But they're not queer Amelia Jones discusses ways in which Asco's work can be read within a queer framework in "Traitor Prophets:" Asco's Art as a Politics of the In-Between.[i] At the Asco Symposium in March of 2012, she stated, "Our understanding of [Asco's] work shifts if we place it in ... a slightly shifted historical framework."[ii] Much like Amalia Mesa-Bains noted a change in the Chicano art world's perceptions of Asco's work, once dismissed as "apolitical,"[iii] Jones proposes a new reading of Asco which places it within a context of queer performance and art-making that became more popular in decades following the height of Asco's production as a unified collective of artists. However, Jones also acknowledges that Asco's art is not "typical of the largely affirmative politics-driven Chicano or feminist or gay/lesbian/ queer practices of the 1970s or 1980s." [iv]
Queer Practice Jose Esteban Muñoz cites Eve Sedgwick's definition of "the term queer as a practice" when she calls it the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects,...of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us...[the need for] sites where meanings didn't line up tidily with each other [and] to invest these sites with fascination and love.[v] The difficulty in performing queer readings of works whose focus or creators are not specifically identified as queer (LGBTQ2) lies partially in a reluctance to obliterate differences under the catch-all term queer. This problem also vexes the project of queer Indigenous studies as it runs a risk of overlooking particularities of race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, and tribal affiliation. Neither is the object to simply assume stereotypical styles of (re) presentation as naturally and unambiguously linked to queer individuals and communities. Rather, queer readings look at what is strange, or "queer" about a work of art, a text, or a performance. Queer readings locate defiant abnormality in texts and works or art and performance, in order to trace a suggestion of what this defiance can say to or about others, be they the subjects of the work, its readers and viewers, or typically marginalized groups in a variety of contexts. "Te vez como un joto" At Garfield High School, the members of Asco were already utilizing elements of the wild costuming that would come to play a major role in their tactics of performance and public intervention in the 1970s. Willie Herrón often dressed in drag and recalled shaving his eyebrows as a sacrifice, which became the subject of one of Asco's No-Movies Ascozilla/Capitalismo. Members of Asco were "marginalized by fellow students who were hostile to the cross-gendered or queer signifiers members of Asco put into play."[vi] At Williams College in 2012, Willie Herrón recalled "crossing over genders...in the late 1960's already" and "wearing Patssi's makeup" even though his family warned him, "te vez como un joto."[1] It may be useful to think of this manner of dressing as Asco's first foray into performance. Apart from a possibly superficial reading of Asco's use of "queer signifiers," there are ways of reading Asco's works as "queer" though its members are not specifically self-identified as queer (LGBTQ2) and its subjects may not readily be perceived as aligned with queerness or performances of such. As Amelia Jones has noted, The LA of ASCO is an LA not only of inclusion (the aim of the 'authentic' activist artist's body) but of discussion, contestation and open-ended self-performance even in relation to the artist's chosen coalitional identity. As the shrewd members of ASCO recognized, it wasn't enough to establish a unified 'Chicano/a' identity to contest white mainstream culture.[vii] The various "sites" that Asco creates in the realms of art-making, political performance, and cultural expression have been seen to challenge one another as well as popular conceptions of the traditional Chicano/a artist. Asco's works include visual, performance, and mail art. As such, their own body of work as a collective can be seen as a site "where meanings didn't line up tidily with each other" and "seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique." Their works were often unreadable in the "codes most readily available" to their audiences at the time and especially against the backdrop of traditional Chicano/a art-making and cultural production. In this way, Asco's practices of performance and art-making can be read as queer according to Sedgewick's definition. //BORDERLANDS// As with the No-Movies' purposeful blurring of supposedly distinct genres of film, photograph, and performance, Asco's performances confuse categories of performance, protest, media intervention, and hoax. This confusion can be seen as the result of Sedgwick's definition of "queer as a practice" as well as an integral part of enacting that practice. Moreover, Jones argues that Asco's works, especially from 1971 to 1975, "worked against the binary of borders by occurring in the 'borderlands' like those described by Gloria Anzaldúa as materially, conceptually, and politically in-between spaces."[viii] The alternative spaces that Asco enacted in their public performances and interventionist tactics provide the material for a more intricate queer reading of their art and cultural object making processes. Their works exist in these "in-between spaces" insofar as they transgress rigid boundaries of genre and question rigid notions of so-called Chicano art. However, their performances and public interventions succeeded also at creating new spaces, spaces queer to the actual physical backdrop of their performances, the normalized urban landscape of (East) L.A. Strange parade On Christmas Eve 1972, Asco members Patssi, Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón responded to the cancellation of the East Los Angeles Christmas parade in Walking Mural.[ix] This response occurred in the form of their own procession along the normal parade route, in which the Asco artists played the parts both of floats and parade participants. In Walking Mural, Patssi costumes herself as a version of La Virgen with foil, cardboad, glitter, and a variety of fabrics[x], Gronk as a Christmas tree made of green tulle, Willie Herrón as the traditional mural personified, and Harry Gamboa photographing the procession. |
Utilizing both the figure of La Virgen, who appears prominently in murals painted by Chicano and Chicana artists and the figure of the mural itself, Walking Mural mobilized the static images they felt had dominated a normalized Chicano art canon, becoming less effective at depicting a lived Chicano/a reality or perspective.
This mobilization questions the continued usefulness of Chicano imagery that is consistently relegated to a static medium rather than occurring in a live and ongoing way. Walking Mural creates a queer space in the form of "a counterspectacle intervention."[i] It provided a counterspectacle in place of and in the same place as the original spectacle of the East L.A. Chritmas Eve parade. Moreover, it intervened in the urban regulation that had subsequently banned the same parade. Chavoya notes Asco's tactic of "situating social critique in contested urban spaces" in a reaction against the "normative landscape" of L.A., regulated as it was and continues to be by an "official culture" that attempts to make the Chicano presence invisible, or according to Asco member Harry Gamboa, Jr. into a "phantom culture".[ii]Walking Mural serves as a deliberate intervention of art into the normal business and goings on of the "contested urban space" produced by the cancellation of the annual parade. Walking Mural can be seen as injecting the defiant abnormality of Asco's performance aret into the normalized space of East Lost Angeles. That is, Walking Mural queered the city's visual and physical landscape through the performance of a strange parade that the normative law of the city had forbade. Queering the City In 1974, Asco staged a ritualistic occupation of a traffic island on Whittier Boulevard called First Supper (After a Major Riot). This traffic island had been built over "a particularly bloody site of the East L.A. riots"[i] of the previous year in an attempt by the city to " 'prevent further demonstrations.' "[ii] This ritual occupation of an architectural attempt to normalize what had been another contested urban area included a stylized supper among the four core artists of Asco, with their faces painted in the tradition of Mexican calaveras.[1] Gronk's painting Terror in Chile is seen in the background, attached to the street sign, a symbol of "political alliance with the victims of the Pinochet regime."[i] This along with their stylized occupation can be seen according to Chavoya as
all[ying] their resistance with the literal occupation of islands as an act of anticolonial protest, such as the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island and the Chicano occupation of Catalina Island.[ii] In discussing this and other of Asco's public interventionist performances, Chavoya references Foucault’s idea of a "heterotopia." He writes: "In the face of crisis, Asco engaged a transverse tactic of heterotopic resistance and deviation."[iii] Foucault defines heterotopias in a 1967 manuscript "Of Other Spaces," as places opposed to utopias, which he defines as "sites with no real place".[iv] Instead, heterotopias are "real places-places that do exist" in which "all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted."[v] Foucault's sixth principle of the heterotopia states that all heterotopic spaces "have a function in relation" to all other space. This function, according to Foucault is either to create "a space of illusion" that reveals all other, real spaces to be even more illusory or to "create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled."[vi] Performances like Last Supper used public spaces as a place of "political practice" to imagine rigidly delimited spaces differently. In doing so, Chavoya argues, that members of Asco created what Foucault calls a "countersite"[vii] to the regulated landscape of their city. Where Asco encountered restricted spaces (as in the canceled parade route of Walking Mural), they introduced " a carnivalesque inversion of authority and reclamation of social space."[viii] In doing so, they resisted the norms of an urban landscape that sought to erase their and others' Chicano and Chicana presence from the visible landscape. As a response to urban planning attempts to de-politicize and make a "non-place" of the traffic island on Whittier Boulevard, Asco reintroduced unwanted protest in an unexpectedly memorious way. As a memorial occupation for the violence of the L.A. riots, Asco also countered the "messy" and "jumbled" space of city traffic with a stylized form of remembrance that opposed the "historical amnesia"[ix] that city planners tried to produce by leveling this site of former violence. The traitor-prophet Amelia Jones likens the work of Asco to Gilles Deleuze's notion of the "traitor prophet" who "turns away from...the white wall/black hole system" rather than remain "pinned against the white wall of dominant significations," "sunk in the hole of our subjectivity, the black hole of our Ego which is more dear to us than anything." Instead, this traitor is involved in "strange or illegitimate becomings,...his or her own line of flight, mak[ing] his or her own myths."[x] In queer and queer of color theory, part of this myth making may come from producing queer readings of objects, texts, and performances found within a relatively heteronormative context or likewise, reading such objects that already define themselves as queer. Where this identification is absent, defiance against dominant, usually heteronormative surroundings can be read as queer performance. The members of Asco and the artworks they created become the traitor prophets, involved in the "strange becomings" of youth who later described themselves as "in the art world [but] ignored by the art world."[xi] Their various individual and collective "line[s] of flight" are often away from an established tradition of Chicano and Chicana art and activism, while remaining informed and informing about their own conditions as Chicano and Chicana identities as both subjects and artists. In Amalia Mesa-Bains' words, "The Chicano identity was forever changed with the emergence of Asco" whose body of work "in a prophetic way tells what can come in the future...when people are unruly and unbridled."[xii] |