October 25, 2007 in progress

A blog-like conversation between cultural anthropologist Gretchen Coombs and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña on “socially-engaged art” (sometime referred to as “relational aesthetics”) and the contradictions of the artistic left. October 2007, in progress.
(This conversation explores some of the trends and actions in art and politics, the intersections between, and the complicated relationship that emerges when the two are mixed. Most recently, socially engaged artwork has been recognized as a viable form of politicized art in that it is artwork that focuses on human relations and interventions into cultural processes. Yet, much of its recognition and subsequent institutionalization begs many questions, how effective is it as a vehicle for social change? What does it reproduce, what does it challenge?
San Francisco is known worldwide for its progressive political climate and its vanguard artistic and countercultural practices. Gómez-Peña has been a pivotal figure in the performance art scene for the past two decades, conducting performative interventions on the media, the streets, and in art institutions. We discuss aspects of art and politics, socially engaged art, the Bay Area’s locational identity, and Gómez-Peña’s work and his relationship to the issues discussed. This ongoing conversation has been edited, re-edited, and rethought, which has made for a fluid approach to conducting this expanded ethnography and a more ethical approach to representation and anthropological research. It is my belief that this conversation becomes a dialogic intervention allows for provisional meaning making and self-representation. GC)

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GC: Summer is winding down in the Bay Area; it’s certainly been an active summer, with the 40th anniversary of the legendary “Summer of Love” in Golden Gate Park and Burning Man’s “Greening of the Man” in which this arts festival turned its focus to environmental issues. Lots of Good times! We seem to always obsess about these nostalgic and activist overtures.

GGP: Perhaps the Good Times are gone for good in San Francisco and we are just creating the illusion of perpetual Good Times and social change.

GC: Why do you think we like this illusion, and how do we perpetuate this myth? Big questions, I know, but maybe we can start with what you think of the current state of politicized art in the Bay Area.

GGP: Orale! Let’s talk about the possibilities and contradictions of politicized art in this time and place.

GC: It seems that this would be fertile ground to really push the limits with art and politics since this city has a reputation as a site for vanguard art practices and progressive politics which attracts people worldwide. Even though the Bay Area may be “progressive,” it is my understanding that the arts community has a reputation for being celebratory and uncritical, which is probably an important element in experimentation. What do you think Gómez-Peña?

GGP: There is a huge community of artists here working in highly charged overlapping territories; activist politics, radical spirituality, performative sexuality, race and gender, new technologies, anti-globalization efforts, you name it. But here in San Francisco we face a unique dilemma: “Progressive” thought, ethnic and gender diversity and “transgressive” art practice are practically official policy. Discourses such as multiculturalism, feminism, Chicanismo, and gay culture are not exactly oppositional, but are rather a part of the City’s master discourse and mythology.

GC: Is this good or bad in your opinion?

GGP: It’s good in the sense that the City and its funders encourage your art practice to be socially conscious and racially and gender literate. But it can have a negative impact on your art, cause you can become self-righteous and complacent, thinking that the whole world thinks or should think like you.

GC: Such a good point! Trying to remake the world in the Bay Area’s image. That hasn’t worked out too well in the past. The common perception of the Bay Area, partially due to the way the media has created an ahistorical “canned image” of free love and radical politics, produces a seductive myth but it also keeps many people from taking the movements seriously and renders much of its potency ineffectual. It seems impossible to escape.

Part of me believes in solidarity and the hope it engenders (art critic and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit covers this beautifully in her book “Hope in the Dark”), and that’s what protest movements, and the many activist/art collectives can provide, but the rebel in me wants to dissent from the norm. It’s seductive to be around the people who think like you, who have the same values and goals. Isn’t that partly why so many like-minded people have gravitated to this particular spiritual and activist vortex?

GGP: Sure, we all love it here. It’s like a bohemian theme park. And we all look the part. We all get some support and encouragement for doing what we do. But there is very little critical opposition to what we do. And as a result…we have very little impact because everyone seems to agree with us, at least on the surface. So the question here is, where do we locate ourselves when making politically and socially pertinent art? Where are the margins located when dissent becomes normalized and even encouraged? Do the margins become conservative? Are we just talking amongst ourselves, patting each other on the back for our transgressive actions, while the rest of the country is undergoing a process of Talibanization?

GC: Preaching to the choir implies a fictive unity. Since, like you said, progressive politics and open cultural forms are the norm here, then it’s very difficult to step outside to oppose or question the efficacy of protest, political art forms, progressive thought and action. You have to make your argument complex so you don’t sound like a disciple of Bill O’Reilly or one of his lot.

Which way is more effective Gomez-Peña, being an interventionist in a city where people see you as a radical, or in a city where you are one of many radicals? Since you play such a vital role in the Bay Area arts scene, how do you adapt and challenge this with your work?

GGP: There is no doubt in my mind that due to its openness and willingness to experiment, SF is a good laboratory to develop radical ideas and new cultural models. It’s a friendly place to workshop and premiere your art projects. But I always encourage my colleagues to constantly leave the city and test their artistic practice and ideas in less friendly territory. I encourage them to go and present their work in conservative parts of the country where being a Chicano performance artist or an extreme body artist is not the norm. I push them to break-through this bohemian complacency.

GC: Right. Navel-gazing at jewelry and tattoos.

GGP: Navel-gazing at extreme identities. San Francisco only looks at itself and it is quite happy with its solipsistic condition. It’s like an “alternative” micro-republic or rather an island. Here it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world exists. This beautiful and hip city can nurture complacency and smugness, and this can be a trap, a pleasant spider web. We think we have it so good here that we forget that the world is a mean place, that 20 miles from the city migrant workers get beaten up and gays still get harassed. When you are constantly presenting your art for the same audiences who love you and agree with you, you can definitely lose perspective. I feel that the most impactful work that La Pocha Nostra makes often happens in conservative cities in front of audiences that don’t necessarily agree with us; in places where they are not exposed to articulate Latinos who talk back and speak up. It is in the outposts of Chicanismo where we can really test the efficacy of our artistic practice.

The other problem here in the Bay area is this particular brand of, should I call it, “New Age Humanism,” which has turned many progressives into self-righteous yet soft-spoken PC zombies…have you had any run ins with them?

GC: Actually that’s one of my own disguises when go under cover, disengage, and “work on myself.” It’s also the same attitude that drives me crazy about this place. The other night I overheard a group of women in a restroom discussing the possibility of taking their drum circle to New Orleans to “help those people process” the tragedy of Katrina. I nearly passed out; is this really what people need-to process their tragedy with a bunch of new-agers in a drum circle? I don’t mean to say there’s no value to this – ritual and healing are important – but really, there are more pressing issues like homes, clean water, and functioning schools.

There’s also a restaurant that officially sanctions – with a zombie smile – gratitude. It’s actually called Café Gratitude.

GGP: Please describe this SF culinary institution for the out of town readers.

GC: It’s is a popular raw food restaurant in the Bay Area. Their menu items act as “affirmations.” I can order an “I am blissful” and when I receive my plate the server will state, “You are blissful.” It’s difficult to take seriously especially when the server pre-empts your ordering with a “question of the day” like “what are you grateful for?” Ugh. Of course we should be grateful for many things in our lives; many of us in SF take so much for granted. But often times I think social change has been reduced to individual healing, which often just reproduces institutionalized oppression and perpetuates racism.

What’s wrong with this picture Gomez-Pena?

GGP: What’s wrong with the discreet charm of the leftoisie? It’s a delicate issue, que no? How to be critical about these matters without sounding like a radical skeptic or like a spoiled brat? I constantly ask myself this question.

GC: A delicate issue for sensitive constitutions. People here know how to live and are living it. Where’s the capacity for critical self-reflection of the leftoise?

GGP: Very pertinent question loca. But I feel that should be precisely our job as critical thinkers. Artists and theorists should always be in disagreement with the master discourse and the status quo, even when this discourse appears to be parallel or similar to ours…even when we are part of the very milieu we criticize.

GC: Such a conundrum. This raises the question of whether criticality means taking the right position on issues or having the ability to ask questions.

GGP: Both. We can attend the demonstration, but at the same time we must challenge the complacency of the dancing left. We must be both present and critical. Our pinche job is to ask the uncomfortable questions even if it means having awkward moments with our colleagues or adding tension to the SF party. That’s part of my job as a performance artist. A couple of months ago I spoke at the Unitarian Church right after Cindy Sheehan. My strategy was to connect the war in Iraq with the war against immigrants. In my presentation I utilized one of my most flamboyant performance personas, El Mariachi Liberachi, and spoke as a performance poet. Cindy was a bit perplexed. But, hey, we need to change the music of the party, que no?

GC: Brilliant strategy. Many artists, activists and intellectuals who inhabit the master discourse are not always willing to call into question the “specialness” of this counter-cultural, and a straightforward critique isn’t always productive when it’s laden with academic language and a complex methodology; both can limit it as an intervening cultural force – it alienates people and constructs an elitist space. The purveyors of positive thinking, or as you call them New Age Humanists, in the Bay Area appear to be more receptive to critique if it’s preempted by affirmations, stories of success, and acknowledgement of good intentions. And increasingly the counter-culture, which includes many in the arts community, demands more performative measures; we want entertainment or spectacle to help make horrible issues more digestible. But it seems like a distraction. Besides, the emphasis here seems to be more on building community and supporting one another in all endeavors, creative, professional and otherwise, which does not always invite such criticality.

Yet there are possibilities in art to make social critiques, and to offer new ways of imagining and experiencing the world, which is why during your performances like Ex-Centris or your recent piece “El Corazon de la Mission” I get an insight to postcolonial issues like race, displacement, nationhood, and gender, etc.

GGP: Can you speak more about what you mean by “postcolonial” in my work?

GC: I found your Mission Bus Tour “El Corazon de la Mission” to be one of the best examples of politically and socially engaged art that I’ve seen in the Bay Area. You were able to literally navigate a contested terrain. It wasn’t about feeling good about my place in the world – I was implicated but only in that I saw myself in relation to the Mission and the larger issues that are present there. You embraced so many stereotypes, yet your fierce insight revealed itself in your voice-over, the engagement you incited with your audience during the performative bus ride, with the people on the street, at the immigrant bar you took to us at the end, and with Violeta Luna, the performance tour guide. We all, with you as a leader, not only moved through the Mission space but we also inhabited multiple psyches, Latino’s, hipsters, and drunks. This project doesn’t make a distinction between the local and the global; you erased those fictive boundaries to reveal a microcosm of larger issues facing inner cities across the country, issues that reveal the historical and current reality of immigration, legal and illegal, as well as the complicated politics of “progressive” tourism.

In some respects this project intervenes in some of the limitations of Bay Area progressive culture as it is at once self-reflexive about your relationship to the City and how we all embody multiple identities that provisional and contextual. It was awash with irony; hipsters on the bus, and hipsters on the street, immigrants at the bar and on the street. Can you speak a bit more to what ideas inform this project and if you think this project was successful at poking a hole in the myth?

GGP: “El Corazon de la Mission” was one of the hardest projects for us. Our original idea was to parody this new phenomenon of extreme tourism by creating a bus tour of the Mission District, which has been labeled by pop magazines, “the hippest hood in the hippest city of the US.” We wanted our audiences to perform the dual roles of uncomfortable voyeurs and performers, and we wanted the neighborhood itself to become the stage for a moving performance and the people in the street to become involuntary performers. The idea was great but it presented us with many challenges: It is one thing to do our particular brand of radical performance art indoors, say at an experimental art space where we control the context, and another is to bring it to the unpredictable streets of San Francisco. To do so we had to answer many questions: How much Spanglish art and weird imagery can we afford to have if we wish to attract a non-art audience? What is the right balance between artistic experimentation, activist politics and populist entertainment? How much nudity and extreme behavior can take place in the streets? We pushed it as much as we could but we definitely had to pull back at certain moments. It was a constant balancing act.

GC: But it worked. The “assignment” you gave out at the end of the bus tour was very poignant for me. I picked “Ask a Mexican immigrant about the story of his/her crossing.” I found it very effective in taking us out of the satire on tourism cultural back to the reality of what the Mission is with its immigration issues and historical amnesia that affects the locals and hipsters alike. What effect do you hope it will have on your audience? Can you tell me more about how you came to do this and what you hope it engenders? Have you had any feedback about that aspect of your “performance fortune cookie?”

GGP: People told us it worked. We wanted our audiences to look at the Mission from another perspective; from the perspective of a performance artist and cultural critic. We wanted to make the Mission unfamiliar so that the audience could discover other phenomenon they might not normally see: the intercultural complexities within the Latino communities; the tensions and secret wars between so called hipsters and locals; between the old and the new bohemia; the hidden histories of certain buildings and certain streets. So far I think it’s been very successful. Even many Mission residents told us that they experienced their own neighborhood in a very different way. A local critic said that it was “Gómez-Peña’s most ‘community-friendly’ art project to date.” (pause) I don’t know what to think of this statement.

GC: You’ve remarked how Latino artists are consistently bracketed within a community arts context so if you do something local it is “what is expected of you,” right?

GGP: True. Often Chicano/Latino artists are expected to produce community-minded art and because of this we are not granted the same conceptual freedoms as those given to European and New York artists. I’ve written extensively about this. If I were to engage in the kind of minimalism that German artists are expected to generate, or if I were to engage in the kind of high tech conceptualism that some Anglo colleagues practice, a US curator would not take me seriously. “Latinos” are always expected to stage our identity, to deal with culturally and politically specific subject matter. We are condemned to always make “community art.” It’s annoying. The term “community art” is often a euphemism for art that does not fit in the museum. It is convenient for chi-chi curators not to invite “artists of color” into the museum through the front door because the assumption is that “they are taken care of elsewhere by their own community;” it becomes an alibi of sorts. When in reality it’s more of a financial issue. The budgets of big cultural institutions allocated for artists “of color” are considerably smaller. It’s a form of racism. Every time I get invited to present my work in a prestigious museum my agent has to fight for a budget that is at least equivalent to the one they offer to a non-Latino artist. And then the art world complains that Gomez-Peña is too pricy. You can never win.

GC: You are able to operate outside of the “community art” label because of your status art world, yet you still face formidable challenges.

(…)

GC: From what I understand you see yourself primarily as a performance artist/activist, yet the active, or should I say, interactive aspects of your work accomplish what many relational artists aim to achieve. How do you feel your performance work creates social engagement, either in broad terms or under the rubric of “social practices?”

GGP: The terms used by the art world to describe my work are constantly changing. I have been called a political artist, a multi-cultural artist, a theorist of hybridity, a border artist….In the past few years they have re-baptized me a “relational artist.” It’s fine with me. Who knows what they’ll call me next year. As a performance artist I welcome all denominations (laughter)

GC: Or what you will call yourself when you write a grant…But let’s go back to the question of social engagement.

GGP: I used to think that the transgressive nature of my work was located in the finished artwork, in the actual performance or installation piece. But in the past years I have changed the way I think. I now believe that the real political project is located in the border zone that exists somewhere between aesthetics, theory, pedagogy, community and activism.

GC: Be more specific.

GGP: My colleagues and I are paying much more attention to the collaborative process. La Pocha is now interested in bringing both collaborating artists and audience members into the creative process of the making of the piece. It is in this process of exchange, and because of the potential of the radical pedagogy of performance, we feel that change can actually take place. The utopian idea behind our new proposal is: if we can cross certain borders within the workshop, inside the rehearsal space, and during the actual performance, we might get inspired to cross them in the larger social sphere. The idea is for both participating artists and audience members to make aesthetic, ethical and even political decisions in situ, thus co-creating the piece with us. I am arguing for art as a kind of radical democracy that involves the active engagement of the artist with the local communities and the audience. But the challenge is to do this without compromising the aesthetics, without watering down our art. “Feel-good” art is not what we are after.

GC: Right. In my opinion art experiences open up cultural spaces into which new ideas, aesthetics, and activist methods, can move around and inhabit. It’s how that space is navigated, the imprint it makes, that I can recognize social change (or see a critique). Socially engaged artists have inherited some of the directions to these openings and it’s up to them to move through the space, mark it with new language, and color it with new hope and dreams. But I also hope they remain energized with radical thoughts, don’t succumb to the codification or temptation of the art world, or to the desires of the audience for extreme behavior.

It seems that most of the visible relational work is being done by white artists who are creating works for other purposes other than the art market, for example, self discovery, intervening in their communities and public spaces or making offers of generosity. Though it seems they still need the art world for legitimacy and legibility. Social practice art work takes on a hue of sophistication when practiced by white kids in art school, and this work often relies on the clout of the artist to frame the work as “art” instead of “community art” or “activism.”

Yet often times socially engaged art reveals more than you’d expect – race, class, issues of access, to name a few.

GGP: Yes, it’s definitely a matter of racial, class and gender privilege. Chicanos have been engaged in “relational aesthetics” and what you would call “socially engaged art” forever. Since the inception of the Chicano arts movement in the 60’s, artists have been exploring the relationship between art, politics and the larger community; the border between the cultural institution and the public sphere or the street. Chicanos have been making “relational art” projects with migrants, prisoners, youth at risk, sex workers, you name it. And the art world in capitals never paid much attention. In the past years, the trend of relational aesthetics has suddenly made this territory hip and worthwhile of theoretical attention. It’s weird. I hope the many other histories of art get vindicated.

GC: I hope so too. Your work has been successful in this way. It might be fine for a particular, and possibly privileged subjectivity, but if we want to talk about political efficacy, then we have to ask if socially engaged art work and/or activism goes beyond making certain folks feel good about breaking out of their alienation, finding their “place” in an environment, or delighting in free exchange in an overly commodified world. I do see value in this, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s important to look at how many of these activities reproduce certain relationships that go unnoticed. Artists have been working in these interstitial spaces for ages, but now it’s been codified and institutionalized. There’s an obsessive need by art world to develop new trends by reframing and renaming movements that have been popular in the art world; these potent radical interventions get appropriated into a discourse and at the same time erase pivotal movements in art and cultural history. What other contradictions do you find in this model?

GGP: The artists operating in what Argentine curator Gabriela Salgado terms the “zones of silence,” (cities and countries that exist under the radars of the art world) make extremely interesting socially engaged work yet they go unnoticed by theorists and curators. These artists seem to only be relevant when more privileged artists acknowledge them or when they are temporarily discovered and featured by a curator or a critic on safari. My troupe, La Pocha Nostra, faces this dilemma constantly. When we make a project in a provincial city of a Latin American country and incorporate a group of local artists, they suddenly experience attention that can’t be sustained once we leave town. I always wonder if we do more damage than good. We try to maintain a dialogue with them and when possible invite them to continue the collaboration in the future but it’s very hard for us to persuade foundations to fund an ongoing collaboration of La Pocha with a group of unknown artists from a city that it’s not on the art map. It’s an ethical dilemma I don’t know how to solve. I am part of the problem. La Pocha’s art is part of the problem. I often feel that in our attempt to create bridges with artists living in a “zone of silence” we end up creating expectations which will be impossible for us to deliver in the future…But sometimes we succeed. Performance artists Maria Estrada from Barranquilla (Colombia), and Amapola Prada from Peru are now regularly touring with La Pocha. I hope we continue to find the funds to work with them.

The question here is how can we discuss the complex ethics that exist in the relationship between the socially engaged privileged artist and his/her willing collaborators and/or invisible artistic peers? How can we develop a more enlightened and continuous relationship? I’m talking about the need to develop a less colonial model; a more symmetrical and dialogical one in which both sides benefit equally? Any ideas?

GC: I am not an artist so I don’t think I am as sensitive to this problem, but I do find it problematic… I come from an anthropological background so for me it would be an ethical and sustained engagement, but that would always shift depending on the context. The dialogue must have equal weight for all involved parties; there has to be self-representation as well.

Once something is named, it’s easily codified and co-opted for another purpose—to support an exhibit, a program at a school, organize conferences, and even to serve a liberal agenda. Much like many things in our society, they only become visible to benefit someone else at the maker’s expense. I’d like to think that when artists are “discovered” they can also use this strategically for their own benefit, whether it’s for grants, commissions, or a job. It becomes part of an ongoing dialectic.

As far as making these works less colonial, I think this is a tough issue and regards the role of the artist in society and how they feel their work intervenes in larger cultural processes and become recognized in their communities or in art institutions. Many artists working in this capacity strive to make a difference in their communities, which often involves activities that resemble “help” and some sort of facilitation. They feel they are picking up where other social structures have failed, i.e. the breakdown of locally based businesses, food distribution, or just getting people involved in their communities. So it’s difficult to critique this even if there are inevitably problems. Yet we can’t be afraid of being critical of seemingly benign social processes even if the intention is good. Effects are equally important to assess.

GGP: I feel this is precisely our formidable challenge. And you, what kind of interdisciplinary theoretical models you wish to develop while researching socially engaged art?

GC: I want to get out of the murky art/non art dichotomy and art critic/anthropologist to see that much of this work can be viewed from a variety of positions, theories, etc. I would like to relate art to anthropology, see where they intersect, how they can contribute to other discourses, and most especially how art as a cultural process can create a potent social critique. Certain seminars, like the one I recently organized at the Cultural Studies Association in Portland, had participants in the seminar that ranged from artists that work with their communities by disrupting corporate food distribution or who work with seniors to give voice to their concerns, to cultural activists studying the street theater/activism of the Raging Grannies and Code Pink, and Argentine art collectives who act as social and political formations. I hoped that the artists and academics invited into a conversation would strengthen a critical discourse around their work. And for the academics studying art as a cultural and social process, to further engage in the people that these academics “study” (putting a face to a process) so, in the end, my project becomes about the intersections of art and anthropology. I don’t imagine it will end there.

GGP: Elaborate carnalita. To which other territories will this research lead?

GC: It will traverse many territories, cross many theoretical boundaries. This is already the issue with social practices. Art critics like Clair Bishop would like to assess these works for their aesthetic qualities, not solely on their ethical imperative to “bring art to the masses” or to institutionalize the “social.” Other critics like Grant Kester believe this is what makes this work worthwhile, that it doesn’t succumb to the aesthetic formal qualities imposed by the art world on contemporary art. I don’t think it’s that binary but we shouldn’t underestimate of the importance of formal qualities of art making and the effects social practices may have in the world.

Calling these works “art” keeps them bound within a particular discourse. Ultimately it’s how the concepts manifest — and how the majority of the public understands and engages with “art” —not the art establishment that is invested in terms like “relational aesthetics.” Having a “bleed” with other disciplines might require that they be assessed from those disciplines and contribute to those discourses (anthropology, sociology, etc.), which is why I find your work particularly compelling. Your performance art encroaches on politics, nationalism, and anthropology, which acts more as a praxis of “artistic politics” rather than of “political art.”

GGP: I must confess to you that self-referential art bores me to death. The type of art we like to practice is always in dialogue with other territories such as…journalism, pedagogy, activism, cultural theory. In the theoretical realm we are in dialogue with anthropology, sociology, art and literary criticism. Our art is about connecting dots, constructing bridges and tunnels, crossing interdisciplinary borders. The fact is that for contemporary art to be pertinent to a larger audience, to be meaningful in several milieus, it has to be connected to the larger debates of the times. La Pocha Nostra has huge audiences, and it is precisely because what we say is accessible and meaningful to non-art audiences.

GC: Which do you think are the larger debates of the times?

GGP: What a humongous question! Well, let’s attempt to make a list…The problematic relationship between North and South; between the West and the Middle East; those are important issues. The impact of the war on terror both in our society and our psyches is also worthy of our attention. This brings us to other issues: invasion of privacy, censorship, cultural isolationism, paranoid nationalism; violence in all realms and territories. Violence is one of the central subject matters for contemporary art. Immigration is also crucial. Are we going to accept the fact that immigration is changing our culture for good or are we going to offer resistance? Do we want an open or a closed society?

GC: Alternative and deviant sexualities, caring for the poor and aging…..

GGP: The list is very long, and artists are articulating these issues in a very original way. The problem is that neither the ruling class nor the mainstream media are listening to us. The question here is, how to recapture our voices in a time when power doesn’t even know it has to listen to the critical voice of artists? That’s a major predicament…But now, it’s time to turn the table around. It’s my turn to ask you some tough questions.

GC: Shoot!

GGP: Why are you so personally interested in socially engaged art?

GC: Hmm. I’ve always been interested in art and social criticism/activism, and more recently the art practices that challenge social structures within an urban context. On the surface these practices seem to embody a more “conceptual” activism, but when you scratch the surface you realize it’s entirely more complex. The emphasis from object-based art to temporal actions and experiences must somehow indicate a cultural shift. But maybe not; they could be one more trend, but I hope not. During graduate school I worked with artists and scholars who are immersed in new ways of theorizing activist practices in order to gain deeper insights into understanding the institutionalization of art and social engagement.

GGP: In your opinion, which are some of the most provocative socially engaged art practices that you have witnessed or experienced in the past few years?

GC: Definitely the “Ex-Centris” performance, which tapped into my embedded cultural desire for the other, which seems to be an unspoken aspect of much of the “Bay Area mythology” that freely borrows from other cultures but seems have less care for the people attached to those cultures. I struggle with this contradiction in my own life, and I’m exaggerating to make a point, but how do we deal with this? What are the implications?

Also William Pope L.’s work like the “Black Factory” where his van roams around the country “selling” items of black origin challenging the representation of what constitutes “black.”

A less obvious example is Red76’s “How to Create a Cultural District,” which appeared Jack London Square in the spring of 2006. Briefly: the collective occupied an area of town, which has no “culture” so to speak and set up small booths, temporarily libraries, and other interactive or ephemeral art installations. This started at around 1:00 am. The problem was that area already has a vibrant night culture, with plenty of clubs and people cruising around. It was odd; a bunch of white kids doing their “art” thing with the black community on the peripheries some who seem puzzled, or at least amused, by what was happening. The cops, not surprisingly, didn’t bug the artists at all even though they didn’t have permits for street performance. I didn’t think the work itself was that successful, in fact it exposed race relations more than anything else, but it did generate quite a debate in our class. So in some respects, I think it was successful since we were forced to extrapolate our expectations for socially engaged art and its effects in the world.

For me – maybe it is specifically for this context since the criteria for evaluation is so slippery –it’s successful if it’s provocative, i.e. if it generates a conversation or makes me think at a different level. Yet I realize this varies from person to person and the context in which these art practices are experienced. And I know this can be problematic since for every event or art experience we may not find a critical forum in which to discuss our interpretation of the event. Each project/exhibit has different challenges that hinge on what and how the viewer/audience experiences them. But if the goal of social practice work, and I use this term broadly here, is to engage people in some sort of social interaction, then we have to consider seriously the blurry line between art and entertainment, having and “experience” and having a “meaningful” social interaction that might illicit agency for both the collective and the individual. The questions remain: who gets to have the meaningful interaction? Is this just for the artist? What do the unwilling participants gain?

GGP: Can you speak to the ways that this type of artwork differs when it gets presented in galleries vs. the streets?

GC: William Pope L.’s “Black Factory” is a good example. I saw this work while I was in New York last summer at the end of a hot summer day and Pope L.’s team looked tired and had seen better days. Yet parked outside the Sculpture Center in Queens it lost something; it felt more like an artifact than something alive and engaged. But this is what happens with institutionalization and repetition. “The Black Factory” was recently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which was more about its documentation. Sure, they had events surrounding the show, and you could “interact” with the objects, but for me they’d become ossified. But maybe that doesn’t matter and I shouldn’t hold every art experience accountable for being “effective” and it’s impossible to know what sort of thing – agency and compassion to name a few get – are activated for each person.

With socially engaged art the “original” work can act as intervention, a social event, or be an established a long-term relationship with a particular community, all of which can resemble other things – social work, social networking, activism. But they become “art” when they enter the gallery. The institutions are not entirely responsible; artists can frame their work as “art” not matter the context, whereas an activist doesn’t go into a situation trying to make art or even care about whether or not anyone is going to perceive the work as art or not.

GGP: By returning to the gallery space, does the political charge get diluted?
I constantly ask myself this question.

GC: Instead of the immediate experience, intervention or service, projects and action, emphasis shifts to its documentation (although there are many events within galleries/museums as well), which acts as proof that these things happened, as was the case with Yerba Buena’s rendition of William Pope L.’s work. Maybe this becomes a temporal issue. Not only this, but the relationships these projects might engender become contrived in a gallery space (they even feel staged outside, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing since all art has intention behind it). I’ve always felt that they are awkward. But at times this documentation reminds art viewers that there’s plenty of art – or activism for that matter – happening around them, in their community, in the nooks and crannies where they wouldn’t normally look.

GGP: Art institutions (museums, galleries, biennales, magazines, etc), have tremendous power to shape our views of society, no?

GC: An institutional framework can act to authorize, confer, and legitimate our understanding of these artistic practices and their importance in our lives. Focus on work that makes ruptures, albeit temporary and provisional at the same time, contributes to narratives about progress, liberalism and community building. They illustrate of ways that institutions instigate a dialogue about personal and collective responsibility for a public good, and fit comfortably into a progressive cultural and artistic agendas (there’s a long history of this in the Bay Area). Some of this analysis exposes the social and historical conditions these artistic practices often obscure and the new relations of power they engender.

GGP: So…where do we draw the line when it comes to socially-engaged art? In the conceptual border that exists between the gallery world and the streets? Or in the border that lies between voluntary and involuntary art practices? In the actual methodology or in the documentation process? At what point are certain socially inspired forms of art practices no longer considered “art” by the artistic institutions? Let’s open this can of worms. Go for it!

GC: Please allow me to extrapolate from a different perspective. This is one of the more perplexing and challenging aspects to these ideas and I struggle with these questions. Isn’t all artwork socially engaged in that it generally invites an engagement with something (painting/sculpture or someone, a performer) within a social space? And it’s not unusual for art to enter charged discursive realms that aim to reflect societal ills or oppressive political policies. This question has also triggered theoreticians and artists alike to hold tenaciously to ontological categories – it is art because they say it is, or does it belong to some other social and cultural processes? I’ve heard some artists say that their work (for example making jam from surplus fruit in their neighborhood or working with seniors and making a DVD of their reciting a James Joyce poem the screening it) is art because they say it is art or that they are using art’s tools – or adding a conceptual frame – for a specific result. What I find interesting, and my seminar in Portland clarified, is that these are very culturally specific acts. What passes as art in one place, doesn’t necessarily get received as art in another.

GGP: Are you extending your relativism to the realm of culture in an anthropological sense? If that is the case, what is political art say in Mexico, Argentina or Brazil, is not necessarily political in the US and vice versa? An interesting example comes to mind: When the Mexican art world discovered multiculturalism, it was already dead as a trend in the US. Same with border art. More recently, Mexican female performance artists are engaging in extreme sexual actions that in the US are no longer acceptable. When they perform them here, they are met with profound criticism from feminists and performance theorists. What these critics miss is the fact that the social and political conditions these women artists are facing in Mexico are quite different from those in the US and therefore might elicit a different type of practice. Ignorance of the current social complexities in Mexico makes US critics miss the point. People forget to practice cultural relativism because the assumption nowadays is that all issues have become globalized. And this is only partially true.

GC: To a certain extent – remembering that cultures aren’t so isolable. Your examples are cogent nonetheless. You have to look at what’s facing each particular group—the social distance of political issues and how artists respond and intervene. Just as with feminism in the 1970s when western feminists tried to extend their ideas of liberation, emancipation, domesticity, etc., to all women of the world, we can’t do the same for what constitutes the political. The issues that present themselves as urgent in the Global South are different for most American artists yet arguably many artists here deal with racial and class issues in their work. But the overall political climate is different so different approaches to subversion are needed. Many people I know feel completely disempowered and ineffectual in anything they do to oppose the government; yet artists are able to use other tactics that hope to intervene on a micro political level, making small ruptures locally and contextually. This appears to be the goal or intent of many social practice artists. And then there are some who do not want to be held accountable to be political in any way in their work. In American society, there’s a privilege in saying these actions are political or not, for we have the choice to engage politically if and when we want.

GGP: Well…not everyone has that choice. Young spoken word artists in the black and Chicano communities may not have that privilege. Artists of color living and working in the “inner city” or in troubled working class neighborhoods often face similar predicaments than those of artists in so-called “third-world” countries. African American performance poet Keith Antar-Mason once told me: “You know man. People think that in the US artists never get killed. But in South Central LA if you are a young graffiti artist or a tagger you might get killed by a cop simply for practicing your art.”

GC: You’re right. You’re exposing my subjectivity Gomez-Pena. I certainly refer more to a particular class than race. The everyday urgency just isn’t there although I certainly acknowledge that many activists work within their communities. As student at a private school I don’t witness this as much. That’s why I’ve attempted to make critical thinking a form of activism. I’ve always believed in arts’ possibilities but also I am hesitant to give it more power than other cultural processes, whether social movements, community outreach, etc., that are working for social change.

In my opinion, this is why many of these practices try and work on the micro-political level instead of tackling larger political issues that dominant our cultural landscape. In past decades it may have been easier to recognize political or social action, especially when it comes to art practice.

It is my hope that these hybrid practices will continue to thrive, acting as social interventions, and making us consider the potential of prying open new cultural spaces in which we can move, learn, and act.

(…)

GC: 9/11 changed the landscape dramatically. Let’s talk about the new challenges that US artists face.

GGP: The Bush administration created overnight a culture of prohibition, isolationism and censorship. Immediately after 9/11 it was suddenly dangerous for US artists to talk about certain issues, to use certain kind of imagery, and to utilize certain public spaces to present our work. Our project Mapa/Corpo, couldn’t be presented in the US for several years. It got worse remember? Artists started facing charges in court and intellectuals began to loose their jobs in universities. America became a closed society. Fortunately we began to experience dissent by 2004. The unlikely leaders of dissent were angry Republicans and radical comedians…

GC: And the Hollywood left…and the Dixie chicks…

GGP: Things are getting better in some respects.

GC: The post-911 political climate creates new challenges for Bay Area artists, and so this type of “social turn” that I am referring to might point to a larger cultural undertone where it’s easy to get caught in the “see and heard everything” cacophony around us, and where many people – both artists and audiences – desire connections and experiences that make them feel empowered to make this world a better place, if even momentarily. Many artists believe that their work can be beneficial to society without always considering who does and does have access to their participatory artworks. And because these artworks are often open-ended and indirect, the viewer or participant relies on the artist (author) to direct the experience. They reinforce certain forms of subjectivity and to a certain extent, arts autonomy in the world. And some of these practices often merge into the flow of spectacle. They keep distractions circulating all around us and fear at a distance. Some of these new strategies and tactics intervene in more ambivalent ways, and often their open forms allow us to indulge in collective meaning making.

However it is not enough to simply come together and participate in these artworks, this cannot be an end in itself. And I’ll paraphrase artist Andrea Fraser here, “participant observation” engages visitors in producing their own representation and at the same time poses an understanding that these “political acts” indicates a notion of politics rooted in individual will, which one could argue is in fact intimately linked to a conventional understanding of art, as well as a quite a bit of conservative ideology. While these may appear to be creating new for empowerment amongst the audience, they are still circumscribed within a particular understanding of civic engagement. These active attempts at tearing at the social fabric and occupying space differently suggest knowledge of political art that more or less identifies politics with a kind of “subversion for subversion’s sake” or “transgression for transgression’s sake.”

What’s your take on this Gomez-Pena? Do you think this reflects a certain American or Bay Area subjectivity?

GGP: American individualism also expresses itself in progressive milieus. There is a romantic tradition in America of the lonely iconoclast, the political anti-hero, who through his own volition and charisma turns things around and affects social change. I have been fighting this all my life. As a member of the Border Arts Workshop, I was singled out as the true rebel and leader, and this was totally unfair to the other members of the group. In La Pocha Nostra we’ve had the same problem. Despite the fact that we constantly tell journalists and critics that La Pocha is an international association of rebel artists and that our projects are collaborative, when they write about us they tend to choose me as el jefe. Is this an American thing? I think it is. Americans have a really hard time seeing themselves as members of a larger community….unless it is a community of temporary interests.

GC: Good point. I understand this is a criticism of social practice, using people as tools for something that can be called art thereby garnering attention through exhibits, grants and residencies. But it also creates agency with people if it’s not “right.” Again, perhaps it’s temporal issue. The longer one is involved with a group or community, the less likely there is to be exploitation with the people. But it depends on what the artist sets up with the participants because critic Miwon Kwon makes a great argument for short-term community art projects. It’s complex and has to be assessed on a project-to-project basis. When artwork enters the gallery it raises another set of questions with the audience. What kind of experience did they expect? I, for one, don’t like to participate in something against my will, or worse, made to feel awkward because I’d rather not get involved. It’s sort of like having to hug someone I don’t know.

GGP: Hey, what’s wrong with hugging someone we don’t know? Just kiddin!