Gómez-Peña Unplugged

Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008–2020)

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Emma Tramposch, Balitrónica Gómez, Emma Tramposch, Balitrónica Gómez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000263343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

Gómez-Peña Unplugged is an anthology of recent and rewritten classic writings from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a figure who stands alone as unique and ground-breaking in the history of performance art and as the artistic director of transdisciplinary performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

Throughout this collection, Gómez-Peña tackles literature, theory, pedagogy, activism and live art in an eclectic mix that demonstrates how the process of writing is simultaneously a performative exercise in embodied language. The writing stands as a call for action, utilizing what Gómez-Peña terms "imaginary activism" and "radical citizenship"; it invites the reader to embrace a borderless, polygendered, crossgenerational and race-literate ethos. This timely anthology comes straight from the heart of a troubled Trump-era United States and a crime cartel–ridden Mexico. Artists and writers are prompted to engage in radical performance pedagogy within the civic realm and to think of themselves as public intellectuals and "artivists" participating in the great debates of our times.

By encouraging emerging artists and writers to wildly imagine their practice beyond the normative art world and academia, this book is a fundamental read for scholars and students of performance art, political theatre, cultural studies, literature, poetry, activism and race and gender politics.

Performance Art, Live or Time-Based Art, Cultural Studies, Experimental Poetry, Multiculturalism, Social Practice, Chicano/Latino/Border Art & Literature, Relational Aesthetics, Public Art, Artivism, Activism, Psychomagic Ritual, Literary Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Ethnic & Gender Studies, Queer & Women Studies, Post-Colonial Theory, Techno-Art, Cyborgian Studies, Exoticized & Fetishized Identities, Deconstruction Stereotypes & Binaries, Anti-Essentialism, Anti-Nationalism, Radical Citizenship, Anti-Racism, Race & Gender Literacy

CHAPTER 1
Performance art vs. the “art world”

Introduction

“Not Orlan.” From the “No Portraits” series. Gómez-Peña exhausted in his California studio after a 3-day photo shoot.

Photo by Zen Cohen, 2012.

As performance artists, our relationship to the Art World in capitals has always been ambivalent & awkward from both ends; a macabre dance with lots of intermezzos and pauses. This love/hate relationship has been good for both sides: THEY can claim they are open enough to be able to contain our madness & WE can claim the romantic positionality of being necessary outsiders or partial insiders. … The Art World loves to commodify & exhibit our freedom while we desire to access their funding and infrastructure. Our desires never truly align. – From the artist’s performance diaries.

Gómez-Peña has consistently adopted a complex positionality around being a “strategic insider/outsider” in the Art World. As he explains, the idea of being a permanent insider, gives him “the creeps and bores him to death.” While many of his art projects are intended to engage in the discourse of contemporary art and the “Art World,” many other projects are created for community-specific contexts, the media, street activism and social technology.

This strategy of multi-contextuality has granted the artist certain extra freedoms and access to multiple audiences. This section includes texts that reveal this strategy and spirit and confront the inconsistencies and contradictions of the so-called “International Art World.”

An irreverent prayer/toast to cleanse this space

(Versions of this prayer have been used by Gómez-Peña to bless museums, galleries, theaters, festivals, town meetings and home parties. Dear reader, we invite you to create your own versions and see how the performance toasts can shift the content of conversations.)

Faux Indigenous chants with words intertwined in other “glossolalia” invented languages such as “Sony Sanyo Motorola” … “Google, Twitter, Instagram.” …

Oh great spirit of critical art

Cleanse the walls of this residence (or museum or …) with your ancient breath And help us create an instant cloud of tenderness & generosity That will permeate every workday, exhibition and project we undertake Starting tonight

More Indigenous chants inserted with intertwined words: “chipotle, taco, guacamole,” etc.

Oh great spirit of conceptual art

Bring us good health and funding

Bring us huge audiences and great reviews

And give us the strength to contribute

To the creation of a better city, a less racist country

and a higher public consciousness

Oh great spirit of irreverent art

Replace the silence, drama and seriousness of the art world

with good conversations, humor, sex, and music

And starting right now

may every person we know and love

enjoy their work at home and in this space …

may it give you all more life

And now … FUCK YOU señor Donaldo T.!

Let me start this fuckin performance.

OOOOOmmmmmmmmmm ……

Dwelling in unnecessary wounds

(Performance text, 2000. Rewritten in 2015.)

El Aztec Vampire, 1990. New York.

Photo: Courtesy of Pocha Nostra Archives.

Marina Abramo/bitch tells this painful joke:

–Question:

How many performance artists

Does it take to change a light bulb?

–Answer:

I have no idea. I left after 3 hours.

Performance artists are constantly asked to define what we do/why/where? Here’s another failedattempt to define performance art; this time to my own compadre James Luna (Rest in Power), while touring “Red America”

Excerpt from the video version:

Ay!, but if only I was a good actor,

the bastard son of Klaus Kinski and Sophia Loren,

or the border twin of Antonio Banderas or Danny Trejo,

none of this drama would have ever happened.

If only good performance art equaled bad acting;

misdirected acting, or vice versa

like mediocre theater directors tend to believe,

this performance, my “loca” life, would have never taken place.

Que weird thought carnal!

If only I was a furious rocker

A trendy painter

A cutting edge comedian

(pause)

Maybe? Not really …

Performance & comedy don’t mix very well.

The result is a joke that no one understands.

Pero … if only I had had the guts to join the Zapatistas for good

the guts to fight the border patrol with my bare hands,

the guts to tell my family I am truly sorry for all the pain

my sudden departure caused them 35 years ago,

when I was young & handsome

& still had no audience whatsoever.

But I was a “coward” –you told me

I ended up making a life-long performance piece

to justify my original departure, the original sin …

And labeled it “Fighting colonialism since 1492”

But if only I had never left my “homeland” in the first place,

what would have become of my life?

It would be considerably … simpler, perhaps?

I’d be less loco, perhaps

less angry, perhaps;

less … “Chicano.”

less … “Native”? Alien? Criminal? Vestida?

Awkward phrase, “insensitive,” delete!

Pero … if only I didn’t have to worry about my audience;

Entertaining YOU with queer Aztec high tech glam

and weird Spanglish jokes that “do not translate!”

(Commenting specifically on my particular costume and “war paint” make-up that night)

… Like you carnal Full Moon,

Just making art to pay my bills,

to avoid prison, deportation and mental hospitals,

to justify intellectually my “antisocial behaviour.”

… If only I didn’t have to perform to exercise/exorcise

my inner demons and freedoms –

–Excuse the cheesy rhyme –

for I could do it every day, everywhere …

(3 pages and a hundred conversations later)

… but that’s the subject matter of an essay,

not a performance.

Besides,

you did not come “here,”

to this fucked up planet,

to witness

my political mind at work …

Or did you?

–Your Mexican bitch, GP

In defense of performance

(Hybrid text: Essay/Chronicle, 2003. Rewritten 2018.)

“Postcolonial Re-enactment.” From the photo-performance portfolio “Mexico en X-paña” by Gómez-Peña, Javier Caballero and Orlando Britto-Jinorio, 2005 (the performance artists chose to remain anonymous).

(Attempting to map out the fluctuating territories of live art, this text might be one of Gómez-Peña’s most influential classic essays. It has been published in several languages, blogs, magazines and books in different versions. This particular version has been rewritten and expanded for a new generation of readers and young artists interested in body-based art practice.)

Question: “Excuse me, can you define performance art?”

Answers:

• –“A bunch of weirdos who love to get naked and scream about leftist politics.”
• (Yuppie in a bar)
• –“Performance artists are … bad actors.” (A “good” actor)
• –“You mean, those decadent and elitist liberals who hide behind the art thing to beg for government money?” (Conservative politician)
• –“It’s … just … very, very cool stuff. Makes you … think and shit.” (My slacker nephew)
• –“Performance is both the antithesis of and the antidote to high culture.” (Performance Artist)
• –“I’ll answer you with a joke: What do you get when you mix a comedian with a performance artist? … A joke that no one understands.”
• (My godfather Rene)

My reasons behind the writing of this text

For twenty years, journalists, audience members and relatives have asked me the same two questions in different ways: What “exactly” is performance art? And, what makes a performance artist be, think and act like one? In this text, I will attempt to elliptically answer these questions by drawing a poetical portrait of the performance artist standing on a map of the performance art field.

I will try to write with as much passion, valor and clarity as I can, but take heed: the slippery and ever-changing nature of the field makes it extremely hard to define in simplistic terms. As my conceptual godfather Richard Schechner told me after he read an early version of this text, “The ‘problem,’ if there is a problem, is that the field ‘in general’ is too big and encompassing. It can be, and is, whatever those who are doing it say it is. At the same time, and for the same reason, the field ‘in specific’ is too small, too quirky, too much the thing of this or that individual (artist, scholar) who is doing the doing.” With this in mind, I will, in this text, attempt to articulate “my thing” –to map my own performance field, so to speak. In doing so, I will try to join my many colleagues, the rest of the citizens of my performance map, in the common goal of critiquing “high art,” consumer culture and global politics, as well as narrow-minded notions of identity, community and art making.

To be congruent with my performance praxis, I will constantly cross the borders between theory and chronicle, between personal and social realms, in hopes of coming across some interesting intersections and bridges.

I am fully aware that my voice within this text is but one in a crowd of subjectivities. By no means am I attempting to speak for others, establish boundaries and checkpoints in the performance field, or outlaw any art practice that is not captured by my camera. If the reader detects some conceptual contradictions in my writing–especially in my strategic use of the dangerous pronoun “we” or in my capricious placement of a border–I beg you to cut me some extra slack: I am a contradictory Vato, and so are most performance artists I know.

The cartography of performance

I. The map

First, let’s draw the map.

I see myself as an experimental cartographer. In this sense I can approach a definition of performance art by mapping out the “negative” space (as in photography, not ethics) of its conceptual territory. Though our work sometimes overlaps with experimental theater, and many of us utilize spoken word, stricto sensu, we are neither actors nor spoken-word poets. (We may be temporary actors and poets, but we abide by other rules and stand on a different history.) *1. Most performance artists are also writers, but only a handful of us write for publication. We theorize about art, politics and culture, but our interdisciplinary methodologies are different from those of academic theorists. They have binoculars; we have radars. Performance artists spend the bulk of our time “scanning” rather than “focusing,” as theorists do, settling on one spot and then pulling out the binoculars. When performance studies scholars refer to “the performance field,” they often mean something different than what performance artists mean: a much broader field that encompasses all things performative, including anthropology, religious practice, pop culture, sports and civic events. While we chronicle our times, unlike journalists or social commentators, our chronicles tend to be non-narrative, symbolic and polyvocal. It’s a different way of chronicling. If we utilize humor, we are not seeking laughter like our comedian cousins. We are more interested in provoking the ambivalence of melancholic giggling or painful smiles, though an occasional outburst of laughter is always welcome.

Many of us are exiles from the visual arts, but we rarely make objects for display in museums and galleries. In fact, our main artwork is our own body, ridden with semiotic, political, ethnographic, cartographic and mythical implications. Unlike visual artists and sculptors, when we create objects, they are meant to be handled and utilized without remorse during the performance. We actually don’t mind if these objects get worn out or destroyed. In fact, the more we use our performance “artifacts,” the more “charged” and powerful they become. Recycling is our main modus operandi. This dramatically separates us from most costume, prop and set designers, who rarely recycle their creations.

At times we operate in the civic realm and test our new personas and actions in the streets, but we are not “public artists” per se. The streets are mere extensions of our performance laboratory–galleries without walls. Many of us think of ourselves as activists, but our communication strategies and experimental languages are considerably different from those utilized by political radicals and anti-globalization activists.

We are what others aren’t, we say what others don’t, and we occupy cultural spaces that are often overlooked or dismissed. Because of this, our multiple communities are composed of aesthetic, political, ethnic and gender rejects.

• *1. The history of performance art has been largely written from the ethnocentric perspective of the European and “American” (as in US) avant-garde and does not acknowledge other histories of indigenous and ritual performance. In the Americas, pre-Columbian performance practices may have more to do with the history of performance art than with theater, but this is a territory I am not trained to defend.

II. The sanctuary

For me, performance art is a conceptual “territory” with fluctuating weather and borders; a place where contradiction, ambiguity and paradox are not only tolerated but encouraged. Every territory a performance artist stakes (including this text) is slightly different from that of his/her neighbor. We converge in this overlapping terrain precisely because it grants us special freedoms often denied to us in other mono-cultural and unidisciplinary realms. In a sense, we are hardcore dropouts from our original metiers and communities embarking on a permanent quest to develop a more inclusive system of political thought and aesthetic praxis. It’s a lonely and largely misunderstood journey, but most performance artists I know, including myself, love it.

“Here” tradition weighs less, rules can be bent, laws and structures are constantly changing, and no one pays much attention to hierarchies and institutional power. “Here,” there is no government or visible authority. “Here,” the only existing social contract is our willingness to defy authoritarian models and dogmas and to keep pushing the outer limits of culture and identity. ...