Fillip

Artmoreorless: The Early Performances of Asco
Jesi Khadivi

A black hole lies at the centre of a photograph. Looking like a gaping wound, brown water appears to trickle from its obscured bowels onto a pile of organic debris before gathering into a fetid pool littered with scraps of plastic and other detritus. Slouching elegantly with their hands in pockets, four figures surround the hole while staring blithely at the camera. Behind them a familiar landscape—of decaying, industrial infrastructure—provides the backdrop to nondescript, overlooked urban terrain.

Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Patssi Valdez, and Willie F. Herrón are the figures occupying this particular frame, individuals who came of age in what Arthur C. Danto describes as the “era of revulsion.”1 After meeting at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles during the late 1960s, they began working together under the name Asco—the Spanish word for nausea or disgust—to produce conceptual performances that unfolded between the street and the printed document.2 For the work described above, the aptly titled Asshole Mural (1975), the precise function and location of the hole in the photograph are unclear and less significant perhaps than Asco’s artistic and political responses to such elusive spaces, which eschew direct engagement with identity politics in favour of a politics and practice more difficult to parse, yet still involved with identity. Borrowing an expression from the artists themselves, performance scholar Amelia Jones has used the term “Artmoreorless” to describe the strategically slippery and multifaceted practice of this intermedia collective. Throughout their fifteen years of collective practice, Asco’s work both commented on their exclusion from regimes of representation and embraced a “space between,” which they carved out for themselves in actions, as in 1972 when Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón spray painted their signatures on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), effectively appropriating the structure as their own giant readymade in an unsanctioned gesture.3 Nearly forty years later, LACMA’s 2011 retrospective of this complex collective’s output, Elite of the Obscure (curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez), raised a number of questions about exhibiting performance-based and ephemeral works, as well as the institutionalization of DIY practices.

Like many DIY artist collectives operating adjacent to the circuits of object-oriented production and reception, Asco created works that were difficult to categorize according to the most commonly recognized mediums for art-making. While it can be argued that the sheer range of what they produced—which includes performances, slideshows, drawings, paintings, and ephemera—implies that Asco’s work cannot be discussed vis-à-vis medium-specific histories, I would like to argue that obscuring Asco’s contributions to the medium of performance in favour of exhibiting the multimedia breadth of their work, as the LACMA retrospective did, fails to capture the nuances in their variegated strategies toward performance and in the questions of representation that their work critically raises. Looking back on Asco’s early projects, one finds at least two distinct forms of performance: one that engages the body and the urban landscape of 1970s Los Angeles and another that engages the image and its networks of distribution. A third, less clearly defined typology combines the two, comprising both live performance and purposefully circulated documentation. Although a dominant discourse within performance art stresses the importance of a live encounter, Asco’s approach to conceptual performance complicates the primacy of liveness that this argument presumes.4 I will analyze the three typologies of Asco’s early performances to explore how the collective differently articulates political and social critique through live and media performance, respectively. Moreover, I will consider questions that arise from this analysis, such as “What kinds of challenges did Asco’s split focus on live and media performance pose for the curators of Elite of the Obscure?” and “How did the exhibition’s conceptual framework and methods of display respond to these challenges?”

Taking a multifaceted approach to performance, Asco staged interventions in meaningful sites, including contested urban spaces such as East LA’s main commercial thoroughfare—Whittier Boulevard (the site of a series of repressive crackdowns on Chicano youth in the wake of the Chicano Moratorium Riot in 1970)—as well as in performance spaces specifically designed for the camera.5 In some cases, Asco distributed documentation of their carefully orchestrated scenarios via mail-art circuits, while other performances took the form of unsolicited media interventions. Asco’s activities in the margins were perhaps a function of both exile and activism, and the collective used the exclusion of Chicano artists from mainstream exhibition venues in Los Angeles to their advantage. Its members chose to create interventions within their own neighbourhoods instead of seeking institutional validation, enacting a physical and conceptual space for the direct engagement of localized social concerns such as police brutality, drugs, gang violence, and discrimi­natory urban planning practices. To this end, the collective deployed the power of printed matter, conversation, and rumour, circulating their genre-bending brand of performance art through mail art and popular media channels alike.

The Chicano Body and the City

The body plays a specific and central role for Asco in agitating the urban landscape of Los Angeles. Unlike body artists such as Chris Burden and Carolee Schneemann who use their bodies to consistently refer to the endurance, vulnerability, and limitations of the corporeal form, Asco brought the body into play as a means for drawing attention to space, and vice versa. In other words, Asco’s members interested themselves less in the body as a sensuous physical form and more in the social relations that a body’s presence could elicit. In their early performances, the group would stage disruptions in busy urban areas dressed in elaborate costumes that combined the aesthetics of glitter rock with bastardized versions of Chicano symbols and religious iconography. For Stations of the Cross (1971), the collective’s first public performance, Asco hijacked the format of a traditional Mexican Las Posadas processional to enact a protest against the Vietnam War. On December 24, the last day of the nine-day Las Posadas celebration, Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón paraded down Whittier Boulevard in white face paint, resembling demented biblical figures, lugging a fifteen-foot cross crudely fashioned out of cardboard and craft paint behind them.6 The trio amassed a crowd of onlookers who followed the artists’ processional down East LA’s main shopping artery toward their final destination: an army recruiting office. There, the collective conducted a five-minute silent vigil to protest the high Chicano death rate in Vietnam. After a moment of silence, Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón blocked the door with the crucifix and then ran away. Their outlandish costumes and disruptive street tactics in Stations of the Cross appear comical, but, in fact, the intervention responded seriously to an increasing urgency surrounding the effects of the Vietnam War on Chicano communities in Los Angeles and the escalating circumscription of free speech and movement in East Los Angeles during that time. Writing about this period in an article commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, collective member Gamboa recalled how East L.A. was placed under excessive police control during the next few years in a manner that closely resembled a military occupation. Chicano youths were routinely rounded up, harassed, beaten and arrested, without regard to their constitutional rights. I had firm beliefs regarding my activist role as an American citizen who sought change from my cultural perspective. Being shot at by numerous riot police strengthened my sense of purpose.7

What might Gamboa mean by saying he sought change from his cultural perspective? Furthermore, how did this desire for change shape Asco’s street performances? Jones writes, “one of the tenets of body art, especially situated within an activist practice, is the enacting and the asserting of the self within the social.”8 By inserting their bodies within the fragmented and segregated urban fabric of Los Angeles, Asco’s members deployed activist-artistic strategies in their early works, usually performing in highly charged and symbolic areas within their own neighbourhoods, ranging from gang zones to seemingly innocuous non-sites such as a traffic island at Arizona and Whittier boulevards, where a particularly brutal clash during the LA Riots in 1970 occurred.9 In an era of almost militaristic standoff between police and Chicano youth, Asco opened a space for dissent that directed itself not only towards the war in Vietnam and the divisive zoning that cut East LA off from the rest of the city via a nexus of freeways, but also towards the iconography of Chicano art, especially muralism. In saying that he sought change from his cultural perspective, Gamboa seems to speak not only from the position of a young Chicano targeted by police violence, but also through Asco’s critical methodology of “making strange” (i.e., taking spaces, forms, and practices familiar to Chicano communities and making them unsettling). Gamboa and Asco’s other members thus articulate and seek visibility for an expanded notion of “Chicanoness,” one that doesn’t conform to prevailing models of Chicano identity.

Asco’s relationship to the systems of production, display, and reception of contemporary art and accepted artistic strategies within the Chicano art community, largely dominated by the essentialist and nationalistic narratives of muralism, is one of disidentification. According to José Esteban Muñoz, disidentification scrambles and reconstructs an encoded text in a fashion that both exposes the message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recruits its workings to account for, include, and empower “minority” identities and identifications.10 Gronk and Herrón had already independently established themselves as muralists before working together as Asco. However, the ephemeral nature of the group’s artistic production, coupled with their interest in creating self-reflexive spaces to interrogate and pluralize the notion of Chicano identity, prompted them to collectively explore a conceptual approach to muralism that worked against the universal, rooted identity (and identification) promoted in many Chicano murals. Instead, they worked to posit a new framework for muralism that was dynamic, flexible, and performative. By combining elements of street theatre and Mexican processionals, Asco’s earliest performances riff on Chicano mural iconography, positing a mash-up of religious and mythical references. Unlike most of the murals found in East LA, Asco’s “dynamic” murals used actual bodies dressed in varying forms of queer and punk drag, thus physically inscribing a social space in which to challenge static notions of Chicano-ness.

Public Relations

As their work combining muralism and street theatre indicates, Asco’s early performances explore notions of identity formation and its representation, deliberately complicating familiar signs and symbols within their cultural milieu to articulate alternative visions and revisions of the Chicano self. As their practice matured and their work gained increasing layers of complexity, Asco expanded their focus on symbols of Chicano experiences in Los Angeles to include thinking about how these symbols circulate in culture more broadly. While Asco documented the bulk of their performances, the dissemination of performance documentation did not become a vital ideational component of Asco’s artwork until around 1974. Around this time, Asco began to work on what they called No Movies—a self-created medium featuring “film stills” from non-existent movies that the collective scripted, staged, and then photographed with the intention of circulating via mail art and media networks. By purposefully disseminating documentation of their performances, Asco expanded their audience and began shifting their collective energy away from creating urban disruptions to intervening in the world of images. While later works in this genre interrupt the homogeneity of 1970s Hollywood with fictitious Chicano stars embodying and promoting their own form of glamour, works like Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) and Instant Mural (1974) formed a bridge between Asco’s nascent activist work in the public realm and their later, more ambiguously political engagement of the image. The notion of place and context is of particular importance in early No Movies, often reflecting real-life concerns affecting the community or directly engaging Chicano cultural heritage. Works like Decoy Gang War Victim address cycles of violence and their representation in Asco’s East LA neighbourhoods, while the performances-turned-No-Movies Instant Mural and First Supper (After a Major Riot) (1974) took place in sites of bloody conflict between Chicano anti–Vietnam War protesters and the Los Angeles Police Department.

For Decoy Gang War Victim, Gamboa photographed Gronk lying in the middle of the road covered in ketchup and flanked by two flares. As a hit-and-run performance most likely seen by only a few people, Decoy Gang War Victim can be read as a sort of vigil for those engaged in gang violence or victims of violence in general. In a conversation with curator Phillip Brookman, Gamboa recalls: “We would go around and whenever we heard of where there might be potential violence, we would set up the decoys so they would think someone had already been killed.”11 Through creating a decoy, Asco foreground the centrality of violence both gang related and police generated. After the performance, the collective sent a photograph to a number of news outlets, claiming that the depicted figure died in a gang fight. The grainy, yet nonetheless dramatic, image shows Gronk lying alone in the middle of a dark street, except for three or four figures lurking in the deep background of the image. KHJ-TV subsequently used the photograph to support a news segment on “endemic violence” in Chicano communities.12 Part performance, part activism, part media hoax, Decoy Gang War Victim illustrates the hybridity of Asco’s artistic and political engagement during this period. Not only does the project concern itself with how Chicano images circulate in popular media, positing a dramatic image of a “corpse” in the street, but through the work Asco sought to make an impact on life in the barrio by jamming circuits of rumour that fuel gang retaliation, and in doing so, put themselves at risk. Gamboa, in a roundtable discussion on LA art published in Artforum, explained how the project was a response to the incendiary tabloid-style journalism of the two major Los Angeles newspapers, which often listed the names, addresses, workplaces, and gang affiliations of victims or their family members in an effort to maintain high levels of reciprocal gang violence, thus selling more newspapers. The desired effect of Decoy Gang War Victim was to generate a pause in the violence in order to rob the newspapers of their daily list of victims.13 By presenting Gronk’s body as an absurd, ketchup-covered effigy, Asco’s members very well may have deterred further violence and given actual victims of gang violence and their families a temporary reprieve from media scrutiny. Yet how can we understand the significance of this hybrid gesture? And, does it gain power through its hybridity? Not quite a media hoax, nor strictly a performance, Decoy Gang War Victim illustrates Asco’s adoption of indeterminacy as a guiding principle. By creating a work that resists easy categorization and calls into question the very movement of an image through media networks as a foundational concept, Decoy Gang War Victim creates the conditions of its own visibility, establishing a network for the display of the work beyond the confines of the gallery and museum. Around the same time that Asco were working in Los Angeles, curator Seth Siegelaub reached similar conclusions about the power of circulating images and utilizing networks beyond the static exhibition space to promote and distribute artworks that did not fit neatly within its institutional boundaries.14 In Asco’s case, the expanded context for the presentation of artworks had as much to do with imagining alternative systems of representation as it did with finding novel forms of display that accommodated forms not especially well suited to presentation in a white cube space. In other words, Asco developed this system out of contingency and necessity.

Hollywood cinema had certainly locked out Chicano actors and actresses in the mid ’70s when Asco began their No Movies works. As Rita Gonzalez, co-curator of Elite of the Obscure, writes: Asco lived in the shadow of Hollywood, feeding off of its productions but also striving to create a counter-vision out of their own lived realities. Asco’s invention of No Movies, or film stills for non-existent films, allowed the group to appropriate the spectacle of Hollywood even as they critiqued the absence of Chicanos in the mass media.15

Unlike Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills, an ongoing photographic project roughly contemporary with Asco’s No Movies, Asco made no attempt to allude to stereotypical scenes that viewers could have seen in other contexts. In Asco’s case, Chicano representation in mainstream American cinema simply did not exist. The No Movies genre was thus an attempt to articulate and approximate what Chicano cinema could look like: a fusion of glam and gore as inspired by fotonovelas (comic books) as the Hollywood star system that excluded Chicano people. From its beginnings as a supplement to the politically tinged performances described earlier in this essay, which were circulated through correspondence art circuits, No Movies developed into an elaborate system that included faux publicity materials and an award ceremony. Through this system, Asco articulated a concept of representation that reached beyond the image to implicate its systems of distribution, promotion, and reception. By creating an award ceremony and an intricate, albeit satirical, administrative apparatus to accompany the visual components of the No Movies genre, Asco sought to construct a new system that not only represented but also promoted and rewarded them.

Archive of the Obscure

Asco’s ethos of Artmoreorless—a way of working and being at the interstices of art, politics, and propaganda—fulfills Gregory Sholette’s description of DIY, improvisational practices and institutions as forms of dark matter. As in astrophysics, dark matter in the arts operates in the shadows, while its activities are essential to the perpetuation of the universe of art. Sholette presciently challenges historians of this “dark matter” to consider how best to work with this material. “Where are the historians of darkness?” Sholette asks. “What tools will they require beyond a mere description of these shadows and dark practices and towards the construction of a counter-public sphere?”16 In other words, how can we move beyond simply showing and describing these artistic practices towards creating a dynamic form of display that accommodates and amplifies their implicit tensions and ambiguities? Operating on the fringes of—and sometimes in direct opposition to—the densely networked power and taste-making structures of both contemporary art and the expanded social field, dark materials coalesce into their own ecosystems that imagine alternative systems while remaining tethered, however obliquely, to the systems they help perpetuate. All of Asco’s performances provide glimpses of dark matter, yet nowhere in their work does this shadowy material coalesce into a coherent system as fully as in the No Movies genre. Indeed the presentation of the range and depth of these works was one of the strongest aspects of the collective’s September 2011 exhibition at LACMA. The curators placed the No Movies works, dating from the mid to late ’70s, in their own room and arranged photographs, slide shows, magazines, and publicity materials in separate displays that allowed the viewer to imagine the various permutations that this genre has taken. However, the visceral and aesthetic impact of other performance works represented in the exhibition diminishes when presented alongside a plethora of archival materials. As an archive, Elite of the Obscure does an admirable job of documenting fifteen years of collective production, treating each element of the group’s production with equal weight and rigour.

Elite of the Obscure encompassed most of the collective’s canonical works, along with nearly a hundred and fifty collectively and individually authored objects including paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as performance documentation and props. Many of the works for the meticulously researched exhibition had never been seen before and the works on view included a number of lesser-known works, as well as pieces authored by peripheral collaborators and later members. The exhibition provided a remarkably clear view into the frenetic production of the collective and the grassroots ebb and flow of its ranks. In terms of presentation, the exhibition presented a roughly chronological order, with some sets of photographs and objects isolated in subcategories to elucidate certain creative relationships and influences outside of the core collective members that influenced Asco’s production.

Although the exhibition provided a sensitive, in-depth view of the collective’s ad hoc production it failed to consistently illuminate distinctive and innovative aspects of Asco’s performances. The three models of performance I describe unfolded within specific historical periods, with some overlap and ambiguity among them, but the distinctions among these apparently divergent styles begin to erode when placed within a chronological grouping that elides specific sets of concerns. Gonzalez and Chavoya collapsed three distinct typologies of performance—one that relates the body to the urban landscape, another that explores the relationship between images and their circulation, and a third that combines the two. Elevating the group’s history over a focus on the aesthetic and political relationships between their works obscured the development of the group’s signature No Movies genre. As a catchall phrase for fake film stills, the term also applies to transitional performances such as Instant Mural and Decoy Gang War Victim—something that was not brought to light in the exhibition’s didactic texts, nor through the presentation of photo documentation within the show. The exhibition’s comprehensiveness worked against it at times and ran the risk of negating some of the collective’s most sophisticated, medium-specific innovation. Iconic works like Malibu (1975), Asshole Mural (1975), Walking Mural (1972), Spray Paint LACMA (1972), and Seymour Rosen’s documentation of Stations of the Cross (1971) disappear among drawings, Polaroid scrapbook pages, and issues of Regeneracíon.17

What Asco’s former members describe as their “hit-and-run aesthetic” testifies not only to the collective’s boundless production and creative energy, but also to some of the challenges inherent in displaying their work beyond the different models of performance that they engage. Asco’s work is fuelled by an ethos of making-do, working with whatever materials are at hand, including whichever collaborators are available. However, the exhibition’s chronological focus and dense interweaving of wildly divergent materials precludes a thoughtful exploration and consideration of Asco’s primary medium: conceptual performance. Can a traditional retrospective approach withstand the pressure that DIY practices like collective authorship, rampant productivity, and vast amounts of intermedia material place on the exhibition format? For that matter, can Asco’s intermittently formal and informal production withstand the pressure of a retrospective? Would showcasing a more limited set of practices and concerns develop deeper relationships between an audience unfamiliar with Asco’s work and their projects? Or conversely, does focusing on the group’s strengths and core members’ contributions advance an incomplete and dishonest account of the collective’s history, obscuring the dark material that propels the group’s artistic production?

Elite of the Obscure went to great lengths to contextualize aspects of the collective’s artistic production within the city of Los Angeles and the broader realm of Chicano art and politics via wall text and an extensive catalogue. However, the exhibition failed to frame Asco’s work in relation to national or international dialogues within the arts and did little to underscore how Asco approached performance in innovative or groundbreaking ways. While the retrospective’s curators attempted to address the marginalization of Asco’s practice historically, their didactic framing of the exhibition continued to peripheralize through blunt-force. The wealth of material on view left behind matter more obscured than revealed.