ABSTRACT

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a Mexican performance artist living in the United States, explores transculturation at the junctures of opposing societies, cultures and languages. His work hybridizes multiple media combining printed text, video, plastic arts and theater. His performance art blends dramatic techniques from popular theater, “happenings” and political “art actions.” He co-founded a performance troup called Poyesis Genética in 1981, which, after several incarnations, became the Taller de Arte Fronterizo/Border Arts Workshop in 1985. These groups staged collaborative, interdisciplinary performance interventions on the U.S.-Mexico border. In 1986 Gómez-Peña began co-editing and publishing a bilingual and binational magazine, The Broken Line/La Línea Quebrada with the express purpose of highlighting issues on the border.1 Additionally, he has collaborated on large-scale installations, photomontages and radio programs.2 Although Gómez-Peña’s performances have been mentioned by various critics in essays on postmodernism (Homi Bhabha, Nestor García Canclini, Jean Franco, Celeste Olalquiaga, Juan Flores), his work remains largely unanalyzed. Recently at a literature conference I spoke with a scholar who warned me that Gómez-Peña’s work would resist rigorous analysis. “How can you possibly analyze him without falling victim to his satire?” he asked. It is true that Gómez-Peña’s work imposes a series of logistical complications. His politically confrontational performances make use of a corrosive, oftentimes kitsch brand of parody. His propensity to lick the microphone, babble in “tongues” and scream obscenities at his audience may prove difficult to describe in academic discourse without taking refuge in the hollow imprecision of a term like enfant terrible. I sustain,

nevertheless, that it is crucial to consider Gómez-Peña’s work critically in spite of, and even because of, his iconoclastic hermeticism. Studying Gómez-Peña’s unconventional texts demonstrates how performance art can be used as a political instrument in the 1990s, even in the midst of a (postmodern) flood of mass-produced images.