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Performing Art and Research | The Voice of MLK Jr. | Mystery in the Stacks
Performing Art and Research in the Humanities: Focus on Ron Broglio
and Cristbal Martnez
This spring, Accents on English features two scholars whose art installations and performances lie at the heart of their scholarship. In
individual interviews conducted in April, the artists each share some insights on the broader significance of their work. Associate Professor
Ron Broglio discusses his passion for and perspective on a recent performancethe Digital Tabernacle performed at ASUs Emerge
2014: A Carnival of the Future. Cristbal Martnez, doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition, talks about his dissertation as well
as a new project with Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective. Together, these scholars advance a vision of art that allows
viewers to contemplate contemporary existential and political concerns in the humanities.
Upon entering the performance space, patrons attending
the Digital Tabernacle faced two men dressed as ministers
demanding that they surrender their mobile phones. In this
performance, Ron Broglio collaborated with Marcel
OGorman of the University of Waterloo, who wrote an
article for Slate.com last March covering the performance.
Broglio explains that that the performance asks people to
interrupt their digital habits in order to reflect on how they
immerse themselves in the world and how they use their
technology. The artists draw on applied media theory and
continental philosophy and argue that technology is an
apparatus of prosthetic memory. Cell phones, Broglio
points out, serve as an extension of our social memory.
Thus, the implications of asking people to surrender their
phones might include that they are now required to give
their full attention to a conversation instead of
communicating with distant others, that they must change
their spatial awareness while traveling because they can no
longer rely on GPS, or even that they might have to plan
ahead to arrange meetings because they cannot rely on texting to get together with others at a moments notice. For Broglio, the goal of
this performance is to transform the audience: When you return to the technology, you see it differently and you perhaps use it
differently.
Broglio, referring to OGormans forthcoming book Necromedia, states that people use technology to ward off mortality because
technology is so easy to use that it dissipates the friction of the world around us. However, he counters, what makes us human is the
ability to contemplate existential questions and ultimately to embrace our mortality. In the performance, Broglio and OGorman take on
the roles of the ministers of the tabernacle, deliberately drawing on the cultural trope of the street preacher to engage the audience.
Broglio explains that street preachers talk about good and bad habits, immortality or another life, so the artists leveraged that knowledge
in their performance to interrupt the impulse to hold mortality at bay through technology. Their ultimate purpose is to provoke the
audience to examine rituals performed around technology with the hope that they will perhaps see something new.
Like the Digital Tabernacle, reframing cultural symbols to
engage in alternative discourse is also a key feature of
Cristbal Martnezs work. Martnez, who has earned a
Bachelor of Art in painting and performance art and a
Master of Art in computational media, is now completing his
doctoral dissertation in rhetoric and composition. While at
first glance these three degrees might seem unrelated,
Martnez argues that they all function as tools that have
helped him craft a Native theory of media. As a Mestizo
from northern New Mexico, Martnez draws on indigenous
knowledge systems as frameworks for designing media. In
his dissertation, he looks to indigenous artists to examine
the ways in which indigenous entrepreneurship, cultural
sovereignty, and rhetorical sovereignty come together with
media for the purpose of self-determination and
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Language & Literature, 851 S. Cady Mall Room 542 | P.O. Box 870302, Tempe, AZ 85287-0302
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sovereignty. He is particularly interested in how sovereignty
might be enacted in virtual space through media.
Martnez is also a member of Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective. The group is currently working on constructing an
ephemeral monument titled The Repellent Fence, which will vertically intersect the US/Mexico border fence for 2 miles on either side.
This repellent fence will be made of scare eye balloonsbeach ball sized balloons painted with a graphic symbol of concentric circles
representing an eye, typically used as a bird repellentplaced in 200 meter increments along the 4 miles. The art collective frequently
uses this symbol in their installations because of its obsolescenceas a bird repellent, the product is only temporarily effectiveand
because the graphic symbol of the eye evokes multiple culturally embedded narratives that change depending on the context. For
instance, Martnez explains, the concentric circles also function as spiritual mediators that have shared meanings across various
indigenous cultures throughout the Western hemisphere.
One of the purposes of the Repellent Fence is to ground the
discourse of immigration in an indigenous perspective in a
way that complicates and reframes understandings of the
US/Mexico border fence. Martnez argues that the border
fence bisects indigenous nations and fails to recognize the
experiential and lived complexities of tribes geographically
located in these places, including interrupting those who
continue to follow ancient trade routes that have afforded
economic opportunities historically for such groups. The
artist explains that the Repellent Fence functions as an
artifact of diplomacy because constructing it requires
conversations and collaborations between various local
communities such as indigenous nations, ranchers, recently
deported and recently arrived immigrants, as well as the
border patrol. Ultimately, the Repellent Fence appropriates
and re-imagines media such as the ineffective scare eye
balloons to highlight the ephemeral nature of the border
fence and to support indigenous self-determination and
sovereignty.
In these reflections on their work, Broglio and Martnez each make compelling arguments for the powerful role performance art and art
installations can play in provoking alternative considerations of contemporary discourses.
Sybil Durand
Photo 1: Ron Broglio (right) gestures as collaborator Marcel O'Gorman looks on during their "Digital Tabernacle" performance at ASU Emerge 2014 (photo by Nina Miller).
Photo 2: The members of Postcommodity, from L to R: Raven Chacon, Cristbal Martnez, Kade L. Twist, and Nathan Young (photo courtesy Cristbal Martnez).
Photo 3: "Repellent Eye Over Phoenix - 2008," an earlier work by Postcommodity (photo courtesy Cristbal Martnez).
Header background image: "Speak Not Against the Sun" and "Do Not Make Water Facing the Sun" [fol. 39 recto] (c. 1512/1515), French early 16th century. Pen and brown ink with watercolor and
stylus on laid paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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