LACMA

THE FIRST PHANTOM The first phantom calls itself Chicano art. This category produces something that can be seen, that has even generated its own canon and corresponding debates, but that otherwise does not exist in the art world, from the museum to the academy. In his essays and performance scripts, Harry Gamboa Jr. provides a language for this particular form of invisibility: "phantom culture," "urban exile," and "orphans of modernism." 12 Similarly, Rupert Garcia situates Chicano art as well as his own artwork vis-à-vis modernism: "European and Anglo-American theoreticians of post- modernism rarely and insufficiently addressed issues of race and ethnicity. They infrequently recognized that many U.S. 'artists of color' were by definition opposed to modernism." Given this opposition, which links modernism (and modernity) with colonialism (and imperialism), Garcia argues that Chicano art must be seen as "a variety of postmodernism" that specifically mobilizes the very approaches— "historical, regional, and figurative"—that modernism rejected. 13 In their reframing of Chicano art, Garcia and Gamboa provide a basis for reexamining work that has all too often been dismissed as "cultural nationalist," "essentialist," and "illustra- tive"—that is, as something that never rose to the challenge of modernism and its investment in aesthetic autonomy, formalism, individualism, and internationalism. Yolanda M. López's work exemplifies some of the major strategies within Chicano art, but it also reveals the direct influence of semiotics, deconstruction, and feminism in the artist's own contributions to these strategies. 14 In one of her most well-known images, Who's the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? (1978), she expresses a political stance on immigration through Pre-Columbian iconography. As a print, this image was meant to circulate broadly within the community and in public space. Its politics rely on two ironies: the first one a humorous reversal of position vis-à- vis whites and Mexicans-as-indigenous; and the second one the fact that her Pre- Columbian figure is based on a photographic study of a present-day Chicano. Working under the name Los Anthropolocos, Richard A. Lou and Robert J. Sanchez incorporated this image—now circulating as a T-shirt—in their 1992 counter- anthropological performances digging for a lost white culture in California. Here, the artists extend López's reversal, producing an unsettling image in which the Chicano viewer experiences the shock of the Other looking back, of an Other that is none other than Barry Manilow. López also refigures Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe as a form of Chicana portraiture for herself, her mother, and her grand- mother—again, using photographic studies. This project emerged out of an earlier series of family portraits of these same women that not only introduced everyday women into the visual iconography of the Chicano movement but did so on a larger-than-life scale (eight feet tall) as a counterpoint to both heroic muralism and mass-media stereotypes. Also working in the graphic arts, Malaquías Montoya likewise addressed the plight of so-called undocumented immigrants, but from the start his art situated 21 Los Anthropolocos (Robert J. Sanchez and Richard A. Lou), Dig Site #7A33, Discovering Barry Manilow, 1993, from The Whitefy-ing Project Yolanda M. López, Who's the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? 1978 (printed 1981), offset lithograph, 22 1 /2 x 17 in.

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