In Coco Fusco’s “The Other History of Intercultural Performance”, it was interesting to read the artist’s perspective on the performance piece of The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey in 1993. Collaborating with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, both artists “sought a strategically effective way to examine the limits of the ‘happy multiculturalism’ that currently reigns in cultural institutions, as well as to respond to formalists and cultural relativists who reject the proposition that racial difference is absolutely fundamental to aesthetic interpretation” (145). Along with creating an effective strategy and a response, the artists tied the concept of the cage to “zoos, parks, taverns, museums, freak shows, and circuses” (148) that occurred in the past European and American history. What shocked me the most from this article was the dehumanization of non-whites and the treatment that the audience gave to both Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña during their performance.
Fusco states that the “freak show” concept began with Christopher Columbus, when the explorer brought back few Arawaks; one “was left on display at the Spanish Court for two years” (148). From then on, Europeans and people of white-descent began to display non-white individuals as objects, not as human beings, to bring their fantasies of the “exotic” into reality. On page 154, I was appalled to read that several (or many) museums preserved remains of these individuals. The Hottentot Venus especially made me question the museum’s intentions for preserving her dissected genitals: Why would the museum keep the remains of an individual who has passed away (when she can no longer “exhibit” herself in person)? Wouldn’t this act be considered as inhumane? In terms of mistreatment towards non-whites, the artists themselves have experienced this treatment in a similar yet different way. Fusco recounts of the times when the audience verbally attacked either artist in a harmful or sexual way. There were also times when few audience members approached the artists physically and attempted to perform sexual activities. Even with the guards or zookeepers present, shouldn’t the audience know their limitations? In regards to the audience, how far is going too far?
I'm glad that you put "exotic" in quotations! Indeed, we have to be careful when we use that word and when we create binaries like "us" and "them."
What happens in the US and Europe in the colonial and modern eras, in terms of exhibiting non-Western cultures, is completely inhumane and atrocious. There is no doubt about that. I believe that today most museums and hopefully much of the museum-going public have learned from past mistakes.
Jackie, I think that you bring up some interesting points, which the artists intended to point out as well, about the limits of peoples' behavior. What do you all think of this? Was/is it ever right to exhibit people? How does that play out when exhibiting art and artefacts of non-Western cultures? Is there a difference between art and craft?
In the essay “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” Coco Fusco reflects on performing the role of the “noble salve” in collaboration with performance artist Guillermo Gomez Pena.The performance was meant to create a satirical commentary on the western concept of the exotic, but to the artist surprise to brought to light issue they has not anticipated. The performance was created in reference to the history of ethnographic exhibitions, made popular by Christopher Columbus, humans were being exhibited in museums for centuries as objects from far lands. Fusco and Gomez Pena similarly displayed themselves in a large gold cage where they dressed in “traditional” garb and engaged in “traditional” activities of the fictitious homeland they created called “Guatinau.” What’s comical, yet simultaneously disturbing, is that the audience truly believed that the artist were from a newly “discovered land” and when people found out the island they off the coast of Mexico didn't exist people were furious. I was amazed by the varied reactions from the audience members, the intellectual and artist were quick to critique the performance, Europeans convinced that this was the real deal, children curious about the display and Latin Americans demonstrated solidarity, not only did it vary among region but also depending on class. One of the questions that Fusco posed at the beginning of the article was “Have things changed?” I would argue that Although the ethnographic exhibition of human beings is no longer a common practice in the west, the stereotype of the “exotic” is ingrained in our society, It just manifest in a different manner.
Fusco speaks of how the ethnographic exhibitions served as a sort introductory lesson on non western cultures. “Emerging at a time when mass audiences in Europe and America were barely literate and hardly cognizant of the rest of the World, the displays were an important “education.” These shows were where most whites “discovered” the non western sector of humanity. I like to call them the origins of intercultural performance in the west” (Fusco,149). This reminded me of the goals of Fuscos performance, it was meant to educate the audience about performing the role of the “other”, but it lead Fusco to discover that not much has changed since the time of Columbus and the “freak shows. Fusco cites examples of perverse voyeurism from contemporary documentary film and even draws from her own experiences. This performance defines what performance art should be.
This article basically attacks ethnocentrism and delineates and gives acclaim to "reverse ethnography" by showing an example of two undiscovered Amerindians namved Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco at the Art Department of the University of California, Irvine in 1992. For example, the local health officials were mostly concerned with excrement disposal, a fear of redolent of Orange County's right-wing extremists' characterization of Mexican immigrants as "environmental hazards." This in itself was interpreted as a form of ignorance and racism. For example, in the book "The Predicament of Culture" by James Clifford written in 1988 explains how modernists and ethnographers of the early 20th century projected coded perceptions of the black body--as imbued with vitalism, rhythm, magic, and erotic power, another formation of the good versus the irrational or bad savage. In my opinion, I feel colonized societies or peoples had suffered from so much racism and ignorant treatment of them but I still remain undetermined as to finding a solution to the origins of colonizations and it's effects of racism.
"Experts say he's a political leader!"
Their point is intact here--racism, racism, racism...
Coco Fusco’s The Other History Of Intercultural Performance set off with the inspiration for Two Undiscovered Amerindian Visit. The legacy of performing the identity of an Other, Latin America’s expression of opposition through satiric spectacle and a man lived as an ape on display in Germany gave them purpose. She ruminated her role as a savage behind bars and that of her collaborator Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Their original intent was to facilitate commentary on Western concepts of the exotic, primitive & the Other. Fusco and Guillermo did not anticipate the public to take the performance literally or spot-light the moral implications. They took advantage of their 92nd Biennial invite’s commemoration of the discovery for their time in the cage to serve as a metaphor for ethnographic paradigms, eroticizing rhetoric and their condition. The performance focused less on the artist’s actions and more on the reactions of the audience. The basis for the piece was European & North American practice of exhibiting the indigenous begun by Christopher Columbus. Fusco designated the non-Western shows as the origins of intercultural performance in the West and chronicled their association to various sectors of the art world. She sought to stress the construction of ethnic otherness as per formative and in the body. Fusco’s point is that the practice of appropriating and fetishing the primitive while erasing the original source continues. Fusco and Pena experienced the audience members as having taken on the role of the colonizers. For the performers, the exhibitions dramatize the colonial unconscious of American society and prompted natural history museums to internally scrutinize.
I side with Fusco with the exception that I would modify their ‘lies tell a different story’ to their tell a story in need of telling. I don’t feel that the artists were unethical as stated by The artists’ offering themselves up to the people brought paradoxes, revelations about the museum system, sexual objectification, the humanity of children and my personal understanding of Fusco to the surface. I expected the message to not evade Latin Americans or Native Americans however I being of Native American, Latin American and African American descent, was bewildered that not all peoples were able to pull from history and ascertain the symbolic significance. I’m not the most cultured or educated person but I can’t fathom the behavior. I was disgusted that people took advantage of having two trapped bodies at their disposal and disturbed that a fake could garner the validity of the Smithsonian. I have always felt that in the transition from childhood to adulthood, people lose a sense of wonder, sensitivity and concern for the world. The children showing the adults up further solidified that notion in my mind. I connected with this reading more than any prior because it was quite personal. Having been bullied, being a minority from a low economic status and as a woman who has first hand knowledge of being objectified by someone whom you look to as a teacher, I felt for Coco Fusco. I wasn’t surprised that Gomez-Pena struggled with being reduced to an object. The fact that by virtue of being a woman Fusco was better prepared says a lot about women’s roles and interpersonal relationships. I did a presentation in the illustrator Al Parker. The artist was famous for his American Airline Ads, Ladies Home Journal covers and depicting the male gaze. Women throughout time have been pictured as being the arbiter of societal mores, representing sexuality and mother nature but also as a aesthetic Other. Al Parker’s work for instance spanned the spectrum as I noted that his work almost always had women posed in a physically appealing side profile, hunched over in a fetal reminiscent position and/or seemingly unaware of the attention that they’ve received. Fusco encountered a equally heightened and controlled violence that likens the circumstances faced by women that art pays witness to. You couldn’t pay me to replicate the performance. I give them props for willingly incarcerating themselves. The most poignant of Fusco’s disclosures has to be, “I know I can get out of the cage but I can never escape.” To me in that quotation, she speaks of womanhood and poverty in Latin America but the quotation has an infinite application.
In The Other History of Intercultural Performance by Coco Fusco documents the performance piece she executed in collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Much like the famous Stanford Prison psychology experiment where students fell too comfortably into the rolls of domineering prison guard and tortured prisoners, Fusco and Pena experience a display of too familiar self-entitlement imposed by colonizing nations as they portray fictional “undiscovered Amerindians” from a concocted island off the Gulf of Mexico. It is unclear what is more upsetting, that the “freak show” concept of displaying so called “savages” references past ethnographic exhibitions or that groups of visitors couldn’t separate fact from fiction since as Fusco notes no one asked “about the legitimacy of the map or the taxonomic information” that accompanied the exhibit.
I appreciated Fusco’s breakdown of audience reaction, as she sought to find patterns in visitors by location, gender, and age. Noting the issues visitors in the United States took with the authenticity of these “savages” and if only their skin color was darker of Fusco’s dance more appropriate, then the performance would be truly believable. That someone had the audacity to state that the piece “failed if the public misread it” is simply proof of Western ignorance, that the failed reading of the piece was exactly why the piece was successful since it points to how pervasive racism and colonialism has been to Western culture. My favorite anecdote is when she mentions Barbara Kruger “charging out of the gallery as soon a she read the chronology of the human display.”
More upsetting is the difference in which Fusco and Pena experienced the issue of objectification as the performance traveled around the world. She notes that Pena found it more difficult and that her “experiences as a woman had prepared me to shielf myself psychologically from the violence of public objectification.” I feel this is such an unbelievably successful performance piece since it manages, despite its loud presentation, to be so nuanced in meaning.
On a random note: This guy in my bio lab class was spouting off on some anti-Obama movie called 2016 in class the other day after the debates. He was saying that Obama has ushered in some sort of social justice campaign that is undermining everything America stands for. Something along the lines of “We have been taking for years, you know we took from Indians and from Black people…” and he went on and on about how Obama was creating this apologetic environment that was going to “F*** us over and ruin American since Iran is going to nuke us now that we are weak.” So 20 years later, here we are spouting the same c**p.
How can anyone not take one history class and not feel bad for all the atrocities white dominant western culture has brought on the world?
I don’t think it’s surprising he was a heterosexual white male in a cut off tank either.
Appropriate gif is appropriate: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m42m4fkQMw1qchhhqo1_500.gif
Through this article, we learn directly from the artist involved in the action. Coco Fusco, one of the artists involved, explains how "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…" came about and how we came to view "the other" in relation to how the "the other" was presented by people like Christopher Columbus to the Europeans. The other artist involved is Guillermo Gomez Pena, together with Fusco they present themselves to the public, from inside a cage as specimens, undiscovered peoples with uniquely contemporary tasks like "sewing voodoo dolls and lifting weights to watching television and working on a laptop computer" (145). It was interesting to read about how the idea came about and how in a way they made fun of how previous indigenous peoples have been and continue to be presented throughout history as inferior and to the public at museums, more specifically natural history museums. It is also ironic that the performance while poking fun at this objectification also opens up the possibility of the objectification of the artists doing the performance by contemporary viewers and visitors of the exhibition. We see that people now as they did in the times of Columbus continue to be intrigued by the exotic and the unknown, wanting to learn more about these "people". What is curious is that the authenticity of what is claimed is not questioned. People really believed that these were indigenous peoples and not artists or actors pretending to be what they claimed. I imagine that it would be easier to believe while displayed at the natural history museums but not so much at the art museums. Still, from the artists recollections, it seems that most believed that the performance was authentic.
In the article "A Savage Performance" by Diana Taylor, she discusses the performance entitled "The Other History of Intercultural Performance" by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena. It seemed a little comical to initially read that there had been a post in a local newspaper about a new tribe being found in the Amazon. It seems that many spectators were easily fooled and could not distinguish that this performance was just that. For me it was a bit difficult to fathom such vulnerability between the museum visitors and the artists. Being exposed to an audience in such a manner seemed too unreal, but I feel that they perfectly represented the vulnerability and lack of proper representation of many indigenous groups.
Interestingly the performance was an "in your face" representation of many issues concerning the way indigenous people are represented in history, in addition to the way indigenous life is portrayed in museums. Taylor states, "The performance challenged the way history and culture are packaged, sold, and consumed within hege-monic structures" (Taylor, 164). This performances exemplifies and challenges the information that we know to be "historical facts" about indigenous people.
In Coco Fusco’s “The Other History of Intercultural Performance”, it was interesting to read the artist’s perspective on the performance piece of The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey in 1993. Collaborating with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, both artists “sought a strategically effective way to examine the limits of the ‘happy multiculturalism’ that currently reigns in cultural institutions, as well as to respond to formalists and cultural relativists who reject the proposition that racial difference is absolutely fundamental to aesthetic interpretation” (145). Along with creating an effective strategy and a response, the artists tied the concept of the cage to “zoos, parks, taverns, museums, freak shows, and circuses” (148) that occurred in the past European and American history. What shocked me the most from this article was the dehumanization of non-whites and the treatment that the audience gave to both Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña during their performance.
ReplyDeleteFusco states that the “freak show” concept began with Christopher Columbus, when the explorer brought back few Arawaks; one “was left on display at the Spanish Court for two years” (148). From then on, Europeans and people of white-descent began to display non-white individuals as objects, not as human beings, to bring their fantasies of the “exotic” into reality. On page 154, I was appalled to read that several (or many) museums preserved remains of these individuals. The Hottentot Venus especially made me question the museum’s intentions for preserving her dissected genitals: Why would the museum keep the remains of an individual who has passed away (when she can no longer “exhibit” herself in person)? Wouldn’t this act be considered as inhumane? In terms of mistreatment towards non-whites, the artists themselves have experienced this treatment in a similar yet different way. Fusco recounts of the times when the audience verbally attacked either artist in a harmful or sexual way. There were also times when few audience members approached the artists physically and attempted to perform sexual activities. Even with the guards or zookeepers present, shouldn’t the audience know their limitations? In regards to the audience, how far is going too far?
I'm glad that you put "exotic" in quotations! Indeed, we have to be careful when we use that word and when we create binaries like "us" and "them."
ReplyDeleteWhat happens in the US and Europe in the colonial and modern eras, in terms of exhibiting non-Western cultures, is completely inhumane and atrocious. There is no doubt about that. I believe that today most museums and hopefully much of the museum-going public have learned from past mistakes.
Jackie, I think that you bring up some interesting points, which the artists intended to point out as well, about the limits of peoples' behavior. What do you all think of this? Was/is it ever right to exhibit people? How does that play out when exhibiting art and artefacts of non-Western cultures? Is there a difference between art and craft?
In the essay “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” Coco Fusco reflects on performing the role of the “noble salve” in collaboration with performance artist Guillermo Gomez Pena.The performance was meant to create a satirical commentary on the western concept of the exotic, but to the artist surprise to brought to light issue they has not anticipated. The performance was created in reference to the history of ethnographic exhibitions, made popular by Christopher Columbus, humans were being exhibited in museums for centuries as objects from far lands. Fusco and Gomez Pena similarly displayed themselves in a large gold cage where they dressed in “traditional” garb and engaged in “traditional” activities of the fictitious homeland they created called “Guatinau.” What’s comical, yet simultaneously disturbing, is that the audience truly believed that the artist were from a newly “discovered land” and when people found out the island they off the coast of Mexico didn't exist people were furious. I was amazed by the varied reactions from the audience members, the intellectual and artist were quick to critique the performance, Europeans convinced that this was the real deal, children curious about the display and Latin Americans demonstrated solidarity, not only did it vary among region but also depending on class. One of the questions that Fusco posed at the beginning of the article was “Have things changed?” I would argue that Although the ethnographic exhibition of human beings is no longer a common practice in the west, the stereotype of the “exotic” is ingrained in our society, It just manifest in a different manner.
ReplyDeleteFusco speaks of how the ethnographic exhibitions served as a sort introductory lesson on non western cultures. “Emerging at a time when mass audiences in Europe and America were barely literate and hardly cognizant of the rest of the World, the displays were an important “education.” These shows were where most whites “discovered” the non western sector of humanity. I like to call them the origins of intercultural performance in the west” (Fusco,149). This reminded me of the goals of Fuscos performance, it was meant to educate the audience about performing the role of the “other”, but it lead Fusco to discover that not much has changed since the time of Columbus and the “freak shows. Fusco cites examples of perverse voyeurism from contemporary documentary film and even draws from her own experiences. This performance defines what performance art should be.
This article basically attacks ethnocentrism and delineates and gives acclaim to "reverse ethnography" by showing an example of two undiscovered Amerindians namved Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco at the Art Department of the University of California, Irvine in 1992. For example, the local health officials were mostly concerned with excrement disposal, a fear of redolent of Orange County's right-wing extremists' characterization of Mexican immigrants as "environmental hazards." This in itself was interpreted as a form of ignorance and racism. For example, in the book "The Predicament of Culture" by James Clifford written in 1988 explains how modernists and ethnographers of the early 20th century projected coded perceptions of the black body--as imbued with vitalism, rhythm, magic, and erotic power, another formation of the good versus the irrational or bad savage. In my opinion, I feel colonized societies or peoples had suffered from so much racism and ignorant treatment of them but I still remain undetermined as to finding a solution to the origins of colonizations and it's effects of racism.
ReplyDelete"Experts say he's a political leader!"
Their point is intact here--racism, racism, racism...
Coco Fusco’s The Other History Of Intercultural Performance set off with the inspiration for Two Undiscovered Amerindian Visit. The legacy of performing the identity of an Other, Latin America’s expression of opposition through satiric spectacle and a man lived as an ape on display in Germany gave them purpose. She ruminated her role as a savage behind bars and that of her collaborator Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Their original intent was to facilitate commentary on Western concepts of the exotic, primitive & the Other. Fusco and Guillermo did not anticipate the public to take the performance literally or spot-light the moral implications. They took advantage of their 92nd Biennial invite’s commemoration of the discovery for their time in the cage to serve as a metaphor for ethnographic paradigms, eroticizing rhetoric and their condition. The performance focused less on the artist’s actions and more on the reactions of the audience. The basis for the piece was European & North American practice of exhibiting the indigenous begun by Christopher Columbus. Fusco designated the non-Western shows as the origins of intercultural performance in the West and chronicled their association to various sectors of the art world. She sought to stress the construction of ethnic otherness as per formative and in the body. Fusco’s point is that the practice of appropriating and fetishing the primitive while erasing the original source continues. Fusco and Pena experienced the audience members as having taken on the role of the colonizers. For the performers, the exhibitions dramatize the colonial unconscious of American society and prompted natural history museums to internally scrutinize.
ReplyDeleteI side with Fusco with the exception that I would modify their ‘lies tell a different story’ to their tell a story in need of telling. I don’t feel that the artists were unethical as stated by The artists’ offering themselves up to the people brought paradoxes, revelations about the museum system, sexual objectification, the humanity of children and my personal understanding of Fusco to the surface. I expected the message to not evade Latin Americans or Native Americans however I being of Native American, Latin American and African American descent, was bewildered that not all peoples were able to pull from history and ascertain the symbolic significance. I’m not the most cultured or educated person but I can’t fathom the behavior. I was disgusted that people took advantage of having two trapped bodies at their disposal and disturbed that a fake could garner the validity of the Smithsonian. I have always felt that in the transition from childhood to adulthood, people lose a sense of wonder, sensitivity and concern for the world. The children showing the adults up further solidified that notion in my mind. I connected with this reading more than any prior because it was quite personal. Having been bullied, being a minority from a low economic status and as a woman who has first hand knowledge of being objectified by someone whom you look to as a teacher, I felt for Coco Fusco. I wasn’t surprised that Gomez-Pena struggled with being reduced to an object. The fact that by virtue of being a woman Fusco was better prepared says a lot about women’s roles and interpersonal relationships. I did a presentation in the illustrator Al Parker. The artist was famous for his American Airline Ads, Ladies Home Journal covers and depicting the male gaze. Women throughout time have been pictured as being the arbiter of societal mores, representing sexuality and mother nature but also as a aesthetic Other. Al Parker’s work for instance spanned the spectrum as I noted that his work almost always had women posed in a physically appealing side profile, hunched over in a fetal reminiscent position and/or seemingly unaware of the attention that they’ve received. Fusco encountered a equally heightened and controlled violence that likens the circumstances faced by women that art pays witness to. You couldn’t pay me to replicate the performance. I give them props for willingly incarcerating themselves. The most poignant of Fusco’s disclosures has to be, “I know I can get out of the cage but I can never escape.” To me in that quotation, she speaks of womanhood and poverty in Latin America but the quotation has an infinite application.
ReplyDeleteIn The Other History of Intercultural Performance by Coco Fusco documents the performance piece she executed in collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Much like the famous Stanford Prison psychology experiment where students fell too comfortably into the rolls of domineering prison guard and tortured prisoners, Fusco and Pena experience a display of too familiar self-entitlement imposed by colonizing nations as they portray fictional “undiscovered Amerindians” from a concocted island off the Gulf of Mexico. It is unclear what is more upsetting, that the “freak show” concept of displaying so called “savages” references past ethnographic exhibitions or that groups of visitors couldn’t separate fact from fiction since as Fusco notes no one asked “about the legitimacy of the map or the taxonomic information” that accompanied the exhibit.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated Fusco’s breakdown of audience reaction, as she sought to find patterns in visitors by location, gender, and age. Noting the issues visitors in the United States took with the authenticity of these “savages” and if only their skin color was darker of Fusco’s dance more appropriate, then the performance would be truly believable. That someone had the audacity to state that the piece “failed if the public misread it” is simply proof of Western ignorance, that the failed reading of the piece was exactly why the piece was successful since it points to how pervasive racism and colonialism has been to Western culture. My favorite anecdote is when she mentions Barbara Kruger “charging out of the gallery as soon a she read the chronology of the human display.”
More upsetting is the difference in which Fusco and Pena experienced the issue of objectification as the performance traveled around the world. She notes that Pena found it more difficult and that her “experiences as a woman had prepared me to shielf myself psychologically from the violence of public objectification.” I feel this is such an unbelievably successful performance piece since it manages, despite its loud presentation, to be so nuanced in meaning.
On a random note:
This guy in my bio lab class was spouting off on some anti-Obama movie called 2016 in class the other day after the debates. He was saying that Obama has ushered in some sort of social justice campaign that is undermining everything America stands for. Something along the lines of “We have been taking for years, you know we took from Indians and from Black people…” and he went on and on about how Obama was creating this apologetic environment that was going to “F*** us over and ruin American since Iran is going to nuke us now that we are weak.” So 20 years later, here we are spouting the same c**p.
How can anyone not take one history class and not feel bad for all the atrocities white dominant western culture has brought on the world?
I don’t think it’s surprising he was a heterosexual white male in a cut off tank either.
Appropriate gif is appropriate:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m42m4fkQMw1qchhhqo1_500.gif
Through this article, we learn directly from the artist involved in the action. Coco Fusco, one of the artists involved, explains how "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…" came about and how we came to view "the other" in relation to how the "the other" was presented by people like Christopher Columbus to the Europeans. The other artist involved is Guillermo Gomez Pena, together with Fusco they present themselves to the public, from inside a cage as specimens, undiscovered peoples with uniquely contemporary tasks like "sewing voodoo dolls and lifting weights to watching television and working on a laptop computer" (145). It was interesting to read about how the idea came about and how in a way they made fun of how previous indigenous peoples have been and continue to be presented throughout history as inferior and to the public at museums, more specifically natural history museums. It is also ironic that the performance while poking fun at this objectification also opens up the possibility of the objectification of the artists doing the performance by contemporary viewers and visitors of the exhibition. We see that people now as they did in the times of Columbus continue to be intrigued by the exotic and the unknown, wanting to learn more about these "people". What is curious is that the authenticity of what is claimed is not questioned. People really believed that these were indigenous peoples and not artists or actors pretending to be what they claimed. I imagine that it would be easier to believe while displayed at the natural history museums but not so much at the art museums. Still, from the artists recollections, it seems that most believed that the performance was authentic.
ReplyDeleteIn the article "A Savage Performance" by Diana Taylor, she discusses the performance entitled "The Other History of Intercultural Performance" by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena. It seemed a little comical to initially read that there had been a post in a local newspaper about a new tribe being found in the Amazon. It seems that many spectators were easily fooled and could not distinguish that this performance was just that. For me it was a bit difficult to fathom such vulnerability between the museum visitors and the artists. Being exposed to an audience in such a manner seemed too unreal, but I feel that they perfectly represented the vulnerability and lack of proper representation of many indigenous groups.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly the performance was an "in your face" representation of many issues concerning the way indigenous people are represented in history, in addition to the way indigenous life is portrayed in museums. Taylor states, "The performance challenged the way history and culture are packaged, sold, and consumed within hege-monic structures" (Taylor, 164). This performances exemplifies and challenges the information that we know to be "historical facts" about indigenous people.