Distributed for Seagull Books
Conversations Across Borders
For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.
Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism, and globalization gone wrong. Conversations Across Borders explores dialogue as a performative act,as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these textspropose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation.
“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.”—VillageVoice Literary Supplement
Table of Contents
Editor’s Introduction
Laura Levin
Part 1: Conversation as...Alternative Mapping
Performing in the Zones of Silence
with Gabriela Salgado
Chihuahuas, Rockeros and Zoot Suits: Notes on Multiculturalism without People of Colour
with Josh Kun
Post-México en X-paña
with Orlando Britto Jinorio
How Does One Reach Manchuria?
with Felipe Ehrenberg
Interlude: Performative Actions
Postcards from Alaska: A Chilling Tale of Performance Artists in the Snow
with Silvana Straw
Tech-ila Sunrise (.txt con Sangrita)
with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Part 2: Conversation as Workshopping Theory
Theatricalizations of Postcolonial Theory
with Eduardo Mendieta
In Search of a Radical Pedagogy
with Laura Levin
Pose and Poseur: The Racial Politics of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Photo-Performances
with Jennifer A. González
There Goes the Virtual Neighbourhood
with Lisa Wolford Wylam
The City as a Bohemian Theme Park
with Gretchen Coombs
Interlude: Performative Actions
Letter for the Year of the Snake
with Rebecca Solnit
Aztechnology: Racism in Radiolandia
with Roberto Sifuentes and Matthew Finch
Part 3: Conversation as...Uncomfortable Inquiry
Tim Miller and Guillermo Gómez-Peña vs Homeland Insecurity
with Tim Miller
El Mad Mex Responds to the Question: Is the Performance Field Racist?
with Friend X
Navigating the Minefields of Utopia
with Lisa Wolford Wylam
Away From the Surveillance Cameras of the Art World: Strategies for Collaboration and Community Activism
with Roberto Sifuentes and Lisa Wolford Wylam
Agreeing to Disagree
with Elaine Katzenberger
Interlude: Performative Action
Encounters with the Right
with Radical Nativist and Republican Barbie
Afterword: A Performance Chronology
Multiple Journeys: The Life and Work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors