“Our job may be to open up a temporary utopian/distopian space, a de-militarized zone in which meaningful “radical” behavior and progressive thought are hopefully allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the piece. In this imaginary zone, both artist and audience members are given permission to assume multiple and ever changing positionalities and identities. In this border zone, the distance between “us” and “them,” self and other, art and life, becomes blurry and unspecific.”
Guillermo Gomez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña doing what he does best: turning a room into contested territory, making everyone complicit in the spectacle. Look at these images. Bodies arranged, costumed, positioned like evidence at a crime scene where the crime is colonialism and everyone in attendance is holding the smoking gun.
This is the thing about his work at PAI: it’s not precious. It’s not gallery safe or academic safe or anyone safe. He creates what he calls a “demilitarized zone,” but don’t be fooled by the peaceful terminology. This zone is where all the cultural landmines are buried just beneath the surface, and he’s walking around with a metal detector, making sure everyone hears the beeping.
The audience doesn’t get to watch from a comfortable distance. That’s the whole game. You’re in it. You’re implicated. The performers move through the space wearing their hybrid costumes, their constructed identities layered like archaeological digs of American mythology. Wrestling masks meet indigenous regalia meet contemporary street wear. It’s beautiful and grotesque and exactly right.
What Gómez-Peña understands, what makes this work at PAI resonate, is that performance art isn’t about creating beauty or even about creating discomfort. It’s about creating permission. Permission to be multiple things at once. Permission to question which identity you’re performing right now and who benefits from that performance. Permission to admit that the border between self and other, between us and them, was always a convenient fiction maintained by people with guns and real estate.
The temporary utopian space he mentions? It’s there in these images. Not utopian because it’s pleasant, but because for this moment, this hour, this performance, different rules apply. The scripts get flipped. The observer becomes observed. The exotic becomes examiner. And everyone goes home having to reckon with what they saw, what they participated in, what they maybe learned about themselves in that demilitarized zone where nothing was actually safe at all.
