Breathe Her In:

In the fall of 2011, queer and transfeminine Filipino American artist Mark Aguhar (1987-2012) performed, for an intimate audience, Casting a Glamor: Peony Piece as part of her MFA thesis at the University of Illinois at Chicago. ¹ In the piece, Aguhar carves out a small spotlight for herself in a circle of silk peony petals, inhaling and exhaling deeply as she brings new, fresh air to the gallery with her body and casts glamor in front of her as if it were a magic spell (Figure 1). Art critic and writer Roy Pérez describes the performance space as follows:

Aguhar ... performed > Casting a Glamor: Peony Piece> for an audience composed largely of classmates and friends as one of her final art school critiques. No video and only a few photos exist of the performance, so we have to construct the piece through the memories of audience members: Entering the room, one encountered a soft spotlight illuminating a pool of silk peony petals. Once the audience was positioned, Aguhar walked in wearing a strapless lavender A-line dress in long and pleated chiffon, her hair lying wavy and relaxed down past her shoulders, her face made up with carefully arched brows, long lashes, and feline eyes. At the perimeter of the small space, at the edge of the spotlight, Aguhar removed a pair of platform boots, stepped her bare feet lightly into the center of the pool of petals, and slowly lowered herself to the floor, her dress whirling and clearing away the petals around her. Sitting, one leg extended and the other tucked beneath her, Aguhar proceeded to gaze at the audience, her expression alternatingly demure, beseeching, hostile. After some length of time, Aguhar rose, leaving petals whirling again in her wake, put the boots back on, and exited the room.
It’s fitting that the piece exists only as ephemera. Among the mediums here are not just clothing and lighting, but the audience’s affective transformations as the space changed. The performance brought classmates, professors, acquaintances, and friends from Chicago into the space of Aguhar’s gender drift for prolonged reckoning, in contrast to the chance and fleeting encounters of everyday life. Her gaze invited the audience to take inventory of its own feelings about her transition and her body. By making each person in the room the object of her returned gaze, Aguhar revealed all the vectors of interaction along which we construct the social world together. The piece suspended normal, scripted avenues of communication and reclaimed this bandwidth for each person to experiment with and to reimagine queer relation. Her platform boots sat on the periphery, sparing the peony petals from getting squashed and giving Aguhar’s feet a rest while she reclined for her viewers’ gaze. The boots marked a threshold between the normative flow and everyday existence beyond the room’s walls and the spotlit magic circle, what she sometimes liked to call her “goddess actuality.” The performance dared you to imagine yourself in a femme-empowered, brown-centering elsewhere. ²

I quote Pérez at length here because he was Aguhar’s friend and he interviewed audience members who were present for this fleeting performance with little documentation. As such, this description is evidence of what transpires when we are invited to sit in Aguhar’s circle. And as a compilation of audience memories of the performance, it is alive: susceptible to change and awaiting other interpretations and new voices to (mis)remember what happened in shared time-space.

This essay moves past the platform boots and towards the “femme-empowered, brown-centering elsewhere” of Aguhar’s circle as we breathe in an elongated moment of brown commons and transfeminine aliveness.³ It considers the breathy and glamorous dimensions of Aguhar’s performance piece by reading it in relation to the concept of “airy poetics” as it is developed in feminist geographical researcher Sasha Engelmann’s writing on art and affect, as well as German philosopher Gernot Böhme’s “aesthetics of felt spaces.” From here, this essay explores breath as a nexus for the performance’s engagements with wider questions of Aguhar’s transfeminine stasis, reproduction (the power of breathing and sustaining life), and embodied interactions with groups of people, paying particular attention to questions of safeness and labor in peoples’ everyday lives and the stillness of the observed breathing of Aguhar’s transfeminine body in front of an audience. For Aguhar, the importance of attending to the ways air, breath, and breathing are aestheticized in her life is intentionally elaborated for audiences to notice the beauty of her breathing much by doing little in a world that demands she perform or die because she performs too much. I argue that this performance allows us, when invited into Aguhar’s circle, to consider breath as a sensational and intensive mode of embodiment capable of producing unanticipated forms of closeness, beauty, and affiliation when invited. In such an artful mode of environmental sensation, Aguhar asks her audience to witness her beauty through shared air and breathing room, as if her glamor’s actuality is a kind of aesthetic osmosis, shared with the people she wants to share it with through breath and against non-consensual, abrasive, and violent forms of visibility. This is all to say that Aguhar’s making of this particular breathy and beautiful space, this aesthetic performance’s accomplishment, is all in her air, so to speak. In what follows, I imagine how trans women and transfeminine people, especially racialized trans women and transfeminine people, might breathe differently when we are invited to sit in Aguhar’s circle.

Brief as it was, Aguhar’s multimedia artistic production recapitulated and condensed her life-long relationship with the daunting and heavy atmospheres of masculinity, depression, bitchy flippancy as a “call out queen,” and white forms of masculinity and supremacy — from her early drawings, blog posts (“blogging for brown girls”), and YouTube videos to her later installations and performance artworks offline and in the live. Her work tends to be read in relation to her tough and on-guard persona, “critical” and “separatist,” as if the fight against a world that wished her dead was her whole world.⁴ The heaviness of her left-behind platform boots are case in point. This is a certain “burden of liveness” that has come to define weighty, idealized accounts of the trans woman of color as a figure who is in-the-live and unmediated, not historical and multiple, who fights all time and enjoys herself too little (even when all she has is a little), riots and never rests.⁵ Aguhar is not a solo figure of or symbol for racialized knowledge of gender or a cipher for “trans woman of color” at the center of a circle in this performance. Hazardous air is not the only air she breathes.

The truth is, Aguhar had fun, experienced joy, flirted with white men, and felt beauty and her work attests to such ambivalent, complicated, and de-idealized experiences with other people. It is no surprise, then, that Pérez’s latest writing on her work turns to the memory of Peony Piece to theorize and ask after an aesthetics of proximity in Aguhar’s oeuvre. Peony Piece celebrates gathering and multi-sensation (the visual, the olfactory, the textured, etc.), a multi-sensory assembly that mimics the radical openness of the breathing body in stillness. Here, with the peony’s opened flower and petals sprawled about the floor in the shape of a porous circle, Aguhar’s body is present, open, and proud; and the gallery space, with Aguhar’s body at its center, is a living surround of “the anti-depressant-like effect of peony” combined with illusory aromatherapy and deep breathing.⁶ Aguhar’s openness comes from the porosity enabled by a circle of silence, meditation, and breathing with the people in front of her. The question posed by such vulnerable, de-idealized, and in-the-live gathering is this: how to defunction the aestheticization of racialized trans women’s deaths in the popular imagination as a particular effect of a racialized transmisogyny by beautifying their lives anew in the presence of their trans sisters and girlfriends?⁷

The answer can be found amid the breathy and sororal relations of a trans woman and her circle, in the difference the aesthetics of her beauty and her breathing make in the world for other transfeminine people. For trans women and girls, and not the anti-trans, racist, and cisgender optics of mass media and culture that wish them dead⁸ racialized trans women are not merely rhetorical devices or emblems of a revolutionary aspiration, but people with everyday lives, often opaque on purpose, as aesthetic blur, for protection, but open, honestly and unapologetically open, when in the room with their girlfriends. Aguhar’s breathing grounds her as both a historical actor and a person in present time, and trans women in the room with her can feel this. Her still and relaxed — glamorous and unbothered — presence at the center of a circle is a critique of the idealized notion that the mere presence of a trans woman of color is immediately revolutionary, political, or otherwise performative and void of personhood. In breathing and looking back, she is more than just a figure: neither an image, model, or statue, nor an untouchable, finished, and closed-off flower on a stem. As such, a performance of proximity to Aguhar’s life in the gallery space might better be called breathing room for “transy gender babes” (Figure 2): a place for feeling brown, transfeminine life in its multiple haptic and sensuous registers, not merely a room for visuality and defenceless forms of visibility, but a space for seeing and being seen by people who Aguhar wants to be seen by and whom she herself wants to see.

Another aesthetic of brown and transfeminine performance and gathering is possible then. Peony Piece asks audiences to participate affectively with Aguhar’s racialized transfeminine embodiment, not as an object of study, but as pure beingness or “goddess actuality,” or even “ladyboy tranny chick-with-dick actuality,” as Aguhar might put it.⁹ It is but one example of Aguhar’s use of her own personal history as aesthetic medium, as an invitation to spend time with her body and herself. As her swan song, performed just months before her suicide in 2012, Peony Piece activates collective witnessing and bids farewell to the world and the friends she invited to see it. It is leave-taking, departure, from a world she lived in, got attached to, despite its harm, because of its beauty. Aguhar’s interest in finding breathing room for gathering, for trans girls and their living or posthumous circles, and the difficulty of finding an arts-based language or medium for such renewed habits of assembly for trans women, was central to her project as an artist. Perhaps the language does not need to be spoken at all. Perhaps it is gestural and still, like lyrical silence or dramatic pause, or perhaps it is glittering and bold, like a drawing that pronounces, “I’d rather be beautiful than male”(Figure 3). The glamor we breathe in such a performance is one of an attractive or exciting quality, but also enchantment; magic.

You see, in addition to being an aesthetic goal, glamor was also a pedagogical method for making art in Aguhar’s brown and transfeminine life.¹⁰ Derived from the early eighteenth century (originally Scots in the sense of enchantment or magic), the word glamor is an alteration of the word grammar. Although grammar itself was not used in this sense, the Latin word grammatica from which it derives was often used in the Middle Ages to mean trance-like scholarship or learning including the occult practices popularly associated with learning. Transfeminine audience studies often requires occult-like practice of conjuring and other forms of artful inventiveness, if not outright and unabashed imagination. While I cannot assume trans women visitors to Aguhar’s circle or trans women audience members at her performance, I can imagine the breathing room inside and around such a glamorous circle that Aguhar created and left for trans women in her world-making project of gathering and assembly with a language and aesthetic all our own. In a circle, unlike the too-close of a huddle or a cuddle, there is room for difference, breath, and an exchange of air: closeness “without approximation.”¹¹ To sit with her performance, live or after-the-fact, is to breathe in a life and a world otherwise, where space is brown and transfeminine, and there is space for brown and transfeminine openness and attraction: for trans women and their circles, where we might plan, study, and make beautiful lives together. Peony Piece breathes life into the world for trans women and girls across difference; and as such, its genre of performance art is not defined by deadening loss or a liberal humanist project of capitalist consumption, but a closeness and openness to the meeting places of trans women and girls. Peony Piece exhibits trans women’s relational circles as possible, as realized, in being felt and seen in common places with other trans women and girls — from the streets, the performance space, and the art school to the museum, the blog, and the nightclub.

If all of this sounds poetic, all up-in-the-air, but material and not too far from the ground, it’s because it is. In Engelmann’s aesthetic judgement and Aguhar’s performance, “airy poetics” (or is it airy performance here?) draws attention to “the simultaneous material, affective, and aesthetic impressions of air,” where air draws attention to breath and what is happening between us while poetics or performance denotes grounding and embodied material.¹² A poetics of air’s relationship to breathing is obvious: both denote aliveness. Böhme would agree. Essential to his “felt spaces” is a concept of aura. A technically produced reproduction of an aesthetic moment like a photograph for Walter Benjamin, not necessarily so for Böhme, aura is more live and felt immediately, present in time and space, “something spatially diffused, almost like a breath or a haze — an atmosphere, precisely.”¹³ Breathing is how aura is shared bodily, how the body becomes tense or expands in the presence of an audience. Böhme’s reading of aura is an atmosphere that infuses the self. Peony Piece, on the other hand, is of Aguhar’s individual making, but made collective and shared. The power of aura, like breath, is its lasting power, like blush on cheeks or a peony’s perfume. Böhme summarizes his contribution to Benjamin’s notion of aura and his own aesthetics of “felt spaces” in the following way: “To sense aura means to absorb it into one’s own bodily disposition. What is sensed is an indeterminate, spatially diffused quality of feeling.”¹⁴ “To sense aura” in this felt space, in Aguhar’s atmospheric architecture, is to pay attention to her breathing, to her beautiful aliveness.

The invitation to exchange air and breath — the invitation to Aguhar’s circle — changes you in ineffable ways. Not radical or revolutionary breathing, but ordinary, like a space for taking a break, a reading group, or a knitting circle. By conceptualizing an aesthetic of air and atmosphere in Peony Piece and Aguhar’s place in the middle of its circle, I am not interested in mere essence over appearance, a theory of breathing without bodies. As a theatre and performance scholar, I reject a theory of the body void of psychic and physical presences and practices, even when the live event itself is against the constant action that performance demands of its performer. In fact, in spotlighting Aguhar’s breath in this performance, I feel her present and distant, both closed off and open, where the interiority of her complex personhood is nestled in the aesthetic and pleasurable exterior of her circle outlined with the petals of her favorite flower and her audience of friends.¹⁵ The history of happenings in the experimental performance scene testifies to such an idea; ephemeral performance “pieces” often become pieces of us with their deep interior lives and long afterlives.

Aguhar offers a rare kind of evidence: a one-time chance to breathe with her in the most intimate and vulnerable of circles complete with spotlight and all. In doing this, she understands that the interaction between the body of the performance artist and the viewer of the audience performs the work of commemoration in an aspirational moment where racialized trans women can breathe while at rest. This is an aesthetics of transfeminine envelopment and felt spaces for trans women and their circles and it is breathy and relaxing, beautiful and meditative. Aguhar, at the center of her circle and de-idealized in such a center, is about what she knows by simple being there breathing: about what she knows about aspiring toward or breathing in, aspiration is, of course, from the French aspirer or Latin aspirare , from ad- “to” + spirare “breathe,” a beautiful life. This beautiful life is for herself, certainly — the girls are doing it for themselves no doubt; but it is also for the people around her, her sisters, the girls in her circle who are disturbing and shielding the view from the outside.

Today the performance lives on in the memories of a select few who attended it and a pink, pouty photograph that emits calmness and fierce conviction. Head-up shoulders-back, looking back at you: casting glamor! And although there are few archival records of this powerful performance, they are by no means defined by such a performance’s loss — of Aguhar, of an ephemeral moment in time, of her repertoire, of such a circle with Aguhar’s beauty, her likeness, at its center. But Peony Piece is not a fetish, an idol, or a memorial in psychoanalytic iterations, if memorial means a stop sign: a place that prevents further movement when one stops to admire it. It is not closure, but a space of openness and continuity in airy (porous, breathy, circular) directions: a performance to breathe in Aguhar’s lasting power, just as this essay is an ode to remember her by. Peony Piece is how trans women learn best practices and techniques for holding and lifting one another mid-air and in shared air, where we can go deep, gather, and breathe our sisters in. To conclude, I leave us with Aguhar’s lush and breathy, decidedly breath-giving, not breath-taking, theatricality as medium,¹⁶ and ask that trans women and girls keep breathing each other in and meeting back in such a circle amid different, future iterations of shared air and artistic atmosphere, even if a sister lives to breathe another day, especially if she does not.