LACMA

During 2002, Sandra de la Loza's self-described guerrilla art collective, Pocho Research Society, inserted "(un)official historical markers" next to familiar monu- ments around Los Angeles (for example, the one overlooking Dodger Stadium, which had displaced the residents of Chavez Ravine), sending out press releases and providing tour maps. The action, called Operation Invisible Monument, was intended to "interrupt a historical amnesia, trigger memory, and interrogate the present" as part of a "systematic investigation of discourses of place and displace- ment." 21 De la Loza's work starts as an intervention in public space, requiring viewer participation outside the gallery, either within the official tourist mappings of historical markers, or by recoding urban development as sites of displaced histories. In the end, however, her work's continuing impact relies on photo documentation and gallery exhibition, and to that extent it resonates with the diverse group of photographers in Phantom Sightings: Delilah Montoya, Christina Fernandez, and Ken Gonzales-Day. These photographers span two generations, including an artist whose earlier work places her among the first phantoms (Montoya). Yet, in their landscape photography, these artists, as with de la Loza, share a conceptual approach to their subject that makes "absence palpable." 22 Other artists—among them Romo and Slanguage (Los Angeles), Alejandro Diaz (New York), and Cruz Ortiz (San Antonio)—have produced and circulated work through flyers and handpainted signs that are inserted into the urban visual culture of chain-link fences, telephone poles, and other available surfaces. In the case of Romo, he advertises events for nonexistent clubs and for the "renowned chemist and spiritual leader Doctor Eufencio J. Rojas" (portrayed by Romo), providing a ludic exploration of racial and cultural dynamics, belief systems, and the desire for knowledge and power. Like Asco's No Movies, Romo's flyers are an exploration without a referent, and, as such, their texts offer a siren song for modernity, drawing in the viewer with a false promise: "Come and join the millions of happy souls worldwide and discover the answer to the question, 'Why am I here?'" 23 Ruben Ochoa and Marco Rios pose that question from inside a car on the clogged freeways of Los Angeles. In Rigor Motors, they imagine a coffin that conforms to our lifelong position behind the wheel or seated at a desk, of a life spent in the fetal position. Ochoa has also imagined "freeway wall extractions" in which a digital mural stands in for the obscured landscape. And in his CLASS: C mobile art gallery, Ochoa has repurposed a 1985 Chevy van used in his family's tortilla delivery business. Unlike other mobile exhibitions that set up antigallery structures, CLASS: C actually reproduces the "white cube" of the gallery or museum space, then uses its mobility in order to resituate the "white cube" in other social spaces: Ochoa's father's tortilla delivery route, rush hour traffic, and flea markets. The mobile art gallery's name conjures the class struggle that informs its institu- tional critique of the gallery space: CLASS: C is both the type of drivers' license required to operate the van, and a pun on the cultural status of the "white cube" 26 Arturo Ernesto Romo, A Guide to Pressure Points of the Head and Shoulders, 2004, 24 x 18 in., silkscreen on paper

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