Art as Activism

Guillermo Gomez-Peña has been shaking up the art scene for decades with his controversial pieces on the Mexican-American experience, xenophobia, exoticism, identity and border cultures. Never one to lose his edge, Gomez-Peña has recently been tackling the post-9-11 hysteria and xenophobia that has dramatically altered our national character. Addressing issues such as the demonization of “brown bodies” and the isolationism that has become worryingly characteristic of our country, president, and mainstream culture, Gomez-Peña crafts explicit in-your-face art pieces that integrate video, audio, spoken word and performance. Gomez-Peña ’s art work aims at creating dialogue, debate, and visibility about the issues surrounding the Mexican-American experience. His work is as beautiful as it is outraged, and in the era of fear and isolationism, he is an important voice of dissent.

Gomez Pena’s recent essay “Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference” allows for a contextualization of his performance pieces and is an important read for those new to his artwork. In his essay Gomez-Peña proves himself to be equal parts artist, activist, intellectual, and upstart. The anger is real, as is the near-genius intellectual clarity and piercing social and cultural analysis that comes through in this essay.Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference explores the notions of nativism, post 9-11 hysteria, isolationism, xenophobia, demonization, national security, and border culture through the lenses of a cross-cultural Mexican-American artist and activist. Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference makes for an excellent manifesto. It outlines, in ringing clarity, the cause and effects of our current state of affairs. National Security actually means security for White-Anglo-Saxons and insecurity for everyone else. He places the anti-immigration debate in the framework of American nativism- the American urge to cling to a white dominated society that actually never existed.

But not only is Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference a brilliant analysis of our culture, policies, and media, it is also a call to arms for all artists and thinkers. Gomez-Peña argues that it is up to artists to “question the discourse of power, and to contest the imposition of oppressive practices in the name of national governance.” Gomez-Peña writes that the “the master discourse [of today] embraces and promotes ultra-nationalism, isolationism, xenophobia, and censorship.” Gomez-Peña feels that the duty of artists “to make sure that borders and institutions remain open; and to cross those borders we are not supposed to cross. We, the artists and intellectuals—not politicians or soldiers—are the ones who must defend freedom and democracy.” His case is an ambitious and honorable one, and it is one that he has been personally pursuing for decades.Perhaps what is most brilliant about Gomes-Pena’s art work is that it holds a mirror up to American and Mexican culture and forces us to look into it. His work is firmly planted in mainstream culture, nothing is a fabrication. Rather, his pieces are exaggerations of current cultural and social trends. They are instigative and provocative because of their historical roots, their seed of truth. Gomez-Peña ’s performance pieces offer us a caricature of our own culture. They are painful to watch because we know that once the performance ends, the issues it presented to us do not.

In his satirical performance piece “El Mexterminator”, Gómez-Peña presented a “Living Diorama” where he interpreted the “Ethno-Cyborg”. He performed as a caricature of the imagined Mexican Male which has been created by the imagination of the internet users, i.e. Mexicans as machos, “Latin lovers”, bandidos, and other stereotypes. The piece, although comical, was a sharp rebuttal and criticism of the negative stereotypes that predominate mainstream media’s depiction of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

Another work of Gomez-Peña ’s, Undiscovered Amerindians, curated and performed with fellow artist Coco Fusco, also mocked the West’s colonial inclinations and its exoticism of foreign cultures. In the performance Gomez-Peña and Fusco presented themselves as two specimens representative of the Guatinaui people. They displayed themselves in a ten-by -twelve-foot cage and dressed themselves in outrageous costumes while performing equally outlandish “native” tasks. Gomez-Peña dressed in an Aztec style breastplate, complete with a leopard skin face wrestler’s mask. Fusco, in some of her performances, donned a grass skirt, leopard skin bra, baseball cap, and sneakers. She also braided her hair, a readily identifiable sign of “native authenticity.”

Gomez-Peña explains that “in this project the Coco Fusco and I did a parody of the great traveling “multicultural” exhibitions of principles of the 1900, revealing their inherent political contradictions, by means of the violent juxtaposition, although comedian, of true pre-Columbian and colonial art, with examples of tourist art and contemporary conceptual work.”Fusco explained that the performance piece was a “reverse ethnography . . . Our cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game.”The audience interaction with the piece made it a work without boundaries. The piece did not end where the cage ended, it was continued both spatially and temporally through the reactions, behaviors and attitudes of those visiting and engaging with the performance.

Astoundingly, about half of the visitors who saw the performance piece believed that what they were witnessing was “real.”What is most poignant about Gomez-Peña ’s performance pieces is “the impossibility of an appropriate reaction… there is no tenable audience position…To buy into [the performances] at face value, when one should know better, is to fail dramatically [, and] to ‘play along’ with its subversiveness and to act out the role of gullible viewer that is already scripted by the performance is to test the moral limits of theatrical representation.” Because there is no appropriate or sanctified reaction to the performances, the audience is thrust into an uncomfortable position of both observer and participant. This type of audience engagement gives Gomez-Peña ’s performance art its notorious “bite”. It is impossible to ignore, and equally impossible to accept. By framing xenophobia, exoticism and Otherness through such a confrontational and instigative medium Gomez-Peña ’s message is not only heard, it is felt and lived by his audience.

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota