Asco’s first public performance was “Asco’s Stations of the Cross” in 1971 (pictured above), when a man with his face painted like skull carried a giant cardboard cross past shoe stores and movie theaters in East Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. This Jesus figure was accompanied by two androgynously screwball costumed accomplices on their “procession,” which ended at a Marine recruiting center. After five minutes of silence in memorial to those killed in the fighting in Vietnam, the story goes, the artists ditched the cross at the door and fled.
They called themselves Asco—Spanish for the disgust or nausea their art supposedly provoked—and specialized in absurd, political, mainly obscure provocations. “Stations of the Cross” was only documented (see photo above) because Seymour Rosen, the prominent photographer and preservationist of folk art environments happened to be passing by with his camera.
“Asco: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972-1987” at the Williams College Museum of Art, is billed as the group’s first retrospective. It was organized by C. Ondine Chavoya of Williams College and Rita Gonzalez of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it debuted last fall as one of the dozens of Getty-sponsored “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions on post-War Los Angeles art.
The Asco quartet of Los Angeles Chicano conceptual artists—Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie F. Herron III and Patssi Valdez—plus a varying cast of accomplices, worked together from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. Herron and Gronk had come out of the Chicano mural movement, and aligned with its opposition to racism, poverty and the Vietnam War, but felt stifled by its earnest codes. “Instead of creating social realism protest art,” Gamboa said, “social surrealism seemed more to the point.”
A photo documents their 1974 “First Supper (After a Major Riot),” in which four performers, some of them masked, have a strange ritual dinner on a traffic island underneath the Whittier Boulevard sign. (Photo above by Harry Gamboa Jr.) Their gathering—including a skeleton mannequin, a dead child doll, and Gronk’s expressionist painting “The Truth about Terror in Chile” of an anonymous tortured body—transforms the seemingly mundane city street into a magic realist vision. But the point was that the street wasn’t ordinary, but charged ground near the location of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, a Chicano anti-war march and rally attended by some 30,000 people that was violently broken up by police and resulted in three deaths—including Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar, who died after being struck by a tear gas canister fired by a sheriff’s deputy into a bar.
“The moratorium just made us blossom,” Herron told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “It was like, this is my purpose for my art now: the police riots, the [student] walk-outs that had happened in the late ’60s.”
Asco’s 1974 photo “Decoy Gang War Victim” showed a performance: a man lying in the middle of a night street surrounded by burning flares. They distributed it to the press—some of which published it as fact. Their goal seemed to be to interrogate and parody the white press’ narrative of Latino violence—though they also simultaneously helped fuel the story.
Other projects like “No Movies,” photos advertising scenes from films that didn’t exist, and “fotonovelas,” narrated slideshow narratives, were cheap, do-it-yourself ways of playing at film making in the style of slasher, glam sci-fi, and gang war Hollywood B-movies. The group then spoofed the Oscars by giving each other “No Movie Awards,” a gold cobra statue that recalled the symbol of a street gang. Gronk said, “To expand propaganda-wise, I have to get into cinema.”
These projects simultaneously seriously and humorously consider the exclusion of Chicanos from the silver screen and the problems of Chicano communities (for 1976 Dia de los Muertos festivities, they dressed up as “The Three Causes of Death”: a switchblade, hypodermic needle and pharmaceutical pill), while also envying the allure of cinema. They revel in a sort of Hollywood dystopian “malaise” America—much as the contemporaneous Destroy All Monsters gang was doing in Michigan. (Photo above of “À La Mode,” 1976, by Harry Gamboa, Jr.)
Asco’s film stills are contemporaneous—and perhaps arrive slightly before—Cindy Sherman’s much better known “Film Stills” photos in New York. While her costumed self-portrait shots often are read as post-modern signifying or perhaps feminist reimaginings of Hollywood, Asco suggests another origin for this way of working: drag queen spectacles.
The exhibit is a tantalizing but frustrating retrospective. It’s chock full of artifacts—more than 150 works including comics, newspapers, expressionist paintings, a bit of video, and lots of photos of a gay drag wedding, protest graffiti, and absurdist crazy space glam disco dress up—but Asco’s story and context remain elusive.
“Asco: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972-1987,” Williams College Museum of Art, 15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Feb. 4 to July 29, 2012.
“Scissors,” 1974 black and white photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
“Birds Wave Goodbye,” 1972 color photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
“Instant Mural,” 1974 color photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
“Malibu, CA,” 1975 color photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
Asco members graffitied their names on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972. Photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
