unusual appearances in unexpected place
by Douglas
Messerli
Rita Gonzalez, Chon A. Noriega,
and Howard N. Fox (curators) Phantom
Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement , Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, April 6, 2008-September 1, 2008
The art show Phantom Sightings, curated by Rita
Gonzalez, Chon A. Noriega, and my companion Howard N. Fox, opened at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art on April 6, 2008. Because Howard had such a major
role in this show, I had determined that it would be inappropriate for me to
write about it. But as the months passed, it became more and more clear that
the kinds of shifts in perspective experienced by the artists in this show
closely paralleled those changes I had outlined in my essay in 2008 on Richard
Bruce Nugent and his friends in the Harlem Renaissance. If there were ever a
series of events, moreover, that revealed a culture “in the gap,” so to speak,
it was represented in the art and artists of this show
All three curators go out of their way to
clarify that, although the 31 artists represented in this show have strong
links to the earlier Chicano art movement, it is clear that the kind of
essentialist art, an art that celebrated Chicano identity and mythologized a
vision of Aztlán, “conceptualized as the Mezo-American empire that extended
from the centers of Aztec civilization into El Norte—the geographical territory
that predated the Spanish conquest of Mexico and which now includes the
Southwest United States has been replaced—at least by these transitional and
younger artists—by what Howard describes in his essay as “how Mexican-Americans
experience life and identity in a diverse social multiformity—a demographically
unstable, ideologically unsubmissive, and recklessly creative American culture
in which individual group identities may be calibrated and constituted in many
ways, through countless filters and prisms, and in relationship to others’
individual and group identities—identities,
plural.” Rita Gonzalez, from a slightly different perspective, argues for
similar differences:
Informed by an awareness of
transcultural currents, artists in this exhibition
create ‘impertinent and
out-of-bounds ethnic visions’ that veer away from
ethnographic or social scientific
studies into ‘real and surreal visions, absurd
visions of actual events, [and] symbolic
interpretations’ of the city. [her quote
from Harry Gamboa, Jr., Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry
Gamboa, Jr.]
Encapsulated in a larger society that
often confuses and interfuses Spanish-speaking, Mexican, and Mexican-American
identities and living in a country in which only a handful of states in the West
and Southwest are primarily affected by their multi-cultural identities,
Chicano artists, despite their significant artistic contributions, were often
seemingly invisible, unable to gain access to major galleries and museums.
In the first generation of the shift away
from radical Chicanismo, artists of
the Asco group (the Spanish word for
nausea) recaptured public space and reclaimed the museums through
interventions such as their 1972 guerrilla work in which they spray-painted its
members’ names on the exterior walls of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
and numerous seemingly spontaneous enactments such as their First Supper (After a Major Riot), a
formal dinner performed on a traffic island on Christmas Eve 1974, and their Instant Mural of the same year, in which
Gronk taped Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval to a wall with duct tape.
Although the image is clearly a clever
statement on both the role of some art in society and the effect of that
position upon the artist or subject, Gronk emphasizes the performative aspect
of the work:
Patssi always gets asked: Why did you let
them do that to you? Oppression affects
everybody. It doesn’t know sexuality.
Patssi’s on that wall, but in a short amount
of time she breaks free of the red tape.
Some people get trapped in their community,
or a group, or a country, and are unable
to leave it. But the bottom line here is: she
breaks free.
Through their
usurpation of public spaces and performative interventions throughout Los
Angeles, the Asco group set the stage for a new art that was less an expression
of whatever one might define as a Chicano sensibility than a redefinition of
the Chicano experience in contemporary culture, an art that recombined,
shifted, and redefined how Mexican-American artists might express both their
changing identities and manifestations of those identities through art.
As all three curators point out, these
expressions, like those of the Asco artists, often existed outside of the
traditional museum and gallery settings. And rather than creating an
essentialist Chicano identity, these artists worked with elements of their
culture to reshape and remake an art that both poked fun at and richly
resonated with and against the culture at large.
Like the Asco artists, moreover, the
younger figures of the Phantom Sightings
show often 
transformed the
appearance of art and the places in which it was transacted. Their art, in
short, became an art of unusual appearances in unexpected places.
transformed the
appearance of art and the places in which it was transacted. Their art, in
short, became an art of unusual appearances in unexpected places.
Sandra de
la Loza, in her Operation Memorial Monument, “surreptitiously and without permission,”
posted commemorative metal plaques in the rail yards and on the exterior of
buildings, such as Olvera Street’s Italian Hall, in which was housed David
Alfaro Siquerios’s 1932 mural, Tropical
America, seen as a denouncement of American society, and whitewashed within
a year after its completion. Most of de la Loza’s placques have been removed,
but continue a quiet existence on her website and in published photographs.
San
Antonio-born artist Alejandro Diaz, like the artists of Asco, intervenes on the
urban landscape with photo-documentation of performances such as his New
York-based Make Tacos Not War of
2003. Also using photographs, Christina Fernandez reinacts personal histories
of herself and her family as in her Maria’s
Great Expedition, in which she retraces her grandmother’s voyage from her
Mexican hometown to the United States in 1910, and in a series of photographs, Manuel S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d, documenting
issues of hidden labor by representing nameless buildings in East Los Angeles
that unexpectedly contain sweatshops for garment workers.
Carlee Fernandez documents her own body in
photographs, in which she is transformed into other beings (pop stars and her
own father) and beasts (as in Bear
Studies of 2004). Dressing up to look like a picture of her father,
Fernandez, in a sense, reveals her own connections with the beloved figure and
metaphorically becomes that person in her p
hotographic
transformation.
hotographic
transformation.
Ruben Ochoa literally transforms and
changes the urban landscape in his Freeway
Wall Extractions, in which he
applied digitally printed photographic foliage along parts of a retaining wall
of Interstate 10 in East Los Angeles; the effect was to erase the concrete
barriers that stood as gaps between parts of the city, seeming to replace the
concrete with a return to the natural beauty of the landscape.
Others of these artists begin with icons
and everyday images of Chicano culture, reconverting and recombining them to
create absurd and/or phantasmagoric images. Invoking photographs posted on the
United States Customs and Border Protection website, Julio Cesar Morales
creates stunningly beautiful, if surreal images of illegal aliens hidden in car
seats, and even in large piñatas, as they attempt to cross the border. There is
no better image of a “phantom sighting” than Morales’s plainly hidden and
trapped individuals, caught in their very invisibility.
Ken Gonzales-Day
appro-priates picture postcards issued upon lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans
in California during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Such postcards of public hangings were quite popular in their day, and were
sent around the country with an apparent sense of justice for those that
commemorated these brutal events. In Erased
Lynchings, however, Gonzales-Day subtracts the hanged figures, correcting
and rewriting history by focusing the viewer’s attention on the modus operandi instead of the event. In Hang Trees, an ongoing project, he has
traveled throughout the country, photographing the original sites.
Playing
with the popularity of lowriders, “the elaborately decorated, customized
automobiles popular among Chicano—and increasingly among non-Chicano—youth”
(Fox), Ruben Ochoa and Marco Rios create a metaphorical Valhalla for these youths—or at least a chariot to take them
there. In their Rigor Motors of
2004-06, these artists hilariously recombined the automotive culture with death
itself, transforming not just everyday experience, but the ultimate destiny of
human beings.
Such wild and unexpected interventions and
transformations exist everywhere in the art of these younger Chicano artists.
And one hopes that their unusual appearances in unlikely places continue to
astound their audiences for decades to come.
Los
Angeles, September 30, 2008
Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, nos. 11-16
(November 2008).
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