofford. Villa’s mentoring of mixed-race artists and artist-scholars has spurred these artists to address complex subjectivities in relation to citizenship and allegiances.

Ritual comes in the fairly early phase of Villa’s practice, a decade after he had already been doing minimalist painting and sculpture using ritual garments, ceremonial objects, bodily imprints, and other artifacts from Asia, Oceania, and Africa. In Ritual, the artist takes on a mediating role and combines shamanistic performance elements, such as drumming, dancing, and trance poetry, as assertion of Villa’s argument that art actions are a means to rehistoricize. It was through such performative as well as organizing and pedagogical work that Villa meant to collectively mobilize art-world agents against the inequitable conditions of non-Caucasian artists and migrants like him. Villa himself describes Ritual as a weaving together of a composite visual anthropology that drew from his understanding of Western Sudanese culture and what came to be known as Jackson Pollock’s action painting performance filmed by Hans Namuth. In keeping with Villa’s coming to terms with his own personal and artistic trajectories, he overtly referenced Namuth’s documentation of Pollock’s live painting alongside Crazy Masters, a video on African trance ritual. This latter video was screened in a nearby space as Villa put on an afternoon-long performance where he enacted concepts of birth, transformation, and rites of passage stories. The narratives were of peoples and languages coming to be, and of encounters between Villa’s shifting personas and those of other bodies from elsewhere and from other times.

Villa used the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotoemmeli as a textual anchor. Ritual patches together seemingly disparate elements as seen in the meetings between personas who are not known to each other and are of unequal stature such as the Dogon chief Ogotemmeli and Griaule. While the work argues in behalf of self-determination and positions itself against imposed notions of authenticity, the work can also be read as a problematically slapdash melding of cultural practices. Ritual may be considered a seminal work as it was staged within a specific Northern American historical juncture that was opening up to a more plural appreciation of cultures coming from a different space and time.