The Question of Globalization, Power and Representation Essay

Introduction

Globalization has proven many advantages and disadvantages to various countries, nations and ethnicities. However, as everybody else feel the impact of Chinese products penetrating even the poorest and most remote areas of third world countries and English become the language that must, power and representation seem to still be concentrated to certain nationalities and countries.

This paper through the works of Guillermo Gomez-Pena will try to provide close critical analysis with reference to questions of globalization, power and representation. Gomez-Pena was born in Mexico City. He is considered an interdisciplinary artist/writer who came to the US in 1978. He has been exploring cross-cultural issues with the use of performance, multilingual poetry, journalism, video, radio, and installation art. He has created lots of stir and his performance work and critical writings helped develop debates on cultural diversity, identity, and US-Mexico relations.

Gomez-Peña’s works shall be discussed in this essay in a detailed close critical analysis with reference to questions of globalization, power and representation.

Discussion

“Sons of Border Crisis”, Performance art, 1990 video short

In short video performances directed by Isaac Artenstein, Guillermo Gómez-Peña confronts Mexican-American culture clashes, stereotypes, and the Fourth World or immigrants bringing out what researchers and educators publish in a language that could easily be understood by the masses, and popular culture. Gomez-Peña speaks through a bullhorn or on the airwaves of mock-station Radio Latino FM and broadcasts parodied messages that will not be silenced. His comic delivery of comparisons such as “tacos without salsa” and “art without ideas” is tart and sharp with just the perfect irreverence for everyone. Pointed statements such as “thanks to marketing and not to civil rights, we are the new generation,” typify his sarcasm and wit that is genuinely Gomez-Pena. The taped seven series monologues include Son of Border Crisis, El Post-Mojado, The Mexican Fly, Dear Californian, Employer Sanctions, The Year of the Yellow Spider, and The Year of the Hispanic, all of which speak volumes about the plight of Mexican immigrants.

In most instances, Gomez-Pena the Mexican-American is clad in his identity-garb of an American-Indian red feather headdress with long hair and exaggerated made-up face complete with tattoos. This costume ascertains the original owners of the land that is contention: the New World, the Americas now the world power but technically controlled by descendants of white European colonizers or invaders. As Schechner (2005) wrote, “The ultimate migration has been from the nation to the identity group. Here Gomez-Peña’s work is still very far ahead of its time. He rejects nationalism of course. But he also subverts identityism in favor of hybridity. GGP is not this or that. He is this and that and that and that.”

“Border Brujo”, Performance art; 1990

Border Brujo directed by Isaac Artenstein is one of the tirades of Gomez-Pena on occupation or colonization as well as the clashes between the occupier and legal occupant, or whichever has the real right. He is depicted sitting at an altar decorated with a collection of cultural items such as the signature feather headdress while wearing a border patrolman’s jacket with an M-16 at hand decorated with buttons, bananas, beads, and shells. Here, Gómez-Peña delivers a sly and bitter indictment of U.S. colonial attitudes toward Mexican culture as well as history that somehow twists what must have been US leaders and their lawmakers would want the world to believe. He whirls through various Mexican American stereotypes, and pulled on costumes as easily as accents, emphasizing the collision of Mexican and American cultures, their mixture and misunderstanding of each other, of which each appear as a dream, or a nightmare reflection of the “Other.” The turns are both powerful and playful, leaving the audience of Border Brujo enmeshed in a dizzying mix of poignant show of the double edge of forced cultural occupation.

This and other performances have earned him the comment of Horn (undated), “Gómez-Peña uses theatrics to erase borders. His inventive efforts to create a hybrid culture have won him international acclaim,” at the US News and World Report.

Bringing out in a comic yet brutalized if not exact replica of acts and images of the live dioramas between ethnicities, cultures and racism is catharsic in this way, as well as educational and eye-opening. While the US is known to be the progenitors and protectors of freedom, outside the dominant race, other ethnicities who legally, but most especially, illegally enter the territory are accorded the coldness, distant, if not totally freezing welcome equivalent for a hardened criminals.

El Naftazteca: Cyber Aztec TV for 2000 AD (Performance art; 1994)

High seriousness meets deep playfulness in this nightly news in an act of guerrilla television. Gómez-Peña personifies a Chicano-Aztec veejay—“The Mexican who talks back, the illegal Mexican performance artist with state of the art technology” with his favorite theme elaborating the complications of American identity. From his underground “Vato bunker”, where virtual reality meets Aztec ritual, Gomez-Pena is a post-NAFTA Cyber Aztec pirate that commandeers the television signal. Here, he embodies the doubly radical Chicano performance artist, delivering radical ideas through a radical form of entertainment with guest performances by Roberto Sifuentes and Ruben Martinez.

This project is the initial portion with progression in live dioramas conducted in various areas as supported in the internet allowing anonymous sharing and open communication for all those who experience what Gomez-Pena calls anthropological issues (Fundacion Telefonica, 2007).

A Declaration of Poetic Disobedience; Performance art, 2005

Here, Gomez-Pena acknowledges himself as a “Post-Mexican” performance artist operating out of the US for over 20 years. Obsessed to constantly repositioning himself within the hegemonic maps in the Americas, the larger cartography of art, or his personal biography, he has taken it that one of his jobs was to move around. He had to cross dangerous borders, disappear and reappear somewhere else, and in the process create “imaginary cartographies” capable of containing the complexities of his multiple and ever-changing identities, voices, communities as well as performing bodies.

Gomez-Pena adds that the “cartographic project” came to an impasse on 9/11, when all geo-political-cultural certainties suddenly went berserk. In a short moment, Gomaex-Pena observes that “theological cowboy emperor Jorge W. Bush imposed a new simplistic and binary map dividing the world into “us” and “them”: “us” meaning strictly those who agreed unconditionally with his imperial policies, and “them,” meaning all savages determined to destroy “democracy” and “western civilization.” Bush’s “America” became a euphemism for a place inhabited by warmongers and savage capitalists disguised as freedom-loving patriots and innocent victims of evil. And those invested in destroying Bush’s “America” were not only all terrorist sympathizers–even indirect sponsors–but eventually everyone who criticized his fascist policies, including “us,” the critical intellectuals and artists from throughout the world. “We” no longer had a place in Bush’s cartography. “We” were not to question his worldview,” (Gomez-Pena quoted from Video Data Bank, 2007).

This performance aimed to be a symbolic connection between Gomez-Pena’s psyche, body, language, dreams and aspirations, and those of his contemporaries with a new map expanding to include migrants, bohemians, activists and critical intellectuals from the US and other countries. It was an exercise in radical imagination that could only become a temporary reality in performance mode. It is in part chant poetry and part political exorcism, described as both performance and performative literature meant to be “declared publicly and ritually: to be activated and performed within a civic dimension,” (Gomez-Pena quoted from Video Data Bank, 2007).

“Borderstasis” (performance art; 1998)

This performance was considered as a strange, lyrical video diary which is a millennial reflection on the impossibility to “reveal” one’s self in times such now. It is about the intricate connections between work and everyday life, language, identity, love, nostalgia and activism amidst the California apocalypse. Borderstatis explores on the boundaries of public and private, mythical and real, as they exist in the life of a “migrant performance artist” living in a fully globalized world through a series of poetic tableaux vivants, performance actions and found footage. This has been commissioned by German TV ARTE and directed and written by performance artist Guillermo Gómez Peña as edited by Lisa Diener, with sound design by Rona Michele (Video Data Bank, 2007).

As Cummings (undated) observed, ““This peripatetic “post-Mexican romantic” travels around the U.S. and the world practicing a performance art and preaching an intercultural gospel that brings the American melting pot to a boil,” in the American theater Magazine.

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

The Great Mojado Invasion (The Second US – Mexico War), combine Chicano wit and political vision to create an ironic, post-millennial and postmodern look at the future of U.S./Mexican relations. Here, it was said that the artist and director generate a complex commentary on history, society, pop culture, politics of language and the repercussions of ethnic dominance. Gomez_Pena is compared to a ghost from the future that narrates the “mock-umentary,” showing a queue of mojados (“wetbacks”) who re-conquer lost Mexican territory to establish the new “U.S. of Aztlan.” This pseudo-documentary presents a rather real but supposed-to-be fiction account of the history of the current state of affairs of the Americas, from pre-Columbian times to the immediate future.

The video begins at the inception of a second U.S./Mexico war but, contrary to history, Mexico is victorious. The nation-state has collapsed and the ex-U.S. of A. has been fragmented into micro-republics loosely controlled by a multi-racial junta and governed by a Chicano prime minister appointed as El Gran Vato. “Spanglish” became the official language, while people treat the monolingual viewer as a “nomadic minority.”

Anglo militias desperately try to recapture the “Old Order” while the “New Aztlan Regime” satirically depicts Anglos with the same stereotypes now utilized against Latinos: dumb, lazy, violent, drug-taking lunatics who are demonized alien invaders from outer space.

This multifaceted reflection shifts between fiction and the realities exposing the depth of internalized and totally twisted racism in the US of which Gómez-Peña and Vasquez attack hard reality with large doses of irony, black humor, and potent truth.

“EL MEXTERMINATOR I” (ethno-cyborgs & artificial savages), a performance/installation project by Guillermo Gomez-Peña & Roberto Sifuentes

This project incorporated situ digital technologies to the original diorama work of the collaborators. A web page was also designed to enhance the interactivity of the performance with the original plan: For five days, Roberto Sifuentes, James Luna, and Gomez-Pena, “live and perform inside a gallery space surrounded by taxidermied animals and ‘hybrid artifacts’ from our ‘dying Western civilization,” (Gomez-Pena quoted from Fundacion Telefonica, 2007). The performance/installation emulated a futuristic “trading post & curio shop” informed in part by the imagination of both gallery visitors and Internet users.

The project premiered at Diverse Works in Houston, Texas, with the technology provided by Rice University. In front of the visitors, James and Gomez-Pena transformed into different performance personae such as the Shame-man, the Postmodern Zorro, El Aztec High-Tech, El Cultural Transvestite, El Natural Born Asesino, among others, while Roberto captured the details of the transformations on a video camera, then transmitted them onto the Internet. Roberto was CyberVato, a “robo-gang member” consumed by both fake and real techno-gadgetry. Using state-of-the-art technology in situ, he also transmitted daily messages to the Worldwide Web. The technology allowed a connection of the live performance to various satellite sites throughout the country via video teleconferencing allowing visitors of the website to “send in images, sounds, and texts about how (they felt) Mexicans, Chicanos and Native Americans should look, behave, and perform in the ’90’s. Their responses were shown on gallery monitors manipulated by techno-disc-jockey CyberVato, and contributed to the ever-changing personae created by James and I,” Gomez-Pena narrated (Fundacion Telefonica, 2007).

The performance artists embodied the information, re-interpret it, and stylize it the way their audience and sharers felt. The “ethnocyborgs” and “artificial savages” were re-created then incarnate profound fears and desires of contemporary Americans regarding the Latino “other”, immigrants and people of color. This aimed to mirror reality as well as the virtual visitors in order for them to see the “reflections of their own psychological and cultural monsters,” (Gomez-Pena quoted from Fundacion Telefonica, 2007).

Thetechno-diorama performances involve some physical interactivity with the audience where visitors to the galley space are encouraged “to interact with the live specimens” in by feeding, touching, engage in a conversation, hold the props “at their own risk”, as well as point weapon replica at the artists in order “to experience the feeling of shooting at a live Mexican,”. The visitors are also invited to “alter our identity” by changing the make-up and costumes, and even “replace us for a short period of time”, (Gomez-Pena quoted from Fundacion Telefonica, 2007). In addition to what already is a very sponstaneous interactivity, Gomez-Pena added that, “Whenever we can, we try to set up a bar inside the space to “carnivalize” the experience even more. When this happens, the behavior of the audience changes dramatically as they become less inhibited through the ingestion of tropical cocktails.”

Conclusion

Guillermo Gomez-Pena uses graphical, comic, vivid, strong and very potent combination of acting, vocalization, costume and imagery, as well as tart yet hilarious language to come up with these performances of truth disguised in visual tactics and hilarity.

These tackled cosmopolitanism in the global sense from the “outcast”, the deprived, the marginalized, immigrant by colonizers that dominate marketing and hype.

While these dominant race consider itself as straight and the “legal” occupant of a certain territory, as well as the global territory per se, it has forgotten history altogether: that the Anglo-American was an immigrant to the once “new world” where original inhabitants own. It has forgotten how each and every race today save the so-called American Indians, are all immigrants and that it was simply tragic how today the US leaders consider themselves as “guardians” of a land who did not originally belong to them and look down upon “second class” citizens.

Gomez-Pena has captured a medium of expression that hopefully for many citizens of the world, could become popular, if not acceptable seminally, through word of mouth or independent sharing, with or without the hype of the investors or inventors of hype.

He speaks volumes of what every global citizen should be saying. It is a total knock-out punch for the confused race who only has its arms in order to terrify and dictate a world which it does not really own.

What Gomez-Pena tries to do is bring out the experiences, reality and monstrosity in each of every ethnicity through his art, both the installation as well as the performances to inform and educate as well as remove the animosity. In this world of globalization, it has become imperative to educate the stronger and dominant ignorant to the truth that it is not easy for every human to be marginalized.

References

1. Fundacion Telefonica (2007). “Guillermo Gomez-Pena”.
2. Pocha Nostra (2007) “Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra.” Web.
3. Schechner, Richard (2005). “Intercultural Warrior.” GGP.
4. Video Data Bank (2007). “Guillermo Gomez-Pena”.
5. UbuWeb: Film & Video -Web.
6. Eduardo Kac – Web.
7. Franko B – Web.
8. Theatre notes – Web.
9. Banksy: Manifesto – Web.
10. Internet Archive – Web.
11. Australians All – Web.
12. The Presence Project – Web.
13. Theatre du Soleil – Web.
14. Societas Raffaello Sanzio – Web.
15. Ngapartji – Web.
16. Critical Art Ensemble – Web.
17. Forced Entertainment – Web.

Also consider visiting (virtually):

• The Tate Modern
• The Guggenheim at Bilbao (to see the building by Frank Gehry if nothing else)
• MOMA
• PICA (you can literally go there)
• Library resources
• Electronic Course Materials and Reserve – Web.
• Past exam papers – Web.

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Weekly Readings

WEEK 1

Winterson, J. ‘The Semiotics of Sex.’ Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. London, Jonathan Cape (1995): 103-118

WEEK 2

Carlson, M. Performance A critical Introduction. London, Routledge (2004): 110-134

Schechner, R. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London, Routledge (2002): 22-44.

WEEK 3

Grehan, H. ‘Negotiating Discovery in The Geography of Haunted Places. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (1999): 109-121

Goodall, J. ‘Objects of Curiosity and Subjects of Discovery: Humans on Show.’ Australasian Drama Studies 34 (1999):123-140.

Wilson, J. ‘The Geography of Haunted Places’ Performing The Unnameable. Richard Allen and Karen Pearlman (eds.) Sydney, Currency Press (1999).

WEEK 4

Schaffer, K. ‘Staging Seduction: The Sydney Front and the postmodern geopolitics of theatre’s bodies and spaces.’ BodyShows: Australian Viewings of Live Performance. Peta Tait (ed.). Amsterdam, Rodopi (2000): 80-92.

The Sydney Front, First and Last Warning. Performing The Unnameable. Richard Allen and Karen Pearlman (eds.) Sydney, Currency Press (1999).

WEEK 5

Causey, M. ‘Stealing from God: The Crisis of Creation in Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Genesi and Eduardo Kac’s Genesis.’ Theatre Research International (2001): 199-208.

Marshall, J. ‘The Castellucci Interview: The Angel of Art is Lucifer.’

Artaud, A. ‘The Spurt of Blood.’ Antonin Artaud volume 1 Collected Works. John Calder, London (1968):62-65.

WEEK 6

Geczy A. and Genocchio, B. ‘Introduction What is Installation?’ What is Installation? An Anthology of writings on Australian Installation Art. Sydney: Power Publications (2001) 1-8.

Archer, M. ‘Towards Installation’. Installation Art. N. Oxley, and M. Petry. London: Thames Hudson (1996).

WEEK 7

Phelan, P. ‘The ontology of performance: Representation without Reproduction.’ Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge (1993): 146-66

Dubin, S. ‘The Body as Spectacle.’ Arresting Images Impolitic Art and Uncivil Action. London: Routledge (1992): 125-158.

Kauffman, L. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley, U of California P (1998): 20-49.

WEEK 8

Perth International Arts Festival, Three Tales: Program Notes. (2002).

Korot, B. and Reich S., Three Tales – script extract (2002).

WEEK 9

Pavis, P. (ed). ‘Introduction: Towards a theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?’ The Intercultural Performance Reader. London, Routledge (1996): 1-21.

Grehan, H. Questioning the relationship between consumption and exchange: TheatreWorks’ Flying Circus Project, 2000. (to be handed out).

WEEK 10

Michael Balfour and Jeff Stewart in Performance Paradigm ‘The End of Ethics.’ Web.

WEEK 11

Gomez-Pena, G. ‘Letters from the Road: A selection of performance chronicles.’ TDR 46.2 (2002): 97-109.

Gomez-Pena, G. ‘Introduction’ Dangerous Border Crossers. London: Routledge (2000):2-17.