LACMA

41 * * * * * If I have argued that all Chicano artists have necessarily produced phantom sightings, the artists in this exhibition turn that necessity into the conceptual premise for their work. For example, where earlier artists turned to cinema (as form and content for their visual and graphic art), the artists in this exhibition turn to the cinematic (as a free-floating discursive strategy). In either case, the cinema represents the first mass medium, initiating a process whereby an effect of "presence" and social belonging is produced by phantoms that leave no material traces. In this regard, the photographic projects of Harry Gamboa Jr. since the 1970s and Christina Fernandez since the 1990s provide a useful frame for Phantom Sightings. In different ways, each is documenting something that has been disappeared within the urban landscape: Gamboa (both during and after Asco) through staged celebrity portraits of his generational cohort; Fernandez through formal attention to the built envi- ronment itself, including laundromats, sweatshops, and public parks. If Gamboa stages the image, Fernandez stages the camera, and if Gamboa shows what has been removed from our media culture (a diverse social group), Fernandez focuses on the telling detritus that remains in a depopulated urban landscape (clearly drawing an influence from Anthony Hernandez's work since the 1970s). These two ways of seeing, as well as the dialogue between them, inform the other works in the exhibition. But rather than produce bricolage, pastiche, or even palimpsests (key metaphors for postmodern accretion), the works in Phantom Sightings manifest a phantom out of the building blocks of the very same environment within which the phantom is a phantom: Margarita Cabrera's cacti made from border patrol uniforms, Nicola López's maplike installations that render the chaotic experience rather than the rational conception of the built environment, or the various works that remake modernist art out of the materials of Chicano and urban youth culture. In Phantom Sightings, the word Chicano signals an absence rather than an essence, dissension rather than origin. In situating this exhibition in historical context, we have chosen to use the word after rather than the more ubiquitous prefix post, as in post-Chicano, postidentity, postmodern. The artists in this exhibition do not agree upon or use a common name, other than that of artist. They are neither Chicano nor post-Chicano, neither pro- nor anti-identity, since these are false oppositions that give the illusion that the right choice will secure privileged access. Instead, they are artists deeply engaged in the paradoxes of their social being and historical moment—in other words, with modernity. Following pages: • Christina Fernandez, Lavandería #2, 2002

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