The conceptual scheme of “Mediated Asias” arises from our premise that an individual’s “cultural heritage” is intrinsically artificial, constituted partially by inheritance, partially by deliberate learning, partially by fortuitous immersion, and partially by choice. The process of acculturation (i.e. acquiring culture; becoming cultivated within a certain cultural environment) is a prolonged, continuous, and radiating series of value acquisition, one that both penetrates and surrounds a subject with a set of evolving assumptions.
This premise about the constructedness/artificiality of culture involves two corollary concepts: i) acculturation as mediation; ii) cultural heritage as innately multiple and mutable.
According to its usage in psychology, mediation is “the interposition of stages or processes between stimulus and result, or intention and realization” (OED). More generally, mediation indicates the involvement of an intermediary agent or means by which a certain desired result (agreement, reconciliation, or cohesion) is produced. Our cultural propensity, which comprises both affinity and alienation, habit and choice, is gradually defined through consecutive stages of mediation from infancy to adulthood. Facilitators, and at times enforcers, of cultural values (e.g., parents, relatives, teachers, friends, societal models, the media, etc.) usher us into these stages of mediation, which often become so ingrained within us that we no longer perceive them as mediated, as indirectly obtained through the interposition by others.
Cultural acquisition is a gradual, complex, and indefinite process. As would any live process, acculturation subjects the individual to a revolving theater of changing scenes. Some later scenes might replace the previous ones, might coexist or inflect the previous ones, might repeat the previous ones with subtle variations. This analogy suggests that the stages of mediation that constitute the complex process of one’s acculturation would most likely produce in one a mosaic picture of indefinite extension: a picture of multiplicity variable with/through time. In this light, we maintain that an individual’s cultural heritage is always already plural and changeable.
The idea of “mediated Asias” leaps from such understanding of cultural learning as a constant process of mediation. An artist, being an individual who creates cultural products, is in this context a mediator who envisions and embodies a state of mediation, one that has enabled the very production of the cultural artifacts they made. Since all three lead artists from our curated projects originally came from two Asian countries (Lee from Korea; Oguri and Fujita from Japan), what they brought to our performance series at Highways were their mediated conceptions of their own Asias. Their “Asias” are plural not only because they are from different parts of the land mass called Asia, not only because they represent more than one Asian cultures, but also because their personal ownership of their respective native cultures is already defined by multiplicity.
Adding to the above theoretical angle is the fact that these artists were presenting their impressions, memories, and recreations of Asias from a distance. Such a distance was both temporal and spatial. All three artists have left their home countries to resettle in Los Angeles years ago; all three worked for our project as mediators of the cultures that they left behind. Their Asias were geographically located in the other side of our Western horizon and imaginarily situated at the farther end of their mnemonic screens. Their performance presentations were literally and symbolically mediated Asias, both to us the spectators and to themselves the spectacle-makers.
Mediation and Transculturation
While we apply the concept of mediation
to explain the process of acculturation, we also recognize that our selected
artists have undergone another process of cultural acclimatization: that
of “transculturation.”
The phenomenon of transculturation is a significant dimension in our specific
theme “Mediated Asias”; it also adds an important layer to the
SC/W’s exploration of Southern California as a microcosm of the world,
which finds its most direct embodiment in the expanding immigrant population
in L.A. Since Lee, Oguri, and Fujita—as well as the co-curator Cheng—are
all Asian immigrants to the United States, their artworks are in a fundamental
sense products coming out of the artists’ experiences with transculturation.
The term “transculturation” was
coined in 1941 by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to describe
“the different phases in the transitive process from one culture
to another, because this process does not only imply the acquisition of
culture, as connoted by the Anglo-American term acculturation, but it
also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of one’s preceding
culture.”
As Diana Taylor explicates, Ortiz’s theory goes beyond the syncretic
model of an uneasy fusion between two cultures, because it “simultaneously
notes the co-existence of elements,” “underlines the element
of loss of the two systems in the creation of a third,” and accounts
for the “historic specificity and artistic originality of the new
cultural phenomena.”
Thus, Ortiz’s paradigm of transculturation elucidates the nebulous
process in which two cultures merge and become acclimatized to each other,
whereby they assimilate, substitute, and alter each other to (re)produce
a hybridized third culture.
Ortiz used transculturation to analyze the encounter and fusion of the indigenous and the foreign cultures. We suggest, however, that his concept is also applicable on an individual scale to illuminate the complex process of cross-national acculturation experienced by an immigrant within the new host environment. When the given immigrant happens to be an artist, the produced artwork, though it might not directly address transculturation as a theme, often reflects on a subliminal level the effects of transculturation. We discovered through our series “Mediated Asias” that all three commissioned artists communicated some floating “symptoms” of transculturation as postulated by Ortiz, including the concession to assimilating prevalent/Western cultural values and aesthetic modes; the acknowledgment of the loss or transformation of the former home culture, and the exhibition of a customized and hybridized individual culture. These convoluted processes of transculturation have produced the mediated fragments of Asias as our microcosmic mosaic of the world.
In broader terms, transculturation expresses how cultural models are understood and hybridized by differing cultures. It is analogous to the transmission of spoken language. One message is spoken by an entity with a certain set of phonetic tools and linguistic intentions. It is heard and deciphered by another entity having a different set of linguistic tools and linguistic intentions. The second entity then uses that message as the basis for their understanding of an implicit set of underlying meanings as to what communication means. In this controlled misunderstanding (controlled because there has to be some degree of correspondence between the entities or no sense would be made of the message), a hybrid is formed. In terms of cultural features, this could mean parts of a complex phenomenon such as dance can be excorporated from their original context and be incorporated into another context that changes and develops a new sense for the dance.
Transculturation as a model is significant in that it does not assign priority rights to either part of the exchange. Both messages are dynamic with respect to one another. Both aspects of the transculturated phenomena are dominant momentarily in succession. Neither is more acceptable with respect to any overarching sense of cultural formation. Only within a specific cultural subset is one more immediately intelligible than the other.
Transculturation can be used to describe how subcultures within any mainstream can appropriate and modify an existing practice or meaning. With the acceleration of communications and the development of world wide commercial capital culture, the movement of visual images, linguistic expressions and fashions from the fringes to the center is fast becoming one of the most persistent features of everyday life. Transculturation accounts for these movements without moralizing about the relative appropriateness of their emergence. In this sense, transculturation offers us an open-ended conceptual backdrop against which to display the three immigrant artists’ mediated and recreated cultural products, made liberally in Southern California.
In the Flesh
With an almost oxymoronic perversion, the subtitle of our project “In the Flesh” seems to contradict the ideas of mediation and plurality featured in our main title. The “flesh,” taken as the corporeal entity with which an individual encounters the world, privileges the directness of sentient experience and the uniqueness of a singular being. Such a contradiction posed between mediation and corporeality, however, is only circumstantial. Whereas “Mediated Asias” marks the specific scope and area of interest for our project, “In the Flesh” refers to the medium of our presentation: live performance in the genres of postmodern dance (Lee and Oguri) and of performance art (Fujita).
We cite “in the flesh” to indicate the particular point of view that an avant-garde/ experimental live performance piece structures for the viewer. It is a perplexing, awesome (meaning to incur awe or the inability to articulate speech) and often troubling point of view where what is occurring before the viewer’s eyes is indeed occurring. There is no deux ex machina accomplishing the task of moving the performer through space. It is the body of the performer that moves, with or without visible prostheses. It invokes a powerful kinesthetic projection that causes the viewer to feel her/his body move into whatever position the performer has worked to physically acquire. It is the actual exhaustion or exhilaration that a viewer feels when the performance ends and the performers withdraw from the performance area.
In traditional theater, the point of view of the audience is that of suspension of disbelief; the performers and the spectators act as though everything transpiring on stage is believable, including blatantly impossible actions and events. With the suspension of disbelief, the spectators understand the performers’ actions and words to be exchanged in a state where everything is possible, but none has actual consequence or menace. Avant-garde performance does not work within the same code. A performance piece may not necessarily start or stop with the curtain rising; it is seldom done in a traditional theatrical setting (e.g. the proscenium stage) to avoid the neutralization of theatrical traditions. The viewers are as often in the center of the performance area as they can be off to the side. An action may happen in total darkness. The viewers must move around to find their orientation. Noise may occur, music may start and stop without an apparent nexus to the development of the performance in time. The viewers have to use their own flesh to size up the performance for what they think it is worth. A performance is set to expand upon what can be achieved physically, temporally, and acoustically. Unsettling the viewers’ expectations and simultaneously enacting something that once it has been done can never be undone sits at the core of the performance experience. Performance puts the viewers back in their flesh in ways few other cultural manifestations can.
“In the flesh” is how we refer to the particular time frame that performance art establishes for viewer/performer alike. Performances occur in real time and are elaborated in such a way that the deferring of a performance via media or photo reproduction causes it to change into something else. That something else can be quite interesting in its own right, but it is not a satisfactory facsimile of the live performance. Not everyone can see every performance; to see something in real time one must have the time to dedicate and a place small enough to stay so that everyone there can sense one another “in the flesh.” A limitation that most performance artists accept is the fact that working in real time and in the flesh physically demands more than most viewers care to dedicate to a cultural pursuit. Cinemas and concerts are more rightfully popular; every viewer’s position is studied to be relatively equal. The home broadcast or recording emulates the original body position: seated comfortably facing the source of action. There are many degrees of verisimilitude to the original performance, but the guiding concept of these institutions is to be accessible, in high fidelity re-presentations. Performance cannot be thus since it lives in another time frame and physical space. Most orchestra directors would worry about spraying the front rows with perspiration. Performers expect that their viewers will have the freedom to step back, to jump away, or to immerse in whatever objects that come from the performers’ flesh to theirs. In the same time/space as the viewer, with no characteristic or traditional separation between the real of performance and the real of any other event, the performer has no recourse to other modes than being there in the flesh. Slippage in dramatic flow, changes in tempo, the slowing or quickening of attention and focus occur under the view of all. Performers have to learn to deal with these phenomena without losing their own concentration and point of view, for they act, as much as they live, in the flesh—ephemeral, extinguishable, unrepeatable.
Interpreting the Ineffable
Much performance work is difficult to evoke in words. We are involved in this task regularly as curators and critics but we are much happier when we can simply point to the work itself and say “Look there. You see?” Language fails us when we attempt to describe how the gestures the performers are making translate into a precise kinesthetic understanding on the part of the viewer. Some experiences are understood without a need to give them a name; performances are often of this type. We count on the other with whom we are conversing to recognize in our vagueness a similar sense of having captured meaning without being able to describe it fully.
Since there seems to be no linguistic mediator able to control or corroborate our experience fully, we must accept the possibility that our understanding might be utterly solipsistic. We may have misunderstood the experience with regard to the performer’s intentions. We accept this possibility and work with it by using language that accents the fullness of being vague. We re-create the conditions of our understanding and appreciation even as we acknowledge the limits of both. You may have heard of the beauty of the Grand Canyon or the sense of openness that comes a fifth day of fasting or the flavor of a papaya nut, but it isn’t the same thing as actually experiencing it in person, savoring these sensations in the flesh. We strongly suggest that you see some performances. Then the sense of our words, of what we are trying to evoke, may come into focus as you recognize the leap into the ineffable.
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Notes to “Mediated Asias: In the Flesh”
1 See Diana Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” in Interculturalism & Performance, ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York: PAj Publications, 1991), 60-74.
2 Cited by Taylor, 62.
3 Ibid., 62.