As the “alternative” art world collapses due to funding cuts, critical artists engaged in socially responsible projects outside of the museum are faced with a great paradox: the work is more necessary than ever but the means and resources for it are becoming scarcer. We must find “utopian jobs” for critical artists operating outside of the capital art world.

This issue's Critical Acts focuses on “war and other bad shit” in terms of censorship, immigration, and art as a form of political protest and recovery. In “Habeas Corpus,” Ann Pellegrini uses Sally Field's censored Emmy-acceptance speech to exemplify the Bush administration's privatization of mourning as a means “to bind us to acts of fatal violence against an objectified and dehumanized ‘enemy.’” In her account of Luigi Nono's The Forest Is Young and Full of Life , Judy Lochhead examines the possibility of music as activism, noting how history is recycled from the Vietnam War to today. William Bowling and Rachel Carrico describe how art heals in Lakeviews , part of a post-Katrina project. Guillermo GÓmez-Peña rages against “border hysteria,” when the “War on Terror” becomes a “war on difference.”

Dear Curator, Producer, Arts Presenter: Think twice before inviting this performance artist to your institution. His new work might be overtly political and too sexually explicit for these times. Remember: this is post-9/11 America, the Bush era, and these are extremely delicate times. Sincerely, The Artist, USA, 2005. Is self-censorship inevitable in the age of Bush?

Learn about “Pocha Nostra,” the company founded by GÓmez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, in a far-ranging conversation about how to make a performance group in the 21st century.

After September 11th, GÓmez-Peña was a marked man. “You look Arab,” the police told him. Learn more about the performance artist's recent adventures in Europe, Latin America, and the USA.

This writing—part essay, part chronicle, and part performance text—deals with the new “global” culture and what GÓmez-Peña perceives to be its main risks and contradictions, artistic and pop cultural products, major philosophical trends, and political dilemmas.