A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  Willie Herrón and Gronk in 1979 in front of Black and White Mural, 1973 (photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr., copyright Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center)

  This approach set the group at odds with the trends of Chicano activist art. During the First Chicano National Conference in 1969, a clear mandate was expressed through El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán: “We must ensure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture.”13 Asco opposed this approach as one that disguised the reality of life in their community and one that would create a uniform artistic response. Instead, Asco chose to make art on their own terms: intensely political art that rose out of the barrio of East L.A. but shared more in common with the tactics and the humor of the 1920s avant-garde Dadaist movement. Gamboa and company named their collective Asco (nausea), a Dada-esqe “anti-art” name that perfectly summarized their opinion on American society, the Vietnam War, Chicano art and movement politics, and the reaction that most people had to their work.14

  Asco, Walking Mural, 1972; left to right: Patssi Valdez, Willie Herrón, and Gronk (photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr., copyright Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center)

  Instant Walking Murals

  “We were right in the middle of it; we wanted to change it. We wanted to reach inside and pull people’s guts out.”

  —Willie Herrón15

  One year following the Stations of the Cross performance, Asco returned to Whittier Boulevard on Christmas Eve for another silent procession, Walking Mural. And once again, Asco held nothing back.

  Gronk dressed as a Christmas tree, with a red-and-green dress and a five-pointed star painted on his face. Valdez dressed in black as the Virgin de Guadalupe, and Herrón dressed as a mural wall, one that had become so uninspired by the genre of mural painting and the demands of cultural nationalism that it decided to walk off the wall and down the street.16 Herrón’s costume featured three zombielike heads that protruded from the background and formed an arch over his own face that gazed out with a blank expression.

  Asco’s intervention critiqued conventional murals, but it also addressed another key issue: restrictions on public space. In the aftermath of the Chicano Moratorium and a number of smaller riots, the city clamped down on Whittier Boulevard as an intimidation tactic to prevent further uprisings. Police routinely performed random stop-and-searches, and cars were prohibited from cruising down Whittier Boulevard after ten p.m. on weekends. The city also canceled the annual East Los Angeles Christmas parade. Asco’s Walking Mural was thus as an act of defiance against the city’s efforts to control the community. Walking Mural became an unsanctioned parade that reclaimed the streets and stood in solidarity with the community, albeit through avant-garde art that was garish and completely over-the-top. However, Asco won some converts with Walking Mural, and a number of onlookers and friends joined in with the procession.

  Asco, First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974 (photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr., copyright Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center)

  On December 24, 1974, Asco performed another litmus test on the community and the police. They returned to Whittier Boulevard, this time on a traffic island during rush hour, to stage First Supper (After a Major Riot). Each member dressed up in costume and wore masks that twisted Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and the traditional Day of the Dead celebrations into a new concoction. Props included a dinner table, chairs, food and drink, a painting of a tortured corpse, a skeleton, and a blow-up doll.

  C. Ondine Chavoya described First Supper as an

  act of occupation in lieu of their previously mobile tactics.17

  The traffic island the artists occupied had been built over a particularly bloody site of the East L.A. riots as a part of an urban “redevelopment” project in 1973. Following the riots, the surrounding buildings, sidewalks, and streets were leveled and rebuilt to prevent further public demonstrations . . . an example of urban planning administered as a preventative obstacle and punitive consequence for mass social protest.18

  Asco’s response was to reclaim public space and to become more creative with their form of protest. Following First Supper, on the way walking home, Gronk took out a roll of masking tape and taped Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval (a frequent co-collaborator with Asco) to the exterior wall of a liquor store, creating Instant Mural.

  Gronk described the concept behind the spontaneous performance:

  To me, the idea of oppression was that tape . . . It had a conceptual message—a thought-provoking one: how we are bound to our community and get bound to our environment. How we get caught up in the red tape.19

  Asco, Instant Mural, 1974; left to right: Patssi Valdez and Gronk (photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr., copyright Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center)

  Others could have read Instant Mural differently, and this was the point; the open-ended reading of Instant Mural defied the didactic modes of Chicano murals and kept the work raw, uninhibited, and cutting-edge—even with forty years of hindsight.

  Museums and Decoys

  “To be revolutionary is to be experimental.”

  —Gronk20

  Asco, Spraypaint LACMA, 1972 (photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr., copyright Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center)

  Asco, Decoy Gang Victim, 1975 (photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr., copyright Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center)

  Gamboa’s photograph of Valdez taped to a wall proved to be one of Asco’s classic images, exemplifying the importance that photography played in their work. It was designed with the camera in mind.21 Photographs and Super 8 films by Gamboa gave Asco’s ephemeral works an extended life and allowed the images to travel far and wide, away from the constraints of East L.A. However, not all of Asco’s work was situated in their own community. One of their most infamous works was performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In 1972, Gamboa asked a museum curator, who likely did not know him, why contemporary Chicano art was absent from the museum’s exhibitions. The curator’s response was that Chicanos did not make “fine art,” they made “folk art” or they were gang members.22

  Gamboa’s response was to give the curator a taste of his own medicine. He returned that night, after the museum was closed, and he, along with Herrón and Gronk, spray-painted their name “gang-style” on the side of the museum.23 Gamboa latter described Spraypaint LACMA (or Project Pie in Da/Face) as an action that “momentarily transformed the museum itself into the first conceptual work of Chicano art to be exhibited at LACMA.”24

  As Chon A. Noriega writes, Asco’s tags did not last long: “When LACMA whitewashed Asco’s signatures, it simultaneously removed graffiti and destroyed the world’s largest work of Chicano art, obscuring the inclusive notion of the public that underwrote its existence.”25

  While LACMA inadvertently tried to erase any notions of gang activity in Los Angeles, Asco created another performance to bring attention to the issue. Decoy Gang Victim (1974) addressed gang violence in their community, and used creative methods to try to stop it. The process involved showing up in the general region where a gang member had been killed or hurt, and setting off flares in the street. Next, Gronk would lie in the middle of the road, covered in ketchup, and pretend to be dead—the victim of a retaliatory killing, thus obviating the need for a revenge killing by a rival gang.

  Asco took the action a step further by distributing photographs of the decoy to mainstream media outlets—a critique of the media’s habit of sensationalizing violence in the inner city. KHJ-TV News fell for the decoy and ran a photograph of Gronk on a live broadcast as a “prime example of rampant gang violence in the City of Angels.”26

  Decoy Gang Victim resonates so powerfully, for it combined Asco’s avant-garde performance work with community activism, suggesting t
hat their antagonistic relationship toward the community was equally matched by their efforts to improve it. For if they were truly outsiders, why would they risk life and limb to try to stop gang violence? East Los Angeles served as Asco’s subject matter, but it also was their home, and they employed art as a means to address the many problems that their community faced.

  Asco’s work was designed to agitate, but it was also meant to inspire. “We were after the kids that were looking for something different,” reflects Herrón. “We wanted to find that little niche and create something . . . so if anyone wanted something alternative, they would turn to us for the alternative.”27 Herrón adds, “I felt we were doing it to expose them to art, to expose them to . . . looking at people that exist with them differently.”28

  Asco achieved this goal, but their largely unwelcomed internal critique put them at odds with their audience. Their name said it all. Disgust with society, disgust with conventions, disgust with the way things were. Asco confronted the social and political problems of their time, and sadly ours—poverty, failing schools, high dropout rates, prisons, war, military recruiters, and racism. Their early work (1971–1975) was uninhibited and unstained by the art world.29 No matter what their medium was, Asco critically challenged the inequalities and violence that plagued their community and greater Los Angeles. They also critiqued the tactics of the Chicano movement and the Chicano artists who were addressing the same issues. They created what Max Benavidez called a “parallel art movement,” largely because other movements had rejected them.30

  24

  Art Is Not Enough: ACT UP, Gran Fury, and the AIDS Crisis

  THE MOST ICONIC GRAPHIC OF the AIDS movement was arguably the movement’s most ambiguous—a pink triangle on a black background with text that read SILENCE = DEATH. To the viewer who encountered the image for the first time, the logical question became “Silence about what?”

  By 1985, the number of reported AIDS cases nationally was more than 11,000. By mid-1986, this number was over 30,000, and nearly half of these individuals, primarily gay and bisexual men, had died.1 San Francisco gay activist Cleve Jones recalled that at that time “everyone’s address books were a mass of scratch-outs.”2 People were going to funerals every week. Entire social circles were being wiped out.

  The government response to the AIDS crisis was shameful. Various government officials vilified gay and lesbian people instead of responding to a health emergency with compassion and expediency to find a cure. President Ronald Reagan was particularly callous. He pandered to the Religious Right and waited until the sixth year of his presidency before ever mentioning the word “AIDS” in a policy speech. And when he did, he proposed cutbacks in AIDS funding as well as mandatory-testing legislation that, if enacted, would only further demonize people with AIDS.

  Other pundits went a step further. William Buckley wrote in a New York Times March 1986 op-ed piece that people with AIDS should be tattooed on their upper arm and buttocks to prevent the further spread of the disease. Not to be outdone, Lyndon LaRouche received the over 394,000 signatures required to place an initiative on the California ballot that called for people with AIDS to be placed in quarantine camps. This never came to fruition, but the climate of blame was deadly as funding for research and drugs that might slow down the virus, along with care for those already infected, remained substandard. Instead, the gay lifestyle and sexual “deviancy” was incorrectly deemed to be the cause of the AIDS virus that might harm “innocent” victims—children, hemophiliacs, and straight people.3

  Silence = Death became an urgent response, not only to the deadly virus but also to the media hysteria and the political attacks that targeted the gay community. People with AIDS feared, justifiably, that the government might place them in quarantine camps. The Silence = Death graphic addressed this fear and the dangerous political and cultural climate. The pink triangle symbol referenced how gay prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear pink triangles on their clothing before they were murdered, thus historically reinforcing that the failure to speak out was akin to death. The slogan and image became a call to action. To present an empowering message, the triangle pointed upward, as opposed to the Nazi image that pointed downward, and once the AIDS activist group ACT UP adopted the image, the message itself evolved. It was a call for direct action and creative resistance to force the government to adequately address the AIDS epidemic and help its citizens who were infected.

  Silence = Death Project, Silence = Death, 1986, poster, offset lithography, placard, T-shirt, button, etc. (LGBT and HIV/AIDS Activist Collections, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

  ACT UP employed activist art with such success and at such at a high volume that they are almost without peers in terms of prioritizing culture as a form of resistance. Numerous art and video collectives were formed within ACT UP, including the Silence = Death Project (who created the iconic image in 1986), Gran Fury, Little Elvis, GANG, ACT UP Outreach Committee, DIVA TV, Testing the Limits, and House of Color. Their mediums included graphics, posters, T-shirts, installation, billboards, film and video, and performance art, among others. In ACT UP, artists were not simply asked to make banners or to design flyers—an insulting, and all-too-common role that artists are asked to fulfill in activist organizations. Instead, artists were active participants in ACT UP. They helped shape the organization’s mandate, identity, and tactics—including art as a form of direct action.

  ACT UP

  In early March 1987, more than three hundred gay and lesbian people gathered in New York City and founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).4 ACT UP’s mandate was specific—“medication into bodies”—free access to antiviral drugs to help those who were infected and more public awareness to stop the spread of AIDS. ACT UP embraced direct action as the primary way to respond to the AIDS crisis, to force the government, pharmaceutical companies, and the media to respond. Each meeting began with members stating in unison that they were “united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”5 These words were quickly backed up in practice.

  Silence = Death Project, AIDSgate, 1987, poster, offset lithography (LGBT and HIV/AIDS Activist Collections, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

  The first ACT UP/NYC demonstration took place just two weeks after the founding meeting. On March 24, hundreds gathered at Wall Street to protest the FDA’s slow approval process for drugs and the collusion of government and corporate interests that profited from the manufacture of AZT, the only FDA-approved AIDS drug, sold by the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome. AZT was a double negative; it was highly toxic and incredibly expensive. AZT cost patients more than $10,000 a year, despite the fact that the government had subsidized Burroughs Wellcome to develop it.6

  During the protest, activists blocked traffic in the streets, an effigy of FDA commissioner Frank Young was hung, and seventeen people were arrested. In the aftermath, the demonstration made national news and CBS newsanchor Dan Rather credited ACT UP for bringing national attention to the issue. Several weeks later, the FDA announced plans to speed up its drug-approval process, and in December, Burroughs Wellcome announced plans to drop the price of AZT by 20 percent. The stunning success of the Wall Street action placed ACT UP at the forefront of the AIDS activist movement. In a short time, more than a hundred ACT UP branches were formed in cities across the United States and abroad, although the NYC branch would remain the most visible of the chapters.

  Structurally, ACT UP was organized into a series of committees that allowed people to engage with the group depending upon their talents and interests. Gregg Bordowitz of ACT UP/NYC explains:

  ACT UP [NYC] was not one monolithic institution. It was a group of people who met every Monday night. Many of them were parts of smaller groups, or cells, or affinity groups within the larger group. And those affinity groups to some extent had, if not a separate life, a life outside the group.7

  Commi
ttees included, among others, a steering committee, a coordinating committee, and a women’s caucus. A majority caucus was formed in late 1987 because African Americans and Latinos represented the highest percentage of AIDS cases in NYC. For many, ACT UP became their social circle, dating scene, extended family, and way of life. Members would often go to different committee meetings nearly every night of the week.

  ACT UP was also home to numerous art collectives that marked the organization from the very beginning. Michael Nesline, who was a member of the art collective Gran Fury, recalls how members of the Silence = Death Project first introduced themselves to the group:

  Avram [Finkelstein] stood up and said, “I’m one of the people that made those posters [Silence = Death]. Most of us are in the room. We talked about it after last week’s ACT UP meeting, and we decided that we want you all to know that we made those posters and we want ACT UP to be able to use that poster and that image for whatever purposes ACT UP deems appropriate. So, it’s yours.8

  The image would quickly be put into action, including during the New York City Gay Pride Parade on June 28, 1987. ACT UP blanketed the march with the logo on T-shirts and signs carried in the parade. Nesline explains:

  What the media was impressed by was the uniformity of our presentation. I mean, all of the posters are black posters with big pink triangles. It looked really organized. That was not a completely conscious strategy at that point. It quickly became a conscious strategy, because we realized that it worked, for the media.9

  But the images and slogans were not aimed just at the media and spectators. Cultural critic and ACT UP/NYC member Douglas Crimp argues that the primary audience for the graphics was people within the movement: