FACES FOR THE NINETIES : ...

Censorship, like borders, is about drawing lines between what (and who) is and isn’t allowed. So it’s fitting that a decade that closes with an American arts censorship imbroglio and the fall of the Berlin Wall has brought to the fore a performance artist whose work is all about such borders.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena, the San Diego/Tijuana-based performance artist who last year received a New York Dance and Performance Award, or “Bessie,” gives voice to the new demographics of North America at the same time he envisions a borderless Utopian future.

In his solo performances and in his collaborations with the San Diego-Tijuana-based Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Gomez-Pena invokes the stigma of several worlds to call attention to the contradictions of social and political boundaries. His argument, simply put, is that if you expose the border (or censorship) for what it is and violate its false limitations, it looses power over you.

Dressed in a necklace of fake bananas, wearing a trinket-laden border patrol jacket and a longhaired wig, Gomez-Pena tells a tale in several languages, covertly changing from one stereotype to the next as he confuses the viewer with their ethnocentric prejudices.

Where decades of performance art have wallowed in conceptual diversions, flirted with self-indulgence and experimented with media gimmickry and spectacle, performance artists of the ‘90s such as Gomez-Pena reject the worn-out distinctions between performance, street theater and gallery art as well as the dichotomy of art and activism. They call upon viewers to do the same. Say goodby to elitist formalism and hello to a vividly politicized performance art in all colors.