PUBLIC ART IN
THE AMERICAS

Introduction

Mirko Lauer:
Peru’s Fine Art
of Flag Washing

John Pitman Weber:
Out of the Studio,
Into the Streets

José Luis Soto and
Isa Campos Castañeda:
Mosaic Opening Night

Dora Andrade:
Brazilian Movement Gives Girls Dignity

Home: AMERICAS.ORG   September 2001  

Now Playing: Exotic People

Coco Fusco is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist and associate professor of Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. She has performed, exhibited and curated work throughout North America, Europe, Australia, South Africa and Latin America. She’s the author of The Bodies That Were Not Ours: Writings on the Situation of Postcolonial Culture (Routledge, forthcoming), editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999) and author of English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New Press, 1995). In a 1998 slide show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, she said many of her public performance works focus on rituals—interactions through which ‘people define themselves and their sense of place.’ Below are excerpts, beginning with her description of Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, which premiered in 1992 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

I did a traveling performance with Guillermo Gómez-Peña nine times over the course of two years in the United States, Europe and Australia and we ended up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The idea was to make a satirical commentary on the history of the ethnographic display of indigenous people. [We suggested that the practice began with Columbus, who brought Arawak indigenous people back to] the Spanish court and put one of them on display. That’s a kind of intercultural performance that we thought hadn’t been really recognized as part of performance art history, and we traced its path from the early period of contact to its development into a kind of circus freak show [in] the late 19th and early 20th century.

We looked pretty ridiculous, like we had walked off a Gilligan’s Island set. The confusion that our presence generated was really an educational experience for us. We had no idea of the power certain institutional frameworks could have to encourage people to project certain kinds of fantasies onto us. And that’s what the performance experience was for us, to learn just how little control we have over how people see us when we start engaging in these kinds of performances in public.

After working on that project, we were thinking about ways to take up the problems and the issues that we had been dealing with in relationship to history. I was also really amazed by the possibilities that were opened up by working with what I call “spontaneously generated performance audiences”—people who don’t necessarily choose to see a work, but sort of bump into you for one reason or another. That’s what public space sort of enables you to do, or create, pulling a stunt like getting yourself inserted into a Museum of Natural History, where people aren’t really expecting that sort of work to be presented to them.

I was interested in the idea of working in a shopping mall because it was another kind of semiprivate, public space, where people [are] in this zoned-out state of looking at things, looking at windows, looking at objects, buying and touching, and in [an] interactive mode and visual mode. Once you leave places like New York, [the mall is] the only place where people congregate. . . . So we thought about ways to create a piece that dealt with how shopping malls represented or communicated a kind of classification of the world by means of what was in them. Maybe I was just really blown away by the Mall of America, which I saw when I was working on Amerindians at the Walker. But there was a way in which it has everything, in the way that fools you into believing that everything is there, and it’s all sort of neatly classified and packaged. There’s this weird dynamic, because the mall is full of weird little corner shops where you can buy coffee from Kenya and flute music from Peru, but adolescent youths of color are definitely not desirable people to have in there. So I thought there [were] certain strategies of containment that I’d like to explore.

So we developed this piece, Mexarcane International, and we set up shop in different shopping malls. . . . The idea was that we were representatives [of] a multinational corporation that marketed and distributed exotic talent for special events. [In corporate attire with my computer and cell phone, I interviewed people and gave] them a set of multiple choice questions to determine their taste for exotic people, exotic places, exotic travel, exotic sex, exotic tchotchkes, exotic anything-you-might-find-in-a mall. Based on the answers, I gave them a code to see Guillermo do a performance for them.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to convince a shopping mall in the U.S. because they saw pictures of our earlier work and thought that we were too frightening! So we ended up doing it in Toronto, Glasgow and London. [That] wrapped up my work on ethnographic paradigms. I felt like I had expired that issue. I was particularly frustrated with not being able to deal with issues of gender and femininity when I was exploring these kinds of problems, so I moved into another area. . . .

I developed a piece with Nao Bustamente, who’s a San Francisco–based artist. I wanted to deal with the issue of Latin women’s sexuality. I had been doing some research on the re-emergence of prostitution or sex tourism in Cuba that has escalated since 1993 to become, at this point, [a major] source of income for women under 25. I did interviews with women involved in the business, with men who were involved as pimps, with men who were involved also as prostitutes, although gay prostitution is not as big a deal in Cuba as it is on some of the other islands in the Caribbean or in Brazil. And it was based on those experiences that Nao and I started to think about the history of this representation of the Latina as oversexed, as a sexpot.

There are these dolls that are sold in Latin folk art shops. They’re made of papier-mâché and they’re these busty, cute Latinas—mostly Mexicans—with dark, curly hair and their names are hand-painted across their undershirts. And it turns out those dolls are representations of prostitutes from the port city of Veracruz in Mexico, but on Mexico’s Caribbean side. So to get ourselves into developing a piece about this, we started to do photo shoots in which we dressed up as the dolls [in] a series called Paquita y Chata Se Arrebatan (Paquita and Chata Go Over the Top).

And we kind of go through, section by section, different kinds of culture tourism, indigenous-oriented tourism, New Age spiritual tourism, and we get to, finally, sex tourism. And there, the sociological material that we drew from for the script [came] from the interviews that I had done in Cuba and all these sex tourist language books that we bought, which are like Berlitz guides, but instead of saying, “How do I get a taxi?” and “Where is the bank?”, it’s like “Roll over and get the whip” and “Are you married?” and “If you’re married, are you into having an open relationship?” [These phrases are used by tourists] who want sexual partners in Asia and Latin America and anywhere else they decide to go.

This part of the performance is a dialogue in which we bring on a male member of the audience and train him, using phrases from the guidebooks, on how to pick up a Cuban girl in Spanish. And he gets his Spanish lesson on stage and it’s very, very funny. And presenters always say, “What if people don’t want to do it?” I’ve never had trouble getting a guy up there. I don’t know if it means that I have some special talent, or that they’re just really eager.

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