Turning the Tables

DJ Maria Chavez puts a subversive spin on consumer culture.


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Published: Nov 19, 2008

HAD TO BE THERE: Chavez has sworn off recording and merchandising her performances. "I feel like recording exploits the moment," she says. SO CLEAN: Maria Chavez was inspired by the artwork on a box of laundry detergent; she mimics the pose in her performances.

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Mr. Clean. Snuggles the Bear. Those Scrubbing Bubbles. The corporate mascots of American cleaning products aren't very likely to inspire artwork or social commentary. But when avant turntablist Maria Chavez found a box of the Mexican laundry detergent brand Roma six years ago, she knew something would come of it.

"It had this indigenous woman on it cleaning clothes," Chavez describes. "She's wearing peasant garb, and you're assuming that she's washing someone else's clothes and not her own. In Latin America, there's definitely a micro-racism where if you're indigenous and brown, you're considered lower class than more Spanish, white-looking people."

Originally hailing from Peru, Chavez felt a personal and familial resonance with the woman on the soap box and clung to the image, bringing it with her when she moved from Houston to Brooklyn in 2005, assuming it would find its way into a painting. But when composer Pauline Oliveros invited her to participate in SoHo's Women & Identity Festival earlier this year, she created a multimedia piece around the image called ROMA: Economical and Effective.

The performance involved Chavez playing her turntables in a posture echoing that of the woman on the box, whose image is projected in the background. "The whole idea," Chavez says, "is to question the roles that we project onto each other, whether it's as a brown woman to a white man, or just walking down the street and looking at a homeless person. Because those ideas are not really real, they're actually just as fleeting and ephemeral as the projection itself. It's like you're staring at a painting for too long; your eyes see what the subject is, but as you continue to stare at it your vision becomes blurred and the piece becomes something completely different."

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While she was pleased with her own performance, Chavez was disappointed at the audience's interpretations, which noted the similarities in race and gender between performer and image, not the more universal point she was striving to make. So when she reprises the piece in Philly, it will be with the additional involvement of artist James Morrison, whose role involves live screenprinting of his own drawing based on the Roma logo.

"I'm visually using my drawing and screenprinting as a method to reinvent the image present in society," Morrison says. "Within my work, I'm interested in bridging the gap between the commercial art market and consumerist culture, most specifically through using screenprinting as a vehicle to transport the work into other sectors of life. I've deliberately chosen to manifest my work in formats that are ephemeral, disposable and self-destructive in nature."

While she's directly involved with that consumer culture as co-owner of Houndstooth, a vintage men's clothing shop in Brooklyn, as a performer Chavez has sworn off recording and merchandising her performances for the foreseeable future. "I feel like recording exploits the moment," she says. "My work is all about the environment that I'm in and the moment that I choose to do things. To have someone else listen to it afterward takes it out of context. Recording equipment makes me really nervous and self-conscious. Oftentimes when I perform there's a point where it's no longer me; I have complete separation from my thoughts, from my fears, and I just am. I'm addicted to that. Finding that point means more to me than selling CDs."

Despite the relative lack of recorded evidence, Chavez's work has become increasingly acclaimed over the few years that she's been on the scene. Her relationship with the turntables began as a club DJ in Houston with a weekly electronic music radio show. Growing bored with dance music while studying audio engineering at the University of Houston, she undertook an internship with Houston's Pauline Oliveros Foundation, where she began improvising. Since then she's worked with the likes of Thurston Moore and Charalambides' Christina Carter, and was recently an artist-in-residence with Merce Cunningham Dance Co. After years of ruining records and breaking needles to find the sounds she was looking for, she is now apprenticing at the Brooklyn Phono pressing plant, learning to lathe her own vinyl.

"It's a whole new world of sound, of possibilities," she says. "I'm making this micro-sculpture within the vinyl and then playing it, the beauty being that once it's cut it can only be played for a certain amount of time before it becomes white noise. It will never sound the same, just like in improvisation, where you can never get that same moment again. It's the beauty of destruction."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Maria Chavez plays Fri., Nov. 21, 8 p.m., free, with Ian Nagorski, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., bowerbird.org, gatephilly.net.