LACMA

37 title provides a link between a ruling structure (in which everyone claimed to be following orders) and a formal structure that claims it is the object itself (and not the artist) that determines how it should be painted. In an equally provocative move, Capistran provides an "overlay" on canonical minimalist sculpture and painting, suggesting there is more than just surface: namely break dancing on top of a Carl Andre sculpture. In both cases, Capistran injects references to contemporary urban youth culture (break dancing, hardcore punk), not so much as a counterpoint but as a cultural practice that best "uses" these canonical instances of American modernism. In effect, he makes his own generational cohort and their experiential frame of reference into the new "surface" for an art of surfaces. Finally, in collaboration with Mario Ybarra Jr., Capistran has also produced two painting series referencing gallery-based art movements, but "installed" on chain-link fences surrounding abandoned lots: Poor Paintings and Sub/Lime (both 1998). At first glance, the attempt by Chicano artists to situate themselves within modern art history—through direct references to canonical artists, works, and movements—appears to be primarily a concern among male artists. Carlee Fernandez's recent work adds a female voice to this process, while she also continues the inter- esting cross-gender and cross-race self-portraiture of the earlier work by male artists. Her Self-Portrait as Franz West (2006) is part of a series of photographs and sculp- tures in which she reimagines herself as other artistic and historical figures, or even as her own father, restaging an earlier photographic portrait in drag. West, a Viennese sculptor whose awkward-looking works often require audience participation, represents Fernandez's doppelganger, as an artist loosely linked with an activist movement, yet whose work is all too often described as merely "sociable." But Fernandez's camouflage shirt and a deep crack in the concrete beside her left foot suggest that this self-portrait as West is hiding as much as it reveals about the artist. The image portends an unanswered secret and a pending danger. Indeed, what is hidden beneath the camouflage and photographic mask? And what are the aesthetic and professional risks of this masquerade? West is an unusual choice for a self-portrait, and yet he also conjures up the fault line between an art of social protest and an art that is just "sociable" enough to be marketable, a fault line also explored by Gronk, Garcia, Casas, and others. In the end, Self-Portrait as Franz West offers an image of the second phantom hiding from the first, hiding in the plain sight of European art history (the third phantom)—that is, an image of the artist hiding and not-hiding all at once. Like Gronk's Puta's Cave, Fernandez's self-portraiture reveals that the artist can never escape or step outside representation, in all the senses of the word. The above is meant to be suggestive, pointing to a tendency within Chicano art that has been ignored by those writing about Chicano art as well as by those who assume that Chicano art bears no relation to the history of modern art. 36 But a

• Cover