Chaz Bojorquez: Taking "Old School" Further by Rocio Aranda

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Charles Bojorquez Taking “Old School” Further

Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

In the painting titled Placa, former graffiti writer Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez lists the names of people who have been significant in his life. The artist creates a personal roll call, a kind of metaphoric self-portrait of himself and his community, in square, brushstroked letters that at first impression appear to be abstract pattern on a blue-gray background. The names start at the upper left of the nearly seven-foot-wide canvas with CHINGASO, BLADES (the name of his girlfriend), and KIKI. They conclude at the lower right with his own name and then LARRY, SNOW, AÑO, LOCO, and 1980 on the bottom line. Bojorquez, who was born in Los Angeles in 1949, wrote his tag across city walls throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. He has described this work, made with fine art materials and donated to a museum, as his mantra painting, one that he created to acknowledge in a different realm the strength he had been given through the support of those he names. As the artist notes, placas, or plaques, are the “public announcements” of the streets.1 In this system of public address, the placa announces loyalty, unity, presence, group identification, demarcation of space, territoriality, and many other concepts. But Bojorquez’s easel painting is not merely a group of names or an assertion of urban identity. Through medium, format, technique, and placement, these acrylic letters also participate in the art-historical debates about the legacy of modernism in late-twentieth-century painting and about the influence of movements ranging from pop and abstract expressionism in the United States to informalism in Spain. The informalists’ interest in abstracted objects, like city walls and the markings they retain over time, is renewed in Borjoquez’s work. As a young art student, Bojorquez had a distaste for movements like pop, minimalism, and the early conceptual assemblage of the late 1960s. But these “old school” artistic trends have nevertheless marked his expression. Evoking daily Chicano life through Cholo-style graffiti letterings rooted in the landscape of the city streets, Bojorquez references pop art’s interest in mundane objects. Taking these hand-scrawled, ever-present signs and adapting them to canvas, the artist asks us to reconsider both the meaning and function represented by these letters. The purposeful illegibility of the words is also adapted from the real texts, which are written in a style germane to West Coast graffiti. The work’s spare simplicity, reminiscent of minimalism, and emphasis on pattern render the words more significant as marks on the surface of a painting—a formal statement. Finally, it also functions conceptually, exploring a relationship between the text as a sign with multiple underlying meanings. This act of name writing, of underscoring a presence and a being, is part of growing up in many urban neighborhoods. As a ritualized act, it becomes part of a larger system

Fall 2004

Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez, Placa/Roll Call, 1980. Acrylic, 68 ¼ x 83 ⅛ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of the artist

of communication in which art plays an increasingly important role. What is it that the artist has created in this work—awareness, social thought, philosophical dissonance? The original writing on the city wall and, indeed, the entire history of graffiti have already endowed its subject matter with a pedigree. L.A.-style graffiti is specifically a group-based naming project, and letters are generally painted in capitals with black paint and in the style known as Cholo—a style that has evolved from the history of Chicano culture.2 Bojorquez thus alludes to a dialogue with the original text, its writers, and its varied audiences. The faithful replication of the real object—the text from city streets—is essential to the meaning of the painting on canvas, which becomes about landscape, the people referenced, and the history of these writings. By making a painting on canvas, Bojorquez potentially engages different audiences. He creates an opportunity for them to encounter, in an institutional setting, a text that is largely about unsanctioned, noninstitutionalized cultural practices that mark cultural boundaries. The artist’s decisions also serve to undo the immobility of the original text, which is attached to a city wall. By its transformation

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from a street narrative to the subject of a work of art, the text circulates in a new world, the art system, and all that is engaged in that system. Exploring the relationship between language, text, and meaning, Bojorquez’s Placa/Roll Call is instructive. This painting differs from other works by the artist in that there is no replication of Aztec or Mayan stone sculpture, no overlay of calligraphy (Bojorquez has traveled the world, studying writing systems)—nothing but the stylized lettering against the neutral, wall-like background. Art historically, Bojorquez’s work makes reference to allover abstract painting in the way that the text takes up the entire picture plane. Filling this space to the very edges, the text becomes not only the signifying subject but also the technique of the work and the object—its physical presence. The re-presentation of a real text—which exists in time and space as a marker of authority, authenticity, and existence—for a different audience requires a reconsideration of its meaning. It underscores the act of “conversing” through the original wall text and, subsequently, through the painting. The wall text and the painting participate in a network of communication that is part of contemporary existence. Jean-François Lyotard’s explanation of the various communication circuits used by languages and speakers is significant to a reading of Bojorquez’s work: A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee or referent. Lyotard adds that this message system encourages movement “to the extent that it combats its own entropy; the novelty of an unexpected ‘move’ with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes.”3 Acknowledging the performative act associated with graffiti writing helps us to see this statement as part of a larger movement—a language game that is played across the urban landscape. Social conditions, relations, and expectations all play into this conversation that is ciphered across the walls of the urban neighborhood. Members of one group make the first move by placing their names at the border of their territory and a neighboring group responds in kind, with its own list. Messages pass across these “nodal points” of communication—the barrio walls—and act on senders, addressees, and referents, instigating the creation of new messages by new senders for other addressees. As the artist has stated, “a majority of my paintings are done on canvas, but painted to represent concrete (resembling a bridge or a wall along the Los Angeles freeway). On these stained, sooty skins, I investigate the inner symbology of street writings.”4 Bojorquez’s reference to the symbology of street writing underscores the issue of the text as a sign, a marker of language, of social reality, of power relations, and the role of the individual. By participating in this exchange of language, the written conversation serves not only to mark territory and witness existence but also to engage in a larger system of representation. The letters mark identities associated with each name, underscoring their real presence. The painting then reinscribes this discourse in the context of the art object. In terms of the institutionalization of art, this work also presents an interesting case. For example, if we understand legitimized or official systems of representation to be meaningful in relation to one another, how can graffiti function in terms of the system of art and its institutionalization? Its meaning and use are both drastically changed by being represented

Fall 2004

Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez in his Los Angeles studio with Graffiti Mandala in 1999

on canvas. It is further manipulated by being associated with the history of aesthetic production. As an art object, as the carrier of meaning for the art object, the text is fundamentally changed, as is the act that it references. That is, graffiti scrawled on an urban wall is reconfigured as an object of contemplation on a wall that is institutionalized within the system of art, museums, government subsidization, and a host of other legitimizing factors. As a cultural object, this painting thus reconsiders several things. It circumscribes real and imagined boundaries, demarcations created by economic shifts, changes in public policy, and, ultimately, cultural policy. Its location within the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection underscores the advantages of the mobility—literal and metaphoric— afforded to a fixed text that is redesignated as a work of art. For me, Bojorquez’s painting is particularly successful because it acknowledges its place within the history of aesthetic production, because it records the specificity of one person’s narrative, and because, stylistically, it refers to an entirely American cultural phenomenon. The work evokes a part of the history of American popular culture in an inventive form. The lettering that fills the canvas is the artist’s formal gesture that also becomes a social gesture.

Notes

Photo Credit 91, Photo by Scandalous

Charles “CHAZ” Bojorquez, “Los Angeles ‘CHOLO’ Style Graffiti Art,” www.graffitiverite.com/ cb-cholowriting.htm; April 2004.

This style of writing has been documented in Jerry Romotsky and Sally Romotsky, Los Angeles Barrio Calligraphy (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1976).

Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15.

Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez, “Charles ‘Chaz’ Bojorquez,” http://latinoartcommunity.org/community/ ChicArt/ArtistDir/ChaBoj.html; April 2004.

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