Live Painting, Poetry Smackdown Mixes Surreality, Combat, With Paint, Babes, Crime Fighting Drag Queens Lucharrificos fight crime, struggle for la Cama Sucia while creating art and mayhem at Museum of Living Artist installation by John A. Rippo August 16th saw one of the most fascinating and truly bizarre installations in recent San Diego history as a brilliantly clever, schizophrenic battle of spoken word and sprayed paint flew fast and furious in the Museum of the Living Artist in Balboa Park. The installation, Poems, Painitngs and Piledrivers, A Live Painting Smackdown, featured a battle of words and images between Mexican wrestlers turned artists turned performers Mon Santo, Sonny Diablo, Miss Slowcialization and the Chicanonauts, among others, who presented a fanstastic tale of a terrible crime on Planet Lucha-the theft of La Cama Sucia. There was much fighting and revenge; a battle between art and nature that centered around a trio of detective trannies who travel, Ulysses-like, through a maze of bi-cultural impediment to arrive at the apex between the forces of the future, as represented by the genetically modified Mon Santo and los tecnicos, and the home team, the sons of Slowcialization, los rudos, for the right to...continue to battle it out for the future. The show was presented by AZTECGOLD, a production effort headed by Lou Chalibre (yes, as in "free fight") Victor Payan and Sandra Pocha Peña that bills itself as an irreverent guide to everything that matters. The evening's wild performance was a continuing refinement of a developing theme that will be made into a film in Puerto Vallarta later this year which will be produced by Isaac Artenstein, producer of Water for Chocolate and who once was the principal of Café Cinema, a coffeehouse in Little Italy. The installation was a hit for the two hundred or so patrons who got to visit the rich world of Mexican mystical surrealism presented by masked and costumed wrestlers from Lucha Libre Internacional, a pro wrestling group. One can never have enough controversy amid the creation of art and the preservation of culture, and for at least one observer of the night's performance, a passion play of the conflict between the creative process, the bureaucratic function and the grim realities of 21st century urban life all commingled in the same room at the same time during the performance. Whether it was when one of Las Sexy Fresas got nudged a bit too hard by a flying -and crashing-tecnico or when the rudo smashed the tecnico across the shoulders with his own painting, and then pummeled him furiously when he was down, the metaphor of how the delicate flower of art must attempt to thrive amid the Arctic blizzard of the marketplace and administrative ego was just too hard to miss. But in between bouts of wrestling fury, there came the trannies, Britney, Sweet Virginia and La Luz de la Cama Sucia, to deliver shrill homilies against the world as it is and the crimes its perpetuates against us all. It certainly made the flying paint that stained clothes, camera lenses and other works of art worth the trouble. Throughout the performance, Lou Chalibre egged on the crowd, asking them if they preferred los tecnicos over los rudos and noting with alternating glee and alarm the confused answer of the crowd. The work was brilliant and the San Diego Art Institute is to be commended for risking its treasures for this treasure to find it audience.   All writings and recordings on this site © Victor Payan unless otherwise noted