Brian Fuata’s Generous Opacity ‑

Essay on Brian Fuata

Brian Fuata’s Generous Opacity

Essay written for the Anti-Live Art Festival Publication after he won the Anti-Live performance prize, Finland 2022

Politics

It must have been 1997, Pauline Hanson was surfacing as the mainstream face of white supremacy in Queensland, Australia. As a response to this, an anti-racist political movement was formed to respond to this new manifestation of the ongoing conditions of colonisation in the country. As someone whose family had been directly affected by racist attitudes, I attended the regular protests. I was nineteen and had been in the country for three years after arriving from El Salvador, escaping a civil war. The antiracism movement was made up of mostly young people like me. I felt I could contribute more than by just attending the protest and gathered all my confidence and decided to attend some organising meetings, travelling from almost an hour away by bus from my parent’s house in the suburbs.

 The meetings were always held in different places. These places were usually university rooms which were booked after class hours for an evening. Strategies were discussed; to direct action or not to direct action?  Where should the ‘movement’ go next? Who should speak at the next rally? What should go on the flier? Who would distribute the fliers and where?

 I don’t remember the conversations ever addressed the self-education of those present - they being all middle class and white except for me. It seemed that racism was conceived by the group as primarily an abstract, optical matter. That is to say there wasn’t much discussion to the actual effects of the thing we were protesting. It was a very lonely feeling sitting at these meetings where my accented input was received with special curiosity and excitement but a palpable lack of interest in what I was saying.

 One evening, as we sat for another meeting in a new university institution, a person I had not seen before arrived and sat next to me. This person was Brian Fuata. After meetings we would chat about what had taken place and agreed on each other’s critiques of what was playing out before us. The complexity of what racism actually is built upon and its effects could never be understood without the knowledge of the nuanced lives of those who lived it and there was no room for this in the ‘movement’. As well intentioned as everyone was and as optically present as we were our input could only be limited to validating this flattening of our experience.

 After our brief dabble with activism we moved cities and countries and didn’t see each other again for more than ten years. In this time Fuata had worked within the Pasifika contemporary performance community in the UK and I had followed his work from a distance on Myspace, to give you a timeline.

Optics

Fuata and I encountered each other again in Sydney in 2002. A practicing artist now I was there to check out Guillermo Gomez Peña’s The Museum of Fetishised Identities at Performance Space. This work was presented as a five hour tableaux vivant which included a number of local artists who together had devised this performance as part of a workshop with Gomez-Peña. As I looked closer at the performers I recognised Brian just as he was raising a peeled banana to his mouth in a very slow and deliberate movement. His shoulders were bare and he articulated a set of movements with his body in intervals. It was mesmerising.

I had followed Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s work for some time and had been particularly interested in his work with Coco Fusco Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West.[1] In this work the two artists perform every day rituals as two indigenous peoples from an imaginary land, dressed in an amalgam of ‘exotic’ indigenous costumes and presented inside a cage. Touring museums throughout Europe at the height of the discourse on identity politics, the work played on the history of colonial othering and objectification of the bodies and the everyday ‘doings’ of black and brown people.

 Back to Sydney, The methodology of Gomez-Peña’s workshops consisted of identifying and distilling basic movements which speak to each performer’s subjective relationship with the world.  A set of repetitive, looped almost, small gestures. Brian and I have spoken before about how we saw ourselves back in our short stint as activists. To be singled out without subjectivity even in these places of change is a very destabilising thing to one’s sense of self, this was its antithesis.

 The movements Fuata performed were abstract, rendering the psychological space into the physical gesture. These movements were familiar and abstract at once. After the performance we drank wine set up a limbo stick, and did the limbo with Gomez-Peña.

 Cruising

In works such as his Framed movements performed as part of Fuata’s collaboration with Agatha Gothe-Snape at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the format employed by Fuata is a type of guided activity. The participants do physical warm up exercises until they begin to engage in the act of walking around the gallery space, they are encouraged to look into each other’s eyes as they pass each other’s bodies inevitably aware of the dense activated space between. This is a charged work in which the participants find themselves in fact cruising. The act of presence itself comes to the fore as the main modality in this work, and this is when I see Fuata’s project beginning to exist within the realm of relationality.

In Fuata’s work the relational is a present space, it is humour, a break from solemnity, in fact the opposite of the self-consciousness (for performer and audience) of conceptual performance art. In Fuata’s relational space there is a radicality which those present do not get to experience if what they are searching for is optical cues.

 This is political work, it is funny and it is direct, it is familial and warm, a type of hosting but it also refuses to give us what we think we see, that is, Fuata, a brown man, refuses to perform. Instead he twists the space of expectation. Fuata allows us to live in that very moment beyond conceptions of what we are looking at because we are immersed in all its nuance.

Illusions and apparitions

Fuata’s performances usually include a clearing of a space in the middle of the room. Within a physical space there is usually a chair, a bed sheet, a phone, paper, words, a glass of wine, a glass of water, a laptop, a ladder acting much in the same way as theatre props. In the case of the more text based email performance, it is the format of electronic correspondence, which becomes seized and repurposed into a type of stage in Fuata’s work. These are everyday objects and ways to communicate for which an original intended function is transformed as the ghost activates them, lifting them, manifesting this haunting before our very eyes. Often comical but always transforming, for example in the performance at the Sydney Biennale Fuata elegantly guides the audience by dragging a large white sheet up the grand staircase to the Museum of Contemporary Art which he later dresses himself in to become ghost. 

If we go back to thinking about the movements, I can imagine how this would be confronting to those expecting something a bit more exotic and familiar in the way of visual language from a brown body. Perhaps something more ‘pure’. What is interesting here is that what Fuata is presenting is intangible and something that requires the viewer to think, immerse themselves in, let go and think deeper. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Fuata uses acting tropes of repetition, creating a sense of safety and everydayness—for as he wonders from one part of the room to the other it is these repeated anchoring words in a rhythm, which comfort the viewer as Fuata improvises.

 After all the history of the scientific parading and measuring and prodding of brown and black bodies there seems to be still, expectations of ‘authenticity’ for the way the body is presented or even a way materials are used by black, brown, indigenous people that is considered more acceptable, more virtuous. This doesn’t take into account the actual space in which the displaced or the diaspora has to device ways through which to keep its genealogical continuum whilst adapting to its changing surrounding conditions.

 There seems to be a safety in deferring to these simplistic and flattening expectations, in re-enacting their violence. There is nothing wrong with addressing these acts of course. This is crucial knowledge. Fuata’s work acknowledges it for example in the very astute painting of his own body in grey scale to mimic the history of depictions of brown bodies on screen for a recent online performance. And of course a history is alluded to in his ghost incarnation. Paradoxically as Fuata becomes the ghost by covering his body - in plain view of the audience - with a white sheet the unseen is called upon. 

 The ghost is a visitor from the beyond, from a realm always present but never seen and yet it is overlayed over every interaction, it picks up chairs, it laughs, it reads from a phone with a shaky and deep voice. The ghosts reminds us that the politics of the past are still embedded everywhere. In each and every space. Dripping off the walls.

Each of Fuata’s performances either via email or IRL is different in the sequence of the hand and body gestures and/or word play that are repeated. This repetition creates a layer of playful poetic anchoring to the work. Equally as comforting the delineation and the setting of boundaries with tape on the ground or by attendants to the event as they sit and make space for Brian to perform, in a way not dissimilar to street busking spectatorship.

 What at first seems like conceptual performance art because of its visual sparseness, instead creates conditions for the hosting of a relational space. The word, vā  is the name the Samoan language gives to a space in which relationality takes place. The vā is many forms, it exists in conviviality, in ceremony, and is commonly depicted in tattoo patterns as the space in between lines. When looked at in the context of the vā, Fuata’s performance logic begins to take form.

Fuata uses humour and engages with the world around in its own everyday context sometimes using props, through email, ringing his mother mid-performance, complimenting an attendant on the scarf they are wearing, saying hello mid performance to someone he recognises in the audience or welcoming a newly arrived person into the room. These are techniques, which also engage in the familial whilst more and more unexpected things begin to take place. Fuata pauses at intervals and returns to the audience with a new word, phrase, movement responding to a prompt, building upon, repeating until another pause calls upon the next movement.

The space Fuata highlights is a space of complexity, there is a radicality in the fact that this space is housed albeit temporarily in a contemporary art space, where this kind of warm interaction is not usually on display nor in operation. Contemporary galleries for artists are of course workspaces and Fuata plays with ideas of labour by setting up an alarm for exactly twenty minutes. This time is strictly adhered to. As soon as the alarm goes off everything stops. Just like that, the performance is over.

 Conclusion

Brian Fuata’s methodology is one of rigorous and generous opacity. There are many ways in which artists engage with culture, queerness, race and gender. Some seek to educate, some use the artistic platform to engage with culture, to reimagine, reappropriate. Some seek to subvert the colonist gaze through gesture. Fuata’s work not only exists in the present but in its improvisational nature, a repetition of words and actions, sets up a pattern and tempo to engage with in the moment. Not unlike the loops in techno music on a dancefloor, relationality in Fuata’s work generates rhythm out of the everyday and creates a sense of joy and possibility.

 Brian Fuata understands that the artistic platform, the institution itself is political that there are remaining and steady hums of old anthropological understandings of race and difference playing in the background. Hums quieter but no different than those more audible in the politics going on at the anti-racism meeting where we first encountered each other.

 The writer of this essay, Lucreccia Quintanilla, is an artist, writer, DJ and researcher gratefully living and working on the lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation.

 Lucreccia Quintanilla 

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLX2Lk2tdcw