In December 2004 a mix of artists, writers, and theorists assembled for a conference on “Art and Commitment” organized by the University of Minnesota.2 Here I had the opportunity to observe a new generation of college students experience a solo performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña for the first time. Given the upper-midwestern location, one would have expected the audience to be invariably white, but there were some Latinos and a mix of international students and faculty who came together for this event. There was also a new generation—advised by their parents “to catch the act, because this guy is cool”—packed into the auditorium, waiting.

Soon a handsome, middle-aged, dark, sexy man, with waist-length salt-and-pepper hair, eyeliner, and a mustache, appeared in a flouncy skirt, stockings, high heels, and over-the-top jewelry: a “heterosexual transvestite,” by his own description. His seduction of the audience was immediate. Quickly lulled into a trance of spoken-word transgressions, we, the gringos, aided by a few vocal Latinos, willingly responded to Gómez-Peña’s Spanish/Spanglish, and under his direction to “repeat with me out loud” all enthusiastically said in unison: “Mèxico es California, Nicaragua es Miami, Pakistan es Londres, Turquìa es Frankfurt, Cambodia es San Francisco, Haiti es Nueva York…” A bilingual hootenanny of unexpected juxtapositions

Carol Becker

Guillermo Gómez-Peña:Sophisticated Seduction

Source: Border Art Clásicos(1990-2005): An Anthology ofCollaborative Video Works byGuillermo Gómez-Peña, 2007

Our interdisciplinary methodologies are different from those of academic theorists. They have binoculars; we have radars.

–Guillermo Gómez-Peña1

El Naftazteca, Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Photo by Eugenio Castro, 1999

leading us through the patterns of 21st Century immigration. Gómez-Peña quickly transformed this next generation into a new gang of co-conspirators, helping him to embody his complex critique of U.S. racial politics. We are not them, he demonstrates to us. We are we. We understand them, but they don’t understand us. They are the masters. We are the slaves. The slaves always understand the masters. The masters never understand the slaves: in this resides our power. A little Hegel, a bit of Fanon, and we all become aligned with the maligned. For a collective moment, everyone appears to be on the same side, his side, where gender, cultural identity, sexual ambiguity, intellectual sophistication may or may not actually match our own. Nonetheless, for the duration of Gómez-Peña’s performance, we are happy to suspend our own points of orientation and follow him as he leads us through the serious matter of racial politics in the United States: Who has a place, who does not have a place, in the monotonic, monochromatic, monolingual cultural identity called “American”: or should we say, “Norteamericano?”

At the heart of the performative is an activation of consciousness, triggered by multicultural puns and transcultural associations. Mexican by birth, Mexican-American by choice, this linguistic trickster does not appear to be insecure about who he is, but he knows many who are trapped in stereotypes and in the dangerous dynamics of disempowerment that characterize the

lives of the underclasses in American society. For the time we spend with Gómez-Peña, we empathize with the disempowered, whose lives are dictated by the vagaries of global capitalism and the greed of those who open and close borders at will.

To further layer these dynamics of place and class and to create a faux mythological dimension for his own persona, Gómez-Peña adds the variable of time. He does not just play with what is now, he also conjures what once was. Through the imagined sounds of ancient societies—Aztec, Mayan, Olmec, Toltec—he slips in and out of history (verbal pentimento) channeling personas through bizarre fake dialects that appear to take possession of him. This collage of shifting linguistic realities is also manifested visually. Self-consciously adorned with feathers, jewels, crinolines, dime-store junk, and inoperative hand-made robotic appendages, he appears to have leapt out of a black-velvet painting of an Aztec warrior gone PoMo. But this tacky mix of present and past serves a purpose. It brings us to the future: the hybrid, cyborg “Texmex Robocop,” to use Gómez-Peña’s language, foreshadowing what is to come.

By his own admission, Gómez-Peña relies throughout on the archetype of the anti-hero.3 In his case it is embodied in the straight drag queen, the brujo/bruja alluring in his/her failure to be defined by any of the traditional categories of gender, race, language, ethnicity, geopolitics,

class, education, or temporality. The most sophisticated among us, he nonetheless presents himself as the most caricatured. A “counter-cultural avatar,” he calls himself, making self-derisive allusions to ’70s performance art about which this young audience knows only the jokes: “How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb? I don’t know, I left after three hours.”4

Gómez-Peña says that his performances are not generic, but are, rather, “linguistically site specific,” dependent on how much a given audience can understand. So the percentages of English, Spanish, Spanglish, French, or faux Foucault may vary, depending on who is present. When he performs in Latin America, the pieces may be more dependent on the visual, with the language puns secondary. Certainly then, the pop-cultural icons might be read differently; the transnational, post-Mexican Aztec-cyborg more meaningful to those directly threatened by global homogenization.

Once Gómez-Peña’s audience has successfully surrendered to these verbal and visual seductions and suspended all disbelief, he goes even further, piercing the broader political enigmas of our time. As an audience, how could we possibly align with Gómez-Peña and then still vote for George Bush? Of course, there have been those—on college campuses, in barrios, in urban communities—who have voted against what Gómez-Peña would surely see as their

02

The Great Mojado Invasion, Part 2 (The Second U.S.–Mexico War) , 2001

03

own best interests, in spite of his efforts. Consciousness is not usually transformed by one performative moment—although it can be shaken up.

“In the act of cruising a border we find temporary emancipation,” he writes. For his part, the performance appears to be about living in that ambiguous zone just long enough to feel free to say and do whatever he desires. For the audience, the pleasure is in witnessing, experiencing, and participating in cultural transgression with impunity. Can we feel the pathos of our own condition, the absurdities and contradictions of our political situations, if they are presented to us in small, unthreatening doses? Gómez-Peña navigates this terrain through the body—a personal radar that always lets him know how far he can go and how far we will go along with him. “Dreams,” he writes, “tend to be much more radical than ‘reality.’ That’s why they are much closer to art than to life.”5 Performance, one might say, is potentially even more radical than dreams, because it has consequence in the world and happens collectively, which is why we are drawn to it.

These performances are, in part, a type of activism, actualized through humor but deeply rooted in rage and the consciousness of social injustice. This core gravitas grounds the whole effort and keeps it from sliding into camp or self-indulgence. Diving into such turbulent waters demands that we blur the boundaries between self and other, here and there, and for a moment allow new organizations of thought to prevail. And it is this potential that is at the heart of Gómez-Peña’s intent.

1 “Guillermo Gómez-Peña: In Defense of Performance Art,” in Art and Performance LIVE, Adrian Heathfield, ed. (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), pp. 78-85.

2 “Art and Commitment: A Conversation Between the Arts About Their Role in Contemporary Society” was held December 2–5, 2004 in Minneapolis at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota. As participants, we were each invited to bring a person with whom we wanted to be in conversation, hence the title of the event.

3 During the conference I had a chance to speak to Guillermo about his work; these are references to that conversation.

4 This joke was told to me by performance artist Marina Abramovic.

5 “In Defense of Performance Art,” p. 79.

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