Reflections on Diana Taylor: A Savage Performance

In Diana Taylor’s essay “A Savage Performance” the author discusses the role of the museum in an ethnographic context as it relates to Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s “Couple in a Cage” performance. Taylor states, “Museums enact the knower/known relationship, preserve (a particular) history, (certain) traditions, and (dominant) values” (p 164). I found Taylor’s phraseology with the use of parentheses in this passage effective in communicating the hegemonic devices at work within the curation of museums especially those of natural history or ethnography. The authority of the museum to edit is exemplary of their power and dominance of other societies or cultures, as Taylor explains, “the monumentality of most museums emphasizes the discrepancy in power between the society which can contain all others, and those represented only by remains, the shards and fragments salvaged in miniature displays” (p164).  The museum itself, a symbol of that hegemonic order, functions as the authoritative superior which has the power to “contain", display or exhibit the “other” cultures. 

The artists created a documentary of the performance. I find the discussion of whether the video does the same thing as the very museums and discoverers that the artists are critiquing to be quite interesting. Does this video perpetuate the view of “us and them”? Does “reversing the ethnographic lens” provide an insight to the audience subject? (p169). Taylor explains, “the subject of analysis in the Cage performance is not the “couple” inside but the audience outside” (p 172). If that is the case, than the video provides the audience to see themselves as subject, albeit unknowing performers. The author asked artist Gómez-Peña, “what his ideal spectator would have done”; his response, “open the cage and let us out” (p 169). In the discussion of intervention I cannot help but consider the standardized restrictions of the museum in context of performance and theatricality and their symbolic relationship to colonialism; specifically, "don’t touch the art" and "don’t interrupt the show”.