Fleeting Inscriptions: Asco, Ephemera, and Intergroup Exchange in LA
Scholar and curator C. Ondine Chavoya takes up the notion of “the collective,” in relation to the LA-based group Asco. Though Asco’s members performed and collaborated together, they have staunchly rejected the “collective” label, and with it, the implication of a cohesive artistic ideology and practice. Through an examination of archival ephemera and first-hand accounts by Asco artists, Chavoya reconsiders the group’s identity through their own self-identification and through exchanges with Los Four, another seminal Chicanx collective of the period. This significant new scholarly project considers Asco with an eye to its fluid and heterogeneous organization, thus reframing prevailing art historical discourse.
C. Ondine Chavoya, “Fleeting Inscriptions: Asco, Ephemera, and Intergroup Exchange in LA,” in Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s, eds. Gwyneth Shanks and Allie Tepper, Vol. III of the Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020). https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/side-by-side/artists-groups-in-los-angeles-asco-and-los-four
There is a striking absence of Chicanx and Latinx artists in art history and museum collections.1 Asco: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972–1987, the 2011 exhibition that I co-organized with curator Rita Gonzalez, was a response and a corrective to this legacy of rampant institutional exclusion.2 One purpose of the exhibition was to address a history that, as scholar and curator Chon A. Noriega has argued, “is fragile, ephemeral, and—in terms of the archive—largely neglected.”3 Asco: Elite of the Obscure was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the very museum that members of the then nascent performance and conceptual art group Asco defaced by signing their names in spray paint on the museum’s exterior walls nearly forty years earlier. After Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, and Willie Herrón III made their marks on LACMA’s building, Gamboa returned with Patssi Valdez, the fourth founding member of Asco, who posed in the early dawn light for the now iconic photograph, Spray Paint LACMA (1972). Through this simple yet daring act, Asco claimed the building, and indeed, the entire institution, as an enormous conceptual artwork and “the world’s largest work of Chicano art.”4 Spray Paint LACMA allegorized the exclusion of Chicana and Chicano artists through institutional critique.5
Asco was wildly interdisciplinary and experimental with a deeply sardonic attitude and a confrontational edge. Notably, they were also all very young (just out of high school) when they first started working together. The artists adopted the name Asco—Spanish for nausea—as a way to signal and channel their disgust with many of the social conditions and injustices—including racial discrimination, inferior public education, police brutality, economic inequity, mass media stereotypes, and the war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia—that affected people of color and young people in the US. Working together, they “developed a set of strategies based on the youth culture of East Los Angeles,”6 merging this with forms of protest that they learned while participating in anti-war efforts and Chicano student organizing and activism. Beginning in the early 1970s, Asco initiated impromptu public performances that creatively engaged forms of protest, experimenting with tactics of procession and occupation as in their Walking Mural (1972), First Supper (After a Major Riot) (1974), Instant Mural (1974), and Asshole Mural (1974). With a shifting roster of artists working into the late-1980s, Asco persistently moved between media, creating performances, public interventions, Super 8 films, video, mail art, fotonovelas, image-text works, theater, and other genres. In the process, the group developed novel methods, including the No Movie, an intermedia form in which “performances were created for the still camera to communicate concepts in a filmic sense.”7 Asco’s No Movies and performances often took the form of “camp spectacles and sly conceptual works,”8 and “like much of Asco’s body of work, depict[ed] unrelenting violence, cruelty, and absurdity, as well as Hollywood glamour, punk defiance, and cosmic irony.”9 Asco’s early work has been characterized as “conceptually political.” Its themes were often political and violent, or politically violent, or about violence against those who were political.10 And while this body of work has been branded as agitprop by some critics, it was inherently much more ambiguous, designed to be difficult to define and pin down.
Although often described as a collective, the artists who founded Asco did not identify or describe themselves as such. In his catalogue essay for the foundational exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (1990–93), Harry Gamboa Jr. trenchantly declared, “The cohesiveness of the art group as collective was never fully realized by the individual members of Asco.”11 Yet it remains a fairly common and persistent practice in the growing body of literature on the group to describe—or misidentify—Asco as a collective.12 Nowhere in the exhibition catalogue, wall texts, or promotional materials for Asco: Elite of the Obscure, however, did Gonzalez or I refer to Asco as a collective. We both considered the term too rigid, fearing it would give the impression that the artists and collaborators cohered under a single interest. We were also concerned that the term collective was too over-determined by the arc of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, especially Dadaism, Futurism, and Russian Constructivism.13
Instead, we carefully used terms such as “collaborative artists’ group” and “artists’ group,” or described Asco as part of a constellation of artist networks, attending to the ways in which artists involved in Asco self-identified and communicated their methods and forms of collaboration. For their part, in 1982 they declared, “Asco is a group of independent artists,” a decidedly different self-definition from the term collective.14 In our introductory catalogue essay for the retrospective, we outlined how Asco came together in the early 1970s as a “tight knit group of artists” through multiple spheres and activities, including muralism, performance, activism, the social networks of Jetter youth culture they were involved with in East LA,15 and by working together on artwork for the journal Regeneracíon.16 We underscored, however, that Asco was an elastic framework, constantly contracting and expanding, always fluid and permeable, serving as a platform for collaboration and experimentation rather than a static entity.17 Highlighting Asco’s “form of flexible and productive strategies for collaboration,” as well as their overall “precarious and sometimes wayward collaborative venture,”18 we recognized that “Asco was never a synchronized body.”19 Asco’s methods of collaboration were not precisely defined, demarcated, or synchronized as the artists regularly indicated over time and as I detail in this essay; perhaps that is the point. It is worth considering that, like their No Movies, Asco repeatedly defined or conceived of themselves in the negative, thinking and speaking in terms of what they were not. In this way, the “symbolic force of this language of rejection and refusal” became a site of creativity, enabling Asco to imagine and develop new artistic forms, new modes of collaboration, and “new definitions and conjunctions for meaning through negation.”20 This approach was not taken up as a form of nihilist dismissal but as a means to explore possibilities outside of fixed or set options, aesthetically and organizationally, especially during times when the social and political context set increasingly prescriptive roles for Chicana/o artists and artists’ groups.
It is necessary to recognize, however, as Carlos Francisco Jackson has noted, that artistic “collectives have been prominent in many national and international artistic movements” and “were especially important in developing the Chicano Art Movement.”21 With this in mind, Gonzalez and I also saw Asco operating in counter-distinction to other Chicano art groups of the time, such as Los Four, a group that “became emblematic, to a certain degree, of what Chicano art was supposed to be and look like.”22 Institutional recognition for Los Four came early with a group show at LACMA in 1974. For Asco, in contrast, such recognition came much later. This disparity is partly due to how Asco operated as a group: often in a less formalized way and with less interest in developing an identifiable collective aesthetic, especially during this early period. The lag in institutional recognition can also be tied to their use of ephemeral artistic forms—forms which were not easily presented or contained within the institution at the time. “Indeed, the art and activism of Asco,” asserted art historian Nizan Shaked in 2008, “had gone widely overlooked for decades until their noteworthy contribution began to be acknowledged and understood to its full capacity.”23 In what follows, I explore different orientations to collaboration and collectivism pursued by Asco and Los Four. While these two groups are often positioned in opposition to one another in the chronicles of Los Angeles art and Latinx art history, here I aim to document how artists associated with both groups interacted and exhibited together in the early to mid-1970s and to turn our attention to often overlooked pieces of ephemera that signal moments of exchange and recognition.24
The invitation to consider the notion of the collective in relation to Asco has provided an opportunity to reconsider questions of self-definition, group organization, and intergroup exchange.25 When asked about precisely these issues in 2019, Harry Gamboa Jr. emphatically stressed, “we were never a collective group,” adding, “the term was imposed by institutions and scholars.”26 When asked about his resistance to the term collective, Gamboa described how one of Asco’s aims was to “rethink the Chicano Movement” and to reconsider the role of collectivism in the political activism of the Movement and the artists’ involvement in it. The Chicano Civil Rights Movement—of which Gamboa was a student leader—promoted particular forms of collectivism in its efforts to protect and recover rights and to promote cultural reclamation and self-determination.27 “Even with the ongoing drive to collaborate and to promote people,” Gamboa stated in our recent conversation, “[I] would not be subsumed by collectivism” again.
When discussing Asco’s modes of collaboration, Gamboa noted, “We were well aware of each other’s talents and often competed with one another.” There was an “agreement to perform together,” but, according to Gamboa, it was “always for specific credit … and never with the notion of a collective.”28 In fact, the phrase “never a collective” was reiterated multiple times during our conversation. Two decades before this conversation with Gamboa about collectives, collaboration, and artists’ groups, MOCA curators Julia Brown and Jacqueline Crist asked Herrón: “How did Asco work?” Herrón responded: “It was pretty much collaborative all the time; everyone has ideas and in some way or another the ideas were used. The productions became larger and started to involve more people, although there were still many things being done individually.”29 In 1981, art historian Shifra Goldman asked Patssi Valdez about the origins of Asco: “At what point, did you think of yourselves as a group?” “We never discussed it,” Valdez replied. “We just did things.”30 That same year, Gronk described Asco’s methods in a particularly unique way, claiming that their form of collaboration involved “using each other as our own media.”31
Asco’s organizational matrix is perhaps more easily compared to that of a rock band than to that of an art collective. This idea was noted by Goldman in the 1980s and advanced by some of the artists as well. Gronk often frames the origins of the group by describing how the artists entered a garage to collaborate on the magazine Regeneracíon—but instead of emerging as a garage band like many from their generation, they emerged as an artists’ group.32 Into the 1980s, participants such as Sean Carrillo would describe the form of collaboration as “the ASCO school of art,” especially as Asco began to engage more individuals for larger, ensemble-style stage performances, programs, and events.33
The first official appearances of the name Asco were linked to specific group exhibitions. The first of these, Da me Asco, was held at the Student Union Gallery on the campus of California State University Long Beach in 1973. In 1974, an eponymous exhibition simply titled Asco was organized at Self Help Graphics and Art in East Los Angeles. However, when the artists speak about the history and development of the group, and the meanings and resonances of the term Asco, they usually begin their narratives at a moment in time that precedes these specific exhibitions.34 In Goldman’s 1980 interview with the founding four Asco artists, Herrón becomes slightly exasperated with the interviewer’s line of inquiry, interjecting, “It was Asco, but we weren’t called Asco.”35 In her interviews, Goldman is very particular about establishing chronologies, and, in this group interview, she was clearly having trouble understanding the nonlinear timeline of Asco’s development. Likewise, in a solo interview between Goldman and Valdez the same year, the artist was compelled to explain, “It was a group but we didn’t have a name for ourselves. But it was a definite thing,” when describing collaborative projects that occurred before the group officially adopted its name.36
The potential for confusion in Asco’s history and organization lies partially in the widespread deployment of the terms “collective” and “artists’ group” as interchangeable and synonymous classifications. This happens more frequently in English-language writing. In Latin America, and Mexico in particular, there is a subtler, if implied, designation between the two terms. The number of artists’ groups that emerged in Mexico City in the 1970s–early ’80s are “collectively referred to as los Grupos,”37 while the term colectivos is often used in reference to the rise of muralism in the earlier part of the twentieth century.38
The extensive exhibition, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, consolidated significant efforts to historicize the Chicano Art Movement as a national movement in the United States. A section of the exhibition was devoted to three artists’ groups: Asco, Los Four, and the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF).39 In the catalogue, the terms grupo and grupos were generally privileged over the term collective. Indeed, grupo is a word specified and defined in the multi-page glossary provided in the catalogue. Yet even as the catalogue relies on the term group or grupo, its glossary definition simultaneously—and slightly contradictorily—uses collective as a synonym for grupo. The definition provided for grupos reads:
Artists’ groups or collectives that were organized throughout the country during the time of the Chicano art movement. Grupos were often affiliated with specific community art centers (centros), and their cooperative efforts ranged from producing collective works of art to showing individually produced art in exhibitions devoted to their grupo or to Chicano art generally. They often wrote manifestos and position papers outlining their shared philosophies and goals within the framework of the Chicano civil rights movement.40
In describing the relationship between artists’ groups and the development of the Chicano Art Movement in the same catalogue, curator Philip Brookman recounts that “Chicano artists have often come together in structured groups to achieve their goals.” As Brookman develops his analysis, he marks a distinction between “structured groups” and “collectives.” At the very least, Brookman is careful not to collapse the two terms, saying, “These groups are multifaceted, fluid organizations—sometimes formed as collectives—that seek to empower the development of the alternative structures deemed necessary to fulfill community needs and aesthetic goals.”41 What is significant about Brookman’s description is how he calls attention to the fluidity of artists’ groups and emphasizes that sometimes artists’ groups are formed as collectives—but not always. A collective is thus not the singular or exclusive route for the structure or organization of artists’ groups; likewise, it should not be the de facto term or concept.
What is also salient in Brookman’s account is that regardless of the specific configuration that an artists’ group took, one of the crucial motivations for these groups to come together in the first place was because “mainstream cultural institutions” were simply “inaccessible to the Chicano community.”42 This point recurs frequently throughout narratives about the formation and rise of Chicana/o art groups. For instance, writers Max Benavidez and Kate Vozoff note, “For artists so estranged from the mainstream, art collectives offered a small-scale community and a way to alleviate their mutual isolation. Most artists of this period [the 1970s] describe the early art groups not as an aberration but as the only possible forum for self-expression and survival.”43
In Los Angeles, “two Chicano art groups [Asco and Los Four] typified the community perspectives of the decade,” according to Benavidez and Vozoff, who ultimately frame the two groups as “inversions of one another.”44 More recently, curators Chon Noriega and Pilar Tompkins Rivas linked the two groups, while noting significant distinctions: “Asco and Los Four were artist groups, each initially formed with four core members, which developed distinct aesthetic agendas (one conceptual, the other expressive) and also served as a basis for art exhibitions that sometimes drew in other artists.”45 No doubt, Asco and Los Four each assumed different sensibilities and agendas—not just about art and art-making—but also about collaboration and the function of an artists’ group. These differences point to vastly “different ideologies” about “producing art within a group framework.”46
In comparison to Asco, Los Four was much more formalized. Los Four held member meetings, took and distributed minutes, and wrote and published manifestos.47 The collective spirit that Los Four aspired to was conveyed in a California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) student newspaper at the time of a 1975 exhibition on campus: “The member’s idea was to deal ‘collectively with the production of art—be it printing, film making, graphics, or outdoor murals—and to protect that property through collective ownership of that property.’”48 Members of Los Four signed a charter for incorporation in 1975, and were therein technically “Los Four, Inc.”49 And, as a visit to the Archives of American Art revealed, Los Four maintained a shared bank account with checks bearing the name of the group.50
The naming of Los Four originated with a 1973 exhibition at the University of California at Irvine. It was curator Hal Glicksman who suggested that it would be best to have a smaller number of artists specified in the name of the group and the title for the group show initiated by Gilbert “Magu” Luján as part of his MFA thesis exhibition in the university gallery that Glicksman oversaw.51 Luján invited Carlos Almaraz, Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha, and Frank Romero to participate. While the group’s name suggested a stable and finite number of four members, the roster of artists in Los Four often changed, as did the number of artists in the group. Artists Judithe Hernández and John Valadez, for instance, participated in numerous projects and exhibitions, becoming, ironically, the fifth and sixth members of Los Four.52 In other words, though Los Four was much more formalized than Asco, it, too, was somewhat porous. For example, founder Luján left the group during the summer of 1974 as a result of tensions with the Oakland Museum and the Los Four exhibition tour—although his departure ultimately proved to be temporary.53
The reprise of the Los Four exhibition at LACMA in 1974 is regularly celebrated as the first exhibition of Chicanx art in a major museum, and although the exhibition received hostile reviews from the mainstream art press at the time, it was immensely popular and travelled extensively throughout California afterward.54 As a result, Los Four “immediately reached a level of recognition apart from the rest of the city’s Chicano artistic community.”55 The Asco artists crashed the LACMA opening dressed in elaborate costumes and makeup in an act that could be considered either an outlandish upstaging of their rivals or an extension of their rambunctious and rebellious relationship to the institution that inspired the defacement of the museum two years earlier. The action could be read as another form of institutional critique, one that potentially continues, revives, or regenerates the critical questions evoked by Spray Paint LACMA, an intervention responding to the question of what is inside and what is (or remains) outside of the museum.
The two groups were keenly aware of their differences, and commentary from the artists invokes various points of distinction—sometimes in the form of veiled critiques. In contrast to Los Four’s manifestos, Herrón explains, “We just did it… and we defined it afterward.”56 Gronk recalls that “there were no bylaws, there were no fees, there were no … manifestos or anything like that.” He continues, “Our manifestos came out of our No Movies. Our manifesto came out of like, you know, the criticism or critiques that we would do on our fellow artists at that particular moment in time.”57 And, in this regard, some of Asco’s critiques were directed at the “collectivism officially promoted” by Los Four.58 As Gamboa retrospectively declared, “the notion of being a collective was something we laughed at.”59 Years earlier, this burla or mocking laughter surfaced when Gamboa asked Gronk in a published interview, “What would you be if you were not an artist?” Gronk cheekily responded, “I’d be one of Les [sic] Four.”60
These intergroup rifts resurfaced during a 2011 panel discussion at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College featuring Gronk, Judithe Hernández, John Valadez, and Patssi Valdez as part of the programming for the Round Trip: Eight East Los Angeles College Alumni exhibition. Distinctions were articulated as differences in style—at once aesthetic, political, and sartorial—but in ways that were largely distilled and communicated in terms of personal affect. For example, when characterizing the relations between Asco and Los Four and while invoking her group’s more Marxist orientation, Judithe Hernández recalled, “We were so revolutionary and grubby. [Asco] were so glamorous.”61 Several years later Hernández elaborated on this topic when explaining in a slightly more critical tone, “They were too cool for us, or we weren’t cool enough for them.”62
Despite the recognition of their differences—which these various critical jabs pronounced—members of both groups sporadically came together for specific projects and exhibitions. In the early period of each group’s activities, there were interconnections and exchanges within what was a robust and porous network. Intersections between various groups were frequent “among counter-cultural formations,” a fact that aligns these two Los Angeles artists’ groups with the ethos of the broader counter-cultural developments of the era.63 Artists Gronk and Carlos Almaraz served as particular points of connection between the two groups, and can each be considered the two queer founding members of their respective artists’ groups, although Almaraz did not use the term in his lifetime.64 Almaraz and Gronk both showed at Mechicano Art Center in East Los Angeles, as did Harry Gamboa Jr. and Willie Herrón III.65 Almaraz also contributed to Regeneración while Gamboa was co-editing the journal and the other founding members of Asco were working on the magazine’s visual imagery.66 By 1976, Almaraz and Gronk were both involved in the journal Chismearte: Almaraz co-founded the Concilio de Arte Popular that published the magazine and Gronk was on the editorial board.67
Almaraz wrote an essay titled “Groak at Mechicano” for a college assignment in 1972.68 Written in the first person, the five-page typewritten text—now in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art—is part diaristic record of the young artist’s journey to the Mechicano Art Center, part exhibition review, and part profile on the artist Gronk (referred to as Groak and later as Lorenz Groak Pedrigon throughout).69 Although Almaraz’s text and title suggest it was a solo show, the actual exhibition he describes was much more likely Ahora lo Veras, which also included work by Gamboa and Herrón.70 This student essay curiously documents an early encounter between the two artists. Almaraz patently sizes Gronk up in this inchoate period of contact—before Almaraz began working with Los Four and while Gronk was participating in what can be described as proto-Asco group projects and exhibitions.
Almaraz reports that the exhibition upset his aesthetic sensibility. He found the paintings of faces and figures on cardboard, paper, and Masonite to be “brutal” and “unpleasant and hard to look at.”71 He loosely describes some of the sculptural elements in the exhibit, including a sewn multimedia work displayed on the floor and a vintage dress adhered to a wall, and he remarks on the thematic and conceptual connections in the show between collage, environment, and theater. But what strikes Almaraz most about the exhibition is how the installation communicates Gronk’s—and presumably the other artists’—interests in performance, happenings, and intermedia. Moreover, Almaraz stipulates that such attributes can be identified with the artist himself, claiming, “Groak is a man of costume and illusion; everything is a part of his work in the same way that everything is a part of his theatre.”72 In the essay, Almaraz postures as an art critic obliquely and disapprovingly critiquing Gronk for his performance in the role of avant-garde provocateur and as an artist taking on multiple identities and roles.
Although not featured in the exhibition, Almaraz also describes an early Asco performance, Stations of the Cross (1971), and conveys the threats that the unannounced public happening elicited from passersby.73 The morbid procession along Whittier Boulevard, a main commercial thoroughfare in East Los Angeles, was staged as a protest against the Vietnam War. During a busy Christmas Eve, Herrón dressed as a calavera Christ carrying a large cardboard cross with Harry Gamboa Jr. and Gronk in procession behind. As he attempts to explain the precariousness and risk involved in the performance, Almaraz suggests, “Groak lives in an environment that is quite hostile towards him because his theatrics (some personal) makes ‘vatos’ [Caló for dudes or homeboys] feel uncomfortable.”74 Clearly, what Almaraz is trying to identify and communicate here is homophobia.
Almaraz concludes his account by declaring that Gronk’s work is “very aggressive” and offensive, and it is evident that he can not quite disentangle his assessment of the artwork form his encounter with—and estimation of—Gronk. Overall, Almaraz is disdainful, finding the exhibition to be neither beautiful nor an authentic representation “of the barrio.” Ultimately, Almaraz declares it as “terribly aggressive; it comes at you and pulls at you.”75 The sensation that Almaraz describes as uncomfortable, unpleasant, upsetting, or aggressive is exactly what the (future) Asco artists would identify as the Asco effect that they sought to achieve through their work together.76 Almaraz’s review serves as a testimony to how Asco’s work was received and the responses it generated among artists within the Chicano Art Movement.
Despite such antagonisms, exchanges between members of Asco and Los Four existed and can be traced through several promotional and archival documents. A poster for the first iteration of the Los Four exhibition that opened at University of California at Irvine on November 21, 1973, illustrates potential forms of connection and exchange between artists in Los Four and Asco. The poster reproduces one of Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha’s sketchbook pages still showing the fringed perforations at the top from the ring binding.77 The drawing depicts a female subject in a three-quarter portrait pose looking out to the viewer. The figure is surrounded by a dense array of text and other drawings, including images of cacti, pyramids, calavera skulls, and a space ship. Alongside these images are phrases, including: “que viva la raza,” “los marcianos legaron ya” (“the Martians have already arrived”), “arte chicano existe” (“Chicano art exists”), and “con safos.”78 In an otherwise caustic review of the Los Four exhibition at LACMA (where it travelled after Irvine), art critic William Wilson described de la Rocha’s drawings as “delicate, elaborately poetic portraits of friends surrounded by the barrio environment and icons.”79
In the top left corner of the drawing, the names Gronk, Willie, and El Bob appear. Like the many other names and text in the portrait, the typographical style invokes that of Pee-Chee folder art, doodles, or placas—a form of wall-writing that functions as a symbolic marker of territory and/or affiliation. The listing of names effectively operates like a collection of placas or plaqueasos— “a public announcement of names”—that maps out and visually pronounces a roster of associations and affiliations.80 The intimate sketchpad has been transformed into a poster to publicize the group exhibition. In this confluence, we see the advertisement for a group show—or a solo show for an artists’ group—that situates the group and its members within a broader community network of artists and interpersonal and cultural spheres. Here we can see the intersections and overlaps of this network of artists illustrated in the form of vernacular barrio traditions, such as plaqueasos and the roll call. We can grasp, too, how aesthetically and conceptually important these connections must have been for artists like de la Rocha.
The following year, Gronk participated in the exhibition Los Four en Longo, held at the Long Beach Museum of Art,81 where as one of six exhibiting artists, Gronk presented a brown paper bag filled with videotape.82 As Almaraz recalled years later in his oral history for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, “We [Los Four] tried to collaborate with Asco … We did a couple of exhibits, the Long Beach exhibit, and we tried things, but it didn’t work.”83 By 1975, meeting notes indicated that “Los Four [was] basically an exhibition group,” with seven or more artists variably participating in projects tied to specific exhibitions.84 Such was the case for the Los Four/Asco exhibition held at The Point Gallery in Santa Monica in June of 1975.85 A total of eight artists participated in this exhibition as Los Four: Carlos Almaraz, Gloriamalia Flores, Judithe Hernández, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Maricio Ramirez, Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha, Frank Romero, and John Valadez. Meanwhile, four Asco artists participated: Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez, who exhibited spray-paint paintings on canvas. The exhibition was not reviewed and few details remain about its layout, checklist, or other specific attributes. According to Gamboa, none of the Asco works sold.86
Each group was responsible for generating and circulating their own publicity; as a result, there were at least two different promotional announcements for the exhibition.87 The one that circulated more widely and can be found in numerous archives and collections is a printed postcard with twelve different images arranged into a grid on one side. Each participating artist is represented by an image, text, or some combination of both within a small rectangle. These announcements were offset lithographs printed with an overlay of colors, including red, yellow, orange, and green to suggest that the cards had been spray painted, and were cut in a way to create a variability in color patterns on each card. The postcard carries forward the visual aesthetic of the striking accordion-fold catalogue designed by Frank Romero for the Los Four exhibition at UC Irvine.
The invitation design suggests a discrete delineation between the artists’ groups: the Asco artists all appear in a single column, while the Los Four artists are clustered in the two other columns. The images used to represent the groups also differ. Six of the eight Los Four artists submitted drawings of human figures for the announcement. While several of these drawings include the artist’s signature, the space allotted for each artist is so small that the signatures are rendered nearly illegible. In contrast, three of the Asco artists, Gamboa, Herrón, and Valdez included graphic renderings of their names; in essence, they submitted their signatures.88 While Herrón and Gamboa employ typography, Valdez engages barrio calligraphy and placas. These forms are in fact intricately related, as the specific written aesthetic of placas was based on and influenced by typography associated with newspaper headlines and titles as well as honorific items like diplomas and certificates.89
Valdez’s contribution is a remarkable placa or plaqueaso that shares stylistic similarities with the drawings and collages she produced for Regeneracíon and the now nonextant aerosol works on canvas she experimented with and exhibited during this time. Valdez’s first name is rendered as a stylized placa using a diamond shape to dot the “I” at the end; the letter is rendered in such a way that it resembles a candle stick, with the diamond shape forming a flame above. Two lipstick marks flank the placa. Produced with marker, it effectively channels the tradition of barrio calligraphy, which aims to bestow an “aura of prestige around their street names to represent them with maximum dignity and pride.”90 Valdez’s piece was made in collaboration with a young graffiti artist, known as Joker, who Valdez was teaching at the time as part of a program to provide art lessons to “at-risk” youth including those involved in gangs. The student produced the lettering and Valdez provided the lipstick prints, and then submitted the doubly- or triply-signed work for the exhibition announcement card.91 Valdez’s contribution importantly appropriates and retools what was a predominantly masculinist form—especially at this time—to represent her participation in the exhibition. A variation on a popular clique name “El Loca,” or “the crazy-one,” appears above Valdez’s placa, asserted in an “incorrect” way that transgresses the strictly gendered and codified rules of the Spanish language as well as the barrio traditions of clique naming. (Loca is gendered as female and the article El is plainly masculine.) Curiously, the way the nickname is written is as a single conjoined word, “eLoca” but with the “eL” hovering below the “oca,” and the “L” extending to join the two registers and connecting to Valdez’s name as well. Joker, the clique name of the student who inscribed the letters, appears below Patssi, with the name of Valdez’s artists’ group, ASCO, anchoring the roll call below.
The second publicity document for the exhibition at the Point Gallery was a thermal photocopy that appropriated one of the photographs of the performance of The Wedding of Maria Theresa Conchita Con Chin Gow (1971), a simulated queer marriage on the quad at CSULA featuring Robert Legorreta (Cyclona) as the veiled bride in white beside a kneeling groom in a top hat.92 Cyclona holds a bouquet and sturdily embraces the artist Mundo Meza whose head is tilted back. Neither Cyclona nor Meza are identified in the promotional flyer nor were they included in the Los Four/Asco gallery exhibition. And, although Gronk often collaborated with Meza and Cyclona during the time of the performance image, some four years earlier, Gronk did not appear in the wedding performance.93 At the top of the flyer, ASCO is spelled out in all caps in letterpress stamps, with the “S” coming from an inverted numeral “5” and the “C” formed by a U flipped on its side. A vintage snapshot of two men seated in a park, one bare-chested, is collaged onto the wedding portrait obscuring much of the bridegroom’s face and upper body. The gallery name, “the point,” is collaged to the bottom of this photograph, although no details about the exhibition, such as address, dates, or hours, are provided. In this way, this invitation is much more informal and less traditional since it does not include these necessary details.
Gamboa recounted later that the “intergroup rivalry” between Asco and Los Four was at an “all-time high” at this juncture while exhibiting together at the Point Gallery on the Westside of Los Angeles.94 This was the last time the two artists’ showed together in an exhibition that they organized themselves.95 The groups grew more separate as their conceptual differences and aesthetic directions became more pronounced and as both individual personalities and group identities became increasingly defined in opposition to each other. As Gonzalez and I noted in the catalogue for Asco: Elite of the Obscure,
The Asco group functioned as an umbrella collaborative structure for imagining and producing a wide range of work, most importantly in the production of their own identities as artists, which necessarily involved a certain amount of self-mythologizing for the individuals involved in the group and for the group itself.96
Collaboration for the group was complex and can perhaps best be understood through its shifting dynamics and exchange, both within Asco and between groups over time. It is possible to discern these internal negotiations and individual expressions through the ephemera of the period, such as the Point Gallery postcard and its emphasis on the signature or placa. After all, as critic Roberta Smith has suggested, “Invitations are style statements in a minor key, ancillary artworks of a collective sort.”97
In their reference to graffiti, the use of signatures and placas in the ancillary form of the postcard invitation invokes the gesture of the now iconic Spray Paint LACMA. Graffiti was used strategically as a medium and sign system in Spray Paint LACMA. Enacted as a retort to the reported response of a LACMA curator—who when confronted with a question about the lack of Chicana/o art in the museum’s collections, claimed that Chicana/os did not make fine art, but only made folk art or were in gangs—Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón signed their names. Thrusting their individual placas onto the museum’s walls mobilized one of the primary functions of graffiti: to “assert a group’s presence against their erasure by the dominant culture.”98 A part of the texture and impact of the institutional critique (and its continued relevance) emanates from what scholar Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino identifies as one of the placas’ key functions, which is to “keep a public check on the abuse of power in the streets.”99 We can extend this idea to consider how artists associated with Asco asserted their presence in order to put a “public check” on the museum. Spray Paint LACMA used unsanctioned graffiti as a form of conceptual and institutional critique to mark exclusionary practices and cultural boundaries while also circumventing them—even if only temporarily.100
Graffiti marks—and remarks on—contested spaces and is subject to cycles of repression and (re)emergence as well as processes of erasure and (re)inscription.101 The fleeting inscriptions of three artists’ names in black and red spray paint were quickly whitewashed, presumably dismissed as a crude act of vandalism, yet the group’s critique could not be so readily suppressed. Spray Paint LACMA is now recognized as a key work by Asco, and is remembered as a landmark of conceptualism in the 1970s. It has also come to be known as a radical act of protest about museums and institutionalized racism, becoming a powerful example for subsequent generations of artists. Even if it was only seen in person by the artists and a handful of maintenance workers, Spray Paint LACMA has had an indelible impact on contemporary art.102
While a minor form, copies of the Point Gallery postcard invitations—which did not directly engage with the walls of an institution, but instead circulated freely and abundantly in artistic spheres of their own making—have certainly outlasted the actual spray paint surreptitiously applied to the museum wall. As such, the invitations are ephemera but not necessarily ephemeral, since they also outlasted the manifestly ephemeral event they promoted—the exhibition. In context with other artists’ signatures, Valdez’s placa opens up a dialogue about inscription, representation, and artistic identity, while also calling up the impact and legacy of Spray Paint LACMA, a work with meaning and resonance that is still open, ongoing, and contingent as it continues to circulate through photographs over time. Valdez did not participate in the guerilla graffiti under the cover of night with her male counterparts, “even as the iconic image is predicated on her body marking the space of the male artists’ ephemeral authorship vis-à-vis the museum.”103 Malik Gaines has suggested that “Valdez’s photographed body personifies the racial, gender, and political differences that played out against the body of the museum in this action, a museum that had a poor history of showing women artists, people of color, or performance art, even.”104 Therefore, Spray Paint LACMA, “made visible the condition of exclusion and marginalization faced by Chicano artists,”105 while the action itself was predicated on the exclusion of Valdez’s participation in the graffiti defacement. Forms of defacement, according to Michael Taussig, simultaneously make visible social regulations and limitations while also having the capacity to liberate new meanings and conceptions.106 And placas positioned on public walls distinctly function as “a call to act and react.”107
Over the years, Spray Paint LACMA has generated extensive responses and reactions from participants and later raconteurs and commentators. Valdez, for example, explained in 1981, “I was there after it [the spray paint] was done.” And, when asked about Gamboa’s photograph, Valdez responded in a fairly sassy and defiant way, “My name wasn’t there, but I was.”108 This variance in modes of participation (between the presence of the body or the placa or signature) may also signal the incompleteness of the collective act. And, in this way, perhaps we can also see Patssi Valdez’s placa as part of an ongoing dialogue about exactly whose name appeared on walls of the museum in Los Angeles, a continued negotiation and reassessment of forms of collaboration and their limitations.
The author would like to thank Tatiana Flores, Richard T. Rodríguez, and especially Mari Rodríguez Binnie for their astute and generous feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.
C. Ondine Chavoya is a Professor of Art History and Latina/o Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in contemporary art and visual culture. A specialist in Chicanx and Latinx art, Chavoya’s writings have appeared in Afterimage, Artforum, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, Performance Research, Wide Angle, and in numerous exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. His curatorial projects have addressed issues of collaboration, experimentation, social justice, and archival practices in contemporary art. Recent exhibitions include Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011), Robert Rauschenberg: Autobiography (Williams College Museum of Art, 2017), and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (MOCA Los Angeles, 2017). He is also co-editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019).