A newly published reflection on the work of Texas performance artists is reframing resilience as a combination of endurance, improvisation and care—not simply the ability to absorb pain. Writing in Glasstire on Aug. 8, Jessica Fuentes examines how live art by José Villalobos and Tammy Melody Gomez turns physical vulnerability and survival into public experiences, giving audiences a close view of what persistence demands before, during and after a crisis.

Fuentes begins with Villalobos’ 2024 performance “Producto de la Máquina” at Artpace San Antonio. According to her account, the artist wore a bit and harness connected to a motorized horse walker and moved for about an hour across an uneven, soil-covered floor. The mechanism proceeded slowly, but its repetition created strain as Villalobos stumbled and pulled against the metal bar in his mouth. Spectators stood around the gallery, watching and recording while remaining unable to relieve him of the action he had undertaken.

That relationship between performer and audience is central to the work’s force. Viewers do not encounter a static representation of difficulty; they watch fatigue accumulate in real time. Their presence can provide attention and community, but it can also make suffering into a spectacle. The performance therefore raises questions about complicity: What does it mean to witness another person’s struggle? When does observation become passive consumption, and what responsibility remains after the performance is over?

Villalobos has long used performance and culturally charged objects to challenge machismo and the policing of queer identity. In a 2019 Glasstire interview, he described drawing upon symbols associated with Norteño culture—including boots, belts and sombreros—to dismantle ideas of masculine power from within. Raised between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, he has connected his practice to the expectations of toughness he observed in family and public life.

His endurance works sharpen that critique because they refuse to treat toughness as an abstraction. The body carries the consequences. Fuentes points to actions across Villalobos’ practice that have involved rope burns, dragging himself across soil and other forms of controlled physical hardship. Such works can expose the violence embedded in demands that people suppress pain to meet prescribed standards of masculinity, belonging or social acceptability.

But the lesson is not that injury itself produces resilience. Fuentes recalls a conversation with another endurance artist who described exercising, stretching and mentally rehearsing difficult actions before performing. Recovery included caring for injuries and sore muscles while consciously reminding herself that the enacted danger had ended. That largely unseen process complicates the dramatic image of the artist who simply pushes through. Preparation and aftercare are not peripheral; they are part of the artwork’s infrastructure.

This distinction separates meaningful resilience from romanticized suffering. A body used as an artistic medium cannot be stored after the exhibition or replaced like a damaged material. The artist continues living in it. Performance therefore foregrounds limits, consequences and the need for tenderness. Endurance is sustainable only when paired with restoration and an awareness of what the body has experienced.

Gomez’s “Saliendo Abierta (Emerging Open)” approaches resilience from a different direction. Rather than placing her body through a new endurance test, the Fort Worth poet and performance artist recounts an actual emergency from May 2008. Gomez entered a bedroom closet to wind a roll of film in darkness, Fuentes writes, only for the door to close and lock behind her. She lived alone, had no phone with her and remained trapped for 55 hours.

The performance uses the closet door as a central object and reconstructs the mental and practical work of survival. Gomez eventually straightened and reshaped a wire clothes hanger, then used it to carve through the wooden door until she could reach the locking mechanism. The solution was neither immediate nor guaranteed. It emerged through repeated observation, experimentation and the conservation of enough energy to continue.

Her story demonstrates resilience as flexible problem-solving under conditions a person did not choose. It also disrupts the reassuring assumption that help will always arrive. Community can be indispensable, but Gomez’s ordeal required self-reliance because no one else knew she was in danger. Her performance asks audiences to consider how they react when familiar systems disappear and control becomes impossible.

One of the ideas Gomez draws from the experience is the value of practicing a lack of control. That principle also runs through live art. Unlike a film or a completed museum object, a performance unfolds in a particular room before a particular audience. Bodies tire, timing shifts and unexpected reactions alter the atmosphere. Artists can establish rules and prepare extensively, but they must remain responsive to conditions that cannot be completely rehearsed.

Gomez has connected that adaptability to an earlier collaborative experience with choreographer Deborah Hay and artist Tré Arenz. Women & Their Work’s archive describes “Italy: Real & Imagined,” presented in Austin in 1998, as a three-hour, multisensory performance installation involving more than 50 invited performers. Participants developed prescribed roles, while only the organizers held a complete view of how the parts would converge.

That structure offers another model of resilience: individuals act without possessing full knowledge, yet a larger work becomes possible through coordination and trust. The project did not eliminate uncertainty. It distributed uncertainty across a community whose members remained committed to their roles. In everyday life, the corresponding skill is not blind dependence but the cultivation of relationships reliable enough to function when no individual can control the whole situation.

Performance art also helps distinguish resilience from numbness. The performer’s task is not necessarily to deny fear, discomfort or exhaustion. Those sensations may be the very substance that gives the work meaning. Resilience instead involves noticing what is happening, making informed choices and continuing—or stopping—with awareness. That framing allows vulnerability to coexist with agency.

For museums, presenters and cultural organizations, the implications are practical. Institutions showing demanding live work must consider performer safety, consent, access, rest and recovery rather than concentrating solely on the audience-facing event. Ethical presentation requires clear boundaries and contingency planning, especially when a work involves physical stress. The surrounding support system can determine whether risk remains intentional and artist-led or becomes exploitative.

The same principle applies to audiences. Witnessing is not inherently passive, even when intervention would disrupt a performance. Viewers can examine their own reactions, resist treating pain as entertainment and carry the work’s questions into civic life. Art cannot supply emergency preparedness, mental-health care or public policy by itself. It can, however, reveal behavioral patterns that ordinary language often conceals.

Villalobos and Gomez ultimately present complementary accounts of survival. One exposes the cost of social systems that reward punishing versions of toughness; the other reconstructs the creativity required to escape a literal enclosure. Both show resilience as an active process rather than a heroic identity. It depends on physical knowledge, emotional honesty, improvisation and, whenever available, trustworthy collective support.

The clearest lesson is also the least theatrical: endurance alone is insufficient. People need time to prepare, permission to adapt and space to recover. Performance art makes those needs difficult to ignore because the evidence is present in a living body. Long after the audience leaves, that body remains—and caring for it is part of surviving.