ABSTRACT
“I’m Offended” takes on the culture of privileged hypersensitivity permeating the art world and academia in English-speaking countries, especially in the US and Canada. “Acknowledgments: A Poem in Dialogue with Balitronica and Garcia Lopez” is a critique of the tedious pre-performance ritual of “acknowledgments” in academia and the art world. In “Spanish Lesson #69: The Word ‘Academia,’” Gómez-Peña often collaborates with artists and writers from other countries utilizing shared, online documents in which they “jam” and create a collaborative text; this piece was developed in dialog with Brazilian performance artist Filipe Spindola. In “Explaining to a Nurse What I Do,” Gómez-Peña explains to “regular people” what performance art is. “PC Poem” reflects on activist gatherings in the Bay Area. The theme is an obsession in San Francisco on increasing diversity and sustainability in communities. In “Dead-In: Weird Performance Art for Radical Change,” Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra create a script in which they put into practice different versions of this exercise and performance action when Trump got elected, in both art spaces and public plazas. The goal was to stage a collective “dead-in” photo opportunity as a form of “instant activism” for social media.
