La Cho Co La Te Ra

Rewind Ritual- Rituals of passage toward a new media in the Dominican Republic

Until the end of the nineties performance in the Dominican Repub ic was, almost in ts tota ity, an alien discipline in which three cats and a dog were used only as a s deshow at openings for painting exh bitions Only a small group of multimedia artists, including Geo Ripley, Martín Lopez, and Charo Oquet, conducted independent performance art in which artistic strategies njected meaning nto the final work Geo Ripley with painting, Mart n Lopez with photography, and Charo Oquet with installation, managed to integrate performance i n t o t h e i r m o r e c o n v e n t i o n a p r o posals

At the time, the documentation of these actions with cameras and the creation of art action through a camera were almost nonexistent These performances and works existed in a per pheral area of the art world, where access to equipment was limited and art-wor d writing and d scussions had limited references to such projects

The national academ c menu was not any r cher than the possible local references The art schools, until recently, were focused on institutiona romantic modern sm Which we are still trying to shake off today Performance and its masters were treated in a slight manner with only a one-hour workshop offered once every two years To all these ills, which fell on performance, we must also add the deficiency of a theoretical concentration in our academic world, scaffolding without which an eminently conceptua art cannot be articulated In this landscape; self-teaching under the protection of a network of initiations, social gatherings, small private librar es, parties and coincidences, foreign lovers that send monographs, v deos and magazines, the Internet and faith, was the only remaining option, even for the graduates of the Fine Arts Academy

In 1999, the terms performance and video action were limited and inorganic in the Dominican context I bought my first digital camera and with it I documented my sma l daily actions The immed acy w th which the new apparatus allowed me to capture and reject my body permitted me a different access It was more crit cal and various, dislocating my knowledge of normal space, time, and language. It cou d be asserted that the small camera was my teacher, my studio, and also that which made possible the quantum leap. This was a leap that was occurring in the work of many other emerging artists in the third world, who began to experiment with similar devices

These projects destined to be projected dur ng an electronic party or to be shared in small art spaces in Mexico, Puerto Plata, and NY, made me ass milate video-creation and performance from a strange, almost biological familiarity (The same one that is now shared compulsively by the thousands of people that post daily in You Tube, one that aligned me to a visual deconstruction, whose voluptuousness has infected my writing.)

I w a n t t o d i s c u s s t h s j u m p t o w a r d s t h e n o nconventional arts in the Dominican Republic in terms of a contemporary artist whose recent artistic path saved the country from decades of conceptual and formal lethargy. The work that I am going to focus on, Eliú Almonte's "the Goat Sacrifice" (2001), manages to be placed with n a tradition and dissolve it

I had known Eliú Almonte through his installations, his co lages and the impressive co lection of more than 30 colors of Chuck Taylor's Converse sneakers he had managed to amass from the Puerto P ata flea markets He is a cultural activist, midnight cowboy, and creator of the CHOCOPOP (first festival specialized in performance in the Dominican Republic) Yet it was not unt l I saw the video "The Goat Sacrifice", that I was honored and thrilled to know him This piece, a ritual that initiates a new per od n the visua arts in the country, is the simple and effective exploration of a subject It is so effective that it has permeated a great part of Dominican discourse

Let me describe the work itself A machete penetrates a b ack goat chosen from a meadow; the head of the goat is cut off We see El ú's image t w i c e i n t h e v i d e o - - o n e i n w h c h h e a p p e a r s carry ng the goat on his death journey, in the other his hand ho ding a leg of the animal He prefers to stay behind the goat, but not like a passive spectator. Instead he makes the camera something more mag cal, the nonexistent sacrificial stone in the very green meadow on which the victim rests. The piece works, in a cultural heritage reading, like a generational relay race of the already ritualistic and consecutive representation of the great Dominican sacrifice of the XX century; the death of the primordial male goat, the tyrant Rafael Leonidas Trujil o, n cknamed "The Goat" But Eliú does not remain like one of the infamous multitude of artists who have made their small tribute to the execution and to the dictatorship (one and the same face of a coin), his video d sassembles l i v e , t h e m y t h a n d q u a l f i e s a n e w m a g i c a lt e c h nological discourse that reduces the monster to bones The very close video shots, as in a porno clip, reveal a sophisticated commentary on the compulsivity w i t h w h i c h t h e e v e n t h a s b e e n represented on pages and on canvases for 40 years Eliú's work also may be alluding to the g e n e r a t o n s o f D o m i n i c a n a r t i s t s w h o h a v e s a c r i f i c e d truth for a genuine search for the lame and servile official version, instantaneous repetition phenomenon ad infinitum since the times of the regime.

This repetit on becomes flesh at the end of the video, when the camera zooms n on the skull of the goat resting on a shining bowl at the same time that we hear the starting of the motor of a nearby auto This image repeats itself several times zooming in and out. By doing th s it estab ishes the possibility of a new distance, from which the bodiless goat, placed on a metal bow , turns the Dominican patriarcha trauma into a clinical specimen, diagnosed and awaiting a final cure

The fast rate that the tools of digita reproduction allow images to be consumed and discarded has worked like a time machine in our marginal areas, where the artists sharpened by the toils which the new medium demands, are as comfortable in the new media as in the solitude of the present body T h e f u n c t o n a l i t y o f t h e v d e o - a c t i o n o r documented performance piece in a country where witnesses are for sale and where machines were for a long time pr vileges of a minority s obvious A new itter of Dominican creators find themselves immersed in the exploration of this discipline, resuming discuss ons as old as bread and cheese, but more importantly, prov ding new so utions to old problems, populating local spectators with the necessary - What the hell is this?

Dulce Verguenza was conceived over a del cious breakfast of Mangu and café con leche in Puerto P ata with Charo Oquet, David Vardi, Pip Brandt, and Duane Brandt It was performed at La Chocolatera, an abandoned chocolate factory, and expanded around the city This spontaneous and exciting collaboration came together quickly, as we used all natural materia s found at the local market. We purchased cinnamon, molasses, cocoa powder, a paste made from sweet dried fruits, and other colorful spices Next we walked towards the butcher, “la carniceria” to purchase beautiful white chicken feathers

Charo and Pip made a beautiful earth toned painting on my body At first I felt almost as if I would suffocate in a cloud of cinnamon I did dare not open my eyes When I was at my stickiest, they covered me in the white f e a t h e r s T h e r e s u l t w a s a n e p h e m e r a textured and great sme ling painting on my body, I am sure that I looked a walking Jackson Pollock painting with hair on top, tied up in cinnamon sticks and feathers stuck to it

At the end I was coaxed into jumping on the back of a motoconcho, which is a motorcycle taxi to parade my decorated body around town The group performance was very intuitive, and seemed a lot like cooking The way that th ngs came together seemed very spiritual, yet earthy to me