#sweety's

Sweety’s for Remezcla (Bryan Rodriguez, Julia Mata, Ximena Izquierdo Ugaz, and Eduardo Restrepo Castaño)

Styled by Vianca Lugo

A text for PAUL PESCADOR: Pink, Gray, Navy & Cream at Sweety's, presented by Anthony Greaney & the Pyramid, on Sept. 20, Boston.

I’m not sure if Paul Pescador is talking about a dog or a person: A few months ago, she gets a bladder infection. She can’t hold it, and will go everywhere. We have to take her to the doctor. This is Yellow and Turquoise, a performance. He moves about on crutches—or hops across the stage on one foot—stacking boxes, balls, hats, lengths of fabric, and inflatable toys. He shows stop motion images of things on the screen behind him—an equine-shaped paper cutout taped to a plastic zebra, paper taped to a sheep, severed ears, paper cups covered in green tape, rolls of crepe-paper streamers. He’s talking about the dog, probably.

I see this collection of things around him on stage and I think, This is familiar. He’s doing something awkward with things. I know that feeling. Yellow and turquoise boxes, stacked up on one another. He puts the scarf on the ball on top of the stack of yellow boxes and it falls off. He puts the scarf on the ball on top of the stack of boxes and it falls off again. It almost gets away, across the floor. He hops a little and puts the ball on top of the stack of boxes. He puts the scarf on the ball on the top of the boxes and it stays. It’s teetering on the edge of the box, set in place by the weight of the scarf. The ball falls off and Paul goes to work on the red bucket on the turquoise stack of boxes. He puts two pink pool noodles in front of the red bucket and a white floppy hat on the bucket.

The crutches, the hopping, the falling—have you ever tried, on your tippy toes, to reach the top shelf to put away the heavy ceramic salad bowl when you’re just not quite tall enough but too lazy to get the stepstool? Have you ever balanced your coffee cup on the passenger seat of your car as you remove your seatbelt and coat while driving because the cup holders are filled with junk? Or maybe it was the tray in the cafeteria—one of the orange trays—have you ever tried to balance it all without losing it in front of a hundred strangers...

I’m piecing together a story of Yellow and Turquoise—one that follows pets and mothers and brothers and a courtship during late-night mosquito-laden strolls with glasses of wine. On the stage, in the room, in the space—wherever Paul Pescador does this performance—he spreads everything out around him and moves through it with a purpose that feels automatic. It’s a purpose that feels like a human mimicking the idea of what humans do. One by one, items are divorced from their meanings and given new meanings. Oh—that ball on the box is a head. Oh—but now the ball is on the ground again because he tried to put a scarf on it. Doesn’t he know that that ball won’t stay up there? Doesn’t he know that that pool noodle won’t stay upright? Why is he trying to make that stay when it just won’t? Why is he making that thing do what it will not do? Why is he making things that don’t mean what he’s making them mean mean those things?

At the end of Yellow and Turquoise the story is that they are in a bar and there is dancing and a broken foot. There is a hangover the next day. Things are broken. Things are partial. Things are mashed together, incongruous, taped, inflated, stacked, speckled. These “they” are stuffed latex gloves, flirting and dancing with each other at the bar. They are dentist’s-office-green latex gloves taped into little human shapes attached to upside-down paper cups to keep them upright. The latex gloves are struggling with being human in a body, being a body, and being the thing in the body. And I believe it. Sometimes I struggle with being a human in a body. Everything falls over.

Plastic is feet and legs that stand up and walk or sit or topple over. Just because you have legs doesn’t mean you can walk. The things in a Paul Pescador performance—things as characters, parts of a narrative that are slippery and loose like a dream—walk before they have learned to walk. They walk because they have seen walking before, and so therefore walking exists, and so they should walk. Falling, then, is just part of it. Love is like that too. Love is there—so they fall in love. And it happens, and it’s real. Or is it love? It must be love if Green is asking Black to turn the light off, and not in a lusty way; in a way that says: I want to go to bed, turn the light off already. This is another video and performance: Red, Green, and Black. Obviously, they’ve been together for awhile. And Red wants to cuddle. There is more soul in a plastic bucket here than in some entire shopping malls filled with shoppers.

Another performance: Orange. There’s an e-mail to write. There’s a cell phone call to answer in the shower while he shampoos his hair—he rubs blue rope over his head. He walks the dog. When he answers the cell-phone call in the shower I begin lose the necessary definitions for items. The meanings of things slip away down the drain of that shower, which is really a small stage in front of several layers of fabric taped to a wall, and this feels very good. The shower becomes the walking of a dog, which is a green paper thing on a tangle of green wires. The things that he makes are sometimes so mangled and taped and cut and torn you don’t know what they used to even be when you definitely know what they are meant to be. Or you think you do.

There are short videos, made on a phone. 1) He’s plucking the elastic ropes that hold in the inflated rubber balls at the supermarket. 2) He’s reaching for the purple cabbage. The cabbage is cut in half and there’s a mirror beyond it and his hand is hesitant, reaching, and I get the sense that his hand can see itself—in the mirror—reaching for the cabbage. The hand is going to touch the cabbage not for the same reasons that you or I would touch a cabbage. 3) He’s holding balls next to his balls. We’re looking at his shorts. He’s preventing the balls—ping-pong balls—from falling between his legs. But he’s opening his legs just a little bit as if to see how much he can open his legs to let the balls fall but he doesn’t let the balls fall. This is just too much. You want to have that pleasure but you don’t want to have that pleasure but you want the just-before-the-pleasure to keep going on until you realize that it’s not really the pleasure unless it’s happened (and what does this all sound like?...) and then while you’re thinking about it—too much thinking—the balls just whoosh/plink on the ground. Whoosh/plink. Of course I can’t hear the “whoosh” but that’s what I imagine the sound of a ping-pong ball falling through space from the space between his legs to the hard ground below might sound like. And the plink... plink...... plink of hard plastic like a stale air encased in a plastic egg bouncing away. He opens his legs just a little more. Another falls. Stopped, but one gets away. 4) He’s outside. He blows on the red flowers and they sway.

I know this feeling of waking and not knowing where I am but being in the middle of a dream and coming out of it and realizing that I am in a bed, in a dark room, somewhere I do know. Paul Pescador’s narratives are as slippery—vanishing and reappearing between consciousness and appearance—like waking while sleepwalking. Why is he putting that ball on top of that stack of boxes? Why was I putting on my mother’s shoes—this was decades ago when I used to sleepwalk—always too big for me, always... I was fondling her pantyhose. She was telling me that I could have the shoes but, For god’s sake, Sarah, please leave the pantyhose; you’ll put a run in them... I am waking up in the middle of a dream in her bedroom.

I’m mixing many performances here with the personal associations I make. The stories are sad. The actions are funny. They make for the squeamish. Somehow it links that high shelf with the heavy ceramic salad bowl, or the coffee on the car seat, or the time I dropped that cafeteria tray. “Color functions as both a noun and a verb, and then it becomes a location. Each formal quality becomes very subjective,” said Paul Pescador in an interview with Paul Soto. Thoughts function as both memory and exposure, past and present. Formal qualities become content and meaning. Assemblage becomes performance and story. Tape is connective tissue. Paper is skin. Plastic is hair, voice, emotion, exhaustion.

ternyata sakit ati,,marah,,n punya uneg'' itu baik juga,,

jadi bisa marah,,,balas sakit ati,,,bis tu ngomong secara dewasa,,,alias curhat,,,bis tu jadi dekat lagi,,

tu lah cerita sweety hari ini,,

sebenanya sich g da masalah,,cuma mawu nyari perhatian,,,hahahhhahah

just kidd....

gag tawu dech mawu nulis apa lagi bwt para sweety's,,

so kita saling melengkapi aja dech,,

n gag bole merasain yang anehh'' lagi,,,