When I first read McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, a few of years ago, I was struck by it. I felt it so aware of today’s technology and the possibilities it opened for us as a society. This time around, almost every single page presented a problem for me. Regardless, I think McLuhan’s work, although incredibly problematic in many instances, can also be very insightful in the possibilities that new media opens for people to present and re-present themselves, in their own terms. In the following post I want to discuss what are some of the main ideas discussed by McLuhan and an extremely academic discipline such as art history. Coming from an art historical background, reading this I immediately draw a parallel between a particular artist, Guillermo Gómez Peña, and some of the academic attempts to “deport” him from art history and his subversive use of performance art as a way of becoming the medium to force himself back into the books. Bear with me, there’s cool media ahead (although, content warning: some of the media ahead contains some form of nudity, swearing and discussions about race).

Let’s begin, then, with some of McLuhan’s thoughts. One of the core arguments of his book is the idea that societies are more influenced by the type of media they communicate through than by the actual content of their communication, so I started to wonder, what are the kinds of media that influence me and how are they representing me? What kinds of media does the society I live in interact with and how does that change their views on certain topics? To give you some context, I currently reside in the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the Musqueam, Tseil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples in  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I am an international student from Mexico going to the University of British Columbia and my way of communication is entirely based in social media. It is the tool I use to connect and keep in touch with my family and friends who live back in Mexico or elsewhere in the world, the medium I use to do my school work (be that through Facebook to develop group presentations, through emails or even google docs): everything happens somewhere on the web, that forever-underconstruction “space”.

Thus, when thinking about the assertion that societies are more influenced by the type of media they communicate through, I think of performance art, who has for decades now used both “old” and “new” media to force itself into the walls of Art History’s palace (emphases are mine. I find art history to be an incredibly colonial discipline that has somehow managed to stay afloat in today’s world without ever being self-critical). A particular example of an artist that has invited himself over and over again into the history(ies) of art is Guillermo Gómez Peña, and I believe that one of the reasons for his success is his understanding of the medium as the message and his capacity to use cyberspace as a platform to make available the content he creates, thus questioning who gets to write history in the 21st century and generating his own histories. Born in 1955 in Mexico City, he is a Chicano artist that lives, works and creates in and between borders. Being the radical creator that he is, he has always taken advantage of the medium(s) to propagate his message. Here are some of the ways in which he interacts with the mediums such as twitter, youtube, and even google docs to propagate ideas both about his own agenda but also about the mediums themselves and the possibilities they can open for self-presentation:

He is constantly reinventing himself and his practice according to the tools that become available to him.

When talking about performance art, the question of documentation has always been front and centre. How can such an inherently ephemeral practice be capitalized and valued in the future? Can performance art be recorded, or does that diminish its power? In the case of Gómez Peña, he not only records his performances but he produces film stills, he transforms the performative acts into textual translations that he then converts into books every few years, he encourages his audiences to become “activated” by photographing his performances, thus ensuring his visibility in cyberspace. In 2015, I was lucky enough to see one of his collective’s performances in Vancouver as part of Live! International Performance Art Biennale at the VIVO Media Arts Centre. This performance was the result of a five-day workshop that involved 12 local emerging “rebel” artists as well as core members of the collective. The group studied the cultural and political impact as well as the aesthetic currency of their work. The analysis and final creation of a pedagogy of their exhibiting practices culminated on September 23rd, inaugurating LIVE’s 2015 program. The performance had a duration of approximately 4 hours and spanned two warehouses on 2625 Kaslo Street.

Thinking back to this performance, there are several aspects that are almost a response to some of McLuhan’s arguments. He approached the idea of the vision’s predominance in an art perspective rooted in the discourse of the female nude and the –predominantly- male gaze. Upon entering the second warehouse we were welcomed to a scene of globalized decadence. A “geisha”, as the artists called her, sat atop a pile of neon clothes, handbags, cigarettes, microphones and cameras. Audience members are invited –and pressured- to take photos with this living and moving mannequin.

This effectively subverts the idea of the gaze and returns the power back to them, mocking you mocking them. “Let’s Facebook the shit out of this!” –Gómez Peña screams every once in a while, excitement visible in his face in the realization that he has infected most audience members with a consumer necessity to immortalize what perhaps should not be immortalized. What at the beginning presented itself like a humoristic scene is now revealed as a direct commentary on the commodification of culture, of Other, of identity through social media and smart phones and the construction of Self that each of us perform in our public profiles.

This is who I am; this is who I am not. It is a critique of the obsession with the visual using an apparatus of re-presentation that depends on vision –the camera. The issue arises here when questioning the effectiveness of this particular tool. Did the audience know the artists were mocking them? Did the participants realize that, by photographing themselves with this mechanical life-less “geisha”, they were becoming that which was being critiqued? This, perhaps accidentally, becomes a commentary on society’s dependence on social media and the blindness with which we so readily snap a photo and release it in the digital world, which in turn hinders our critical thinking and our capacity to take a stand against commodification, racism, essentialism, etc. At the same time, this becomes a commentary on the privileging of visual discourses and re-presentation over immersive, affective, embodied and physical experiences.

As per McLuhan’s beliefs, it is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media. He writes that electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” to pour upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. According to this statement, minority groups can no longer be contained or ignored because the medium of electrical circuitry has given society a space for all voices to be heard. As we can see, Gómez Peña takes constant advantage in his favour of cyberspace. McLuhan argues that “only the hand that erases can write the true thing”. Gómez Peña proves over and over again that no matter how many times the discipline attempts to write him off from it, he will use the media in his favour to write himself back in, in his own terms. I guess the hand can keep trying to erase, but as long as there is someone writing back in, there is some hope.

For more Gómez Peña and La Pocha Nostra:

http://www.pochanostra.com

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/lapochanostra/