LACMA

shadow, thereby forming a composite masculine figure that will, no doubt, be mistaken as a self-portrait of the artist (signaled here by the conflation of three sets of hands: those of the artist, his alter ego, and the shadow). It will also be, pace Plato, as close as anyone can get to the real Gronk, since all such access is neces- sarily mediated through representation. In thus substituting Plato with the puta, Gronk subverts what Jennifer Doyle calls the "rhetoric of prostitution" within art criticism since the mid-nineteenth century wherein the prostitute serves as an alle- gory for the artist's position within the art market. 25 This allegory manages "the anxiety that [art] has no inherent value, no value outside relations of exchange" by reframing the issue as a morality tale about the confluence of sex and money. It is an allegory about women told for the benefit of male artists in an attempt to keep them aligned with the notion that the proper work of art "is supposed to transcend popular taste into a realm of classic, timeless, universal value." 26 In Puta's Cave, however, Gronk enacts a reversal of this allegory, finding in the puta a productive figure for himself as a racial and sexual minority and as an artist who had just achieved some level of success within the market. 27 As Max Benavidez argues, "Gronk adds a playful dimension to Plato's allegory of representation, suggesting that sexuality, prostitution, and even his own art have a place in the dark cave." 28 Similarly, César Martínez's Mona Lupe: The Epitome of Chicano Art (1991) refigures the Mona Lisa as the Virgin of Guadalupe, and as a self-portrait of the male artist (not unlike some speculation that Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting is also a self-portrait, or similar avant-garde gestures by Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí). It is precisely these confluences—of the old world (Mona Lisa) and the new (Virgin of Guadalupe) of the sixteenth century, and of subsequent modernist-cum-masculinist reworkings of these images within art history—that Martínez identifies as the epitome of Chicano art. Thus, if Martínez offers a playful and telling hybrid (Mona Lupe) located at the start of the conquest of the Americas (and, hence, arguably as a point of origin for Chicano identity), he does so in a way that situates himself through self-portraiture in the context of modernism. This painting, then, allegorizes his ongoing effort to reconcile the political and cultural imperatives of the Chicano movement with his own formal training and personal interest in color-field painting and abstract expressionism. One can see this effort throughout his Bato series, started in the late 1970s, which presents direct frontal portraits of Chicano social types set against a color-field background, especially in the 1990s when the figure and ground began to merge and move toward expres- sionism and abstraction. In Courbet and the Vendôme Column (1989), Rupert Garcia considers the key figure in realism (a movement Courbet not only named but also explicitly linked with socialism and democratic ideals), portraying Courbet in a fittingly rough real- ist style as he is about to be crushed by an abstract rendering of the Vendôme column. Of course, Courbet—who argued that the column perpetuated "the ideas of war 31 César Martínez, Mona Lupe: The Epitome of Chicano Art, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 28 1 /8 x 20 1 /4 in., National Museum of Mexican Art Permanent Collection, 2001.55, Museum Purchase Fund, The Center for Sleep Medicine and Steve and Joellen Ham in memory of George Busiel

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