LACMA

54 In testing the official, unofficial, and orificial, Ybarra and others in Phantom Sightings test the parameters of art in urban spaces and the representation of the urban in contemporary art. Artists in the exhibition are drawn to the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla interventions. As Melisa Rivière notes in her study of unsanctioned graffiti and sanctioned "aerosol art": "illegal art challenges established cultural values surrounding private property, organized aesthetics, social status, and identity." 27 Although situated within an institution, Ybarra's Belmont Ruins invited museum visitors to violate the sanctity of his museum-within-the-museum. He placed markers (albeit erasable ones) on the periphery of the installation, allowing museum attendees to make their own "orificial" contributions to the history of Belmont. Sandra de la Loza's Pocho Research Society, an enterprise that is mostly the artist's own project but at times involves recruits, cleaves the discourse of clandestine militant action with the seemingly neutral gestures of public historical memorializing not simply to produce an unauthorized inser- tion into a landscape but to generate debate on the use and rendering of sites and entire communities. The society uses historical plaques in order to convey yet camouflage its radi- cal intentions. By blending into asphalt and brick, these faux monuments perfectly simulate the gravitas of the official marker. De la Loza's interventions are rooted in Chicano art; however, her Pocho Research Society work departs from a form of religiosity and paternalism found in much of Chicano iconography and themes, and in this rupture finds methodological and theoretical affinities with the work of Chicana feminism. Like the Chicana feminist writers and visual artists that Laura Elisa Pérez describes, the Pocho Research Society disorders "dominant social and cultural, spatial and ideological topographies of the 'proper' in the United States." 28 De la Loza activates architecture and urban spaces through defiant insertions of cultural memory. A revisionist historical effort has been under way in Los Angeles to address gaps brought to light by historians such as Gail Dubrow, who found that only 2.3 percent of cultural- historical landmarks documented the contributions of Native American, Latino, or Asian Americans to civic life. 29 But is there is a limit to the compensatory work a monument can accomplish? In the PRS's tagging with bronze plaques, the city is textualized (and contextualized)—in de la Loza's words, annotated, but only briefly. 30 As it does for so many artists in the exhibition, the city becomes a laboratory for improvisation and the circulation of unsolicited proposals. Primary to de la Loza's work with the pseudohistorical society is what Dolores Hayden has named the "politics of place construction." 31 This was also expressed in View from the East, her project for Ruben Ochoa's mobile gallery in a van, CLASS: C. De la Loza inserted three large-scale black-and-white prints into the condensed gallery space, distorting the viewer's sense of scale. In addition to the spatial disori- entation, de la Loza's work altered the dominant geographic coordinates of the metropolis. The vantage point she captured—an establishing shot of Los Angeles from a hypothetical movie—looks at the city "center" from the rolling hills of City Terrace, an unincorporated part of East Los Angeles. Rather than zoom in on the downtown, the image invites the viewer to contemplate the many untold stories— or in de la Loza's words, the "magnitude of possibilities"— contained within the homes and yards of the East Side. Eduardo Sarabia's L.A. River, like a number of other works in Phantom Sightings, is a sketch for an architectural intervention. The design consists of a monument that extends the functionality of the concrete riverbed that serves as flood control channel for the Los Angeles River. Sarabia's L.A River can claim Robert Smithson's Proposal for a Monument to Anartica [sic] (1966) as source material more so than the epic historical narrative spatialized in Judy Baca's Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–83). While at first glance Sarabia's collage might seem merely a poetic juxta- position, it resonates with subversive interpolative potential—the riverbed becomes an outdoor amphitheater envisioned as a site for Buddhist meditation, collective theatrical improvisation, or perhaps even competitive pep rallies pitting East Siders against West Siders. Like Sarabia's L.A. River, Juan Capistran's group of digitally assisted drawings, What We Do Is Secret (2002), started out as a photographic document of industrial spaces. Capistran transforms the photographs of abandoned or reconditioned commercial warehouses and factories that once thrived in South Central into architectural line drawings. In place of buildings, however, he inserts equipment used by disc jockeys, such as the clunky cases used to transport turntables and speakers. The title of the series refers to another sonic intervention, the "secret" staging of raves and after-hours parties in these old buildings. 32 Capistran metaphorically renders the multiple and occulted histories that have taken place in the same site. In the temporary reclamation of private and public sites (as in the staging of punk rock shows and raves in backyards, parking lots, and converted storefronts), generations of artists from the 1970s to the present tested out mutable identities and began to gather a reservoir of images and sounds for their future archival content.

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