Guillermo Gómez-Peña:
There Goes The Virtual Neighborhood

While consistently breaking new ground in his own performance work, Guillermo Gómez-Peña reviewed numerous exhibitions for the magazine from 1985 to 1987. An eloquent and provocative writer, our interview with him in 1993 was featured prominently in Interventions and Provocations: Conversations an Art, Culture, and Resistance, a book of ART PAPERS interviews published in 1998. Here, he shares a recent e-mail dialogue with performance theorist Lisa Wolford, part of a forthcoming collaborative book titled Mexterminator: Ethno-Techno Art. 

It would not be far-fetched to describe Guillermo Gómez-Peña as the Picasso of avant-garde art practices in the latter 20th Century, for this Mexican-born multidisciplinary artist employs a variety of media in a prolific capacity to explore cross-cultural issues and the racial divide in American culture. Not that the renowned Spaniard was obsessed with such issues, but his fierce output was unmatched by other artists of his era. As such, few artists today put out like the San Francisco-based Gómez-Peña and are as daring, using whatever media necessary to push aesthetic boundaries and art as activism. His creative arsenal ranges from performance art to installations, from cyberspace to the public domain, from National Public Radio commentaries to the printed word in books that document his artistic exploits. One of his most ambitious projects is “BORDERscape 2000,” a multimedia performance collage that unfolds in sensurround like a politically charged circus operetta. It features Gómez-Peña as the “Mexterminator” ring leader and a cast of hybrid misfits that include Sara Shelton-Mann as a transvestite Mariachi, Roberto Sifuentes as a cyber vato, and Juan Ybarra as a naked green-colored extra-terrestrial, representing the Mexican illegal alien in the American imagi­nation. The piece comments on police brutality and a changing topography where the cultural other is both feared and sexually intriguing. Such works are exemplary of the complexities in both aesthetics and content that Gómez-Peña seeks to create as a mirror of our hyperreal times. 

—Jose Torres Tama 

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: After eight years of exploring cyberspace, I still feel a bit of a foreigner, a webback. The full citizens of cyberspace seem to regard their “neighborhood” as a kind of suburb in which otherness is not exactly welcome. I will never forget the day Roberto and I crashed a debate on art and new technologies on the net and started using Spanglish. In the middle of the “conversation” someone said: “there goes the virtual neighborhood.” In other words, the Mexicans had crashed the party. How have you responded as a working class woman intellectual to the virtual horror vacui and the hegemony of cyberspace? 

Lisa Wolford: The types of exclusion I’ve come across are gender-based rather than related to ethnicity, but at the same time…it’s hard to feel completely at ease in a segregated neighborhood, even if you can “pass” to some extent. In one sense, I’m a compliant consumer drone, which is largely how the internet works to position people, especially women. So long as I stay within the safe little suburbs of the virtual shopping mall, I’m content and comfortable with my surroundings. 

GGP: But at the same time, there are some very scary places out there in the virtual badlands! I don’t just mean the obvious things, like the sites run by hate groups and white supremacist organizations… 

LW: What terrifies me is the ubiquity of xenophobic, racist, sexist, and virulently homophobic behavior that I see manifested on websites, bulletin boards and discussion groups that have no overt connection to extremist organizations. I think the internet has become a site for the most extreme forms of p.c. backlash, and that there’s a direct relationship between the relatively modest gains in social justice agendas and access to power for women and people of color “irl” [in real life], and the prevalent expression of reactionary views on the web. 

GGP: Of course, the mythology speaks of a raceless/genderless/classless “space,” or rather a mythical cultural zone beyond race, gender and class. And people are willing to kill to keep it that way…just like in the suburbs, que no? This is why it becomes tempting for “people of color” and women to impersonate white males on the net, or just to pretend there are no barriers of color or gender. Have you ever had the desire to impersonate other identities on the net in order to have access to worlds or communities you are normally not allowed into? 

LW: I don’t know why, but I never have. I’ve thought about it, especially when I wanted to express more aggressive or assertive views than I feel are appropriate to my online persona. But I’ve never really understood the fascination of experimenting with “passing” or identity tourism as a kind of diversion, taking a holiday in someone else’s skin…. Obviously it has different implications depending on whether a person is crossing into or out of privilege, whether they take a certain action to avoid being hassled or as part of a kind of exotic masquerade. In some circumstances, I use a gender neutral nickname on listprocs, but I’ve never deliberately adopted a male persona, or a persona that was overtly marked in a racial sense. I have lurked around certain objectionable sites with a kind of morbid fascination, the way people slow down when they pass a bad wreck on the freeway. 

But what about you? I know you’ve expressed frustration with the utopian discourses around cyberspace and the depoliticized nature of most of the scholarship. Yet you’ve talked about surfing around some of the scarier apartheid zones of the net. 

GGP: You know me. I am a paradoxical vato. My relationship with mainstream culture has always been marked by fear and desire, by willingness to experiment and to be part of it all, and at the same time by outrage. I am a critical voyeur. I am also ridden with mysterious obsessions. And one of my obsessions is to understand extreme right wing culture in America, which to me is not exactly a fringe subculture but puro mainstream. In fact I believe that all the internet has done in this respect is to unleash dormant forces, to bring to the surface the already existing right wing impulses of mainstream America…. The internet has helped me to get into places where I would never be allowed as a Mexican or as an artist: militia chat rooms, KKK websites, bizarre cults, teen vampire cofradías. It never ceases to amaze me—the amount of fringe crap and sociopathic activities Americans are into. When you browse the net, America becomes a very scary place. It’s like a mall of the perverse and the superfluous, a deadly combination. It warms my heart to think that regular Americans without a specialized art education are actually scared of performance art.

LW: And yet completely comfortable with much more extreme behaviors and expressions than what gets enacted in the majority of performance art, so long as what they’re seeing is contextualized as pop culture and therefore presumably ephemeral and “harmless,” rather than high art… 

GGP: True… Sometimes Carolina [Ponce de Leon] and I visit extremist websites for a couple of hours late at night. We feel like mischievous kids looking at a forbidden world in hiding…and then we panic. 

LW: Because what you’re seeing is so overwhelming, or is there another reason? 

GGP: We somehow feel we can be traced. It’s a mytho-poetic sensation, but it feels real, and we get the hell out. 

LW: Well… don’t think it’s entirely a superstitious reaction. It’s certainly possible that your online activities might be monitored. 

GGP: Spooky, que no? It’s like peeking through the window of the house of a scary neighbor who is fully armed, or who is in the middle of a Satanic ceremony. Now why do we do it? I don’t know. The vicarious experience of extreme otherness is very much part of our times, and we are all guilty to different degrees. We all take part in “extreme cruising.” It’s like a global sport. I am also interested in the so-called “extreme sex” websites, “couples TV,” specialty prosthetics, aficionado porn, toda esa locura. Luckily, I don’t have enough free time to spend doing this. 

LW: Why the fascination with these things in particular? 

GGP: I want to understand why this sleazy culture of vicarious sexuality is actually driving the economy of the net. Why are they so much more successful in terms of capturing people’s imagination than, say, the art world? I am hoping to parody some of their strategies to distribute radical art ideas and images. Our upcoming website will feature a section created by Chicano artist Rene Garcia, a section in which people will get to impersonate their favorite cultural other, stage it at home, photograph themselves with a digital camera, and send us the image so we can include it in a revolving gallery of aficionado performance artists. Their photos will be formatted like loteria cards. It’s like the Chicano performance art version of amateur porn. These are the dark corners of the new technology that I am interested in. I wish to dive into the abject zones of the collective subconscious using new technologies as conceptual traveling devices…. I am not interested in using new technologies purely for purposes of information. I mean, the internet is a great research library, I know, but as an artist I am more interested in the exchange and exploration of poetics, performative strategies, subconscious fluids, and cultural projections.

LW: Do you think that people will participate in this form of interactivity to the same extent that they have with the text-based confessional sites? I know that people’s behaviors can be very extreme during live performances, but I’m curious whether people will actually stage these sorts of tableaux in their own homes without recognizing the ways in which they’re implicated by the images they enact. To conceptualize and stage a tableaux, photograph it digitally, and send it to be posted on a website requires a much greater investment of time on the part of the participant than responding to a live performance. It seems to me that it would require a much greater level of commitment on the part of the person, and that you might tend to get more responses from people who are in some sense motivated by a desire to act in complicity with you, people who would approach these images and actions ironically rather than in the more…I don’t know…vulnerable way that they tend to reveal themselves in the live performance or the confessional narratives. 

GGP: I truly think that people will participate with different degrees of self-consciousness, but since we haven’t done it yet, I can only speculate. One of the characteristics that define our contemporary culture is mindless interactivity and a desire to participate in dangerous games without having to suffer real political, social or physical consequences. One of the false promises of global culture and the internet is that we can all participate in activities, communities and even cultures that are not ours without experiencing ethical consequences. We also live under the illusion that we can finally “talk back.” People actually believe that their e-mails to the editor or the TV producer do make a difference; that their amateur videos can become news; that they themselves, if they have the right equipment or software, or an interesting story to tell, can become instant actors, journalists, citizen celebrities. Talk shows make us believe that appearing on national television is a real possibility for anyone with a shocking secret to tell. Joining a chat room makes people “feel” they are part of an actual community, and often this community is constituted by people you will never meet in person. It’s like a community of the imagination. The impulse of needing to belong to a larger community is very strong nowadays. We all seem to be lonely, disconnected and bored. It’s a generalized malaise in the “global village.” 

LW: Do you think the idea of virtual community and genuine, deep interaction by means of new technologies is entirely impossible? Or are you saying that most of what passes for “community” on the web is too transitory and superficial to deserve to be called that? 

GGP: No, esa, I hope I don’t sound that tapado. I used to be more skeptical about the notion of “virtual communities,” but I have changed. I now believe that for many people who are disenfranchised or who live in culturally isolated or politically reactionary parts of the world, the net becomes a very liberating space, a very meaningful community. In other words, gays and lesbians in the Bible belt or progressive activists in conservative, rural parts of the U.S. can find a community of like­ minded individuals on the net, a community that has been denied to them in the dangerous social sphere that surrounds them. And they can use the net to organize events that take place in the material world. Also, progressive communities can “network” at an international level, and this of course is extremely desirable. I mean, the Zapatistas have created one of the largest virtual communities on the planet. 

But at the same time, there are a lot of people who prefer to relate to others strictly via cyberspace, and that to me is a sociopathic copout. I know lots of people in California who spend more time on the net than they do talking to other humans. My friend, journalist Francis Pisani, told me something very interesting the other day. He says it is not coincidental that America is the capital of cyberlandia, that Americans, especially Anglos, have always been anti-social by nature, and that the internet became the perfect justification for Americans to pretend they have a social life without actually going through the hassle of negotiating space and confronting difference in the “real world.” And I believe that’s also true. It’s complicated. I think that virtuality is forcing us to redefine traditional notions of community, defined by geography, ethnicity, gender and class, and that we are precisely in the middle of this redefinition process. 

I personally see myself as a partial member of multiple communities, and a few of them—only a few—are strictly virtual. I am still too anchored in the material world. At the risk of sounding like an old Bohemian, I still believe that the psychological and cultural complexity of a live conversation at a bar cannot possibly be attained in cyberspace. 

LW: I certainly wouldn’t want to give up the sensory aspects of that experience. Still, I might be the most anti-social American you know, verging on feral, and I’m certainly guilty of using email as a way to avoid dealing with people I’d rather not have to communicate with in person. For people who are socially isolated or for whom interaction in the real world presents genuine obstacles, the net can be a valuable space for creating affirming relationships. 

But of course it’s also a tempting place to hide. I don’t think the impulse toward escapism in American culture is particularly new, just that the net offers different ways to play it out, ways that are particularly attractive to people who feel they’re more in control of their ability to use language and text than they are of other factors in their daily lives. I wouldn’t want to suggest that I don’t believe in the possibility of finding or creating genuine community online, but in terms of my own interactions in virtual domains, I haven’t yet experienced anything that I could call community in any true sense, though I have witnessed instances where particular members of a group found themselves negotiating markedly different sets of expectations about relationships, obligations, and the commitments that did or didn’t ensue from participating in an online conversation. I find the net to be more valuable in fostering and maintaining connections that I’ve begun “irl” than in creating new relationships. What other illusions or false promises do you see in new technologies?

GGP: I am particularly perplexed by the promises inherent in new technologies that anyone can become a part-time artist, a weekend artist, an after-hours artist. If they buy the right software and have a couple of extra hours, they can become instant filmmakers, digital photographers, or performance artists. Content is secondary, commitment is not required, and skills…they can be learned with a program. I hope I don’t sound elitist, but I truly wonder how this affects the work of truly committed artists who put themselves on the line to engage in critical thinking? I still don’t know. I am perplexed by this dilettantism. I am also perplexed by the trivialization of “extreme behavior” in global media. The other day I was watching the MTV show Jackass in which people with no TV experience whatsoever get to engage in superfluous “extreme” acts, guerrilla theater interventions and public pranks for the video camera. One guy walked the streets of a provincial city dressed as the devil screaming anti-God slogans. Someone beat him up real bad and he was laughing. Another guy wearing underwear covered himself with chili con carne, pretending it was shit, and asked passersby for hugs. As soon as people realized they were being filmed they complied with the hug.

LW: The people who made the final edit, anyway. I can’t believe there weren’t just as many people who would have just wanted the camera out of their face, but that wouldn’t make good television. 

GGP: But the weird thing is that the presence of the TV camera gives people the permission to engage in outrageous behavior. One of my upcoming video projects will be inspired by this kind of pop cultural performance phenomenon. I want to go into the streets with a video crew and ask people to impersonate a Mexican for 50 bucks. They can sing, talk or act “Mexican.” We will even provide them with a few props or costumes. I think that people will go for it. 

LW: I’m sure you’re right, and I suspect that a lot of people would do it without even being paid.

GGP: I have to be careful here. By no means do I wish to perpetuate this culture of mindless participation, nor do I wish to make fun of people’s willingness to make fools out of themselves. I wish to continue opening the Pandora’s Box of interracial relations and let those demons and chimeras out. I also want to understand people’s current fascination with the bizarre, with so-called “extreme behavior.” This might actually help me understand my own audiences, and my new relationship with them. What does it mean for them to participate in the spectacle of the brown body on display? What is the new relationship between brown body and white voyeur? Between performance art and pop culture? What is the difference between mindless interactivity and meaningful interactivity? All these are crucial issues for Latino performance artists. 

LW: This seems like a logical extension of your ongoing project in “reverse anthropology.” I’ll be curious about the extent to which people’s willingness to interact will be affected by factors like location, or whether they’ll respond differently depending on the racial composition of the camera crew and the facilitators. 

GGP: You’re right. It won’t be the same to ask a corporate executive in the business district to “impersonate a Mexican” as to ask a tourist at Pier 39, or a drunk yuppie at a trendy Latino club in the Mission. 

LW: Just by the fact of putting themselves in that situation, people are tacitly implicated (indirectly, anyway) in the kinds of dynamics you’re trying to evoke. 

GGP: For the moment I think that the person inviting people to participate, the conductor of the experiment, must be a middle-class looking blond woman to make people feel safer. 

LW: Really? I would have thought that an attractive Chicana, at least if she initially appeared non-threatening, kind of like a Hollywood Latina, would have a very easy time getting people to go along with this. 

GGP: Perhaps you are right. Also if the crew is in costume it might help a bit. We’ll probably try out different options and see what works best. But going back to what we were discussing earlier, I wish to ask you, do you have any interest in “extreme cruising”? 

LW: Only occasionally. For the most part, my online activity is strictly functional or deals with groups and topics that I identify with in some way, all of which are surprisingly mainstream. I know that fringe cultural sites proliferate on the web, but I rarely seek them out. Forms of extremist political expression like militia sites and right wing hate sites terrify me. I’ve read a certain amount of critical work about those types of domains, but I’ve actually never called one up. I guess I’m afraid that if I step outside the circles in which I’ve become’ comfortable on the net—mostly academic and literary sites, mainstream pop cultural sites, commercial zones—I’m going to wind up in a virtual KKK rally. Of course I understand that the internet creates space for a vast range of expression, including political sites that facilitate activist work I definitely support. I certainly understand that there’s a value in studying extreme hate sites on the web, taking the pulse of right wing America, examining rhetoric and strategies in order to better understand the enemies we’re fighting and to come up with more effective tactics for counter hegemonic political work. 

But I come close enough to feeling paralyzed just looking at supposedly mainstream cultural expressions, thinking about where we are as a nation and where we’re going now. I think that if I really picked up the rock, so to speak, and looked at what kinds of things were crawling underneath, something in my head would just snap. Does that happen with you when you visit some of these extremely hostile spaces on the net? Or does it give a kind of fuel to your activism to have such a stark reminder of what it is that you’re working against? 

GGP: Being an uninvited guest in the perverse mindscape of extreme right wing America can cause incommensurable sadness and a sense of hopelessness, especially when you realize how much better organized and equipped they are than we are. But at the same time it fuels my rage. It reminds me of how important the work we do is, especially outside of the artworld and academia. It also reminds me of how close we are to “them,” physically and geographically. When I visit a supremacist website located, say, in California, with members in major cities like San Francisco or LA, it suddenly dawns on me that “they” are not stereotypical rednecks in Idaho—that in fact they are everywhere, and that they may very well be our neighbors, or our audience members. Their children might go to the same school as my son. Traditional notions of us/them, urban/regional, center/periphery are no longer useful to understand our new society.

LW: Especially at a time when the people I used to think of as “they,” the rabid conservatives, are fully in control of “our” U.S. government. 

GGP: It’s true that distinctions between “them” and “us” seem to have become blurry. It’s happening everywhere to different degrees. The side effects of globalization and the much-touted new economy are being felt everywhere, and creating painful new borders between our communities. It seems that the only truly global feature of globalization is the crisis. The global project is by no means “global.” It involves a handful of rich countries from the Northern hemisphere and their elite clients in the Third World, and that’s about it. The rest of us are mere inhabitants of the south side of the digital divide, inconsequential consumers. 

LW: So much for the utopian promises of the digital optimists, even those in the art world and academia. 

GGP: With a few exceptions, the cultural side effects of globalization are not being discussed in the debates around art and new technologies. These debates are often characterized either by an incredible political naivete that equates all forms of interactivity with democracy, or by escapism—a nervous desire to enter into the rarefied zones of technological complexity, where matters of race, gender, identity and privilege are perceived to be irrelevant, where the postcolonial debates seem to be inconsequential. 

With  a  few  exceptions,  the  debates  are  dominated  by  North American and European white guys in their 30’s and 40’s, nice techno­-liberal  guys  who  love  to  publicly  express  their  a-critical  fascination with what new technology can do, with unprecedented special effects. Let’s face it: they often express their obscure scientific theories in a digital esperanto that only 10 people can understand. And when a post­ colonial intellectual or a feminist or a young cyber anarchist grabs the mic, they go: “Shit, not again.” They stand up and leave the room, probably thinking, “I migrated to cyberspace in order to escape from these troublemakers. I created all kinds of border checkpoints so they couldn’t get in, and now here they are.” 

LW: I think part of the problem is that, for the most part, the people controlling the debates don’t live in the middle of the tacit war zone that cities like San Francisco and Seattle are becoming. They aren’t the people dealing with the tangible effects of sili-colonization. They aren’t losing their homes, and they probably don’t think a lot about what the workforce that creates the physical apparatus for all these magnificent gadgets has to go through just to survive in the areas where these beautiful toys get put together. 

Donna Haraway has pointed out that the labor force that assembles- the bits and pieces of new technologies is predominantly female and largely Asian, women caught in the infomatics of domination…. But you’re right that those aren’t the kinds of issues or voices that get heard in the celebratory discourse of new technologies. Surely by now, though, you and Roberto aren’t still the only web-backs crashing the party. How do other Chicano artists and intellectuals respond to these debates? 

GGP: Largely with imagination and humor…. Since we don’t really have access to the new technology, we imagine that access. Chicano technology is imaginary technology. My technological gadgets are illusory. They don’t actually work. My robotic third hand, as opposed to the one of Stelarc, is useless. All it can really do is betray me, deform my features, distort my identity. My identity morphing mask, which can alter people’s ethnic features in a matter of seconds, is just a poetic project…and so are my chipotle squirting jalapeno phallus and my very, very sentimental “robotic bleeding heart.” When Roberto and I proposed to a couple of art and technology departments in chi-chi universities the possibility of actually creating purposeless, poetic robotics, they didn’t know what to do with us. I guess they did not understand our humor. But I really agree with Marcos when he says that no revolution can happen without poetry and without humor. Once I remember, at the MIT artificial intelligence department, they showed me the amazing robots they are creating—one that can actually identify a specific individual when he or she enters the room and the other one (I don’t remember his corny name) that can allegedly engage in a restricted menu of emotional responses through facial and verbal expressions. The poor thing looked like a corny French cartoon of a calf’s face, but anyway, my hosts told me that they had invited all kinds of people to interact with them, mainly Western people connected to science, of course. I politely suggested to my hosts that if they were to invite people from dramatically different cultures and metiers to interact with the robots, they might be in for a big surprise. I suggested they invite shamans, poets and artists from non-Western cultures to play with the robots—say, an aboriginal shaman, a pygmy witch doctor, a Zapatista elder, or a Siberian storyteller. I mean, people who also deal with parallel realities. These people would really chal­lenge their Discovery Channel humanism, que no? 

LW: And maybe short circuit some very expensive technology in the process! It could be that I’m very naive about these issues, but a fair bit of what I’ve seen in the techno-art milieu strikes me as purposeless in any concrete or immediate sense. The issues people are engaging with seem so abstract, or…maybe so familiar. 

GGP: They may seem purposeless and abstract to us, but the extremely expensive gadgets actually do amazing things. Those sensors attached to the body really trigger or alter the behavior of machines or light or sound sources. Those environments can actually “think.” That immersion technology is truly fantastic. But the question is, so pinche what? 

LW: Exactly. 

GGP: The cult of high technology as an end in itself is not interesting enough to me. Although the art technologists deal with incredible conceptual complexity, the actual projects are often quite conservative, politically and aesthetically speaking. We need to ask tougher questions: How are these new technologies affecting and transforming our sense of self, our notions of identity, community, sexuality, memory, race, the body? Who has access to this technology and who doesn’t and why? The question of access is crucial to me. I am all for Chicanos playing in the media lab of the art world, but first we have to be invited, to be allowed in. They have to be willing to engage in a dialogue with us, to accept our irritating questions. It hasn’t happened yet. 

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his three homes have been San Francisco, Mexico City and the “road”.

His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations. His artwork has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT), the Venice Performance Art Week Journal, and emisférica, the publication of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU). Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Lisa Wolford Wylam was a specialist in performance art, theories of acting and directing, and performance ethnography, with a particular interest in the work of groundbreaking theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. She was best known for her involvement with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy and her ethnographic work with US-based performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his company, La Pocha Nostra. A founding vice president of Performance Studies international (PSi), she served as program chair for the 2010 PSi conference, Performing Publics, held in Toronto.