The Successes and Failures of “Couple in a Cage” Anonymous College

Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians is a bold experiment of a performance whose successes and failures stem from the same aspect of the show: its tendency to blur the lines between the audience and the performers. When Two Undiscovered Amerindians succeeds, its presentation of an ethnographic display makes its audience question their complicity in the history of colonialism, regardless of whether they take the display at face value or not. When the performance fails, it misleads its audience so completely that they can ignore its message against colonialism, and substitute their own contradictory or unrelated interpretation. Both reactions are made possible by Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s decision to almost completely collapse the fourth wall and invite the spectators to interact with the display. This action, in the terminology of Diana Taylor, collapses the “narrative” of an art performance into the “scenario” of a real ethnographic show. The suspension of disbelief caused by this collapse allows audience members to personally decide what the performance signifies, for better or for worse.

As seen in the documentary The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey and Fusco’s clarifying article “The Other...