Moment of Friday: Gronk's 'Citizen Kane' is 1957's 'The Giant Claw' Arts and CultureArt Carolina A. Miranda
L.A. artist Gronk is a film buff. He says his "Citizen Kane" is a 1957 black-and-white monster flick called "The Giant Claw." (Gronk) For Moment of Friday, L.A. painter Gronk gets totally sci-fi with a 1950s bird from outer space What inspires Gronk? A campy 1957 flick about a man-eating bird called 'The Giant Claw' Gronk revels in the man-eating habits of a big bird in 'The Giant Claw' Whenever L.A. painter Glugio Nicandro — more commonly known as "Gronk" — employs a new studio assistant he says he likes to stage a session known as "Culture Hour." For this educational episode, he screens "The Giant Claw," a black-and-white scifi flick from 1957 about a group of scientists who do battle against a massive foam bird resistant to all human weaponry. "My assistants have to watch this," he chuckles. "It's my 'Citizen Kane.'" (You can find it here.)
Gronk frequently draws "The Giant Claw" into his paintings and other works. It's also a regular feature on his coffee cup doodles, which he regularly posts online. (Gronk) Gronk says he loves everything about the picture. There's the fact that it stars Jeff Morrow as a roguish engineer/pilot, and Mara Corday as mathematician Sally Caldwell, who is referred to as "Mademoiselle Mathematician." There is also the bird itself. "You don't see it for like the first 20 minutes of the movie," says Gronk. "All you are told is that it is bigger than a battleship over and over. And then it appears and it's like a big, big turkey with a long neck and it's after a plane and it eats all the people. Then all these scientists come along and try to figure out a way to kill it and one of them looks like he wandered in from another movie." And, of course, there's the snappy 1950s dialogue, which delivers lines like, "What you're saying in essence is that black is white and two and two make six." "There's a scene where one of the scientists holds up a feather and says something to the effect of, 'It appears to be a feather, that's all we can say,'" laughs Gronk. "And you're like, 'What is this? Plato's Cave?' Those little things are poetry."
"The Giant Claw" has also inspired pieces of sculpture: This claw in Gronk's downtown studio puts the squeeze on a cardboard plane. (Gronk) "The Giant Claw" has been a large source of inspiration for the artist. The bird's claw image regularly makes appearances in his paintings; he has crafted it as sculpture and he often draws it onto coffee cups (part of a series of illustrations he regularly features on his Instagram). In 2010, he published a collection of drawings and titled it "A Giant Claw." Beyond the camp, however, he says he is really intrigued by the movie's low-budget feel. "The idea of doing things on the fly, on the cheap — that is very inspiring," he says. "That's something I try to incorporate into my work. I like that creakiness. It's beautiful." cComments Got something to say? Start the conversation and be the first to comment. Add a comment 0 It is an ethos he brings to his painting (he is a longtime muralist and painter), as well as to his set design. For a number of years, Gronk has painted the sets for a number of operas produced by award-winning L.A. theater director Peter Sellars. This includes a modern staging of Henry Purcell's 17th century opera "The Indian Queen," about the conquest of Mexico, which was produced at the Teatro Real in Madrid last year.
In recent years, Gronk has been focused on set design for a number of Peter Sellarsdirected operas. In a new exhibition at Lora Schlesinger, in Santa Monica, he shows work tied to this creative process, such as "Untitled (14-001)," a monoprint from 2014. (Gronk / Lora Schlesinger Gallery) Gronk says he keeps his designs for these operas purposely low-tech. "Generally, it's just me doing all of the painting," he says. "'Indian Queen' was written in the 1600s, and theater technology was very flat. So I try to keep everything very flat. I tend not to make obstacle courses for the performers. It's a stripped-down sensibility. Literally, it's a very big painting for an opera. And Peter choreographs it so that the performers interact with it." Part of this creative process will go on view at Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica this weekend, when a series of works related to his opera set designs go on view: expressionistic prints and canvases that serve as studies for the abstract backdrops that eventually wind up onstage. "I make paintings that I use to register the color palette for the sets I do," he says. "There's a lot of information that goes into them and they are generally my presentation to Peter. These might register as fragments and bits for the set I did for 'Indian Queen,' but all of the works hold up as singular pieces of art." So far, however, he hasn't been able to work "The Giant Claw" into one of his opera sets. "Peter generally shies away from pop references," he says. "But maybe one day I will find the right opera for it." "Gronk: Ruins," opens Saturday and runs through Oct. 18 at Lora Schlesinger Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., #T3, Santa Monica, loraschlesinger.com. On Sept. 13, an artist talk at the gallery will be held at 4:30 p.m. with a reception following at 5 p.m.
Sifting through ‘Ruins’ Posted September 3, 2014 by The Argonaut in This Week
“In-N-Out Art,” a Gronk selfie While designing set pieces for a Peter Sellars opera, artist Gronk created enough work to constitute a Santa Monica exhibit By Michael Aushenker Like the Picassos and the Modiglianis before him at the brasseries of 1920s Montparnasse, Gronk starts his day by walking a block from his home studio to his favorite café, meditates and sketches while nursing a cup of coffee, and then returns to his studio to attack his work — art that will export the stimuli and intangibles of his Los Angeles environs globally via the opera world. “Ruins,” Gronk’s solo show at Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica, debuts Saturday, featuring abstract paintings that are by-products of his decades-long association with Peter Sellars — preliminary explorations for the iconic theater director’s adaptation of the Henry Purcell opera, “The Indian Queen,” based on Sir Robert Howard’s 1664 play chronicling rifts within the Peruvian and Mexican hierarchies prior to the Spanish invasion. “I haven’t had a show on the Westside in a while,” Gronk said, without a trace of understatement. In fact, the painter, who draws as much inspiration from master German Expressionists such as Max Beckmann as he does from his own Chicano background, has been busy applying his talents toward creating set pieces for one Sellars production after another since the two began collaborating in 1995.
When Sellars first proposed they work together on “The Screams,” Gronk said he remarked how the piece was “so long, so many people in it,” to which Sellars reacted, “‘Yeah, that’s why I’m doing it!’” That collaboration set the stage for several more operas, including 2005’s “Ainadarma,” with its David Henry Wang libretto (the accompanying CD won two Grammys), as well as Vivaldi’s “Griselda.” “He’s a brilliant man,” Gronk said of Sellars, “and you learn so much from each thing you do and sometimes you go into areas you never thought you would.” Born Glugio Nicandro in East Los Angeles, Gronk doodled on a cup at his beloved Syrup Café on Spring Street last Friday morning while discussing the 16 works on display at the Bergamot Station-based Lora Schlesinger Gallery. For “Ruins,” Gronk has created “actual pieces that can hold their own,” he said. “It’s almost like sentence-making, a haiku, a codex” spawned while forging his “Indian Queen” battle plan. “When you say yes to working with Peter, all of a sudden you’re spending a year doing research. He gives you a lot of leeway to come up with things. The guiding line is that you have to do the research.” For “Indian Queen,” Gronk picked apart English history circa the opera’s 1600s origin, discovering “the Great Fire of London had just taken place, the Plague is going on.” Essentially, Gronk tends to be a production’s first link, his palette setting the tone. “Peter comes along, looks at what I’m making and figures out how to stage it,” Gronk said. “In the case of opera, the set comes first — then costumes and the rest.” Gronk has yet to contemplate the next Sellars project because “Indian Queen” continues to travel from Perm, Russia, to Madrid and now to England, and Sellars recently decided he needed yet another element. “Right now in my studio is the floor of an opera house in London. I have to go up on the roof to paint these [independent works],” he said. “It’s not as if I have a crew or a team. Every brushstroke that goes into the set is mine.” Between operas, Gronk, whose work was spotlighted by MOCA in 1985 and LACMA in 2004, still enjoys traveling and transmitting his experience and wisdom to students, from elementary to university level. However, L.A. remains home. For 25 years, Gronk has worked out of the same studio, taking in the sights and vibrations of the city’s center, expanding his visual lexicon. When he moved into his building there were just three people in it; now there are 30 units. “You can come to Spring Street, but a block away is Broadway and you may not go there. Within that range, you have many different people. Broadway is a Third World nation, just on that one street,” he said, likening the atmosphere to movies “Blade Runner” and “Fellinis Satryicon.” Such dense parcels of humanity feed Gronk’s imagination. “I don’t drive. I’m someone who uses public transportation, just like Peter Sellars. You’re taking information on the way, the way things look on the street, and you’re going to use that, mixing it all up with historical information.” There’s the push and pull of gentrification, but “change is a part of the city. To me it’s not just whole buildings that make up a city, to me, it’s the people.”
Cry as people might about another chain popping up, “young people who work at Starbucks are usually going to college,” he said. Conversely, there’s been “an abundance of dogs” in recent years, walking the hot cement, no doubt forced out as more condos means a penchant for house cats. “Where does a dog go?” he asked rhetorically. All of this shapes Gronk’s work, whether accompanied by tenors and sopranos at the Perm Opera House or hanging inside a Bergamot Station gallery. “You pull from all the different sources, make sense out of it. Or make nonsense out of it. It’s a constant looking at the world you live in,” he said. “Ruins” runs through Oct. 18 at Lora Schlesinger Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. T3, Santa Monica. An opening reception takes place from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on Sept. 13. (310) 8281133; loraschlesinger.com
ART REVIEW : The Two Lives of Gronk : The LACMA exhibition shows how the artist began his career as an anti-art rebel, but later turned to a mainstream painting style. March 19, 1994|CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT | TIMES ART CRITIC Is it possible for an artist to begin a career in a determined anti-art mode, which spits out absurdist and confrontational gestures against the failures of bourgeois society, and then to switch successfully into a form that is steeped in conservative tradition? That question is at the heart of "Gronk! A Living Survey, 19731993," a smallish exhibition that opened Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show was organized by Rene Yanez, curator of the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, where it had its debut last summer. It cleaves into two parts. First is an assembly of artifacts, souvenirs, drawings, sketchbooks and mementos from Gronk's earliest involvement with street theater, mural painting, performance and Conceptual art in the 1970s. Next come about two dozen Expressionist paintings in oil or acrylic, as well as a few drawings and prints, which the L.A.-based artist has been making since 1984. Connections between the two periods are easy to draw, but only the earlier is of sustaining interest.
Gronk--he was born Glugio Nicandro in 1954--began to make art as a member of the rambunctious Chicano collective, ASCO, founded in 1972. Together with Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herron and Patssi Valdez, he participated in a variety of boisterous activities that partook of a renewed interest in Dadaist art common among American and European artists of the period.
ASCO is a Spanish word for disgust, loathing or nausea. The snappy capitalization of the group's name made it wickedly redolent of commercial corporate logos--sort of ACME with a hangover. Inspired in part by the contemporaneous spirit of the Chicano civil rights movement, Pop art, anti-war activism, feminism, post-Stonewall gay liberation and other complex currents of the day, the artists brought Zurich Dada of the late-1910s to 1970s Los Angeles. Photographs in the exhibition's two jam-packed display cases suggest how, in mocking recognition of the near invisibility of Latino life in Hollywood products, movies were conceived, written, directed and acted out in the streets--albeit without the otherwise essential use of movie cameras or film. Other pictures show a heavily made-up Valdez pinned to highway retaining walls with industrial tape, creating a sly and resonant mix: She's part "talking mural," in homage to the Mexican tradition of painted walls that speak to passers-by, and part community representative held in bondage by the culture. Among ASCO's earliest, simplest and most devastating actions was to illegally spray-paint the collective's name on the entrance doors to the County Museum of Art. Thus tagged, the artistic legacy of the mainstream as represented by the museum was deftly claimed as their inviolable turf. The artifacts in the exhibition's display cases create a fascinating time capsule of a lively and inventive moment. Disappointingly, the show's slim and boosterish catalogue does little to chronicle this significant history--and Gronk's specific role in it--in any but a cursory way; nor does it offer much sense of how and why the group began to unravel. But unravel it did. By the early 1980s the artists of ASCO had gone their separate ways; in 1984 Gronk began to paint. He had of course painted before, but not quite in the way he does now--which is to say, in the typical, gallery-bound format of oil or acrylic on canvas, and in a painterly style of simplified, posterish images. The date of this sudden move is instructive. For painting, after a long hiatus, had by then definitively returned to the art-world's international center stage. American, Italian and, especially, German Neo-expressionism were fueling a newly explosive art market, while the first U.S. exhibitions of the decisive German branch had been prominently displayed in Southern California. The L.A. art scene, relatively moribund during Gronk's earliest years, now claimed a new Museum of Contemporary Art and a rash of new commercial galleries, and was on its way to capturing a place in the spotlight. Gronk's switch to a mainstream painting style doesn't feel like a cynical repudiation of ASCO's earlier aims. As a scan of the sketchbooks shows, such images as a dark-haired woman in a back-less dress and seen from behind (Valdez?) even carry over into similarly themed paintings. Gronk's most common subject is a rear view of an anonymous, theatrically garbed woman gesticulating before an open window.
Instead, Gronk seems to be painting as if his canvases are meant as a kind of mis en scene --portable murals--to decorate the raucous new theater of an expansive art world. His pictures of lone women contemplating painted rectangular vistas mimic the artist's (and the viewer's) place and action before the painting itself, while 1984's "Cabin Fever" is a satirical depiction of a black-tie, cocktail-party crowd, which mirrors the familiar sight of upscale revelers at an art exhibition opening.
Other apparently autobiographical paintings are also on view. But Gronk's embrace of an old-fashioned style--standard emotive Expressionism--makes for pretty routine stuff. The pictures, absent the sometimes razor-sharp edge of his youthfully incursive Dadaism, seem to want to merge private introspection with social commentary in an effort to represent identity. The result is painting as a merely stylish mask.
Artist GRONK Lives His Life In Ever-Changing Mediums Gronk. It's a name that could never quite blend into the crowd. It is fitting, though, for a native Los Angeles Chicano artist who has not only dabbled--but excelled--in many different areas of the art world. His resume includes, but is not limited to, performance art, drawing, painting, set-making, print-making, glass work, animation, photography, teaching and now, authoring. Born Glugio Nicandro, Gronk knew from an early age that “art was always something that [he] would be creating, using his imagination and his hands.” As a teen Chicano artist amidst the turmoil of the 1970s, his name (“GRONKIE”) was easily recognizable spray-painted on the side of one of the most prestigious art institutions in the nation: the LACMA. But he does not discuss that much nowadays. During a visit to his home and studio recently, Gronk - a riveting storyteller - began telling of his performance artist days, but quickly shifted toward talk of his current ventures. Gronk feels that his interests are ever-evolving and loves keeping up with new trends and concepts. He names Syrups, Amoeba Music, and LA Live among his favorite haunts and always takes public transportation to get there because he does not drive and has no interest in getting a license. You can find him on Facebook, where he posts pictures of his work, and on YouTube, where you can see some of his informal interviews filmed in a café. But by looking at his home and studio of more than 20 years, you cannot pinpoint old or new in the architecture or style. The mesh of decades leads to a visual feast that has the eye darting all over the rooms in an attempt to absorb it all. Murals fill his hallway and a stand containing large glass brains - remnants of a past in glasswork - accent his "living room." His building, situated at the edge of Gallery Row near Broadway Street, sits among such a richness and diversity of people that he says he'll never move. He loves the grittiness and the ugliness of the city. There can be a transformation from ugly to beautiful when that grittiness is so intensified that they go full circle and become beautiful, Gronk says.
But beauty was not exactly what he was creating when he was with the performance group ASCO, which means "nausea" in Spanish. They specialized in garnering attention and respect for Chicano artists as well as experimenting with off-the-wall techniques, literally. Some of their most well-known pieces, called “instant murals,” were staged “happenings,” where they duct-taped a member of the group to a downtown wall and then took a picture. Those were only some of the stunts they used to pull back in the 1970s. One of their other clever plans was to set up a dinner table in a street median and then try to eat an entire dinner before the police came. All of those pieces seemed to pale in comparison to “Spray Paint LACMA” in 1972 when ASCO spray painted their names on the side of the famous gallery. At the time, LACMA refused to show Chicano art, claiming that all Latinos could do was graffiti. ASCO, spurred by these false assumptions, twisted that into a very memorable, ephemeral statement. Later years found the group pursuing different, separate careers and Gronk found his next career move while running his mouth. He remarked that he could create a piece the size of a football field to someone at MoCA in only two weeks. Bill Viola, from MoCA, took him up on his ambitious claim. Gronk completed the piece in that exact time limit, that same size, and suddenly he was a painter. Painting was something he “happened to be good at” naturally, according to the artist. He then did shows in galleries all over the world, nonstop. Though he loved the work and traveling he was doing, he did not like the lack of studio time. So he decided to only correspond with galleries in Paris and L.A., though the art world warned him that he was losing out on many chances for exposure and money. He said he decided not to sell out or settle for a lifestyle that did not suit him, so he went his own way. Today, L2Kontemporary gallery in Chinatown represents him and accommodates his creative process, which allows more flexibility. The physicality of creating a huge painting installment thrills Gronk, and he loves improvising during the process. He says he feels most comfortable in the unknown spaces where he is attempting to create something that he has not achieved before. He stakes much value in small, passing thoughts that may seem inane or incoherent but later could turn into an idea for a project or an exhibition. “Whenever we come up with an idea, we create a universe—a Big Bang in our heads,” he said. “You can never have doubt, even in the midst of a dark period in your life or in an uncertain part of your creative process."
Photo by Kristin Yinger His works are largely abstract, but he does make use of a set of shapes and forms that he sees as letters of his artistic “alphabet.” Just as you use the same set of letters and merely rearrange them in different combinations to create words and ideas in written language, so does he rearrange his visual alphabet. As “an observer of his time,” this alphabet plays a crucial role in allowing Gronk to record and react to outside stimuli. One such letter is "Tormenta," a woman inspired by 1930s film noir that always appears in a timeless black dress with an open back and opera gloves with her back turned to the viewer (Gronk insists that you can know just as much about a person seeing them from the back as from the front). "Tormenta" adheres to his idea of a strong but glamorous woman who has become one of his signature motifs in his varying mediums. Tormenta means “storm” in Spanish and when seen in his work, she has that same powerful effect that seeing a storm on the horizon does. Gronk is never one to stick to one medium that he feels safe in, so he turned his unique vision to other endeavors. The world of theater called him, so he began creating sets for the L.A. Theater and the Santa Fe Opera, among other companies. He also entered the world of movie animation, animating some of the opening sequences for Disney’s Fantasia 2000.
Photography and authoring have been among Gronk’s latest ventures. His new book comes out in October, almost in the style of a graphic novel. Entitled "A Giant Claw," it is based off of the 1957 sci-fi movie of the same name. The ludicrous plot of the movie has an “extraterrestrial giant bird made of antimatter” visit and terrorize Earth. This is yet another example of the humor Gronk manages to convey in a lot of his works. In the meantime, there is nothing Gronk would like more than to have fans friend him on Facebook or meet him at Syrups to chat about inspiration and creativity. To reach reporter Kristin Yinger,
Tree Seeds Graffiti Art Installation on Empty Downtown Floors
By Ed Fuentes | February 26, 2013
A five-story downtown building has foliage growing out of the edge its roof. And it became inspiration for an art exhibition. "Downtown is changing. The tree is growing," said Gronk, a founding member of East Los Angeles based Asco.
Gronk, who is constantly producing multi-disciplinary works, named the ficus growing out of brick and mortar in the city's core, "The Little Tree That Could." Since he himself has lived in downtown since 1979, both he and the tree could be named the "Cling of Broadway." Recently he and others painted new artworks on the fourth and fifth floor of the building -- raw space that has sat empty for years, but are now about to be rehabbed and restored. The exhibition titled "Under Construction" was held February 16, and is a temporary signifier for a changing downtown. The one-night enclave of works by artists who work and live in downtown Los Angeles carried an informal recall of graffiti applied in the empty shells of buildings as temporary installations; a limited edition that, if lucky, is documented.
Gronk's piece is titled "Evacuated, Resettlement, Deportation" -- a twist on how word meaning, like a city, is in constant change. "One culture leaves, another comes along, and uses what the former culture left behind," he said.
Art by Gronk. Photo by Stephen Zeigler Story Continues Below Support KCET Other artists in the one night show included Eyeone, Kozem, Adict, ACME, Richard McDowell, Codak, Swank, Vyal, and Lawrence Mota. "Building tats" is what "Under Construction" artist, and in part co-curator, Tanner Goldbeck nicknames the works on the fifth floor. "The painted walls will be there for a while, but all the hanging art had to go," he said. "In a few months they will be tearing up that top floor. Flash-in-the-pan."
As for the tree, it is surviving without soil. Its roots are still growing; it is able to thrive on moisture within the building. Now owned by David Gray, art has been the building's ethos for a while. This is the same Broadway site that hosted Johanna Poethig's "Calle de la Eternidad" (Eternity Street). The spontaneous art began when Gronk and Goldbeck strung lights on the tree, with access provided by onsite construction management. "The owner was open to letting more people paint, so I invited some friends. It's a rare opportunity to have an open space to paint indoors without drama and no hassles, so they jumped at the chance," said Goldbeck. "We got to spend a few Saturday's hanging out and painting. The fun part of the art life." Goldbeck wishes it could be up longer, but soon the elevator shaft will be removed, along with most of the roof, as the structure is reinforced for the building's transformation into the new downtown personality. "Construction waits for no one," Goldbeck said. "I'd like to think some of the parts will remain behind the walls for some future construction people to figure out." Left behind images is something Gronk has played with since middle school, when as a young artist he made masks modeled after African folk art and left them around East Los Angeles for anthropological surveys to discover and solve. "Ephermeral is also art," said Gronk.
Under Construction exhibition I Photo by Erwin Recinos for L.A. Taco
Under Construction exhibition I Photo by Erwin Recinos for L.A. Taco
Under Construction exhibition I Photo by Erwin Recinos for L.A. Taco
A tree grows on Broadway I Photo by Tanner Goldbeck Top photo: Art by Gronk next to the tree that grows on the roof of 351 S. Broadway. Photo courtesy of Gronk. Additional photos courtesy Erwin Recinos for L.A. Taco, and Tanner Goldbeck.
Gronk by Marisela Norte
Instant Mural, 1974. Color photograph. From left: Gronk and Patssi Valdez in the ASCO performance piece. Photograph courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr. I met Gronk back in 1979 at a Dia de los Muertos happening on Brooklyn Avenue in East Los Angeles. I was hanging around alone with my camera, not really sure what to do, when I saw three people walking toward me. I immediately recognized Patssi Valdez, she of the plum-colored lips, the epitome of ELA glamour. Patssi and I had known one another as children, and she had gone on to become an accomplished painter and photographer. With her were Harry Gamboa Jr., whose photographs I had recently seen in Mexico City at El Palacio de Bellas Artes—and Gronk. I knew of Gronk; I had heard all the stories about him. Here I was face to face with three founding members of the seminal Chicano art group ASCO (“nausea” in Spanish): a group of independent artists, part performance troupe, part urban legend, that worked collectively through live performance, video, film, photography, and the fine arts. These were Chicano artists who challenged the dominant cultural climate. It would be a couple of years before my spoken word was invited into the fold. I joined the traveling-circus sideshow that was ASCO in the ’80s. Gronk and I have remained close friends. We share a deep affection for cinema (high and low) and long walks downtown. I sat with Gronk at his studio on Spring Street in Downtown Los Angeles a few afternoons ago.
Gronk, images from Gronk's Brainflame, 2005. Digital animation. Score by Steve Laponsie, animation supervised by Hue Walker. Marisela Norte Everyone gets so up in arms when your site-specific work gets painted over, even though you agree to it. Gronk People like to hold onto life in many ways, but everything is transitory. This is it, right now. Youth doesn’t last forever, beauty doesn’t last forever, so appreciate it for the moment. MN And love it! G Take your memory with you. You own memory by taking it inside you at a particular moment in time. Instant Mural (1974), where I taped Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval to a wall with duct tape, was like that. MN You know, I’ve never seen the image of Herb taped to the wall, only Patssi. G Herb is on the other side. Patssi always gets asked: Why did you let them do that to you? Oppression affects everybody. It doesn’t know sexuality. Patssi’s on that wall, but in a short amount of time she breaks free of the red tape. Some people get trapped in their community, or a group, or a country, and are unable to leave it. But the bottom line here is: she breaks free. My Titanic series in the ’80s, which included a show at Manazar Gamboa’s temporary Galería Ocaso, was transitory. I created the inside of the Titanic collapsing inside the exhibition space. In inspiration and execution, my Hotel series of paintings and performances staged at different hotels—The Hotel Senator, The Grand Hotel—was also transitory. You never own a hotel; you check in and you check out. MN And guess what, someone else is going to be sleeping in that bed! G On another level you can see the issue of my murals being painted over as a tip of the hat, an homage to those who came before and whose pieces were whitewashed. [David Alfaro] Siqueiros came to the US— his America Tropical was whitewashed. [Diego] Rivera comes to do his big mural for the Rockefellers, and it has been whitewashed. In a sense, our recent history has been whitewashed; that temporality is in a lot of my work. Not only the murals, but you sense it in things like BrainFlame as well, the animated works I made for the hemispheric dome at the LodeStar Astronomy Center.
Oh look! A hummingbird. It came in at the beginning of our interview. It went to that painting over there because of the red! (Gronk’s Tormenta series—the infamous woman who turns her back on the world.) MN You have a pet now! G The BrainFlame animation has figures coming onto a landscape and discovering that they can alter nature by looking at it. Then this one creature goes up into the canal of the glass brain and experiences something totally different. It explodes. There’s no struggle; it’s not like a sense of loss, or a fear of death. People hold onto things because they fear death. For me it’s an acceptance of death. Once you realize that creatively, it liberates you. MN I imagine everything opens up. G It’s kind of like our journeys, those we take in life, the different things that we bump into, or hummingbirds flying around in the studio. MN I think he wants to stay here. (I vividly remember one of my very first meetings with Gronk in the early 1980s. We were all sitting at Philippe’s waiting to get our picture taken, and he was drawing a lobster on a paper napkin. Naturally, I asked him if he too loved the ’50s sci-fi classics. His smile told me everything I needed to know; from that moment on, we would share a language of movies. Today, Gronk hands me one of his latest DVD purchases, a double feature of The She-Creature (1956; “Hypnotized! Reincarnated as a monster from Hell!”) and Day the World Ended (1956), a Roger Corman classic that begins with “What you are about to see may never happen . . . but for this anxious age in which we live, it presents a fearsome warning. Our Story begins with . . . THE END!”) The cover art is great. Don’t tell me, another handsome but eccentric scientist gone completely mad. Godzilla! I remember watching it when I stayed home from school with chicken pox. They made a couple more after that, right? G They made a lot. The original Japanese version had some content and depth. It came out the same year as Seven Samurai, 1954. I was just going through this book on ’50s films before you got here. This Island Earth with Rex Reason, one of my favorite actors in the world. Just his name alone! (laughter) For me it’s an accumulation of sources from philosophy, Catholicism, art . . . and then mix that with ’50s sci-fi like The Killer Shrews. The absurdity of the situations in these films. When you’re a kid you believe it all, but I kind of still enjoy that aspect of being surprised. I prefer to watch the original Godzilla, which was more pointedly anti-atomic bomb, as it was made nine years after Hiroshima. I don’t really watch it so much as listen to it while I’m working and doing things in the studio. It’s constantly playing in the background. This giant radioactive monster destroying a whole country! MN Now that’s a word from my ’50s childhood to be sure—radioactivity. So the film works as your accompaniment while you make art? G It’s also memory. MN I can see why the Japanese version was never released in the US. G Most striking is the opening scene: a boat with all these men inside, and off in the distance you see two flashes of light. Then everybody is disintegrated. (Gronk begins to show me images from the DVD that will accompany his forthcoming book written by Max Benavidez and published by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center this spring. In some ways I am seeing parts of my own life flashing before me: the party at the Score Bar downtown 20 years ago; an image Gronk took of me standing next to a woman named She La La who claimed to be “the original Baby Dumpling”; Ruben Zamora dressed as Marie Antoinette. I remind Gronk that I was the one powdering Ruben’s back all night with Johnson’s baby powder.)
MN I remember that one, and meeting Martin Sheen there! I even did a reading in conjunction with that exhibition. (Gronk created wearable art for the nuclear age for a No Nukes event in 1982. Several artists created paper fashions.) G There you are, Miss Atom (and Mr. Shelter). Everyone who sees these photographs is just mesmerized; it’s a time capsule, and they think it was such a glamorous period. You’re such an actress—look at that! So much emotion. (Gronk is showing me several snapshots—me wearing a black tissue-paper dress created by Diane Gamboa for a weekend of performances at the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco in 1983, and scenes from my play EXITO for the big Art + Success exhibition. EXITO dealt with post-mortem success: a Spanish language noir play that became a play about the death of romance once I translated it into English.) MN My God, we were just kids! Look at that one: my bracelets, his camera and jacket, the old radiator in the room. It’s like a Godard movie. Look at the old telephone! G And the bottle of Coca-Cola (laughter). It’s so American! (He’s done it, I think: he’s captured a moment in my life. I see an image of my 27-year-old self in bed with a former lover. We are both using our forearms to cover our eyes from the invading camera. We do look like something out of the French New Wave or Confidential magazine circa 1956.) And look at that lamp. It’s a flying saucer connected to the headboard! MN Does he even know that this exists? It’s Two or Three Things I know About Her; it’s A Married Woman . . . Pardon me, make that unmarried woman please! Now, this photograph. (A triptych of photographs depicts two intoxicated men on the street in front of a downtown market, capturing their struggle just to stay standing.) I remember you sending me a postcard of these photos. Whatever happened to those two, I wonder? It’s interesting—I never knew you were carrying a camera all that time. Who knew? G Well, so many stories told the history, and I think it’s important that everyone has their voice.
First Supper After A Major Riot, 1974. Color photograph. From left: Patssi Valdez, Humberto Sandoval, Willie Herron III, and Gronk in the ASCO performance piece. Photo courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr. MN But what about the dinner party? I’ve walked across that traffic island a thousand times. What do you remember about it this afternoon? (The First Supper After a Major Riot performance 1974 has been documented with both photography and Super 8 film. Gronk, Patssi Valdez, Willie Herron, and Humberto Sandoval had an al fresco dinner at a table set up on a traffic island in one of the busiest intersections in East Los Angeles.) G Again, historically we all see it differently, but for me it was just a dinner party on Whittier Boulevard. We were all attempting to eat the meal as fast as we could before the police came. So we did. We set the whole thing up and then we were out of there! It documents a certain moment of time. It was done without asking for permission. That was one of ASCO’s principles, to just go out and do things. MN Now tell me, how good were you when it came to putting things away? Are your photos and documentation in any kind of order? I find that when I open up a box, there’s a flyer from a reading I did with Wanda Coleman, or one with Pleasant Gehman, next to a letter from a student I met after a reading, some old bills . . . . It’s just such a mess! G Well, that’s what my archives were like too. That’s why I’m going through them now, putting everything in plastic bins. MN My God, you saved all the postcards! I burned a lot of letters from someone.
G No! MN Yes, I only kept the one with the apology. (laughter) (It’s a relatively quiet afternoon at Gronk’s studio. There are some traffic sounds outside, what Gronk refers to as the ocean, an occasional door slamming, but for the most part it’s a tranquil setting where two friends sit together sifting through old photographs and drawings, sipping coffee, and listening to Dawn Upshaw singing Yo Soy La Libertad (I Am Freedom) from the Peter Sellars production of Ainadamar. I realize that I am completely content at this moment. About a year ago I was walking back from a long lunch with Gronk at Café Angelique on Spring Street. We walked by a corner store downtown that reminded me of the old miscelanias (variety stores) in Mexico. The display window had everything: battery-operated toy police cars, bamboo plants, ladies’ bras, umbrellas, soccer balls, and one item that really caught my eye—a pair of silver sandals for a little girl. I could only think of the hundreds of little girls accompanying their parents on shopping trips downtown. How many would be as mesmerized as I was by this little pair of silver shoes. I ended up buying them for Gronk. During one studio visit they were prominently displayed on top of his computer monitor. Much later they became part of an installation he did for the 727 Gallery.) There they are! The little silver sandals! G They’re something most people might disregard or think is not important, and here they end up in the history books! They were a very important component of the installation I called Cheap Construction. They revealed what was missing: the little girl. MN That’s a cue. Ladies and Gentlemen, Bunny Lake is Missing . . . . G Exactly. Here is a culture that once existed and is no longer here. Look at downtown, look at the neighborhood and all of the construction going up around here. Who is being displaced? MN Yes, I passed the latest Doggie Boutique on my way down here: organic shampoos for your dog or cat, plush purple doggie beds, little rhinestone collars, and baby tees—and there were two men sleeping on the sidewalk right outside the door. G That’s what I’m saying. MN Well, Gronk, I’m so excited about your new book! But I feel like there should be more. G Well, other people are interested, like Ondine and Ramon, Colin from UCLA. (The New Wave of academics in and around Los Angeles currently writing about ASCO.) They all want to do their interpretation. This book is what they will leap off from. It’s the tip of the iceberg, as it were. They can gather more stories that ask— MN —the other questions. G And also offer different interpretations. A lot of the imagery in the book is presented chronologically. It tries to capture as much as possible. People call me a painter, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Other aspects of what I do perhaps lead to the paintings. It will have more than just one point of view. Also, several of the people in the book have passed away. This is what happens in life when you revisit your past—that Pandora’s Box opens up. Those memories where you think, Do I really want to go there? But there are also people in my life who have influenced my work. One example is those silver shoes; they were so necessary to the piece, the missing fragment! That day we spent together something happened; it’s the glue that holds the piece together. That’s what I enjoy the most, the assembling of things, putting bits and pieces together. I also enjoy taking them apart. But when it all comes together, it’s food for thought for the next piece.
You noticed the two men in the black-and-white photographs I took, falling and collapsing as they try to brace themselves. And here you see, some 30 years later, an image of the two women from Ainadamar, holding themselves up against a wall. (Gronk created the sets for Peter Sellars’s production of Ainadamar, which is based on the poet Federico García Lorca’s life and death during the Spanish Civil War. The place where Lorca was executed is called Ainadamar or Fountain of Tears.)
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2863/gronk
Journal drawing, 2000. MN I’m looking at your drawings over on the wall, and I’m guessing that those are your journals; that’s your literature!
G My diary. These drawing books anchor me in many ways as an artist. Just to jot down a note on a napkin, in a book, wherever: an observation, a word, a phrase you overheard, a fragment, just like the man you recorded on the way down here. (Gronk is referring to the man who dances outside Clifton’s Cafeteria on 7th and Broadway. He dances to the music, whatever it may be—reggaeton, cumbia, salsa, banda—that comes out of the tiny sliver of a record store next to Clifton’s. Dances and growls at the onlookers that pass him by.) Whatever it is, it’s something that I don’t want to forget. So I just jot it down and it might not make any sense at that moment in time, but perhaps later on it will come up in something. That’s what is constant. One painting or one work of art for me is like one letter in my alphabet. You have to keep several letters to even form a word, let alone a sentence, let alone your whole story. One of the discoveries I made going through the archive (Gronk’s personal archive consists of photographs, small drawings, letters, poems, found objects, and well over 1,000 notebooks of drawings.) is that a lot of what I write is personal notes. My writing makes comparisons to film, literature, philosophy, all kinds of things that I am intrigued by. I just completed a series of monoprints with Francesco Siqueiros at El Nopal Press. I noticed certain recurring shapes or forms that refer back to what I had been reading or connections to things in the past. I’m calling the series Swamp Diamonds, for that love I have from my past for the B-movie; those particular films that set your life ablaze when you were a child. So it’s biographical but I also mix up Day the World Ended with Attack of the Crab Monsters and Roger Corman’s Swamp Women, and then combine that with Greek mythology, the Bible, all of these different stories, because that’s kind of what I am in many ways—mixed up. MN Greek mythology—it draws you, doesn’t it? I always thought that Swamp Diamonds was a slangy reference to female prisoners, jailbirds if you will, but no, they were actually out looking for diamonds in a swamp! G Yes. I think of it as both. The magic of putting two words together that don’t necessarily go together, it’s just how I found the words fascinating slippers and built a whole show around them. A shoe store had gone out of business, but the words fascinating slippers were still legible in front of the building, even after the letters had been removed. The dirt and grime of downtown Los Angeles left their outline. So then you take something from the streets and mix it up; it can be very jarring, but I like the ability to utilize that information. It’s like ancient stories that are still being told. For me, being an outsider within Catholicism in East LA, it’s part of the research that I mix with autobiography. I see it all as something so theatrical and beautiful at the same time. MN I take it no one ever made you go to church? G No, I did it on my own because I wanted to be a good Catholic like all the other kids. I felt like I was being left out, so I went to see what it was all about. MN I just felt envious of the kids with ashes on their foreheads. G They had the mark! Yes, that ritual aspect was intriguing, the notion of saints, of pain and sorrow. It still filters into many things you see today, bridging into work that I do. It’s what we talked about: You are where you live, in many respects. But I am not a junkie or a crack addict! But those kinds of things also filter into the work: the poverty that exists here; the way cultures are now butting up against each other and having to deal with one another . . . and all of those things perhaps will fade away forever. That kind of information is what I’m trying to gather and in some way document by putting it in my artwork. I’m an observer of my time, and I share my observations. That for me is the greatest job of an artist, the ability to share. Even going back in time to ASCO and pre-ASCO, it was always interesting to mix with other people in a way that you could learn from that experience. Then, of course, time changes you and you move on to other things. The work shifts, but those memories still enter into the picture.
Black and White Mural/Muralists, 1979. From left: Willie Herron III and Gronk. Photograph courtesy of arry Gamboa Jr. MN Patssi made a comment about you—something about the way you dressed living in East Los Angeles, and yet you were never murdered! G (laughter) That’s something that a whole younger generation can’t fathom, because they have so many liberties now. MN The mantra now seems to be, I want to be different just like you! (I remember a time when I was terrified to come to this building. But sitting here with Gronk, with this little breeze coming in, and the curtain fluttering, that piece of the piano propped up next to a 14-foot image of Tormenta, the hummingbird that came to call . . . movies from Aventurera to Band of Outsiders, a library of images to go through. It’s all here.) G It’s a different procedure when I work by myself in the studio than when I work on projects with groups of people or go on site to do an installation. When I’m working inside my studio, it’s like I’m speaking in tongues; I’m not quite sure of what I’m doing. Things are in a sense being channeled from many different sources. Time for me is really important, to give some distance to it and then I can take a look at what I’ve done. Does this piece create a sense of harmony? Does it have a flow, and does this speak about the materials that I’m using? Does it also have something for the eye to push and pull, to give and take? Those are some of the issues I attempt to deal with when I’m looking at what it is that I do. I get a lot of requests for work on canvas, but there are times when I’m not working on canvas. Maybe I’m working on smaller pieces, or in diary form, or maybe I’m just on the computer. I’m not the kind of painter who’s constantly in front of the canvas, who wakes up every morning and says, I gotta go create. It doesn’t quite work like that for me. It’s an accumulation of things that I need to see or relive, something from the ’50s like Godzilla
that becomes my time machine. It transports me to a more innocent worldview, and in hearing a language that I’m not quite familiar with in the background—other things enter into me.
Gronk on the set for Ainadamar, 2005. Photograph by Bob Godwin. Reproduced by permission of the Santa Fe Opera. MN Now, how about the set design work? G My set design came about some time ago. Caca-Roaches Have No Friends was one of my earliest performance pieces, and I did all of the sets for it. I did sets for a lot of the ASCO performances in the ’70s and ’80s, and for the play Striptease; every time it was restaged, the set was slightly different. MN Just because? G Each site was different, and the design was done on site. Most of them were destroyed once the performance was over; that was in keeping with the on-site installations I was also doing at the time. When I did Morning Becomes Electricity at the Temporary Contemporary in downtown Los Angeles, we staged it in front of one of my paintings. In the piece I am being taken to court and have to answer to whether an artist has any responsibility for his creations. A lot of my pieces took the witness stand and said that they were ugly and didn’t want to exist. The only one that was sensitive to me, as the artist, was Tormenta. That kind of gives you an idea of how I began doing set design. MN And then you went on to do several productions for other theater companies, right? G In 1989 I was asked to do a play, Stone Wedding, at the Los Angeles Theater Center. They said, “This play is right up your alley, it’s all magical realism.” I immediately thought, Oh no! (laughter) I told them that I’d like to read the script. It was the worst play that I’d ever read in my life! That’s why I wanted to do it.
MN Because? G There was nothing redeemable about the production. I designed a Garden of Sorrows of green surfboards stuck inside terra cotta planters. What’s more sorrowful than six surfboards that will never see the ocean? They’ve lost their purpose in life. The play was a critical disaster, but the set got really good reviews! Right after that, other theater companies started calling me and asking me to do their sets. East West Players—the oldest Asian theatrical company in the United States—its director, Nobu McCarthy, asked me to do the sets for The Chairman’s Wife, a play about Mao’s wife. MN Did you know much about her prior to that? G Only what was popular reading—the Gang of Four. But here was the chance to dig a little deeper and really research, which is the part I like the most about the work. I did a huge set that had Chinese ideograms. The advisors saw my Chinese calligraphy and started whispering to one another. I thought, Oh, a faux pas! But they asked how I learned to do the Chinese calligraphy so well. The way you make them with that one stroke, they commented. I told them I learned it from a spray can; it’s all in one continuous line, so it’s kind of the same method. The play goes all the way up to the time of Tiananmen Square, so I used bicycles that looked as if they had been run over by tanks. Those bicycles were a perfect metaphor. MN How about your work with Peter Sellars? I used to see him waiting for the bus; he’s another nondriver. G In the ’90s I was always running into Peter Sellars in different cities, but there was one time in Madison, Wisconsin where he was giving a lecture and I was in the audience. He came running up to me afterward and said, “One day we’re going to work together!” So one night I got a phone call from him. He was doing Genet’s The Screens and did I want to do all of the screens and what did I know about Genet? I had just finished reading the bio on Genet. The Northridge earthquake had recently hit and everything had come crashing down in my studio; I told him that there was this huge crack on the wall that I’d been referring to as Genet’s Crack. Peter said, “You’re perfect for the show!” MN And now I’m sitting here reading the credits on the compact disc for Ainadamar, the last production you worked on with Peter. Gronk, this is exciting—hello Dawn Upshaw, Henry D. Huang, and Osvaldo Golijov! G I went to the Santa Fe opera house about a month in advance to begin the work on Ainadamar. There was no crew or assistants; it would all be done by one hand. Peter came when I was in my last couple of days of painting. He flew in from Paris or Vienna, came in and sat in the set for about four hours, and the next morning he flew back to Europe. The set is based on the notion of a seed. I did a landscape, but under the ground, so you can see roots, seeds, pods, body parts, fragments, bits and pieces of things. Lorca was killed by the Fascists in the early stages of his life. Yet his poetry, his ideals are still germinating and growing. Doing the sets renewed me and got me out of the commercial art arena. It was a good journey, to take off, to read, to do the research, to take the time and really understand what it is that I do as an artist. It was an important step for me. MN That’s music to these ears. It’s interesting how much my job gets in the way of my work. G The hardest thing these days is to make something that’s beautiful; it’s easy to make ugly art. I think it takes a lot more talent to make something beautiful. Beauty to me is when you show something to someone that they’ve never seen before. That’s what a great work of art does; it shows you something that you didn’t know existed.
—Marisela Norte is an East Los Angeles-based writer whose work has appeared in many publications, including Rolling Stone, Interview, and Chicana Art. Norte has performed her work throughout the US and internationally, most recently at the Tate Modern in London. She is currently working on Strangers on the Same Train of Thought, a collection of transit prose.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art 5905 Wilshire Boulevard 323-857-6000 Los Angeles Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 September 4-December 4, 2011 Creating art by any means necessary, while often using their bodies and guerilla tactics, Asco artists merged activism and performance and, in the process, pushed the boundaries of Chicano art. Asco (19721987) began as a tight-knit core group of artists from East Los Angeles — including Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez — often in collaboration with Humberto Sandoval. They took the name Asco from the forceful word for disgust and nausea in Spanish and, through performance, public art, and multimedia, responded to the turbulent sociopolitical period — both in Los Angeles and a larger international context. Gamboa coined the turn-of-phrase, “elite of the obscure,” to describe the Asco cast of characters, a “collection of the anonymous, the undocumented, and selected barrio stars.” Together, they made up a parallel, alternative construction of glamour, and it suggests that Asco recognized the disadvantages of marginalization but also found inspiration in that underground status. Throughout its history, Asco produced a wildly creative and sometimes elusive body of work that ran parallel to known developments in the contemporary art world, often countering it or verging off-course in unexpected and sometimes prophetic ways.
This first major retrospective of Asco art is arranged chronologically and provides a broad synthesis of the numerous conceptual underpinnings of the group, including experimentation and collaboration; the body engaged with the city; and a reimagining of media culture. Urban Insurgents Asco’s members were keenly aware of how public policies and urban planning could create conditions of disparity and even segregation — geographically and economically. The works in this gallery depict the group’s involvement in various actions and staged photographs on the streets of urban Los Angeles. Asco participated in a number of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations in East L.A. that were initiated by the Chicano cultural art space, Self Help Graphics. The artists’ resistance to and reimagination of accepted cultural symbolism is evident in the photographs taken by Seymour Rosen and Ricardo Valverde. Also present in this gallery are photographs of actions that present Asco’s involvement in and critical response to muralism. In the group’s Walking Mural performance (1972), a mural becomes so disenchanted with its immobility and environment that it breaks free from its wall. Asco engaged with muralism through experimentation both in form and content. In •Walking Mural•, •Instant Mural• (1974), and in their various Dia de los Muertos performances, the Asco artists expanded the medium to make it mobile and performative, merging muralism with conceptual art. Asco cannibalized the mediums of graffiti, muralism, and later film to stage movement and possibility in exchange for static, iconic, and mythical representations. No Movies —Rejecting the reel, projecting the real The No Movie was Asco’s signature invented medium: cinema by other means. A conceptual performance that invokes cinematic codes but is created for a still camera, the No Movie is a staged event recorded without motion picture technology in which artists play the parts of cinema stars. The resultant images are then disseminated as stills from “authentic” Chicano motion pictures. As noncelluloid forms of cinematic expression, No Movies envision the possibility of Chicanos starring in and producing a wide variety of Hollywood films while simultaneously highlighting their relative invisibility. Essentially, Asco created images to advertise films that had no other existence, and the imagery was circulated in a variety of inventive and innovative ways. No Movies were distributed to local and national media outlets, including film distributors, and reached an international audience through mail art circuits. Asco’s extravagant stylizations and effective masquerades were noted early on by art critic Eduardo Flaco. In one of the earliest art reviews of Asco’s work, Flaco singled out the early group show, Chicanismo en el Arte, which was held at LACMA in 1975. Writing on the No Movies presented as slide projections in the gallery, Flaco explained, “The slides also document a number of studio photo-works on an incredible variety of images and subjects, all executed in [Asco’s] flamboyant style that combines elements of performance, theater, conceptual documentation, and an aura of Rock Stardom.” Jerry Dreva and Gronk recognized their numerous shared affinities, attractions, and connections immediately when they met in 1973. Both artists were founding members of art groups and actively involved in mail art, and they would meet at Butch Gardens, a gay bar in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. This relationship, mediated by correspondence art, was significant in the development of Gronk’s expanding aesthetic language, and it had a tremendous influence on the Asco group. The social and aesthetic exchanges between Gronk and Dreva culminated in the exhibition, Dreva/Gronk 68-78: Ten Years of Art/Life at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 1978. Just as mail art was born from a system of communication, the Dreva/Gronk exhibition focused explicitly on the communicational aspects of both art production and circulation; in this way, the exhibit presented communication as a conceptual framework and creative act. The art/life premise, Gronk explained, “involved making our lives as important as the objects we would create,” a commitment he learned from Dreva. Teddy Sandoval, connected to the scene and the milieu, was the artist chiefly responsible for conceptualizing and creating Butch Gardens, a space for a community of gay artists in the early 1980s
named after the aforementioned gay bar. Sandoval’s paintings, collages, and later ceramics involved a play with Mexican iconography and Latino popular culture inflected with camp and humor. In their performance collaborations, Gronk and Sandoval produced an early satire of the North American art world’s “discovery” and celebration of Frida Kahlo, emphasizing the Mexican surrealist’s proclivity for bending codes of gender and sexuality. Art/Life: Expanded Collaborations and Networks Jerry Dreva and Gronk recognized their numerous shared affinities, attractions, and connections immediately when they met in 1973. Both artists were founding members of art groups and actively involved in mail art, and they would meet at Butch Gardens, a gay bar in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. This relationship, mediated by correspondence art, was significant in the development of Gronk’s expanding aesthetic language, and it had a tremendous influence on the Asco group. The social and aesthetic exchanges between Gronk and Dreva culminated in the exhibition, Dreva/Gronk 68-78: Ten Years of Art/Life at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 1978. Just as mail art was born from a system of communication, the Dreva/Gronk exhibition focused explicitly on the communicational aspects of both art production and circulation; in this way, the exhibit presented communication as a conceptual framework and creative act. The art/life premise, Gronk explained, “involved making our lives as important as the objects we would create,” a commitment he learned from Dreva. Teddy Sandoval, connected to the scene and the milieu, was the artist chiefly responsible for conceptualizing and creating Butch Gardens, a space for a community of gay artists in the early 1980s named after the aforementioned gay bar. Sandoval’s paintings, collages, and later ceramics involved a play with Mexican iconography and Latino popular culture inflected with camp and humor. In their performance collaborations, Gronk and Sandoval produced an early satire of the North American art world’s “discovery” and celebration of Frida Kahlo, emphasizing the Mexican surrealist’s proclivity for bending codes of gender and sexuality. 1980s Generation Asco’s spontaneous actions of the early 1970s were by the end of the decade modified into scripted ensemble pieces highlighting the interdisciplinary interests and talents of their participants. During this time, the ensemble changed often, restructuring in response to a commission or invitation that came from a variety of sources, including journals, university museums, and cultural centers. Asco’s 1980s projects often were developed as star vehicles for prospective recruits, and reflected their respective looks, styles, talents, and skills. It was a period of significant reorientation in performance art: from body- and action-oriented works to staged and scripted performances. The increasing institutionalization of performance made it more dependent on public funding and commercial development at the very moment when battles over the legitimacy of public funding for the arts, and particularly performance, were blazing. Just as the field of performance was undergoing professionalization and consolidation (tendencies associated with the Reagan-era 1980s), the careers of the Asco artists also were moving in different directions and becoming increasingly professionalized. Asco’s collaborations with artists and participants were never static and defined but rather fluid opportunities for personal and aesthetic exchange. As the artist group contracted and expanded through the late 1970s and ’80s, it drew from a range of artistic approaches. The group remained active until 1987. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 19721987, the first retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco (1972-1987), co-organized with Williams College Museum of Art. Geographically and culturally segregated from the still-nascent Los Angeles contemporary art scene and aesthetically at odds with the emerging Chicano art movement, Asco members united to explore and exploit the unlimited media of the conceptual. Creating art by any means necessary — often using their bodies and guerilla tactics — Asco merged activism and performance and, in doing so, pushed the boundaries of what Chicano art might encompass. Asco: Elite of the Obscure includes nearly 150 artworks, featuring video, sculpture, painting, performance ephemera and documentation, collage, correspondence
art, photography (including their signature No Movies, or invented film stills), and a series of works commissioned on occasion of the exhibition. Asco: Elite of the Obscure was organized by Rita Gonzalez, LACMA’s curator of contemporary art, and C. Ondine Chavoya, Williams College associate professor of art and Latina/o studies. The exhibition is also a part of Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, bringing together more than 60 cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. “This is the first opportunity to expose the nearly 15-year output of this important yet underrated art group,” said Gonzalez. “Asco’s retrospective will include works by the artists and an extended network of collaborators, many of which have not been seen since they were produced.” “The exhibition will provide revelations and surprises for both those who are familiar with Asco’s work, as well as those just discovering it,” said Chavoya. The core team of artists, Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III, Harry Gamboa, Jr., and Patssi Valdez, met in and around Garfield High School in East Los Angeles in the late 1960s.The emerging artists took the name Asco from the Spanish word for disgust or nausea, and set about expressing this shared feeling through performance, public art, and multimedia in response to turbulent socio-political issues in Los Angeles, and in dialogue with a larger international context. Asco eventually expanded to include a larger group of artists and performers; and the exhibition will highlight the contributions of the group’s many participants and collaborators including Teddy Sandoval and Jerry Dreva, among others. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Asco developed a sophisticated body of work attentive to the specific neighborhoods of Los Angeles and, in particular, its urban Chicano barrios. Their work circulated more as rumor than as a documented historical account, due in part to the group’s interest in hit-and-run tactics, but even more so due to their location outside of the designated geographic centers of conceptual art production. However, the group eventually inserted themselves into a broader circuit as they became engaged with an international cast of artists involved in correspondence art. http://arttattler.com/archiveasco.html