I just got back from the opening of Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement. I have other reviews on various burners (and I’m too goddamn busy to polish any of them - grrr), but I was really, really impressed by how LA the show is - That’s LA in crossed letter Dodger font. It’s anything but a “Chicano show”, and the first ones to (smartly) admit that are the curators. Two things greet the visitor upon immediate entry to the gallery, a short and well written curatorial statement that smoothly steps away from the racial orientation of the show, admitting that the post-Chicano subtitle to the exhibition is really just a starting off point, and the work of the artists group ASCO (active 1971-87), which really make me wish that Patassi Valdez would re-visit her fierce, early ’80s wardrobe, if only for the sake of performance, but which more importantly function as diving board for the potential viewer.
More than anything this show feels like a legitimization of much of what has been going on on LA galleries over the past decade or so. There are superstars in it like Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and up and comers like Shizu Saldamando (I really wish that some of her ballpoint drawings on fabric were included in the exhibition - I think they’re her most meaningful work, and there are examples of them in the catalog). There are a few artists in the show that who’s work I don’t think is particularly strong or relevant, but in a show with this many artists, that may be more a matter of taste than of talent. As the exhibition itself is crowded with work, seeing it in a crowd at an opening certainly isn’t the ideal viewing environment - it’s difficult to make connections between works.
Phantom Sightings is essential reading, and in its ordinariness (for gallery crawling Angelenos) a solid sit down meal of comfort food at an institution that seems to often have very little connection to the ground floor of the creative works that it celebrates.
Technorati Tags: LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Shizu Saldamando, art, contemporary art
April 12th, 2008 at
It’s interesting to me that you say that this anything but a “Chicano show” and that mention Shizu in the same review. Shizu’s artwork manifests the fluidity of identity, yet you conceit that a “Chicano show,” or Chicano identity for that matter, is supposed to resemble your conceptions. I’m sure you can see the fallacy in that. You make an interesting point when you claim the curators admit to this–I’m curious about the exact articulation of this sentiment.
April 30th, 2008 at
Here’s a photo of the brief curatorial statement that’s at the head of the show.
It’s my interpretation that the action curating a show like this comes very close to ghettoizing a broad scope of largely unrelated artists into the “Chicano” field. I think that the curators, in admitting that the “Chicano grouping” is a curatorial artifact are facing the reality that we have moved past the time when that term was really politically, and even ethnically coherent. What we’re dealing with isn’t a Chicano show - it’s a post-Chicano show, and therefore a non-Chicano show.
Considering Shizu’s work, I think the identity that she’s really dealing with is an Angeleno one, and not a Chicano one. As someone who could easily shoehorn himself into a “sort of Chicano” identity politics, I find Shizu’s work to be thoughtfully free of the kind of auto-stereotyping that has unfortunately come to define much of the work of the early “Chicano artists”. I wouldn’t consider Shizu to fall within the traditional definition of Chicano, any more than I myself do.
I don’t think that a Chicano identity has to resemble my conceptions, but I do have a personal perception and an experience of Chicano identity. I don’t see Chicano identity as particularly fluid, I see the idea of Chicano identity as somewhat exclusive, even defensively/offensively used to draw a line in the sand between Mexican-Americans and Americans with ancestors in Central and South America.
May 30th, 2008 at
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