G*G*P

I had cocktails with performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena and one of my professors on Monday night. I think I can die happy now.

I've been really into GGP's work for about 10 years. He's most famous for his guerrila artwork with CoCo Fusco, a Cuban performance artist (he's from Mexico City), and even more known for their piece, "Couple in a Cage," which garnered a lot of attention during the 1992 Columbus anniversary "celebration." CoCo and GGP pretended they were from an "unknown" Amerindian tribe, replete with an elaborate cultural and religious background. It was, of course, fictional, but a bunch of dumb people thought it was real--which was the point, especially since they kept themselves in a large cage (sort of like a precursor to Borat--"ha ha! the joke is on you, dumb ass!!"). "Coulple in a Cage" is a commentary on the exoticization of people of color, a history of colonialism and imperialism, "Us/Them" rhetoric, dehumanization, a history of parading people of color as dioramas at world's fairs, etc. You know, the commodification of indigenous people at the hands of the colonizer, etc. Images from their performance come up in a lot of contemporary art surveys, and his text New World Border is used (from what I understand) pretty prevalently in Chicano Lit courses. I know it's one of my favorites!

(from "Couple in a Cage," 1992)



On Monday night, my friend and I went to see him perform for free at UCR, a new piece called "The Mexorcist." It was fantastic. He's this HUGE presence on stage--a sweeping sample of hyper-masculinine crotch-manipulation (yep) coupled with anti-capitalism, anti-establishment, anti-border politics. His show certainly lived up to the standards I'd set going into it. He came out in a black knee-length skirt with a lot of sequin detail, a "native" bone breastplate, a chicken feather headdress, a black mariachi jacket, a fingerless punk black glove on one hand and a skeleton glove on the other, pink new wave sunglasses, and drank from a flask that looked like a human heart; and proceeded to rail against the Bush administration, "terrorism," and the 700 Club. Totally poetic, totally provocative, yet without the heavy-handed mis-direction that can often accompany political art. It was rageful and hilarious, a combination that is necessary in piquing my interest.

After the show, one of my dissertation committee members (JD) came up and asked if we wanted to go have drinks with her and GGP. Um, yeah!?! We went down to the Mission Inn, where he was staying with GGPs current partner (not CoCo Fusco), and had dinner and cocktails and talked art and indigenous studies--turns out, he and I have a friend in common, a Pala performance artist named James Luna--and ghosts. It was amazing. The contrast between his on-stage persona and his actual presence is remarkable. In person, he is delicate, effusively polite, and soft. The Queerness of it was delightful and, well...kinda hot. As I talked to him, I kept thinking of his rather graveling, booming voice on stage, and realized how identity is at all times a series of performances. I've been reading The Archive and the Repertoire (a book on performance studies and the cornerstone text for the research fellowship I'm involved in in the Spring), about how performance is both epistemological and ontological: it both is a way of knowing and a way of being, respectively. When performance is doubled like this, it reminds you even more that "ontology" is a series of performances, and therefore, identity is never (nor should it be) a static thing. Furthermore, that there is no division between a "true" self and a performed self--it's all part of the same person, the same subjectivity. Anywho...

Here are some photos of GGP, one recent, one from the mid-90s.