92 Year in Review : The Cover Thing : Counter-Columbus Cachet Anoints Performance Art

The year 1992 may be remembered as the one in which performance art took on Christopher Columbus and won, but it was also a time when the medium broke through to a new level of professional cachet.

With a variety of local and national works, performance artists took their place at the forefront of an unexpectedly successful counter-Quincentenary arts movement. At the same time, major New York venues finally began to court, commission and produce Los Angeles artists. Columbus may be gone from the national psyche for a while, but it will be hard to keep performance artists down on the farm--or out of the major theaters--from now on.

It was clear even before the year began that ’92 would be a high-profile time for the alternative arts community. Performance art, with its penchant for direct attack and insurrectionary politics, seemed tailor-made to take on the nexus of prejudices symbolized by the Columbus celebration.

The official Columbus booster effort, lead by the U.S. and Spanish governments and an array of private sector interests, was first out of the gate, with the 1986 launching of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission. But it was apparent going into 1992 that the counter-movement was gaining the upper hand in the public and media’s eye.

High-profile performances sanctioned by the Jubilee Commission and its allies--such as the “Honeymoon Miralda” project, a conceptual work by Spaniard Antoni Miralda in which the Statue of Liberty was wed to the statue of Columbus--failed to generate the hoopla that backers had anticipated.

The counter-Quincentenary works, on the other hand, were more widely heralded than anyone had expected. They also found strength in numbers, presented en masse by such events as the September Santa Monica Arts Festival, an all-day happening on the pier that ushered in L.A.’s spate of critical takes on CC’s ride.

Nationally, one of the most ambitious counter-works--and one that exemplified the philosophy of the anti-Columbus attack--was Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco’s “The Year of the White Bear.” The multipart, multivenue work entailed a gallery exhibition, radio broadcasts, a performance-theater piece called “New World Border” and the notorious “Cage Project,” a site-specific performance seen in cities as various as Irvine, Madrid, London, New York and Minneapolis.

Gomez-Pena and Fusco, costumed as ersatz natives and speaking a made-up lingo to one another, put themselves on display in a gold cage. They were fed by keepers, taken to the bathroom on leashes and otherwise maintained in the manner of zoo animals--all for the benefit of whatever audience happened by.

The work commented not only on the 19th Century practice of putting exotic specimens on display, but also on the Western idea of “The Other.” Surprisingly, audience members often didn’t “get it,” mistaking the artists for genuine “natives.”

In a different aesthetic vein, actor-performer Roger Guenveur Smith brought his “Christopher Columbus 1992” to stages in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. An extended movement-based dramatic rap, Smith’s solo recast the explorer as a sleazy travel agent with a timeless but insidious colonial agenda.

Speaking of agendas, though, not all of 1992’s performance art was focused on the Columbus side of patriarchal culture. This was an election year, after all, and so there were plenty of Big Boys to target.

Amid the sea of stand-up commentaries and run-of-the-mill impersonators, the most notable entry was Beth Lapides’ campaign for First Lady. The season-long work took her on tour across the country and to the floor of the Democratic convention. Wrapping herself (literally) in the flag or a slinky chartreuse evening gown, her bleached hair piled mile-high, she stumped for the right of the American people to elect a candidate for a powerful position that ought, she said, to require more than simply sleeping with the President.

L.A. performance artists also dared to go where no performance artists had gone before--namely into such bastions of mainstream theater as the Mark Taper Forum and two New York venues--Lincoln Center and the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

Keith Antar Mason and the Santa Monica-based Hittite Empire became the first Los Angeles artists to receive a commission from Lincoln Center’s prestigious Serious Fun! Festival. In July, they performed “Forty-Nine Blues Songs for a Jealous Vampire”--an episodic choreo-poem about police brutality and the oppression of black males--to favorable notices.

The Hittites were also among the most active of the many performance artists who created works inspired by the spring riots. Although “49 Blues Songs . . .” contains riot references, the Hittites created other works more specifically concerned with those events, and they spent much of the latter half of the year touring that material.

Those good New York reviews helped persuade the Taper to include an excerpt from “49 Blues Songs . . .” in its October “Out In Front” festival. Also on the bill in that four-day smorgasbord were a number of other prominent L.A. performance artists who’d never graced the Taper boards before. And this month, some of the same artists who were in “Out In Front” were also part of the lineup for the Public Theater’s second annual Festival of New Voices.

Taken together, these inroads constitute an important beachhead, not only in mainstream theater but in the hearts and minds of the New York producing community. Just as performance artists have come to be included among the candidates who might fill out a theater’s season, so too have Californians been added to the list of those who are suitable for Eastern audiences.

These New York inroads are not just one small step for a few performers but a giant step for Western artists and the cultural diversity they represent. Now, if only L.A.’s own venues would take these artists just as seriously. If Lincoln Center can commission a Keith Antar Mason, after all, surely L.A. can do the same for other equally worthy home-grown talents.