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Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement
Carrie Paterson
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Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement April 6 — September 1 2008 Los Angeles County Museum of Art “Phantom Sightings” materializes territories between post-minimalism, appropriation, graffiti, identity politics, performance, murals, camouflage and conceptualism, all the while refusing the title’s suggestion that this is another “post-identity” show. These Latino artists working “after the Chicano Movement” incorporate their political inheritance and go forward as a trans-mestizaje hybrid halluci-nation. The best works use borderlands and border identities to traffic in the dis/orientation and mutability of signs, in distortion, mutating spaces, and by morphing analogs of the powerless or marginal into representational strategies. | | |  | | Margarita Cabrera, Vocho(Yellow), 2004. Vinyl, battine, thread and car parts Juan Capistran, The Breaks, 2000. Giclée print. | | | Julio Cesar Morales’s Undocumented Interventions (2005) are x-ray vision drawings of people being smuggled across the border sewn into seats, behind trunks or inside piñatas. In her Man (2006) self-portraits, Carlee Fernandez hybridizes her body with male influences including her father, Charles Bukowski, Hundertwasser, and Lars Von Trier. Rubén Ortiz-Torres animates a 3-D morphing surface over a toy low-rider in Backyard Boogie Woogie (2003). The ‘driver’ bounces with the unidentifiable vehicle, transplanting the title of Mondrian’s painting riff. Eduardo Sarabia paints hyper-realistic images of family and friends but places masking color swaths upon the canvas. Identity protection is the flip side of erasure. Delilah Montoya’s panoramic photographs like Migrant Campsite, Ironwood AZ (2004), reveal only the minimum — shadows, plastic water jugs hung on branches. The place itself is a false reference but for the traces of people. | | |  | | Christina Fernandez, Lavanderia #1, 2002 Julio Cesar Morales, Undocumented Interventions #5 (detail-one of ten), 2005 | | | There’s No Place Like Home: 10 Years… Federal; 14 Years…Federal, 18 Years to Life…State is a photo series by Mario Ybarra Jr. of houses in his neighborhood; however, the “record” is always incomplete. Ken Gonzalez-Day removes lynched bodies from appropriated postcards; we can see that the trauma has been staunched but still bleeds off the paper. When cultural transmissions are scrambled, as in the performance relics of Cruz Ortiz (The Corrido de Spaztec Aztec and How He Was Freaking Out on Freddie the Hawk While Listening to a Billie Holiday CD...), identity acts as a subterfuge for even well-worn tropes of ‘cultural hybridity’ — in this exhibition it’s pocho, caló, undetermined, out of control. Ruben Ochoa’s lenticular photograph of his freeway wall erasure-mural envisions a space of being and imagination. Yet dreams of the new self are an opaque window in Christina Fernandez’s “Lavanderia” series (2002), where graffiti tags on the glass of Laundromats fix territory to class. Some actions still can’t be sanctioned by the museum. Juan Capistran’s The Breaks (2000) was performed between rounds by security guards on LACMA’s own Carl Andre lead floor. This work is actually a billboard for the show, but is left officially unexplained — an inside punk joke, unlike the reified photograph hung at the entrance showing the art collective Asco’s (‘nausea’) tags on LACMA in 1972. History is one thing... but art — art is still dangerous. | |
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