Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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In 1972, four young Mexican-American artists sneaked up to the facade of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and spray-painted their names on it. With this act of desecration, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times, the collective known as Asco was protesting the exclusion of Chicano voices. The four also meant to claim “the art museum and everything in it, regardless of global origin, as their own cultural inheritance.” Almost four decades later, LACMA has welcomed Asco inside. This 120-work retrospective begins with works by those four artists, who forged an art scene “with an eye toward articulation of Mexican-American experience.” But most of the paintings, photographs, and sculptures on display here are of a more recent vintage. They suggest that, “a full generation later,” Chicano artists no longer define themselves solely by their ethnicity.
This “impressive show” is not the by-the-numbers display of identity politics you might expect, said Christopher Miles in the LA Weekly. Certainly there are works that reflect Mexican-American subject matter: Carolyn Castaño’s hyperactively decorative portraits, for instance, suggest an “ethnically flaired postpsychedelic disco cartoon telenovela.” But most of the artists here seem content to go their own way. Margarita Cabrera creates “sewn soft replicas of hard goods ranging from blenders to Hummers.” Ruben Ochoa has draped a freeway divider wall with an enormous digital photograph that made it seem to disappear. The curators occasionally attempt to force some common denominators onto the widely diverse works. But the exuberant and idiosyncratic creativity of these artists “trumps any grafted-on themes.” The end result suggests there may no longer be any such thing as a Chicano aesthetic—and that’s a good thing.
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