Amsterdam Group B- Comments on Gomez Pena Video

Guillermo Gomez Pena’s performance highlighted several key notions and provocations concerning mediality, theatricality and the gaze of spectatorship. Firstly the gun behaves as a visual mirror or visual metaphor for the nature of a camera. Like a gun, a camera ‘shoots’ which clearly has an inherent violence to it. The gun brings into light the ‘invisible media’ that directs our gaze. This is a self-reflective process that Pena is taking part in, realizing the violence of the medium that directs our spectatorship and gaze. Secondly I would argue that a television screen is in a constant process of appearing/disappearing or absence/presence as images and signals are sent, relayed and immediately disappeared in place of the next. This is a constant process of live, performative re-configuration, which constitutes a theatrical performance.

In terms of shared experience with audience and performer I would argue that this does take place, even though it is a recorded piece. Whilst the circumstances of the performance are altered, Pena would be repeating or imitating his prescribed set of actions even if we were in the same physical space as him. Derrida argues that imitation is re-mediation, so whatever space this is viewed in we are experience a process of re-mediation. It is this re-mediation, which Philip Auslander argues is a characteristic trait of Performance as a response to Peggy Phelan’s assertion that irreproducible ‘liveness’ is an ontological trait of performance, which he is working against. If we use Auslander’s performative understanding and Derrida’s re-mediation then it is possible to see the video work as containing key characteristics of performance.

Furthermore, the idea that an actual audience is required as co-presence to make something a ‘performance’ or theatrical and that this criteria is unfulfilled in visual media, specifically in this case video, seems quite problematic. Gomez Pena is fully aware that he is being taped and that this tape has the potential to be viewed by an audience. The knowledge that the performance is not only during the here-and-now of Gomez’s actual embodied performance, but will be archived and re-viewed affects the actual live performance. Thus there is an audience inherent in the mediality of the act. Co-presence is not necessarily defined by the sharing of physical space between two people, nor the shared self-consciousness of both being watched and watching. A good example of this would be the nature of advertising and the presence that it has in society.