California Performance

California Performance Jan Breslauer DAN KWONG, A.K.A. the Samurai Center Fielder, stands poised for battle. Looking like a cross between an Akira Kurosawa warrior and Casey at the Bat, he moves with fluid grace across the stage, stopping, turning, rapping and recounting a series of anecdotal narratives about underexplored corners of Asian-American history and a California boyhood. Photos of Japanese -American internment camps flash on the wide upstage screen, as the smartalecky caption "How's Camp?" cuts between the images. The Angeleno son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, Kwong is one of Los Angeles' most promising performing artists. His autobiographical tales weave the personal into the anthropological, mixing irony and humor with the bitter pill of injustices past. A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, trained martial artist and long-time amateur baseball player, he infuses his works with techniques drawn from a variety of disciplines. The visuals -from high-toned screen graphics to abstract sculpture pieces to toys used as props-are sparing but precise, with one or two carefully-chosen objects sufficient to evoke a setting. And Kwong brings all these elements together with as much finesse as he has commitment to his subject. A storyteller whose multimedia essays are based on his Los Angeles upbringing and a gentle sense of humor, Kwong joins a vanguard of a new generation of California performance artists. On other stages, at other times, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco venues are filled with likeminded raconteurs. He is one among an emerging cadre of California artists who emphasize a new social biography, chronicling not only the plight, but the future, of their ethnic or sexual-preference affinity group. 87 Their style has become the hallmark of West Coast performance, and it may well point the way toward the future of national performance, as the throes of demographic change in California wend inevitably eastward. Spurred by personal experience and the audible rumblings of race, time, and place, these women and men are creating an art of documentary, identity, redefinition, and liberation-in that order. The song may have changed from the agitprop of the 30s, the experiments of the 60s, and even the nascent feminist art that burgeoned in L.A. during the 70s, but the insurgent message remains the same. Perhaps for these reasons, California performance has finally begun to attract critical attention. In addition to the pioneering work of the quarterly journal High Performance-foundedby critic Linda Burnham in a downtown L.A. loft during the late 70s-you can now read about the work of these artists in the mainstream press and learn about it in the major universities, many of whom hire the artists themselves as visiting faculty. Over the past several years, books on the subject have begun to proliferate. Led by Henry M. Sayre's The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Gardesince 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), the publishing world has taken a tentative interest in contemporary performance . While Sayre touches on some key figures and movements of earlier California work-such as Eleanor Antin, and feminist art in general-other volumes have since been devoted exclusively to the performers and performances of the Golden State. The updated edition of PerformanceAnthology : Source Book of CaliforniaPerformanceArt edited by Carl Eugene Loeffler and Darlene Tong (San Francisco: Last Gasp Press and Contemporary Arts Press, 1989), covers the years 1970 through 1988, and is a valuable catalogue of related activities and publications. Most recently, the Mime Journal(Claremont, CA., 1989-90; 1991-92) has published two volumes on the subject, one devoted to the San Francisco Bay Area and one to the Los Angeles region. While these efforts-taken collectively-represent a stride forward for the medium and California's significant contribution to its development, they also point up the problematic relationship the written word has long had with performance art. Nothing if not topical and ephemeral, performance seems bound to the fate of critical incomprehension and a tardy public awareness. Inevitably, by the time any analysis of trends in the genre make it into print, the artistic tide has turned and performance art is off on a new...