Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage

4. Nao Bustamante’s “Bad-Girl” Aesthetics

135 T his first chapter of the second part of Performing Mexicanidad, which focuses on experimental performance and videoart practices by female artists Ximena Cuevas and Nao Bustamante (considered doyennes of Mexican and Chicano avantgarde art, respectively), reconceptualizes the avant-garde artistic practices of Nao Bustamante as a “bad girl,” as opposed to the “bad boy” thought to be the traditional actor of transgressive political art. My rereading, claiming, and positioning of performance, video, and installation artist Bustamante as a “bad girl” allows me to enact an important critical intervention: to situate Bustamante’s performative practices within a historical trajectory of avant-garde art, a movement that simultaneously genders, queers, and racializes the historical and the neo-avant-garde. While it may be true that the artists examined in the first part of this book may also be “bad girls” in the art world, due to their politically charged, gendered, and queer artistic interventions, my attributing the moniker of “bad girl” to Bustamante’s aesthetics is intended to specifically highlight the ambivalent position of her cultural production in regard to both avant-garde practices and identitybased artistic expression, the latter in the specific case of the United States. I agree with José Esteban Muñoz, who, in his essay “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” writes: The work of Nao Bustamante does not conform to our associations of art practices that emerged at the moment of identity CHAPTER 4 NAO BUSTAMANTE’S “BAD-GIRL” AESTHETICS 136 politics, nor does it represent an avoidance of the various antagonisms within the social that define our recognition and belonging as racialized, gendered, and sexed subjects. Bustamante’s work tells us a story about the problems of belonging in alterity. I contend that her oeuvre meditates on our particularities, both shared and divergent, particularities that are central to the choreography of self and other that organizes our reality. (675–676) This particular minoritarian strategy of subjectivity self-fashioning, which Muñoz has theorized as a process of constant disidentification in his book Disidentifications (1999), is, according to him, “negotiated through a particular affective circuit” (“Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 676).1 My particular designation of Bustamante’s cultural work as “bad-girl” aesthetics is about consciously working through her apparently contradictory position—not being able to “conform” yet “not representing avoidance”—and viewing it as a productive source for Bustamante’s tactic of “unsettling comforts.” Thus, on one level I place this Chicana’s artistic production within a larger tradition of gendered avant-garde practices, but I also extend Bustamante the status of “bad girl” as one beyond that of being able to create art that contains “shock” potentials. Her “bad-girl” status is also garnered with queer capabilities that help us to begin to dismantle or, at the very least, to make sense of the problematic aspects related to “alterity,” following Muñoz’s lead. Yet, I do not propose that in the act of viewing Bustamante’s conceptual performative practices through this particular theoretical framework we will solve any enigmas regarding any racialized avant-garde production. It is my contention that refusing to be disciplined by one identitarian category or artistic practice is the site that generates Bustamante’s artistic operations, and, in the process, as I discussed in the introduction to this book, creates spaces of desire and fear where “apparently inconsequential ‘daily’ geographies of hope” are mapped (Anderson, “A Principle of Hope,” 212). Moreover, in her exercise of “unsettling” national heterosexual culture, Bustamante places her performing body front and center in her concurrent process of reimagining both avant-garde and popular cultural discourses. However, I do want to clarify that she more than appropriates popular cultural representations to produce experimental art. Just as video and conceptual artist Ximena Cuevas, who is the focus of the following chapter, Bustamante participates in what I have termed NAO BUSTAMANTE’S “BAD-GIRL” AESTHETICS 137 queer performative interventions. The performative interventions that I examine in the second part of Performing Mexicanidad are similar to activist-oriented public-sphere interventions that deploy theatrical strategies in that they propel the spectator into a parallel process of unmasking hegemonic social and cultural systems. Again, this relationship harks back to the cultural production examined in the first part, as the artists that make up the “Re-imagining the Archives of Mexicanidad” section of this book are reworking bodies, forms, and practices that have constituted...