Three Public Interventions

"If our personae survive the involuntary audience of the street, they will probably survive the meanness of the art world."

-GP to a journalist from the Detroit Free Press during a "street intervention."

WHEN OUR PERFORMANCE PERSONAS SUDDENLY WALK OUT OF THE MUSEUM

(Three Public Interventions)

1998

Introduction

Roberto Sifuentes and I see the ever changing performance art world as a moving laboratory in which to develop and test radical ideas, images and actions, a conceptual territory that grants us special freedoms (aesthetic, political and sexual) often denied to us in other realms such as academia, political activism, grassroots organizations and certainly the media. One of the ultimate goals of our work, however, is to step outside the art world and venture into unfamiliar territory, specifically into socially and politically sensitive locations. Our ideas and performance personae acquire particular weight, dimension and density when presented in populist contexts such as community radio, public squares or streets, monuments and historically charged sites. Our work continually shifts back and forth among these different context, returning to the sanctuary of the artworld in search of complicity and the space, tools, and infrastructure that allow us to develop new work, then turning again toward populist venues where our ideas and the accessibility of our work are tested in a very different way. In this sense, we are privileged border crosses, temporary insiders (or rather "insiders/outsiders") in many worlds. Within the art world, our work gets developed and presented in optimum technical conditions, but often for audiences primarily interested in style, form, and highly specialized theoretical matters. Our involuntary audiences in populist realms tend to be less theoretically sophisticated, but more demanding in terms of clarity and spectacle -- and quite often, more sincere and compassionate. Our best work results precisely out of the friction created by these overlapping worlds.

The following text chronicles three public interventions THAT TOOK PLACE IN VARIOUS SITES AND CONTEXTS. "The Cruci-Fiction Project" was staged with an invited audience, but designed largely with the intention of generating media coverage. "Ode to a Dying Barrio" was created first and foremost for an "involuntary audience" on the streets of the Mission, but documented by a PBS television crew. The objective of "Ellis Island y que?" was to generate photographic images that would later be distributed in multiple formats and venues. In all three cases, the distribution of the documented images, whether through photos or video, consolidated the symbolic meaning of the work. Though these types of performance interventions are central to our performance praxis, they often go unnoticed to critics and art historians, who concentrate almost exclusively on work that takes place within the confines of the art world.

I

PUBLIC INTERVENTION #187: "THE CRUCI-FICTION"*1

On the evening of April 10, 1994, one week after Easter Sunday, an unusual "end-of-the-century performance ritual"*2 took place at Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands Park across from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. My accomplice (or rather "co-penant") Roberto Sifuentes and I crucified ourselves for three hours on two 16- by-12-foot wooden crosses dressed as the "contemporary public enemies of California." Wearing my gala mariachi-rockero suit, I was an "undocumented bandito" crucified by America's fears of immigration and cultural otherness. Inscribed on the cross above me were the letters "INS" (Immigration and Naturalization Service). Roberto, as a "generic gang member" hung on a cross 15 feet to the left of mine, costumed in stereotypical lowrider attire with his face covered in intricate "tribal" tattos. The letters "LAPD" (Los Angeles Police Department) were written on the cross above his head. The tableau vivant was a symbolic protest against the xenophobic immigration politics of California's sinister (now ex-) Governor Pete Wilson (the US's version of Jean Marie Lapen). The piece alluded to the Biblical tale of Dimas and Gestas, two somewhat anonymous thieves who were crucified alongside Jesus Christ. In our performance, Jesus was missing.

With the help of friends, Roberto and I climbed onto the wooden crosses around 6:30 pm. Our wrists were strapped to the crosses with thick rope. The beach was very windy, and the sun was slowly sinking over the Pacific ocean behind our backs. Fliers were handed out to a crowd of over 300 people, asking them to "free us from our martyrdom and take us down from the crosses as a gesture of political commitment." We naively thought it would take the audience about forty-five minutes or an hour to figure out how to get us down without instructions or a ladder, but we miscalculated. Mesmerized by the melancholy of the religious spectacle, it took them over three hours to realize that our lives were literally in danger, and then to figure out how to get us down. By 9:45 pm Chicano counter-cultural capo Rene Yanez and a group of Japanese taiko drummers decided they had to take action, and formed a human pyramid to untie us. By then, my right shoulder had become dislocated, and Roberto had almost passed out. Our tongues, torsos, arms and hands had lost all feeling, and we were barely able to breathe from the pressure of the rib cage against the lungs. Once we were taken down, we were carried by some performers and audience members to a nearby bonfire, and slowly nurtured back to consciousness with water and massage. A chiropractor in the audience volunteered to put my swelling shoulder back into place. Others in the crowd rebuked those helping us, screaming: "Let them die!" It felt like a cheesy reenactment of a Biblical scene. I was inundated with conflicting feelings of joy and despair, but unable to verbalize them. The next morning a doctor made me aware of my heroic stupidity: "Another half hour and you would have been dead."

Though Roberto and I were aware that our actions would have an impact on the live audience present at the beach, the "Cruci-Fiction Project" was staged primarily for the media. The choice of site, the cinematic placement of the crosses, and the dramatic time of day made the tableau vivant extremely photogenic. As a result, photographers and videographers went wild. Within a week and a half, the piece became international news, appearing in Der Speigel (Germany), Cambio 16 (Spain), the Mexican dailies Reforma and La Jornada, and various U.S. newspapers and art publications. And with the exception of Cambio 16, which reported that Roberto and I were a real mariachi and a gang member acting out of political desperation, the media clearly understood that our project was a performance art piece functioning as an emblematic gesture against nativism and xenophobia.

Eventually, "The Cruci-Fiction Project" crossed into the realms of the mythical and the vernacular. As Roberto and I toured the country with other projects, people we met on the road would ask us if we had heard of "the two crazy Mexicans" who crucified themselves somewhere in L.A., on the U.S.-Mexico border, or in San Francisco. Their second- and third-hand descriptions of the piece and its objectives differed radically: the "crazy Mexicans" were either protesting la migra [the border patrol], police brutality, NAFTA, the "English Only" movement, the California governor or the Mexican government. In these anecdotal descriptions, the performance protestors often "used real nails," "spent several days on the crosses," "ended up in jail," or "were deported back to Mexico." Since we believe that performance is merely another way to tell social truths, we tried not to correct any of these versions, and often Roberto and I didn't even tell the storyteller that we were in fact "the crazy Mexicans."

On October 4, 1995, a strange coincidence occurred. A Mexico City policeman named Ricardo Chaires Coria crucified himself (in uniform) on a wooden cross right in front of the monument of El Angel de la Independencia, to protest poor wages and police corruption. His chubby body was strapped to the cross with tape and rope. He actually managed to stay there for seven hours. The traffic on Reforma Avenue was paralyzed for the entire time. When his colleagues finally decided to bring him down, he was near death. A journalist freind of mine later told me that he suffered permanent damage to his lungs.

One day, a neighbor showed me a hip San Francisco postcard with one of the many photos from the "Cruci-Fiction Project." There was no description of the event, much less of the politics behind it. Roberto's name was left out and mine was misspelled. Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of political art at the end of the century

II

PUBLIC INTERVENTION #209*: "ODE TO A DYING BARRIO"

In late August, 1996, my performance colleagues and I staged a "street intervention" at the corner of 24th street and Mission Boulevard in San Francisco. We were followed by a PBS cameraman shooting footage for a documentary about our work. The goal of our intervention was to symbolically return to the heart of the Latino barrio after a three month-long tour in order to renew our sense of belonging to our immediate community. In the act of reclaiming our cultural space, we were confronted with the painful realities of a neighborhood trapped between social abandonment and "gentrification," a dubious capitalist endeavor that implicitly requires the displacement of the area's historically Latino population.

Two performance accomplices joined me for this adventure. Roberto Sifuentes, aka Cybervato, was dressed in designer "robo-gang member" attire, with chromed prosthetics and a tank top T-shirt saturated with holes and blood from implied gunshots. My comadre Nao Bustamante was dressed as "Mea Culpa," a deranged and hypersexual Selena*2 wearing a cow-print microskirt, huge white plastic boots, and exaggerated chola make-up, and playing a nostalgic accordion. I was costumed as "El Quebradito," a burnt out Norteño singer and a veteran of many border wars. I sat on a wheelchair wearing a leather suit, snake skin boots and a Stetson hat. My sad bag of props included a miniature accordion, a "silent megaphone," and a pulsating rubber heart. It was a typical day in the lives of three migrant performance artists returning from our battles in the American heartland to besieged Chicanolandia.

The sun was out, as were the citizens of the street. The nervous PBS crew had been told to maintain a discreet distance so as not to intimidate the crowd and inhibit their interactions with us. Our melancholy diorama unfolded as an ode to the beauty of a dying barrio whose hours are counted, a weird 3-D postcard from "the other America." Nao and I played a mournful Mexican waltz with our out-of- synch accordions, while CyberVato flagellated himself with a feathered S & M whip or lovingly made out with a jivaro shrunken head. Nao and Roberto froze AS I DRANK "conceptual blood" from my pulsating rubber heart. We looked like a dysfunctional border family of unemployed artistas -- a homeless family of performeros locos, but a family nonetheless. A hand painted sign in front of us read: "Not a performance". We were clearly a little mad. The street became our temporary performance stage, a huge alternative space without walls

People gathered around us. The young vatos locos got a kick out of our stylized marginality, and so did the prostitutes, the drunks, the punk rockers, and the old Latino bohemians who hang out at the legendary "La Boheme" Cafe across the street from the corner we had chosen as our performance space. Homeless people watched us with a melancholy sadness, identifying with our extreme and yet somewhat familiar type of otherness. Even the perfumed señoras and children passing by on their way to the market or to church stopped to watch or smile at us. They knew what we were up to.

Like most Latin barrios, the Mission is used to extreme behavior. The only person who seemed visibly upset by our presence was a soap box evangelist, who approached us, speaking in broken Caribbean Spanish. "What the hell are you doing in my place?" "Doing exactly what you do," I answered, "trying to express ourselves in a city where the streets are often used by people to express themselves." He replied that he'd been speaking on that corner for more than three years and had never seen us before. "Don't worry," I responded. "We are only here for today." He asked if we were making a movie, and I told him no, that we were "for real." (I still don't know exactly what I meant by "for real.") He started meticulously scrutinizing our costumes and props, and suddenly freaked out (or pretended to freak out). He grabbed his megaphone and began to yell: "People like them are a living expression of the devil inside our communities." He went on and on, clearly performing, just like us. I grabbed my "silent megaphone" and began to subvocalize; no words come out of it. This irritated him even more. "God said that the anti-Christ would one day show up in the form of...of... cheap entertainment" People began to shout at him to leave us alone and let us do our thing. (Unfortunately, the gathering crowd blocked the sightlines of the TV camera, which was unable to capture the full intensity of the moment.)

The performance was working. People were flexing their civic muscles and participating in our socio-poetical experiment. To express their sympathy, our involuntary audience members dropped coins at our feet, or smiled at us as a sign of approval. When the evangelist finally realized he couldn't upstage us, he grabbed his briefcase and moved to another corner. Without the dramatic contrast of the poor vernacular performance artist we forced into our poetic world, we began to blend in with the street people and the environment so completely that passersby no longer noticed us. We had ceased to be a novelty. We were part of the barrio again.

It was time to move on. We proceeded to walk in slow motion down Mission Boulevard, Roberto pushing my wheelchair while Nao continued to play her nostalgic accordion. The barrio was full of life. We passed by small family restaurants, bakeries, wedding dress boutiques, tropical murals from the golden era of community art, barber shops, old-fashioned photo studios, and fruit markets filled with exuberant customers. Pure urban tropicalia. In front of a liquor store, a Salvadorean drunk handed me a tiny bottle of tequila inside a brown bag. I took a sip. He held my hand tightly, as if metaphysically bonding with me, or expressing his approval of our performance. The king of his corner has OK'd our re-entry to social reality.

I felt an overwhelming sadness, knowing that this vibrant micro-universe would soon succumb to the persistence of greedy real estate agents and Bohemian yuppie entrepreneurs determined to "tame" the Mission District and turn it into a sanitized Latino theme park -- without edges, anti-social behavior, or Latinos.

III

PUBLIC INTERVENTION # 227:"ELLIS ISLAND Y QUE?"

On June 2nd, 1998, the controversial Proposition 227 was approved in California, derailing bilingual education overnight and setting a dangerous national precedent. This nativist legislation represented yet another loss in the long list of political and cultural defeats that our progressive communities have suffered in the past years.To protest this reactionary legislation, Roberto and I decided to "crash" Ellis Island in costume, and stage several in situ activist tableaux vivants. Our intention was to document these interventions photographically, eventually circulating the most interesting images in the form of postcards, posters, calendars, and illustrations for web sites, magazines and books. On the morning of June 3rd, we met with our friend, Spanish filmmaker Pilar Cano, at the hotel where we were staying. She agreed to be our partner in crime in this adventure, and to dress as a "Euro-trash actress/ethno-dominatrix." Roberto and I in full regalia (as "CyberVato" and "El Mad Mex" respectively), would pose as her sexual "ethno-pets" for the day. Eileen Travell, the official photographer of the Met, volunteered to document the event, assuming a paparrazzi-like persona.

At noon, we took a cab to the Statue of Liberty Ferry in Battery Park, where we met Ann Pasternak and three other members of Creative Time, Inc., the organization responsible for producing many of our activities during a month-long residency in New York. They went along on this expedition so as to help us negotiate any possible difficulties with the authorities. Our most "dangerous" looking props (assorted techno-prosthetics, S&M chains, shamanic looking artifacts, "binational" boxing gloves, etc.) were hidden in a handbag. We anticipated that being allowed onto the Ferry would be our first performance challenge for the day.

The Park Rangers spotted us immediately, and talked nervously amongst themselves. As we were about to board, a man who appeared to be in charge approached us in a falsely casual manner. "What are you guys up to?" An uncomfortable silence followed. Since Roberto and I were posing as "artificial savages," we were not supposed to talk at all. "They are famous Mexican wrestlers,"Ann Pasternak replied. The ranger seemed magically relieved, and walked away after mentioning that he'd seen us on TV. He relayed the information to his colleagues, who all cracked up and waved at us politely. I was shocked; it had never ocurred to me that one day the glamour of binational pop culture would save us from jail.(With the new anti-terrorist act, security at national monuments has increased dramatically).

Once on the deck of the ferry, Roberto and I put on our techno-prosthetics and began to adopt whimsical, "Lewis and Clark"-type tableaux vivants. Tourists gathered around us and began to take pictures while their friends and relatives asked if they could pose with us. We made a deal with them: for every photo they TOOK of us, we would get to take one of them in which we would be allowed to pose them however we liked. Our first tableaux with the tourists were mild, as we wanted to keep OUR edgier material for the mythical island of American genesis.

First stop: Statue of Liberty. As the ferry arrived at the dock, Pilar mimicked the statue's famous position, using a Coke can instead of a torch, while Roberto and I knelt in front of her in attitudes of prayer. The tourists went papparazzi on us. The ferry employees watched from a distance in utter perplexity. I was fearful that by the time we got to Ellis Island, we were going to get busted regardless of our new status as "famous Mexican wrestlers." As we disembarked from the boat, one of the ferry employees told a friend in a jaded tone that we were performance artists. As soon as we touched the holy ground of the sanctuary of US immigration, Roberto and I kissed the land like grateful "Tontos," while hyper-cool Pilar put dog chains around our necks, tensed the chains and placed one of her military boots on Roberto's back. A distrustful ranger approached us. Before he could say anything, Pilar volunteered an explanation inspired by our prior encounter with the rangers. "We are a rock band," she told him, "a famous, Tex-Mex rock band, just having some fun and taking some snap shots." The guy swallowed it and left us alone. I never cease to be amazed by the power of language to reinvent identity ipso facto.

For the next four hours, we proceeded to stage silent tableaux in the highly charged space of the monument. This was perhaps our ultimate site-specific performance intervention to date: two border artists, a Mexican "alien" and a first generation Chicano, using Ellis Island as a performance set, at a time when immigration from Latin America has become a poisonous thorn in America's ass, one day after bilingual education was dismantled by the voters of California.Click. At the Immigration Memorial Wall, where the names of immigrants are engraved, Roberto and I posed as obnoxious derelicts, surrounded by sentimental, elderly immigrants who came to honor memories of lost relatives or of a mythic homeland. Click. At the entrance of the Ellis Island museum, we assumed submissive poses, parodying New World natives in front of an invisible Hernan Cortez, while Pili patted our heads and examined the surroundings through binoculars. Click. At a food stand, we were handfed hot dogs and Coca-Cola by our performance mistress. Click. No matter where we were on the island or what we were doing, we were always surrounded by curious people who seemed eager to hold our leashes and pose for photos with us. School children with their teachers on a field trip. Click. Wide-eyed foreign tourists. Click. A group of kids asked us if we were the villians from the new Robocop movie. Click. Despite the overtly sarcastic content of our dioramas, everyone seemed to get a kick out of us. Why? Perhaps the presence of the hyperactive photographer carrying several heavy-duty cameras made people think that we are part of the overall "show." Perhaps the weight and implications of the site were so intense that our actions became secondary, or perversely complementary to the mythos of the site. Perhaps deep inside everyone knew what we were up to, and silently sympathized with our protest.

By the late afternoon, the nervous rangers started suspecting that perhaps we were not a Tex Mex group and began following us from a closer distance, but for some mysterious reason they chose to let us continue with our madness. We entered the museum on leashes held by Pilar. More photos were taken, this time using the huge nostalgic black & white images of turn-of-the-century immigrants as a backdrop. We walked through the barracks where starving immigrants, mainly from Europe and the Soviet Union, used to take their first bath on American soil and shave themselves before receiving a new, mispelled "American" name. We were suddenly inundated with an uncontrollable sadness. We read the enthusiastic slogans welcoming "all peoples" regardless of their "religious creed, their race, and country of origin," and could not help comparing these sentiments with the racist statements of contemporary politicians like Buchanan, Gingrich, and Wilson. "Whatever happened with America's romantic affair with immigration, and the whole melting pot litany?"one of our friends asked. My throat was clogged and I couldn't answer. I knew that particular romance had always been selective, and that the promise of the "melting plot"*4 was strictly meant for "white" immigrants. In fact the melting plot, as one of my performance characters once said, "was more like a menudo chowder, where some stubborn chunks (Asians, Blacks, Latinos & Native Americans) were condenmed merely to float."

At 6:30 pm. we took the Ferry back to Manhattan. Our make-up was running down our faces, our arms and legs sore from the pressure of the metallic prostheses. Overwhelmed by the experience, we contemplated the myriad implications of our actions.

That night, I engaged in a very intense and personal conversation about America's current paranoia about immigration with a gorgeous Colombian immigrant named Carolina Ponce de Leon, a curator of Latin American art living in New York at the time. We compared notes on "our permanent condition of deterritorialization." We found out that we were born on the same year, within six days of each other, that we are both single parents of blond kids, and that we both work in the jagged terrain of transnational cultural exchange and hybrid identities. We learned that we read the same writers and like similar music. We talked about the fact that both our countries are undergoing an acelerated process of political and cultural fragmentation. Two orphans of two nation states drinking tequila in a Manhattan lounge bar. I was completely unaware that months later, she would become my lifetime compañera.

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*1.-An earlier version of "The Crucifiction Project" appeared in the book "Temple of Confessions", PowerHouse, 1997.

*2.-All the words and sentences in quotation marks are direct quotes from the flyer handed to the audience during the "Crucifiction Project"

*3.-The Tex-Mex diva who died in 95 at the hands of the president of her fan club.

*4.-deliverate neologism