Attending lectures by artists, whether or not you identify as an artist yourself, is very rarely a bad idea because artists often present ways of thinking that others have never considered and which can allow those in attendance to expand their ideas to contemplate entirely new modes of operation. Sometimes those new modes of operation involve movement, sometimes self expression, sometimes something as simple as the definition you ascribe to a certain word. Octavio Campos’ lecture at the U’s Arts & Arts History building on Feb. 18 focused on multiple words, among them ‘queer,’ ‘hate,’ and ‘failure,’ as well as the word ‘happy.’

Campos identifies as a Queer Activist Cuban American, having come to America as a young Cuban refugee. Though he will be 50 years old next year, he was most memorable throughout the lecture for his abundance of energy. Working with him seems like an exhausting, but incredibly rewarding, task as a result. Campos switched between video recordings of other people’s performances, video recordings of his own performances, still pictures, and his own self speaking to the audience throughout his allotted time at the U to emphasize his goals with his work, which is, as he says, to “use my experience to illuminate another way of life.” That way of life for Campos is a Queer one, since he identifies himself as a Queer man and his work as Queer Performance art. He did not necessarily use the word as it is used by Queer Movements though; rather, ‘Queer’ referred to a state of beautiful difference and uniqueness that is often met with ugly. The word ‘hate’ that often came up alongside the word ‘queer’ in his discussion describes a cruelty and an ugly that is often thrown at Queer-identifying individuals. Campos emphasized that the pain of failure, another important word for Campos, that can be tied to the pain of a queer identity, can be used to find the beauty in the ugly hate produces. “You have to really fail and really fail hard” was a phrase Campos reiterated multiple times. AS Campos sees it, failure is the gateway to improvement. If you want to become more, do better, open your understanding, you have to fail. Unfortunately, the only way to really make improvement happen is to fail hard. Whether that failure come from a purposeful project or a simple desire to be oneself when society says that self isn’t good enough, it can be productive but it must first be an agonizingly massive failure to get to that point.

Last but not least of the words Campos focused on in his lecture was the word ‘happy.’ We’re all just trying to be happy, he said. Accepting this is a great way to move towards greater acceptance of difference. And why would we not want to accept more individuals? Diversity of a population can only produce a greater diversity and creativity of ideas; and aren’t those things we are always taught to admire?

For anyone interested in looking into Octavio Campos’ work, be sure to check out his website at camposition.org.