LACMA

45 27. Doyle makes a similar argument with respect to Benjamin, Zola, and Manet and their "productive if sometimes melan- cholic allegories for the work of the artist" (ibid., 51). 28. Benavidez, Gronk, 68. 29. Garcia and Gómez-Peña, "Turning it Around," 34. 30. "Politics used to be my driving force. It isn't an overriding concern any more. Now it's what I think of the world, personalized. The technology of the picture has become important. Now many political works seem trying—embar- rassing to one's eyes. It is very difficult to marry politics and technique, difficult to make it work. But I like to walk that fine line." Quoted in Bob Marvel, "Rupert Garcia: Personalized Politics," La Voz (Seattle), June–July 1985. 31. Garcia and Gómez-Peña, "Turning it Around," 15. 32. In Humanscapes 37–39, exit or emergency signs within the movie theater provide diegetic titles located in the foreground space. 33. Enrique Hank López, "Back to Bachimba," in Ed Ludwig and James Santibañez, The Chicanos: Mexican American Voices (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), 263; reprinted from Horizon (Winter 1967). 34. John C. Welchman, "Ekeko to Mufflers: Rubén Ortiz Torres on Kustom, Kamouflage, and Kitsch," in Rubén Ortiz Torres: Behind Garage Funk, exh. cat. (Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 2004). 35. See Sixteen Americans, exh. cat., ed. Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959). 36. For an exception, see Victor Zamudio-Taylor, "Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism: Chicano/a Art and the Pre-Columbian Past," in The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, exh. cat., ed. Virginia Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001). 37. In this respect, it is useful to ponder those instances in which Chicanos may have been avant la lettre within the avant-garde. For example, as David E. James argues with respect to Asco, "the No Movies both precede and exceed Cindy Sherman's Film stills." James draws a sharp contrast between the "communal opposition" of the No Movie and the "sentimental nostalgia" and "individual narcissis[m]" of Sherman's Film stills. See James, "Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of 'Avant-Garde' film in Los Angeles," October 90 (Fall 1999): 2–24. Clearly Asco and Sherman have very different modes of oppositionality, particularly in terms of their exhibition and dissemination, and those differences correspond with their works' critical reception, canonical status, and market value. But, at the same time, it is important to note that both Asco and Sherman proceed from marked categories, working within and against the restrictive repre- sentation of women and minorities in Hollywood (and the spectacle, more generally). See also David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and C. Ondine Chavoya, "Pseudographic Cinema: Asco's No Movies," Performance Research 3, no. 1 (1998): 1–14 (esp. 8–10 regarding Sherman). 38. While the global turn is often presented as something recent, I first heard that "we" had moved beyond the old paradigm of "what is American about American art" in 1992 when I served as an adviser on the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1993 Biennial. The press blasted the exhibi- tion as being concerned more with cultural diversity than with aesthetics, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But what the museum was actually doing was using the biennial as a way to define a global framework for its nation-bound mission. Ironically, the Whitney used the concept of "borders"—as articulated by Chicano artists—in order to largely bypass Chicano artists in favor of Mexican and Canadian artists who were more integrated into a global art market. 39. Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79. While in many ways Bishop provides an insightful provocation, one could do a useful case study on the way in which class- and race-based anxi- eties emerge within her essay, perhaps a sign that neither the author nor the artist stand outside language as "centered" subjects. See Liam Gillick, "Contingent Factors: A Response to Claire Bishop's 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,'" October 115 (Winter 2006): 95–107; and also Bishop's "The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents," Artforum (February 2006): 178–83, and the exchange between Bishop ("Response," Artforum, Letters to the editor [May 2006]: 24) and Grant Kester ("Another Turn," Artforum, Letters to the editor [May 2006]: 22), as well as their books: Bishop, Participation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) and Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 40. Garcia and Gómez-Peña, "Turning it Around," 14–15. 41. While the title names its subject as Mexican American, Quirarte's introduction identifies Mexican American and Chicano as equivalents, then uses Chicano for the most part. Since the book covers the twentieth century (and antecedents), whereas Chicano is a more recent self-designation, the body of the manuscript focuses on individual rather than group names. 42. Ortiz, quoted in Jacinto Quirarte, Mexican American Artists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), xx. 43. Ibid., xxi. 44. Ortiz also wrote various manifestos. See, for example, Ralph Ortiz, "...destruction has no place in our society—it belongs to our dreams; it belongs to art," Art and Artists 1, no. 5 (August 1966): 60–63. 45. Quoted in Quirarte, Mexican American Artists, 101. 46. Quirarte, Mexican American Artists, 101. 47. Ibid., my emphasis. 48. Ray Johnson: Correspondences, exh. cat., ed. Donna De Salvo and Catherine Gudis. (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1999), 124. I am grateful to C. Ondine Chavoya for sharing this reference with me. 49. "Some years ago, I heard something that was to change the course of my professional life and the lives of my patients. What I heard may change the nature of psychotherapy as it is now known.... During a lull in our group therapy session, [a young male patient] told us a story about a man named Ortiz who was currently doing an act on the London stage in which he paraded around in diapers drinking bottles of milk. Throughout his number, Ortiz is shouting, 'Mommy! Daddy! Mommy! Daddy!' at the top of his lungs. At the end of his act he vomits. Plastic bags are passed out, and the audience is requested to follow suit." Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy—The Cure for Neurosis (New York: Delta Book Co., 1970), 9. 50. In 1969, he founded the first Latino art museum in the United States, El Museo del Barrio, in New York. See Yasmin Ramirez, "Nuyorican Vanguards, Political Actions, Poetic Visions: A History of Puerto Rican Artists in New York, 1964–1984" (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2005). 51. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142–43. 52. Quirarte, Mexican American Artists, xxi. 53. Ibid. 54. Ramirez, "Nuyorican Vanguards," 92. 55. Ortiz's genealogy is itself like the usual process of looking up a word in the dictionary, only to be directed to another word, and then another, and so on, with meaning endlessly deferred.

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