LACMA

76 legacy of the civil rights movement and the countercultural revolutions that today, in the twenty-first century, mainstream American culture is profoundly more aware of its multiracial, multiethnic, multinational, and multisectarian demography than ever before—at times uncomfortably so. But homelands, promised lands, and restored diasporas are rooted, fundamentally, in a desire for places and times past. In that respect, the idealized conception of Aztlán and its golden age, while some- times useful in political debate, can also seem quaint and largely irrelevant to the social realities, the needs, the aspirations of a diverse American society. For the artists in the present exhibition, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement, the existence of Aztlán remains theoretical and remote. They are less interested in the historical validity of Chicano culture than they are in its presentness, and they are less interested in Chicanos' distinctiveness and special place than they are in how Mexican Americans experience life and identity in a diverse social multiformity—a demographically unstable, ideologically unsubmissive, and reck- lessly creative American culture in which individual and group identities may be calibrated and constituted in many ways, through countless filters and prisms, and in relationship to others' individual and group identities—identities, plural. The presentation of such nuanced identities is inherently theatrical and performative: identities are less matters of presumed membership within a homogeneous received culture than they are instances of mediated personal behavior in a heterogeneous, multifaceted, ever-shifting social milieu that takes place in the home, in the work- place, in schools, churches, restaurants, clubs, online, and anyplace else where individuals are aware of how they present themselves and are perceived by others. The reasons are myriad, but this performative representation of identity surely reflects the remarkable creative vitality and intellectual challenge that animates and supercharges the restless American culture of diversity. It is a culture in which hip-hop and rap—spawned in inner-city black ghettoes—figure squarely in the daily musical fare of white suburban teenagers; in which art students and cultural critics may be as influenced by video games and "toons" (ranging from SpongeBob SquarePants to Bart Simpson to Japanese anime) as they are by Duchamp or Deleuze. The artists in Phantom Sightings sample, partake of, and willfully remix this panoply of cultural sources, adopting and adapting as they wish. In it all, they deny an essentialist notion of identity, refusing either to codify themselves as members of neatly defined ethnic or cultural groups or to declare a magic immunity to such aspects of individuality. They are not the first Chicano artists to question the Chicano paradigm. Indeed, at the very inception of Chicano art a spirit of "loyal opposition" fused with a somewhat mischievous resistance inspired the artists' collective Asco, the Spanish word for nausea. The artists of Asco, comprised of Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez, and joined by others who drifted in and out at various times, seem in retrospect to have been a roguish and critical voice within East Los Angeles to quash a Chicano civil rights demonstration; Carmen Lomas Garza made delicate, naivelike paintings of home life in rural southern Texas. But surely the utmost measure to define—perhaps even to invent—Chicano identity was the envisioning of a cultural patrimony in the civilization of Aztlán, a largely mythologized or imagined ancient homeland of modern-day Mexican Americans. Aztlán was conceptualized as the Mezo-American empire that extended from the centers of Aztec civilization into El Norte—the geographic territory that predated the Spanish conquest of Mexico and which now includes the Southwest United States. This larger cultural reservoir of Aztlán inspired many artists, such as Gilbert Sánchez Luján, Yolanda M. López, or Luis Jiménez, who drew upon Pre-Columbian iconography and folkloric characters—Colima dancing dogs, Coyote the Trickster, and so on—to create a funky vernacular historicism in portraying familiar sights of East Los Angeles, San Francisco, or West Texas. Their art implied a continuum and direct connection between denizens of the contemporary barrio and a grand—and grandly romanticized—ancient civilization. It may be asked, however, whether Aztlán was experienced by its many tribal societies as a coherent culture across a vast geographic expanse and through history, or if it is a latter-day invention, a conceit of political and cultural activists to impart a sense of legitimacy and lineage on the culture of modern Mexican Americans. If Chicanismo—a term that suggested a revolutionary message of political power— stressed a distinctive cultural identity and the reclamation of a suppressed and all-but-forgotten history, Aztlán gave palpable form and a geographic locus to a vague and ancient past, conferring a claim of material reality to a historicized rumor of a lost civilization not unlike the lost continent of Atlantis. Indeed, the shopworn but pointed protest of Chicano culture that "We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us" is an evocation, sometimes unwitting, of the place and the civilization that is imagined to be Aztlán. But the believers in romanticized Aztlán and radical Chicanismo are not severable from the culture and the society of the border that crossed them, and today Aztlán appears to have been absorbed, subsumed, consumed into a different history and civilization—different, but not separate. It is the

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