Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

‘The Couple in the Cage’ is an example of the power of contemporary Latin American performance art. Made by “El Mexterminator” Guillermo Gomez-Peña and fellow Latina performance artist Coco Fusco, the piece challenged political and racial assumptions about Latin America. Its impact was such that it has been re-interpreted by numerous performance groups, artists and students.

The rabble-rousing effect of the piece demonstrates that performance art can also be political activism. What is more, this link between art and activism could be a critical tool in Latin American resistance to political and economic oppression.

So what is it that makes performance art so dynamic in the dialogue between Latin America, the US and globalization?

A clues lies in the nature of political struggle in Latin America. From tribal pasts and Spanish Conquest to today’s ‘borderless’ free trade and economic imperialism, frontiers and limits are at the centre of Latin American identity.

Borders are explored intelligently through many art forms. In 1960s Colombia the magical Alternative ways of feeling and seeing the world realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s literature challenged intellectual and metaphysical boundaries of logic. He created deliberate friction against culturally imposed Western limits of Cartesian and empirical thought. Novels such as Cien años de soledad asserted alternative ways of feeling and seeing the world.
 
Rewind to Mexico in the 1920s. The Mexican Muralists painted on borders: the walls of cities and galleries. Communist Diego Rivera, commissioned by the Revolutionary Party of Mexico, covered some of the country’s most prominent architecture: the National Palace and the Secretariat for Public Education.

This work was often intended to make symbols of the state apparatus. Awe-inspiring murals on the boundaries of huge government buildings both incorporated and excluded the public: drawing viewers to the art but diverting attention from political affairs within the building.

Yet this ‘border-zone’ was still politically active: like fellow muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’ ‘La Marcha de la Humanidad’, Rivera’s murals attempt to subvert this divide. The depiction of the Revolution at the Secretariat is peppered with contemporary events, personalities and scandals. There are hidden messages and critiques of the institution painted onto its most sacrosanct walls.

Now, however, the political activism of such work is now treated with historical interest rather than contemporary fervour. Yet the issue of borders has not left the region nor its artists. In the twenty-first century, films such as La Zona and City of God explore the unassailable economic boundaries between rich and poor affecting Latin America.

These cinematic explorations focus on story and content as a way of questioning boundaries. Yet the ‘borders’ of Latin America are now complex webs that transcend Artists must deal with contemporary features of boundaries and identity-forming their geographical definition: their very shape and location are in question. The artists must find a form equipped to deal with these contemporary features of boundaries and identity-forming.

This is performance art.

Unlike the genres previously mentioned, performance art is, by its nature, art about borders. It is borderline in every sense of the word: practiced on the margins of society and art (whether very rich or very poor), blurring boundaries between life and artifice. It is stateless and self-renewing; distinguished by its commitment to the indistinguishable.

As such, it offers Latin American artists the perfect opportunity to interrogate personal, national and international relations. The instability of such relations can be pushed and probed by the openness and instability of the art form. No form, materials or audience is pre-decided: your identity and your approach is rebuilt anew with each act of performance.

In 2008, Guatemala-born performance artist Regina Jose Galindo rented an $8000-dollar ‘detention trailer’ from Sweeper Metal Fabricators Corp, a private prison company, and lived there with her 2 year-old daughter and husband for 24 hours. The trailer was installed in Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, on the border with Mexico, where hopeful immigrants and families such as Galindo’s are often detained in such trailers for months on end.

In an echo of reactions to ‘The Couple in the Cage’, visitors to the gallery were appalled that the artist ‘subjected’ her toddler and husband to such endurance. They did all this whilst peering into the trailer from the gallery floor.

Galindo’s audience indignantly enact the silent prejudices which commit innocent detainees to such private prisons. Blaming the Latina, ‘othered’ artist for subjecting her daughter to this confinement, the visitors do not see that they permit this imprisonment: as viewer/voyeurs, and as US citizens.

That Galindo could make the piece so easily is a startling indictment of the private prison system’s confusion of state and vigilante law. As such, ‘America’s Family Prison’ (the work’s title) uses these publicly available forms of repression and imprisonment to stir the American audience.  
It directly forces a consideration of the States’ complex relationship with its Latin neighbours. In 2010, the movement of bodies – and contraband – between Mexico and the United States is more frequent and fatal than ever: in the borderzone of northern Mexico there have been over 20,000 murders in the last ten years.

With ‘real life’ as a tool, performance art tackles the border transgressions problematising Latin American identity through re-enacting them, drawing focus With real life as a tool, performance art tackles the border transgressions through re-enacting them to these events and their effects. Using materials of non-art practices allows performance art to infiltrate and inhabit a political ‘border-zone’ between state, art and legal boundaries. We awaken to the reality that truth is far crueler than fiction.

But what about performance art which struggles with the boundaries within Latin America?

An artist whose work deals with the limits of Latin American selfhood is Belgian-born, Mexico-based Francis Alÿs. His work is slippery to define, based around events or ‘actions’, which are portrayed using video, audio and photography, questioning the strength of protest and manual work in an increasingly distanced, cyber-developed world.

This is detailed in two pieces: ‘Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing’ (1997) and ‘When Faith Moves Mountains’ (2002). In the first, the artist pushes a block of ice around the streets of Mexico City until it melts. This is recorded by a following video camera: sometimes across the street, other times on his shoulder. In the latter, over 400 volunteers with shovels move a sand dune 10 cm in Lima, Peru, exhibited as a ‘making of’ film.

The events are marked by their ultimate invisibility; all that is left is a recording.  It is a damningly honest portrait of ‘work’ in Latin America, where very often, making something does lead to nothing. The pieces support Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that hyper-developed capitalism has replaced ‘work’ – an activity with a fixed product – with continual, productless labour.

The power of this message derives from the ‘doubleness’ of the performance. The first performance is the local people making the action; the second performance being the video of these passing efforts. In showing these recorded communal events in galleries, Alÿs places the viewer/voyeur in the role of distant jefe, enacting the absentee landlordism of contemporary economics and the effect ‘development’ doctrines of ‘First World’ countries, with their technologies and big banks, have on ‘Third World’ labour.

Yet it is ironic that the artist celebrated for investigating local issues is of white Western origins. Alÿs shows how, inversely proportional to Gomez-Peña’s San Francisco spectacles and Other-as-freak-shows, an outsider-in-Mexico can humbly and unspectacularly use performance to highlight daily injustices and conditions of Latin American life. However his prominence – he recently exhibited at the Tate Modern - could also reinforce Gomez-Peña’s assessment of current trends:
 

This trend sees the ‘global elite’ pick a hot culture and channel it for a few months. The trend can also be inverted: this internationalism, like the economic agreements like NAFTA, has opened Latin America to ‘colonisation’ by Western artists who can take advantage of cheaper rent and work space. And, for all these examples of Latin ‘resistance’, the fact remains that many political leaders have willingly exposed their countries to this colonization.

Alÿs’s body of art, interrogating borders from Gaza to Germany, is clearly not motivated by a superficial orientalism. Nevertheless, a doubt remains: does performance art’s transgression and nomadism only accommodate those with the money to travel and explore get a richer experience? Do those who are poor or do not speak the right language remain where they are? Even in Latin America’s art scene, Mexico is dominant as the most rich and most ‘American’.

The one border that performance art is yet to fully transgress is between artisanal work and the ‘international’, ‘professional’ art scene: and this is a border which still excludes an overwhelming silent majority.