.Project
Description
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John Rechy |
Mysteries
and Desire: This work focuses on the fictional nature of autobiography, memory, and history. Drawing its central thematic from Autobiography, a Novel (a work Rechy has been writing for several years) and passages from virtually all of Rechy's published writings, it assembles a rich network of personal memories and family documents, setting them against larger collective histories of Chicano culture and the gay world. It tells of Rechy's paternal grandfather who was personal physician to Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, but who was forced to flee to El Paso when Diaz was overthrown. It tells of the poverty the Rechy family experienced during the depression, and the many tales told about John's mysterious father. It also mines the outrageous fictions that circulate around John himself, a fascinating literary figure who, as a gay icon, a Chicano writer from Texas, a longtime bodybuilder, and a gifted teacher of creative writing at USC, has long been a subject of notoriety and fantasy. Combining childhood drawings, family photographs, historic documents from Mexico and El Paso, archival footage, taped interviews, and popular representations of the male body and gay world, and rearranging them into three interrelated realms--Memories, Bodies, and Cruising--it enables players to weave a rich tapestry of associations that can be used to solve mysteries and generate new fictions. In Mysteries, you navigate through a Quick-Time VR representation of the author's subjectivity, triggering an array of audio and visual associations randomly accessed; in Bodies, you control the pace of morphing male figures, performing patterned repetitions in three related disciplines--religious ritual, writing, and bodybuilding; in Cruising, you emerge in Griffith Park where, as voyeur or participant, you move across America's sexual arenas-- from Hollywood, to San Francisco, to New York, to New Orleans, seeking release. The script and conceptual design were developed collaboratively by Rechy and Kinder, and the graphics and interface design by Kristy Kang and James Tobias, with additional artwork by Augie Robles. |
| Exhibition List: |
June 4-
June 18, 1999 October
14-24, 1999 October
22, 1999 November
1, 1999 May 3-7,
2000 June 9
- June 11, 2000 June 15-17,
2000 September
10, 2000 September
23-30, 2000 November
2000 November
23-December 3, 2000 November
1-3, 2000 Updated 10.5.00 |