LACMA

as a site that defines class (and that has played a role in gentrification and urban renewal projects). While recent work by these artists has a genealogical relationship to Asco (and the Chicano movement), its sociohistorical context is radically different. Since the 1990s, the social reform programs that responded to the broader social protests of the 1960s and early 1970s have been largely dismantled. Meanwhile, the Latino population has grown from a small minority to the plurality or majority in many urban centers, albeit as an increasingly diversified and stratified group. Finally, the cultural land- scape is now one defined by global mass media and "new technologies" (a phrase that already sounds quaint), often at the expense of public support for both elite and community-based arts. In short, this new generation operates outside either a social movement or a viable notion of the public, and it does so within the intensified "white noise" of global media and a multiracial, multilinguistic urban street culture. THE THIRD PHANTOM There is a final phantom, and that is the one lurking in the title of this exhibition. It is the phantom of the first two phantoms, and it is heard in the homonyms for sighting: Siting: To situate or locate something in a particular place or position. Citing: To mention something or somebody as an example to support an argument. These are the actions that turn the apparitional into something real (or social), that locate it within a context and reference it within discourse. Without such siting and citing, we fail to see how the artists themselves engage—intellectually, aestheti- cally —the very artistic genealogy from which they have been excluded. Chicano artists have often produced works in dialogue with art history and artistic influences, thereby providing coordinates by which to sight/site/cite their work. Consider Ochoa and Rios's Rigor Motors, discussed above, which combines lowrider culture with a commentary on how modernity disciplines the body, but also clearly references René Magritte's own seated coffin paintings. This engage- ment with the art historical cuts across various boundaries within Chicano art— whether my distinction of three phantoms, different generational cohorts, or the curatorial binaries established by touchstone Chicano art surveys since the 1980s. 24 Chicano artists are not sui generis concerned only with the creation of identity art, but rather artists who have engaged global issues, participated in international art movements, and contributed to new genres and formal developments. In Puta's Cave (1988), Gronk goes to the heart of the matter with a pun on Plato's Cave, one that inserts his alter ego—Tormenta, the mysterious woman with her back always to the viewer—as the producer of a shadow that Plato's prisoners will mistake for reality. In the pun offered by the title, the puta (or whore) uses her hands to cast the shadow of a stag, one that becomes merged with Tormenta's own 30 Gronk, Puta's Cave, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 in., private collection

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