The Artist as Citizen: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Felipe Ehrenberg, David Avalos and Judy Baca

Complicated times call for new strategies. In the '80s artists from Mexico, the border region and southern California were illuminating issues of Latino politics. Some were doing more than that by actually employing art strategies to get involved in the binational political struggle. Their issues included the survival of Mexico City in a time of terrible crisis; the outlaw status of undocumented workers in the U.S.; the cultural visibility of Latinos and other ethnic groups in southern California; and the reinterpretation of reality in the borderland region between the two countries. Here San Diego-based scholar and border artist Emily Hicks positions four noteworthy activist artists in the postmodern cultural battlefield. —Eds.

A flamenco surfer surrounded by waves of blood / a tourist donkey cart strategically placed and later perceived as a threat to public safety / a rock concert in the midst of the coffins and debris after an earthquake / a portrait of the man who discovered blood plasma and later died of lack of blood in a Southern hospital.

These images appear in the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Felipe Ehrenberg, David Avalos and Judy Baca. Some artists in Mexico City, Los Angeles and the U.S.-Mexico border region are producing work that is profoundly political and linked to "performance" in its largest sense. Their work may offer a narrow conceptual passageway between the Scylla and Charybdis of performance [art] and mass culture. To negotiate this passageway is to broaden the definition of the artist.

The notion of art as cultural intervention—or what Mexican muralist Arnold Belkin, in his attempt to define Mexican interdisciplinary artist Felipe Ehrenberg, calls "the artist as citizen"—stretches the definition of art beyond even the flexible boundaries of postmodernism. [1]

As the critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, postmodernism has many variants, some that are progressive and others that are not. [2] And yet, it is within the debates of postmodernist criticism in North American and European art journals that performance artists like these are again redefining themselves. Among the features that link their work to a postmodernist critique are: 1) the medium changes according to the requirements of the cultural intervention—it can be community organizing, mural art, journalism, radio, criticism, multimedia performance, etc.; 2) works may be collaborative, even anonymously so; 3) works may be changed or compounded by other artists; 4) the meaning depends on the active participation of a politicized audience.

Most importantly, many North American performance artists have experienced the isolation of small, specialized audiences and the pressure to do more accessible work. Postmodernist critics have christened this dilemma as the problem of high culture vs. mass culture. Artists experience it as a problem of performance vs. entertainment. [3] But consider instead the alternative response of an artist like Felipe Ehrenberg and his project of the reconstruction of Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake. For him, the goal is not to be a pop star, but a responsible citizen/activist. At the moment, his community is Tepito, the devastated neighborhood in the city of his birth, Mexico D.F.

For muralist Judy Baca, who grew up in Pacoima, California, the definition of community includes the relationships of ethnic groups, the interrelationships of social problems, and the question of who occupies a public space. The community for her mural projects began in East Los Angeles, but then expanded to include blacks in South Central Los Angeles, Filipinos in Echo Park and Japanese in Little Tokyo.

For David Avalos, who grew up in National City, California, 20 miles from the U.S.-Mexican border, the creative context is the Chicano community, which he calls "a community outside the law." Using site-specific works and media-art strategies, he explores the notions of "citizenship" and "identity" in relation to the labor provided by the undocumented worker, a "citizen" whose civic rights are systematically denied.

For Gómez-Peña, a performance artist and writer from Mexico City, the community is the border region of Tijuana-San Diego, where he has lived since 1983, and which, for him, represents a microcosm of U.S.-Latin American relations. Through collaborative, interdisciplinary art projects, involving people from both countries, he attempts to create a binational dialogue that supersedes mass-media-produced misconceptions and transcultural fears.

These citizen-artists, involved in cultural projects that often include performance, get excellent media coverage and reach very large audiences without striving to be pop stars. The recent activities of Felipe Ehrenberg in Mexico City have received wide coverage in the international press. A performance by Gómez-Peña appeared in a Louis Malle film on new immigrants to the U.S. that aired nationally on HBO. Baca's Great Wall is perhaps one of the most widely viewed and discussed Chicano murals, and Avalos' donkey cart sparked a national media scandal involving a federal judge. What do these artists have in common?

In a recent site-work, after being authorized by city officials, Avalos brought his own version of a Tijuana donkey cart to the Federal Building in San Diego, where the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) office is located. Traditional Tijuana donkey carts are decorated with hats, serapes and images of Aztec warriors and buxom Indian princesses. Tourists, including middle-class North American families and U.S. military personnel, pose for photographs on the carts. Avalos' cart, instead, is painted with the image of an undocumented worker being frisked by a border-patrol agent. While the traditional carts give the tourist a romanticized taste of Mexico, Avalos' version gives the viewer the opportunity to identify with a daily experience of an undocumented worker. Declared "dangerous" and "anti-American" by a federal judge, the cart was ordered removed immediately. When Avalos refused to remove the artwork, it was confiscated and detained in a storage area of the Federal Building. This resulted both in television interviews and national feature articles in which Avalos was paradoxically allowed to address the social contradictions embodied in the artwork and often avoided by the media, and to expose the authoritarian censorship of the judge. At this point, we can say the piece was completed.

Gómez-Peña creates border stereotypes in order to deconstruct their underlying oppositions: a cholo/punk, a wrestler/shaman, a Latin American general/movie star, a "bruja"/maid. His works involve a continuous recycling of images and texts. A recent text that began as a radio art show on the U.S.-Mexico and the U.S-Canadian borders entitled Border-X-Frontera, later inspired a performance by Poyesis Genética around Avalos' donkey cart in front of Sushi Gallery (San Diego). Another version then appeared on a local cable station. This sparked Cabaret Babylon Aztlán, a multimedia work performed at the Centro Cultural de la Raza. Malle filmed a segment of this version, with the donkey cart as the set, and juxtaposed Gómez-Peña's performance describing thousands of "Waspbacks" illegally crossing the border into Mexico, with anti-undocumented worker statements by Harold Ezell, Western Regional Commissioner of the INS. The same text appeared on the cover of the bilingual art journal La Línea Quebrada, in Uno-más-uno, the most important newspaper in Mexico, and in two art exhibits accompanying an upside-down map of the continent. This strategy of recontextualizing image and texts has much in common with postmodernism. It undermines the sanctity of the single creator, the finished piece, and the work of art as a commodity.

Baca's work, in its mixture of the mural tradition and community organizing, also undermines the sanctity of the single creator. In 1976, Judy Baca began the Great Wall Mural Project, the largest of its kind in the world, in the Tujunga Wash Channel of the San Fernando Valley. Baca envisioned the channel, which had been built by the Army Corps and was being developed into a park, as a wall that could bring the diverse mural groups she had been organizing together at one site. It began with 80 teenagers and nine artists. The mural depicts the history of California, from pre-Colombian times to the present. Images include Tomás Alva Edison; [4] Jeanette Rankin, who opposed WW II; Charles Drew, who discovered blood plasma; David Gonzales, recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor; Pulitzer Prize-winner Gwendolyn Brooks; zoot suiters, athletes and many other recognized and previously unrecognized historical figures. The opportunity to paint murals was not the only benefit for participants in the Great Wall Project. They also received counseling on the draft, sexuality, drugs, incest and other social problems. For Baca, art is merely a catalyst for the regeneration of the community.

In the case of Ehrenberg, cultural intervention took the form of entering the disaster area of Tepito in Mexico City immediately after the earthquake. Ehrenberg took some artists, friends, and his own family into Tepito in order to organize brigades to comfort survivors, who had been left without homes, electricity and social services, and to distribute food and clothing. Volunteers who made up the brigades included psychologists, musicians, teachers, actors, university students and painters.

While the Mexican government prevented supplies from reaching Mexico City by insisting that they go through government channels, Ehrenberg and the Tepitenos began to raise money and opened bank account #228333 at the Banco de Crédito Mexicano. To administer the account, he organized the Committee for the Reconstruction of Tepito, which included community representatives, well-known cultural activists, scientists and specialists in fields from urbanism to finance. Between September 25 and October 1, his group managed to give food, medical attention and drinkable water to nearly 5,000 people a day. On October 6, Ehrenberg organized a "Festival of Life," which included music by rock groups, to celebrate, in Ehrenberg's words, "that we are alive, that Tepito didn't fold, and to be aware that we have to help ourselves." In addition, children's theater, concerts and a library were organized. Citizens of Tepito have recently appeared in the press carrying banners saying "No nos moverán de aquí" ("They won't move us from here"), referring to their desire to reconstruct Tepito rather than be relocated by the government. In a sense, these activities can be considered an epic performance installation, in which an entire city functions as a gallery space.

While the above artists' work shares several of the previously mentioned features of postmodernist critiques, what they do not share with some of those critiques is their ultimate goal: the transformation of social conditions. Socially committed artists commonly have very broad backgrounds, and they point to the other influences on their work as more important than their experiences in art schools.

Ehrenberg was a painter who had worked with Margaret Randall on the legendary bilingual journal The Plumed Horn. After the massacre of students in October, 1968, Ehrenberg and his wife left the country. He lived in England for several years, directing the famous Beau Geste Press. He later returned to Mexico where, during the 1970s, he nurtured both a widespread movement of alternative small-press publications called Neográfica, and the creation of a network of art collectives that opposed the gallery system. In 1982, he ran for office on the United Socialist Party of Mexico ticket (PSUM). Ehrenberg's decision to participate in la reconstrucción was inspired by the work of his brother, who went to Nicaragua during the revolution as a cameraman and joined the southern guerrilla front.

David Avalos is a product of the tradition of political activism in the border region. Jose Montoya, one of the godfathers of the Chicano movement, sees Avalos as a Chicano artist who "hasn't succumbed to the false, hedonistic tendency of so many Hispanics who consider being Chicano to be one of the unpleasant realities of these times, and who have eagerly embraced Reagan's redefinition of our national character...the I'm OK, you're poor, poverty sucks bunch." Avalos, who studied communications at UC San Diego and Stanford, is a self-taught artist and has been, since 1976, a member of the Committee on Chicano Rights, which monitors the activities of the INS in the border region. In 1982, he and a group of artists including Gómez-Peña formed BAW/TAF (Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo). This group includes Chicano, Mexican and Anglo artists, and offers a successful example of multicultural, multidisciplinary artmaking.

Gómez-Peña came to the United States from Mexico City, where he studied linguistics and was a student activist at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM). He entered CalArts in 1979, and two years later cofounded with Sara Jo Berman the Poyesis Genética troupe in order to explore artistic and political contradictions between the United States and Mexico. The troupe toured Europe in 1982 and relocated to the Mexican-American border in 1983. Gómez-Peña's art projects include bicultural journalism for radio and newspapers and binational interdisciplinary art projects involving people from both countries. Both activities proceed from the same set of concerns, but utilize different formats in order to reach different audiences.

Judy Baca attended Cal State Northridge and received a master's degree in art education. Her decision to define herself as an artist came halfway through her career, because she "couldn't align art with her sense of political commitment." Her community organizing as a director of mural projects has resolved this conflict; she has been personally involved with more than 150 murals. Furthermore, her cultural activities in Los Angeles have created a bridge between feminism and the Chicano movement.

In the Mexican and Chicano art worlds, the relationship between art and politics is a much more widely shared reference code. This is particularly true in the case of Ehrenberg, Baca, Avalos and Gómez-Peña, who are bicultural, have identified with the upheavals of the 1960s, and have been involved in social activism outside the art world. In the context of the economic crisis and the earthquake in Mexico, politics and art are clearly connected for many artists in a way that they are not in the art scenes of New York and Los Angeles. When one is of Latino descent living in the border region, confronting everyday violations of human rights, media distortions and the ethnic insensitivity of the general population, one has no choice but to engage in some kind of social/political discourse.

It is unfortunate, but probably true, that the best reaction many North American mainstream artists may hope for is that a painting will sell or a performance piece will be reviewed. This is a less satisfactory response than the attainment of the more ambitious goal of the activist: a profound cultural impact outside of the art world. The question of why many artists settle for less than being understood, and for merely a career, may have something to do with their inability to conceive of themselves in historical terms and therefore to understand the world as a political structure.

The vast majority of North American artists have not experienced the political repression in El Salvador and Guatemala, the fear of invasion by Reagan in Nicaragua, the war against "subversives" in Argentina and the U.S.-Mexico border region, police brutality in Chile or in the Chicano barrios, or the ecological deterioration of Mexico City. Instead, their primary experiences are likely to be art school, art openings, "relationships" and mass culture. Their sense of belonging in the world is mediated by mass-media images. And their problems are "personal," not social. Few have engaged in cultural activism. Those who have most likely have experienced other cultures and other political regimes.

For artists not currently involved in socially committed activities, there may be something to learn from cultural activists. Will art schools encourage students to form multicultural groups and begin to produce a new generation of artist/citizens? There are isolated examples like Rutgers University and UC San Diego, but a mass movement is very unlikely. However, at least we can recognize non-New York, non-master-discourse-packaged art forms in whatever contexts they occur. Mexico City, the border region and the Chicano barrios of California are three such contexts. A multicultural redefinition of the "art world" and a willingness to become fluent in many art languages could facilitate an interchange among artists from a variety of contexts, including those mentioned above and the Anglo art world.

Notes

1. When this article originally appeared, I failed to thank Philip Brookman for his help with information about the work of Felipe Ehrenberg. [return]

2. Fredric Jameson, "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate," Critical Inquiry, January, 1985, pp. 53-65. [return]

3. Jacki Apple, "Commerce on the Edge," High Performance, no. 34, vol. IX, no. 2, 1986, pp. 34-38. [return]

4. Better known in the United States as Thomas Edison. [return]

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Fall 1986.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002