LACMA

chronicling embraced aspects of posturing and gesturing, as if they were art world celebrities mugging for historicizing paparazzi. In fact, Asco's primary strategy was always in posing and undercutting the sincerity, the certitude, the fierce purposeful- ness of what are known (with deceptive simplicity) as "reality" and "identity" and "mean- ing." Asco members never asserted that life and its daily realization are meaningless, but they did naggingly peck away at any sense of gravitas and self-aggrandizement that individuals, groups, and (especially) revolutionary causes might display. Little wonder that their irreverence did not win the endorsement of revolutionary Chicanismo. Whereas "Chicano school" art attempted to reveal, to explicate, and to celebrate a coherent Chicano culture and history through the founding of a new artistic movement, 2 Asco explored the contestual value systems, the vital incoherence, and the inexplicable contradictions of a factious American culture in its antic art. Both camps were a response to a multiform society. Chicano school artists attempted to forge a contemporary idiom based on a recovered history and a shared cultural memory. Asco positioned themselves in the contemporaneous "main- stream" of avant-garde art; their affinities were more with Andy Warhol, whose cheaply made 16mm movies debunked the tradition of high-art cinema, as well as with pop art, nascent conceptualism, and the well-established tradition of dada more than with the Mexican American muralism and folkloric traditions they affectionately parodied. Yet they shared with Chicano school art many of the same issues related to individual identity, group identity, and the experience of being marginalized as a phantom culture—a concept articulated by Asco cofounder Gamboa. Within the history of Chicano art, which is now into its fourth decade, it is reasonable and important to acknowledge Asco and friends as an alternative parallel tradition to Chicano school art. Numerous artists in Phantom Sightings, most of whom came to artistic maturity in the 1990s and after, specifically credit the precedents and strategies of Asco as active influences on their own development. They continue to advance the development of that alternative tradition today. In contrast to the Chicano school assertion of a distinct Mexican American iden- tity and sensibility, most artists in this alternate tradition are apt to question the very basis of personal and group identity, and they in fact display a widespread interest in constructing images and metaphors of cross-cultural and multiple iden- tities. To any observer who believes in the concept of essential cultural, ethnic, or national identity, the art in this exhibition will seem a willful act of cultural trespass and cross-boundary intromission, not unlike traversing the border from one demar- cated neighborhood (or country, or culture) into another. Yet for the artists in Phantom Sightings this aesthetic of trespass does not necessarily indicate transgres- sion or violation, but might connote being where one is not known or recognized. A stranger in a social setting, an outsider at a cultural happening, or an interloper into a social activity might be a trespasser— guilty not necessarily of anything illegal nor of stirring up trouble, but just out of place, an aberrant, misfitting presence. 78 the Chicano art movement—which may well be how they saw themselves. Many of their works had a benignly subver- sive aspect, as their infiltration in 1974 of a traditional November 2 Day of the Dead community observance in a cemetery in East Los Angeles. Dressed in outlandish costumes, Asco artists quietly disrupted the affair, simply moving through the crowds. Their Instant Mural (1974) was an impish invasion into public urban space in which Gronk used masking tape to attach Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval to an outside wall of a building on a neighborhood avenue—an action that few if any passersby understood to be, as Asco intended, a satiric send-up of the muralist tradi- tion (so influential on Chicano art) of José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, with their grand and heroic message of social revolution. A somewhat more politically motivated action was Asco's 1972 guerrilla project of spray-painting its members' names on the exterior walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. No mere tagging, but rather a conceptual "appropriation" of the institution itself, the action was Asco's response to the museum's appar- ent indifference to Chicano art. In another urban intervention, First Supper (After a Major Riot), on Christmas Eve of 1974, Asco and friends staged a formal dinner party on a traffic island, providing a curious spectacle for holiday rush-hour drivers—another absurdist activity designed to make spectators wonder about complex motives and hidden meanings but that mainly flouted convention and common sense. And Asco's legendary No Movies were made without benefit of motion picture film— that is, they were in essence staged movie stills, like photo- graphic story boards, that stood in for the live-action motion pictures that Asco could not afford to produce. In truth, Asco would not have produced them as true cinema even if they had had the cash, for the No Movies were unalloyed games of theatrical posing and make-believe meant as gestures of inauthenticity—campy spoofs of the plots, characters, costumes, lighting, and sets that described the glamour and pretense of old Hollywood. Asco's dada-inspired antics were canny and clever, and Asco documented almost everything they did with an archivist's sense of dutiful preservation, but even that

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