LACMA

identities: fashioned like a Post-it pad, each new pull-off leaf offers a different identification of the artist, title, date, and medium. Thus in a manner reminiscent of gang graffiti the object's identification plate—its "tag"—is perpetually replaced by another. The apparent historicity of the mural is an artificial contrivance, a newly minted, studio-fabricated image with the guise of a long, weathered, history of transforma- tions. Romo's mural underscores the erasures of history, the contingent nature of all meaning, and the evanescence of all art: even the pyramids of Egypt and the Yucatan will ulti- mately perish. Unlike the modern Mexican mural tradition epitomized by Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera, whose monumental depictions of heroic struggles exhorted viewers to fulfill their own cultural, ethnic, and class struggles, the ontology of Romo's mural is not declarative or propagandistic but is utterly anonymous and unintelligible, full or arcane if not altogether faux references. For all its ragtag appearance and eely purport, Romo's art is intensely romantic, even utopian, in its yearn- ing. The persona and the meanings behind his art are urgent and prophetic. Like the prophets of antiquity—Jeremiah, Cassandra, the Oracle at Delphi—Romo, aka Dr. Eufencio Rojas, may be perpetually misunderstood, unintelligible to ordinary thought, a sibyl whose oracular utterances remind us that there may be realities that we can perceive only indirectly—phantom truths, so to speak, that we can only strive to know, or to know about. —HOWARD N. FOX On January 31, 2006, Arturo Ernesto Romo donned a rabbit's-head mask, strode out of his studio north of downtown Los Angeles, and hiked about five and a half miles along a route of main boulevards and crosstown thoroughfares, to arrive at Tropico de Nopal art gallery, just west of downtown, whereupon he tossed a gourd over the gated entry and departed. A friend documented the action on videotape, though few pedestrians took note of or intruded upon the rabbit-man's walk, and Romo completed the journey without incident. All that publicly transpired was the exchange of a patently false identity (the head of the rabbit) for a real, if anony- mous, identity. Yet for the several hours that it took to make the journey, Arturo Romo walked the wide world in an altered state, unknown and unrecognized by others and engaged in an activity that had no ostensible meaning other than its utter lack of rational, workaday meaning. He was, in a certain sense, a phantom: obscured, invisible to himself and others. Romo operates invisibly on the streets in other ways. Much of his practice consists of publishing handbills and leaflets that resemble spiritualist tracts, commonplace in East Los Angeles, that urge repentance and salvation. Romo's, however, are often penned under the name of Professor Eufencio Rojas, and are cryptic rants that alight upon such subjects as Chicano art, mysticism, revolutionary consciousness, floating houses, and slaughtering chickens; Romo qua Romo is nowhere to be found. And although Romo often appears in his art in videos and photographs, his visage is almost always obscured—covered by a paper bag, a cloth, various masks, or digitally erased. In fact, Romo requested that all references to his name be deleted from the Phantom Sightings exhibition and its attendant materials including this catalogue—a request that makes no point except to those who already know its specious purpose. But his intent—to become a transparent lens or a pure conduit to communicate a message—pervades his art wherein themes of altered states and transformation abound. Romo's project for Phantom Sightings is a mural whose content is, literally, inde- scribable. Mottled and fragmentary, it appears to be a mural that was partially scrubbed out to be supplanted by a second, and the second to be similarly obscured by a third, so that only ghostly traces of any of the mural's several incarnations are evident. Even the adjacent object label on the wall is a sequence of disposable 192 ARTURO ERNESTO ROMO

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