Testing the Border of Art and Politics

Loudspeakers carry voices in Spanish and English into the streets. Activists brandishing walkie-talkies converse with their unseen comrades. Megaphones and video monitors bring still other voices and faces to a startled crowd.

The setting could be the epicenter of a guerrilla combat zone. Or maybe it’s just one of those avant-garde art-happenings we haven’t seen much of for a decade or two.

If it’s hard to tell whether you’re in the midst of one or the other, that’s because the event you’ve just happened upon is both.

Taking it to the streets--literally and figuratively--in “Fronteriso Conceptual,” an evening of multiracial, multiethnic, multimedia performance art on Friday at 9, will be Los Angeles performers Elia Arca and Tim Miller, poet-performer-musician Ruben Guevara, poet Ruben Martinez and San Diego-Tijuana performers Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Emily Hicks.

Their “eminently political” work will be part of the festivities marking the one year anniversary of Macondo Espacio Cultural, an alternative space for Latino performing arts at 3068 W. 7th St. And the performers plan for their tactics to be as insistent as their multicultural message.

Like New York’s immigrant Squat Theater--which used similar strategies to open up the traditional boundaries of stage and audience--these Californians employ performance to “question authority.”

And while the multimedianess of the performance is an obvious metaphor for the evening’s theme of communication, participants are equally concerned with the barriers in the way of such exchange.

“All of us have different takes on this idea of the border,” explains Martinez, an Angeleno of “Mexican-Salvadoran” heritage. “It’s a multipurpose metaphor for the self and other, distances between two countries and two cultures.”

“North American or ‘continental’ culture--in the new, reappropriated sense of the word--is increasingly about the borders between all kinds of people, whether built around culture, ethnicity, gender or whatever,” adds Miller, whose performance often centers around the gay experience.

“We’re trying to challenge those borders through creative work,” says Miller. “And move on to the next step which is cultural fusion.”

And, as activist artists, they insist on the inseparability of artistic and social agendas. “We need to transcend the aesthetic borders that limit our work to try to achieve a universal poetic,” Martinez suggests.

Hence the guerrilla theater strategies: “We have to re-appropriate the technology that poets used to fear and redefine the space between audience and performers,” says Martinez.

But the task is greater than simply displaying the various cultures. “Along with this idea of cultural sensitivity and people within their own communities doing community specific work is also this emerging idea that it’s not enough to just be staying in our little fiefdoms,” Miller asserts.

“It’s not enough to just turn the cultural-specific works into museum pieces, although the ruling structure would prefer that--since people getting involved with each other can be a threatening idea.”

Further, Miller, who is co-director with Linda Frye Burnham of Highways, a performance space which opens in May, sees “this project as indicative of the kind of text that could be going on, a politically and emotionally challenging kind of multiculturalism.”

Which is not to say these artists don’t see visibility as at least a first step. “It’s great that the dialogue is opening up,” says Guevara, a Chicano born in Boyle Heights and famous for his rock ‘n’ roll.

“There’s a recognition by the mainstream art establishment that we exist,” Guevara continues. “(But) there’s still that separation: it’s ‘us’ and ‘them.’

“That’s why (the performers in this project) want to address that (oversimplification) and be confrontational,” Guevara insists. “We don’t just want to talk about the problem, but also to show its ramifications, to reach out and get a hold of our common humanity.”

Achieving this next step will require changes in the status quo. “We need structures that encourage the new terrain that is intercultural work--spaces, funding, press,” Miller offers. “And artists have to once again see themselves as social thinkers and visionaries and not just as entrepreneurs.”