Alex Donis: An Introduction

I invited Alex Donis, a Los Angeles-based artist to create a cover image for the special issue on dance. Alex's work imagines a world where dance brings unlikely partners together. I also invited Richard Meyer, an art historian who specializes in contemporary American art, to offer a context for understanding Alex's contribution to this issue.

My thanks to Alex for his creative interventions, and to the USC Arts Initiative for supporting this project.

David Rom�n, Editor

Alex Donis specializes in unexpected, even impossible, pairings--an American marine performing a ballet with an Iraqi soldier, a Los Angeles police officer disco dancing with a member of a South Central street gang, the Hindu god Rama kissing Jesus Christ on the lips. Donis places each of his couples against an undifferentiated white background, as though to suspend them in a space outside of historical context and political confiict. His dancers and kissers appear before us like lucid, technicolor fragments from an otherwise indecipherable dream. In pictures such as Abdullah and Sergeant Adams (the cover image to this special issue of Theatre Journal) and Officer Moreno and Joker, Donis takes adversarial relationships marked by hatred and violence and restages them as dances of joy and mutual pleasure. He forces deep-seated animosities to give way, however temporarily or tongue-in-cheek, to affection.

Donis approaches the most volatile and divisive of social issues—war, religion, street gangs, the police—through the unexpected lens of same-sex pairing and sensory pleasure. Given the culture wars over homoerotic art in the late 1980s and 1990s, we should be neither surprised nor complacent about the fact that this artist's work has been subjected to acts of vandalism and censorship.

In 1997, Donis mounted an exhibition entitled My Cathedral at Galeria de la Raza, a nonprofit art space in San Francisco dedicated to Latino culture. The show featured a suite of light-box paintings in which famous, but otherwise irreconcilable, figures were depicted in the midst of a kiss. Within a few weeks of the show's opening, two of the light-boxes were smashed by anonymous vandals. The destroyed works included Jesus & Lord Rama.

In 2001, Donis was invited to exhibit work at the grand reopening of the Watts Towers Art Center, a community-based cultural center located in South Central Los Angeles. Donis had formerly worked as an art teacher at the Center and his prior connection to the venue was one of the reasons he was selected for its reopening exhibition. For the occasion, Donis created a series of paintings entitled War which featured fictionalized pairings of police officers dancing with gang members. Immediately after the installation of the show, community groups in Watts protested the exhibit, and the Center received threats that violence (whether directed at the paintings or at the gallery's staff and visitors) might ensue if Donis's works were not removed. The Center promptly cancelled the exhibition and, in the absence of the artist's knowledge or consent, removed his paintings from its walls.

My point in rehearsing the public confiicts over Donis's work is not to claim that the artist has been victimized by intolerant community groups and censoring institutions. Rather, I wish to underscore the power of his art to reveal the pressure points and fault lines that structure contemporary society. Donis does not, in my view, demean police officers or military men or gang members or religious deities by having them dance or kiss each other. He does, however, propose a radically different vision from the received images we have of these figures. It is a vision fueled by the expanded possibilities and utopian impulses that contemporary art, at its best, can provide.