Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement

Originally Published in Art Lies Magazine, Issue No. 59 Fall 2008

Asco, Spray Paint LACMA, 1972 (printed 2007); digital print of color photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr.; 30 x 40 inches; courtesy Harry Gamboa Jr.; © Asco; photo © Harry Gamboa Jr.; photo courtesy UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Archive

“Chicanos don’t make art, they make graffiti.” This is what an unnamed Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator told Harry Gamboa Jr. in 1972. In response, Gamboa, along with other members of the art collective Asco, defiantly spray painted their names on one of the museum’s outer walls. In signing their names to it, they recreated the museum as a piece of conceptual art. Seeing Asco’s photo documentation of this event, Spray Paint LACMA, at the entrance to Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement made this writer’s idealist heart pump just a little bit faster. This is the kind of radical gesture that gives one hope that art can actually do something, inspire a generation and raise important questions, as well as give the middle finger to people in power unwilling to see what’s right in front of their faces.

Selecting art by a younger generation of artists working after the ostensible end of the Chicano Movement, curators Howard Fox, Rita Gonzalez and Chon Noriega use this exhibition to highlight a turn away from “realist” practices saturated with overt symbolism and indebted to the didactic murals typical of 1960s radical art. Instead, they select work by artists laboring not under the Chicano label but alongside it, using the term as a conceptual springboard rather than an institutionalized straightjacket. As an exhibition built on investigating Chicano art today—a concept the curators self-consciously admit is problematic—Phantom Sightings is comfortable in its willingness to embrace the notion that there is no monolithic Chicano identity or characteristic kind of “Chicano” art.

The exhibition fills the LACMA galleries to capacity with over 100 artworks by 31 artists, from Whitney Biennial art stars to relative newcomers. The walls look as if they are literally bursting at the seams thanks to this unfortunate curatorial gesture; likewise, architectural flourishes resemble shantytown housing. LACMA is known for going over the top with its exhibition design (bowler hats for guards in a recent Magritte show, for instance), but here—in a show addressing issues of race, class and the border—the cobbled together entrance signage and overhangs just look forced, distracting and offensive. Fortunately, the work in this exhibition remains largely unscathed by this poor decision.

Works that stand out harness the momentum of Asco’s conceptual slingshot, using the conceptual power of humor, a keen understanding of institutionalized racism and a fluid understanding of identity. A prime example is Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series in which the artist erases hanging bodies and ropes from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spectacle lynching postcards; what’s left is a ghostly illuminated crowd staring into a void. The simple gesture of removal refocuses the viewer’s gaze and calls attention to the important role spectatorship plays in gruesome events. A visit to the artist’s website informs us that more Latinos were lynched in California than persons of any other race or ethnicity. Looking at Gonzales-Day’s work demands a sobering reflection not just on the past but on racist violence today, which, in light of the perennial police riots and crackdowns and state-sponsored executions inflicted on people of color, has a disturbingly resilient presence

Sandra de la Loza, working under the name The Pocho Research Society, also takes history to task with Fort Moore: Living Monument, a multimedia installation deconstructing the latent meanings behind the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, a huge bas-relief monument in downtown Los Angeles celebrating the city’s independence from Mexico in 1847 during the Mexican-American War. In her multimedia installation of videos, objects in vitrines and explanatory wall texts, the artist charts moments of conflict near the memorial: a newspaper article from 1859 describes the lynching of a man named Juan Flores on top of Fort Moore Hill. A photo with accompanying text explains how students marched in front of the memorial during walkouts in 2006 to protest anti-illegal immigrant legislation. In her video, the artist uses subtle animation techniques to alter the existing memorial, making flags fall to the ground, walls crumble and words change. Taken as a whole, the installation poetically asks questions about what sorts of histories get overlooked in the process of constructing nationalist memory.

Taking another route, Alejandro Diaz embraces humor as a conceptual foil to frustrate expectations of Chicano identity. His Sayings are hilarious cardboard signs with hand-drawn one-liners like “Make Tacos Not War” and “This product was made with the use of inner-child labor.” As art objects hung salon-style on gallery walls, these modest rib-ticklers echo David Shrigley’s signature deadpan phrases in their brevity and wit. But Diaz’ overarching politics are unavoidable, especially when one learns that the artist is known to hawk these signs outside the Plaza Hotel in New York while wearing a mariachi outfit—an action poking fun at both his perceived ethnicity as well as the socioeconomic power relations associated with his immediate environment. Fulfilling their intended purpose, Diaz’ Sayings tease laughter from countless English-speaking viewers (there are no Spanish translations available). But there is also a problematic space in the silence between these chuckles where one is left to wonder if the viewer is laughing with or at the racist stereotypes and economic realities that make these jokes possible—and so poignant.

Like most large group exhibitions interrogating hotly contested subjects, Phantom Sightings has its regrettable features: overcrowding and ill-conceived exhibition design aside, there was the inevitable brouhaha over who was not included (or refused to participate). But, as is the mark of any well-curated show, the exhibition is sustained by the artworks it showcases. If successful, the show will inspire more venues to revisit the identity-politics debates of yesteryear, but this time with voices that use the ambiguity, uneasiness and playfulness of identity as a tool to address pressing contemporary issues and lingering historical concerns.

Tucker Neel is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles.

Dancing Daze: Bodycity

Originally printed in Artillery Magazine, sep/oct 2008 vol 3 issue 1

bodycity

After being thoroughly hijacked by fundamentalists, and injected into bombs and body bags in distant lands, the term “democracy” has sustained a thorough linguistic beating over the years. Despite the grim state of things today, there is hope for those who seek avenues for true emancipatory group participation. For these people it’s refreshing to see artists, especially collectives, reclaiming democracy as a working practice, a way to describe how they make their art. One such group is a hometown dance collective called bodycity.

A self-proclaimed “dance democracy”, bodycity, previously known as collective static, has performed in both public and private spaces in and around Los Angeles for the past three years. Composed almost entirely of women, the group’s numbers have swelled to over a dozen and waned to just five as members have come and gone. Only a few ever took classical ballet or modern dance and most get their prior training from rocking out alone at home. Collectively their dance philosophy eschews any conservative ideology demanding choreographic or physical perfection.  Instead, their practice bristles with a do-it-yourself spirit based in accepting imperfections, embracing mistakes as opportunities, assets that heighten the possibility of democratic inclusiveness.

The troupe’s aesthetic is part Barbara Mettler, with her totally improvisational dance philosophy (which got rid of the stage, and the audience, all together), and part Judson Dance Theater, which revolutionized the professional dance world by creating performances emphasizing chance and repetitive movement. In line with this tradition, bodycity’s choreography is full of awkward repetitive actions, developed through a process of improvisation, individual and group research, and collective decision-making. Yet while they acknowledge that dance has a living history, they get more inspiration from 80’s workout videos, urban vistas, Youtube and dressage than from their modernist predecessors.

Often sewing their own costumes or enlisting friends’ creative skills, they have danced as birds to lead flocks of people along the Santa Clara River in Valencia, donned utility gloves to dance/scale the steepest street in California, performed with cacti and bamboo in the Huntington Gardens, and initiated impromptu performances in Echo Park. In costumes or not, Bodycity’s work is at its best when employing considered site specificity to bring out unexpected meaning in curious locations.

bodycity LadyStranger dance promo shot

Earlier this year the dancers began collaborating with the musical group Glasser (which sounds like the Kate Bush and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ irrepressible lovechild) to create Lady Stranger. Performed at Mr. T’s Bowl, a hipster/hobo watering hole in Highland Park, Lady Stranger seized the venue as the perfect site to excavate latent sexual innuendo. At the start of the dance the performers, decked out in pencil skirts, tight shirts and old-fashioned lace dickies shimmy on top of booths and do-wop next to the juke box, their actions conjuring “loose women” archetypes from the 40’s and 50’s. Later the troupe erupts into fist-pounding stomps, guttural grunts, and arrow-hurling warrior poses executed with hair-raising synchronicity. These sex pot / Amazonian juxtapositions, slyly communicate how barroom interactions are themselves coded dances walking the line between fighting and fornication.

Wikidance

For Wikidance, created in 2007, the group capitalized on our web 2.0 obsessed culture and used the internet as a democratizing tool and a site unto itself. To initiate the piece, bodycity posted a video on vimeo.com as part of Ultimate Blogger 3, an internet blogging  contest (which they almost won), asking viewers to record any movement or small dance and submit it to be incorporated as part of a final piece uniting all the submissions into one performance. The almost two-dozen submissions ranged from the bootyshakin’ to the absurdly minimalist: a man slowly leans a against a pole, a girl gyrates a’la The Village People, a couple awkwardly mock an embrace, a mother and son lock hands and gesture tai-chi-style to the camera. Yet despite the unpredictability of the submissions and the systematic structure required to put the entire piece together, the resulting performance isn’t overly cerebral or confusing; like the best user-generated internet content, it’s perfectly imperfect, addictive, inspiring, and fun to watch.

Wikidance

When viewed in its intended environment – on the internet – the final Wikidance is as a moving collage; the dancers promenade, pose, vogue, spin and wave, duplicating the movements in the submission videos to Yeah by LCD Soundsystem. In a brief segment two dancers, outstretched arms scissor-like, embrace one another, mimicking a particular submission video. A second later actual scissors enter the camera frame, like an animator’s eraser in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, to slice out each dancer from the video one-by-one. In de-centering choreographer’s stereotypically dictatorial position and turning the building blocks of the performance over to the very audience the dance addresses, Wikkidance proves itself quite liberating and inspiring. And that’s the key to bodycity’s allure.

Their democratic idealism requires that they practice what they preach and work with conceptual and physical exertion bordering on exaltation to bring the viewer into their dances as much as possible. When successful, their work breaks down the boundaries between dancer and audience, choreographer and company, public and private to sincerely state that dance is everywhere and that it can happen with and to anyone at any time.

Bodycity is currently: Madeline Baugh, Betsy Hume, Jennifer Lehman, Cristina Paul, Molly Rodgveller, Lake Sharp and Meagan Yellott

-Tucker Neel