LACMA

60 San Antonio-based artist Cruz Ortiz populates drawings, posters, and videos with his wily alter ego, Spaztek Aztek. He has played with the melancholic lyricism shared by Mexican rancheros and indie rock, and along with a generational cohort represented in Phantom Sightings has transformed the agitprop poster—in this case as a confessional and idiosyn- cratic form. 36 Ortiz—who teaches public high school in addi- tion to working in his studio—has been interested in the political and cultural shift brought on by the sons and daugh- ters of recent immigrants. When his high school students became involved in the immigrant rights marches of 2006, Ortiz started to consider the political and cultural differences between first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants (and beyond). He became interested in the ways formations of citizenship were intensifying the Chicano politic of his first-generation students, thus politicizing Tejanos (Texan Chicanos) like himself. Ortiz started to draw cartoonish yet politically motivated maps and diagrams, utopian concoctions that engineered Rube Goldbergian machines to aid migrants in passing through to el otro lado. In an offbeat proposal for Phantom Sightings, he indicated plans to dig elaborate underground tunnels under- neath the museum. In this "orificial" quest, the artist jests on lacma's own institutional location near a renowned excava- tion site, the La Brea Tar Pits. Ortiz's maps and diagrammatic schemes also signal the class boundaries of art world access, suggesting that the museum or other "cultural destinations" are not readily ascertainable sites for new immigrants— or even artists of color. 37 That which became identified with (and perhaps too easily conscribed as) multicultural art addressed place through the use of personal relics, altars, spaces of commemoration, and diaristic or confessional text. 38 Multicultural and feminist artwork in the 1980s and 1990s especially mined the site of installation as a place for memory work about ancestry and cultural legacies. 39 Diverging from this memorial and somatic impulse, Jason Villegas is more likely to use avatars and doubles instead of testimonials and first-person narratives. Thoroughly intrigued by bootlegs and other signs of rampant global piracy, Villegas populates his installations with hand- made objects that make only a rudimentary attempt to mimic the pure plastic products and logos of authentic luxury (and wannabe luxury) items. Villegas's cosmology is built on an all-consuming consumerist beast, patterned after the popular Japanese video game Katamari Damacy. In the video game, one moves through urban spaces collecting objects—from the miniscule to the skyscraper—like a consumerist dung beetle. Villegas's recent work, G*D (2007), a multi-tiered shrine inhabited by his logo memes, is an explosion of inau- thentic goods and fictionalized services. In this topographic rendering of personal obsessions and transnational flows, identity is refracted through a messy fictive digital universe. Rubén Ortiz-Torres has long been interested in the collision of media, often looking to car customizers and other creative engineers of popular culture for inspiration. Working with Salvador Muñoz, whom he calls a "hydraulic researcher and engineer," Ortiz-Torres has customized a pickup truck into a confabulation of a border patrol vehicle and a kinetic sculpture (Alien Toy, 1997), gold-leafed and chromed a "silent" leaf blower innovated by an amateur inventor, and created two 3-D movies about car culture in Havana and East Los Angeles. Recently, Ortiz- Torres has customized graffiti through computer animation. First, in Backyard Boogie Woogie, the remote control that would generally contort the hydraulics on a tricked-out lowrider is used to adjust a mutating and color-pulsating form. The graffiti tag is a customized expression in flux. Ortiz-Torres extended this Frankensteinian ambition in his multipart works during a residency at New York's Art in General creating "virtual public art." 40 In conflating Frank Gehry and graffiti, Ortiz-Torres's work acquires dimensionality and becomes sculptural and architectural. Mario Ybarra and Ortiz-Torres once proposed another form of virtual public art, one that would have staged a performance in a simulated Los Angeles. Elements of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are set in Los Santos (a thinly disguised L.A.) and involve a painstaking geographic simulation of the city. Ybarra and Ortiz-Torres joked about spending hours trying to get to an actual point in the game where they could ride a motorcycle on the steps of lacma and declare it a conceptual art piece. With more than a sly nod to Asco's Spray Paint LACMA (1972), the artists' desire was to claim a distinct and visible presence within the institution while maintaining the fluidity and transparency of a phantom on wheels. Looking to the vernacular landscape, Arturo Ernesto Romo's multivalent art practice also strives toward a chameleon-like state. Romo's "discovery" of the Crystal Brilliance Manifesto took place in an archaeological study of Frank Hernandez's La Familia Hernandez (1972), a disintegrating mural on Workman Street in L.A.'s Lincoln Heights neighborhood. Attracted to the mural's content—an ambisexual hydra emerging out of a body of water with snakes in each hand protected by cherubs—Romo claims to have found the manifesto hidden underneath layers of paint. In this poster, as in many of his other manifestos and statements, the artist devises a highly imagistic, poetic, and crystalline language that contorts and refracts

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