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Reviews
Performance as Reverse Anthropology
An evening with artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 21 March 2003
reviewed by Maria Clara Bernal
The Color of Theatre: Race, Culture and Contemporary Performance
Edited by Roberta Uno with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns
Published by Continuum, London and New York. 2002.
reviewed by Isobel Whitelegg
XXV São Paulo Bienal
Iconografias Metropolitanas
Parque do Ibirapuera, 23 March - 2 June 2002
reviewed by Isobel Whitelegg
Performance as Reverse Anthropology
An evening with artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 21 March 2003
On 21st March this year Guillermo Gómez-Peña walked into the stage of the BP Lecture Theatre at the British Museum wearing a cowboy's hat, a vest made of bones and a zarape wrapped around his waist to give a talk on Performance as Reverse Anthropology.
Presenting himself as the eclectic combination of a series of stereotypes was the appropriate introduction to the talk he was about to give on one of his ongoing projects. Since he co-founded the Border Arts Workshop Gómez-Peña has become one of the most important artists and theoreticians working on the subject of cultural contact. His constant questioning on why and how the United States has oppressed and finished cultures to then romanticise them led him to the practice of a reversed anthropoology.
For several months Guillermo Gómez-Peña with a group of artists had been developing The Temple of Confessions a performance-installation presented in different places of the United States where they dressed as 'saints' -a mixture of religious icons and artificial savages- and displayed themselves in glass boxes. The point of this exercise was to invited the visitors to "confess their intercultural sins", i.e. to confess the fantasies they had regarding 'Latinos'. "The project functioned simultaneously as an elaborate set design for a theatre of myths and 'cultural pathologies', and as a melancholic ceremonial space for people to reflect on their own racist attitudes towards other cultures."[1] Soon after the project acquired life of its own; Gómez-Peña not only gathered the "confessions" but also, studied and recreated the stereotypical images of the 'Latino' contained in the "confessions" in his "dioramas", the outcome were mythological beings that represented contemporary concerns as the artists puts it: "the temple of confessions was more about American's cultural projections and its inability to deal with cultural otherness than about the Latino 'other'."[2]
The talk had been announced with a poster with the slogan "The British Museum, illuminating world cultures", the talk without a doubt "illuminated a culture" but not in the way the British Museum has done during its history - most of the pieces that the institution holds are in one way or the other the souvenirs of a long history of imperial domination. The talk of Gómez-Peña was also related to imperialism but as its title suggest in a reverse way. With this project he and his colleagues proposed to "research the American mind regarding Mexicans and Latinos" Thus this time the subject of collecting and study was not the "cultural other" it was the Empire. MCB
[1] Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Dangerous Border Crossers: the artist talks back, London, New York: Routledge 2000, p.39
[2] ibid.
The Color of Theatre: Race, Culture and Contemporary Performance
Edited by Roberta Uno with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns
Published by Continuum, London and New York. 2002.
Aiming to present a ‘first voice’ or primary perspective on race and performance emanating from artistic practice rather than critical theory, the Color of Theatre is structured around four performance texts, each presented as a literary point of reference to four recent works performed at the New WORLD Theatre. The NWT grew out of a student-organised project at the University of Massachusetts, founded in 1979 by Roberta Uno, now the theatre’s artistic director and professor of Theatre at the University. It was then dedicated to the work of artists of colour, at the time a marginal six percent of the student body, under-represented, if at all, in campus life or in the curriculum. By structuring itself around the performance pieces (including Quinceañera written by Alberto Antonio Araiza and Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, and BORDERscape 2000 by Guillermo Goméz-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes) with the addition of interviews with those involved in other theatres (including La FOMMA – Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya - and Spiderwoman Theatre), and a group of essays that are the work of writers and performers with intimate experience of various forms of live arts, this publication hopes to find a discursive position that is always connected to the experiences, both day to day and performed on stage, of those implicated by the idea of there being such as thing as culturally-specific theatre (for example native American, Asian American or Latino) or a strand in theatre or performance that is specifically about cross-cultural contact.
With Goméz-Peña recently making his presence felt in London’s Tate Modern and at the British Museum (see above), this publication serves to give some idea of the type of environment within which his practice was formed, indicating something of the experiential roots of the quasi-futuristic and highly theatrical activism represented by his work. The politics that is at the heart of the works addressed here is of the inherent and personal type, as that implicit by virtue of the fact that this is the work of artists who can be deemed marginal by virtue of ethnicity and/or sexuality. Although this might suggest that the political is an inescapable ghetto within which the artists involved must reside, the idea that the mainstream does not have to be viewed an insurmountable obstacle but can be broken down and entered into is also constructively mooted (and arguably Goméz-Peña’s recent presence in the UK is evidence of this). As Velina Hasu Houston states in her essay ‘Notes from a Cosmopolite ‘I am local to another nation as well: the nation, if you will, of theatre art; which is actually more like a universe.’ Certainly the artists included are allowed to be for- against- or undecided regarding whether or not the term culturally specific (or specifically about cultures and cultural contact), fits with their work. To quote Hasu Houston again, ‘When I cannot be pigeonholed, theatres stop trying to categorise me and move on to what is important – the work, which is why we got together in the first place’. For me this view strikes most of a chord, what matters of course is the work. The fact that this book does allow unadulterated access to the documentation of performed works - and more than one perspective on where to place them - makes it a publication valuable and accessible to all those interested in looking, whichever angle they choose to do so from. IW
XXV São Paulo Bienal
Iconografias Metropolitanas
Parque do Ibirapuera, 23 March - 2 June 2002
Introducing his concept of Metropolitan Iconographies the chief curator of the XXV Sao Paulo Biennale, Alfons Hug, questioned the ability of art production to keep up with the speed, scale and complexity of urban life; would art be tamed by the city, he asked, rather than setting the pace?
The pace for this Bienal was set by the crowds attending its opening night. It was clear that what was at stake for the work on show was not to keep up with this pace, but to be able to bring this crowd to a standstill. The most successful works were thus those capable of creating a pause, framing that which is taken for granted in the life of the city.
A video installation created by three members of the Latvian Co-op F5 (Famous Five) does just this, examining one of the side-effects of the metropolis: light pollution. Seated in front of a large screen, the visitor is confronted by a series of faces, which are gradually flooded by light from a source directed squarely into the eyes. Irises expand into alarming blackness, and retract to the point of disappearence, a temporary blindness that is in turn imposed upon the viewer, when at intervals two burning beams of light inturrupt the projection. Meanwhile, on a small screen set into the left hand wall, a tram is travelling further and further out of the metropolis, its destination the uncertain point at which the artificial light of the city diminishes, and the night sky is visible. Accompanying sound, the rythmic movement of the tram and the sound of sattelites communicating from deep space, holds the two visual elements of this installation together in a mesmeric environment.
This Bienal is dominated by photography. The result of this is that works must be truly exceptional to stand out; those that do take an expansive approach to the technical and formal possibilties of the medium. Micheal Wesely, one of the artists selected to represent Berlin's contemporary art production, uses a home-made camera with an exposure time of two years, to record the construction of the city's Potsdamer Platz. Chien Chi-Chong, representing Taiwan, examines a subject matter that is interesting in itself, the private religious institution Lung Fa Tang, which uses no medication in the treatment of its mentally impaired patients, instead employing chains for therapeutic purposes, chaining a more lucid patient together with one who is deemed unsound. What is arresting in these works, displayed cyclically, is the creation of an formal vocabulary, the subjects photographed pair by pair from the same head-on vantage point producing a work that successfully surpasses the documentary genre.
São Paulo is a city all too often perceived from the outside as a destination for global commerce, or an airport set conveniently en route to its prettier neighbour Rio. It is a city to which little time is devoted, but its scale and complexity demands time to appreciate. This Bienal, deliberately inclusive, with a theme that is delibarately expansive and does not make itself entirely coherent, has generated a situation that, intentionally or not, is similar.
The success of the show depends not on whether or not the works are keeping up with the pace of urban life, but on whether they can renew the viewers capacity for patience, wheher thay can provoke an situaton that allows the viewer to become observant. To those living and working in São Paulo the city is somewhere entirely different to its position within global economy of art or commerce. An event running concurrently wth the Bienal may have helped international visitors to approximate this perspective. Arte Cidade, a site specific project now in its fourth year, takes place at various locations in São Paulo's Zona Oeste, an old industrial district established largely by the city's first Italian immigrants. Several generations of Brazilian artists took part this year, including José Resende, Waltercio Caldas, Carmela Gross and Marco Gianotti, with international contributions by Vito Acconci and Rem Koolhaas.IW
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