In defense of performance

Guillermo Gómez Peña

Flight map

• Background– Lo chicano– Wanderings of a post-mexican

• Overview and key points

• Criticism: questions & things to think of

• Provocation: GGP & E. Trías meet on the limes

Background: lo chicano

• México-U.S.A border phenomenon• ‘politicized mexican-americans’• Chicano movement

– Socialist & nationalist ideology (Aztlán, Mex-US war 1836, 1847-148)

• Treaty of Gudalupe Hidalgo; Plan Espiritual de Aztlán; Plan de Santa Barbara; I am Joaquín

– 1960’s civil rights struggle• Reyes López Tijerina; Luis Valdez

Performing lo chicano

• an identity predicated on the dynamic interaction between nationalist withdrawal and cultural hybridization– "performances of lo chicano enact a dialectic

between accessibility (openness to the dominant culture) and inaccessibility (the assertion of difference), in which accessibility is shown to be necessary, but inaccessibility is finally insisted upon.” -Daniel Belgrad, ‘Performing lo chicano’

Background: wanderings of a post-mexican

• México City (1950?-): neither hippie nor punk

• BA latinamerican literature (UNAM, 1974)– O. Paz & Revolutionary Nationalism: mestizo

• MA Post-studio Arts (CalArts, 1978-1982)

• La Pocha Nostra (1993- )

GGP is…

• Practitioner:– performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism,

photography, cultural theory and radical pedagogy, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the body, 'extreme culture' and new technologies

• Theorist:– Reverse Anthropology: assume a fictional center, push the

dominant culture to the margins, and treat it as exotic and unfamiliar

…and a post-mexican

• Post-Mexican– “Ya estamos en una condición postmexicana en el sentido que ese

México bronco, tradicional, revolucionario y nacionalista está muy debilitado, está retrocediendo". R.Bartra

• Postnationalism– “launch a kind of political identity centered on values of

democracy and fundamental human rights.” J.Habermas

• Not a mexican, not a chicano– “I realize that the space between my remote Mexican past and my

Chicano future, is immense and my identity can zig-zag across it freely.” G. Gómez Peña

Overview

• Chronicle-essay. – Attempt to convey embodied experience

• Three parts– Cartography: What’s the field like?– Introspection: How’s it to be in the field?– Sense of direction: relation to the world?

Thesis

• “Performance is a way of being in the space in front of or around an audience; a heightened gaze, a unique sense of purpose in handling thee objects, commitments, and words, and at the same time, it is an ‘ontological’ attitude towards the whole universe.”

Key Ideas

• The central place of the body – embodied knowledge

• Bordering as strategy– risk and multiple identities

• Rules of the game– Inclusion & justice: opening spaces,

irritating questions

Critical Questions

1. What is the difference between reusing and recycling?

2. What is a border? Who draws the line?3. Is it possible to open up an 'empty space' or 'de-

militarized zone'? (Foucault)4. What is the step between issuing 'irritating questions'

and developing witnesses (Etchels)? Is the psychic sedimentation enough?

5. Do performance artists dismantle or legitimize authority by antagonizing it?

More C.Q.

6. How can we talk about the underdog without fixing them in a representation or trying to speak for them?

7. What is the limit? What would be a desirable ethics to deal with risk?

8. How is the 'embodied theory' 'embroided with language-based knowledge' (Taylor)?

9. How can we characterize that 'space between acting and being oneself?

10. Is not there a risk of the seemingly 'anti-burgeois' performance-art of becoming utterly burgeois?

Things to think about…

• Is there such a thing as a natural body?

• What is tradition? Is it homogeneous?

• Who is 'I'? Where do we find it?

• What could one say of the relationship between 'fictional' and real centers?

Provocation: GGP & E. Trías meet on the limes

• Limes: limit & territory (roman empire)• Limítrofe: the one that is fed by the fruits of

the limes• Ethical stance: in-between ethos

– "That is why man can be considered an inhabitant of the border, not belonging here or there, neither animal nor god, but bordering or with the quality of a centaur. (...) Thus, the limit, found between the nature and the world, constitutes our own condition. A condition always referring to a middle term between two undetermined ends." R.D.U.

Interested?

http://onthelimes.blogspot.com