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chavoya_asco.pdf

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10. Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco

C. Ondine Chavoya

Asco (NAUSEA):

1, a feeling of sickness at the stomach, with an impulse to vomit

2, disgust; loathing

3. Gronk, Patssi, Gamboa, Herron

4. Collaborations 1972 thru 1976

-Harry Gamboa Jr. and Gronk in "Interview: Gronk and Gamboa"

Formed in the early 1970S by four Chicano artists from East Los Angeles, Asco set out ro

test the limits of art-its production, distribution, reception, and exhibition. As a col­

laborative creative corps, the original members of Asco, Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk,

Willie Herr6n, and Patssi Valdez,l engaged in performance, public art, and conceptual

multimedia art. The artists merged activism with performance in response ro this turbu­

lent social and political period in Los Angeles and within the larger international con­

text of alternative youth cultures and radical politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Asco created art by any means necessary, often using their bodies and guerrilla, or

hit-and-run, tactics. The artists banded together through their shared sense of dis­

placement and as an alternative to gangs, violence, and other negative elements affect­

ing the community. Manifesting their ideas in the public arena of the streets, the

artists recognized the power ofpublic representation and documentation and expertly

learned to circumvent traditional institutions by creating alternative methods of ac­

cess and distribution. Their work critically satirized and challenged the conventions of

modernist "high" art as well as those of "ethnic" or community-based art. The conno­

tations of their self-adopted name, Asco, testifies to the initial effect of the group. Asco

189

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190 C. Ondine Chavoya

is Spanish for nausea or repulsion with the impulse to vomit. The name acknowledges the response that their street and gallery work provoked, particularly from within the Chicano art movement. Throughout the 1970S and into the 1980s, the Asco group ini­ tiated urban street actions that critically interrogated the social space of Los Angeles. Formed in the early 1970S by four Chicano artists from East Los Angeles, Asco set out to explore and exploit the unlimited media of concept and, in this way, create "con­ ceptual art in urban form" (Sandoval 1980).

This essay discusses the intersections of performance, interventionist public art, and media technologies in the work ofAsco while focusing on what their early public art actions elucidate about public space and urban relations in Los Angeles.2 After several years of collecting the traces and fragments of Asco's history of production,3

I have come to understand that one of the most salient and dynamic characteristics of their public work was Asco's talent for situating social critique in contested urban spaces. The frequent object of their critical interventions was the normative landscape and official culture of Los Angeles that has repeatedly represented the dty's Chicano population as an invisible "phantom culture" (Gamboa 1981: 15). Asco developed a sophisticated visual and theoretical language attentive to the specific geographies of Los Angeles and, in particular, the urban Chicano barrios. Through performance, the artists brought urgent attention to the urban spectacles of violence, police brutality, exploitation, and discrimination. It was here that the geographic and social space of Los Angeles became much more than the site of production; it became the very mate­ rial for Asco's conceptual art.4

ASCD and the Ethics of Combat

Without contextualizing Asco's public spectacles, it would be difficult to discern the dynamic interaction between critique and seduction, play and provocation, and ac­ tivism and abstraction that characterizes them. Thus, I consider Asco's public art in relation to the historical surveillance, suppression, and erasure of Chicano public space and contextualize their aesthetic strategies and interventionist tactics within the practices and activities of the Chicano Civil Rights movement.

Between 1968 and 1973, Chicanos in southern California protested the dispropor­ tionate number of Chicano casualties in the Vietnam War and the relationship be­ tween this statistic and inequities of education and unequal opportunity for Chicano youth. Gamboa, Gronk, Herron, and Valdez all attended Garfield High School in East L.A., the nation's largest barrio and a locus of political organization and vio­ lence.5 Harry Gamboa Jr. helped revive Regeneracion, a Chicano political and literary magazine first published by Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon in the early 1900s. Gamboa became an editor in 1971 and enlisted Valdez, Herron, and Gronk to work on the publication. This was the first time the four artists came together to col­ laborate on a single project.6 Without formal training, few available models, and even fewer venues for exhibition, Regeneracion was Asco's collaborative training ground.

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Internal Exiles - 191

While in high school, the artists were involved in a clique of the Chicano youth

movement that "rebelled against social victimization by adopting 'an extreme and

flamboyant use of language and fashion'" (Dubin 1986: 2). Known as Jetters, mem­ bers of this group were noted for their wild dress, tricky talk, and sardonic attitudes,

and their "extravagance ofdress and manner served as a placard for social impotence"

(Gamboa 1985). As Gamboa recounts:

With over three thousand predominantly Chicano students mced with unequal

opportunities at home and probable overrepresentation in the fields of death in

Vietnam, ... [Garfield1 high school gained notoriety as the trendseuer of Chicano

fashion, etiquette, violence, and slang .... The mutual awareness of the musicians

and artists in the midst of social and political change allowed them to convey their

shared experience through personal and group expressions of music or art. (Gamboa

1991: 127)

On March 5, 1968, more than one thousand students walked out of five high schools in protest of the substandard educational system in East L.A. By the end of the week, sixteen high schools were involved, and over ten thousand students were on

strike during the fifteen-day period. This student boycott for educational reform,

known as the Chicano Blowouts, was the first major mass protest against racism un­

dertaken by Mexican-Americans in the history of the United States. This organized,

nonviolent student strike "brought the largest school system in the nation to a stand­

still and made news across the country; a Los Angeles Times reporter interpreted the strike as 'The Birth of Brown Power'" (Munoz 1989: 64). Nonviolence, however, did not prevail. Students, demanding to address the board of education, assembled in a

public park, where they encountered the newly instated Disaster and Riot Training

(DART) forces. Student resistance was met with police hostiliry and violence.

On March 4, 1968, the day before the first planned blowout, FBI Director

J. Edgar Hoover issued a memo to local law enforcement officials across the country

urging them to place top priority on political intelligence work to prevent the develop­

ment ofnationalist movements in minority communitiesJ Gronk, the first to engage in

performance and life action art, contributed to the political newspaper Grassroots Forum and Chicano nationalist student publications. Gamboa served as the vice presi­ dent of the Garfield High School Blowout Committee and contributed to the activist

news periodicals Chicano Student News and La Raza. Gamboa's role in organizing the Blowouts made him the target of surveillance by "New Left" internal subversives and un-American activities observers. In testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in

1970, Gamboa was named one of the hundred most dangerous and violent subversives

in the United States, along with Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Reies LOpez

Tijerina; Gamboa's part in organizing the Blowouts was deemed "antiestablishment, an­

tiwhite, and militant" propaganda (Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, I970; 12).

The military resonances of the term "avant-garden are dually relevant when dis­

cussing Asco. Asco's avant-garde strategies were "urban survival techniques" (Gamboa

192 C. Ondine Chavoya

in Brookman 1983: 6) that emerged from the organized protest movement against the use of Chicanos, and other people of color, as the literal avant-garde in the war in Vietnam. The emphatic characteristic integral to the diversity ofwork Asco produced is their "ethics of combat."8 "Ethics ofcombat" is perhaps the most appropriate phrase to describe Asco's signature form ofspatially politicized aesthetics. In the face ofcrisis, Asco engaged a transverse tactic ofheterotopic resistance and deviation.

Through effectively engaged countersites, Asco actualized what several post­ modern theorists have called for, and attempted to identify, in contemporary cultural practices. Scholarship in urban studies, cultural studies, and more recently art history has undertaken the analysis of the production of space as a conflictual process ofdomi­ nation and resistance to domination (under capitalism) (Deutsche 1992: 42). Marking the city as the most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power­ "the headquarters of societal modes of regulation" (Soja 1989: 235)-much of this work either originates from or takes up the particularly overdetermined postmodern example of Los Angeles.9 Chicano history, a history explicitly parenthetical in this work on postmodern cultural geography, is the story of territorial occupation through legal manipulation working in concert with violence (Gutierrez-Jones 1995: 100),10 Situated as an aesthetic coalition of politics and production, Asco's public art recog­ nizes space as a terrain ofpolitical practices and enacts the emancipatory potential ofa spatial, aesthetic imagination (Villa 1993: 36).11

Walking Murals and Other Defacements

On Christmas Eve 1971, Gamboa, Gronk, and Herr6n performed their first walking mural, Stations of the Cross, and iconoclastically transformed the Mexican Catholic tradition of the Posadas into a ritual of remembrance and resistance against the deaths in Vietnam. The trio arrived at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Whittier Boulevard in outlandish makeup and costume. Carrying a brightly colored cardboard cross, Herr6n led the procession as a stylized calavera-Christ wearing a long flowing white robe with an emblazoned sacred heart. Faithlessly following him were Gamboa, as a zombie altar boy wearing an "animal skull headpiece to ward off unsolicited commu­ nion" (Gamboa 1991: 124), and Gronk as Pontius Pilate in downlike makeup, a bur­ gundy velvet gown, and his signature accessories: a green bowler hat and an excessive­ ly large, beige fake fur purse.

Performing the "Stations of the Cross" along a one-mile stretch ofWhittier Boule­ vard, the procession's final rite was held before the U.S. Marines Recruiting Center at the Goodrich Boulevard intersection. Gronk blessed the site with Kress dime-store popcorn and the trio observed a ceremonial five minutes of silence. The fifteen-foot cross was placed at the door of the recruitment center before they fled the scene. Stations ofthe Cross conceptually, if not efficaciously, staged an urban disturbance to symbolically block any further Chicanos from enlisting at the center that day.

Patssi Valdez joined Gamboa, Gronk, and Herr6n for their encore Christmas Eve

lent against the e in the war in Asco produced ,ropriate phrase

le face ofcrisis,

t several post­ [)orary cultural Itlyart history 'OCess ofdomi­ : 42). Marking In of power­ -much of iliis ~ postmodern ~etical in this iltion through

1995: IOO).10 )lic art recog­ potential ofa

first walking :an Catholic st ilie deaths ~r Boulevard board cross, )Wing white amboa, as a :edcommu­ [CUP, a bur­ n excessive-

trier Boule­ .g Center at dime-store fifteen-foot ilie scene.

urbance to Iy. 'istmas Eve

Internal Exiles - 193

Figure 1. Asco, Walking Mural, 1972. Left to right: Patssi Valdez, Willie Herr6n, Gronk. Photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr. Used by permission of the artist.

Whittier Boulevard performance in 1972, titled Walking Mural. As a result of the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War (1970), a peaceful demonstration that turned into a police riot, and subsequent retaliations and urban disturbances, the Annual East Los Angeles Christmas parade had been canceled. 12 Assuming the tradi­ tional course of the countermanded parade, the artists staged a public spectacle in which they were both ilie participants and floats. In the process they advanced the convention of street murals from a static media to a moving performance medium.

Walking Mural was a counterspectade intervention-a carnivalesque inversion of authority and a reclamation of social space. As public manifestations, Stations ofthe Cross and Walking Mural are more than reminiscent ofsocial protest. "So much death had been occurring and does occur in East L.A. without any meaning attached to it,» Gamboa said in an interview. "We wanted to give people a certain kind of almost gastro-intestinal response" (Sandoval 1978). Asco's theater of social engagement was a form of celebratory protest that merged aesthetics and activism. Improvising absurd imagery and environmental interventions was Asco's calculated tactic to disrupt the perceptual responses of the audience. 13 As Herr6n states, "We wouldn't plan it so people could actually come and see it, we would just drop in on everything in its nor­ mal pattern" (Brown and Crist 1985). Even if startled spectators and unknowing par­ ticipants could not precisely decipher ilieir allusive critique, the artists hoped that the very occurrence of these bizarre and unorthodox activities in public thoroughfares would raise questions in the minds ofviewers.14

When asked why Whittier Boulevard was so significant in their performances,

194 C. Ondine Chavoya

Herr6n replied, "Because we felt we'd get maximum exposure there and also be­ cause that particular ... stretch was the focal point of the riots .... To this day [1985] the police completely block the street after 10:00 p.m. on weekends so you can't drive through" (Brown and Crist 1985). Chon Noriega and I discussed this no­ tion in relation to the multiple critiques that Asco's public performances actualized. Noriega, emphasizing the last point Herr6n alludes to, positioned these critiques as follows:

Part of what they were saying was that the Mural Movement and the Chicano Art

Movement had become as frozen as the "frozen revolution" of Mexico that it was

referencing, and that its icons had ceased to function in a flexible enough manner for

either aesthetic or political ends. . . . [T]hey were also critiquing the fact that in

1971-72, Chicanos could not walk down Whittier Boulevard without being stopped

by the police .... So they were situating their critique in a space that Chicanos did

not have access to--public space.15

Momentarily retaking control of the landscape, the artists enacted an alternative in­ terpretative practice from the position of those subordinated by urban spatial politics. As Rosalyn Deutsche reminds us, "The unity ofpublic space depends on repressing­ on establishing-as external to 'the public'-the differences and conflicts as well as outright injustices of urban life; public space becomes an appropriated territory subject to, rather than representing the limit of, regulatory power" (Deutsche 1992: 38-39). Underpinning the dominant social geography of Los Angeles is a disciplinary structure of containment and exclusion maintained by various policing activities and organizations (Davis 1990). The effectively enforced practices of containment and ex­ clusion are accordingly racialized; the production of space for cultural hegemony in Los Angeles, manifest and maintained by its exclusionary and segregated spatial for­ mation, has historically labored to implement and secure the systematic containment of the Chicano population, physical and otherwise. This technique of social-spatial control can be seen as an effort to relegate Chicanos "to a sphere outside the public, to bar admittance to the discursive construction of the public, and in this way, prohibit participation in the space ofpublic communication" (Deutsche 1992: 38). The experi­ enced effects of this prohibitive and disciplinary exclusion were poignantly epitomized in testimony presented to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigating contin­ ued allegations of police brutality and violations of federal law by L.A. law enforce­ ment agencies during the East L.A. riots of 1970. As one community representative proclaimed, "Whether the law knows it or not ... were the public, even if we are brown" (Commission 1970: 13).

Asco took the issues of "minority" representation, access, and inclusion in public institutions to an unprecedented, if mischievous, extreme with the 1972 performance Project Pie in De/Face. This event was incited by a confrontational meeting between Gamboa and a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) con­ cerning the absence of Chicano art in the museum's collection and exhibitions. The

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Internal Exiles - 195

curator's response was that Chicanos didn't make "fine art"; they only make "folk art" or they were in gangs. In reply, Gamboa, Gronk, and Herron initiated Project Pie in De/Face, also known as Spraypaint LACMA, by signing their names to all the county museum entrances in gang-style fashion, thereby claiming the institution and all its contents as the artists' own conceptual piece-"the first conceptual work of Chicano art to be exhibited at LACMA" (Ganlboa 1991: 125).16

Project Pie in De/Face crystallized the artists' collective identity as a collaborative performance group. The prejudicial practices of the arts institutions, coupled with di­ rected spatial interventions into a new realm, the west side of L.A., fueled Asco's crea­ tive and subversive edge for the next ten years.J7 In 1973, the group began a series of midnight art productions, the Instructional Destruction Projects, by spray-painting bill­ boards and walls on Sunset Boulevard with slogans such as "Pinchi Placa Come Caea" (Fuckin' cops eat shit), "Viet/Barrio," "Gringo Laws =Dead Chicanos," and "Yanqui Go Home." In one such incident, the artists were stopped, searched, and interrogated by three units and six deputies of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department (Gamboa

and Gronk 1976: 33).

SymbOlic Resistance/Spatiallnterventiol1s: Nonplace and the Symbolized Space of Place

The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and simili­

tude, There is no room for history unless it has been transformed into an element of spectacle,

-Marc Auge

Figure 2, Asco, First Supper (after a Major Riot), 1974, Photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr, Used by permiSSion of the artist

;

1

196 C. Ondine Chavoya

First Supper (after a Major Riot) was performed on December 24, 1974, during rush hour on a traffic island at Arizona Street and Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles.

In this performance Asco adopted the act ofoccupation in lieu of their previously mo­

bile tactics. The traffic island the artists occupied had been built over a particularly

bloody site of the East L.A. riots as a part of an urban "redevelopment" project in 1973. Following the riots, the surrounding buildings, sidewalks, and streets were lev­

eled and rebuilt to prevent further public demonstrations. ls The redevelopment of

Whittier Boulevard is an example of urban planning administered as a preventive ob­

stacle and punitive consequence for mass social protest. Transforming the traffic is­

land into a stage for a macabre reenactment of the Last Supper, including elements

from Days of the Dead celebrations, the artists memorialized the death and destruc­

tion that occurred at the scene years earlier.19 Beyond identifYing the site as a spatial

symbol of subordination, First Supper enacts a counterspectacle to mitigate its trans­ formation into a nonplace and spectacle of historical amnesia.2o

Immediately following the occupation of the traffic island, Asco initiated another

performance concerning forced immobility and bound constraints. Gronk invented

the Instant Muralwhen he fastened Humberto Sandoval and Patssi Valdez to the exte­ rior wall of a liquor store with masking tape. Gamboa's account of the performance

provocatively suggests how this enigmatic happening was received: "Several anony­

mous individuals, concerned about their welfare, offered to help Valdez and Sandoval

escape from the confines of low-tack masking tape. After an hour of entrapment,

Valdez and Sandoval simply walked away from the visually intimidating, yet physi­

cally weak lengths of tape" (Gamboa 1991: 126).

Through Ascos spatial-aesthetic imagination, Instant Mural renders idiographic the "relations of power and discipline inscribed in the apparently innocent spatiality

of social life" (Soja 1989: 6). Instant Mural can be interpreted as challenging the fra­ gility of social controls while "actualizing the adhesive relations between society and

space, history and geography" (Soja 1989: 223), with specific attention to the loc;:ations

and functions of cultural identity and gender within this paradigm. In this way, Asco's

ethics of combat can be seen as making us, in the words of Edward Soja, "insistently

aware ofhow space can be made to hide consequences from us ... how human geo­

graphies become filled with politics and ideology" (Soja 1989: 6). Given their spatial

and historical contexts, walking Mural First Supper, and Instant Mural are simultane­ ously prophetic evocations of space, tactical forms of symbolic resistance, and spatial

I I interventions. In this manner, the "symbolized space of place" constitutes the very

material for Asco's urban performances.

When members of a local Chicano gang discover plutonium in cans of spray

paint in Lorena's Lament (1981), East L.A. gangs enter into the nuclear age of atomic gang warfare. This fotonovela performance, also known as Last Rites in the Left Lane, occurred on the Fourth Street Bridge at Lorena Street. Twelve performers blockaded

the center lanes of the bridge for over two hours; when three LAPD squad cars arrived

at the scene, the only evidence of the disturbance found were discarded aerosol cans.

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Internal Exiles - 197

"The bridge," Michel de Certeau contends, "is ambiguous everywhere" and rep­

resents a "transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of place ... [and] the 'betrayal' of an order" (de Certeau 1984: 128). The Fourth Street Bridge divides and connects East Los Angeles to downtown. Hollywood has imaged the bridge innumer­ able times as an abject zone of demarcation in film, as in Boulevard Nights (1979) and Mi Familia (1995), and television, as in the popular series CHiPS. The persistent rep­ resentation of the Fourth Street Bridge as boundary and frontier has invested it with an iconic aura and metonymic power by which to signify the phantasmagoric threat of East L.A. and those who occupy it. Given de Certeau's uncanny interpretation of the bridge as an attack ofstate, the ambition of a conquering power, or the flight ofan exile, the Fourth Street Bridge is the exemplary space, or nonplace, for a dystopic bar­ rio rendition ofglobal politics.

Media Hoaxes

Asco set out to promote an awareness ofviolence and the foolishness of promoting it (Gamboa in Rupp 1985). Seeing the problems and violence facing East L.A. "as prob­ lems because we were right in the middle of it; we wanted to change it. We wanted to

reach inside and pull people's guts out" (Herron in Benavidez 1981). It was this set of shared convictions that made it additionally imperative for them to shatter "people's

preconceptions ofwhat Chicano artists should do" (Gamboa in Benavidez and Vozoff 1984: 51).

Decoy Gang "War Victim (1974) was both a performance and a media intervention. After dosing off a residential city block with flares in the Li'l Valley area of East LA.,

Gronk sprawled across the asphalt with ketchup allover him, posing as the "victim" of a gang retribution killing. As Gamboa explains, "We would go around and whenever we heard ofwhere there might be potential violence, we would set up these decoys so

they would think someone had already been killed" (Brookman 1983: 7-8). The per­ formance's status as media hoax and counterspectade depended upon the significant­ ly different purposes to which the documentation was put to use. Asco distributed a photograph of the performance to various publications and television stations, which was accepted by the local media as a real scenario ofviolence. The image was broad­ cast, for example, on KHJ-TV L.A. Channel 9, as an "authentic" East L.A. Chicano gang murder and condemned as a prime example of rampant gang violence in the City ofAngels. Whether the decoy restored peace to the barrio or was effective in can­ celing out the media's representation of an actual death is highly unlikely; however, the process exposed the possibility of media manipulation to artists.

Recognizing the power of documentation, the artists appropriated the spectacle of media publicity. This merger of performance and media manipulation became in­ tegral to future Asco activities. The artists were all too familiar with the power ofphoto­ graphic documents "to structure belief and recruit consent; the power of conviction

and the power to convict" (Tagg 1994: 146). Not only did the mass media represent

198 C. Ondine Chavoya

Figure 3. Asco, Asshole Mural, 1975. Left to right: Willie Herr6n, Patssi Valdez, Gronk. Photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr. Used by permission of the artist.

crime and violence as East Los Angeles' "major gross product" (Brookman I983: 8),

but also the FBI's COINTELPRO agency targeted Gamboa for "internal subversives"

surveillance. This was possible, Gamboa argues, because "they [the FBI] had pictures

and I didn't have pictures to prove my point" (Noriega I996: 2I4). Thus Gamboa

characterizes kco's work as "conceptually political" (Brookman 1983: I); that is to say, its themes were often political or violent, or politically violent, or about violence

against those who were political. k Kosiba-Vargas concludes, "kco rendered new interpretations of the Chicano urban experience which emphasized the irrationality

of an environment shaped by violence, racial oppression, and exploitation" (Kosiba­

Vargas 1988: 4). The impetus was not to create spectacles per se but to bring atten­

tion to the spectacular condition of everyday life in the barrio and, through counter­

spectacles, to destabilize the power of the media (to represent it as such).

Abject Space, Abject Actions

kco's spatially politicized aesthetics embodied resistant meanings in order to mobilize resistant readings. In one performance series kco members appointed themselves

municipal officials to East L.A., an unincorporated county territory without a dty hall. kco toured their "municipality" on random site visits, designating various spaces

and objects to be civic landmarks, monuments, and preservation zones. In one such

arry Gamboa Jr.

nan 1983: 8), Isubversives" had pictures IUS G3lllboa that is to say, out violence ~ndered new irrationality m" (Kosiba­

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Internal Exiles 199

"No-Movie" performance, a storm drain was anointed with the illustrious title Asshole Mural (1975).

The sewer, Stallybrass and White suggest, beyond supplying the fundamental substructure for the city to manage and purify waste, is a symbolic system that func­ tions as, and represents, "the conscience of the town" (Stallybrass and White 1986:

140-41). The social organization of the city's topography is structured by concepts of the body that are, in turn, mapped according to notions of dirt and cleanliness; these

mediating ideologies "always-already" inscribe "relations of class, gender, and race"

(Stallybrass and White 1986: 125, 130, 145). In Asshole Mural, Asco reverses the symbol­ ic axis of the city's system ofspatial purification and organization by memorializing its abject, orificial source.21 The artists identify the city's waste disposal system as the city's asshole and claim it as a ready-made mural. By physically and conceptually posi­ tioning themselves at the permeable center of the system that demarcates the clean from foul, high from low, east from west, and city from slum, their bodies mediate the

contaminant threat. Traditionally monuments mark, embody, and make visible power relations. Steve

Pile describes this process as making space incontestable "both by closing off alterna­ tive readings and by drawing people into the presumption that the values they repre­ sent are shared" (Pile 1996: 213). Asco's practice of spatially politicized aesthetics is an

example ofan enacted heterotopia that embodies and actualizes such alternative read­ ings. Asco's performance demonstrates a process ofrecombinative simultaneity for criti­ cal resistance and dialogue: to read monuments as "grids ofmeaning and power" is also

to recognize their active participation in the control and manipulation of space, both real and metaphorical (Pile 1996: 214), both the directly experienced spaces ofrepresen­

tation and the conceptual representations ofspace (Soja and Hopper 1993: 198). Asshole Mural is, perhaps most important, a performative intervention into the

historical process that has produced Chicanas and Chicanos as the categorical blind

spot-the "disposable phantom culture" (Gamboa 1981: 15)-ofdominant institutions and media. The tactic utilized is to usurp the authority and power invested in the civic heritage industry as spectacle and transform it into a counterspectacle.22 Asshole Mural is a performative, active invention of monuments, and in the process marks an ab­ sence. Asco's aesthetic strategies and interventionist tactics are a project of cultural invention emanating from neither the fragment nor the ruin, but from the absence.

This is perhaps the crucial difference and theoretical site of resistance between Asco and the more traditionally defined Chicano art movement.

Asco did not adhere to the prescribed agenda for Chicano artists within the movement to unite and educate "the family of La Raza towards liberation with one

heart and mind" (First Chicano National Conference 1969: 3). Neither obviously di­ dactic nor consumable, their work was seen as an unproductive expenditure that did not fulfill the tenets ofnationalism within the Chicano movement and potentially ob­ fuscated a nationalist ideology.23 A substantive distinction between Asco and other

Chicano artists and collectives of the time relates specifically to their location within

200 C. Ondine Chavoya

identity politics and divergent investments in reclaiming cultural traditions and ef­

faced histories. In this respect, Gronk contrasts Asco's work with identity-based and/or

community-oriented work: "A lot of Latino artists went back in history for imagery

because they needed an identity, a starting place .... We didn't want to go back, we

wanted to stay in the present and find our imagery as urban artists and produce a

body of work out of our sense of displacement" (Durland and Burnham, 1986: 57). One of the tenets of the Chicano art movement was resistance, but for many

movimiento artists what induced the response of "Asco" was the transgressive deviance of Asco's work. Transgression, as Tun Cresswell reminds us, "in distinction to resis­ tance, does not, by definition, rest on the intention of the actors but on the results of

the 'being noticed' of a particular action .... It is judged by those who react to it,

while resistance rests on the intentions of the authors" (Cresswell 1996: 23). Asco realized how their actions were deemed transgressive, and how they too were

marked as abject; hence their name. Asco strategically aligned themselves with the

response their work generated, and from it harnessed, but could not control, the

power of the abject. Asco's multimedia works were viscerally inspired and intended to

galvanize a response from the community (Gamboa n.d.: 2). In the words of Harry

Gamboa Jr., the artists were simultaneously "attracted and appalled by the glitter and

gangrene of urban reality" (Gamboa 1998 [1984]: 54). They recognized the psychic­ social power of abjection to structure subjectivity and group identity and to regulate

social hierarchies; in turn they appropriated this power to work toward social change.

As a result, Asco expanded the social and cultural focus of Chicano politics and the

public role ofartists working within the Chicano movement.

Social Unwest: Psychogeography of aPhantom Culture

A whole new history remains to be written of spaces-which would at the same time be the his­

tory of powers (both of these terms in the pluralJ-from the great strategies of geopolitics to the

little tactics of the habitat.

-Michel Foucault, "The Eye of Power"

I've been going to downtown LA as often as possible ever since I realized what public trans­

portation was all about. Every time I get off the bus on Broadway, I lose my identity and spend the

rest of the day trying not to find it. The personal void is overwhelmed by the impersonal vacuum

of social unwestwhich splatters the environment like a bad choice of colors.

-Harry Gamboa Jr.

''Asco formed a distinct impression in the barrio that self determination was an active

term" (Gamboa 1979). The performance and multimedia production of Asco is an aesthetic coalition of politics and production, performance and action; in this way

Asco succeeded in creating and effecting social commentary in nontraditional form.

Their bodies provided the most immediate form, and the social space of Los Angeles

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Internal Exiles 201

provided the most effective forum for the materialization of their concepts (i.e., social

commentary). In so doing Asco was able to oppose, in an attempt to transform, the

terms social subordination and spatial subjection that conditioned their environment and restricted their experience. As a whole, Asco's work can best be characterized and

understood as social, spatial, and aesthetic infractions of place (place here as a regula­

tive and hierarchical location that is both social and spatial).

Foucault's concept of the heterotopia, where resistance is conceptualized and re­

activated through local knowledges and enlisted in struggles against specific modern

techniques of power (Gregory 1994: 297), is artfully performed throughout the work

of Asco. Asco's public performance art demonstrates the enacted heterotopias ability

to "mobilize and stimulate a radical and postmodern politics of (spatial) resistance

that redraws the boundaries of identity and struggle" (Soja 1996: 154). The point of

departure and strategy of signification for Asco's performative work are the ways in

which space and place are used to structure a normative landscape. Asco recogni7M

the "city as a signifYing practice itself productive ofmeaning and subjectivity" (Deutsche

1991: 56). Moreover, they recognized the cultural and subjective costs of this norma­

tive landscape; they refused the interpellative address of this normative landscape and

challenged its power to reconstitute its cognitive foundations and effects.

Asco's spatial-aesthetic imagination, actualized through their ethics of combat, is

an apt antecedent to Fredric Jameson's "call for" (and manifesdy fulfills his "predic­

tion" of) a "new aesthetic" founded on cognitive maps Qameson 1988: 347). Jameson

contends that each stage ofcapitalism has produced a unique spatial order. In the cur­

rent third phase of late capitalism, capitalism is not "visible" in the same way it was in

entrepreneurial or monopoly capitalism (Wolff 1993: 226). Condensed into a post­

modern hyperspace, the alienated dty produces alienated bodies that are "unable to

map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they

find themselves" Qameson 1984: 89).24 According to this logic, the cognitive map

would provide an apotropaic for the symptoms and effects of the alienated dty and

supply the salve for "dis alienation. » Although Jameson persuasively prescribed and

"wistfully yearned" for the "conceptual map" of postmodernism, he has not been able

to supply it.25 Had he known of the insurgent counterpractices undertaken by the

subordinated (and relatively powerless) subjects of "Fortress L.A." (Davis 1990) when he viewed Los Angeles ftom the Bonaventure Hotel in 1984, this knowledge would

have fundamentally conflicted with his formulation for a "practical reconquest of

space"--dependent upon a class reductionism and myopia that subsumes the axes of

ethnidty and gender.

The dty is "lived and experienced in different ways" (Tagg 1996: 180); differentia­

tions of power within the dty and uneven positioning in relation to spaces of power

result in significant differences in the perception of space (Zukin 1996: 46; Ghani

1993: 51). The control of spatial relations orders and localizes difference, and the spa­

tial mechanisms of subordination mark and interpellate its subjects. The view from

the Bonaventure Hotel and the Fourth Street Bridge at Lorena Street are radically

]

202 C. Ondine Chavoya

different. Obviously, they are different on account of differences in geographic loca­ tion and vantage point, but most important, the perception of space is influenced by how the body of the individual viewer is viewed, surveyed, and interpellated in and through space (it affects and conditions what and how one sees.)

Asco's public art exposes the hegemonically enforced yet tacit limits and exclu­ sions of urban space. John Tagg has described how urban planning and the emergence of the modern metropolis in the nineteenth century "systematized and demarcated" the various functions of the city "in a separation that controlled circulation and traced

a pattern ofdominance, but also orchestrated sights and opened up vistas that marked out a distinct function of the city as spectacle" (Tagg 1994: 84). If spectacle was a dis­ tinct function of the modern city replacing, or in opposition to, the city as practice (Suarez 1996: 25), then Asco appropriates the spectacle as their practice for counter­ spectacle. Asco's (early) performance actions cognitively map the absence of Chicano public space by inventing it: reversing the terms ofexclusion, even when unable to re­ verse the conditions of exclusion, with tactical hit-and-run interventions.

Notes Earlier drafts of this essay were presented at Duke University; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; l'Universite de Paris X; and the 1997 College Art Association Annual Con­ ference. Research and writing were facilitated through the generous support of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (1996-97) and a College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship (1996-98), and Visiting Scholar residencies at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (1996-97) and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives and Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1995). For access to archival col­ lections I express grateful appreciation to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Stanford University Libraries Special Collections, where the Gamboa archives have been collected. Special thanks to Chon Noriega for editorial assis­ tance, the University of Rochester VISUal and Cultural Studies graduate faculty, Coco Fusco, Shifra Goldman, Roberto Trujillo, Elizabeth Tuttle, AlARMA, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Gronk. Portions of this essay also appear in "Orphans of Modernism: The Performance Art of Asco," Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, edited by Coco Fusco (London: Routledge, 1999).

The source for my title is the Los Illegals' album Internal Exile (198:;, lead singer: Willie Herron). The band's new wavel punk rhythms and cri tical lyrical interrogations ofthe geographies ofpower and violence in Los Angeles are a vital counterpart to Asco's urban performance art.

Urban Exile: Collected Writings ofHarry Gamboa Jr., written by Harry Gamboa Jr. and edited by Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), includes criti­ cal essays on visual culture, plays and performance scripts, fiction, poetry, and reproductions ofmail art and No-Movies.

1. Humberto Sandoval has also been considered one of the original members ofAsco, as he was involved in Asco performances as early as 1973. However, unlike the other core mem­ bers, he is not and never has considered himself to be a visual artist.

2. For a detailed discussion and analysis ofAsco's No-Movies, see C. Ondine Chavoya, "Pseudographic Cinema: Asco's No-Movies," Performance Research 3, no. I (1998): 1-14.

3. III issues a wa that severa thatremai works of1 the slightc that rhe 0 1998: 101)

4. II interrogat tioned USI ences. To Chicana/I Jones, M Chicano the heget has had a

5. school, ( dents fai counted Chicano 1969). C orher La southwe the hom

6. Willie l­ Asco. !J worked

7. in CaW were ad also uTi theMe. cations include

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ographic loca­ influenced by

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its and exclu­ :he emergence Idemarcated" on and traced s that marked tcle was a rus­ ty as practice : for COunter­ e of Chicano unable to re­

:Ontemporary Annual Con­ n of a Ford Professional

;LA Chicano Archives and archival col­ ons. the Los :clons. where fitorial assis­ Coco Fusco. )()a Jr.• and )rmance Art :0 (London:

nger: Willie geographies mceart. boa Jr. and :Iudes criti­ >roductions

ofAsco, as core mern­

: Chavoya,

'14·

Internal Exiles 203

3. In his essay "Light at the End ofTunnel Vision," Harry Gamboa Jr. (1998) saliendy issues a warning concerning the dangers ofhis torici zing Asco's work: "The viewer must beware that several zombies do not constitute a living or relevant art group .... The tangible evidence that remains ofA~co is supported by hearsay and conflicting memories ofplausible events. The works of Asco were often created in transitory or easily degradable materials that crumble at the slightest prodding and fade quickly upon exposure to any glimmer of hope. It is unlikely that the objects. historical accuracy, or spirit of Asco will ever be recovered" (Gamboa [1994] 1998: 101).

4. Indeed, Asco's public performances not only challenged aesthetic traditions but also interrogated the sanctioned uses of public space and the public domain and how those sanc­ tioned uses set the terms for communal relations, cultural identities, class, and cultural differ­ ences. To this end, I extend a new direction currently being mapped out in the analysis of Chicana/Chicano cultural production by scholars such as Jennifer Gonzalez, Carl Gutierrez­ Jones, Michelle Habell-Pallan, and Raul Villa. Villa's literary analysis approaches the work of Chicano authors in terms ofwhat their work reveals about the constraints and contestations of the hegemonically organized and enforced parameters of Chicano urban space; this approach has had a profound impact on my methodology and analysis.

5. In a city where only one-quarter of all Mexican Americans graduated from high school, Garfield High "boasted the highest drop-out rate in the nation, with 59 percent of stu­ dents failing to complete the curriculum" (Gamboa 1987: 13). At a time when Chicanos ac­ counted for less than I percent of the University of California's total student population, Chicanos, as a group, suffered the highest death rate of all U.S. military personnel (Guzman 1969). Of U.S. casualties in Vietnam between 1961 and 1969.20 percent were Chicanos and other Latinos. who at the time accounted for only 10 to 12 percent of the population of the southwestern states and a much smaller percentage of the country as a whole. California was the home of the greatest number of Chicano casualties in the Vietnam War (Guzman 1969).

6. A 1974/75 issue of Regeneracion (vol. 2. no. I) is the first to identify Patssi Valdez, Willie Herr6n, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Popcorn (one of Gronk's pseudonyms) as members of Asco. In the archives of Shifra Goldman it is indicated that between 1972 and 1974 they worked as Midnight Art Productions, taking on the name Asco in 1974.

7. At a nationallevei, this was specifically directed against the Black Power movement; in California the political units of the Los Arrgeles City Police and County Sheriff's Office were additionally ordered to investigate the "Brown Power" strike (Munoz 1989: 67-68). See also "Taking Back the Schools," part, of the video documentary series "Chicano! A History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement (produced by the National Latino Communi­ cations Center and Galan Productions in association witlr KCET/Los Arrgeles, 1996), which includes interviews with Patssi Valdez and Harry Gamboa Jr.

8. However appropriate the analogy "ethics of combat" may be to Asco. it is not specific to them; the term has a layered history. Tristan Tura used it to describe the work of Rlmbaud, according to Kristin Ross, who invokes the quotation to develop her critical hermeneutic of social space in The Emergence ofSocial Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 8, and Radl Villa (1991) finds Ross's sustained spatial reading of Rlmbaud a suggestive model for his critical project on the social geographic imagi­ nation in Chicano literature.

9. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell, I994); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989) and Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1996); Margaret Crawford, "Contesting the Public

I

l

204 C. Ondine Chavoya

Realm: Struggles over Public Space in Los Angeles," Journal ofArchitectural Education 49, no. I (September 1995): 4-9; Donald Preziosi, "La Vi(ll)e en Rose," Strategies I (1988): 82-99; Dolores Hayden, The P()wer ofPlace: Urban Landscapes as Public Hist()ry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), in particular Mike Davis (1990), Rosalyn Deutsche (1996), and Fredric Jameson (1984).

10. See also Villa 1993, esp. chap. 1. 11. At; David Harvey explains, "The evaluation and hierarchical ranking of place

occurs ... largely through activities of representation.... Struggles over representation are, as a consequence, as fiercely fought and as fundamental to the activities of place construction as bricks and mortar" (Harvey 1993: 22).

12. A sense ofthe general public attitude toward the Chicano protests, urban disturbances, and police riots that were centralized in, but not limited to, East L.A. during this period can be surmised in the following statements. An editorial in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner argued, "The attacks against people and property were planned by anarchists who have no respect for the country and the American system of righting grievances and obtaining justice" ("Riot Aftermath," Los Angeles Herald Examiner, September 2, 1970, 12). Los Angeles County Sheriff Peter Pitchess contended, "This was entirely a Chicano activity and they cannot control their own people" ("Violence Breaks Out after Chicano Rally in East L.A.," Los Angeles Times, February I, 1971, part I, I, 3). Contrary to such popular and vehement statements, in October 1970 an advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, assigned to study pol ice­ community relations in East L.A., concluded that "whenever police were present, disturbances erupted; when the police stayed away, the demonstrations were orderly and calm." Nearly everyone interviewed agreed, "It's ironic that the peace is kept best in East L.A. when the police aren't around" (Commission 1970: II). At; the preceding statements attest, the Chicano protests were characterized as un-American even as the allegations of police brutality continued and with the substantiated conclusions of police-inspired riots. The canceling of the parade and other restrictions on public space are examples of what Jose Angel Gutierrez has described as the official legal and extralegal repression of the Chicano community particularly when public opinions and actions are enacted in protest ofinjustice (Gutierrez 1986: 28, 30).

13. See Kershaw (1992: 68-70) for an elaboration on this concept. 14. Two accounts regarding the reception of Walking Mural significantly, and interest­

ingly, contrast one another. While one member remembers that "several individuals converted in passing, joined their silent walk through the crowds," essentially producing "art converts" (Gamboa 1990: 125), Herr6n remembers, "They ripped my cape .... They tore my tail off as they screamed 'putos' [faggots]" (Gamboa 1976: 30).

15. Chavoya, unedited interview transcription, published in slightly different form as "Images ofAdvocacy: An Interview with Chon Noriega," Afterimage 21, no. 10 (1996): 5-9.

16. See also Gamboa 1990 and Gamboa 1987. 17. Patssi Valdez's discussion of the West Side provides a sense of how significant this

change was for the group: "I didn't know the West Side existed. Who had time to think about it? I had to take care of my little sister. I was like a mother in sixth grade. Willie had a car, but we just went from East L.A. to City Terrace, and that was a big deal. We'd have to coast the car. We'd look great, but we couldn't put gas in it" (Burnham 1987: 58).

18. Dolores Hayden has extensively analyzed programs of urban renewal and highway construction and the cultural costs of urbanization by differently affected communities. The "increasing sameness" practiced by U.S. urbanization programs, as Hayden outlines, has detri­ mentally affected the cultural landscapes ofcommunity history and identity. "These projects,"

Hayden aJ social re1a1

19. It islands as Island an( Chile, atta Pinocher

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sturbances, riodcan be nerargued, respect for lce" ("Riot nty Sheriff ntrol their 'ties Times, n October Idypolice­ lturbances 1." Nearly the police to protests nued and arade and scribed as len public

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Internal Exiles 205

Hayden argues, "use taxpayers' dollars to muffie history, pave geography, [and] standardize social relations" (Hayden 1995: 100).

19. In addition, Asco conceptually allied their resistance with the literal occupation of islands as an act of anticolonial protest, such as the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island and the Chicano occupation of Catalina Island. Gronk's diptych painting Terror in Chile, attached to the street sign, generates yet another political alliance with the victims of the Pinochet regime.

20. Nonplaces are there to be passed through, not occupied, and Asco's occupation is a performative intervention against the non-place-making of Whittier Boulevard. Marc Auge identifies the nonplace as both a symptom and product of supermodernity. Auge's designation of the non place is neither prescriptive nor apocalyptic, realizing that the differential relation between place and nonplace is never absolute. The proliferation of nonplaces, however, is di­ rectly related to transnational capital and "supermodernity"; indeed, the nonplace is one of its products and mechanisms. Accordingly, the nonplace "designates two complementary but dis­ tinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and the relations that individuals have with these spaces" (Auge 1995: 79). The danger within the nonplace, however, is that these seemingly seamless networks of mobility, transportation, and communication "put the individual in contact only with another image of himself [sic]." Nonplaces mediate a "whole mass of relations, with the self and with others" (Auge 1995: 79) and carry with them specific prohibitive, prescriptive, or informative instructions for use (Auge 1995: 96).

21. As Stallybrass and White explain, "The vertical axis of the body's top and bottom is transcoded through the vertical axis of the city and the sewer and through the horiwntal axis of the suburb and the slum or of East End and West End" (1986: 145).

22. Jonathan Crary has described similar strategies employed by the surrealists and other Euro-American avant-garde artists as "turning the spectacle of the city inside out through counter-memory and counter-itineraries" (Crary 1989: 107). He argues that this strategy incar­ nates "a refusal of the imposed present" (Crary 1989: 107). But whereas such Euro-American avant-garde artists may have attempted to refuse an imposed present by reclaiming fragments of a demolished past in order to implicitly figure an alternative future, Asco's project is clearly not one of cultural reclamation.

23. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan declared that "Cultural Values of our people strengthen our identity and the moral backbone of the movement .... We must insure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture" (First Chicano National Conference 1969: 3). For a more extensive discussion of Asco in relation to Chicano nationalism, see Mario J. Ontiveros II, ''ASCO: A Remedy for the Ill-Effects of an Identity in Crisis, or Strategically Walking Experimentally" (paper presented at the "New Perspectives on Chicana/o Cultures" sympo­ sium, UCLA, 1997).

24. Jameson laments that the postmodern body has lost its sense of place as a result of the "perceptual barrage of immediacy" Oameson 1988: 351). An aesthetics of cognitive mapping, Jameson contends, would "endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of place in the global system" Oameson 1984: 92). Following Lynch's influential study the Image ofthe City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), Jameson's idea of social totality decries the fact that "urban alienation is directly proportional to the mental unmapability of local cityscapes" Oameson 1988: 353).

25. As Steven Connor argues, "Hitherto, Jameson has been able to offer only a map in the future tense, which can cling as a centring principle only to centrelessness itself" (Connor 1993= 229)·

206 C. Ondine Chavoya

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Howe. London: Verso. Benavidez, Max. 1981. "Interview with Willie Herron." Radio broadcast, KPFK-FM Los

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Benavidez, Max, and Vowff, Kate. 1984. 'The Wall: Image and BOlmdary, Chicano Art in the 1970S," in Mexican Art ofthe I97os: Images ofDisplacement, ed. Leonard Folgarait. Mono­ graphs on Latin American and Iberian Studies. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University.

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--.199 ofHan:

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Hayden,D MITl

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Kershaw, E Lond(

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lcanO An in the .lgarait. Mono­ ilt University. IS: Chicano luaque,

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Verso. ess. e 6, pt. 6. fance35:57· !:in: Essays on buquerque,

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ections.

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