From the "Bathroom (Spanglish) Poetry Recital" series, CalArts, 1979. GP in an early PG ritual performance dressed as a shaman "neo-azteca" collaborating with a symphonic cellist. “The birth of Poyesis Genética 1”, GP’s first performance troupe, Cal Arts, LA, 1979. They created performances, installations, public interventions and video artworks that explored “fusing various cultural traditions utilizing performance as a syntactic thread,” and developed an interdisciplinary language that evoked indigenous rituals, blended with sexual and political imagery, personal pathos and iconography from pop culture. The group was comprised of mainly politicized immigrants and foreign students. ![]() Poyesis Genética was Gómez-Peña’s first interdisciplinary arts troupe, formed at CalArts and co-founded with NY choreographer Sara-Jo Berman. "I discovered that as both a 'homeless' and as Mexican, I was invisible to the Anglo population.“ Poyesis Genética GP as a “Mexican Homeless,” spends 12 hours laying on a downtown LA street, 1978. One of the photographs is in the private collection of LACMA. This piece was the first performance by Gómez-Peña fully documented and made visible to the art world. Gómez-Peña called this work, “a metaphor of painful birth into a new country, a new identity- Chicano- and a new language- intercultural performance.” A dog peed on him.Įventually, the artist was evacuated by security guards and thrown into an industrial disposal bin. Over the course of the day, many passersby interacted with the cocooned person/object: talking, kicking, poking, confessing, and verbally threatening. Surely one day we will be able to crack this shell open, this unbearable loneliness, and develop a transcontinental identity.” “Moving to another country hurts more than moving to another house, another face, another lover… In one way or another we all are or will be immigrants. On the wall of the elevator, a text read: Wrapped in batik fabric, the artist lay on the floor for 24 hours. The Loneliness of the Immigrant is an early solo performance piece in which Gómez-Peña transformed his body into a mysterious package, positioned on the floor in a public elevator. GP outside an INS Detention Center, (first site-specific performance) 1978. “Border Walk,” from Tijuana to Los Angeles in 2 & ½ days, 1979. With his head covered in gauze, the artist wore his father’s suit and carried with him a briefcase containing his passport, talismans, and a diary. In early 1979, Gómez-Peña walked from Tijuana to CalArts in Los Angeles in two and a half days. ![]() What follows is an excerpt of the total archives. I also wish to thank Emma Tramposch and Balitronica for being my main accomplices. I fully acknowledge the role of my poetic subjectivity in the construction of this project. ![]() You may consider it an invitation for historians and curators to incorporate our multiple parallel histories in the discourse of contemporary art and for performance artists to engage in similar genealogical projects to think of ourselves as artist/documentarians. It was originally conceived as “a poetic-activist intervention into the historical discourses of performance art. ![]() "Dear reader: This performance chronology is a conceptual artwork in permanent progress.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |