LACMA

66 and landed squarely in the center of the gallery. In this defamiliarizing of the already defamiliar, Ochoa brought up important issues about the institutional settings for site-specific works—and extended that category to include the "official" (Land Art) and the "unofficial" (tagging). HIDDEN HISTORIES OF THE ORIFICIAL Photographer Christina Fernandez names Hilla and Bernd Becher and Lewis Baltz, among others, as key influences in her work. Fernandez's series Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d (1996) and Lavandería (2002–3) also correspond with spatial studies of urban theory and geography in their efforts to depict "intersections (of a multiethnic Los Angeles) where particular social experience and creativity meet with global pressures of capital and geography." 48 In Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d, Fernandez turns the camera lens to dull facades of industrial buildings that contain garment sweatshops. Modestly composed, at times hand-scrawled, the signs on these buildings conjure images of high fashion and commerce. The turmoil and sweat within is undocumented, but the silent and static exteriors relay this information to the viewer. Also addressing the impact of multinational corporate enterprises on the human workforce, Margarita Cabrera takes the home electronics and big-ticket items and Frank Hernandez, La Familia Hernandez, 1972, mural (destroyed), Workman Street, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles Boulevard in East Los Angeles with masking tape. An audi- ence gathered and wondered if the two (loudly attired in glam outfits) were being harmed, until both Valdez and Sandoval broke free and simply walked off. As art historian Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino suggests, the action brought "into question what constituted a mural. Just as important, it also questioned [Chicanos'] complicity in the perpetuation of boundaries which confine us by exposing their frailty (mask- ing tape)." 44 The performance has proven highly influential as an early critique of the perceived majesty and permanence of the mural as well as its effectiveness as urban intervention. A number of artists in Phantom Sightings willfully riff on muralism, and counter its former function as "material embodiment of historical identity," especially by extracting its standard iconography. 45 Ruben Ochoa's Extracted is a multipart work that consists of photographic studies, a bill- board, an earthworks-like sculpture, and a digital mural—all more concerned with the "politics of concrete" 46 than with an iconographic legacy. Ochoa creates a digital mural in the era of digital distraction; it is an insertion of an absented green hillside onto a freeway wall that, like Romo's work, plays with defacement and effacing. If graffiti is the unsanctioned defacing of architectural forms in public and private space, then Extracted and what Romo calls "the new muralism" propose sanctioned erasures and an examination of how the freeway mediates our view of the city of communities. 47 Ochoa also connects the austere engineering of neighborhood boundaries to the abstractions of labor, industrial materials, and decay underlying Land Art. Many Land artists have created works in the middle of rugged, unpopulated, hard-to- reach spaces. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels all test the limits of exploration and losing oneself in the journey to the site. Ochoa's tactics in working with natural materials are distinct; he invokes the stark aggregation of Land Art as a defiant posture but plays with it as a chameleon form. In Extracted, his sculptural project for LA>

• Cover