| Description: | Born in Mexico and now resident in San Francisco, Cuillermo Gomez-Pena - whether working in performance, installation, writing, video or on the web - illuminates the cultural side-effects of globalisation and the commodification of identity. The borderless future he points towards may not yet have arrived, but the cultural margins, with their transgressive agendas (not so long ago closely patrolled by the border guards of taste) are fast disappearing, appropriated now into what Gomez-Pena terms 'the mainstream bizarre':
'A perplexing oxymoron ... nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in mass media and the Internet, where so called radical behaviour, revolution-as-style and extreme images of racialised violence and sexual hybridity have become daily entertainment, mere marketing strategies. From the humiliating spectacle of anti-social behaviour performed in US network talk shows to TV specials on mass murderers, child killers, religious cults, extreme sex and sports, predatory animals and/or natural disasters, and the obsessive repetition of real crimes shot by private citizens or by surveillance cameras, we've all become daily voyeurs and participants of a new cultura in extremis.'
Conceived for Liverpool as a sort of experimental ethnography project, Ex-Centris: A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others (2002) brings Gomez-Pena together with a team of performers from Mexico, USA, India, Japan and Britain to present an interactive museum of 'living dioramas' that parody colonial practices of representation. These include the ethnographic tableaux vivants found in natural history museums, the freak show, the Indian trading post, the border curio shop, the porn window display, and their contemporary equivalents. The participants in this living museum become 'inter-cultural specimens' - charged symbols of cultural difference, reflecting the experiences of those hybridised 'orphans of the developing world' who exist beyond nation states. The performance-installation functions both as a bizarre stage set for a contemporary enactment of'cultural pathologies', and as a ceremonial space for people to reflect on their attitudes toward other cultures. It addresses the appropriation of hybridity by corporate multiculturalism and global media, and asks why certain 'Others' are demonised, whilst other 'Others' are romanticised or eroticised.
The installation Los Video-Crafitis (From the Ethno-Techno Jukebox) comprises a compilation of Gomez-Pena's short films produced in collaboration with Mexican performance artist Juan Ybarra and various independent filmmakers and performers from diverse communities and backgrounds. Ranging from the poetic and conceptual to the comic, the piece includes performances staged for the camera, archival documentation of Gomez-Pena's live work from the past fifteen years, parodies of TV, and performance experiments of 'reverse anthropology'. It offers an eclectic, compelling and, at times, hilarious antidote to the incessant babble and banal media bombardment of our multi-channel world.
'The mainstream bizarre has effectively blurred the borders between pop culture, performance, and reality, between audience and performer, between the surface and the underground, between marginal identities and fashionable trends. Artists exploring the tensions between these borders must now be watchful, for we can easily get lost in this fun house of virtual mirrors, epistemologicall inversions and distorted perceptions, a placa where all desires and fears are imaginary, I and content is just a fading memory. If this happens, performance artists might end up becoming just another extreme variety act I in the great multi-stage circus of global culture.'
Bryan Biggs
[MORE][LESS]Born in Mexico and now resident in San Francisco, Cuillermo Gomez-Pena - whether working in performance, installation, writing, video or on the web - illuminates the cultural side-effects of globalisation and the commodification of identity. The borderless future he points towards may not yet have arrived, but the cultural margins, with their transgressive agendas (not so long ago closely patrolled by the border guards of taste) are fast disappearing, appropriated now into what Gomez-Pena terms 'the mainstream bizarre':
'A perplexing oxymoron ... nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in mass media and the Internet, where so called radical behaviour, revolution-as-style and extreme images of racialised violence and sexual hybridity have become daily entertainment, mere marketing strategies. From the humiliating spectacle of anti-social behaviour performed in US network talk shows to TV specials on mass murderers, child killers, religious cults, extreme sex and sports, predatory animals and/or natural disasters, and the obsessive repetition of real crimes shot by private citizens or by surveillance cameras, we've all become daily voyeurs and participants of a new cultura in extremis.'
Conceived for Liverpool as a sort of experimental ethnography project, Ex-Centris: A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others (2002) brings Gomez-Pena together with a team of performers from Mexico, USA, India, Japan and Britain to present an interactive museum of 'living dioramas' that parody colonial practices of representation. These include the ethnographic tableaux vivants found in natural history museums, the freak show, the Indian trading post, the border curio shop, the porn window display, and their contemporary equivalents. The participants in this living museum become 'inter-cultural specimens' - charged symbols of cultural difference, reflecting the experiences of those hybridised 'orphans of the developing world' who exist beyond nation states. The performance-installation functions both as a bizarre stage set for a contemporary enactment of'cultural pathologies', and as a ceremonial space for people to reflect on their attitudes toward other cultures. It addresses the appropriation of hybridity by corporate multiculturalism and global media, and asks why certain 'Others' are demonised, whilst other 'Others' are romanticised or eroticised.
The installation Los Video-Crafitis (From the Ethno-Techno Jukebox) comprises a compilation of Gomez-Pena's short films produced in collaboration with Mexican performance artist Juan Ybarra and various independent filmmakers and performers from diverse communities and backgrounds. Ranging from the poetic and conceptual to the comic, the piece includes performances staged for the camera, archival documentation of Gomez-Pena's live work from the past fifteen years, parodies of TV, and performance experiments of 'reverse anthropology'. It offers an eclectic, compelling and, at times, hilarious antidote to the incessant babble and banal media bombardment of our multi-channel world.
'The mainstream bizarre has effectively blurred the borders between pop culture, performance, and reality, between audience and performer, between the surface and the underground, between marginal identities and fashionable trends. Artists exploring the tensions between these borders must now be watchful, for we can easily get lost in this fun house of virtual mirrors, epistemologicall inversions and distorted perceptions, a placa where all desires and fears are imaginary, I and content is just a fading memory. If this happens, performance artists might end up becoming just another extreme variety act I in the great multi-stage circus of global culture.'
Bryan Biggs
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