LACMA

From the Chicano movement's beginnings in the mid-1960s onward, the use of public space by Chicano artists developed according to a consciousness about ethics and relevance to community. 2 Working with distinctly public forms such as posters and murals, Chicano artists saw their work as a loudspeaker for the public voice. From early "communicative and educational uses" 3 in which art functioned literally as public relations for the United Farm Workers, the student movement, and the efflorescence of cultural organizations, a public dimension was essential to Chicano art. Discussions regarding audience and community engagement carried over into the 1980s as a number of Chicano artists landed in commercial galleries nationally, producing anxieties about the dilution of what artists and historians found was distinctly Chicano about Chicano art. 4 In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, a larger conversation about art, activism, and diversity was influenced by the changing landscape of arts funding and the import of relational forms of art— from Fluxus to feminist art to what Suzanne Lacy has called "new genre public art." Arturo Ernesto Romo's call to artists to be "moving reflections" does not provide a new model for artists interested in engaging the public sphere, but it certainly proffers a poetic appeal. Taking on the proposition, the artists in Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement seek to make irregular and multifaceted castings on the city. The "new mental and material cartographies" 5 charted in their works differ from the well-defined, affirmative reflections of ethnicity in Chicano and multicultural art. In this essay, I will consider the influences of subterranean (or, as Mario Ybarra Jr. would say, "orificial") phenomena on the artists in the exhibition with an emphasis on how these spatial practices and methodologies that motivate 47 We seek to be a moving reflection, absorbing all manner of hard and soft edges—a crystal on an invisible, irregular axis, wheeled down the street, creating brilliant reflections and casting off distortions of itself and of its surroundings in all directions. 1 —ARTURO ERNESTO ROMO PHANTOM SITES: THE OFFICIAL, THE UNOFFICIAL, AND THE ORIFICIAL RITA GONZALEZ Arturo Ernesto Romo, Crystal Brilliance Manifesto, 2005, silkscreen poster, 23 x 17 1 /2 in.

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