Stylized Dissent

Abstract

For three decades, post-Mexican artist, writer, and activist Guillermo Gomez-Pena has explored border culture, immigration, intercultural issues, extreme culture, and new technologies. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow and performer, teacher, and collaborator with artists and audiences throughout the world, Gomez-Pena is a founding member and director of the radical performance troupe La Pocha Nostra (1), whose fierce works and stylized dissent create a deliberate, active space of pedagogy and performance designed to confront personal and political identities. La Pocha Nostra is a member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, housed at New York University, which, according to its mission statement, is a collaborative, multilingual, and interdisciplinary consortium of institutions, artists, scholars and activists throughout the Americas. (2) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Currently based in San Francisco, La Pocha Nostra incorporates photography and writing as key elements of performance. The following conversation with Gomez-Pena examines the roles of photography in his work; his collaborations with imagemakers; the tension between the two-dimensional photograph and three-dimensional live art; his use of historical, indigenous photography; and his experimental practice of photo-performance, which considers the image as a participant and instigator in live art. I first encountered La Pocha Nostra at an interactive performance in the early 1990s in Pittsburgh, and later as a participant in a 2009 La Pocha Nostra workshop with Gomez-Pena and his longtime collaborator, Roberto Sifuentes. This interview took place on December 5, 2010, in Pittsburgh. JEN SAFFRON: Guillermo, you have told me before that you have an obsession with photography. You mentioned a project of yours called Documented/Undocumented (late 1980s- present) that began this whole obsession. Can you describe what this obsession is all about? GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA: I am primarily a live artist and a writer. Live art--performance art--has been my main artistic practice and, of course, one of the dramas of live art is its ephemerality. It is ephemeral and unrepeatable. That's why at one point I began to think that perhaps video and photography could be prosthetic extensions of my live art. I thought that perhaps the camera could replace the audience, and I began to stage performance pieces for the camera, as if the camera were the audience, in hopes that these cameras could capture the duende [the spirit] of a live performance. This happened in the late 1980s, and since then, what I term photo-performance has been a running parallel activity. There are other running parallel activities, like my passion for radio journalism and audio art, my poetry, my video work--and often all these parallel practices meet, overlap, and intertwine for a while and then separate themselves again. It was around 2004 when I decided to formalize my relationship with photography, which up until then had been completely informal--just working with interesting photographers and looking for surprising convergences between live art and photography. But in 2004 I really began to carefully think it through. I began to ask some epistemological questions about the space between the camera and my body. I also began to think of notions of authorship. In performance photography, who is the author: the photographer who has the option of choosing the frame, deciding which photos to keep and which to get rid of, how to crop them--or the performance artist, who exposes his body/ artifact/map/landscape to the camera in a sacrificial manner? So, I decided to invite photographers I respected to join me in this adventure of looking for a dual authorship. I didn't want to be the mere subject matter of a famous photographer, like Cathie Opie photographing Franco Bean or [Richard] Avedon taking your portrait--I didn't want that. Nor did I want to do what many performance artists do, which is just to hire a very good photographer as a technician and tell them what to do. …