Performance and Revenge

Abstract

In the so-called global era, radical performance artists, whose work is often defined through its use of the human body, are left without a medium. Or perhaps on the contrary, they have all too much to work with. As Gómez-Peña has described, mainstream cultural production is now so saturated with extreme images of violence and sex, as well as the revelation of what were once considered transgressive behaviors and bodies, that the work of performance artists risks merely blending into the “mainstream bizarre.” As suggested in the previous chapter, the riddle of corporeal difference in many narratives of disability, and in the structure of the traditional freak show, operates primarily through the reader’s or spectator’s desire for access to the truth—that is, to the solution of the riddle. If riddles point to a history of the racist categorization of bodies, Mario Vargas Llosa’s and David Toscana’s novels together shift the ground from which a given body might interrogate such categories. Yet in the contemporary culture to which Guillermo Gómez-Peña refers, the space of potential interrogation seems to have narrowed; radical difference and marginal identities are commodified, and the “authentic” slides into hip simulation. The bodies of the “mainstream bizarre” tell no riddles, for apparently their representations leave nothing unrevealed and are quickly replaced by others of equal or greater shock value.

The mainstream bizarre has effectively blurred the borders between pop culture, performance, and “reality.” The new placement of other borders, between audience and performer, between the surface and the underground, between marginal identities and fashionable trends is still unclear.

—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno

Quería vengarme, pero en este negocio la venganza es un lujo que uno no puede darse [I wanted to avenge myself, but in this business revenge is an unaffordable luxury].¹

—Naief Yehya, “La gente de látex”