LACMA

getting people under the fence." 18 Much of his youth was spent within a tight radius of Wilmington, California, an industrial city near Long Beach, one of the most active harbors in the world. When he hit his teenage years, graffiti provided him a "ghetto pass" to other neighborhoods. 19 Artists like Ybarra who emerged in the 1990s grew up with a decentered urban experience. Subcultures such as skateboarding, hip hop, postpunk, and graffiti tagging allowed for transitory experiences of urban space, as well as providing sanctioned and unsanctioned contexts for their work. From 1996 to 2005, Ybarra worked with Juan Capistran under various names, including AllModCons, Space Invaders 13, and Slanguage (which still serves as the name of an alternative art space that they founded in 2002 with writer Karla Diaz). Capistran and Ybarra met while art students at Otis College of Art and Design, and collaborated on a number of public projects that fed into a post–Los Angeles riot "urban information overlay." 20 While the 1992 riots were initially discussed as a black and white issue, the event and its subsequent racial, ethnic, and class tensions exposed the realities of a changing Los Angeles demographic. Capistran, for example, grew up in South Central L.A., identifying more with African American culture than with the Chicanismo of East L.A. Many small businesses lost in the riots became abandoned lots surrounded by chain-link fences. These fences, which were used to hold the space of "official" businesses, became the site for a free and public advertising space for the already thriving informal economy in the inner city. Capistran and Ybarra responded to this new "topography of fences" 21 with two projects: Poor Paintings, a working-class parody of the abstract expression- ist gestural plane, and Sub/Lime (both series 1998), rough-hewn sign paintings on scrap board that ruminated on the sublimity of the crudely rendered fruits and vegetables on amateur signs around the city. Such projects also functioned as glib conversations with art history; that same dialogical impulse would continue specifically in Capistran's own work, with his interest in taking the signs of indus- try and manufacture in minimalism and finish fetish back to an urban context. Both Ybarra and Capistran were attracted to graffiti for its transgressive and clandestine tactics. Graffiti and other urban interventions created active sites for dialogue out of unutilized spaces like freeway underpasses, off-ramps, and construction sites—the oft-seen but seldom noted zones of the city. Years after the L.A. riots, Ybarra's Belmont Ruins, commissioned for lacma's 2005 exhibition Consider This, 22 explored debates around the development of abandoned lots through the rapid gentrification of formerly "undesirable" areas of Los Angeles. The Belmont Tunnel, located just west of downtown Los Angeles, gained notoriety for its connection to the long-defunct Pacific Electric trolley system that once thrived in the early twentieth century, as well as its status as one of the largest open-air graffiti sites in the world. 23 The old transit tunnel and the graffitied yard had been featured in countless films, commercials, and music videos, providing the perfect marks and patinas of urban grime for location scouts and art directors. 50 and, it could be argued, for many early Chicano artists who studied art at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at that time —and its enforcement of a Eurocentric canonical art history galvanized the search for a Chicano visual language. 14 While identity politics is now largely seen as theo- retically passé in art school, some artists seem acutely aware of the problematic wholesale dismissal of discussions of difference. Yet perhaps more sharply than the "urban existen- tialists" of the 1970s and 1980s, they reject the burden of affirmative representation and protest narrowly cast readings of their work—in particular when biography or ethnicity is foregrounded. 15 THE URBAN CONCEPTUALIST Over the last two decades, post-identity artists have engaged with "conceptual art in urban form" 16 through interventions in urban space, works that attempt to record something absented from urban space, or work that takes urban forms and moves them into a gallery context. Coming after the Chicano movement, the artists in Phantom Sightings are aware of the "themes, motifs, and iconography" which had "provided ideological direction and visual coherence to mural and poster production." 17 But rather than positing an authen- tic "Chicano" subject against the backdrop of an exclusionary history, these artists employ such strategies as excavating urban spaces for relics of history, dissonant texts (embedded on walls and freeways), and spectral, often ephemeral, traces. The artists speak of being fluent with the cityscapes and approach their medium as would lexicographers or transla- tors. Industrial engineering is taken as monument, signs are taken as embedded texts, and the phantom tactics of graffiti are emulated. Artist Mario Ybarra Jr. has discussed his art works as delib- erations on the "official and orificial." The "orificial" is that which emanates from the "vent, mouth, or hole." It is both source code and model for Ybarra's work, typifying the undocumented or clandestine tactics of everything from immigrant black market economies to the networking of graffiti artists on the web. He describes his role in terms of the insubordinate and unsanctioned act, seeing his role as "getting clippers and cutting the hole in the fence —[and]

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