Representation, Community, Failure: Wildness & Utopia

At this year’s Scholar & Feminist Conference, “Utopia,” I looked forward to to seeing Wu Tsang and Roya Rastegar’s Wildness, a film that brings together my two interests, art and gender. The film, which I had first heard of in an art museum context (Tsang was involved in the New Museum Triennial and Whitney Biennial in 2012), chronicles the story of the historic Silver Platter. This particular bar in Los Angeles has been home to Latin/LGBT immigrants since 1963, and to a weekly performance art party Tsang and his friends started there in 2008, “Wildness.” Wildness is both not quite a documentary, and much more than a documentary: using elements of magical realism, including anthropomorphizing the Silver Platter itself as narrator, Wildness challenges the elements of truth that are traditionally expected of documentaries as a medium. Magical realism was especially appropriate for this film, highlighting for us the ways in which fantasy can be a useful tool when we imagine ways to create a safe, utopian space. The Silver Platter’s narration, including references to patrons as “mis hijos,” is unsettling and foreshadows the underlying drama about to unfold. It also demonstrates how the bar has become a parental figure of sorts, the home of alternative kinships created by Wildness and the Silver Platter.

Wildness focuses on place and the people who occupy it. However, we see that complications arise when we attempt to define spaces and who they belong to: the fact that Wildness takes place in the Silver Platter, for instance, brings up the tricky, moral question of when it is okay to create a new, safe space, and when an existing space is actually invaded and taken over for that purpose. Jack Halberstam points out that within the Silver Platter, it becomes apparent that “competing subcultural spaces cannot coexist…with the possibility that one will swallow the other.” As the film progresses, the inherent failure in Tsang’s party project is not immediately explicit, but is presented as a series of practical struggles and emotional trials that participants of Wildness and owners of the bar face. Coexistence eventually becomes a problem as the interests of the Silver Platter’s patrons and of Wildness collide. (more…) http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaim-online.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaimy-online.html