[Blog/Commentary] [USA] WIldness: gentrification as an art installation

[Stephanie Stevens]

Skip the Makeup, USA


Monday, May 20, 2013

WIldness: gentrification as an art installation

Posted by Gina at 11:52 AM


Wildness is a recent documentary which premiered at LA Outfest last
May, showed at last year's Frameline Festival and South by Southwest
but is only now playing the US LGBT festival circuit in a broader way.
It's directed by queer artist Wu Tsang (but who uses male pronouns on
his website) and written by Tsang and Roya Rastegar. It concerns an
old school Latino gay bar, The Silver Platter, on the edge of LA's
MacArthur Park (where someone left the cake out in the rain) but, in
recent decades, has specifically become a gathering place for trans
Latinas. It's a complex film (or really, several interwoven films)
together with a meta aspect of self-critique as befits Tsang, who is
primarily a performance and installation fine artist with some
impressive credentials).

[Photo: Hipster Wildness promoters (Tsang is second from left) ]

The film starts out with a highly self-conscious narration of the bar
speaking for itself in the voice of one of the trans women who
frequent it. The narration talks of the bar's history, the women who
find their relaxation away from being marginalized, waxes poetic about
the neighborhood, culture, queerness, etc. At no point does Wildness
or its credits explain who wrote this narration (I'm assuming Tsang
and Rastegar) and, for what's ostensibly a documentary, quite a bit of
commentary is snuck into this aspect of the film. It segues into a
fairly traditional documentary portrait of "look at the gender
variance... isn't it fascinating" in much the same way Diane Arbus or
many others have previously done. We meet the bar's owners (an older
latino, his gay son, the son's lover and the older man's cis daughter
who is essentially the manager). A telling moment is when the owners
(other than daughter) say they're kind of uncomfortable the bar became
primarily for trans women and how they liked it better when masculine
gay males were their customers. The trans women from Mexico and
elsewhere in Central America are shown doing lip syncing, (of course,
putting on their makeup) sharing laughter and letting their hair down.
Most are skewed older, except for a 20-year old trans woman who is one
of the main camera subjects.

But 10 minutes into the film, it takes a sharp left turn and Wu Tsang
is introduced as the film's central figure. The queer, androgynous
Tsang moves from Chicago to LA, is looking for community and decides
the Silver Platter is it. It's from here that the film veers heavily
into New Journalism. As I mentioned in a prior post, New Journalism
was pioneered in the 60s by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Truman Capote and
others as a genre of non-fiction with a stylized and fictional coating
to it where the author and their search for answers becomes one of the
main characters. It breaks through a false assumption of documentary
impartiality but can also make a documentary subject so personal and
shot through the filter of the artist/writer/filmmaker that it starts
to resemble fiction (which can also make it highly entertaining). In
fairly short order, Tsang gloms onto the club and convinces the owners
(who, I'm sure saw Tsang as a young, very educated queer hipster with
connections to white club kid dollars) to give him and three of his
cis friends Tuesdays at the Silver Platter for an ongoing party night
which they name "Wildness." It quickly becomes an upscale
queer/performance art scene celebre but with zero connection to the
trans women who inhabit the club the other six nights. The other three
people who run the club with Tsang seem to lack any identification
with the seedy trans space they're pretty much cannibalizing for its
coolness quotient. Tsang keeps focusing on the idea of "safe space"
for these trans women with little thought that what he's morphing the
club into is something they can neither afford or really ever likely
to belong to.

Within a few months, the club becomes fabulously successful but also a
harbinger of gentrification to come. Eventually, the LA Weekly wants
to do a story on it (pretty much the uber-hipsters' death knoll that's
sure to flood it with college kids, celebrity scene tourists and
suburbanites). In a painful to watch section, gay columnist/club slug
James St. James drones on mindlessly about the "trannies" at the club
and you can palpably hear the queer clubbers and their wannabe allies
leering about the "Mexican transvestites... har, har." The article in
the LA Weekly not surprisingly turns out to be a nasty piece of
transphobic objectification droning on and on about trannies, he-shes
and shemales. Tsang is outraged, waging an internet campaign against
its social activist author, Sam Slovick and finally forces Slovick to
apologize to him. The film never really asks what Tsang's part was in
this debacle nor clarify if Slovick and the paper ever really
apologized to the women at the club or its ownership (which, while
they didn't like the tone of the story, seemed to be glowing in the
piles of money rolling in from "Wildness" nights).

Along the way, Tsang gets involved in some of the internal politics of
the club and naively questions whether their hyper-successful evening
of artsy hipness is throwing the equilibrium of the space off-kilter
(duh... something which the trans women clearly express in a guarded
way even if they're curious about the interlopers). Ultimately, flush
with success, the Wildness team rent a storefront next door and try to
open a legal clinic for trans women. It's a good gesture, but I
couldn't help thinking they were doing some kind of penance for
potentially stealing this space from the women... one of the few for
trans immigrants in LA. I won't tell the outcome of the story but,
needless to say, the Silver Platter is still there, hugely more
expensive than it used to be, and it you look on Yelp, it's all
younger white kids talking about the transsexuals and "transvestites"
and the super expensive drinks. Yup, it's pretty much become an
'Africa USA' kind of "watch the trannies" safari (there are other
spaces like this, such as Lucky Changs in NYC and AsiaSF in San
Francisco... overwhelmingly for cis well heeled patrons to ogle at
trans women of color). I suspect this film was ultimately good
publicity for The Silver Platter after all. As so often happens with
gentrification, the earlier outsiders/developers who move into the
minority space make initial attempts to "honor" the history of the
neighborhood before the drink prices shoot up to 4 dollar signs.

The film shines in its capturing the environment of the neighborhood,
the moment in time (2008), the sounds (it has a great salsa and
electronica soundtrack) and, when it allows the women to speak for
themselves, can be quite moving. It also has a certain level of
self-examination about Wildness, its cultural and trans
appropriation... but never probes too deeply or bothers to ask what
queerness really means for these women and if there really is an LGBTQ
community which unites because of Wildness (which the film limply
tries to suggest). This makes it perfect for LGBT film festivals which
love to believe such sentiments as they show films about gender
variant people of color yet overwhelmingly cater to cis, white,
middle-class patrons who very likely know few trans people much less
trans latinas).

I walked away from seeing "Wildness" with WILDLY mixed feelings about
Tsang. He tries to posit himself as "one of The Silver Platter girls,"
but considering he doesn't speak Spanish and his work has been seen at
the Tate, Whitney and umpteen Biennials, I'm skeptical about him
blending in with impoverished trans women from El Salvador who are in
the US without papers. He clearly loves the women and cares for their
well being but the film never really delves into what they think of
him, his continually filming them (the film suggests a fair number are
afraid of the INS finding them), his gender presentation much less his
friends (who sound nothing if not condescending towards the women).

Wildness, the documentary, ultimately churned up a lot of feelings for
me about race, class, gentrification, trans vs. queer vs. gay and even
what gets to be defined "art" and what isn't. Personally, I loved
seeing the performances by the trans women and drag queens and found
myself cringing at the 25-years-on Pyramid Club ripoff fare offered up
by Wildness and its craaazy, 2008-and-still-punky habitues. What I
valued most from the film was the questions and contradictions I felt
it inadvertently posed while most of the narration and ongoing
soliloquies by Tsang I found self-consciously earnest and motivated by
his inner fear of coming off as an appropriative artist jerk. In the
end, he seems like a nice, sincere queer person but really,
androgynous or not, yet another artist explaining the 'transgenders'
he got to know. I kept feeling this story would have been better told
by another filmmaker who could have given real, honest perspective
about the cultural and class tectonic jolts suggested in Wildness
without being the film's pivot point.


http://skipthemakeup.blogspot.com/2013/05/wildness-gentrification-as-art.html