Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (review)

To performance art devotees, Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a superhero of sorts. Despite his ongoing attempts to de-romanticize his positioning as a rebel artist, it is not hard to find yourself cheering after reading one of his books. In these works, which are composed as experimental collages of performance photos and texts, Gómez-Peña presents himself as the consummate border artist, working to destabilize both purist and tourist conceptions of cultural identity while simultaneously promoting intercultural understanding across shifting boundaries of difference. In his celebrated performance art pieces, this complex negotiation is played out in cheeky acts of translation and mistranslation, with performance personae making up words, switching accents, blending languages, and ultimately ending up in an argot that can be described neither as English nor Spanish.

In his recent book, Ethno-Techno, Gómez-Peña updates his signature approach by rethinking the role of the artist as cultural translator in the "dark forest of the twenty-first century" (282). At the center of his concerns is the need for artists to construct a new language for oppositional politics—even a new language for naming the world—in response to the emergence of two disturbing realities: the first is a condition he calls "the mainstream bizarre," and the second, the cartographies of racism and fear in post-9/11 America. We are now witnessing, he argues, a repackaging of the "radical," where consuming edgy products like MTV and iPods is couched in the language of countercultural revolution. Here, in the age of "corporate multiculturalism," the border has been commodified as style, and performance artists compete with a wide range of mainstream entertainments that claim to be interactive and transgressive (shows like Fear Factor and Extreme Makeover immediately come to mind). Gómez-Peña reflects on this development in "Brownout 2," one of the powerful performance scripts included in the book. "What does 'radical behavior' mean after Howard Stern," he asks, "Jerry Springer, Bin Laden, Ashcroft, Cheney, / six-year-old serial killers in the heartland of America, a First World Banana Republic . . . Florida, / tampering with electoral ballots, / an AA theological cowboy running the so-called 'free world' / as if he were directing a spaghetti western in the wrong set?" (214).

In this brave new world where spectacle reigns over content, where opinions stand in for action, and where political statements need not be reconciled with the facts at hand, language seems to have slipped out from under us. We need to retrain our ears to hear the subtle differences between words that turn Arabs into terrorists and critics into traitors. These ostensibly benign mistranslations prop up the ideology and fantasy of democracy. Gómez-Peña explains: "If only I had known the difference / between desire and redemption / between political correctness and personal computers / between us and US / between humanity and mankind" (196). The relationship between language and political manipulation is discussed in the fascinating e-mail correspondence between Lisa Wolford and Gómez-Peña included in the book, which reflects on the chilling "paradigm shift" (271) that took place in the months after 9/11. In this context, they explain, the words "radical" and "revolutionary" take on yet another set of meanings as they assume the "demonizing" cast of "the Bush doctrine and the Patriot Act" (273).

But perhaps the most important intervention in Ethno-Techno is the articulation of an accessible critical pedagogy designed to re-politicize language and art. This is, of course, where performance art comes in. As a language that communicates across borders and uses the live body to invest signs with new meanings, performance art is uniquely able to talk back to a culture that is "eating away at distinctions between multiculturalism, transculturalism, and interculturalism" (Elaine Peña xxiii). Although this emphasis on critical pedagogy can be found in each section of Ethno-Techno, which include essays/chronicles, radio texts...