Artists Behind Bars : Exhibit at UCI Puts Caged Aborigines in Their ‘Natural Habitat’

Guillermo Gomez-Pena stroked his mustache, pulled on a cigarette and offered an assessment of the work.

“This kind of art is not uplifting,” he said, waving his hand in a dismissive motion. “It’s propaganda. It’s incriminating.”

The work in question was his own, but the opinion was not. Gomez-Pena was taking on the role of a skeptical observer of “The Year of the White Bear: Take One,” a performance art piece that he and writer-artist Coco Fusco are offering at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Wednesday.

Gomez-Pena, winner last year of a coveted MacArthur Foundation fellowship, was play-acting for the benefit of a small group of UCI students, preparing them for possible reactions to the piece. The students are serving as docents (“zoo guards,” the artist calls them) during the performances, answering questions and fielding possible complaints while maintaining the “fiction” of the piece.

That fiction is this: Fusco and Gomez-Pena are aborigines from the Caribbean island of Guatinau, overlooked during the European conquest of the Americas, and now--amid 500th-anniversary celebrations of Columbus’ arrival in North America--they’ve broken their isolation to demand that they be officially “discovered.” During the three days of the performance, they will be displayed in a cage in their “natural habitat.”

They entered the cage Monday morning and will remain until Wednesday night. During that time, they will be let out--always on leash--only to use the restroom and to attend a reception in the gallery. They will stay in the cage even when the gallery is closed.

Inside the cage, accouterments of their civilization include “traditional” artifacts, such as carvings and musical instruments, mixed with the flotsam and jetsam of Western industrial civilization--a TV and VCR and other technological gizmos that supposedly washed ashore on their island over the years. Costumes worn by the artists are a similarly eclectic mix: his look combines Aztec dress with bandanna and shades, hers boasts a beauty-pageant sash that declares her “Miss Discovery, 1492.”

Observers are treated to a variety of “authentic rituals,” Gomez-Pena said in an interview at the university, ranging from “playing traditional instruments to writing on a laptop computer.” Visitors can feed the artists or drop change into the donation box and activate some native dance or traditional storytelling, in a language that combines bits of Spanish with a made-up tongue.

The performance is a bit of an extended joke, a sly bit of fun and parody, but the underlying intentions are serious, the artists say. The project, said Gomez-Pena, is “an attempt to participate in the debate over Columbus’ legacy. What does it mean to this country at a time when identity and race are very touchy issues?” The Irvine performance opens a yearlong project, which will include visits to several sites in the United States before moving to Madrid and possibly London.

Displaying themselves in cages is an idea that Fusco and Gomez-Pena drew from a practice of the 19th Century, whereby “savages” from non-European cultures were exhibited in zoos, public parks, world’s fairs and salons of the wealthy, sometimes in cages and sometimes in so-called “living dioramas.”

While the practice of actually displaying humans in cages has disappeared, the artists argue it has lingered in more seemingly “benign” forms, through ethnographic films, American Indian tourist attractions, even the traditionally garbed Indian making tortillas in the window of a Mexican restaurant. Even the vaunted multicultural movement comes under fire from the artists.

“The illusion of authentic cultures exhibited and transparently understood continues to circulate stereotypes,” Fusco said. “These myths (about other cultures) are still being recycled, and we still need to exorcise them.”

Alien cultures are objectified by both ends of the political spectrum, from the untamed savage imagined by the political right, to the noble savage glorified by the political left, Fusco said. That polarity is reflected in the debate that has accompanied observance of the quincentennial of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, a debate that has largely been “very reductive, very schematic,” Fusco believes.

“This has become the subject of the year for the art world,” Fusco said, saying that artists are wise to use the media spotlight afforded by coverage of the quincentennial to focus on complex issues of racial identity and conflict, on the American Indian condition, on political correctness, on the notion of “history from the viewpoint of the arriver.”

These are issues that both artists have tackled throughout their careers. San Diego resident Gomez-Pena received his $230,000 MacArthur Foundation grant as a result of his writings and performances centered on issues of the U.S.-Mexican border (he is a founding member of the Border Arts Workshop). Fusco, from New York, has written and lectured widely on cultural politics. The two began collaborating in 1989.

“The Year of the White Bear” takes its title from a poem written by a native of what is now Colombia, a poem that reflects first-hand on the initial contact between indigenous Americans and the conquering Spanish (called “white bears” by the poet). In addition to addressing age-old issues of cultural conflict, the Irvine piece also makes some specific reference to racial tensions between Latinos and whites in Orange County, where the “Mexican population is subjected to tremendous racism,” according to Gomez-Pena.

While many whites are happy to lounge at Mexican resorts or enjoy Mexican food, or crafts, Latinos themselves are largely perceived as criminals, both artists said. Visitors will be sardonically reminded that the savages are “safe” because they are in the cage.

In Irvine, the piece has been developed to a large extent through workshops and other collaborative means with university students and faculty. When the artists are let out of the cage at the end of the three-day performance, they will be ritually released by a university official.

Being on view, and under scrutiny, for long stretches “is not going to be a very cathartic experience,” Fusco predicted. “We’re treated this way, objectified, on a daily basis.”

Gomez-Pena expects viewers to get the point of the performance and hopes it will add something to the soul-searching that swirls 500 years after 1492. “At best, what the Columbus debate might contribute,” the artist said, “is to force people to make peace with history, to come to terms with it.”

* “The Year of the White Bear: Take One” will be on display to the public today and Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery. At 7:30 p.m. both nights, the gallery will reopen for a “ritual ceremony.” Admission is free. Information: (714) 856-6610.