In 2011,the Chicano/a multimedia art collective known as Asco was acknowledged by the art world when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a retrospective of Asco's works from 1972-1987.
Elite of the Obscure: Patssi, Gronk, Willie Herrón, &Harry Gamboa In 1972, Asco executed their conceptual performance piece Project Pie in De/Face, or Spray Paint LACMA on the exterior of the same museum. The performance was a response to "a LACMA curator's dismissive statement that Chicanos made graffiti, not art"[i] when Asco artist Harry Gamboa, Jr. inquired about the lack of Chicano and Chicana artists in the art museum of a city highly poplulated by Chicano/a residents and communities. Having "signed their names to the entrance of [LACMA],"[ii] Gamboa, Willie Herrón III and Gronk returned the next day and photographed Asco member Patssi Valdez with their spray-painted signatures. The retrospective opened for a second time at the Williams College Museum of Art, where Chicana artist and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains' keynote speech recalled an earlier generation of Chicano/a artists and activists' reactions to the guerilla style art that Asco made in 1970's Los Angeles. Asco succeeded at making revolutionary art against and in conversation with the backdrop of better established, recognized, and older Chicano/a artists. |
"Asco" is Spanish for "a feeling of sickness at the stomach, with an impulse to vomit."[iii] This conversation was not constantly comfortable or amicable as the four artists of Asco often viewed their works in opposition to what they felt was quickly becoming stereotypical Chicano/a artwork. Bored or disgusted by the so-called Chicano art that appealed to mainstream art audiences, Asco performed their own Chicano and Chicana perspectives. Rather than attempting to fit into the narrow milieu of Chicano/a art being produced at that time, the members of Asco imagined their own identities and art works as part of a Chicano/a future they were creating. In 2012, Patssi Valdez remembered, "The reason I became an artist was so that I could say or do whatever I wanted."[iv]
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