The Embedded Aesthetic of Performance Art

This past week in my Art Practice and Theory class, we have begun to focus on performance art and its implications. In particular, I was struck by how many parallels I was able to draw between Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s discussion of his craft in “In Defense of Performance,” and Faye Ginsburg’s essay “Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.” Specifically, I found that Ginsburg’s whole notion of an “embedded aesthetic,” to be very much akin with Gomez-Pena’s view of his body and the way that it functions in his art. Though Gomez-Pena initially refers to his body as an “empty canvas,” this is a misnomer, as he later goes on to liken it to “a tiny model for humankind,” as well as, “a metaphor for the larger sociopolitical body.” By utilizing the body’s representational nature as part of his work, Gomez-Pena hopes that others will in turn view the connections that he establishes through his pieces and subsequently “recognize them in their own bodies.” The success of the artist’s work thus relies upon its ability to embody social relations at both the individual and the communal level with the human body acting as a symbol for both. This is more or less the same goal of Aboriginal filmmakers who, as Ginsburg states, strive to produce work that has the capacity “to embody, sustain, and even revive or create certain social relations,” also via aesthetic representation. I believe it is no coincidence that both Gomez-Pena and the Aboriginal filmmakers are members of formerly colonized ethnic groups and accordingly, this manifests itself in their art by way of their perceived need to appeal to a specific cultural community, as well as, the global population. As Gomez-Pena states, by attempting to literally “decolonize” his body in his performance pieces and by “making these decolonizing mechanisms apparent,” hopefully his audience “will get inspired to do the same.”