Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

This thesis addresses the writing into history of Chicano performance art and, as a related question, what it means to make work as a Chicano artist in relation to a range of art institutions, exploring how strategies of resistance can connect, challenge, and transcend notions of what it means to develop a practice rooted in the politics of identity. Rafa Esparza is a queer Chicano performance artist from Los Angeles, whose work has recently been featured at the Bowtie Project (Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Hammer Museum, and most recently the Whitney Museum at the 2017 Biennial. The narrative arc of Esparza’s practice in the past five years is used here as a case study of a contemporary critique, one working both inside and outside of the institution. With consideration for the site specificity of his work alongside historical and conceptual readings of Chicano performance in and around Los Angeles, most notably in the work and exhibition of Chicano collective Asco, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008) exhibition, I argue that Esparza’s practice demonstrates a shift in socially engaged performance art and its exhibition. Underpinning my analysis of Esparza’s practice, I draw on the scholarship of seminal queer, performance and decolonial theorists José Esteban Mùnoz and Achille Mbembe in considering ideas around the creation of counterpublics and the decolonization of knowledge and being more broadly.