Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  Invisibility was met with irony or absurdity. Indigo Som’s Mostly Mississippi photos of Chinese restaurants paid tribute to eateries as pervasive and unseen as kudzu, behind whose fading signs and crumbly facades labored working-class Asian America. In her Human Advertisement videos, Xavier Cha danced around dressed as a pink fingernail in front of a nail salon, or a shrimp in front of a sushi bar, as if to scream, “Consume this!”

  Ala Ebtekar—whose installation Elemental placed boom boxes decorated like Persian miniatures and fresh-out-of-the-box Adidas sneakers with Tehran-textiled fatlaces into a minimalist mock-up of a centuries-old Iranian tea house—told the journalist Cynthia Houng, “We may be speaking in a third language, unlike the older generation, which tended to place a hierarchy upon the cultures and to place them into confrontation with each other.”28

  Jean Shin’s Unraveling took hundreds of sweaters donated by artists and community activists and used the yarn to trace the social network of affiliations. Her work was a map of institutional Asian America, the process of collective identity-making that Asian Americanists called “panethnicity.” Glenn Kaino’s Graft stitched taxidermy models of a salmon made from the skin of a shark, and a pig with the skin of a cow. Was it hopeful or unnatural for one to try to change the skin they were in?

  As a display of radical diversity, the show became, Karin Higa said, “an anti-identity identity show.” “The whole point was heterogeneity,” she said. “What could you glean from the Asian American experience from looking at this show? Well, what you could glean from it is, ‘Wow, you can’t really fix it ’cause it’s all over the place.’”

  At a time when, as Bronx Museum curator Lydia Yee noted, it was as easy as it had ever been for mainstream curators to “end up with a show of all white males,” the curators were sure that exposure for the artists was enough of a reason to have mounted the show.29 Still, Chiu said, she felt that the Asia Society might never do another exhibition of this kind again. “As a curatorial thematic, it feels very forced to do,” she said. “I feel it would be forcing something onto artists that is not really coming out of the work.” But without such shows, how might non-Black artists of color be seen and recognized?

  Laurel Nakadate shot sad and funny movies with lonely white men she had just met. With a circle of her finger she might command an overweight, bespectacled man stripped to his BVDs—with the sad look of a character in a Dan Clowes comic—to do a slow twirl. Then she, also down to her bra and panties, might reciprocate the gesture.

  These movies would be discussed in the art world in terms of postfeminist sexuality, not her mixed-race identity. But in an interview with the One Way curators, Nakadate returned to intersectionality. She was a yonsei, and her father had been born in a World War II internment camp. While making the videos, she realized she had been working with what she called “a trace” of memory.

  “At first I thought [these movies were] about girlishness and going out and finding lives to try on but then I remembered finding out that my great-grandmother was a war bride. These women had photos taken of them before they left—a photograph of them with the strange men they had just married,” she recalled. “I then realized that these were the same kind of pictures that I was making. It struck me that I was making these pictures that I had never seen.”30

  Susette Min’s catalog essay was entitled “The Last Asian American Exhibition in the Whole World,” an allusion to Suzan-Lori Parks’s multiculti-era play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole World. Multiculturalism, she wrote, had long been reduced to “a Band-Aid solution,” “just a ‘trend’ that has now fallen out of fashion.”31 “To unmoor from race is alluring,” Min added. “Were this truly a post-multicultural world could we really see Asian American art with fresh and untainted eyes?”32

  THE EVIDENCE OF PHANTOMS

  In that sense, these post-identity shows could not escape the questions multiculturalism had raised. Presence, diversity, transformation—all of those seemingly obsolete concerns had yet endured.

  By the turn of the millennium, half of Los Angeles County’s population was Latino. In 2004, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center announced a five-year initiative led by the Center’s director Chon Noriega to create exhibitions, publications, and art purchases for LACMA. The exhibitions would include a retrospective of Chicano paintings from the comedian/celebrity Cheech Marin’s collection and a new survey called Remix: Today’s Chicano Art, featuring artists working in painting, sculpture, installation, conceptual, video, and performance art. As Noriega’s team proceeded with Remix, they, too, began to focus on a new generation of artists.

  They realized first that they would need to reckon with the legacy of the massive 1990 CARA exhibition. CARA had been full of prophets, heralds, seers, and documentarists, most of them proudly, politically, explicitly Chicano. But what did it mean now to be a Chicano artist?

  To Noriega and fellow curators Rita Gonzalez and Howard N. Fox, this new generation was “populated with tricksters, shape-shifters, doppelgangers, ventriloquists, and personas—real presences, but ones known primarily by indirect, oblique, or camouflaged presentation.”33 They were doing work that chose “conceptual over representative approaches, and articulate[d] social absence rather than cultural essence.”34

  What’s more, the thirty-one young artists they chose, all MFA’d up, called themselves all kinds of things besides Chicano—Post-Chicano, part Chicano, Mexicano, not Chicano but Pocho, not Chicano but Latino, not Chicano but half-Latino and passing, or none of the above. How could the curators square the legacy of the Chicano movement with all of this new energy?

  Asco founder Harry Gamboa Jr. had long written of the way Chicanos constituted a “phantom culture” in the United States.35 One night Gonzalez made the connection. Each of these works of art was a “phantom sighting,” evidence of people still unseen, caught in that liminal space between invisibility and materiality. So the exhibition would be called Phantom Sightings. But this still did not solve the problem of what to name the artists. How did you name what wasn’t there?

  Gonzalez approached Daniel J. Martinez to seek his input. Since the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Martinez had poured his energies into making uncompromising work and mentoring a new generation of artists and curators in Southern California, including Mark Bradford, Ruben Ochoa, and Eungie Joo. He taught at the University of California at Irvine, and with Glenn Kaino he opened the influential Deep River gallery in downtown Los Angeles.

  When Rita Gonzalez and Ken Gonzales-Day had organized a discussion among artists and curators to talk “post-identity,” Martinez showed up and told the gathering, “I feel like we’re in this record that’s skipping and we can never get out of it.” To him, the facts of underrepresentation were separate from questions of aesthetics, and Freestyle marked a promising strategy for desegregation. “Post-Black was a lure. It was a trick. It was a sleight of hand. There was no such thing as Post-Black,” he said. “It might be all-Black, but she picked talented people that happened to be Black.”

  Martinez suggested that everyone think of Chicano identity in a truly antiessentialist way. “If you explode that idea, the playing field’s left wide open,” he said. He proposed that they take LACMA’s money and give it to underrepresented artists of all races, genders, and sexualities. “Call them all Chicanos,” he said. “You would come up with brand-spanking-new work that shows that there’s an actual possibility of a change and a shift in the culture.”

  “They all laughed at me,” he said.

  But now one pressing question—how could one do a Chicano show that wasn’t about Chicanos?—gave way to another that seemed more distressing—what kind of strategy for recognition and advancement dismantled any structure for recognition and advancement? “Without a name and a context,” Chon Noriega asked in his catalog essay, “how can this work be seen, let alone integrated into the art world and our national visual culture?”36

  So the sh
ow’s subtitle—“Art after the Chicano Movement”—would prove more provocative than the title itself. By shifting from identity to chronology, the show would elide the need to name the artists, construct an untenable identity, and stake political claims or histories. But it would also confuse art-world supporters and critics and leave a lot of Chicano elders’ hearts cold.

  CONCEPTUALISM WITH DIFFERENCE

  The first image in Phantom Sightings was a photo of Asco’s Spray Paint LACMA from 1972, with Patssi Valdez looking punk-rock vivacious in bright red lipstick, red sleeveless blouse, and rhinestone jeans, standing on the museum footbridge that had been adorned with the names of her Asco camaradas: “Herrón Gamboa GRONKIE.”37 Here was LACMA, at the institutional direction of Chicanos, validating an image of Chicanos protesting LACMA for the exclusion of Chicanos from LACMA. The image felt, at the same time, like the raised flag and the flowers on the coffin of an alternative art history.

  Phantom Sightings began with disappearances, erasures, and traces. Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching and Hang Trees series were based on his research of lynchings of Mexican Americans. He digitally expunged the victims of lynching photo postcards, leaving just the crowds dressed in their Sunday finest and posing for the camera, chatty and celebratory, the initial subject of their interest—in his final race performance—removed from history.

  Ruben Ochoa installed paintings onto freeway walls that made them look like they had been cut out. His work pointed to Judy Baca and SPARC’s monumental Great Wall of Los Angeles and Willie Herron’s mural, The Wall that Cracked Open. But instead of the people in all their struggle, rage, and glory, Ochoa put up trompe l’oeil landscapes, revealing how walls had grown where people and neighborhoods were being disappeared.

  Yet clandestine movements still gathered. In The Breaks, Juan Capistran b-boyed on what looked like Carl Andre’s floor piece, Equivalent VIII. In Los Angeles/White Riot, he put a white X on a five-foot canvas—drawing together the connections between midnineties Malcolm X baseball caps, the band X’s song about white flight (whose album cover evoked a KKK burning cross), the Clash’s tribute to the Notting Hill carnival Black uprisings, Malevich’s art theories, and Ryman’s white paintings.

  ASCO, Spray Paint LACMA. 1972. © Harry Gamboa

  Artists addressed how NAFTA had ensured free flows of capital while border militarization blocked flows of bodies. Margarita Cabrera had grown up in the El Paso/Juarez area, where exploited women workers in maquiladoras pumped out the low-priced apparel and consumer goods that filled suburban homes north of the border. She sewed a vinyl replica of a Volkswagen Bug, a German car mass-produced in Mexico, leaving loose threads dangling to remind viewers of her labor. Her puffy cacti for Agave were made of Border Patrol uniforms—a nod to the treacherous daily struggle played out between migrants and feds, and the fact that the ranks of ICE agents were increasingly being filled by young brown men and women who otherwise faced poor job prospects.

  Photographer Delilah Montoya shot panoramas of abandoned high-desert camps along the migrant trail—the relentless stretches of dirt and creosote, the water jugs, the torn clothes, and all they had left behind. Julio Cesar Morales’s ink-and-watercolor works depicted methods undocumented immigrants had used to cross the border—a man kneeling inside of a car seat, a four-year-old girl tucked into a PowerPuff Girl piñata, bodies conforming uncomfortably to the forms of North American constructs.

  Phantom Sightings had opened almost exactly two years after millions—not solely Latino, but Asian, African, and European immigrants and their supporters—had taken to the streets across the country to demand immigration reform. Those demonstrations had led to the biggest congressional effort in a generation and impacted the presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain. It was a moment, Rita Gonzalez said, when people were saying, “We are not invisible. We are not a phantom culture. We are the majority. We demand the stakes.”

  The Breaks by Juan Capistran. 2001. Courtesy of the artist.

  THE END OF IDENTITY?

  Yet if the culture was shifting, the language still lagged. Old binaries—the political versus the aesthetic, the real versus the fake, assimilation versus authenticity—framed the show for even Phantom Sightings’s most sympathetic critics. Art critic Natalie Haddad wrote in Frieze, “Does an unmarked Chicano identity equal a whitened one?”38 Reyes Rodriguez, the owner of downtown gallery Tropico de Nopal gallery, challenged the museum, the artists, and the curators, telling Agustin Gurza of the Los Angeles Times:

  The inherited plight and struggle and history of the Chicano art movement is not one you can toy with, not without expecting any sort of questioning.… Do we just keep quiet and allow LACMA to declare that Chicano art is dead? What does that really mean? That you want to be more European or more a part of, let’s call it the Anglo world, or whatever it is that validates you? Is that really success?39

  After the show closed, Rodriguez and Phantom Sightings artist Sandra de la Loza presided over an intense discussion of just these issues at the gallery. The curators were invited to sit and watch.

  New York Times critic Ken Johnson was even less sympathetic. His review led with the question: “Is it time to retire the identity-based group show?” His answer—an unqualified yes. The notion, he wrote, was “a bureaucratic artifact as much as a curatorial one.”

  “Artists of many different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been assimilated into the art world,” Johnson wrote. “It becomes readily apparent that the artists are not unified by any single style or conceptual approach.… Are they doing something unusual that the art world needs to catch up on? Not those in this show. Is it news that they are creatively diverse as American artists in general? It should not be.”40

  Johnson’s job was to ask whether the show had succeeded or failed. But asking whether all identity shows should be eliminated was a different question altogether. “Those are the kinds of questions that don’t get asked about other shows,” Karin Higa said. “[Critics] don’t even realize the kind of expectations they ask of race-based shows.”

  Johnson’s dis was part of a maddening continuity. In an earlier generation critics had dismissed artists of color by calling their work “identity art.” Now that a new generation of artists of color was “post-identity,” critics were still uninterested in the questions of race they were raising. The world had been colorized, but the art world remained colorblind.

  Phantom Sightings artist Eamon Ore-Giron mused, “People say multiculturalism is dead and we’re like, ‘OK, when’s the Post-White show?’”41

  POST-IDENTITY, THE MARKET VERSION

  Out in the hot, flat, crowded streets, marketers and advertisers were taking identity much more seriously than much of the art-world elite. Multiculturalism had reaffirmed to big capital the centrality of identity and culture in the new global world. Advertisers all had the same research, but research only answered yesterday’s questions. Now that everyone knew the demographics, what was next? For the young generation in the target sights, the question was now: How did it feel to no longer be a problem, but just another stick of gum for lifestyle capitalism to chew up?

  To some it was liberating. In 2005, John Lee, a former professional skateboarder from New Zealand, and his partner Jiae Kim, a designer from Cupertino, poured their house savings into Theme magazine, a hip experiment whose goal was to capture “the global tipping point that is Asian influence … people and movements that are inciting cultural evolution.” Tibor Kalman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Mike Disfarmer were their influences. Nam June Paik, Nikki Lee, and Wieden+Kennedy’s creative director, a pioneering Chinese American named John C. Jay, were their subjects.

  But Lee and Kim would tell anyone who asked that Theme was not an Asian American magazine. “Ethnicity is a business. A big business, I guess,” said Lee, whose magazine supplemented the work of their boutique marketing company, the Theme Agency. “And there’s that smell of desperation.”

  To them, mul
ticultural market segmentation had simply reinforced stereotypes based in being less than white. Too many Asian American–branded projects betrayed a sense of inferiority. Kim said, “I want to be part of people doing great stuff—people with confidence, poise, and something to say.” Equality meant expecting more. In the new style vanguard, personal and cultural evolution was a hopeful process.

  Identity was still the present and future of capitalism. And if productivity had been the central question of the industrial era, creativity would be the fetish of the postindustrial era. By the turn of the millennium, business magazine covers—most seemingly descended from Colors—looked more diverse than the companies they covered, and every issue promised to unlock the keys to creativity the way women’s magazines promised to unlock the keys to desirability. It was no longer about harvesting the recognition of identity but monetizing the creation of identity.

  In 1999, the year protestors clashed with police outside the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, Nike began an experiment called “NIKEiD.” The idea was simple—consumer customization—and it had come from the streets. Long before brands even considered them worthy of their attention, long before anyone had heard of “the long tail,” generations of hip-hop kids in neighborhoods abandoned by capital and the state had been making their own shirts, stenciling their own crew jackets, and painting their Air Force Ones. NIKEiD wanted in. It would allow consumers to design their own shoes based on Nike templates.

  Individualized shoes were inherently scarce products. When Nike offered celebrity-designed shoes, they found they had stumbled upon a new market segment. The limited-edition shoe created a global cult of mostly young male sneakerheads, the most fanatical of whom could demonstrate indifference to extreme weather and personal grooming in pursuit of shoes they might never wear, but would put under a glass case. Why not make the limited edition available to everyone?