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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Public art as liberatory pedagogy through performance methodologies

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Public art as liberatory pedagogy through performance methodologies

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Content PUBLIC ART AS LIBERATORY PEDAGOGY
THROUGH PERFORMANCE METHODOLOGIES

by
Tania Picasso

A Thesis presented to the
FACULTY OF THE, USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Tania Picasso

ii
Dedication

From the depth of the cerro de La Granja, through the playa azules de La Peñita, piercing
the heart of East Los Angeles and beyond, this is dedicated to those who continually
struggle to cross-borders and rise above adversity.

Y todo corazón a mis grandparents: Jesús “Chuy” y Celia “Chelita” Picasso y José
Manuel y Maria del Refugio “Cuquita” Parra.

iii
Acknowledgements
This text was a collective effort; either through inspiration, motivation or direct
and specific editing feedback, it was made with the help of many great people who I wish
to acknowledge. My deepest gratitude goes out to my official and non-official thesis
committee members. These people include Caryl Levy and Janet Owen-Driggs for being
great mentors—thank you for always being positive and also for sharing with me your
pedagogy in PAS 371, what a memorable experience! To Ferdinand Lewis for always
being critical and positive and who challenged me to “make him care” about my passion.
Warm thanks to Sarah Cifarelli for being a supportive and motivating force in this
process. To Anne Bray for encouraging me to think outside of the box to take a risk by
participating in La Pocha Nostra’s summer workshop. I am especially thankful to my
thesis adviser, Lauri Firstenberg who challenged me in profound ways. Warm gratitude
to Brent Blair for inspiring me to tell undertold stories—your guidance has been the light
that I always knew I needed. La Pocha Nostra crew—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Michele
Ceballos, Roberto Sifuentes y Violeta Luna whose pedagogy is amazingly inspiring and
has awakened the bailarina-activist-community-centered-public art-advocate inside me.
I am in great debt to my family who have provided unconditional love and
patience throughout this journey. To my parents, Sergio y Carolina Picasso for
encouraging me to persevere and strive for success without forgetting our family’s
history of struggle, gracias por tener fé en mi. Thanks to my sister Karina for reminding
me that life should be seized in every small kick-boxing moment; my brother Diego for
providing a silent but solid strength of encouragement. Para mi familia Picasso y familia
Parra including all my tios, tias, primos and primas who have provided me nourishment
iv
through their smiles, text-messages, food, emails and words of encouragement. To my
nephew, Nano, whose little brain is full of wonder and brilliance. Gracias a la familia
Rodriguez who have always been supportive of my educational endeavors. Much love
and gratitude to Cindylandia, my life-long hermana-friend—ours is a story that runs
through the soul of East Los, the city that sealed our friendship. To my Nina Sandra
whose courage has always been a source of inspiration. I could not have embarked on this
educational-life journey sin el apoyo de mi novio chulo, Dr. Moises W. Rodriguez; thank
you for reminding me to take it “one hour, one task, one day at a time” and providing me
with your balance of humor and academic discipline.
Warm-felt thanks to my public art studies colleagues; you are all amazing people
and I know together we can change the world using public art-community strategies. To
all my friends and colleagues that have provided immense support throughout this
journey—including Almie, Ara, Consuelo “Chelo”, Summer, Vero, friends at
DCA/Public Art Division, Zipporah Lax Yamamoto and Tomas Benitez.
Deep gratitude to the teachers that left a deep imprint on me, people like Mr.
Chavez, Ms. Gordon, Mr. Smith and Mr. Woessner who all had interesting approaches to
teaching, making learning fun, exciting, and challenging by making me apply our
classroom lessons to my every day experience, which ultimately made me connect the
dots with public art as a real and thriving component in our culture. These teachers
embodied what I feel is a liberating, dialogical approach to teaching, but I am also very
cognizant that this was not the case with all of my peers and was more often than not an
exception rather than the norm.
v
I am reminded everyday that education is a fundamental right and not a privilege.
As a first generation Mexican-American mujer, I am reminded about the struggles that
my grandparents, Jesús y Celia Picasso and José Manuel y Maria del Refugio Parra
encountered as they crossed the Mexican-U.S. border. It is through their struggle to
establish our family on this side of the border with the hope of providing us with broader
opportunities that has made me more impassioned about family, community, my culture
and raza, and has solidified my belief in education and art as a tool for social change and
empowerment.

vi
Table of Contents

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………....ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………....iii

List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………...vii

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………viii

Preface………………………………………………………………………………….. ix

Introduction: Public Art as Liberatory Pedagogy………………………………..…….. ...1
Related Scholarship……………………………………………………………….5
Conscientization…………………………………………………………………..9
Transgression………………………………………………………………….....13

Chapter 1: La Pocha Nostra……………………………………………………………...20
Ethnotechno Methodology……………………………………………………….21
Collaboration and Teaching Community………………………………………...23
Interview with Roberto Sifuentes……………………………………………..…26

Chapter 2: Asco…………………………………………………………….....................34
The Chicano Movement………………………………………………………….35
An Approach to Conceptual Public Art………………………………………….37
Community Response……………………………………………………………40

Chapter 3: Code 33………………………………………………………………………43
Suzanne Lacy…………………………………………………………………….45
Rooftop Conversations and Performances……………………………………….46
Building Community…………………………………………………………….49

Chapter 4: Public Art As Liberatory Pedagogy—Permutations……………………..….53

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..67

Appendix A
La Pocha Nostra summer workshop, Performance Literature Piece

vii

List of Figures

Figure 1…………………………………………………………………...La Pocha Nostra
Figure 2…………………………………………Image of workshop space and props used
Figure 3……………………………………………………………………..Detail of props
Figure 4……………………………………………………………………..Asco members
Figure 5…………………………………………………………………….Walking Mural
Figure 6………………………………………………………………..Spraypaint LACMA
Figure 7…………………………………………………………………..………...Code 33
Figure 8……………………………………………………………………...……..Code 33
Figure 9………………………………………………………………………….....Code 33
Figure 10…………………………………………………………………………...Code 33

viii
Abstract

Why is it important for traditional classroom settings to infuse a critical approach
modeled after certain performance methodologies? How can these performance methods
serve as models for social justice within the context of public education? In Public Art
As Liberatory Pedagogy Through Performance Methodologies the notion of community-
based art strategies in relation to public performance methodologies and processes is
explored. By anchoring my work in the philosophy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, there is an evaluation of the critical, dialogical, problem-posing lens in public
art as a tool to advocate for socio-politically marginalized communities. This text
examines the work of performance art collective, La Pocha Nostra, Asco, an East Los
Angeles-based conceptual performance group, and Suzanne Lacy’s Oakland project titled
Code 33. Key issues raised relevant to these performance methods include their potential
to be utilized as a model for social justice within the realm of public education.

ix
Preface
This thesis stems from my personal experience and journey as a first generation
Mexican-American Latina and the first to pursue higher education within my family. It is
a challenge to de-personalize the topic of this thesis that I am emphatically passionate
about in order to prepare a critically objective manuscript that maintains an appropriate
tone for academia. My education, my belief in art as a tool for community development
and social change, my Latino community, my role as a first generation Mexican-
American mujer struggling to find her voice within the ranks of higher education are all
essential elements to my positionality and perspective. The impetus for this thesis topic
derives from my experience in academia, always concerned with the community
component and the utilitarian use of art and the potential it has for effecting social
change, particularly in historically marginalized groups and communities.
I strongly believe in public art as a tool to help bridge and develop underserved,
socially marginalized communities. Growing up in City Terrace and navigating the
streets of East L.A.—Gage Avenue, Cesar Chavez Boulevard, Eastern Avenue, Whittier
Boulevard—I developed a keen appreciation for the type of public art, culture and life
that thrived in the landscape. Murals like the “Tree of Knowledge” by Josefina Quezada
and Teresa Chacon,
1
were exemplary of accessible artworks along with mariachi-banda-
norteña-music, the hustle and bustle of a creative “informal” economy, and (scarce but
present) cultural and educational programming; for me, during my youth there was no
distinction between “high” and “low” art. I always found these type artworks and

1
http://www.lacountyarts.org/civic_anthonyquinnlibrary.htm

x
imagery to be visibly accessible and therefore public. I continue to find myself drawn to
public art because of its accessibility and my belief that it can unify, mobilize and
empower communities. While I do not mean to limit my definition of what constitutes
art, I would like to underscore the interconnectivity between art, culture, public education
and life based on the culture and environment where I was raised and the education I
received from teachers at Garfield High School. The overarching question throughout my
thesis research focuses on the possibility of applying performance strategies inside a
classroom such as those at Garfield High School and seeing how that could possibly
impact the outcome of graduation and the pursuit of higher education. Although the text
features performance strategies that are collaborative in nature, it stems from my idea of
illuminating the interrelatedness of art, education, community and everyday experience.

1
Introduction: Public Art As Liberatory Pedagogy

“It is necessary, perhaps now more than ever, to think critically but constructively about
what constitutes an effective activist art practice.” –Grant Kester
2

In its most essential definition, pedagogy is the art of teaching. The term
pedagogy in this text will be employed in a literal fashion—public art as a teaching
strategy and as a way of teaching communities how to communicate and how to look at
themselves and their environment on a deep level. Critical pedagogy, as dancer Sherry
Shapiro asserts, “refers to this process as giving voice to one’s own experiences by
articulating the “reality” of one’s life; coming to critical understanding of the socio-
cultural mapping of consciousness; and using individual voices collectively to struggle in
the retelling and remaking of life stories.”
3
This study will focus on public art as a genre
of accessible art interventions into the public sphere generated through community
processes, taking on a variety of forms, both permanent and ephemeral. In particular, I
will use performance methodologies as an apparatus to discuss the way public art can be
a critical praxis that is explicitly dialogic in nature. Praxis, as cultural theoretician
Antonio Gramsci remarks, focuses on the unification of practice and theory, or as Paulo
Freire declares, elicits “reflection of and action,” in order to generate process driven work
that aims at transforming the world, which seems to be at the root of the performance

2
Grant Kester, Art, Activism and Oppositionality Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, Durham
and London, 1998), 17.

3
Sherry Shapiro, Pedagogy and the Politics of the Body: A Critical Praxis (Garland Publishing Inc., New
York and London, 1998), 13.

2
models examined in this text.
4
The approach to the field of public art this study is
invested and features art as a tool of education and social change with a critical impact on
communities. Public art as liberatory pedagogy infuses a critical component in artwork
pertaining to building community as a means of directing us in a socially-conscious,
human liberation state of being; by incorporating characteristics that are engaging and,
for example, that invite a dialogue, public art as liberatory pedagogy opens lines of
communication that focus on humans as active subjects rather than passive objects, and
tackle the situation in a problem-posing fashion.
5
This approach to art-making is critical
and necessary as a means of liberating individuals from oppressive forces of domination.
A sampling of art collectives that are concerned with using performance methodologies
to deliver and perform pertinent issues include the work like Cornerstone Theatre
6
who
create partnerships with communities to decide on the subject of interrogation through
performance; El Teatro Campesino
7
who unionized labor workers around the tool of
theatre and activism in the California Central Valley; Los Angeles Poverty Department
(LAPD)
8
who perform issues that are educational and enlightening surrounding the issue
of the disenfranchised homeless; and Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses, a project in

4
Stephen Ducombe, Cultural Resistance Reader, “Antonio Gramsci, From The Prison Notebooks,” 59. and
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (30
th
Anniversary Edition with an Introduction by Donaldo
Macedo, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., New York, 2006), 51.

5
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30
th
Anniversary Edition with an Introduction by Donaldo
Macedo (The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. New York, 2006), 57.

6
Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States (Rutgers University
Press, 2005), 99.

7
_____, 47.

8
_____, 78.

3
Houston, Texas that converted historical shot-gun houses into living spaces for low-
income families. These art collectives can be perceived as examples of artistic practices
that operate in a way that resonate with community members and aims towards producing
dialogue, activism, raising critical consciousness. As performance-based, dialogical,
process-driven, artistic and critical events, these public art practices utilize criticality and
pedagogy in equal measure.
In the eminent contribution to various fields, the renowned book Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, Brazilian educator, political and social activist Paulo Freire emphasizes the
urgency to search for justice for the poor and oppressed through a pedagogical approach
that speaks to the hegemonic power dynamics consuming our society. Written in 1968
while exiled, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is “rooted in concrete situations and describes
the reactions of laborers (peasant or urban) and of middle-class persons.”
9
Despite
Freire’s having been directly influenced by the working class conditions in Brazil, his
text speaks to a broader, universal audience, independent of country or region.
Furthermore, this text continues to profoundly impact contemporary thinkers, educators
and activists from across many disciplines that may be interested in implementing a self-
reflexive, critical approach in their practice and who may have been affected or
influenced themselves by similarly oppressive systems of domination. Paulo Freire’s
model resonates today relative to traditional models of learning and living, and is
applicable in most fields of study which challenge oppressive power structures across
issues of class, labor, race and education. More specifically, Freire’s philosophy is

9
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 37.

4
apparent in the work of artists, scholars and educators like Henry Giroux, bell hooks,
Sherry Shapiro, Augusto Boal, Chela Sandoval, David Trend and Grant Kester who tend
to utilize criticality as an instrument of engagement in their field and as a way of
rethinking traditional models of learning. Seen through this lens, then, the expansive field
of public art interestingly enough becomes a fruitful area to apply artistic, pedagogical
strategies as a method of social change. In the context of this investigation, Freire's
philosophy may serve well to widen traditional definitions of public art to include
pedagogically relevant community-based performance art practices.
This study will focus on three public art and community based models. The first,
La Pocha Nostra, is a multidisciplinary arts organization that utilizes the body as
political-artistic tool to challenge the status-quo. The second, Asco, is a performance
collective of artists in East Los Angeles “[whose] work critically satirized and challenged
the conventions of modernist ‘high’ art as well as those of ethnic or community based
art”
10
in the 1970’s. Lastly, I explore Suzanne Lacy’s Code 33 an Oakland-based project
that used collaborative, performative strategies to engage inner-city youth and the police.
What happens when students and community members are exposed to alternative
teaching models? Taking into account their communities’ complex and rich histories of
multi-layered, multi-generational, multi-ethnic experiences, these hybrid contributions to
the fields of public art, performance, collectivity and education provide for dialogic and

10
C. Ondine Chavoya, “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of ASCO” in
Space Site Intervention, Situating Installation Art, ed. by Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), 190.

5
unique ways of thinking about and engaging with pressing and what Freire describes as
“urgent issues” prevalent in these respective communities.
11

Related Scholarship
The definition of public art is elastic and may change according to variant
characteristics such as context, historical relevance and political climate. In this
investigation, Paulo Freire’s philosophy resonates in the field of public art that aims
towards a more democratized, community-based, humanizing approach.
12
For example, a
component of Freire’s liberation philosophy is recognized for challenging the banking
concept of education and instead utilizing a problem-posing approach. Freire’s liberation
model helps guide us in a direction that deals with criticality and goes on to define the
banking concept in writing:
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the
depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the
teacher issues communiqués and makes deposit which the students patiently
receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in
which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving,
filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to
become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis,
it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity,
transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.
13

11
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 38.

12
The overall book incorporates this idea of “humanizing,” Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
13
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 72.

6
Moreover, the misguided system that Freire describes appears to be at the root of most
traditional institutions of learning, specifically within inner-city schools and the urban
communities comprised of people of color.
14
Based on my first hand experience as a
student at Garfield High School, located in the heart of East Los Angeles, I can attest that
the city’s educational system’s presumptions are to a certain degree based on the notion
of the students being “depositories,” and do not necessarily inculcate some type of
criticality within the work.
15
In this instance, perhaps it becomes too large of a
responsibility for an artist to tackle all the issues and problems of society, yet the need for
illuminating these issues is still great. What do we risk if we were to provide alternative
modes of expression through the arts within traditional learning institutions? Public art
as liberatory pedagogy is an attempt to infuse art with engaged criticality. Perhaps this
approach can reshape the way society thinks about its communities, education systems,
and the impact public art in terms of propelling communities in a liberatory direction.
The artist working collaboratively with a community typically understands the
intersubjective relationship of the contemporary and increasingly globalized world and
the inherent message they project through their collaborative efforts with the community
is one that encourages a collective approach, working towards a common goal with

14
http://innercitystruggle.org/story.php?story=123
15
I acknowledge that this is a big claim and do not mean to generalize the entire Los Angeles Unified
School District’s curriculum. Based on my own experience, for four years, my academic schedule was
always incorrect which forced my best-friend, Cindy and I to make regular visits to the counselor’s office
to demand an academic schedule that complimented our learning trajectory. I was able to have a sampling
of teachers that were indeed invested in a dialogical form of education by incorporating new learning
strategies, but the system as a whole had a way of making students feel as if their education was not a
priority.

7
various perspectives.
16
Renowned performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña states, “My
job may also be to raise questions. I do not look for answers. It is the role of the activists
and academics to attempt to provide answers, domesticate them or explain them.”
17

Gómez-Peña, Asco and Lacy are invested in the act of raising questions, which is in itself
a political action; to raise questions means to examine one’s circumstance with a critical
lens and acknowledge its complexity and maybe even perhaps attempt to unpack the
complexities. By raising critical questions the artist invites the community to participate
in a self-reflexive opportunity. It is an approach that is non-imposing or intrusive in the
sense that they are collaborating with communities to generate a dialogue that allows
people to engage in a way that adds their individual and collective voice and is about all
the processes leading up to and following after it.
18
Criticality and community
engagement forms the defining frontier between studio-based art and public art as
pedagogy.
The banking-method concept contrasts starkly with Freire’s model of problem-
posing that he advocates. We transgress when we focus on this problem-posing
approach.
19
According to Freire, the problem-posing approach to a liberation model of
learning in the context of public art as pedagogy and practice takes the people’s

16
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 75.
17
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethnotechno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (Routledge,
New York, 2005), 24.

18
Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts,100.

19
Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Augusto Boal and Chela Sandoval echo this point about utilizing criticality in
order to transgress.

8
historicity, their heritage, class, race, positionality, as their starting point
20
in order to
begin unpacking their individual life-stories and goes on to say:
Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as
fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their
emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of
the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating
intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perception of
reality.
21

This model when applied to public art practice, has the capability to directly impact the
community’s sense of agency, specifically when applied to education for inner-city
youth. Oppressive paradigms of education in urban Latino communities seem to follow
traditional models of teaching and learning.
22
What happens when a traditional teaching
model is rooted in an artistic, dialogic approach? What if we applied an approach similar
to the public art performance methodologies deployed by La Pocha Nostra, Asco, and
Suzanne Lacy in the classroom where students might be craving engaging alternative
teaching methods? Freire notes that “problem-posing education affirms men and women
as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a
likewise unfinished reality.”
23
If, then, problem-posing education affirms people as
beings in the process of becoming, then criticality and self-reflexivity are tools for self-
fulfillment. The problem-posing model, if applied to public art practice, provides an

20
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 84.
21
_____. 86.
22
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, Inc. Maryland, 1998), 30.

23
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 84.

9
opportunity for the artist to become an agent of change to help communities maximize
their potential through an art practice that infuses critical praxis. I will investigate how
the works of La Pocha Nostra, Asco and Suzanne Lacy, to a certain degree, seem to apply
Freire’s liberatory ideology and pedagogical approach in their praxis. These artists, when
working in the public domain or engaging with a specific community, become
facilitators, mentors and teachers. Here, rather than the artist entering a community and
imposing their sole idea on that particular group, their approach is one that engages their
collaborators and dispels many of the contradictions within traditional forms of education
that seem to perpetuate the authoritarian banking concept of education.
Another key concept in Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the idea of
“conscientization,” taking on the function of connecting theory and practice, not unlike
the tenets of liberation theology which is also founded in advocating for the oppressed.
Conscientization as discussed by Paulo Freire, is the “liberation of the oppressed [that] is
a liberation of women and men, not things. Accordingly, while no one liberates himself
by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others. Liberation, a human
phenomenon, cannot be achieved by semihumans.”
24
The word conscientization is
comprised of the words “conscience,” which means having an awareness of oneself and
“ization”, which is the suffix that means the process of making or becoming. Therefore,
conscientization is the act of raising critical consciousness, and in doing so, may incite
action.
25
Furthermore, it is a process that liberates individuals by shifting ideology from

24
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 66.
25
Freire also uses the Brazilian term, “conscientização” to describe the act of conscientization, Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, 66-68.

10
passive object to active subject. Freire describes that all people have a base-knowledge,
which demands a problem-posing way of thought, and a dialogical form of
communication that is informative, empowering and engaging.
26
This ideology
acknowledges that individuals are capable of making choices for themselves rather than
having someone else make those choices for them. For Freire, this process raises critical
consciousness, and in the context of contemporary performance strategies it is evident in
the examples of La Pocha Nostra, Asco, and Code 33, whose works are fundamental to
the discussion of performance-based models that function as a form of pedagogy.
La Pocha Nostra, Asco and Suzanne Lacy attempt to explicitly challenge notions
of patriarchy and colonial history by directly addressing issues of resistance, social
repression, ethnicity and more importantly rising above systematically repressive
structures through unconventional approaches.
27
Using community as the dialogical and
instructive impetus, this type of public art practice has the capacity to triumph and break-
down ethnic, cultural and socio-economic borders. Public art as pedagogy has the
potential—sometimes realized, sometimes unfulfilled—to help a community thrive. If
the artist embarks in a collaborative dialogue with the community by playing the role of
facilitator or mediator, then the people themselves will likely become much more
autonomously engaged in their own community's outcome” or something like this. As
performance artist and La Pocha Nostra front-person, Guillermo Gómez-Peña notes:

26
_____, 66.
27
The work of scholar/activist, Chela Sandoval is of particular importance as she theorizes about a post-
modern meta-narrative that essentially is an amalgamation of critical scrutiny in various fields;
Methodology of the Oppressed, vol. 18, Theory out of Bounds (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

11
Many of us think of ourselves as activists, but our communication strategies and
experimental languages are considerably different from those utilized by political
radicals and anti-globalization activists. We are what others aren’t, say what
others don't, and occupy cultural spaces that are often overlooked or dismissed.
Because of this, our multiple communities are constituted by aesthetic, political,
ethnic, and gender rejects.
28

For the community-based artist, the lexicon of the art-producing process is by its very
nature in fact political. On the one hand, one could argue that these artists appear to be
genuinely interested in contributing positive change through a dialogic, artistic and
pedagogical approach that bring forth issues large in scale and have profound effects on
communities. On the other hand, their methodology and philosophy manifests itself in a
gradational fashion and fluctuates in relation to the duration of the artist’s impact. The
language that La Pocha Nostra, Asco and Suzanne Lacy utilize seems to be rooted in
performance strategies, which has the potential to reach multiple communities. But as
Gómez-Peña asserts, it is a different language, an explicit and implicit approach that
makes their work different, and to a certain extent pedagogical.
In the forthcoming chapters, I will examine the extent to which these artists share
a pedagogical approach relative to notions of community, art and performance strategies.
During my time as a participant in their summer intensive workshop, La Pocha Nostra’s
methodology appears to be infused with a liberatory pedagogy, or as performance artist
and founding member of La Pocha Nostra, Roberto Sifuentes put it, “We are teaching our
methodology, and pulling from it the moments that occur within the circumstance of the

28
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “On Performance Art,”
http://www.pochanostra.com/antes/jazz_pocha2/mainpages/in_defense.htm

12
workshop.”
29
In my experience, this seemed to occur through a dialogical, problem-
posing, critical approach filtered through an artistic expression. La Pocha Nostra’s
intention appears to teach their methodology and also borrow from Freire’s model of
critical pedagogy. But I wonder about the extent to which a pedagogical approach exists;
is it only throughout the duration of the workshop? Does the participant then go on and
disseminate what they have learned? In regards to Asco, I am uncertain whether they
would explicitly align their 1970’s artistic-activist spirit with Freire’s model, but their
attempt to explore new forms of artistic expression that generated a dialogue and
contributed a critical approach to art-making aesthetics in the Chicano community
compels me to examine their work through a model based on liberation, criticality, and
dialogue. Finally, one could argue that Code 33 is exemplary of a public art project that
is based on process, dialogue, and communication strategies to address the needs of a
community despite the longevity of the project. In this sense, by collaborating with the
Oakland community, Suzanne Lacy seems to be directly helping to facilitate a
conversation about relevant issues, perhaps even emulating Freire’s concepts about
engagement and open dialogue. By examining the work during the summer intensive
workshops conducted by performance art troupe, La Pocha Nostra, 1970’s and 1980’s
East Los Angeles avant-garde collective Asco, and Suzanne Lacy’s project, Code 33, this
study will bring to bear the relevance the influence of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed model that explicitly advocates working alongside individuals acknowledging
their roles as active subjects in order to engage in problem-posing, critical thought. Why

29
Phone interview with Roberto Sifuentes, December 2007.

13
is it still relevant to continue to discuss public art outside of the margins inflicted by the
oppressive system of colonialism? What turns performance art into critical pedagogy?
Why is a community-building praxis a liberatory pedagogical tool? These artists
acknowledge their role, without attempting to perpetuate a learning and art model based
on the imposition of colonialism and oppression. It seems that on a certain level these
artists challenge history through having an inclusive, participatory, dialogic approach.
These projects represent examples of artists and collectives engaging with marginalized
communities. These projects allow for students, community members in Oakland, East
Los Angeles, the Chicano-Latino community, and the community of international art-
rebels involved with La Pocha Nostra, to engage in critical community discussion to
engage in critical community discussion and consider broader contexts like the impact of
colonialism, imperialism and contemporary politics. We risk remaining at the margins
without a critical approach to public art if we deny the complex, fascinating and
audacious potential of performance art in relation to teaching, instructive, empowering
devices. More importantly, Asco’s 1970’s work, Lacy’s Oakland project and La Pocha
Nostra’s annual intensive summer workshops seem to cross boundaries and enable
audiences and collaborators to learn and participate in discussions and acts of
transgression.
Transgression as discussed by educator, author, activist and scholar, bell hooks is
a way of breaking barriers that suppress people and communities; to transgress is to cross

14
boundaries.
30
Hooks, like Freire, La Pocha Nostra, Asco and Suzanne Lacy are border-
crossers, challenging questions of paradigms of power, oppression and domination.
Inspired by Freire’s pedagogical model, hooks advocates for a similar form of change
within our education system. Art critic, artist and scholar, Coco Fusco mentions that “the
absence of any interrogation of the identity and ethnicity of the implied Self transforms
race into a problem of the Other.”
31
The artists I will discuss in this text attempt to
transgress by interrogating issues of the self through a deepness that entails looking at
one’s environment and history. Approaching public art critically can have the potential
for a radical learning mechanism in a typically classical school environment. Hooks
remarks that “teaching is a performative act. And it is that aspect of our work that offers
the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing
out the unique elements in each classroom.”
32
A critical approach in our teaching system
is especially beneficial in communities where there is a stagnant approach to teaching
based on the limited or lack of resources, funding and willingness to engage with learning
material in a creative, untraditional, exploratory fashion.
33
If we infuse a critical praxis in
public art, not only does the work become pedagogically liberatory, but it also allows us

30
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, New York,
London, 1994), chapter 1.

31
Coco Fusco, “Fantasies of Oppositionality,” in Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from
Afterimage, ed. Grant Kester (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1998), 72.

32
hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 11.
33
Erika Hayasaki and Erica Williams, “Staying the Course at L.A. Urban High Schools,” Los Angeles
Times, March 25, 2005.

15
“to create a cultural climate where biases can be challenged and changed,” therefore “all
border crossings must be seen as valid and legitimate.”
34

Echoing what Suzanne Lacy asserts in her seminal book, Mapping the Terrain,
New Genre Public Art, “What is needed at this point is a more subtle and challenging
criticism in which assumptions—both those of the critic and those of the artist—are
examined and grounded within the worlds of both art and social discourse.”
35
The 1990’s
activist ethos evident throughout Mapping the Terrain is one that is indicative of the
1970’s feminist movement that influenced Lacy’s public art practice. The work of La
Pocha Nostra, Asco and Code 33 could be viewed as examples of a public art practice
that deals with art and social discourse performance tactics that integrate a
communicative approach. Art historian and critic, Grant Kester also argues “that the
current political moment demands an activist aesthetic based on performativity and
localism, rather than on the immanence and universality that are the hall marks of
traditional aesthetics.”
36
If performance liberatory public art is produced from an
engaged critical processes and approaches such as the model employed by Paulo Freire,
focused on a contextual interrogation of the socio-political and historical circumstances
of the communities, wherever there is a sustaining form of culture, then public art has the
potential to change and empower communities by way of intersecting art and education.

34
hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 131.
35
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Bay Press, Seattle, Washington, 1995), 173.

36
This book was published in 1998, however, that same urgency Kester portrays is still relevant a decade
later. Grant Kester, Art, Activism and Opposionality, 15.

16
Chicana feminist writer, poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa also encourages us to
remove ourselves from the margins. Margins are spaces and places where oppression
exists because it is on the periphery. Similarly, in his book, The Location of Culture,
cultural theorist Homi Bhabha also discusses re-shifting one’s perspective from outside
of the margins in to the center and asserts, “the minority perspective, is a complex, on-
going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of
historical transformation.”
37
The center, then, is a position that can illuminate pertinent
discourse. By blurring these borders one is able to re-center the complexity, significance,
and viability of Latino culture as it is in the urban landscape on the northern side of the
border. In other words, one can attempt to dissect relevant stories of history, struggle,
marginalization from the center as opposed the outside, which appears to shed a new
perspective by pulling it away from the shadows of the margin and into the core. The
fact that La Pocha Nostra, Asco and Lacy seem to choose to work with communities that
have been historically marginalized and to engage them through a pedagogical public art
approach, appears to speak to Bhabha’s notion of hybridity. Moreover, in her book,
Borderlands/La Frontera: New Mestiza, Anzaldúa confronts the blending of Anglo,
Texan, Mexican, Indian and Chicano cultures, crossing of borders—both physical,
cultural and psychological—to discuss the impact that a Spanish, colonial history has on
notions of Mexicanidad and the Latino diaspora in the U.S. Southwest. Addressing the
use of borders as a divisive tool between “us” and “them,” Gloria states that “it is in
constant transition” and meant to “close off the minds and physicality of immersion or

37
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (Routledge, New York, 1994), 2.

17
even traversing both areas.”
38
This very act of blurring borders can be interpreted as an
act of resistance, an act of criticality and urgency. Regarding the blurring distinction of
Western and Non-Western approaches to art and culture, Anzaldúa says:
Western cultures behave differently toward works of art than do tribal cultures.
The “sacrifices” Western cultures make are in housing their art works in the best
structures designed by the best architects; and in servicing them with insurance,
guards to protect them, conservators to maintain them, specialists to “view” them.
Tribal cultures keep art works in honored and sacred places in the home and
elsewhere. They attend them by making sacrifices of blood (goat or chicken),
libations of wine. They bathe, feed, and clothe them. The works are treated not
just as objects, but also as persons. The “witness” is a participant in the
enactment of the work in a ritual, and not a member of the privileged classes.
39

What this passage illustrates is an independent way of viewing indigenous cultural
infrastructures that incorporate a public art experience as part of their everyday life and
not as something separate as is the distinction between a Latino-American culture versus
a European model. The relevance of acknowledging a position based on a culture
influenced by its native-indigenous heritage becomes significant in my discussion of
performance art as public art pedagogy. Sharing the same sentiment, Guillermo Gómez-
Peña comments that “…their [Latinos in Los Angeles] actions are not exactly considered
‘avant-garde.’ They are merely responding to a tradition that considers art as an intrinsic
part of life, and culture an ongoing process of negotiation.”
40
Moreover, Gómez-Peña
like Anzaldúa understands the importance of pulling away from margins where systems

38
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, San Franciso, 1987),
25.

39
At the end of this passage Gloria references Robert Plant Armstrong’s, The Powers of Presence:
Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence, 4. Borderlands, 90.

40
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “A New Artistic Continent,” in Art in the Public Interest, ed Raven Arlene,
(1993), 107.

18
of oppression exist, and asserts, “today when we attempt to define a contemporary Latino
consciousness and culture, we must acknowledge pan-latinoamericanism and
indigenismo as being both seminal and integral concepts for artists working on both sides
of the border.”
41
In other words, bearing relevance to the influence of various notions of
Latino-ness grounded on pre-colonial indigenous traits plays a vital role in discussing
how critical praxis in public art can enable and mobilize individuals and communities.
42

Accordingly, Anzaldúa and Gómez-Peña recognize the viability of a culture
where the distinction between art and life is blurred as well as Mexican-Latino
experience in the United States. In the United States, specifically in predominantly
Latino metropolis’ in California, there is an array of varying Latinos from different
countries, different states, and generations in the United States.
43
The work by La Pocha
Nostra, Asco and Suzanne Lacy inform these ideas about crossing borders in order to
activate communities and engage in much needed conversation about relevant issues.
Their methodology to public art collaborating with communities or the urban landscape
has much to do with re-centering the perspective of socially and historically marginalized
people as it does with introducing a performance language to deliver their message.
Similar to Asco, Suzanne Lacy and La Pocha Nostra, Anzaldúa straddles these spheres
and enters a new, third space that demands a critical approach. If we choose to expand
conventional parameters for learning, and other forms of oppressive domination, it

41
_____, 110.
42
For a more in dept reading on notions about third-space and hybrid identities please refer to the works of
Homi Bhabha, Michele Foucoult, Chela Sandoval and Franz Fanon.

43
Throughout this text I will vacillate between using the terms Latino, Mexican, Mexican-American and
Chicanos, which is a reflection of my own layered Mexican, American, Chicana-Latina identity.

19
becomes possible to scrutinize existing methodologies and institutions, therefore
transgressing some of the boundaries that keep people in subordinate positions.
Anzaldúa’s notion of blurring borders highlights the urgency of re-shifting our frame of
thought to incorporate people who have been pushed to the margins parallel to what some
of the artists and projects that I explore in this text attempt to achieve.
Anzaldúa remarks, “the ethno-poetics and performance of the shaman, my people,
the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art
from everyday life. The religious, social and aesthetic purposes of art were all
intertwined.”
44
What Anzaldúa describes is indicative of arts integral role in Latino
culture, independent of a generational, mono/bilingual tongue, Latino identity. Therefore,
public art cultivates a way of life within the urban Latino landscape and it is important to
understand that public art as liberatory pedagogy combined with a critical praxis has the
capability of breaking down borders. But what I find is most important to keep in mind is
that this approach and criticality of interrogating communities transcends some of the
same ethnic, racial, cultural borders that artists are trying to facilitate and negotiate.
Public art as liberatory pedagogy and looking at performance as critical praxis transcends
any confining role(s) in order to work with specific communities. Defiant, resistant and
necessary, the nature of crossing borders as a means to transgress is evident in the work
of La Pocha Nostra, Asco, and Lacy. The artists and projects I will examine in the
forthcoming chapters share the following public art pedagogically liberatory approach
relative to notions of community and art.

44
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 88.

20
Chapter 1: La Pocha Nostra

“To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and
history is naïve and simplistic”—Paulo Freire
45

Founded in 1993, and officially incorporated in 2001, performance art troupe, La
Pocha Nostra focuses on critical issues including globalization, border-culture, popular
culture, hyper-identities, the demise of modernity and the resurgence of the artistic rebels.
Created as a collaborative response, “out of our necessity to survive as Chicano artists in
a racist Art World. Pocha is a direct and pragmatic response to the lack of funding to
artists of color in the U.S,”
46
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Nola Mariano and Roberto
Sifuentes formed La Pocha Nostra. In other words, the foundation of their organization
grew out of an urgency and critical evaluation of their position as artist’s of color
working in a predominantly Anglicized arena. Their methodology combines traditional
Suzuki methods, as well as experimental dance, theatre shamanistic rituals,
47
resulting in
a form of radical art pedagogy that could potentially enable individuals who participate in
their workshops. By utilizing various forms of studies that live within the realm of
shamanistic and classical rituals, they are able to create an eclectic style that is also
representative of their diverse collaborators (Figure 1).
In their book, Ethnotechno, that maps out La Pocha Nostra’s performance
methodology and pedagogy, Guillermo Gómez-Peña stands clear and contradictory in
his thoughts about the correlation between performance and a public art approach. He

45
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50.

46
www.pochanostra.com/downloads/pocha_manifesto.doc

47
Gómez-Peña, Ethnotechno, 97.

21
notes, “… we are not ‘public artists’ per se. The streets are mere extensions of our
performance laboratory—galleries without walls.”
48
Yet their praxis as a collective is
based on networking, community-building, and performing socio-political issues in a
radical, mainstream bizarre way, in order to break stereotypes of race, gender and
sexuality, for example. These elements seem to comprise critical public art pedagogy.
Interestingly their play on socially constructed roles allows the definitions to be open to
interpretation and allowing us to consider radical performance methodologies as a form
of public art pedagogy. Gómez-Peña also asserts, “to us, the artist is, above all, an active
citizen immersed in the great debates of our times. Our place is the world and not just the
‘art world.’”
49
He acknowledges the separation of spheres—the artworld and the world—
and locates La Pocha Nostra’s work in one that is seemingly aligned with the world. In
other words, as an active citizen, the artist operates in ways that inherently compliments
Paulo Freire’s philosophy of conscientization as it weaves a dialogical approach that is
meant to provoke discourse within communities. Interestingly, though, La Pocha Nostra
also incorporate the language of the traditional artworld in order to expose, shock and
interrogate their role as the “gatekeepers” of what constitutes art. The artist has the
potential to act as an agent of facilitating a type of experiential learning through
performance strategies.
Their book, Ethnotechno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy
functions as an instructive, pedagogical, dialogical text. It can be perceived as a
companion-piece for those interested in reenacting and understanding the exercises

48
Gómez-Peña, Ethnotechno, 22.

49
_____, 78.

22
incorporated in La Pocha Nostra’s intensive workshops. When an artist like Guillermo
Gómez-Peña utilizes subjects that exist outside the walls of a museum and gallery it
becomes problematic and profoundly useful to look at how performance is an instrument
in politicizing a European-based model to how art is viewed. Additionally, Ethnotechno
attempts to coexist in the world of academia and the real world as a guide to their
methodology, which, in a sense is a parallel to La Pocha Nostra’s attempt to vacillate
between the artworld and “real” world.
Participants in La Pocha Nostra workshops typically enter the workshops with an
artistic knowledge-base, La Pocha Nostra, then, teaches their eclectic methodology with
an awareness that these “students” enter as active subjects coupled with a willingness to
learn and engage with the material, but with the mutual understanding that it will be
manipulated, taking on a new form of new interpretation influenced by collaboration.
Hence, the vision becomes collaborative in nature, and seems to compliment Paulo
Freire’s notion of moving in a liberatory direction by understanding that students, or in
this case artists, are active subjects versus passive objects. The idea of the artist imposing
their view, following the banking concept is challenged, as introduced by Freire.
Members from La Pocha Nostra acknowledge that the workshops have great potential to
be shaped by the personalities, moods and environments of the participants. In fact, they
welcome this artistic contribution and defiant spirit so long as it is done with respect and
dignity. They incorporate a critical component into the fabric of their methodology.
Additionally, the exercises are tailored to have an open exchange of ideas because there
appears to be a realization on La Pocha Nostra’s behalf that the participants are active
subjects rather than passive objects. The challenge lies in how the workshop participants

23
then infuse what they have learned in the collective-setting fostered by the workshop to
their own practice, and their own communities. How does one accept an active subject
role in order to incorporate their artistic pedagogy in the community? Freire’s dialogical
model seems to be visible in La Pocha Nostra’s summer workshops in the respect that the
group dynamic is constructed in a non-authoritarian manner which invites critical self-
reflexivity and engagement. Their receptiveness also illustrates La Pocha Nostra’s
hybridic nature to accept various responses and suggestions in order to represent all the
participants concerns—there seems to be an exchange of pedagogy in this sense (Figure
2, 3).
50

Collaboration serves as a crucial component in La Pocha Nostra’s methodology.
As a participant in their summer-school workshop in Tucson, Arizona, I was pleasantly
surprised to witness Guillermo, Michéle, Roberto and Violeta’s receptiveness to modify
the workshop schedule to satisfy both individual and collective needs. One of 26
participants amongst performance, visual and two-dimensional artists, assistant
professors and graduate students, I had the opportunity to challenge myself in a way that I
never anticipated. Engaged, open and with the mind-set that I was embarking on a
journey, I uncovered entrenched value-based boundaries and endured visceral responses
and ruptures stemming from a colonized past that I never realized existed within me. It
was during this time that I also gained a deep appreciation and respect for performance

50
During the summer workshop, we were discouraged from introducing the element of the
camera/frame/lens. By not having photography during rehearsal, in my opinion, people became less self-
conscience and were able to explore their artistic capabilities without having to worry about how they were
going to look or be perceived. The images that I have included are strictly images of the props we utilized
that were a collection of all the participants personal artifacts.

24
art.
51
In order to better suite the needs of some of us who wanted time to reflect on our
decisions to create tableau-vivants in a particular fashion, La Pocha Nostra incorporated
an exercise by one of our comrades that entailed forming Zapatista-guerilla style
community working circles. This exercise came at a particular time in our journey when
our energy level had declined due to the extreme hot climate of the Sonoran Desert.
While many colleagues held to the notion that reflections on individual and
collective journeys should appropriately take place only at the end of the workshop
process, taking time for reflection and conversation at the mid-point proved to be an
extremely relevant process. Here, we shared our thoughts on a specific topic. One person
in the group was the designated “cultural and intellectual d.j.”
52
and arbitrarily jotted
down staccato pieces of the conversation in the way that they understood it. After sharing
our feelings about art, change, the self, we created a performance literature piece that was
a reflection the groups interpretative voice. For this exercise I was the interlocutor, the
cultural d.j., responsible for annotating the groups conversation (see Appendix) that
unfolded organically. The work itself was segmented: first was a conversation, then there
was time jotting down and interpreting of ideas, which were finally read aloud to the
entire group, after which we returned to small group dialogs again, allowing us to draw
parallels between experiences and topics of interest. The result was a communicative
performance literature piece through the familial activity of conversation. How the
conversation is interpreted by the interlocutor is relevant, and how it is presented to the

51
La Pocha Nostra’s workshop made me wonder, how, if applied to inner-city youth, particularly in East
L.A., could this type of art-making, community-building approach empower, educate and inspire one to
transgress.

52
Gómez-Peña, Ethnotechno, 28.

25
group—intonation of voice, accentuating certain words and certain points, incorporating
pseudo-words, bringing in Spanish—are all part of the performance literature piece.
Since it was the first time La Pocha Nostra utilized this exercise, it will be interesting to
see how this concept will might be expanded in future workshops. Also for the few of us
who were also instructors or teaching assistants it became an exercise that sparked
excitement and possibly applicable in a “traditional” classroom setting. The workshop
itself was and continues to be a stimulus for many of us, and La Pocha Nostra’s liberatory
pedagogy has aspects that are applicable in traditional educational environments. Similar
to Paulo Freire’s emphasis on holding a dialogue based on common and disparate
perspectives, La Pocha Nostra also seem to place the concept of community process at
the center of their work.
In their ever-evolving manifesto, La Pocha Nostra lays out a map that helps define
who they are, their work, their multiple-ephemeral community, and artistic goals.
Explicit and contradictory, La Pocha Nostra aims at encouraging public dialogue that is
antithetical to the static setting in academia, religion, pop culture, and politics. Gómez-
Peña notes that La Pocha Nostra’s tactic “challenges authoritarian hierarchies and
specialized knowledge by creating temporary utopian spaces where interdisciplinary
dialogue and imagination can flourish.”
53
As radical morbid, extreme and complex as
their renditions may be, they offer a universal truth about all of our deepest fears,
anxieties, passions and beliefs. So, even if a tableau-vivant looks like pop-culture-meets-
immigration-meets-dominatrix-on acid—the imagery represents a diverse canvas of

53
Gómez-Peña, Ethnotechno, 79.

26
interpretative cultural beliefs. It is the audience, then, who will experience it in the same
fashion. There is a deep, intrinsic value in a public art approach that combines
community involvement and a keen interest in the transformative power of exposure
through performance.
I had the opportunity to conduct a phone interview Roberto Sifuentes recently,
five months after participating in their summer workshop, during which he discussed his
individual influences as well as La Pocha Nostra’s thoughts on the dialogical approach
that their workshop fosters, what community means relative to their artistic goals and
what it means to cross-borders. In this interview, Roberto provides an insight that is
general but also very specific to our artistic learning experience in Tucson:
Tania Picasso: If you could start off with sharing with me your background, your
artistic influences—artists, environment and theory.

Roberto Sifuentes: First and for most I’m a Chicano, I was born to activist
parents in Los Angeles and grew up sort of with them as a young child in the
Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the 70’s, both my parents were activists at
UCLA. I grew up in a highly politicized environment and knew that I wanted to
deal with politics and express myself and deal with identity politics and Chicano
issues and growing up in Los Angeles I thought of course that I would do that
through the film industry but when I went to school back east in New York I
discovered the power of performance art and the power of live theatre. For me
that tended to make a lot more sense, so I began working with experimental
theatre companies in New York. The Living Theatre with Judith Malina and
Hanon Reznikov (The Living Theatre being an old 40-50 year old anarchist,
pacifist, collective) and I started working with them because I wanted to see if it is
really possible, in the moment, to inspire an audience to act, to really act, really
do something, to take some kind of action, which of course you never see in the
movie theatre, and it certainly doesn’t happen in our culture, so I gravitated
toward that experimental theatre. Through one of my mentors at La Mama
Theatre [inaudible] Shapiro, he introduced me to Guillermo Gomez-Pena, first his
work on Border Arts Workshop, which I wrote my thesis about among other
things, and then we began working together in 1991, just after Guillermo received
the MacArthur Fellowship and was working on a project at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music next festival and was looking for Chicanos to work with so I
began working with him there, mainly as a designer. After touring with that

27
project and the couple in a cage piece with Guillermo and Coco [Fusco] we found
that we had a like aesthetic and we decided that we should start collaborating
creatively on projects and performing together. Since 1994 to the present, we
founded La Pocha Nostra and have been performing performance installations,
language based pieces in all corners of the globe, from the most unlikely venues
in the swamps of Georgia, to the collegiate center town of Helsinki, Finland…to
Chicano community centers, museums. The reason why I gravitated away from
theatre and toward conceptual and performance art, I found that as a Chicano, as
an activist, I really wanted the power of my own voice in the artwork, and of
course being an actor in film or theatre I wanted to make my own work, my own
voice. In performance we’re not bound by a particular discipline and the confines
of that discipline. We’re allowed to be chameleons and think of an issue or topic
and audience we want to address. And we could choose the form accordingly.
The pleasure of being a performance artist is that you get to cross media in order
to make the most effective statement and the other wonderful thing is that you are
not limited to a particular type of venue—you could perform in galleries, street
festivals, community centers.

TP: If you could talk about the individuality between the four members and what
you bring as a collective in order to make La Pocha Nostra work. Could you
touch upon your individual backgrounds that feed into your roles?

RS: Certainly, Guillermo as an exciting and excited driven creator that he is—he
is an amazing inspirational force throughout the workshop. He loves to talk
through a lot of the exercises and ideas behind the exercises and what people
might be imagining in beautiful and poetic way that brings people in a unique
place rather than it just being pragmatically “do this do that.” Guillermo brings a
wonderful energy and the intellectual backbone to the whole process, which is
absolutely wonderful. Michéle, who we’ve been working with since 1994 in the
Temple of Confessions project, comes from an interesting background as a prima-
ballerina of the Columbian ballet to this radical alternative dancer performance
artist that she is with all these wild alter-egos that only she could really talk about.
She’s also a warm, caring, nurturer. She definitely listens more than we do,
sometimes to the feelings and emotions that are being brought out by some of our
participants. Guillermo and I tend to drive, and put our feet on the petal but all of
our roles overlap. As a dancer she does incredible movement work, she’s a great
teacher. She’s a balls-out performance artist, we have such trust in each other that
we take great risks and Michéle and Violeta are great examples of that and it
really inspires the participants to push themselves further. Violeta, she’s just a
mad woman. The really interesting thing is she speaks in Spanish and doesn’t
speak English so fluently that she feels comfortable teaching. She deals with the
politics of language and talks primarily 99% in Spanish. And we don’t most often
translate, so the language also becomes an issue in the Pocha workshop. And it
becomes interesting…

28
TP: But this also follows your concept of crossing borders, especially borders
based on language...

RS: Yes, [Violeta] comes from a deep place in theatre performance art. When she
speaks, gesticulates, moving…she teaches very physically. It forces people to
listen and to look and reach back in their brain to the Spanish that we in the
United States have in reserve.

TP: If you could please talk about La Pocha Nostra in the context of community
and collaboration, more particularly with the different venues. What does
collaboration mean within that context?

RS: La Pocha Nostra has been trying to experiment with new forms of
collaboration since its inception. Unlike a traditional theatre which gets together
conceptualizes a piece, goes out and creates, puts up the finished product. We
work in a more organic process. We are a relatively small core group of
collaborators. Part of our political praxis, the way we make work and engage
communities, is that even from the beginning in the early 90’s we would create
modular art pieces and would allow for the inclusion of local artists who have
like-aesthetics and like-politics and would jump into the work in some capacity—
musicians, poets, theatre artists. For us it is really important when we enter cities,
we need people that we engage with local artists, community theatre, community
activists artists so we get a feel for the city. We often include local artists,
depending where we are, so we could ground the performance in the local. Pocha
nostra is about networking. In subsequent years, late 90’s, 2000’s mainly we’ve
been engaged in creating the Pocha Nostra methodology as a structured way to
engage with each community that we enter. And also a way for us to create an
ephemeral an company with concentric circles of members and associate
members who after having taken the workshops share a common performance
vocabulary…..that’s the way Pocha operates now, and the pedagogy is reinforcing
that model and again we are in the center a small group of core collaborators, in
the next circle our collaborators we work with more frequently and it goes out
from there but are still an integral part of our process and we know we can call on
them. Our pedagogy right now is a way of redefining how a company can operate
and also a way to engage and learn from each other because in the work we share
the artists that we meet share with us their own processes.

TP: Regarding the distinction between methodology and pedagogy—are these
terms interchangeable? Could you explain?

RS: The terms are somewhat blurred because at the same time that we are
building a piece ourselves or with the group, we are also teaching. We are
teaching our methodology, and pulling from it the moments that occur within the
circumstance of the workshop. And this can happen by design, or those lines are
blurred by design….it is important for us to travel…network and quite often these

29
communities overlap and mix. That’s why it’s important to have these summer
workshops.

TP: What are your personal thoughts on participants of La Pocha Nostra
workshop returning to the classroom, studio, streets with this guide book on
radical performance methodologies?

RS: We are mongrels, hybrids, we are multi-cultural Frankensteins. We are happy
that our methodology, our pedagogy is taken, borrowed, reshaped and morphed
into many other things. We say that at the beginning of all our workshops and
really encourage our participants to take from it what they want and please use it
and change it and adapt it and make it their own. Make it functional for their type
of practice. Not everybody is going to incorporate it into a straight, if it’s
possible, performance art practice. Not everybody is going to take it to make
work that looks like us and of course they couldn’t, we have a lot of visual artists,
sculptors, and photographers, we use aspects of the methodology to create still
images. Other people use aspects of the methodology in order to create more
intimate pieces that they are not used to doing or a way to get somewhere but
that’s totally cool. We don’t’ expect people will go out and make something that
looks exactly like what we do, but we think it’s an effective way of making art. It
is a totally adaptable form. It is adaptations as it is, an amalgamation of our own
experiences, some come organically from the way we found them we created
work,others have been borrowed from our own history as performance artists. We
have taken workshops ourselves in the past and our collaborations with amazing
dancers, actors who have brought new exercises into the process and we have then
Pochafied.

TP: I was really amazed with La Pocha Nostra’s openness and willingness to
incorporate new exercises to fit the needs for everybody there because their were
some people, and I was one of them, who didn’t have a direct performance art
background, per se, but needed more reflection time, exercises that involved
writing and processing in a “traditional” way. We had the performance literature
pieces that “Juan” created as a result of us wanting a little bit more and I was
amazed at how open you were to that and adapted your own style so that and it
worked. If you could talk a more about the improvisation on La Pocha Nostra’s
end to incorporate new exercises and techniques—even though at first I felt that
you guys were resistant towards having something that was explicitly pedagogical
even though your practice is very embedded in pedagogy…

RS: I think the resistance that you were feeling was our trying to stay out of the
head and inside the body. Quite often we are working with performance theorists
and activists and performance artists that we work with are oftentimes are very
wonderfully intellectual. Sometimes part of the challenge is to get people out of
their heads, which can be a comfort place…the exercises are very intimate and
personal, so there is a lot of self-reflexivity that goes on that’s very personal for

30
each individual participant in the workshop, and that’s great, but if we begin with
the dialogues too early, then the tone of the workshop will be only about very
personal feelings that are being brought up. But if you wait a while until those
feelings wash through, and people have a chance to deal with them on their own,
then dialogue could be a little deeper. We find that it’s very important to listen to
the group to know where people are coming from in the group and adapt and
change all the time. Particularly in these intensive workshops we design them and
redesign them every single day. And that’s an important part of our process as
Pocha is we sit everyday before the workshop for several hours talk about what
went on, where we’re at, where people are at and what we think should happen
next. In Tucson, we got into a lot of heated debates particularly around, “when do
we introduce a more cerebral approach, how is it best to introduce it, how can we
not get lost in it” and I think by opening ourselves us to congestions from
members of the groups, we were the one’s who discovered the best way to
approach our Poetic theory, but it was members of the group who introduced this.
We reshaped it, came to it with our own rules and put it to test the next day. The
wonderful thing about the workshop and community is that extends well beyond
the hours of the actual physical work. We get together, we hang out, party
together, a lot of intellectual discussion takes place at the bar after a few drinks
where we could all sit and that way it also moves away from the heavy realm of a
circle trying to think of things to say and do much more loose and informal
environment. It’s more conducive fun and interesting exchange of ideas.

TP: Could you speak more about what you hope to gain from crossing territories
such as anthropology, sociology, cultural and critical theory?

RS: Our work is described as cross cultural diplomacy. The act of touring,
traveling, the act of being migratory, the road is our home. The act of crossing
borders is an essential act of La Pocha Nostra. We have many new homes all over
the world and communities where we feel at home by building connections
between non-art centers, between Canary Islands and Chicanolandia….quite often
time these communities overlap and mix. With the summer intensive workshop,
the artists that we worked with in the past can plan for the summer time and come
to these workshops. Crossing those borders is creating a…and maintain their own
connections. Grow as a concept, pedagogy, friends….On the one hand, the
performance work, although highly experimental and avant-garde, is also highly
populist. Our idea is not to make work that is exclusive in any way. Certainly if
it doesn’t work in our community, it doesn’t work.

In this interview, we are able to better understand La Pocha Nostra’s adaptability
and improvisation in order to incorporate new exercises into their methodology.
Consequently, the art of teaching operates within layers; first, with the art collective

31
teaching the students their strategies, second, the participants expressing their ideas and
interests to weave throughout the workshop. Again, what seems to be operating here can
be interpreted as a Freire-esque method of communication in order to be engaging and
address prevalent issues. La Pocha Nostra’s pedagogy is also, in part, influenced by
Brazilian theatre instructor, educator and socio-political activist, Augusto Boal.
54
Boal’s
Theatre of the Oppressed is informed by Freire’s work, and reinvents the Aristotelian
idea of “mimesis” which relies on the art of recreating and projecting images of reality.
55

Boal challenges the idea of mimesis in theatre by acknowledging that theater “can also be
the repetitive acts of daily life,”
56
blurring the roles of actors and spectators, creating
what he terms “spec-actors,” thus permitting all people to perform the social conditions
surrounding them. Evidently, La Pocha Nostra weaves exercises that deal with utilizing
the body as a way to perform issues influenced by popular-culture, national-foreign
relations, gender-bending, and systems of cultural oppression. In fact, their performances
oftentimes encourage the audience to interact with the piece rather than merely observe,
this idea is similar to what Boal and Freire’s idea of becoming active subjects. Yet, this
is merely one of the many approaches incorporated into the workshops in an effort to
illustrate their unique performance approach and attempt to cater to the different
backgrounds of the participants. A focus on the workshop in Tuscon reflecting the
mantra of the group, is the emphasis on process as part of the actual product. In other

54
Tania Picasso personal communication with Roberto Sifuentes, December 2007.

55
Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (Theatre Communications Group, New York, 1985; Originally
published in Spanish as Teatro de Oprimido, 1974), 1.

56
Augusto Boal, Games For Actors and Non-Actors, preface, xxv.

32
words, the end result, the grand finale performance at our host institution, the Museum of
Contemporary Art (MOCA, Tucson), was merely an extension of the learning, artistic
process that we experienced and not the ultimate goal.
57

Mid-way through our workshop, with the help of my colleague, Teik-Kim Pok,
we coordinated an art-show that showcased the work of all our colleagues. Located in
the loft of a Tucson-based artist
58
, we decided to create two spaces where we would share
our work. On a large projector, we were able to see websites, stills from performances of
past and on-going projects. The second half occurred in the living room area where we
heard spoken-word pieces and Teik-Kim performed, “Breakfast of Champions,”
59
a three
minute rendition of a swimmer’s love for cereal, swimming and Dionne Warwick. Being
able to facilitate a discussion of our backgrounds and artistic view points provided a
framework for the type of work most of us were creating in collaboration throughout the
summer school workshop. While not everyone in the workshop had a background as an
artist, all of us were art advocates to a certain degree and interested in implementing the
strategies we learned in our classrooms, research, and art practice. What I continue to
find fascinating is how we, the students from the summer school, will implement La
Pocha Nostra’s pedagogy in our work. For example, how does this work translate in a
way that is polemic and raises political and social consciousness relevant to our various

57
Due to miscommunication I left Tucson the morning of the final performance. I felt comfortable with
this decision (and was unable to change my flight plans) because of La Pocha Nostra’s members
encouragement throughout the ten day journey. Graciously, Guillermo, Michéle, Roberto and Violeta
allowed me to deal with the overall syntax of the show during the rehearsal.

58
Artist’s name shall remain anonymous as this particular evening event was not coordinated by MOCA.

59
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LaWbhHjvBi0

33
communities? Does working within the parameters of a traditional art practice contradict
the goal of La Pocha Nostra? If so, does this impact their approach from the perspective
of working from inside the white-cube to the public that exists outside of the cube? It is
intriguing to see what stems from attempting to engage with the raw material that we
learned in the workshop in the way that is unique to our vast communities while tweaking
the branding mechanism deeply embedded in La Pocha Nostra stylistic choices.

34
Chapter 2: Asco
“One’s conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by
reality.”—Antonio Gramsci
60

The 1960’s Chicano movement in California, particularly in Los Angeles,
stemmed from the social and political injustices experienced by farm-workers in Central
California. Through the formation of a union, led by labor organizer and socio-political
activist, Cesar Chavez, these series of events were a catalyst for the overall issues that
were central to Americans of Mexican descent. Scarce resources, overcrowded
classrooms, inadequate education, low wages, gang violence, police brutality, violations
of civil rights, lack of political power all contributed to the emergence of what is
historically recognized as the Chicano Civil Rights Movement,
61
which was one that
coincided in time with reform and liberation movements of many peoples within and
outside the United States.
62
This explosive period of political activism, affirmation of
identity, space and voice within this realm, reverberated on various levels resulting in a
type of renaissance of Latino culture. An exploration and creation of literature, theatre,
social reform, poster art, activism, identity awareness and of course art were all elements
that helped create a Chicano renaissance. Art was utilized as a tool to help articulate the
events of the present time, and reaffirm their identity that had indigenous roots while

60
Antonio Gramsci, “Prison Essays” in Cultural Resistance Reader, ed. Steven Ducombe (Verso, London,
2002), 60.

61
Shifra Goldman and Tomas Ybrarra-Frausto, Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of
Chicano Art 1965-1981 (Chicano Studies Library Publications, University of California, Berkeley), 32.

62
_____, 4.

35
simultaneously embracing their American heritage.
63
Asco, the Spanish word for nausea,
was also a conceptual avant-garde collective that deliberately challenged notions of
Chicano identity through their provocative public performance strategies.
Although short-lived
64
, Asco’s approach to art and the East L.A. landscape was
one that combined pedagogy as a means of expanding institutional categories of Chicano
art. Liberartory pedagogy, in Asco’s case, seems to ensue through their street
interventionist performances as a method of exposing and educating the community as to
the possibilities of Chicano art. As Guillermo Gómez-Peña notes, “[t]he streets of Latin
American cities and Chicano barrios have always operated as ‘free stages’ for para-
artistic events of an interdisciplinary nature that strongly resemble what we now call
‘performance art.’”
65
For Asco, the rawness of the East L.A. streets was their laboratory,
allowing them to experiment with alternative modes of Chicano artistic expression.
Having paved the way for contemporary Latino artists, theirs was a style that defied
traditional elements of Chicano art, which typically resorted to the use of images of a
Mexican heritage embedded in Catholicism as well as national and cultural pride. Art
historian Tomas Ybarra-Frausto describes this cultural-visual vocabulary as one that
incorporates elements from “such sources as prison and gang iconography [tattoos and
panuelitos], religious art [altars and votive chromos of saints] and the urban lifestyle

63
Goldman and Ybarra-Frausto, Arte Chicano, 12.

64
The dates of Asco’s existence are from 1972-1987; http//:www.harrygamboajr.com.

65
Gomez-Peña, “A New Artistic Continent,” 108.

36
[lowriders and cholos].”
66
Thus, visual representations within the Chicano paradigm were
meant to be reflective of the social conditions “as well as the liberty to express subjective,
personal and spiritual states of mind.”
67
In regards to notions of Chicano values, culture
and identity, Gloria Anzaldúa asserts:
Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating.
This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of
dual identity—we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we
don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two
cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness.
68

The four founding members of Asco, Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herron
and Patsi Valdez, expressed their social-political concerns in a defiant artistic form that
directly influenced institutional critique of categorization and the communities
perspectives on the various notions of Mexican-ness, Chicano, Latino-ness and
American-ness compared to the traditional murals created by artists such as Judy Baca,
David Botello of East Los Streetscrapers and Frank Romero, for example (Figure 4). In
this sense, Asco was more concerned about directly educating the museum and art world
and claiming a space within a frame fostered by the white-cube; educating the Chicano
community itself was an impetus but also incidental. In other words, their conceptual
mode of expression seemed to derive from a response to the Chicano visual vocabulary,
the focus then became on how to legitimize their work by having institutional recognition
from places like the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA). But it is also

66
Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, “A History of Chicano Art,” El Tecolote Literary Magazine, vol. 2, no. 4
(December 1980), 8.

67
Ybarra-Frausto, “A History of Chicano Art,” 8.

68
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 85.

37
fair to speculate that the members of Asco were aware of the Chicano community’s
ability to eventually understand their work and that the initial sense of asco would later
be commended and viewed as something radical, audacious and cutting-edge. On the one
hand, Asco’s strategy utilized a banking-concept approach with the hope of forcibly
telling the Chicano community and the museum world that Chicanos were capable of
creating more than a vibrant mural with Emiliano Zapata and Aztec warriors.
69
On the
other hand, Asco simultaneously incorporated a problem-posing method, as discussed by
Freire, in order to raise deeper questions about the axis of Chicano art, culture, identity
and community. The degree that this problem-posing approach was successful varies.
For example, in their effort to educate the community about reinventing notions of a
cultural-image vocabulary, Asco dealt with the institution that was perpetuating those
Chicano representations by denying access to allowing their work to be show-cased.
Another example of how Asco’s work can be questionably emblematic of Paulo
Freire’s philosophical model of conscientization is present in Walking Mural from
December 24, 1972 (Figure 5). In this performance, Patssi Valdez, Willie Herron, Gronk
and Harry Gamboa Jr. use the language of customary Chicano art to elaborate on the
concept of murals by actually performing the piece. Created as a response to the
cancellation of the annual East Los Angeles Christmas parade, which was suppressed
when the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War turned into a police riot, Asco
reclaimed their social and cultural space through a reenactment of skeletal saints and
Jesus figures; Valdez was the Virgen de Guadalupe, Gronk was a Christmas tree, Herron

69
I personally believe that Asco’s introduction of a conceptual performance praxis is something that
complimented the traditional mural style of painting. I appreciate Asco’s ability to be able to thrive in
tandem with the style of other Chicano/Latino artists.

38
“was a multifaced mural that had become bored with its environment and left,” Gamboa
documented the project.
70
Walking Mural was a “carnivalesque inversion”
71
of space in
regards to how Asco traversed the main boulevard through conceptual, performative, and
inherently pedagogical, artistic expression. Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin discusses the
carnivalesque in relation to the “actual carnivals which dominated European popular
culture throughout the Middle Ages”
72
where a division between performer and spectator
did not cease to exist.
73
The carnivalesque suspends the notion of reality, refusing to
accept the official world by providing a utopian idea of a “better life, one of equality,
abundance and freedom.”
74
Asco’s Walking Mural operates on this level of providing a
utopian version of reality by using morbidly absurd imagery. Previously, murals were
static and they only came to life through content and use of vibrant colors. Asco
enhanced the meaning of a mural by adding a new element of movement, performance
and transient space but all within specific cultural and political parameters.
Walking Mural is a reclamation of social space and in this sense Asco’s work
becomes not only a performance piece, but also a silent political protest based on
recognizable cultural imagery and spectacle. Members of Asco wanted to break away

70
Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “In the City of Angels,
Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco,a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or, Asco Was a Four-
Member Word)” in Urban Exiles, Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon A. Noreiga
(University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998), 79.

71
Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,”193.

72
John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, Third Edition, (Hemel Hempstead, Prentice Hall
2001), 108.

73
This idea of the unification between actor and audience is reminiscent of Augusto Boal’s notion of spect-
actors.

74
For a more thorough yet concise description of the carnivalesque as described by Mikhail Bakhtin see
John Storey’s Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 109.

39
from the past and move forward with new art concepts and modes of representation.
However, in rejecting the parameters of Chicano art of the 60’s and 70’s, they adopt
elements of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as clearly noted in their outlandish use
of make-up and costume.
75
Through performance and a conceptual framework Asco was
able to provide a radical form of education to the art world and East L.A. community
alike. Through utilizing an evocative, critical and dialogical approach, Asco adopts a
method of communication with the East L.A. landscape and to its various communities
thus becoming a seeming fruitful example of Paulo Freire’s model of critical pedagogy
and conscientization. Unfortunately, the potential was present in the 70’s and lived as
long as Asco, and the collaborative performance troop eventually dismantled. It is
important to realize the potential this model had in impacting the cultural urban
infrastructure of East Los Angeles and beyond. More significantly, it is worth exploring
how Asco’s audacious, artistic spirit can be applied as a model for learning inside the
realm of public education. What are the implications for a type of learning that
challenges the status-quo? Why are alternative modes of learning, an approach that
centers the self and places unique cultural and socio-political conditions on the frontline?
Another example of Asco’s dialogical, artistically discursive approach is the 1972
piece Project Pie in De/Face or Spraypaint LACMA (Figure 6), which was a direct
response concerning the absence of Chicano art in the museums collection. According to
LACMA’s then curator, Chicanos did not make “fine art”; they only made “folk art” or

75
Chon A. Noriega, “No Introduction,” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., 4.

40
were in gangs—a statement that after all these years is yet to be confirmed by LACMA.
76

However, the mid-1970’s saw major museums slowly begin the process of validation and
approval of selected Chicano artists and specific forms of Chicano art.”
77
Consequently,
all four members of Asco spray-painted their names in old-English style, on all the main
entrances of the museum, transforming the space.
78
This project demonstrates their
ability to conceptually attack larger institutions outside of East Los Angeles, and Gamboa
Jr. goes on to say, “the only reason we spray-painted it is because we couldn’t lift the
whole place and toss it into the tar pits.”
79
Asco’s approach seemed to be more literal and
direct compared to the traditional Chicano art practice that they were rebelling against.
By defacing an institution of mainstream, “high art,” Asco essentially opened doors for
future Chicano representation at LACMA and created what Gamboa deemed “the first
conceptual work of Chicano art to be exhibited at LACMA.”
80
Cultural theorist Homi
Bhabha describes the private and public, past and present as having an intimate
relationship that “questions binary divisions through which such spheres of social
experience are often spatially opposed.”
81
Evidently, the dialogical derives from a
negotiation of binary oppositions of a varying past and present relationship amongst
LACMA, artists working within the traditional Chicano aesthetic and community. The

76
Daniel Hernandez, “The Art Outlaws of East L.A.,” LA Weekly, June 6, 2007.

77
Ybarra-Frausto, “A History of Chicano Art,” 8.

78
Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejaranos, Chicano Art:
Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985.

79
Hernandez, June 6, 2007.

80
Chavoya, “Internal Exiles,” 195.

81
Bhabha, Location of Culture,13.

41
controversy at the center of Asco’s work derives from their willingness to introduce a
new, radical, and interventionist approach to art and their ability to impact and be
impacted by the inner-city urban cultural-political landscape.
Yet, the same radical interventionist tactics that created waves within the
Chicano/Latino community was also one of the reasons, along with personal member
conflict, that inspired the formation Asco B, which was an attempt to capture the
interventionist, conceptual, guerilla tactics of the 70’s with a new set of performance
artists like Diane Gamboa, Maricela Norte, and international conceptual artist Daniel J.
Martinez, but ultimately led to the demise of Asco as a whole. While the fact remains
that a few Asco members have had success within the same institution they tried to
penetrate in the 1970’s and 1980’s—Gronk as the first Chicano artist to have a solo
exhibition showcasing his paintings at LACMA, Diane Gamboa best known for her pin-
up photographs, and Daniel J. Martinez having gained international appeal through the
appearance in a few prestigious biennales—Asco’s legacy created in the 1970’s as a
direct response to the tumultuous political climate is one that can still be remembered as
having a deep impact on the way we think about conceptual performance public art
methods.
The work Asco created as a collective in the apex of their career compels me to
explore their performative methodologies in terms of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy
model. By attempting to engage the Chicano community and the art community,
sometimes overlapping, through their use of creating a hybrid visual vernacular that
spoke to various people, helped raise poignant questions in terms of identity politics,
socio-political documentary on the climate, institutional commentary and critique and the

42
intersection of theory and practice, praxis. To say that Asco performed critical issues is
an understatement as they attempted to personify them. Director of the University of
California, Los Angeles, Chicano Studies Research Center and professor, Chon A.
Noriega asserts that “For Asco, what made Chicano identity performative was not that it
named itself against all odds, as an act of defiance, but that it was constituted within a set
of social relations largely defined by the mass media and the corporate liberal state.”
82

One could argue, however, that the style that Asco chose to represent themselves was in
fact a sense of defiance because, to a certain degree, it attempted to defame cultural,
religious iconography for the sake of art and for the sake of making a statement against
the social relations defined by the media. It is relevant to explore Asco’s work
inquisitively about the connection between their conceptual approach and style and what
they are reacting against. Coincidentally, the systemic catalyst of their work in regards to
the Chicano Movement’s struggle and demand for quality education, raises the question
of how the strategies deployed by Asco such as using their body and ideas to perform
critical, community issues, would resonate with students today who unfortunately are
battling the same issues that sparked an entire movement three decades ago.

82
Chon A. Noriega, “No Introduction,” in Urban Exile, 11.

43
Chapter 3: Code 33

“What artists do and what they ‘ought’ to do constitutes a territory of public debate in
which we seek a broadened paradigm for the meaning of art in our times.”—Suzanne
Lacy
83

Having a broadened paradigm potentially expands the possibility of injecting
criticality in the field of public art. It elicits a union of practice and theory striving
towards a creative praxis. Public artist, activist, feminist, writer, Suzanne Lacy asserts
that “it is time to do more than describe this artwork, time to look more closely at what
exists within the borders of this new artistic territory.”
84
Offering ways to attack this
include reanalyzing the work in more challenging and complex ways through looking at
the quality, artist’s intention and effects, and the work’s method of conveying meaning.
Lacy, a champion-pioneer of New Genre Public Art, which is public art concerned with
community-building and recentering historically underrepresented groups, also invokes a
critical model to foster this practice, and it is one that “calls for a radically different set of
skills…bringing together diverse people within the structure of the work, exploring
similarities and differences as part of a dialogic practice.”
85
Like Paulo Freire, who
advocates for a liberatory, humanizing model, Suzanne Lacy’s earlier work, heavily
influenced by the 1970’s feminist movement, coupled with Leslie Labowitz, helped
create Ariadne: A Social Art Network, that operated as “an exchange between women in
the arts, government utilized media” that aimed at creating strategies to help “produce
seven major public performance events dealing with advertising, news media, and

83
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, New Genre Public Art, 171.

84
_____, 41.

85
_____, 35.

44
pornography.”
86
Lacy’s media, interventionist strategies helped lay the framework for
future community-based projects that would also employ critical, interventionist, dialogic
tactics. Here, Lacy like Chicana feminist author, Gloria Anzaldúa share similar view
points in that:
…ethnic minorities have challenged the assumptions of culture premised in the
work of European, primarily male artists, as have feminists, whose theory of
differences has effectively demonstrated the patterns of dominance deeply
embedded in the language and symbols of representation.
87

Nevertheless, it is not only people of color that are concerned with challenging the
hegemony; artists with a socially conscious approach are equally engaged at addressing
these issues. The fact that this model is not limited to a certain ethnic group and is not
exclusive to people of color makes me evaluate this art practice/praxis as being engaging,
participatory and as a form of liberation through its inclusive approach within the
spectrum of public art. Furthermore, Lacy like Gloria Anzaldúa and Paulo Freire appear
to support a methodology that pulls “typically” marginalized groups outside the periphery
to center their voices and acknowledge their perspective, validating the story that they
have to share in order to contribute to the fabric of our culture and society.
In 1998 through 2000, Suzanne Lacy collaborated with artists Julio Morales,
Unique Holland, Kim Batiste, Raul Cabra, Patrick Toebe, David Goldberg, Anne Marie
Hardeman and with the inner-city Oakland community and residents, specifically youth
of color, to stimulate dialogue and strategize about how to “reduce policy hostility toward
youth, provide youth with a set of skills to participate in their communities, and generate

86
Jan Cohen-Cruz, Radical Street Performance, in Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, “Feminist Media
Strategies for Political Performance,” (Routledge, 1998), 38.

87
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 38.

45
a more profound understanding of youth needs.”
88
Collaborating with youth and the
organizations already in place was a formula that assisted Code 33 in operating against
what Freire terms a banking-concept of education and art and instead promoted a critical,
inclusive and participatory problem-posing method to public art. Rather than assuming
these members did not have knowledge about their needs, Lacy’s approach was
unconventional in that she and her team of collaborators did not necessarily have a preset
artistic agenda other than entering the community and engaging in a conversation.
The three-year long project, which was given the title after the police code for
“emergency, clear the airwaves”
89
incorporated a segmented style. Within Code 33 there
were productive forums such as art workshops, leadership programs, police-student
training, which all sought to promote awareness about relevant youth/police community-
centered issues. Deciding to segment the overall project into smaller and more focused
art projects presented education opportunities and compels me to evaluate this project
within the parameters of Freire’s critical pedagogy and conscientizing model as it
attempted to challenge stereotypes of inner-city youth and police relationships,
confronted the power dynamics of these roles, and fostered the necessary discursive
occurrence crucial in the state of transgression. Understanding that the youth in Oakland
were the best resources and people to strategize with in regards to the change they felt
they needed, Lacy entered and became a part of that community for the duration of Code
33 by helping to facilitate problem-posing tactics.

88
http://suzannelacy.com/1990soakland_code33_overview.htm.

89
http://suzannelacy.com/1990soakland_code33_overview.htm, and
http://crime.about.com/od/legalresources/g/gl_p_code33.htm.

46
More specifically, one of the workshops facilitated through Code 33 comprised of
twelve youth members attending weekly City Hall meetings to assist with performance
planning. The direct goal “focused on education in self awareness and awareness of
youth as a ‘group’ with specific needs and rights. Workshops and youth production teams
were a key strategy in our work.”
90
Moreover, this project aimed at unifying different
community organizations already existing in Oakland such as the Oakland Unified
School District’s Truancy Program, The City Manager’s Office, The Neighborhood
Crime Prevention Councils with young people affected by the pangs of being youth of
color.
91
This allowed the 350 youth involved in Code 33 to participate as a collective
with the Oakland Unified School District’s Mentoring Conference. One of the young
women in this group makes a statement that appears to embody what her peers are faced
with; she notes, “a lot of us teenagers have had incidents where the cops abuse their
power”
92
and it is through these workshops that Oakland youth had a platform to express
their views in a safe space that aimed at challenging the power structure of authority.
With this approach, Lacy’s team of collaborators is able to set-up the ground work for the
performers who are the community members in order to interrogate, equivocate and
explore their concerns.
Taking place on October 7, 1999, the performance component of Code 33
switched roles of participants and spectators alike. Located on Oakland’s City Center
Garage rooftop, this project aimed at continuing dialogue between community residents,

90
http://suzannelacy.com/1990soakland_code33_overview.htm.

91
http://suzannelacy.com/1990soakland_code33_overview.htm

92
Video footage of “The Roof Is On Fire,” courtesy of Suzanne Lacy.

47
local police and youth. By advocating for the youth, in an appropriate and neutral arena
where community members could discuss their concerns regarding the treatment by
Oakland police, Lacy and her team of collaborators, to a certain degree, were able to help
re-shift traditional power modes of learning. In the words of the team of artist
collaborators, “the community became protagonist, implicated on stage as in real life, a
player in the sometimes deadly and always confrontational relationship between police
and youth.”
93
In this project, when the youth participating in the small conversation
circles leave and go to another parking level, change from white to red shirts, and begin
dancing, they become activists and performers and reverse the role of what it means to be
a performer expanding methods of communicating with community members. As
professor of drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Jan Cohen-Cruz
notes, “these projects are politically positioned to maximize civic resources as well as
introduce youth into the mainstream of community life.”
94
It is important to note that the
way this project is executed refrains from reinforcing the switch in power dynamics, in
fact, Lacy in a sense relinquishes authority as an artist to become a mediator and work
inside of the community in order to ensure the collaboration exists on all levels of the
project. Moreover, Code 33 seems to embody what is necessary for a community, a
collective, a People, to transgress through this community-centered approach (Figure 7-
10). Regarding the shift from passive object to active subject, Freire notes “as the
situation becomes the object of their cognition, the naïve or magical perception which

93
http://suzannelacy.com/1990soakland_code33_performance.htm.

94
Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts, 75.

48
produced their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even as it
perceives reality and can thus be critically objective abut that reality.”
95

It becomes fascinating to witness what happens when artistic methodologies are
applicable to people, youth in this case, that are not typically perceived as artists by a
larger collective. Part of the success of Code 33 relied on unconventional performance
strategies rooted in community-building and exploring new ways of dialogue. But
despite the projects emphasis on community, dialogue and activism, I wonder what it
means for an artist to enter a specific community, co-exist with them throughout the
duration of a project, engage them, facilitate workshops, and then move on to a
seemingly different project?
Although, Lacy’s involvement could be perceived as only having temporary
implications because she was a transient community member, the programs and dialogue
that Code 33 helped generate is something that appears to surpass her “temporary”
involvement with the community and could potentially allow for her to be considered
part of the community. It raises the question if one possesses a certain altruistic spirit, if
that connects them to a certain community, making them a type of “honorary” member?
How might multiple definitions of “public” impact our work inside any given
community-based project? Feminist art critic and public art advocate, Lucy Lippard notes
that a community-based, inclusive way of strategizing is a common element in Lacy’s
work. She goes on to contend that “all the performers in [her] works are ‘amateurs,’

95
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 85.

49
telling their own stories and feelings in their own words,”
96
which is a common trait in
Lacy’s work. Interestingly, the lack of distinction between performers and community
members becomes a critical trait in Lacy’s praxis as it has the potency to be an enabling
tool. According to Suzanne Lacy’s website, “the intervention was to create a model in
training program for police officers and support the department’s development of youth
centered policing practices,”
97
and consequently there was policy implementation.
Regarding Lacy’s work, Grant Kester remarks that “while it is common for a work of art
to provoke dialogue among viewer, this typically occurs in response to a finished object”
and adds that in projects like Code 33 “conversation becomes an integral part of the work
itself. It is reframed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine
beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of
partisan political conflict.”
98
Furthermore, this project raises questions about engaging
various types of communities in order to illustrate that the place of the margins in a
contentious area but that still requires exploration and equality in representation.
This inclusiveness seems to make Lacy’s public art practice unconventional,
public, and part of a pedagogical practice that strives to empower community through
and with art. In fact, most of the framework for Code 33 appears to be based on a
problem-posing approach—what better catalyst than to problematize, interrogate the
power structure of the Oakland Police Department than by gathering those most affected

96
Lucy Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays On Art: 1970-1993 (The New Press, New
York, 1995), 217.

97
http://suzannelacy.com/1990soakland_code33_policy.htm

98
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Regents of the
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004), 8.

50
by their treatment? What also appears to be happening at the core of Code 33 is Paulo
Freire’s process-driven emphasis, rather than product driven, in order to facilitate a
productive and creative dialogue. Change can manifest itself in many forms—sometimes
within an instant, within an extended period of time or in a combination—but by focusing
on process, community-based works, change can potentially occur, and compliment a
praxis that focuses on criticality and process, cultivating an opportunity for change. What
happens if we were to focus on this approach within the track-based, semester-based
approach that is common within the inner-city system of education? Could the outcome
be different? Would the student disappearance rate in Garfield High School, for
example, be less than 61% if they were exposed to other methods of learning that placed
their cultural and individual experiences at the center?
99
Or as Lacy asserts, “Even when
the artist’s intentions are to evoke rather than merely to suggest social transformation, the
question of whether art operates differently than, say, direct action must be
considered,”
100
and it is this type of community-based public art approach that can be
perceived as critical praxis as it aims at a democratized way of accomplishing social
change within communities.
The dialogical is something that is operating on various levels crossing and
connecting various communities, essentially providing the opportunity to exchange
opinions and ideas. By having a dialogue-focused method that relies on participation

99
Study conducted by United Students, a student-based organization comprised of students from the
LAUSD community, specifically Garfield, Roosevelt and Wilson High School, coordinated by Inner-City
Struggle, a community organization dedicated to organizing students and families to promote “safe,
healthy, and non-violent” communities.

100
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 46.

51
from everyone involved, Code 33 has the potential to be a model for community
engaging pedagogical practices. In Code 33, the dialogical appears to be evident in
various instances due to the strategies utilized. Variations of conversation were able to
happen, and they were based on the group of people involved in the workshops and those
who attended the final performance piece. Dialogue seemed to be a critical aspect in the
art workshops and the City Hall meetings, and was essentially the crux for the “final”
performance. According to Freire, “[the] liberating action is dialogical in nature,
dialogue cannot be a posteriori to that action, but must be concomitant with it. And since
liberation must be a permanent condition, dialogue becomes a continuing aspect of
liberating action.”
101
Evidently, Code 33 captures the fundamental elements that could
make public art pedagogical due to the critical praxis element. In fact, in regards to the
artist working in the public realm, Lacy notes:
To take a position with respect to the public agenda, the artist must act in
collaboration with people, and with an understanding of social systems and
institutions. Entirely new strategies must be learned: how to collaborate, how to
develop multilayered and specific audiences, how to cross over with other
disciplines, how to choose sites that resonate with public meaning.
102

Here, Code 33 is working with various groups of people—youth, artists, police, city
officials, residents—relying on the individual community members to use their voices
and focus on the process of the project that is meant to facilitate discussion while infusing
performance strategies that speak to the urgency of the socio-political issues. Code 33
functions as a liberatory model because it delineates traditional models of learning and

101
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 139.

102
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 177.

52
artistic practice. The three years of the project can be viewed as a pilot model for
fostering conversation necessary in the community in order to begin to find solutions for
some of the problems they face. This philosophy, similar to the problematizing, inclusive
philosophy of Paulo Freire, is one that emphasizes the importance of collaboration,
criticality, audiences with multi-layered forms of public, and site specificity as a means
of finding specific community concerns that need to be resolved. Code 33 examines
what it means to have a project that is grounded on real and tangible issues that ask the
community who is most affected to participate in an exploration of relevant collective
concerns.

53
Chapter 4: Public Art as Liberatory Pedagogy—Permutations
“For the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolutionary, the object of action is
the reality to be transformed by them together with other people….”—Paulo Freire
103

Incorporating an art practice rooted in social thought and political discourse could
help cultivate a critical and much needed discussion about the relationship between inner-
city youth and public art as an alternative learning tool. Clearly, to various degrees of
success, the methods employed by La Pocha Nostra, Asco and Suzanne Lacy share the
idea, whether it is deliberate or not, to liberate the individual by offering alternative,
critical art methods that differ from traditional modes of expression and choose to
respond to certain problems experienced within their community. Their artwork becomes
a tool that embodies a collaborative essence and attempts to engage, educate, empower
and explore new methodologies to express contemporary societal issues through an
artistic lens. Public art as liberartory pedagogy could be one that deals with an art
practice that embodies “education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as
the practice of domination [that] denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and
unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from
people.”
104
With an art praxis that has its roots in liberatory pedagogy, criticality and
education, we can move toward a democratized, liberated, consciousness-raising state; a
public art approach that recognizes the process of self-actualizing as a concrete, real
experience; specifically in performance art, which incorporates elements that deal with

103
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 94.

104
_____, 81.

54
the body and mind as a site of performing societal issues—the body has the capacity to be
a site of politicization. In this sense, we begin to view performance/public as a way of
reaching conscientization, thus making a public art experience inherently pedagogically
liberatory.
Performance art as a tool of engagement in the public sphere has the potential to
be a form of critical praxis due to its ability to draw attention to viable community
concerns. Though not explicit, the performance strategies of La Pocha Nostra, Asco and
Code 33 inhabit Paulo Freire’s philosophical vocabulary that defies the status-quo that
seems to have roots in the institutional gallery and museum aesthetic. Community-based,
artistic, and educational, public art is leaning more in a direction that defies traditional
models of expression and provides ample room for social discourse and change. Cultural
modes of expression help form our beliefs, and as Gloria Anzaldúa states, “we perceive
the version of reality that it communicates,” additionally noting that “dominant
paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are
transmitted to us through the culture.”
105
Hence, it is our responsibility to collaborate
with communities to be critical and have an awareness that they assist in recreating and
reshaping culture in a free, non-oppressive manner.
Artists like La Pocha Nostra, the legacy of Asco and Suzanne Lacy are attempting
to mobilize members of their respective communities and delving into the world where
theory and practice coexist, creating praxis, in order to challenge the status-quo of how
mainstream society views public art. We risk succumbing to models of oppression that

105
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 38.

55
could be disguised in an art making practice that limits accessibility, that privileges
certain demographics (in terms of viewing and presenting), but if public art functions as a
teaching tool, then we could begin to cultivate a critical praxis that guides us in a new,
liberating direction.

The artists examined in this text vary in artistic methodology, but
whether it is facilitated through a learning summer intensive workshop, interventionist
and hit-and-run or community-centered, they all share the same praxis that integrates a
critical direction, which is profoundly necessary in a public art approach that is meant to
work with a public that has been historically and socially marginalized as art can be an
enabling vehicle.
The work of La Pocha Nostra, specifically through the artist-in-residence
workshop appeals to an international audience and participants with diverse backgrounds.
Relying on traditional white-cube institutions to support their vision, La Pocha Nostra
traverses the spaces between the gallery and streets in order to blur definitions of various
art practices such as performance, dance, theatre, community and studio based work
while simultaneously crossing borders within their own praxis. Their workshops have the
ability, if applied to different communities and perhaps within inner-city educational, to
possibly engage students to the degree that it helps sustain their middle and high school
experiences and becoming a tool to pursue higher education. How (or if) a participant
will specifically incorporate elements of La Pocha Nostra’s methodology within their
field of interest remains unclear, but in my experience the exercises become a
fundamental way opening up dialogue by getting into our bodies as a means of

56
strengthening our sense of classroom community.
106
Moreover, the notion of community
becomes something that has various implications as it has various concentric circles and
can be fleeting, permanent or temporarily permanent.
Although Asco no longer exists as a conceptual performance collective, their
legacy to push the definition of Chicano art has played a vital impact on a young wave of
Chicano/Latino artists and remains visible today. By attempting to stretch the boundaries
of Chicano art through defying seemingly restrictive notions of art and identity politics,
Asco also stretched the definitions of an interventionist public art praxis. Paradoxically,
in providing an alternative mode of expression, Asco relied on familiar visual culture
imagery. Yet, it was through morphing this traditional mode of expression that they
affirmed their identity as artists and inherently provided a guerilla model of activist
pedagogy for their multiple audiences. Asco’s guerilla approach to meshing the socio-
political cultural landscape with conceptual performance strategies does not necessarily
provide an explicit outline of methodologies that can be applied within the realm of
public education; however, their activist spirit and struggle for artistic freedom through
the infusion of criticality, dialogue, and problematizing methods can function as a model
of persistence and critical praxis that could then possibly operate successfully inside a
classroom setting.
Code 33 incorporated a different approach by collaborating with many artists and
working with community members to organically discover what the prominent issue(s)
were. Through problematizing and participating in a discursive dialogue with multiple

106
Throughout my teaching assistantship, I was given a few opportunities to utilize some of these
techniques with the undergraduate students as a way of discussing community-based projects and
performance as critical praxis.

57
groups of people, Code 33 managed to open the lines of communication between youth
and police creating a safe space where they could exchange ideas and dialogue about
their specific experiences. Whether the project’s impact was only temporary or more
permanent is something that needs to be considered, but the concept of a community,
process-driven, dialogic and critical technique, coupled with a performative emphasis is
one that ought to be considered if we were apply these democratized and conscientized
methods inside the realm of inner-city public education.
Public art as liberatory pedagogy and critical praxis allows for us to openly
discuss the hopeful potential it has for being a tool to settle a painful history embedded in
the ramifications of colonization that manifests itself in overcrowded classrooms,
mediocre curricula and a track-based academic system that profoundly affects the quality
of education a student receives. It gives us the opportunity to celebrate culture through
public art methodologies rooted in the art of teaching. Public art has the power to
develop and unite communities, to heal the wounded spirit and to engage, thus the most
applicable model to a true, non-repressive approach is one that does not perpetuate
systems of social, cultural, political and ideological domination that tend to follow a
banking-concept of education and artmaking. The overarching question in my research
aimed at unpacking what traditional institutions of learning might be like if they were to
borrow from the notions of community put forth by groups like La Pocha Nostra, Asco
and Suzanne Lacy, and focus on alternative strategies of learning as a means of hopefully
alleviating some of the problems impacting by youth of color. Suzanne Lacy notes,
“within art criticism, public art has challenged the illusion of a universal art and
introduced discussions on the nature of public—its frames of reference, its location

58
within various constructs of society, and its varied cultural identities.”
107
What would
happen, then, if East Los Angeles, for example, became a frame of unique reference for
students within the Los Angeles Unified School Districts system? How might perceiving
the urban landscape as a cultural laboratory enhance student, teacher and community
engagement levels so that there is dialogue and we begin to “cross boundaries [and] the
barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and
a host of other differences?”
108
How may complex communities conspire to work
together to infuse public art performance strategies within the inner-city public education
system? The shape that a pedagogical model based on community-focused performance
methodologies might take is ambiguous, and perhaps the impact is too, however, it is
critical that inner-city public education seek new methods of critical, dialogic,
problematizing engagement. Public art becomes an act of liberation once the intention is
made to be inclusive, about the people, collaborate with the people and for the people,
and while one’s imagination has the capacity to expand and become liberated through
various forms of expression, it is also paramount to achieve this through a transparent
process that brings art to unconventional yet common environments, localizing it and
attempting to provide access to all. Perhaps we anticipate too much from public art, yet
performance methodologies as critical praxis have the aptitude to be a form of liberatory
pedagogy if introduced into the classroom environment.

107
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 172.

108
hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 130.

59
Figures

Figure 1: La Pocha Nostra members, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Violeta Luna and Roberto
Sifuentes. Photography by Zach Gross. Image courtesy of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and
Zach Gross, page 20.

60

Figure 2: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona. Image courtesy of Kika
Hannes, page 23.

61

Figure 3: Detail image of props used throughout La Pocha Nostra’s summer workshop.
Image courtesy of Kika Hannes, page 23.

62

Figure 4: Original Asco members, Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Patssi Valdez, Willie
Herron. Image courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr, page 36.

63

Figure 5: Walking Mural. Image courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr., page 27.

Figure 6: Spraypaint LACMA. Image courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr., page 39.

64

Figure 7: Code 33, rooftop of building. All Code 33 images courtesy of the artist,
Suzanne Lacy, page 47.

Figure 8: Code 33 dialogue circles on rooftop, page 47.

65

Figure 9: Code 33, performance component, page 47.

66

Figure 10: Code 33, page 47.

67
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70
Appendix A

Performance Literature Piece Created August 6, 2007

Power of collaboration
Minimize distance
Starting as a people
Last jam
Limiting space
Taking leaps
Living betwixt
Confronting
Self-understanding
How do we connect?
Whirlpool of issues
Don’t get confused in the other
Aesthetics?
Subjectivity?
Unresolved conflict in creating
Persona throughout process
Balance
Connect with outside
Main struggle
Something stuck
Internal/external
Is it worse?
External structure
What allows me to move?
Surprise of physical boundaries
Finding a balance
The physicality of making art
Anxiousness
Do you have anxiety of finding something?
Do you feel it?
Hyper-awareness
Learning through openness
Quality of process or product equals no anxiety
Meaningful creation without
Quality of concern
It has meaning to you
It has to have meaning to somebody else
I like, I don’t like

71
Opinions, how relevant?
Ummm. Silence.
Dialogue outside of image
Connect with grander picture
Performing
Can’t direct when you’re part of the chorus
The way you get into an image
Masculine/feminine
Energy of image
Am I misconstruing your words?
We are complex
10 representations
Creation of complexity equals conflict
Yesterday. Amazing.
Because of “chu-chu-chu”
For me
Very sedentary
Sculptural
Now I am an object
Place in space
Body as a tool
Simple action
Tools for process
Help build process
“He has an actual process!”
Peeling of layers
Personal journey
Now
Being in this space has affected me
Your journey becomes mine
How it will manifest itself is a mystery—it feels good.
The Self has real existence
This shell
No inner-self
Fantasy
No gap between self and other
Distinct from me
This equals a gap
My Self has no permanence
There is something there—less defined.
It is part of yourself, being unable to open yourself
Interaction
Connection
Create sense of togetherness

72
I wonder if this relates to what you’re talking about…
Disconnect
Male/female creates a disconnect
But why?
Gender
Race
Ethnicity
Nationality….Are fundamental disconnects that are deep
Point of connection
Level of trust
A lot of trust
Little trust
Trust with anxiety
It is possible to do that
People in the world…
“Wow! It can be done.”
All about what you manifest
Daily choices
Choice in a moment
Whatever we want to see will manifest
Created disconnect with President
We all are creating disconnects
Levels
Discursive
Position yourself
It affects inner-levels
Ideology
An icon
He’s a human being
On a micro level, we can take that out
Our energies are all connected
Effect the world
Does that make sense?
We all choose to disconnect with someone
Working on so many levels
Small elements
Unconscious drives
Sometimes it doesn’t.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Why is it important for traditional classroom settings to infuse a critical approach modeled after certain performance methodologies? How can these performance methods serve as models for social justice within the context of public education? In Public Art As Liberatory Pedagogy Through Performance Methodologies the notion of community-based art strategies in relation to public performance methodologies and processes is explored. By anchoring my work in the philosophy of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, there is an evaluation of the critical, dialogical, problem-posing lens in public art as a tool to advocate for socio-politically marginalized communities. This text examines the work of performance art collective, La Pocha Nostra, Asco, an East Los Angeles-based conceptual performance group, and Suzanne Lacy's Oakland project titled Code 33. Key issues raised relevant to these performance methods include their potential to be utilized as a model for social justice within the realm of public education.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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