By Guillermo Gómez-Peña
(Note: All words that appear in quotations are temporarily "meaningless.")

 

Track #1: The Spectacle of the Mainstream Bizarre
The serpent finally bit its own tail. What 10 years ago was considered fringe "subculture" is now mere pop. The insatiable mass of the so-called "mainstream" (remember the film, "The Blob"?) has finally devoured all "margins", and the more dangerous, "other," thorny and exotic these margins, the better. In fact, stricto sensu, we can say that there are no margins left, at least no recognizable ones. "Alternative" thought, fringe "subcultures," and so-called "radical" behavior as we knew them have actually become the mainstream. Spectacle replaces content; form gets heightened, more stylized than ever, as "meaning" (remember meaning?) evaporates, or rather, fades out, and everybody searches for the next "extreme" image or "interactive experience."

We are now fully installed in what I term the culture of the mainstream bizarre, a perplexing oxymoron, which reminds me of Mexico's ex-ruling party: El Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Nowhere else is this phenomenon more apparent than in mass media and the Internet, where so called "radical" behavior, revolution-as-style and "extreme" images of racialized violence, and sexual hybridity have become daily entertainment, mere marketing strategies. From the humiliating spectacle of anti-social behavior 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. Its goal is clear: to entice more consumers, jaded consumers, while providing them with the illusion of experiencing (vicariously) all the sharp edges and strong emotions that their superficial lives lack.

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, epistemological inversions and distorted perceptions, a place where all desires and fears are imaginary, and content is just a fading memory. If this happens, performance artists might end up becoming just another "extreme" variety act in the great mulit-stage circus of global culture.

What perplexing times for those engaged in critical thinking. Traditionally known for our "transgressive" behavior and our willingness to defy dogmas, cultural borders, and moral conventions, performance artists must now compete in outrageousness with sleazebags Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, and MTV's "Jack Ass". Change channel. Independent filmmakers and video artists now must contend with TV ads and rock videos whose aesthetic strategies are directly appropriated from independent film and experimental video but with a few small differences: they are twice as technically complex and their budgets are logarithmically bigger. Change channel. Public intellectuals (what does "public" mean in this context?) must now attempt to speak to students or write for readers who may regard Bill Maher and the performative polemicists of CNN's "Crossfire" as actual public intellectuals. I know. You know. The difference is obvious: "content," but since content stricto sensu no longer matters, difference makes no difference. Same with "depth."

In this new convoluted logic, Subcomandante Marcos and Tim McVeigh will be granted equal status and media coverage, as will Mother Teresa and Lady Diana. The media invests the banal opinions of Gloria Estefan or Antonio Banderas about Elian, or Latino electoral politics with greater weight than those of writers Carlos Fuentes, Richard Rodriguez or Ana Castillo. The subtext seems to scream: "Whatever amigous!"

For the moment, performance artists are obsessed with the following questions: If we choose to mimic or parody the strategies of the mainstream bizarre in order to develop new audiences and explore the zeitgeist of the 21st century, what certainty do we have that our high definition reflection won’t devour us from inside out and turn us into the very stylized freaks we are attempting to deconstruct? And if we are interested in performing for non-specialized audiences, what certainty do we have that they won't misinterpret our "radical" actions and hyper-ethnicized bodies as merely spectacles of radicalism or stylized hybridity? If our new audiences are more interested in direct stimulation than in content, can we effectively camouflage content-as-experience? I have no answers. I only have clues. My dressing room is filled with suspicious mirrors.

 

Track #2: The Illusion of Talking Back
Since the new global culture is supposed to be "interactive," we are granted the illusion of talking back. We can call the TV or radio station, or e-mail them our opinions. We can post our views in any website we like, join a chat room or place a classified ad in search of quorum or accomplices. And someone will respond right away. If we are lucky, we may be invited to a talk show to exhibit (or better said, "perform") our miseries. Students, intellectuals and civic leaders, along with a bunch of children and housewives randomly chosen by the producer’s assistant, may get invited to an electronic town meeting organized by CNN or by the President himself. Our new culture encourages everyone to have an opinion, and express it (not necessarily an informed opinion, just an opinion). Not to act upon it, just to express it, as a kind of placebo or substitute for action. What matters here is the spectacle of participation. No matter how bombastic or "transgressive" our views may be, hey, if they make for good spectacle they will always be welcome -- and forgotten immediately.

Citizen participation is encouraged, but not in any significant decision making process that may effect social change, just in the construction and the staging of spectacle; the great spectacle of the illusion of citizen participation. The cameras are now pointing in all directions. "Normal people" can suddenly become reporters, actors, singers, performance artists, filmmakers, and even porn stars. We don’t need to have brains, special talents or a perfect body. In fact, the more "normal" we look and sound, the better. If we are lucky, we might be cast in a "Reality TV" show. If our camcorders are fortunate enough to catch an act of police brutality or a theft, our tapes might become news.

The illusion of interactivity and citizen participation has definitely changed the relationship between live art and its audience. Audiences are increasingly having a harder time just sitting and watching passively a performance, especially younger audiences. They've been trained by TV, Supernintendo, video games and the Internet to interact and be part of it all, whatever "it" may be. They see themselves as "insiders" and part time artists. They’ve got the most recent software to make digital movies and compose electronic music. They burn their own CDs and design their own Websites. To them there is nothing esoteric about art. Therefore, when attending a live art event, they wish to be included in the process, talk back to the artist, and if possible become part of the actual performance. They are always ready to walk on stage at any invitation from the artist and do something, "whatever." If this involves impersonating other cultures or taking off their clothes, the better. It's karaoke time. It’s like a live computer game with the added excitement that people are watching.

Given this dramatic epistemological shift, artists and art institutions are pressured to redefine their own epistemological relationship with their public. The educational departments of museums are trying to figure out how to design more technologically interactive, performative and "audience-friendly" exhibits. And artists such as myself are wracking our brains developing new ways to further catch peoples’ attention and implicate new audiences in our performance games. The challenge is obvious: if our production is not "interactive," "exciting," or "dynamic" enough, our impatient US audiences have a hundred other options of how to spend their evening.

 

Track # 3: The Finisecular Freak crosses the Southern Border.
For years Latin Americans witnessed from the South what they perceived as a First World culture of unacknowledged excesses and gratuitous extremes. But thanks to global media, digital TV, the Internet, and the black market, today, they themselves are an integral part of this culture, as daily voyeurs and willing participants.

Some examples come to mind:
The popular Mexican comic books known as mini-novelas feature the weekly adventures of characters such as a lucha libre wrestler with priapismo (a permanent erection) who gets kidnapped and sexually attacked by "extraterrestrial nymphos," and "Pocachondas," "a horny Indian maiden who loves to torture muscled cowboys." Cambio de canal. Spanish language tabloid TV programs such as the recently cancelled "Fuera de la Ley" and "Primer Impacto" present a disparate repertoire of extreme body images, framed by "bizarre facts and people." Close-ups of corpses at the scene of the crime or the accident or people with "rare genetic disorders" share the screen with say, a mob of angry campesinos setting a rapist on fire captured by the camcorder of a bewildered tourist, a recent apparition of the virgin of Guadeloupe, or interviews with witchdoctors and "outrageous artists" such as myself. The old freak show is back in a new high definition format, and you simply can’t take your eyes off the screen. Our lives may suck but the world according to Telemundo or Univision is still wild, sexy and dangerous.

Cambio de canal. The Mexican talk show with the highest ratings right now, "Hasta en las mejores familias" features, among other topics, guests with "peculiar forms of transexuality," "families engaged in bizarre forms of incest," and "men who love to watch their wives do it with their bosses." Needless to say that most of the guests are working class mestizos, which makes the spectacle even more troubling. With an invited audience that includes people with physical deformities and a "jury" formed by a midget, a deaf-mute and a drag queen, the guests are encouraged to bite each other’s heads off, like in the early Jerry Springer shows. If they get way too violent, a team of flamboyant wrestlers and gay bodybuilders will bring them back to their senses. It’s "radical" according to my own family and friends. Cambio de canal.

But, it is definitely Peruvian broadcasting that wins first prize in terms of political incorrectness and humiliation. The most popular comedy program, "Los Cómicos Ambulantes" features an indigenous troupe of fake transsexuals, overweight women in tangas and hyper-sexualized midgets, all wearing "Indian" wigs. Their comedic specialty is to make fun of the slang and idiosyncratic behavior of campesinos and "dumb tetonas" --busty women. During one show I saw, the comedians invited audience members to guess the "weight" of the breasts of a dyed-blond model, whose "enhanced" body had undergone at least five plastic surgeries. Wearing a microscopic bikini, she looked like a character from a Japanese animé cartoon. For 20 minutes, male audience members stepped in front of the camera to grab her breasts and guessed their combined weight. At the end of the program the model sent her regard to her "8 year old son who is watching the show at home. Jorgito, my love, I see you in an hour. Chiao." There are simply no limits to these shows. Since the genre is so new in Latin America, no legal restrictions have been placed on content, and when the intellectuals or citizen groups complain, the ratings go up.

At the Mexico City street market of Tepito, as in similar places in Sao Paolo and Bogota, with enough "conecciones," anyone can find extremely rare pirate videos, from (real or staged) snuff to bestiality with snakes, pigs or rats, to ethnic-specific porn from any culture you wish. This "outlaw" global market offers the consumer more variety than the Discovery Channel. It appears to defy but in actuality strangely complements the "lawful" one, which as we all know, is also ridden with illegalities. In fact, in the global market, the borders between legality and illegality are practically non existent.

 

Track #4: "Extreme sexuality" and other extremely hollow concepts.
Ten years ago performance artists managed to shock the American political class and the mainstream media with their "explicit" sexual language, images and rituals, and sparked a national conversation about censorship, and the role of art. Today, "extreme sexuality" is a hollow concept and a pop cultural genre. The kink of Jerry Springer’s involuntary performance artist guests makes Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, or Valie Export look naively chaste. Baroque forms of racialized transexuality, teen prostitution, incest and family love triangles performed by "normal" working class Americans are displayed daily on talk shows as part of millennial Americana; while sexual fetishes, hard core S&M, and theatrical sex are regular topics on Cable TV and in Hollywood movies. It's no big deal.

The margins continue to stretch in the blink of an eye. Howard Stern invites "midget porn stars" and physically challenged women to his TV show and asks them to show their breasts on national TV. Then (if he finds them "sexy"), he offers them a breast enlargement and brings them back to the program after the operation. In another Stern show, titled "I want to be a vagina millionaire", a guy with a speech impediment and a midget have sex with a prostitute as the cameras follow them to the bedroom.

The new "margins" continue to welcome more immigration from the old centers as Anglo males in their 30s, suffused in their never-ending crises of masculinity, attend "circle jerk" seminars sponsored and filmed by HBO. Yuppies in search of intense experiences to shatter their lethargy attend vampire clubs in San Francisco, New York and London, while financiers and politicians discover the wonders of fetishized S&M. In the porn industry, the kinkiest videos, hotlines and Websites are being marketed to average, middle-class people with boring lives and anesthetized bodies. For the willing consumer of this new sex industry, the unspoken text seems to be: "I am completely disconnected from my body. I badly need an extreme experience to shake my dormant body up and awaken my senses, whatever it takes..." The great paradox here is that behind the spectacle of "extreme sexuality" lies a profound puritanism: So much staged sexuality amounts to not much actual sensuality.

The sponsors of the mainstream bizarre don’t discriminate on the basis of age. Netscape or Yahoo can help lonely suburban teens and kids "navigate" through the user-friendly halls of the great virtual funhouse where online strippers and escorts are passé. There they can find unimaginable photos to download and video clips to watch: sex with animals, child porn, "The Dead babes" website, and the popular "Couple TV" sites which feature amateur couples revealing (or rather "performing") "everything" they do at home from making love and taking a shower to defecating. If the young voyeurs get bored with "extreme sexuality," within seconds they can access other daring sites where they can find neonazi and KKK paraphernalia, militia manifestos, and right wing terrorist manuals detailing the formula to construct bombs in the garage. There are truly no limits to our "options." This is the very nature of our new global democracy: Everything is instantly available to us. All we need is a computer, a modem…and of course, lots of sparetime to exercise our unlimited "freedoms."

Since performance artists simply can’t or don’t wish to compete with these readily accessible forms of "transgression", we must then redefine our roles and ask ourselves some tough questions. In this new panorama, what do we mean by "extreme," "radical" or "transgressive"? These words are now empty shells. What is really left to "transgress"? Should we bother to attempt "transgressing" the outer boundaries of accepted transgression? I remember with nostalgia the days when for my colleagues and I to get naked during a performance piece at a Chicano cultural center would trigger a month-long community controversy. I also remember with a melancholic smile when the Walker Art Center outraged the political establishment for presenting Ron Athey or when Karen Finley was banned in England. Today, things are quite different: Ron gets invited to direct MTV videos; Karen appears frequently in the TV show "Politically Incorrect;" and an HBO film crew follows my Mexterminator project on tour. The image of my dear collaborator dancer Sara Shelton Mann crucified nude as a transgender mariachi with a strap on dildo, which would have sparked riots in Mexico just a few years ago, ends up in the final cut. My jaw drops down to my stomach.

Is this phenomenon a break through in terms of tolerance for true radical behavior, or yet another confirmation that content, in the age of infinite options and multidirectional promises, no longer matters? For the moment, my performance colleagues and I are a bit confused. We are carefully reviewing our image bank, our performance rituals and specially, the language we utilize to frame them.

 

Track #5: Altered bodies & wounded bodies.
In a culture that glorifies acritically the stylized bizarre, the human body is understandably at the center of it all. The body is "hot" again, but the spectacle of the altered or wounded body is much hotter. Wherever we turn, we see bodies and body parts re-shaped, refurbished or "enhanced" by implants and prosthetics, steroids and laser surgery, tattoos & piercings; bodies to wear and/or to watch, premiering proudly their liposuctioned asses and "stapled" stomachs, their volcanic breasts and enlarged penises, showing off their reconstructed chins and borrowed noses. Cyborg bodies and body parts enhanced by high technology, in all states of artificial alteration, appear in movies, prime time TV, fashion and art shows, ads, and Websites. Fully tattooed or pierced bodies are no longer a bold counter-cultural statement. We see them in tourist beaches, Ivy League University campuses and suburban discos.

The popularization and mainstreaming of these practices have finally permitted anyone, not just eccentrics, bohemians, celebrities or upper class dilettantes, to carry out their fantasies, and dramatically alter their bodies. In fact most of us know people who have undergone drastic physical transformations. And many times we ourselves have fantasized about re-shaping or "enhancing" some body part.

At the same time, the spectacle of bodies wounded or even destroyed by social or political drama went from being a tabloid subculture (remember "Amok"?) to becoming a cliche. Mutilated, covered with blood, open sores or prosthetics, "extreme" bodies without identity populate both the corporate mediascape and cyberspace. A vertiginous succession of open bodies, bleeding wounds, dissected abdomens, and missing limbs, whether real or staged, may only cause us to blink our eyes once or twice. Why? I can only speculate: These bodies have been silenced, de-contextualized, emptied of drama and emotion, stripped of their humanity and identity. And as spectators, we have clearly lost our capability to empathize with them and feel outraged by the violent causes that impacted on them.

The combined spectacle of the altered and the wounded body has generated an interest in the strange intersection of performance (and performative photography), (para)ethnography, a fringe of cyber-theory, porn, forensic medicine, and pop culture. But the new areas of interest are quite different from last century’s fascination with the body extreme. It is clearly no longer the "beautiful" or (fictionalized)"natural" body (with its cultural specificities and ideological implications) or theatricalized nudity. It is definitely not el cuerpo político, or el cuerpo cartográfico as in performance art either. It’s the combination of pathology and Eros; of implied violence and high style; of the medical and the criminal realms. It is the morgue, the surgical table, the biogenetic lab, the forensic dossier, as well as the sex club, tabloid TV and the porn Websites with their myriad subcategories. The new objects of fascination are a depoliticized "extreme" body, stripped of all implications, and the suffering, erotiziced body of a (willing or accidental) victim. Whether we like it or not, when we perform, as far as the audience is concerned, our bodies fall in the same category. Our formidable challenge in this respect is how to re-humanize and re-politicize our own bodies wounded by the media, and interveened by the surgery of pop culture.

 

Track #6: Performing the Other-as-freak
Performing against the cultural backdrop of the mainstream bizarre is quite a formidable challenge. My Chicano and Mexico City colleagues and I have explored the spectacle of the Other-as-freak by "enhancing" our own brown bodies with special effects make-up, hand-made "lowrider" prosthetics, useless technology (with strictly poetical or performative purposes) and hyper-ethnic motifs. The objective is to heighten identity features of fear or desire in the Anglo imagination, and "spectacularize" our identities so to speak. The composite identities of our "ethno-cyborg"/personas are manufactured with the following formula: one fourth stereotype, one fourth audience projection, one fourth aesthetic artifact and one fourth unpredictable social monster. We then pose on dioramas as artificial savages or specimens, making ourselves available for the audience to "explore" us, smell us, fondle us, change our costumes and props and even replace us for a short period of time. In the last hour of the performance, people get to choose from an ever-changuing menu of interactions: They can whip us, handle us roughly with dog leashes, "tag" (spray paint) our bodies, and point replicas of handguns and Uzis at us. Some audience members actually invite us to reverse the gaze and inflict violence on them. Curiously, they tend to be the most conservative looking ones.

Ceding our will to the audience and inviting them to "engage in meaningful radical behavior and interactivity" are integral aspects of this new phase in our work. Once, during one of our diorama-performances in Wales, a Latina collaborator dressed as a Victorian chanteuse played strip poker with male audience members for three hours. In another occasion, during the San Francisco premiere of our "Spanglish lowrider opera" Califas 2000, a nude opera singer with her face covered by a veil and a strap-on dildo would get ‘activated' by audience members through fellatio. People went for it. During the tour of The Museum of Fetishized Identities, Mexico City performance artist Juan Ybarra asked audience members to whip him on his back with a flag (of the country we were performing). Willing audience members immediately formed a line to carry out his instructions.
Regardless of the country or the city where we perform, the results of these performance experiments reveal a new relationship between performer and audience; between the brown body and the white voyeur. Most interactions are characterized by the lack of political or ethical implications. Unlike 5 or 10 years ago, our current audiences are more than willing to manipulate our identity, overtly sexualize us, and even engage in (symbolic or real) violent acts.

Unless we detect the potential for real physical harm, we let all this happen. Why? Our objectives(at least the conscious ones) are to unleash the millennial demons, not to pontificate; to understand our new role as performance artists in this culture of extreme spectacle and to open up a sui generis ceremonial space for the audience to reflect on their new relationship with the Other. We believe that these dangerous performance games trigger a long-term process of reflexivity in the psyche of the viewer which hopefully leads to deeper ethical and political questions.*1

*1.-Performance theorist Lisa Wolford and I are currently working on a book based on her four years of field research involving our "interactive dioramas."