Muhlenberg College’s “Center for Ethics” Presents Internationally-Acclaimed Performance Artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Muhlenberg College will present internationally-acclaimed performance artist, writer and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña in his new one-man performance event El Mexorcist 4: Last Mexican Standing on September 12, 2008 at 8:00 p.m. in the Baker Theatre, Trexler Pavilion for Theatre & Dance.Thursday, September 4, 2008 11:22 AM
Tickets are required. They are free to the College community, $10 to the general public and may be obtained from the Muhlenberg College Box Office, 484-664-3333. Additionally, Gómez-Peña will present a free public talk about his career, entitled Multiple Journeys: The Life & Work of Gómez-Peña, at 7:30 p.m. on September 11, 2008, in Miller Forum, Moyer Hall.
About Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Gómez-Peña resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra, a radical arts collective. Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he came to the U.S. in 1978. Internationally recognized, brujo-poeta, theorist and MacArthur Fellow, "El Mad Mex" continues to develop multi-centric narratives from a border perspective and creates what critics have termed "Chicano cyber-punk performances." During these performances cultural borders move to the center while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience members in the position of "foreigners" or "minorities."
To this effect, the artist uses acid Chicano humor, hybrid literary genres, multilingualism, and post-colonial theory as subversive strategies. Shifting between languages, this "border artist extraordinaire" morphs through a series of characters as he bombards audiences with his infamous, border savvy techno-ideology and radical aesthetics. In this journey to the geographical and psychological outposts of Chicanismo, Gómez-Peña also reflects on identity, pop culture, mass media, politics and the impact of new technologies in the new millennium.
Gómez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style of performance-activism, his “theatricalizations of postcolonial theory.” In his most recent book, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, as in his new solo shows, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what’s left for artists to do in a post-9/11 repressive culture of censorship and what he calls “the mainstream bizarre.” Performances of “extreme identity” are familiar to us all through the medium of television (just switch on any reality TV program): Gómez-Peña examines where this leaves the critical practice of artists who aim to make tactical, performative interventions into our notions of race, culture and sexuality.
About ‘El Mexorcist 4: Last Mexican Standing’
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s most recent solo performance, El Mexorist 4: Last Mexican Standing, navigates the contested terrain known as the US/Mexican border. By telling a story of hybrid realities, he acts as a warrior in transnational identity and immigration issues. As ‘El Mexorcist,’ Gómez-Peña assaults the construction of the US/Mexican border that is lined with Minute Men, rising nativism, three ply fences, globalization, and transnational identities.
As a direct response to political and pop cultural phenomena and its effects on art, activism, identity, sexuality and language, Gómez-Peña has been writing, and testing a series of spoken word performance texts. Like most of his performance literature, these hybrid texts suffer from an acute identity crisis. Are they spoken word poetry, performance “monologues,” pop philosophy, art theory, post-colonial thought, or Chicano stand-up comedy? They are 'open texts', works in permanent progress, which means that their publication merely preserves them in one phase of their ongoing development. Some underlying questions are: How and why do we continue doing what we are doing against the backdrop of war, censorship, cultural paranoia and spiritual despair? What are the new roles that artists must undertake? Is art still a pertinent form of inquiry and contestation?
Gómez-Peña’s Career
Gómez-Peña has received the Prix de la Parole at the International Theatre Festival of the Americas (1989), the Bessie Award in New York (1989), a MacArthur Fellowship (1991), an American Book Award (1997) and a Lifetime Achievement Award (Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival, 2000). He has been a regular commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered and Latino USA and has authored eight successful books on performance, border culture and activism.
Gómez-Peña’s performance, installation and video work have been presented at over eight hundred venues across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, Russia, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Argentina. He has presented work at Tate Modern (London), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the House of World Cultures (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona), LACMA (Los Angeles), The Chopo Museum (Mexico city), the Sydney, Withney, Mercosur and Habana Bienales.
About the Center for Ethics
The Muhlenberg College Center for Ethics series 2008: Politics, Ethics and Citizenship is presented in cooperation with the Political Science Department’s Election Series and co-sponsored by the Lectures and Forums Committee, with assistance from the Departments of Art, Media & Communication and Theatre & Dance, and the Muhlenberg Activities Council and the Multicultural Center.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s visit is made possible by the support of the following Muhlenberg College offices: The Center for Ethics, The Department of Theatre & Dance, the Department of Art, and the Office of Multicultural Life.
For more information on this event or other Center for Ethics programs, please visit www.muhlenberg.edu/cultural/ethics.
Muhlenberg College gratefully acknowledges the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation’s support of the Center for Ethics.
