Scum in Ecstasy, 2022

Two Channel, HD, 4:00 minutes

Cinematography by Kate Rhoades

Music by R McCarthy

Sundry Cataclysm, Utopic Media (Ecstasy)

by theo lau

Her first impact against the surface seems to stun Xandra Ibarra slightly, but she recovers, continuing on her way. The camera shakes as Ibarra thrashes, air rippling through her gums, her audience brought into the midst of ecstasy-in-progress slowed to a crawl. Her loose evocation of sweaty ecstasy, mouth, surface, is closer to the high of chewing tobacco than that fad facial massage where they stick their hands into your open maw. 

The two are close – materially scummy, chewing tobacco flushes through the flux surface separating bloodstream and the outside, brought within. Having someone’s hands in your mouth allows them to tap into the surface of your nerves, a sensation so close to the transfusion of another into oneself, though it misses a high’s aforementioned bloodborne incorporation. “Enclosed within the same sack of skin,” flashes on the red-bathed left channel. We can’t get there. This image exists solely as a textual representation, a condition without the (grotesque) steps necessary to achieve it, as Ibarra’s statement approaches both materially and conceptually the basis of vore, a fetish in which one literally consumes the object of one’s desire. Vore hints at a lonely desire for an intimacy that destroys the membrane between self and other, categories of identification falling to the side in complete oneness. This desire remains an impossible fantasy, sustainable only through subjunctive or utopian language states, given the simultaneous abject physical violence toward the consumed and grotesque distension of the consumer necessary for its achievement.

“i want the other to be me,” writes Ibarra, the text appearing on the red screen. 

A gap lies in this statement, between definitions of Other, indicating separate relational contexts - the Other that is generated in relation to the psychological self, and the alienated collective Other that is produced by societal normativity. Both stem from the Western onto-epistemological regime that separates inside and out, operating on interlocking scales. The two definitions circle each other in the form of an ouroboros, akin to Ibarra’s initial elliptical address of an unknown interlocutor: “i / k n o w / y o u / k n o w” followed by “t h a t / i / k n o w,” after a pause. Her text is arranged like a sieve of letters, a shared knowing slipping through its net, just out of sight.

Where in our dissolution do we find a possibility to become one? 

The title of the work, Scum in Ecstasy, offers another referential loophole into undertaking this problematic by way of Western heteropatriarchy’s societal Other, in one instance the moshing femme punk body. In 1967, Valerie Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto, a mercurial, terrifying text overshadowed by her shooting of Andy Warhol in 1968. Her text inverts patriarchal roles of male and female, asserting men as “incomplete females” who are deficient and seek the feminine in oppressive ways. Solanas’ answer to upending intersectional oppression comes via her ultimate societal Other, “those females least embedded in the male `Culture',” characterized colorfully by their crassness, hostility, sexual jadedness, violence, “those who, by the standards of our ‘culture' are SCUM.” Moving beyond the reactionary nature of her formulation and its weddedness to the gender binary,  Solanas’s SCUM-my other is interestingly the sole class in her manifesto characterized by monadic “completeness,” predicated on their “fucking up,” a militant, unorganized fugitivity within normative society. SCUM’s collective alignment comes from their individual isolation, Solanas writing about them as interchangeably singular and multiple – in other words, she posits their antagonistic agency as dissolution into a oneness, a beyond-individual entropy which messily torches the conditions producing the societal Other. 

I want to return to the earthquake of Ibarra’s collision with surfaces, to the ecstatic rumbling of her flail. Much of this essay has been to write around the power of her gesture and its intercession with her desire politics, but maybe it’s cute to fantasize here - let’s say, for a second that Ibarra produces a literal earthquake in her collision, that spans the tectonic gap from performance to screen. What does this vibration do? 

I think of the possibility of genuine, locally shared experience through earthquakes’ other-than-human intercession – we are rooted, for a moment, on the same plane. The text messages circulate: “did you just feel that?” in other words, confirmation that “i know / you know,” that maybe “i know.”  The cataclysm narrative of the Bay Area’s long-due mega-earthquake remains omniscient in the news. We promise ourselves reckoning delayed unto an unknown horizon, arrhythmic, spectral behind each smaller shake, until we are present in it and then maybe we’re all dissolved into the Big One. 

1. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (London: Olympia Press, 1971), 31.

2. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (London: Olympia Press, 1971), 46.
   
   
   

Work Cited

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. London: Olympia Press, 1971. 

Theodore Lau is an independent curator and writer from San Jose, California. Theodore is part of the collective dbnr, and has held positions at Tina Kim Gallery, MoMA, the Wattis Institute, KADIST, and the ICA San Jose. Theodore received a BA in Art History from Brown University. theodore-lau.com/

About the Artist

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based visual and performance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.

Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few.  Recent residencies include San Francisco Public Library (via SF Arts Commission), Vermont Studio Center, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. She has been awarded the UC President’s PostDoctoral Fellowship, the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Eureka Fellowship. She is a Creative Capital awardee and has also garnered awards like the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Eisner Film and Video Prize, Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award.  Her work has been featured in Frieze Magazine, Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally. 

Ibarra’s work has also been featured in several recent and forthcoming books. Her work is discussed in In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance by Amelia Jones. An excerpt from her panel presentation at the New Museum, “Exhibitionist Tendencies: The Past and Present of Sexuality, Gender, and Race in Art” is included in the book Saturation: Race, Art & The Circulation of Value edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings features her performance “I am your Puppet” (2007) while Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sexual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance includes a chapter about Ibarra’s collaboration with performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, “Untitled Fucking” (2013). Leticia Alvarado’s Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategiesin Latino Cultural Production features Ibarra’s performance work “Skins/Less Here” (2015) on the cover and within the book.

As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She is currently a member of Survived and Punished California. As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Sculpture, Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses. Adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University. Ibarra holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and attended the Post-Colonial Studies program held at the Universidat Rovira | Virgili (Spain).

BASEMENT PROJECTS

Underground Projects create a temporary project space in the gallery underground space for newly commissioned site-responsive projects. As part of its commitment to expand paid opportunities for local emerging and mid-career artists in the Bay Area and to surprise audiences with exceptional contemporary art presented for free in an approachable manner, BAC will transform part of its basement into a mini-gallery dedicated to all things “underground.” Finished works will address themes of (in)visibility, submergence, and darkness, with an emphasis on video, sound, and sculptural installation projects.