Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The Marquis de Sade was declared, “the fist commandment of art is ‘never to bore,’” and perhaps no other artist of his generation has embodied this sentiment more than Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the Mexican-born performance artist and cultural theorist living in San Francisco. Since the early 1980s Gómez-Peña, along with his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, have been engaged in “reverse anthropology” staging “postcolonial” performances that foreground race and intervene in our cultural fears and desires by focusing on our obsession with the exotic. He deftly navigates the “post-multicultural” world – accelerated by globalization and nation branding – by using elaborate performative and interactive elements that expose (to the audience) their deeply embedded cultural stereotypes and desires for the other. These interactive pedagogical techniques implicate us in the larger context of identity politics, locating us at the crowded intersection of the politics of cultural difference. Such cultural identities have been shaped and defined by global processes that construct new, hybrid identities composed of new and old traditions and relocated through contemporary global art movements. Gómez-Peña’s has also extensively explored the concept of the "border" within the context of globalization and the process of mutual contagion between Mexico and the United States by developing new vocabulary to describe the reality created by the border phenomenon. It is a subject, like the others he addresses, that continues to demand his performative poetics.
Repository Citation
Coombs, Gretchen. "Guillermo Gómez-Peña: A "New Age Shaman" in a Bohemian Theme Park." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 3, 2010, pp. 1–12. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss3/16