The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey

screening of the video The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, at the 1994 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Atlanta. The video is based upon the perfonnance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit [Washington, Chicago, Syndey, etc.] created by the MacArthur award-winning performance artist, Guillenno Gomez-Pena and cultural critic and artist Coco Fusco. The two artists portray a man and a woman from the remote (imaginary) Caribbean island of Guatinaui. Conceived of as part of a larger countercultural event entitled "The Year of the White Bear" perfonned during the Quincentenary yearof Columbus's "discovery" of the New World, the performance piece was meant to be a critical commentary on the longstanding Western practice of objectifying and distancing the Other through spectatorship, in particular, through .museums· exhibitions of "primitive" peoples. As Gomez-Pena and Fusco explain in a program that describes "The Yearof the White Bear'': "Performance art in the West did not begin with Dadaist ·events. Since the early days of the Spanish conquest, ·aboriginal samples' of people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were brought 10 Europe for aesthetic contemplation, scientific analysis, and entertainment." Two Undiscovered Amerindians ... was seen by visitors to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as by audiences in London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Sydney.The Couple in the Cage records elements of the performance, such as visitors paying to have their photographs taken with the couple, feeding the Fusco or Gomez-Pena bananas, asking the fem ale ''Guatinaui" to dance or the male to recite a story in the Guatinaui language, but its true subject is the audience and peoples' reactions to the performance, in particular, the seeming