art official histories

8/14/2019 Art Official Histories

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Art Official HistoriesChon A. Noriega

Ofevery hue and cast am I, orevery rank and religion,. . I resist any thing better than my own diversity.-Wal t Whitman, Song of Myself

I've been looking for Chicano art, no t just in the museum,though that is hard enough, bu t in the history book. Not surprisingly, neither considers Chicano, Puerto Rican, CubanAmerican, an d other Latino works of ar t part of "American"ar t o ro f the U.S. national culture. The major American museums and galleries have resisted the n ~ s s a r y shift towarda curatorial agenda that embraces the diverse cu ltu ral andartist ic practices within the United States. l Consequently.Latino artis ts are excluded from "American- exhibitions, orincluded a t a n affirmative level, without a significant reorientation o fa r t history's central concepts an d aesthetic criteria.An even more troubling trend has been the brokering of Latinoartists into U.S. museums bywayof exhibitions of Latin American art. Whatcould be provocative explorations ofpan-nationalaesthetics, of Our America, become another form of the denial of citizenship.Latino cultural expressions have been, for the most par t ,constituted as the other side of the "critical distance- ofmodem or postmodem belonging. Latino artists are seen as too"sincere-; and, as such, critics assume there is no mediationor attention to the signifier in their cultural expressions. Butsincerity is no simple matter, s ince , like i rony, it i s assertedin mUltiple contexts; both are hybrid discourses. Tellingly, JoseMarti's last book of poetry, Versos Sencillos (Simple verses,

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1891). written at the same time as his essay Our America;begins with the famous line. "Yo soy un hombre sincero- (Iam a sincere man). But the simplicity and sincerity of thesepoems are misleading if taken at face value. Thus, when Marti,e! hombre sincero. proclaims "Our America: irony becomesan article of faith-as Tomas Ybarra-Frausto has noted aboutLatino art-rather than a calculated, distanced, intellectualpose. 2 More Quixotic than Brechtian, Marti engages in a futuretense performative discourse. in which a pan-national"AmencanM identity is sincerely proposed against an ironic awarenessof present-day realities. Such a "differential identity" constitutes itself as the negotiation between two sets of contextsthe present and the future; the national and the pan-national.

Two observations are important to stress about such a differential identity. lestwe slip into theoretical abstraction. First,Latino ar t is a cultural. political. aesthetic. an d market phenomenon. For better or worse. it does exist. But. given the dif-ferent registers within which it i s produced, exhibited. spokenabout. and acquired. Latino ar t remains entirelydistinct fromother aesthetic categories. But neither exhibit ion history no rscholarship provides the basis for understanding "Latino" ar tas an aesthetics-in-process that has critical mass, intertextualassociations, internal complexity, and, above al l, a considerable range that overlaps with other types of art . So, rather thanalways starting with the premise of cultural or racial otherness (that is, positing Latino ar t as a genre equivalent to it sexclusion), Iwant to propose that we start with general questions about an ar t genre, where the consequent analysis willnot be so bound by ethnicity no r by denying cultural and social determinants. In even a cursory survey of Latino artists,for example. one can't help bu t be struck by the complex andcontradictory nature of their work, whether charted within anindividual career or across categories of aesthetics, ethnicity,and national origin. In fact, in some instances. it may not makesense to foreground ethnicity over genre. Unfortunately, suchsubtleties are lost on many in th e ar t world, where Chicanos,Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Latinos-despite their cultural differences from each other and aesthetic similarities withinstallation artists more generally-share a history of beingexcluded that is as persistent as it is unspoken. 3Second, Latino-identified artists often b re ak t he rul es o ftwo cultures, two traditions, without blurring the boundariesbetween them. Instead, their iconic overlays and hybrid forms2

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Ar t Official Histories

are always made with an eye toward the unequal power relations that exist between and within cultures. In this sense.their ar t reveals the need to sustain, not an essential truth oran underlying coherence, bu t contradictory images, shapes.languages, and frames of reference. The paradox ofmy essay.then, is that I have been making declarative and definitivestatements about what Latino artists do-aJl the while insist+ing that what t hey do i s undo declarative and defiqitive statements in order to r e ~ m a p social space by performing hybridity.

Thus, to expand upon my modest proposaJ, we might consider an ~ o t h e r " American art, not for what it says about itseU, bu t for th e way in which it allows us to reconsiderAmerican a rt a s a national project within the academy. ar tmarket, and public sphere. Rather than provide a supplementthat chronicles artists of color because they were excluded.and uses identity politics as the rationale for such a methodology. why not re-examine issues related to the avant-garde,postmodern art, ar t collecting. and governmental supportusing artists of color as the main examples?Such an attempt is more difficult than it first appears,since the discussion ofnon-white artists occurs within a highlypoliticized and circumscribed se t of parameters. In RobertHughes's recent PBS documentary series. American Visionsl1997j, for example, the ar t critic as born-again Westernerrelives the myth o f the frontier, ending with a belated andhighly coded acknowledgment of racial minorities.4 Rather thanconsider such ar ti st s , in fact, Hughes equates them with aquestion about "identity" that he answers by focusing on Barbara Kruger and Louise Bourgeois. Positioning these twowhitewomen as synecdochiaJ for all those who have been excluded.Hughes then offers the West itself as the proper anodyne forrace and identity politics. endinghis series with paeans to theSouthwestern landscape ar t of Susan Rothenberg and JamesTurrell, and then walking, quite literaJly. into the sunset.Hughes isnot a lone in his assessment ofcontemporaryAmerican art: it is the logical outcome of strongly held modernistprinciples that render vast sectors of the ar t world invisible.Ironically, the verywork excluded by the F r a n c o - G e r m a n ~American modernist triumvirate offer a compelling aJternativehistory that also explains their exclusion. Cesar Martinez's"Mona Lupe: The Epitome ofChicano Art," for example, invokesDuchamp's "Mona Lisa with a Mustache'" in order to insinuate himself-as Mona Lisa cum Virgin of Guadalupe-into the

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canon of Western a rt . O th er ar t i s t s - such as RaphaelMontanez Ortiz, Yoko Ono, Robert Colescott, Adrian Piper, an dthe East Los Angeles conceptual ar t group Asco-allow us tore-vision the "start" of postmodernism in the 1950s, an d retrace its development through various genres: recycled cinema, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, an dphotography. These artists fall t hough the cracks betweenmodernism and postmodernism, since their work does no t fiteasily within either Eurocentric modernism or i t s bete noire,identity politics. In effect, these artists are preciselywhat thecanon had to exclude in order to become the canon.At t he same time, however, Chicano ar t has acquired thestatus of a su i generis aesthetic category, one that is part andparcel of an ethnic social movement seeking both sodal equity an d cultural difference within the public sphere. I t is onlynatural that such work should not si t well with the museum,let alone within i t- in {act, it would seem to have been produced {or just such a confrontation. Two recent exhibitionsoffer some support for this stance: "Chicano Art: Resistancean d Affirmation" and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, dubbed th e"Multicultural Biennial" in the popular press.$ Critics shouldhave seen these exhibitions as resulting from a curatorialagenda articulated with in the inst i tu t iona l set t ing of th e ar tmuseum. In other words, critics should have asked why museums-seemingly antithetical to such political art-shouldsuddenly embrace it in the ear ly 1990s. Instead, they a t t r i b ~uted the curatorial agenda to the ar t itself, an d not to just th eworks in these exhibitions, bu t all "minority" art.

This was not just a neoconservative response. ConsiderHalFoster's comments in a roundtable o n t he 1993 Whitney Biennial held by the October editorial collective. He calls attention to a "pervasive [tendency] in contemporary ar t an dcriticism a like ; a certain turn away from questions of representation to iconographies of content; a certain tum f rom apolit ics of the s igni fier to a politics of th e signified."6 Havingjust got th e hang of the notion that all expression, all languageinvolves a play of signifiers, a continual deferral of the referen t - and that as goes language so goes both the unconsciousand socie ty-we ar e now informed that, in fact, some ar t isattentive to this process , while other ar t is not. Apparently,this "other" ar t goes against the nature of language itself. WhileFoster ra ises th is as an aesthet ic observation, he does s o a spart of an a cademi c g roup w it h deep t ie s t o the Whitney4

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Art Official Histories

Museum i tsel f, a group whose semiotic and psychoanalyticdefinition of th e "political" was seemingly ignored by the 1993biennial. So, it is not too difficult to see the roundtable as moreof an insider dialogue with other critics an d curators t han asan outside critique of the art ists in the biennial.? In addition,the few close readings undertaken during the roundtable ar ecurious for their selective formalism-that is, they engage onlyselect portions of a work, deeming the rest "irrelevant."8 St.i1I,there is an assumption at work here that Foster shares Withth e cu ra tor s and critics he takes to task (and even th eneoconservative critics both sides oppose). If we were to patchtogether a s tatement out of these different positions it wouldhave gone something like this:

The barbarians are at the gate with the ir mult icultural demand. We must tolerate their necessaryinclusion, but, at the same time, their work is dif-ferent-it is politicallycorrect, identity-oriented, and,as an aesthetic malter, merely illustrative. In someways, i t' s not really art as we have come to knowart [as an asi de, i t is here that everyone's Greenbergian premises peek through!, and, hence, it iswork that cannot sustain a close reading.

In such a milieu, th e lines were drawn bctwccn the ethnic artistan d everyone else in the ar t world, even as a civil libertarianoverlay held everything together in a strategic coalition againstthe forces of censorship and reduced federal funding.As you can see, it is difficult for me to talk about censorship in t he usua l sense. Whereas others might be. righteous,an d rightfully so, I f ind myself ambivalent, wantmg to takemore into a ccount . O th er t hi ng s a re going o n b eh in d th escenes, things for which the language of " c e n s o r s h i ~ ~ e r s . u sfree e x p r e s s i o n ~ is inadequate. Think of how the t e ! e v l s ~ o n I.n-dustry protec ts i ts t igh t con trol of a medium from mmontydemands for access by invoking the rights of both free speechan d the free market. Needless to say, I f ind it hard to getworked up into a f renzy to support th e "free speech" of a television network or film studio. And I imagine some groups mustfeel the same way about cultural institutions from which theyremain excluded.

It is with this in mind that I turn to t he mos t r ad icalChic


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tural elite. Lomas Garza. produces gouache paintings calledmonilas that provide an alternative chronicle of communalCamilial, historical, and cultural practices as refracted throughpersonal memory. Her monitos respond to the institutionalhistories ofTexas-of the Alamo and Texas Rangers-but notat the level ofdocumenting racial oppression and violence orpolitical resistance. Instead they tell of traditional custo:ns,communal events, local Colk heroes. Given the folkloric or naive elements of the monitos, it is crucial to note he r anisticintention and choice over the past twenty years. In otherwords, he r ongoing commitment to a singular form and areaof content must be seen at each tum as an innovation in anaesthetic.domain where the one constant is continual change.The momtas a re the product of a compromiso or promise tor e ~ e m b e r for he r community, a project that is by no meansfimshed, and one whose pleasing and deceptively simple apf ' e a ~ a n c e bears the weight of more violent and exclusionaryinstitutional histories. Her retrospective, then, provides a striking instance of an ar t exhibition becoming the site of politicalstruggle at the municipal level. Organized by the LagunaGloriaArt Museum in Austin, Texas, in Fall 1991, ~ P e d a c i t o de micorezon (a little piece of my heart) traveled first to the EI PasoMuseum ofArt, where it was on display from December 14,199I,untilFebruary2,1992.'

The exhibition cameamid a national powershift in the roleo f t he museum and the Cunction o f a r t in civil society, oneaspect of which was publicly debated in terms oC"cultural diversity" versus ~ q u a l i t y . What was less repor ted was how thereSUlting changes-ofdemographics, of funding policies-impacted the internal structure of the art museum, such thatthe board of trustees, the museum director, and th e variouscuratorial departments came to have different, and often conflicting constituencies. And this is what happened in EI Paso.The year previous to Lomas Garza'sexhibit, Becky Duvall Reesehad been hired as the new museum director and given a mandate to bring about change for th e first t ime in twenty-fiveyears. The museum was 100 percent municipally funded andyet ~ a no t r e ~ p o n s i b l e to t ~ local community, especially theMCX1can-Amencan commumty that made up 70 percent of thelocal population. Instead, the museum reOected the city's cultural elite, which oversaw the museum via the EI Paso ArtMuseum A s ~ o c i a t i o n . Duvall Reese se t out t o open the museum to the general public, starting with an exhibition oCMexi-

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Art Official Histories

ca n colonial ar t in the permanent collection, Collowed in quicksuccession by three Chicano exhibitions: the Lomas Garzaretrospective; ~ C h i c a n o & Latino" organized by th e DanielSaxonGallery in Los Angeles; and the ~ C h i c a n o Art: Resistanceand A f f i n n a t i o n ~ exhibition. These exhibitions turned arounddeclining attendance, raising it from a low of 20 people a dayto 100 a day . w it h the Lomas Garza retrospective setting arecord attendance of6,500 people during its six-week run, andthe "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation exhibition at tracting 4,000 people to the opening-alone.The Lomas Garza retrospective, however, initiated an all-ou t public battle between the director and the association. Ina Cront-page newspaper story published in late JaJ1uary 1992,the president of the EI Paso Art Museum Association an nounced that he had taken a personal survey of the popularshow and found that no one liked it. ~ I ' v e asked people to ratethe exhibit from one to ten: he told the El Paso Herald-Post,"and didn't find a s ingle per son who rat ed i t above a one. Tome, i t's an e m b a r r a s s m e n t . ~ l o OfC the record, the associationcomplained about the ~ b r o w n ar tM and "brown faces that nowfilled the museum. Lomas Garza. responded to the press s t a t e ~ments by saying, "There is a strain of racism in that attitude,which is also a Conn ofcensorship. I'm not threatened by it. Ithink it's sad"llbid.j.Were it to end there, this storywould no t be that unusual,a sad-but-true tale of thwarted ideals and expressions. ButDuvall Reese and Lomas Garza went one step further. I f th eassociation could take the high road ofeternal values as heldby a cultural elite. they took the low TOad of political representation. They went to Freddy's Breakfast. That is where th etown leaders met in the mornings before session. Lomas Garzaworked the room, meeting with the mayor and council members, explaining her work, answering questions, and so on.To make a long story short, the city government moved to legally disenfranchise the association. That is, while the association continued to exist, it no longer governed the museum.Instead, the mayor and city council now appoint an advisoryboard, andthe museum director reports directly to the mayor.To look at this case strictly in tenns ofcensorship or even"reverse censorship: misses the point. It 's no t just a matterof discourse-that is, who gets to talk-but that discoursecorrelates to governance-that is, who gets tomake administrative decisions. In this light, then, we need to as k why re-

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cent anticensorship struggles in the arts have proceeded onthe assumption that expression and censorship a re the mirror image of each other, not just in a given case, but in allinstances. In other words. all would-be censors are alike andcan be lined up on one s ide of the border, while the ar t "community'" is all alike and can be lined up on the other s ide ofthe border. There is an epic and manicheaen quality to thisscenario-and i t is not without effectiveness in the strugglesfor control over exhibition spaces and federal funds. Butwhathappens is that any censorship case is read as metonymic ofthe natio.nal struggle between the forces of censorship and freeapression.The local and intra-institutional struggles-and thepossibility that they can point in a number of directions-islost to analysis, except to the extent that local events can serveas an allegory of the nation.What is interesting is that ar t supporters did not alwaysneed to seek recourse to the idea of free expression; in fact inthe 1960s-in, for example, the censorship struggles over JackSmith's Flaming Creatures-free expression was fought for inthe name of art , rather than vice versa. I I It was the rubric of"art" that provided protective cover for controversial works.Since the l at e 1980s , however . we have seen this argumentreversed: ar t ha s been fought for in the name of free express ion. Here. i t i s important to note that I am talking about thepublic debates taking place. In the courts, it was and is another matter, with "obscenity'" as the touchstone for free expression. More recently, we have seen another shift in theterms of public advocacy, with f r expression taking a backseat to economic rationales for the arts sector and its governmental support. The National Endowment for the Arts annualbudget is equivalent to the amount spent by the Pentagon infive hours, yet provides a needed stimulus to th e $3-billionnonprofit arts industry. an industry that employs 1.3 millionworkers and generates $5.4 billion in local, state, and federaltax revenues. Function determines existence. Framed in thisway, s uch an economic argument is congruent with that ofgroups against affirmative action and immigration. In all threeinstances, any notion ofa social function orofthe commonwealis replaced by the market. Indeed, when you start arguing forar t on the basis of i ts tax revenue, your appeal, while directedat the political representation system, essentially links aesthetics tocorporate liberalism. And this congruence, more thananything. explains why the arts establishment rejected the

Art Offtcial Histories

1993 public arts work, "Art Rebate, in which David Avalos,Elizabeth Sisco, and Louis Hock refunded $10 bil ls to 450undocumented workers along the border between San Diegoand Tijuana. An editorial in the New York Times made thistrade-off explicit, arguing that whereas Mapplethorpe was an"outrageous bu t legitimate artist, Avalos and company werea "small bunch of loonies who threatened to undermine liberal efforts to defend the r ight s o f r ea l artists like M a p p l e ~thorpe.11 What was unreal about this art- that is. what madeit "non-art"-was that it raised issues of racism and immigration in relationship to cultural capital at precisely that momen t when t he a rt world was subordinating its advocacy offree speech to the same economic rationale used for nativistand nationalist ends.Censorship efforts are notable for their refusal to read thework in question, and tha t was the case with "Art Rebate" aswell. Close readings constitute a form of dialogue (not alwaysan exalted form, mind you, but dialogue nonetheless) and censorship is about monologue. This monologuJ:-Can, however,take some twisted forms, as with the invocation of politicalcorrectness, wherein majority groups' silence minority groupson the bas is of their supposed hegemony. But for all its presumed power, political correctness cannot s top the assaultson women, racial minorities, and queers that it i s said to havemade taboo. If anything ha s changed, then, it is merely theprotocol for discrimination. which now requires a pro formadismissal of the "pc. thought police. a rhetorical strategy thatrecodes sexism or racism as free speech rather than as a violation of someone else's civil rights.And so the need for modest proposals . . . . The function ofar t in contemporary U.S. society ha s bee n o ne o f the focalpoints for public debate in the last decade. serving in manyways as the symbolic battleground for underlying questionsof community, citizenship. and identity. In short, ar t historymatters. Unfortunately, these complex i ssues are now oftendefmed by entrenched "us-versus-them" positions: quality versu s diversity. conservatives versus liberals, the artworld versu s the s ta te , the politics of the signifier versus the politics ofthe signified, and so on .As a result, "minority issues are notseen as an integral part of national categories and debates,but rather as an unsettling set of outside demands. In addressing issues of racial and cultural diversity, most criticism andscholarship focuses on what's at stake in an immediate sense:

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funding, censorship, protests, lawsuits. In th e process, however, th e exhibition spaces being fought over ar e assumed tobe homogeneous entities. Thus, debate unfolds without a cons id erat ion o f the wide range of exhibition spaces, in tendedaudiences, an d aesthetic orientations, o ro f th e curatorial process that traverses these social spaces from a number of shift.ing positions, such as generation, gender, geography, race andclass. Indeed, debate often unfolds as if i t were limited t o twosides-ours an d theirs-that remain constant despite th e shifting terrain ofAmerican politics.

I f I began t hi s e ss ay by looking for Chicano art , I havefound it mostly in assorted exhibition catalogues outside mains t ream venues an d academic scholarship. Earlier this year,however, Alicia Gaspar de Alba published an extended culturalstudy of th e ~ C h i c a n o Art: Resistance an d Affirmation" exhibition: Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master ' s HouseY Inlooking at th e above issues from th e perspective of th e curatorial choices made within aesthetic, exhibition, and fundingframeworks, Gaspar de Alba provides an interdisciplinaryexamination of th e relationship between cultural politics, a e s ~thetic concerns, an d policy-related i s sues. Here one ca n beginto see both the contradictions as well as the possibility for dialogue aboutm useums an d their audiences. Evenmore, Gasparde Alba provides one model with which to art icu la te the complex relationships between a "minority" a rt a nd larger socioaesthetic formations. More is a t stake than simply being seen.Indeed, without paying attention to context we lose an opportunity to see others an d to se e differently. Such an approachcan s et new terms for ar t history, ethnic studies, an d nationalpublic discourse in which ~ m i n o r i t y " and Umulticultural" ar esomething more than outside demands. Bu t there is, as Gasparde Alba suggests, no simple ~ a l t e r - N a t i v e " except the onedancing between outside an d inside. Herein lies th e paradox: It isnot enough to name oneself without a lso challenging th e ar tofficial histories that occasion such naming. Bu t who daress tep through that looking glass?

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Ar t Official Histories

NotesI want to thank Kathleen McHugh and Bryan Wolf for helping meround out and clarify some of the arguments presented here.

I. For a critical overview of Latino and Latin American exhibitions, see Mari Cannen Ramirez, "Beyond the 'Fantastic': FramingIdentity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art," Art Journal (Winter 1992): 60-68. Reprinted in Gerardo Mosquera, ed., Beyond theFantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism/rom wtin America {Cambridge,MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996),229-46.2. Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, in conversation with the author.

3. As a curator, 1have tried to take a g e n r e ~ b a s e d approach thatalso acknowledges and speaks against the priorexclusion ofChicanosor Latinos by focusing on a particular practic

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