Temple of Confessions.

Mexican Beasts and Living Santos, by Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes. powerHouse Books/144 pp./$18.00 (hb). Temple of Confessions is a documentation of the eponymous collaborative performance, installation and exhibition as well as an expansion of the concepts and concerns that were its impetus. The first presentation of "Temple of Confessions" was in 1994 at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts in Arizona and in the following two years it was presented in diverse settings including the Detroit Institute for the Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. as well as city festivals and a seventeenth-century convent in Mexico.

In an essay about the project Gomez-Pena writes that the collaborators "became two living santos [saints] from an unknown border religion, in search of sanctuary across America." The installation consisted of three spaces: the Chapel of Desires, the Chapel of Fears and a chamber in the middle, forming a sort of spiritual and cultural temple. The temple acted as a participatory pseudo-ethnic diorama and religious display. In the Chapel of Desires Sifuentes sat in a Plexiglas box dressed as a "holy" gang member, "El Pre-Columbian Vato." His arms and face displayed pre-Columbian tattoos and he wore a bloodstained shirt, a bandanna over his head and large headphones. He held a gun that he periodically cleaned with an American flag. Also inside the box were several cockroaches, an iguana and a small table holding a variety of items such as drug paraphernalia and a can of spray paint. He sat in front of the facade of a "pre-Columbian temple" made out of Styrofoam that displayed a neon sign reading: "WE INCARNATE Y OUR DESIRES."

Opposite Sifuentes was another Plexiglas box, the Chapel of Fears, where Gomez-Pena sat intermittently on a toilet bowl or in a wheelchair. He was costumed in a "Tex-Mex Aztec outfit" as a futuristic shaman named "San Pocho Aztlaneca" and shared his box with an assortment of things including live crickets, taxidermied animals and a boom box. The large quantity of Mexican and Latin American artifacts and store-bought stereotypes in the santos' Plexiglas boxes seems absurd, yet they are real. Above him hung a neon sign that read: "WE INCARNATE YOUR FEARS."

In front of both santos were wooden church kneelers and microphones to record the confessions of viewers' intercultural fears and desires. Approximately one third of the viewers confessed. Those too shy to speak into a microphone could write their confessions and leave them in an urn. A toll-free number was also provided for viewers who wished to call in their confessions.

The third space, the "mortuary chapel" or "chamber," contained, among other things, a wooden Indian sculpture; a taxidermied rooster hanging above a body in a body bag marked "COURTESY OF THE INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]"; an old church pew; and black velvet paintings of other living fictitious saints. After three days Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes left the temple and were replaced by effigies of their characters. The installation continued for three weeks during which viewers could still confess.

The artists were surprised by the quantity of the responses to the project and by the emotion present in the viewers' confessions. By confronting viewers with a variety of authentic and powerful cultural stereotypes and asking them to respond by confessing their cultural fears, desires, "sins" and thoughts, the artists tapped into the racial and ethnic prejudice, misunderstanding and hostility that some Americans feel toward Mexico, Chicanos and people from other cultures.

Sifuentes also describes the reaction to the project: "most everyone is mesmerized by the images and the political content of the work and compelled to stay for long periods of time--even those who hate it. What they reveal... toward Latinos, the Spanish language, immigration and urban violence is beginning to take shape as a barometer measuring the climate of racial intolerance in this country. We have only begun to process the volumes of information we have gathered." Some of the confessions are reprinted in the book. They are divided into two sections: intercultural desire and intercultural fear. The confessions are a mixture of the profound and the profane. Some are well-meaning and express solidarity and empathy: "I desire for all of us to know and love each other." The most striking confessions reveal and document the widespread racism, xenophobia and prejudice against Mexican and Spanish American culture: "I am all for cultural diversity as long as it doesn't raise taxes." "I desire that freaks like y ou stay in your little closets." "I badly want a Mexican woman." There is also a smattering of the scatological: "To see the iguana go to the bathroom."

Temple of Confessions also presents visual documentation of the project and contains essays by anthropologist Roger Bartra and journalist Ed Morales as well as two poems by Ruben Martinez. The book is edifying, extending the life of Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes's project. It also contains reproductions of the black velvet paintings of "End-of-the-Century Saints" by Jorge T. that Gomez-Pena calls Conceptual Velvet Art. These paintings hung in the middle chamber of the temple. One image of "Santa Frida de Detroit" depicts a likeness of Frida Kahlo with a Uniroyal Tire as a halo, suggesting the influence of local political, social and economic issues.

Punctuating the book is a variety of Catholic imagery and Mexican/Latin and Spanish American cultural ephemera. Much of the imagery provides a revealing look at cultural stereotypes. One postcard depicts a buxom blonde sitting on a beach wearing a large sombrero printed with the word "MEXICO." An image of "The Mexican Hat Girl," a nude woman covering her body with a sombrero, was found at a flea market in Texas. Reproductions of evangelist comics depict stereotypes of bullfighters and Native Americans. These images are visual counterparts to the confessions of racism. They also show how racial and ethnic stereotypes are imbedded in popular culture and perpetuate racism and cultural ignorance.

Included with the book is a CD-ROM. The first track is a 25-minute audio documentary of the installation/performance. It performs the valuable function of aurally presenting some of the confessions since actually hearing them is an important part of the piece. The audio track also repeats the basic concepts and premise of the project. Gomez-Pena reads from his "Mexican Beasts and Living Santos" essay that is also printed in the book.

A sense of humor, at times subtle, imbedded within the "Temple of Confessions" project keeps it from getting dogmatic and trite. The press releases stated the fiction that the artists were indeed living santos and "street interventions." When they arrived at a city to present their project, the artists wore their santos costumes and were led through the streets on leashes by a well-dressed woman. This act generated local interest in their project as well as local TV coverage and piqued the curiosity of passersby who would not ordinarily know about art events or go to museums.

Chris George is an MFA student at Visual Studies Workshop.