LACMA

NOTES 1. Cited in C. Ondine Chavoya, "Social Unwest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.," Wide Angle 20, no. 3 ( July 1998): 55. Quotation originally published in High Performance 14 (1981): 15. 2. For a discussion of this terminology, coined by Chicano art collector and advocate Cheech Marin, see his "Introduction: The Chicano School of Painting," in Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2002), 7–8. 3. Quoted on Creative Capital website, http://channel.creative-capital.org/project_892.html. reconsidering the viewer's own perceptions as half-truths; their art sows questions, uncertainty, confusion. Their art presents a theater of the inauthentic. Some artists create objects as blatantly make-believe as stage props; they use inappropriate materials; they deliver a heavy quotient of the artificial; they revel in surprise; they flaunt hidden meanings. They wittingly exercise the right to get it all wrong—not to lie and deceive or hoodwink the viewer, but to point out the deceptive nature of appearances, to reveal signs of life in forms and materials where they were not presumed to be, to propose alternate explanations to matters of fact. The art in Phantom Sightings— opposed to literalism, conventional wisdom, and unquestioned beliefs—presents a cultural psychodrama in which realities that are invisible, alien, and outside of common knowledge begin the difficult movement toward visibility, parity, and understanding. the history, and by many who participated in it either person- ally or through the hundreds of picture postcards that were produced by amateur and professional photographers on hand at the kangaroo courts to record their grisly aftermath. These pictures were produced as mementos, or maybe as trophies, for participants and onlookers and were frequently mailed, like any other souvenir postcards, to friends and rela- tives around the country. Ken Gonzales-Day, meticulously researching records in archives, newspaper morgues, libraries, and local historical societies, has discerned that there was a provable history of white-on-Mexican and white-on-Chicano lynchings in the Southwestern states. In his Erased Lynchings series, Gonzales-Day rephotographed historic lynching post- cards, scanned them into a computer, and, using computer programs such as Photoshop, eliminated the images of the dead bodies. In this act of erasure—a virtual destruction of evidence, a kind of visual forgetting—he ironically provokes an act of historical remembering. In his related series, Hang Trees (ongoing since 2002), he made an artistic and ethical project of tracking down and photographing the sites—the fields, the yards, the very trees—where the hangings took place. Today, in situ, those trees may be verdant and lush, or they may be dead and parched, but they bear no inscriptions, no visible signs to reveal their histories; but their presence in his photographs is the visual evidence that reveals their truths. Gonzales-Day's strange pilgrimage is less an homage to the victims—many of whom may indeed have been guilty of crimes but were never properly tried, convicted, and punished—than a reminder of a forgotten or repressed history and the failure of due process, a basic American value. These false manifestations cannot be named by name; they must be named and described by that which they are not: the foliage in Ochoa's invisible freeway wall is not vegetation at all; the smuggled man in Morales's watercolor is not a car seat; the erased body in Gonzales-Day's photograph was not not there. The nature and meaning of these false objects—which is to say their identity—is protean, complex, and multiple. This state of flux is itself a metaphor for issues of personal, ethnic, social, and cultural identity which are often the subtexts, or über-texts, of today's Chicano art. Many works by the artists in Phantom Sightings dragoon the viewer into Ken Gonzales-Day, Next morning when Jimmy awoke, the cowboys were gone, 2003, chromogenic print, 40 x 50 in. Previous pages: • Ruben Ochoa, Freeway Wall Extraction Study no. 8, 2004

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