Ulysses Jenkins screening • performance by beck haberstroh, Maria Antonia Eguiarte, mika Castañeda, and Victor Castañeda H
December 21, 2023, at MCASD

700 Prospect St., La Jolla, CA 92037
5:00 - 7:00 pm in Jacobs Hall
FREE for MCASD’s Third Thursday

In collaboration with MCASD, join us on Free Third Thursday, December 21 at 5PM for the screening of Ulysses Jenkins' Inconsequential Doggereal (1981) followed by a performance at 6PM of Fates, Boots and Bob: A Hijacked Hootenanny Holiday Hullabaloo by beck haberstroh, Maria Antonia Eguiarte, mika Castañeda, and Victor Castañeda H. This event was organized in response to the exhibition Eleanor Antin and My Barbarian at MCASD, with consultation from Alexandro Segade.

Inconsequential Doggereal
Ulysses Jenkins
(1981, 15:13 min, color, sound, video)

Initially created as an editing exercise for his students at UCSD, Jenkins’ Inconsequential Doggereal mixes poetic narrative fragments of self-shot footage with moments ripped from the unending flow of TV news, advertising, and entertainment. The images and sounds of mainstream television are jammed, freeze-framed, looped, overlaid and rewound—clips of science documentaries, movies broadcast on TV, nightly news commentary on the minimum wage, and a 60 Minutes style interview with the actor Peter Sellers are all jumbled together. Jenkins interjects several original threads, which show pickup football games gone wrong, a young white couple doing chores and hanging out at home, and Jenkins himself laying on a green suburban yard as a lawnmower moves perilously close to his body.

Commenting on the title, Jenkins noted: “One Sunday morning, I was reading the calendar section in the L.A. Times. The Superman film was just about to open, and they had an interview with Marlon Brando. They asked him, ‘What’s it like to play the Superman?’ He goes, ‘Well, I really like those doggerel moments.’ I said, ‘Doggerel moments? What is he talking about?’ So I looked up the word, and it means ‘irregular measure.’ So I figured he was talking about the timewhen maybe they’re not using dialogue, or the in-between time when they’re moving within the narrative and there’s nothing being said, or maybe there are gestures you can’t understand. And I thought, ‘That’s what it’s like to be a black person in society. Sometimes things are irregular, and you can’t figure out what’s happening.’”

Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Fates, Boots and Bob: A Hijacked Hootenanny Holiday Hullabaloo

Bob Cratchit is on his way to work when a spaceship crash lands in his path. In this extraterrestrial twist on a holiday classic, an alien, a museum educator, and an enormous piece of sacred toast help Bob navigate his existential workplace woes.

Drawing on references from absurdist theater, politically-engaged performance, pop culture and queer nightlife, this tragicomedy pilfers the practices of Eleanor Antin and My Barbarian to stage raucous homage, mischievous theft and fantastic departure. Through a series of sing-alongs, the audience will help Bob decide whether to give in, organize, or burn it all down.

Victor, mika, Antonia and beck met while attending art school in San Diego. They bring together their interdisciplinary practices to stage participatory performances that celebrate a playful politics of absurdity. In 2023, they produced SUCK OFF!, a 'musical' in the tradition of queer camp theater that follows Dracula through their relationships with an Angel, an Asshole and an Astronaut as they pursue their dream of going to space.

beck haberstroh is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator. They work in community to stage performances, photographs and gatherings that center play and subvert power. In 2022, haberstroh presented a public artwork in the City of San Diego’s Park Social Initiative with collaborator Katie Giritlian and co-authored the book Camera of Possibilities: A Workbook for a Carrier Bag Theory of Photography (Brooklyn, NY: Paper Cameras Press) with Mira Dayal. They have participated in residencies and fellowships at SOMA, Mexico City (2022); BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2019); and Outpost Artist Resources, Queens, NY (2018). Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at venues, including the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego; Small Editions, Brooklyn; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Babycastles, New York; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn; Flux Factory, Queens; California State University Long Beach, Long Beach; and the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY. Their writing has been published by HereIn, Syllabus Project, imaginedTheatres and SCREEN_. haberstroh holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego.

Maria Antonia Eguiarte is an interdisciplinary artist engaging in gesture-based performance and object making. Since the start of her artistic exploration, Antonia has been drawn to vulnerability and care as radical political weapons for quiet gestural revolution. This has been the main focus of her practice as a facilitator and artist. Her gesture-based performance and object-making center on the possibilities of a transnational body that carries multigenerational knowledge of care. Maria Antonia has shown in group expeditions on both sides of the border at ICA San Diego, NIXON, Proxyco NYC, the New Wight Gallery UCLA and Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual. Maria Antonia holds a BFA from La Escuela Nacional de Pintura Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” and a MFA from The University of California San Diego.

mika Castañeda b. 1996, Woodland Hills California, is an interdisciplinary maker, educator, collaborator and libra from Los Angeles California. Placing itself between object and archive, their practice looks towards over sentimentalized concepts surrounding the stage, collecting, and assembly in order to enact narratives of queer hope, holding, and remembering.It concerns itself and themself with one’s proximity to others, and asks simply “how/when do I feel held, how/when can I hold?”. “Who gets to remember, and how do we?”. With these questions as their first point of departure their work fishes out an understanding of these questions through formal studies as sites for mutual witness, heldness, and proximity. Ultimately what is formed is a practice which holds tightly to notions of the then/there of queerness, embracing new formations of ‘place’ and ‘archive’. A practice which, by definition, lends itself to what a space must give in order to become place: community, affirmation of the sacredness of people, and human capacity for transcendence.

Victor Castaneda H is an interdisciplinary artist that works with VR, sound, coding, video, sculpture, and drawings. Through humor he is interested in fantasy and storytelling, as a way to reflect on the fallacies of memories. While using it as a platform to contemplate the potentiality of marginalized queer futures. As well, the idea of the non-body, a formless entity that can exist as an energy source found throughout living organisms. Borrowing from cyberpunk, the non-body can experience the world fully. Asking, what is a body and the future of it? Both of these themes intertwine with each other to create installations utilizing a new media approach with traditional art methods. Victor has shown at the ICA San Diego, Coaxial, Oolong Gallery, and Other Places Art Fair. He is the founder of the Newstand Project, in which he curated art shows in abandoned newspaper vending machines. He has a bachelors from Cal State University of Northridge and a MFA from University of California San Diego.

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