Archiving an Epidemic

Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

Robb Hernández

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479826612
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art

Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife

Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlán—as Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this period—developed a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-garde—one that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large.

With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (1955–85), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955– ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty images—many of which are published here for the first time—Hernández’s work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.

1

The Iconoclasts of Queer Aztlán

On January 30, 2008, Arte No Es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 opened at El Museo del Barrio, a cultural nexus for contemporary Latin American and Caribbean art in the corridor of New York’s museum mile, a stretch of ornate memory palaces including the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Commemorating the forty-year anniversary of El Museo, Deborah Cullen curated an ambitious survey that examined divergent performance expressions and political actions across transnational and regional contexts. Among the hundred artists who “prefigure, link to, and differ from the received history of ‘performance art’” was a rather obscure figure from East Los Angeles, Robert “Cyclona” Legorreta.1 Combining the salacious term for World War II–era zoot suit Chicanas with the destructive force of a natural disaster, his alter ego Cyclona harnessed the chaos engulfing Southern California with draggy rage.

Visitors to El Museo on that opening day saw Legorreta’s “live art” statements in selections from a twenty-eight-page scrapbook, a profound anthology of queer Chicanx artistic collaborations and performances from 1969 to 1974. The book consists of collage arrangements on the front and back of paperboard and glycerin paper. They are strangely disjointed; snapshots are tilted or cropped for a frenetic effect amid taped and glued scraps. Each frame animates Cyclona’s disruptive performance work in compressed temporal structures and sometimes distressed materials (see figure 2.2). His reviled persona pervades the collage like a cinematic sequence. Jump cuts are mimed on paper. The scrapbook’s disassembled pages are recombined in the vitrine, creating a plane of four panels that feature Legorreta in restaged photos and texts. An accompanying label reads:

CYCLONA

(1952 El Paso, Texas, lives-works Whittier, California)

Cockroaches have no friends, 1969

Scrapbook with color photographs

The Marriage of Maria Conchita Teresa and Chingón, 1971

Scrapbook with color photographs

The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta–Cyclona Collection,

The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library and

Archive

Knowing how to generate a public reaction using his body

and attire, Cyclona based his performance art pieces on

homoerotic overtones that contrasted with the Chicano’s

cultural nationalist ideology, which affirmed traditional

conceptions of gender and family structures.2

The heading on the label gives his alter ego’s rather than his own name. Legorreta’s foundational influence in queer Chicanx performance is positioned in “contrast” to “the Chicano’s” family, opposite its nationalism. The text speaks with a didactic, nearly ethnological tone and constitutes his art practice in dichotomous terms. What is not described is his propensity for stirring publics with caustic tantrums and fulminating outcries. Legorreta’s inclusion in the exhibit section entitled “Border-Crossers/Franqueadores de Fronteras” is also telling in that it groups him with work “evoking and challenging the delineations and existence of borders through conceptual practices, performance actions, interventions, and even street theatre.”3 Arte No Es Vida is the first public exhibition of his scrapbook. Despite its showing to a mainly New York audience, Cullen sutures the remnants of Cyclona’s insurgent acts to a corpus of border-crossing conceptual artists in the Americas. But the boldness of such curatorial translation was undercut by the conditions in which Legorreta’s “ethnographic fragment,” in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s terms, was presented.4 After all, the New York Times lauded the “urban interventions of Asco” in its review of the show.5 Such art media discourse distances Legorreta’s instructional role in Chicano conceptualism, neutralizes his significance as a precursor to avant-garde and experimental art vocabularies in East LA, and thus intensifies the symbolism of his body of record placed in a glass box.

If the art gallery is a narrative organization of museum space and the metonymic fragment is “an art of excision, of detachment, an art of the excerpt,” then the scrapbook’s placement is telling: placed in a vitrine beneath the Asco photos mounted on the wall, Legorreta is literally positioned under the feet of the Asco collective, a group that scholars such as Dianna Marisol Santillano argue “redefined contemporary Chicano art and challenged its artistic canons, thus launching the Chicano avant-garde.”6 Her comments are profound and speak to a cultural moment when “postethnic art exhibitions that questioned Chicana/o identification … emerg[ed] in Los Angeles and elsewhere since the beginning of the millennium.”7 Conceptualism and performance strategies are central to the post-identitarian discourses in Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement, which opened at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Coincidentally, Phantom Sightings premiered the same year, making these exhibitions dialogic in effect and indicating that they should be understood as such (Phantom Sightings even makes its way to El Museo del Barrio in 2010). Asco is featured in both shows and located “as a starting point” in Phantom Sightings’ curatorial framework and exhibition design.8 Resting its argument on the collective’s visual genealogy of conceptual artworks between 1972 and 1976, co-curator Chon Noriega suggests, “Since the 1990s, Asco has influenced or provided a point of reference for a new generation of artists and artist groups whose work explores … public space.”9

Whether as a starting point in Karen Mary Davalos’s terms or point of reference in Noriega’s, Asco is central to its curatorial presentation, a substratum for the Chicano avant-garde’s experimental language. The reciprocity between these two shows, one on the East Coast and the other on the West, cannot be emphasized enough. A selection of Asco digital prints from the mid-1970s appeared in both exhibitions, repeating a narrative about the collective under the guise of its four founders: Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez. Despite the group’s rotating cast of collaborators, especially in its later iteration in the 1980s (the Asco B period), what was seen at Arte No Es Vida were seven works from Asco’s early performance oeuvre, which included Walking Mural (1972), Spraypaint LACMA (or Project Pie in De/Face) (1972), and, in particular, Asshole Mural (1976).10 Beneath this institutionally sanctioned display of Chicano conceptualism, Legorreta was flattened under the group that “launch[ed] the Chicano avant-garde,” begging the question: What are we to make of the queer grounds from which Asco stands?11

Growing up in East LA in the 1960s, Legorreta attended Garfield High School. The lives of Asco founding members entangled with his. However, Legorreta’s relationship with queer creative upstart and “soul mate” Mundo Meza, a painting prodigy, proved foundational. Recalling the last conversation he had with Meza before he died, Legorreta remembers that Meza said, ‘Do you remember the first time we met, Robert? And I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘I was a little kid and was on top of my father’s shoulders, and your father and my father were drinking friends.”12 Legorreta explained: “The first time we met, it was when he was almost a baby.”13 His story bordered on a prophetic nearly psychic journey for the pair. Legorreta’s final exchange with Meza, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1985, illuminated the incidental body traffic of East LA happening through the urban sprawl, the “hit and run” collisions that Gamboa imagined occurring between artist, concept, and media in banal barrio life.14 Chicano conceptualism was created out of these conditions rife with creative possibility.

In fact, one of these collisions occurred between these “psychedelic glitter queens” and a classmate calling himself Gronk.15 He would meander in and out of doorways of retail shops “[seeing] what Mundo and I were doing,” Legorreta remembered.16 Described as a “barbarian/beatnik,” Gronk wore “wingtips and these old shiny pants from the fifties—the ones that would glitter.”17 Looking beyond the urban decay in East LA, Gronk sought something glitzier, more flamboyant than himself. “He came up to us one day,” Legorreta added, and “said he was putting a play together and he wanted us to be involved.”18 That play turned out to be Caca-Roaches Have No Friends (1969). Such “run-ins” permeated the social landscape and stimulated a series of transgressive experimentations in Chicanx gender and sexual expression.19 Adorned in swaths of fabric, this trifecta became twinkling subversions of Chicano masculinity. As living art personas, they repudiated machista body disciplining, which dominated the barrio. Their garish self-images intrepidly commandeered urban landscapes and agitated complacent Mexican and Mexican American publics. Recalling his early performance work in 1994, Legorreta concluded, “We were trying to shock people into believing that they could do anything they wanted to do.… I always [said] East L.A. was like a giant rubber that was ready to explode.”20 And explode it did.

Despite advancing what are arguably the first queer Chicanx performance art actions in Southern California, the formative works of Legorreta and Meza in androgynous self-imagery have yet to be evaluated in any substantive way in Chicanx art history, performance studies, and contemporary art. If acknowledged, these artists are cited mainly in relationship to Asco. In fact, Cyclona’s living art performance in Caca-Roaches Have No Friends is “proto-Asco,” according to Amelia Jones, in her catalog essay from the LACMA retrospective exhibition, Asco: Elite of the Obscure (2011).21 Being historicized in a more linear teleology of the collective, Legorreta, Meza, and Gronk are precursory addendums lapsing into that amorphous queer Chicanx avant-garde that is unknown.

In this chapter, I distinguish these visual provocateurs not to restore a more complete picture of Chicano avant-gardism alone but to reframe their discomforting function as iconoclasts of queer Aztlán. In revisiting “queer Aztlán,” I recalibrate Cherríe Moraga’s radical reimagining of the symbolic homeland for dispossessed Mexican Americans in the US Southwest. Queer Aztlán represents a liminal site for these sexual outlaws, “a Chicano homeland that … embrace[s] all its people, including its jotería.”22 I want to consider how these artists’ intimate knowledge and rehearsals of disturbance rouses queer experimentation in Chicanx art, making it potentially explosive. Performance actions, print media art digests, and alter personae teeter on the edge of destruction, deliciously upsetting heterosexual propriety and inciting outrage. I argue that these artists understand that iconoclasm is not unilateral but multidirectional, and that they channel its reactive power in ways previously unseen. By illuminating how creative collaborators—Ronnie Carrillo/Jack Vargas, Joey Terrill/Teddy Sandoval, and Robert Legorreta/Mundo Meza—interject a queer iconoclastic vocabulary into an ostensibly static object-centered Chicano visual field, I unfurl how ethnic and sexual marginalia agitate any straight linearity of Chicano art history with their destabilizing and detonating effects.

Flammable Machos

In art historical terms, iconoclasm is the physical or sometimes symbolic destruction of icons deemed ideologically or politically objectionable. Works of art, monuments, statuary, sacred icons, and even archival repositories are susceptible. They are desecrated and targeted in times of war, regime change, protest, and political struggle. These retaliatory acts are by no means anchored in the distant past, however. According to Erika Doss, iconoclasts (literally, “image breakers”) assault public art projects “considered off...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: How AZT Changed Aztlán
• 1. The Iconoclasts of Queer Aztlán
• 2. Looking for Mundo Meza
• 3. A Roll/Role of the Dice: The Butch Gardens and Queer Guardians of Teddy Sandoval
• 4. Viral Delay/Viral Display: The Domestic Para-Sites of Joey Terrill
• Conclusion: Making AIDS Matter
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author