LACMA

24 the museum to the streets, from the art world to a community engaged in social protest. At the time, police had restricted Chicano public space, first through the disruption of several demonstrations against police violence, then in setting up checkpoints and canceling the annual Christmas parade in East Los Angeles. Asco's performance art broke with the didactic realism that undergirded cultural national- ism, with its search for the real Chicano and the right politics, and instead presented Chicano identity as performative. But, it is important to note, Asco did not imply that Chicanos performed identity, with its inference that one can choose better or worse roles to play. In fact, what makes the group distinct is that it was not vested in identity politics in the first place. For Asco, what made Chicano identity perfor- mative was not that it named itself against all odds, as an act of defiance (the oft- used "I am Chicano" of the era), but that it was constituted within a set of social relations largely defined by the mass media and the corporate liberal state. As such, Asco saw identity as less a question of form and content—that is, a proper name— and more one about the context for speaking and being heard. And so, they turned their attention to Hollywood and global media, through their No Movies (mail art, media hoaxes, film stills) and mimicry of celebrity discourses (Aztlán Awards, home movies). As Gronk explained their strategy, "It's making a movie without the use of celluloid. It's projecting the real while rejecting the reel." 18 Asco's provocation cut both ways, with the "community's" response encoded in the group's very name, which means "nausea" in Spanish. Gamboa's short story "Cruel Profit" recounts the reactions to a Super 8 film by the same title (involving a muralist and a doll nailed to a wall), critiquing the perceived contrast between bad ("abstract") and good ("concrete") approaches to social struggles: You're too abstract.… No one wants to see pictures of someone burning a baby! You should be making movies and taking pictures of people working and suffer- ing, something they can relate to, like showing young Chicanas standing in line waiting for their food stamps or people crowding the unemployment office on Indiana Street, not some doll wrapped in barbed wire.… I think that you better give what I'm saying heavy consideration because it seems like you might become or already are part of the problem, counterrevolutionary; things are too abstract already, the world doesn't need any more confusion, obstacles that confuse people while they try to cope with reality. People need concrete answers, not dreams! Te estoy diciendo la verdad, carnal. 19 Since the 1990s, Asco has influenced or provided a point of reference for a new generation of artists and artist groups whose work explores similar issues within public space, including the groups Slanguage (formerly made up of Mario Ybarra Jr. and Juan Capistran) and the Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History (Sandra de la Loza), and individual artists such as Arturo Ernesto Romo and Ruben Ochoa. 20 Willie Herrón III in Cruel Profit, 1973, Super 8 film directed by Harry Gamboa Jr., screened at the LACMA exhibition Chicanismo en el Arte, 1975

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