LACMA

33 Mel Casas, Humanscape 74 (Deux Champ Stripped Bare by His Art), 1975, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 in. formation. Here, in contrast to Duchamp's mechanical imagery for social reproduc- tion, Casas depicts Hollywood as the machine that produces bachelors seeking to "strip bare" the bride: the background is depicted as a movie screen and the fore- ground as a movie theater audience. The title does not enter the frame until Humanscape 40 (1968), by which point the movie screen and audience space are no longer depicted as such, but rather serve as the historical basis for a generalized format. 32 Thus, if Duchamp turns from painting to the "photograph" (as an index), Casas turns from popular cinema to painting (as an arena for iconic commentary). The above painters represent Chicano artists born between the 1930s and early 1950s, including a number who were trained in art schools before the Chicano movement. These artists' oeuvre evidences what Enrique Hank López called the "schizo-cultural limbo" of a generation that participated in the social protest and cultural nationalism of the late 1960s and 1970s, and yet were profoundly social- ized within (if also excluded from) the American cultural landscape of the 1950s and early 1960s. 33 Their work often alternates at a thematic level between the Chicano vernacular and the high culture of the Euro-American art historical; or, in the case of Martínez and Casas, also expresses this split identification at a formal level through figure and ground. In contrast, the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s and who are represented in Phantom Sightings often start with a modernist • Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Urban Landscape, 2006

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