Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas ed. by Coco Fusco (review)

Reviews toward making visible the complex interrelations of race and non-normative sexuality that inform performance art today. COCO FUSCO, ed, Corpus DeJecti: Perfonnance Art of the Americas, London: Routledge , 2000. Pp. 307, illustrated. $85.00 (Hb); $24.99 (Pb). Reviewed by Lisa Wolford, Bowling Green State University The work of Cuban-American scholar, curator, and performance artist Coco Fusco is grounded in efforts to challenge the invisibility and erasure of contributions by Latino/a performance artists and other artists of color. Fusco's 1995 essay "Performance and the Power of the Popular" contests what she describes as a flagrantly Eurocentric genealogy of avant-garde performance that "lends credence to the assumption that American artists of color started doing performance thanks to the multicultural policies of the 1980s" (160). In Corpus Delecli, Fusco assembles a range of materials that provide a rich overview of performance practices by Latino artists throughout the Americas, effectively calling attention to significant bodies of work overlooked in predominantly Euro-Arnerican constructions of the avant-garde. Fusco's critical aim in Corpus De/ec(i is ambitious and multifaceted, as outlined in her introduction to the volume. In selecting pieces for the collection , Fusco "sought to unite scholarly and creative interventions, to juxtapose performance by Latinos in Latin America, the US and Europe, and to bring together perspectives on peffonnance that derived from visual artists' traditions as well as from theater so that body art, street actions and stage work could be compared and contrasted" (3). In addition to her efforts to "break the tropicalist stereotypes about Latin American performance" (2), Fusco contests what she sees as an ethnographic focus in Latino studies, arguing that this has led scholars to overlook works that don't fit a particular sociological agenda and has also fostered a tendency to ghettoize Latino artists by identifying Latin American cultural production primarily with Boal-influenced agitprop work (4). Fusco challenges conventions of academic writing that exclude artists from criticaldiscussions of their own work, judging this exclusion "particularly ironic, given how much effort has been made in the field of performance studies to analyze the power dynamics of conservative anthropological approaches that suppress, marginalize or objectify the subjects of study" (4). Corpus Delecli is divided into three sections, each of which includes sustained critical essays on performance movements or works by a single artist, along with excerpts from performance texts, photographic documentation, and brief descriptions of live art. Contributions by artists such as Cesar Martinez and Lotty Rosenfeld, while extremely brief, are remarkable in the extent to REVIEWS which they articulate the critical positions that inform the artists' work, offering persuasive evidence for Fusco's assertion that artists should not be excluded from critical discussion of their own practice. Longer essays by Maris Bustamante, Aida Damian Menendez, and Leandro Soto detail the artists ' respective practices and contextualize the work in light of broader social and cultural movements. Given the breadth of the collection and the effort to touch on works by as many artists as possible, script excerpts and performance descriptions are for the most part quite brief. While scripts by several of the artists whose work is referenced in Corpus Delecti (such as Carmelita Tropicana, Luis Alfaro, Guillermo G6mez-Pena, and Fusco in collaboration with Nao Bustamante) are readily available in publication, the evanescent nature of many of the pieces discussed, as well as the unavailability of texts for other script-based performances, marks a clear need for further publications in this area. Thc first section of Corpus Delecti focuses on cabaret performance. While the critical essays in this section deal primarily with cabaret pieces by North American performers, the opening essay, by Silvia Pellarolo, examines the ways in which the persona of Eva Per6n cited constructions of femininity made recognizable to the Argentine public through tango and melodrama, "her performing body an icon which [... J fulfilled vicariously collective desires of representation and agency" (23). Pellarolo's essay resonates intriguingly with Raquel Mendieta Costa's "Exotic Exports: The Myth of the Mulatta." ,Mendieta Costa considers the ways in which fiction and popular entertainment worked to solidify the image of the desirable and highly sexualized mulatta. She traces the eroticization of mixed...