A Puzzling Spectacle of Horrors

Dead chickens hang suspended from the ceiling. The red lights of digitalized news strips blink out arcane messages. A life-size skeleton hovers overhead in the darkness, bony arms outflung as if in crucifixion. Vintage clips from movies and television, interspersed with original footage, flicker surreally.

No, you’re not trapped in a nightmare. You’ve simply wandered into “The Mexterminator Project,” one of those cabalistic rituals to which the urban intelligentsia periodically subjects itself in pursuit of the cutting edge.

This “interactive performance/installation,” which closed Sunday at Highways in Santa Monica, has been created and performed by renowned performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pen~a and his collaborator Roberto Sifuentes. The program has no set length but has been known to run up to three hours. (This reviewer lasted one hour.) There is no seating. The audience wanders through the space like museum-goers at an exhibit.

Sporting tattoos, leather and deliberately deadpan expressions, Gomez-Pen~a and Sifuentes sit across from one another on raised platforms. At first motionless, they gradually begin to move and interact with the audience. Brave souls wander up and feed the men fruit. Gomez-Pen~a sheds his macho cowboy boots to don high heels and makeup. Sifuentes flagellates himself, then puts a gun in his mouth.

The action, what there is of it, is supposedly set in the near future, after Mexico has reclaimed its former territories in a war with the U.S. Gomez-Pen~a and Sifuentes have based their “living diorama” on suggestions from anonymous contributors to their Web site. What results is a fierce, sometimes puckish take on racist stereotypes, cultural attrition and ethnic genocide. Or maybe not.