LACMA

63 meaning. "Think of a mural dedicated to double vision, to sound, to the dead twin of the puff of smoke that you released from your lungs one night to the long faded trails of movement left behind by your hands pushing into the concrete." 41 Romo's erased mural becomes the spectral reminiscence of the overheard conversations, "puffs of smoke," "guffaws, hoots, and car horns" of the city street. As in all of his work, Romo dives into alchemical and metaphysical undercur- rents of the quotidian. He works in materials that he can easily and cheaply propagate, and through these broadsides, pamphlets, and posters engages with the uninten- tional poesy of those anonymous posted messages that we encounter every day. Romo has absorbed the informative impulse and graphic vocabulary of Chicano movement art, but the information that he disperses is far-ranging—made-up "contradictory and contrapuntal elements" 42 that he draws from photocopied and scrawled urban texts. Like his open structure for the Crystal Brilliance Manifesto, Romo's language is refractive instead of prescriptive, ascribing a phenomenological value to the new forms of muralism, street graphics, and street photography through a "luminous exchange." 43 Scoli Acosta's installations contain blurry streaks of street vernacular and the unpredictability of fantasy worlds. He shapes dream content, filmic and popular culture references, literary allusions, and found street detritus into wildly imagina- tive art that has stylistic connections to nineteenth- and twentieth-century avant- garde movements, especially symbolism and surrealism, but also to contemporary manifestations of bricolage and appropriation. After spending a few years living and working in Europe, Acosta returned to Los Angeles in 2004. He reintegrated into the demands of life in the city with an increased awareness of his perception through the windshield of an automobile. His drawings use windshields and the outlines of the sunglasses worn while navigating the city from an interior space to give a sense of the city's imposition of a vehicular consciousness. Acosta's installations are the diagrams of his research process as well as agglom- erations of objects collected from the streets outside his East L.A. studio. Recently, Acosta animated the very mural that Arturo Romo elegized in the Crystal Brilliance Manifesto in a performance dedicated to the mural's erasure. Both Romo's and Acosta's dialogical interventions into this hidden mural's history play off of its anomalous status, its unorthodox rendering of a metaphysical imagination of Chicanismo. Both Acosta and Romo are drawn to the mural's unorthodox cosmic iconography and its outsider status. Performance and muralism do have a long intertwining history, whether inten- tional or not. Although the "masters of Mexican modernism," Los Tres Grandes (Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros), became larger- than-life presences off the wall, Asco can take credit for activating the site of the mural as a performance piece. Gronk staged the Instant Mural (1974) with his Asco cohorts, adhering Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval to a wall on Whittier Following pages: Asco, Instant Mural, 1974 • Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Backyard Boogie Woogie (detail), 2003

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