CULTURAL PROVOCATEUR
posted by James Reel
Oops! I forgot to post a link yesterday to my contribution to the latest Tucson Weekly:
Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been billed as a cultural provocateur and as a radical.Discover his answer here.
Gómez-Peña is in Tucson right now, stirring up artistic trouble courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. He and members of his troupe, La Pocha Nostra, are conducting workshops for 15 like-minded artists, the results of which will be displayed and performed on Saturday, Aug. 11, at MOCA.
Gómez-Peña is a smart guy (in the early 1990s, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant) and a quick thinker, so he didn't seem taken aback when I called last week with a rude question: What good is a radical artist in contemporary America, where even the supposedly liberal media are pretty conservative, and ideas that are even remotely progressive aren't taken seriously or given any real coverage in the mainstream culture?
