One key method to understand what site specific performance art can do is by viewing past pieces of work. Whether Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present or Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City, the scope and effect of the many performances is incredible.

One such performance, which immediately caught my imagination, was The Couple in the Cage (1991) by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña; a piece which parodied and critiqued the once common display of natives from newly colonised lands, and the continuing exploitation of the “other” in museums.

Fusco + Pena

(Image Credit: http://bombmagazine.org/article/1599/)

The performance added to the long colonial history of “discovering” native inhabitants, then shipping them off for display elsewhere. Christopher Columbus took “some Indians by force” (Columbus, 1978, 9), for multiple reasons. Firstly, to give information on their land if they learn his language. Secondly, their presence would verify that he had been to an “undiscovered land”, with Columbus saying “I bring with me individuals of this island and of the others that I have seen, who are proofs of the facts which I state” (ibid, 15). If Columbus is to be trusted, the natives also “believed and propagated notions of his innate superiority” (Taylor, 1998, 161), naming his people a “celestial race” (Columbus, 1978, 9). After his first trip to “The New world”, Columbus returned to Spain in 1493 with several Arawaks, where “one was left on display in the Spanish Court until he died, of sadness apparently, two years later” (Taylor, 1998, 161).

The display of the “other” is a tradition which many museums and galleries utilise, though less explicitly as in the past, and The Couple in the Cage illuminated remaining notions of “colonial fantasies” (ibid, 168) and the theatricality of colonisation, as well as other insidious issues found in society, which I intend to further talk about in a later post.

That’s all for now, but as I said I will certainly be returning to this work at a later date, so keep a lookout for that if you’re interested.

Works Cited:

Columbus, C. (ed.) (1978) Four Voyages to the New World: Letters and Selected Documents. Collected and Edited by R. H. Major. Gloucester: Hakluyt Society.

Taylor, D. (1998) A Savage Performance: Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco’s “Couple in the Cage”. The Drama Review, 42(2): pp. 160-175.