THEATRE
PREVIEW
GUILLERMO
GÓMEZ-PEÑA
Published
in KPBS On Air Magazine August 1990
The cramped, little studio-office says it all
-- in multiple media and in two languages.
There are piles of yellowed newspapers in English and Spanish, racks of
audio and video tapes. The bookshelves
are methodically and bilingually tagged:
Art Magazines/Revistas de Arte, Border Works/Chicano Literatura y
Arte. A skinny strand of smoke climbs
out of the overstuffed ashtray. The Mac
is humming, the phone is ringing. The
artist is in.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña pushes back from one of
three crowded desks in his Sushi Gallery office and apologizes for not being a
better host. As always, he has just
arrived, and is just about to leave.
Keeping "one foot on each side of the border,” the
interdisciplinary artist spends about 60% of his time on the road. "I'm replicating the migratory history
of my people," he says. He grew up
in
Defining Gómez-Peña's art is not easy. Using the border as his artistic laboratory,
he is a radio commentator who produces "audio art," a print
journalist, a poet, a performance artist who's appeared internationally and on
film, co-editor of a bilingual, multimedia arts magazine (La Linea Quebrada/The
Broken Line). All his work is
multicultural, political, experimental and concerned with border issues. His searing, funny, thought-provoking audio
essays can be heard on "Crossroads," National Public Radio's
multicultural newsmagazine (Sundays at
To the casual observer, Gómez-Peña's artistic
range may seem extremely broad, but he considers his work to be concentrated
and focused. "The drastic
separation between journalism and art doesn't exist in
For one so constantly on the move, Gómez-Peña
is relaxed when he speaks, but direct and intense. He is also funny, and rather erudite. His English is impeccable, despite the heavy accent and the fact
that he has learned the language informally in his scant twelve years in this
country. "My job is
language," he says. "My work
immerses me in language. My art and my
journalism is about language. I have to
take seriously the words." In his audio essays, beautifully written and
produced, Gómez-Peña sometimes talks about his personal experiences, as in
"Busted Seven Times," a discussion of his "Chicanization"
and his nasty interactions with U.S. policemen because he "looked
suspicious," which is to say, suspiciously Mexican. "Can you tell a drug dealer from a
performance artist? A repo man from a
Latino journalist? Are you sure?"
He helped to found a collective called the
Border Arts Workshop in 1985, but split off from them last year over
philosophical differences: "Some of them felt it was still important to
work regionally. But I thought there should
be a shift to more international links." As always, Gómez-Peña is true to his word. His current collaborations are bicoastal or
binational. His focus on
"borderization" (rather than "internationalism") keeps him
searching for new models of collaboration.
He's also looking for new ways of making
radio. "The Latino community comes
from a very oral culture; it still looks at the world through radio. What we need on both sides of the border is
a very contemporary radio that speaks to the times. This includes larger formats, radio novellas, multi-lingual
hybrid poetry." Longer works for
"Crossroads" are already underway.
"Norte-Sur," a half-hour audio portrait of how pop culture
reflects North-South relations, was co-produced with Coco Fusco, a
Cuban-American writer from
In a 1988 piece in
L.A. Weekly, Gómez-Peña wrote: "I
live smack in the fissure between two worlds, in the infected wound." Now, he says, "the healing process of
the border must begin."
©1990 Patté
Productions Inc.