LACMA

32 and conquest of the past imperial dynasty"— ordered its dismantling under the Paris Commune in 1871, and was subsequently sentenced to prison and ordered to pay for the column's rebuilding. Facing financial ruin, Courbet died the day before the payment of his first installment was due. This painting is one of a series of diptychs and triptychs in which Garcia explores "apparently 'different' images, ideas, feelings, and colors." 29 Here, he juxtaposes aesthetic movements (abstraction and realism), politics and art, and state and subject. Rather than a synthesis (as part of his overall critique of binary thinking), Garcia depicts a precarious moment in which the artist is about to pay the price—literally—for political action, for realism, and for drawing a connection between the two. Likewise, in his own painting and graphic art, Garcia's realist style emerged out of an "art of social protest" in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, Garcia began to reassess the "fine line" between art and politics, shifting more attention to the "personal" and technique within an art historical context. 30 Throughout his career, he has struggled against the stigma of being identified as little more than a "radical poster maker," while at the same time remaining critical of the marketplace that gave rise to modernism: "Most of the artists who are openly critical of the state are currently being shot by the seemingly invisible arrows of commodification." 31 In Humanscape 74 (Deux Champ Stripped Bare by His Art) (1975), Mel Casas draws out a pun on Marcel Duchamp's name, motivating his doubling of Duchamp's iconic Self-Portrait in Profile (1958). This doubling produces an outline that is suggestive of Duchamp's Fountain (1917), the "readymade" urinal that he signed as R. Mutt and presented for exhibition as an art object. In the end, the doubled portrait leaves the artist "stripped bare" by Fountain, his most famous artwork, one that marks a critical shift in artistic practice; it also suggests Duchamp playing chess (for which he abandoned art), but in this case, playing it against himself. Casas's title also refer- ences Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), a mixed- media work produced around the time that Duchamp gave up painting. The piece, constructed on two large panes of glass and thereby constituting a formal doubling, suggests a photograph but also functions as an allegory of painting. The above references provide a telling entry point into Casas's own artistic project as a post- Duchamp painter. In fact, Casas's portrait of Duchamp is part of his lifelong series Humanscapes: Visual Conundrums (started in 1965), the works of which interrelate visual contradictions and textual puns within a distinct and stable format: each painting has within its frame a title in the lower center, a foreground, and a screen- like background. Casas is largely known for works in the 1970s and 1980s that explored explicitly "Chicano" political or cultural dynamics, despite a significant body of concurrent works that engaged art historical discourses. This "doubling" of the artist, however, must be set against Casas's earliest paintings, most of them destroyed (not unlike Fountain), in which this format emerges in the context of pop art explorations of the female body, male desire, and heterosexual couple Rupert Garcia, Courbet and the Vendôme Column, 1989, pastel on museum board, 80 1 /4 x 32 1 /8 in.

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