Asco and the Politics of Revulsion case study

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Asco and the Politics of Revulsion
C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
Asco (Nausea):
1. a feeling of sickness at the stomach,
with an impulse to vomit
2. disgust; loathing3. Gronk, Patssi, Gamboa, Herron
4. Collaborations 1972 thru 1976
-Ha r ry Ga m boa, J r. a n d Gron k,
“Interview: Gronk and Gamboa”
Q: How did the word “ASCO” [emerge],
how was it coined?
Gronk: That was generally the [re]action
to a lot of the work that we were doing,
when we first started doing work, is
people would say, refer to our work as
giving them, “Uuhllhh!” asco. So we
said, “That’s a nice title,”so we applied it
PLATE 008 ASCO, From the Slasher series, 1975, (detail) black and white
photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center (CSRC) Library
to ourselves. A lot of the stuff early on was like real bloody and used a lot of different
things, like dead birds and bones, and anything we could get our hands on. So the
reaction by the community, or by different people that would see the work, was that
it was giving them nausea. So we liked the word.
Q: The name stuck?
Gronk: The name stuck.
Q: Does it mean anything different now?
Gronk: No, it’s probably the vomit has just refined itself a little.
-Interview with Asco, CAL/FAS, 1983
Throughout their 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.
Asco (PLATE 010> began in 1972 as a tight-knit group of artists from East Los Angeles
composed of Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie F. Herron Ill, and Patssi Valdez, with frequent participation from Humberto Sandoval. Taking their name from the Spanish
word for disgust and nausea with the impulse to vomit, Asco set about through performance, public art, and multimedia to respond to their experience of the turbulent
socio-political situation both in Los Angeles and in the broader international context
(PLATE 009). They remained active until 1987, contracting and expanding to include
artists and performers such as Eddie Ayala, Robert Beltran, Max Benavidez, James
Bucalo, Barbara Carrasco, Sean Carrillo, Ta loo Carrillo, Teresa Covarrubias, Sylvia
Delgado, Jerry Dreva, Guillermo (Billy) Estrada, Consuelo Flores, Maria Elena Gaitan,
Diane Gamboa, Karen Gaboa, Linda Gamboa, Ruben Garcia, Juan Garza, Kevin Gunn,
Victor Herrera-Lutz, Cindy Herron, Sylvia Hidalgo, Terry Holguin, Robert Legorreta
(Cyclona), Adam Leventhal, Daniel J. Martinez, Mundo Meza, Roberto Gil de Montes,
Armando Norte, Marisela Norte, Lorraine Ordaz, Alfonso Pando, Raymond “Ray Red”
Rodriguez, Betty Salas, Teddy Sandoval, Debra Taren, Alfonso Trejo, Gerardo
Velasquez, Daniel Villareal, Virginia Villegas, Dianne Vozoff, Kate Vozoff, Rene Yanez,
PLATE 009
ART EXHIBIT1SALE
RECEPTION
UN.-NOV 5,1972-7:30p.11.
IECNICANO RT CENTtl
NITTI!
vo l GAGE ST. EAST LA.
TWO WEEK
ENGAGEMENT
5 TNIU 19, 1972
Marisa Zains, and Ruben Zamora, some
of whom stayed with the group for a
year or longer, while others participated
for one performance or video project.
PLATE 010
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.Ondlne Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
39
PLATE 009 HARRY GAMBOA, JR., GRONK, AND WILLIE F. HERRON Ill, Ahora lo Veras exhibition
announcement mock-up, 1972, ink on paper with vinyl lettering on board. Courtesy of the Department of
Special Collections, Stanford University
PLATE 010 HARRY GAMBOA, JR., Asco, 1972, color photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Juan Garza
Linguistic Origins
Although the first formalized iteration of “Asco” to designate the group’s activities
was in 1974 at Self-Help Graphics, when it was used as the title for an exhibition,1 the
meanings and the resonance of the term precede this, being found in the shared
experiences and views that brought the artists together. In a 1969 college admissions
statement, Harry Gamboa, Jr. reflected on his active participation and leadership role
in the Chicano student movement and linked his political activism to the sentiment
of disgust. At the age of eighteen, Gamboa wrote, “Last year at this time I was very
active in the affairs of my community. I was deeply bothered and disgusted with the
condition of my community and of the Mexican American people. I learned to distrust
and dislike everything that was pro-establishment.”2 Gamboa’s narrative links his
politicization with a recognition that disgust can both set the terms for and propel
activism and a critical outlook.
The group found their shared purpose in depicting and reflecting the revulsion
they felt about the effect of cataclysmic geopolitical events on their experience of
local realities. The art historian Arthur C. Danto has described the generational attitude
or mentalite of the Vietnam war period as an era of revulsion,3 a response echoed
by Gronk who related his sensation of asco to the effects of the war, and contextualized the word as a response to the war. As Gronk recalls, “a lot of our friends were
coming back in body bags and were dying, and we were seeing a whole generation come
back that weren’t alive anymore. And in a sense that gave us nausea …. that is Asco,
in a way.”4 The disparity between the overrepresentation of Chicanos in the war in
Southeast Asia and their underrepresentation in the arenas of politics and media
culture further directed Asco’s attention and scrutiny to the role of the mass media.
This era of revulsion led many people to seek a new vocabulary for their
demands and opposition, shaped through a generational understanding of the growing importance of media, the impact of public mobilization, and curious new modes
drawn from Happenings and other spontaneous “be-ins.” This was particularly the
case for the young East Los Angeles teenagers in the late 1960s who would come
together under the rubric of Asco in the 1970s. The initial cast of Asco grew up under
the spell of television, fathoming its conformist agenda as well its potential for subversive offerings. For the first time in history, the experience of war became personal
and domestic, it was brought into American homes, it became a “living room war.”
40
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandRltaGonzalez
PLATEOll
As art historian Carrie Lambert Beatty writes in relation to New York performance
culture in the 1960s, there is an argument to be made that the artistic events that this
era of revulsion spawned happened not in an avant-garde bubble but were unquestionably implicated by and embedded in a broader media culture.5 In East Los Angeles,
the reflections and refractions of this era of revulsion take on related yet distinct
textures of regional and cultural specificity, particularly those conditions that Gamboa
came to recognize as “disgusting” in his Eastside community.
On numerous occasions and in different ways, Gamboa, Gronk, Herron, and
Valdez have each described how the name Asco acknowledges the response that their
street actions and gallery work provoked, as well as the reactions engendered by
their defiant, outrageous self-presentation of style and attitude in the public realm
(PLATE 011). Gamboa, for example, locates it at the level of a multi-layered reception:
“The name Asco … came from people’s reactions to us personally … [and] to the quality
of the work which dealt with violence and themes of depression …. [E]veryone thought
41
PLATE 011 RICARDO VALVERDE, Asco Days of the Dead Performance, Termltesy Guerrero, 1975,
gelatin silver print. Courtesy of Esperanza Valverde and Christopher J. Valverde
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandR/taGonza/ez
it [Ascol was the name of the group, and we decided to adopt it.”6 Gronk describes how
the significance of the word to designate the group functioned and was incorporated
into their work: “We decided to go under the name Asco and utilize that as part of
the stuff we were producing at the time.”7 The literal and associative meanings of the
word were effectively exploited in conceiving of the content, method of production,
and presentation of the work.
The Asco artists were simultaneously “attracted and appalled by the glitter
and gangrene of urban reality.”8 (PLATE 012> While this concept was generally communicated through (or understood in the context of) the group’s numerous street actions
and interventions, it can also be perceived in many of the more intimate and lesserknown works, including projects developed while working together on Regeneraci6n.
Harry Gamboa, Jr. became editor in 1971, and enlisted Gronk, Herron, and Valdez
to produce art for the journal, which they did through 1975, ostensibly under the guise
of Chicano cultural and political nationalism. Their pen-and-ink illustrations seldom
reference the articles they are printed alongside. Overall, their imagery evokes spatial
or emotional confinement; every available spot is filled, creating a sense of disorienting randomness and aggressive claustrophobia. Sometimes extremely dark, the images
are subtly yet erotically charged and often suggest gender ambiguity and inversion.
These somber, ethereal, and psychedelic appeals to the uncanny provide a stark contrast to the Social Realist impulse of the conventional iconography of the Chicano
art movement. (PLATE 013) The rupture between image and text increased exponentially
with each issue.9
A page by Valdez unites the power of revulsion with that of glitter and gangrene.
Included in the collage of drawn and photographed self-portraits alongside handwritten and stamped text is the word “glitter,” embellished by three adjectives to read
“shimmering, shining, vomiting, glitter.” As Colin Gunckel elucidates in his essay on
Asco and Regeneraci6n in this volume, this page can be read as a powerful testimony
of the formation of subjectivity: a record of individual pain and anguish, of a relationship of gender, objectification, and violence. However, in the act of combining words
such as glitter and vomit, shining and shimmering, there is a resistant recalibration of
both the abject and objectification (along the axis of gender and creativity). Many
of these words arranged in the various lines of text (no, void, ill, asco) and their symbolic force were later redeployed in titles for various Asco-related works and projects
42
PLATE 012 PLATE 013
such as Void and Vain (1983), No Movies, etc. The symbolic force of this language of
rejection and refusal becomes a site for creativity, shielding, and inversion, creating
new definitions and conjunctions for meaning through negation. As this early illustration by Valdez suggests, the artists increasingly became the subject of the artwork
and, over time, their bodies became the work in both material and form.
As Gamboa, Gronk, Herron, and Valdez worked together on Regeneraci6n,
they developed a language that was visual, verbal, and stylistic. This confluence was
inherited from their association with the Jetters, a social circle of young Chicanos
who came together through their wild dress, tricky talk, and sardonic attitudes. The
Jetters “rebelled against social victimization by adopting ‘an extreme and flamboyant use of language and fashion.”’10 The young artists used charged words and language
allied with survival skills. Not only were they thinking bilingually, they were elaborating a language of doubled meaning and generating ideas about how to replace words
with pieces of charred metal, or otherwise how to use language as a weapon.11
Their assertive postures and jarring use of words and style provided a framework in
which to both develop and describe their work and ultimately themselves. In a 1975
color photograph (PLATE 014), the contortions of their bodies to spell out ASCO were
rapidly orchestrated on a deserted downtown city street. The group’s somatic and
semiotic distortions are illuminated by the lampposts and rising corporate downtown
43
PLATE 012 Regenerac/6n 2, no.4, 1974-75, p.31, drawing by Patssi Valdez. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center (CSRC) Library
PLATE 013 Regeneracl6n 2, no.4, 1974-75, p.5, drawings by Gronk. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies
Research Center (CSRC) Library
44
—-

.,

… –

– – …
— –
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–
i-’ ..
.
–
.
– ., e I . .. .

,,,:

ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.Ondlne Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
skyline. This performance photograph transforms Asco into a conceptual and corporeal
ideogram emblematizing how the word itself functions as a convergence of language,
body, and city.
Another way to understand the adoption of the name Asco is through their
realization that their actions were deemed transgressive, thus they too were marked
as abject. Asco strategically aligned themselves with the response their work generated (it made people ill, made them want to puke), and from it harnessed but could
not control the power of the abject. Their multimedia works were viscerally inspired
and intended to galvanize a response from the community. They recognized the
psychic-social power of abjection to structure subjectivity and group identity and to
regulate social hierarchies; in turn they appropriated this power to work toward social
change. As a result, Asco expanded the social and cultural focus of Chicano politics
and the public role of artists working within the Chicano movement.12
As the example of their involvement with Regeneraci6n helps to illustrate,
in the course of a few issues their work became far more experimental, incorporating
expanded mediums such as mail art, Xerox art, image-text pieces, and multimedia
photographic manipulation. It was these unorthodox revelries that led to the termination of their affiliation with Regeneraci6n, and ultimately the closure of the magazine
itself.13 As Gamboa explains, “We got hold of it, and changed the entire face of it,
and within five years it stopped publication, because the people backing it no longer
recognized their magazine.”14
The Expressway Generation
In postwar Southern California, East Los Angeles became the unrestricted site where
“intrusive and dangerous municipal functions were consigned,”15 in particular
through the construction of elaborate freeway interchanges and retaining walls that
divided formerly connected neighborhoods. In this context, the members of Asco
took to the streets, concocting performances that merged the conceptual with the
urban. Underlying these projects was a concern for the geographical and spatial
parameters that governed the everyday life of those in East Los Angeles in the late
1960s and 1970s, a tumultuous period of suppression and surveillance. As scholar
Dianna Marisol Santillano has noted, “Asco was singular in its use of hybridity, creating
an urban, in a hostile and even dangerous environment.”16
45
PLATE 014 Asco, 1975, color photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. Courtesy of the artist
PLATE 015
Asco’s members were part of what scholar Raul Homero Villa has called the
“expressway generation,”17 the age group that grew up keenly aware of how public policies and urban planning could create conditions of disparity and even segregation,
geographically and economically. In describing Herr6n’s mural The Wall that Cracked
Open, Villa says the work of Asco, “identifies a conjunction of social effects that, like
a social cordon around the barrio, set the limits of mobility for many of its residents.
These external social limits reproduce a racial-spatial formation as an integral effect
of Los Angeles’s landscape of power.”18 Asco exposed the “social cordon” in various
projects (that shuttled from the activist to the allegorical) while simultaneously
enacting “a series of life events” and presenting them as “movie productions.”19
While the activist orientation and proclivity to image making and propaganda
could be traced to a shared impulse to protest, a radical and more insurgent aspect of
Asco’s production could be linked to the clandestine, unauthorized, and underground.
Their discursive beginnings can be attributed in part to the insertion of linguistic
challenges and threats that were initially articulated under the auspices of Midnight
Art Productions. Midnight Art Productions was a proto-Asco grouping whose moniker
was both a reference to a shadowy entity (of producers) as well as a descriptive term
46
PLATE 015 OSCAR CASTILLO, Midnight Art Production’s Upholstery Shop Wall, c.1972, color
photograph. Courtesy of the artist and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) Library
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandR/taGonzalez
for their graffiti (a play perhaps on the Hollywood sign or one’s name or identity writ
large on a wall). In an early act of auto-historicization, Gronk describes the actions:
Billboards spray painted, “Midnight Art Productions,”on Sunset Boulevard,
Instructional Destruction Projects were carried on thru 1973. The following phrases
are just some of which appeared on walls throughout L.A. and disappeared into
the backdrop of graffiti: “Pinchi Placa Come Caca,” “Gringo Laws= Dead Chicanos,”
“Comida Para Todos,” “Yanqui Go Home,” and “Viet/Barrio.” With accumulated
evidence in our possession we are stopped, searched, and interrogated by three
units/six deputies of the L.A. County Sheriffs Department.2O (PLATE O1s)
These so-called Instructional Destruction Projects are comparable to linguistic
forms of dissent that appeared on walls internationally, emanating more from post1968 protest rhetoric than from the terms of Cholo graffiti that centered on the
p/aca (insignia) as a symbolic marker of territory or affiliation. Gamboa recalls his
departure in this period from the more dogmatic orientations of the radical organization Chicano Liberation Front. Borrowing from the terms of propaganda, the
Instructional Destruction Projects sought not a dialectical transformation so much
as a disarming or disorientation of the protocol of the street (codes of Cholo graffiti)
through their refusal to illuminate their coded messages to the uninitiated or to signify concretely to those unfamiliar with the form. These cryptic statements left many
things unexplained and produced wild juxtapositions, with “Comida Para Todos”
(Food for All) set up against Chola/o roll calls or monikers. Unlike the revolutionary
aspirations of the Brown Berets or the C.L.F., Midnight Art Productions expressed the
ultimate irony: the graffiti conveyed a point of view encountered by its public but, as
Gamboa recalled, “it’s an expression of how powerless we ultimately are since we
left the buildings standing.”
21
Midnight Art Productions employed rhetorical strategies drawn from protestfrom the language of the manifesto in particular-to connect the struggles of the urban
poor to the broader geo-political context. Asco’s street performance First Supper
(After a Major Riot) (1974) would use one of Gronk’s paintings, The Truth About the
Terror in Chile (1973), as a backdrop to connect the repressive regime of Augusto
Pinochet to the political injustices that the Chicano population experienced in the
47
barrio and the various means through which Chicano activism was suppressed
by police, infiltration, and defensive urban planning. Over the next few years, Asco
would focus on street interventions and media hoaxes (involving photographs, films,
paintings, and installations) to illustrate the myriad ways in which an aesthetics of
protest and activism could be merged with performance and spectacle.
In a recent short essay by Harry Gamboa, Jr., the artist describes a historical
exhibition of photographs taken during a period of organized antiwar protests in East
Los Angeles from about 1969 through 1971, and in particular a key moment in this
period, the Chicano Moratorium, an antiwar rally that ended with a riot and the death
of prominent journalist Ruben Salazar. A photograph by Victor Aleman triggered a
memory for Gamboa of a moment on January 31, 1971, when the Los Angeles County
Deputy Sheriffs responded to protesting crowds with excessive force. Aleman’s
image, Just Before the Gunfire (1971), presents a frozen scene, an instant that at first
seems subdued as those on the streets stand waiting, but simultaneously menacing,
as one notices a corps of police in the distance about to clash violently with the
crowd. After escaping from an onslaught of seemingly indiscriminate gunfire,
Gamboa vowed to find “an alternate method to confrontational street politics,”22 an
interventionist methodology that he would work out together with Asco members.
This collaboration would bring additional affiliated strategies gleaned from aligned
civil rights movements such as the gay rights movement and the Gay Liberation
Front.23 Asco would return to the scene of violence and suppression repeatedly over
the next few years to execute unsanctioned, public performances. First Supper
memorialized the junction of Arizona Avenue and Whittier Boulevard, the particular
stretch of road that saw actions by the police result in violence. The impromptu
“first supper” was staged on a traffic island during rush hour and featured “a large
nude doll, paintings of tortured corpses [Gron k’s The Truth About the Terror in Chile),
mirrors, chairs, food, drink, and riotous guests.”24
Asco’s first public performance, Stations of the Cross (PLATE 01s), was a morbid
one-mile procession along Whittier Boulevard, the main thoroughfare through East
Los Angeles, during the holiday season in 1971.25 lconoclastically transforming the
Mexican Catholic tradition of Las Posadas into a ritual of remembrance and resistance
against the deaths in Vietnam, the procession consisted of Gamboa, Gronk, and
Herron, who carried a fifteen-foot cross that had been constructed out of cardboard
48
PLATE 016 SEYMOUR ROSEN, Asco’s Stations of the Cross, 1971, gelatin silver print. SPACES – Saving
and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C. Ondlne Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
PLATE 016
49
and layered with paint. The final rite was held in front of the Marine Corps recruiting
center where the costumed trio observed a ceremonial five minutes of silence
before placing the cross at the door of the station and fleeing the scene. Coincidentally,
photographer Seymour Rosen, the founder of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts
and Cultural Environments), an organization that among other things was partly
responsible for the preservation of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, was on Whittier
Boulevard, looking to photograph something “traditionally Chicano” associated with
the holidays.26 Instead, Rosen found himself documenting what would be the group’s
first “manifest[ation of] their ideas in the public arena of the streets.”27
In the 1970s, Rosen became increasingly interested in photographing vernacular
art environments and spontaneous Happenings; in 1976, the groundbreaking exhibition of these images, In Celebration of Ourselves, was presented at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. An accompanying book was published in 1979, containing,
like the exhibit, images of Stations of the Cross. In the book, a shot of Gronk as an
invented persona known as Popcorn is placed within a dynamic layout with a caption
that reads, “Stations of the Cross, Happening, East Los Angeles, 1971.” On the page,
Stations is presented as a Happening among other photographs that include a stylish
San Francisco hippie; a horseman costumed in traditional Japanese military attire
during a Japanese New Year’s parade; and a couple with matching harlequin makeup,
participants in an event called the Freak Ball in Los Angeles. The primary goal of the
book is to show the different types of individual expression within a community or
environment and the ways in which these discrete manifestations create kinship. Rosen
does not attempt to describe Stations of the Cross through a serial and didactic
photojournalistic account; rather, the protest element is abstracted to foreground the
performance as a sign of its time and generational snapshot. Stations of the Cross
comes to represent part of a spontaneous, organic resistance to the status quo.
Sometime after Stations of the Cross, Asco members made a ceremonial
journey through the construction grounds of the Mara Villa projects located in East
Los Angeles. As Gronk describes it, and as is visible from a short sequence of extant
Super-8 film, they donned costumes similar, if not identical to those worn in their
first public performance. The tasks at hand, whimsically yet wryly stated, were the
inspection of “hidden murals” and the scaling of construction mounds. The choice
of location seems calculated, and certainly initiated what would continue to be an
50
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandR/taGonzalez
interest in “situating social critique in contested urban spaces.”28 Gron k’s statement
about the obscured murals would be theatricalized in different performances and
No Movies, highlighting the ephemeral nature of the medium. Asco pioneered situations
and formats where media became porous, where graffiti fused with mural ism and
compelled the necessity for risk taking and transgression in art, often through illegal
or otherwise unsanctioned actions. In their engagement with graffiti and muralism,
Asco challenged the conventions of both forms, and through various street actions
and guerilla interventions, transformed muralism from a static medium into one of
movement, action, and performance.
Even prior to his involvement with Asco, Herron was well-known within the
Chicano arts movement for his bold and influential murals in East Los Angeles. To this
day, Herron’s The Wall that Cracked Open (1972) is one of the city’s most celebrated
and contested murals. Designed to memorialize a site of vicious gang violence
where his brother was brutally stabbed, this important mural unraveled the illusions
behind visual representation and stressed the two-dimensionality of the wall surface. In this manner, The Wall that Cracked Open, like many of the subsequent murals
that Herron and Gronk collaborated on including the Black and White or Moratorium
Mural (1973) in the Estrada Courts public housing complex, called attention to the
wall as a physical and discursive site of signification. “Walls containing multiple layers
of graffiti form a palimpsest surface, whose many inscriptions provide a history
of local street activities,” as artist Jerry and scholar Sally Romotsky wrote in their
study of Chicano graffiti. “Most palimpsest walls record a disputed ownership, sometimes over several years. The disputed walls evolve as a disordered assembly of
documents and contradictory claims, overlapping and abusing each other with force
and regularity.”29 Walls were thus a site for multiple territorial claims as well as
highly personalized memento mori and emblems to both unrequited and consummated love.
In 1972, Harry Gamboa, Jr. visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with
a date. After taking in the exhibitions, he set out to find a curator to discuss the
absence of Chicano and Mexican artists in the galleries. According to the story, the
curator’s prejudiced response set the wheels in motion for an action that would
occur later that evening. Gamboa, Gronk, and Herron tagged an exterior footbridge
on the museum campus and returned in the wee hours of the morning with Valdez
51
to document what they claimed was the first Chicano conceptual art piece at the
museum, which came to be known as Spray Paint LACMA (or Project Pie in De/Face).
The quickly whitewashed graffiti, in effect, became another of the “hidden murals”
that Asco had sought out at the Mara Villa projects, effaced but existing underneath
layers of industrial paint.
Asco worked to enliven and rethink muralism in an attempt to make mobile and
elastic a form of art that by the early 1970s-for some artists-had become institutionalized and all too often restated nationalistic or domestic themes and iconography.
Ephemerality was one means for Asco to bypass the rigidity of muralism’s status as
the proscribed and generative vehicle for artistic training, expression, and experience
within the Chicano movement. They cannibalized the mediums of graffiti, muralism,
and later film to stage movement in exchange for static, iconic, and mythical representations. In Walking Mural (1972) Asco performed as characters in a mural who had
become so bored with the solemn subject matter that they extricated themselves
from the wall and took off down the street.
Gronk, who had previously established himself alongside Herron as a noteworthy muralist, performed as auteur in Instant Mural, taping Patssi Valdez and
frequent collaborator Humberto Sandoval to a wall in 1974. As traffic sped past on
Whittier Boulevard, Gronk used thick white paper tape to temporarily enshrine
Valdez’s body, transforming her into an icon. She then burst forth from the tape, the
embodiment of self-awareness as a mutable and transgressive image in the urban
landscape. In addition to enacting the role of iconic figure bound by the visually menacing yet fragile yards of tape for Instant Mural, Valdez also experimented with
forms of spray paint muralism and graffiti installations. Perhaps most striking in this
regard is the untitled and temporary aerosol wall installation she created for the
Asco No Movie exhibition at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 1978. The
large-scale black-and-red painting features two figures that are corseted, shrouded,
and blindfolded by constraints that are spontaneously and forcefully unraveling.
The graffiti mural evocatively resembles the Instant Mural No Movies, particularly
those photo-documents that depict both Valdez and Sandoval bound to the wall, and
thus illustrates Valdez’s critical consideration of her participation in Instant Mural.
In a later series of performances, Asco members appointed themselves
municipal officials to the unincorporated county they called home, East Los Angeles.
52
PLATE 017 GRONK, David and Goliath, 1978, black and white photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
I tor: Kim Jones as the Mud man and Gronk. Courtesy of the artist
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C. Ondlne Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
Asco toured their “municipality” on random site-visits, designating various spaces
and objects to be civic landmarks, monuments, and preservation zones. In one such
No Movie performance, a storm drain was anointed the illustrious title Asshole Mural
(1975). As such, the artists identified the city’s waste disposal system as an urban
asshole and claimed it as a ready-made mural.
According to Amelia Jones, one of the tenets of body art, especially situated
within an activist practice, is the enacting and asserting of the self within the social.
Asco’s strategies often used the body propelling through cityscapes, a performative
mode in sync with a particular strain of processional pieces in Los Angeles in the
early 1970s that involved urban confrontations or exorcisms. Performances of walking, trespassing, or temporarily transforming public spaces in Los Angeles allowed
artists from diverse backgrounds a corporeal, agitational move away from didactic or
prescriptive modes and methods of enacting identity. As Jones notes, the performers “negotiat(ed) absence by claiming public space for bodies that are now made
embarrassingly visible and exaggeratedly particularized.”30
A whole string of works originating in Los Angeles at this time borrow from the
processional choreography of protest culture as artists “insinuated themselves in
the environment in a quest to claim and hold space.”31 (PLATE 011> Kim Jones’s alternate
persona, the Mud man, was a transfiguration of the artist’s body into a roving assemblage of organic and inorganic materials. His performances of walking along Wilshire
Boulevard in the mid-1970s, or trespassing and temporarily transforming buildings
PLATE 017

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ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C. Dndlne Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
in Venice, involved camouflage and the transmogrification of body and site, invoking
the abjection and horrors he and countless others must have experienced as young
soldiers in Vietnam, and have often been discussed in relation to shamanism and
paganism. At this same time, sculptor and dancer Senga Nengudi was creating performances that incorporated her constructed objects-referred to as fetishes-in
gallery spaces and on the streets, inviting connections to Afro-Caribbean ceremonial
rituals. Freeway Fets (1978), a temporary occupation and activation of urban space,
involved a number of collaborating “activators”-David Hammons, Maren Hessinger,
and the Studio z Brothers (Franklin Parker, Joe Ray, and Roho)-involved in a highly
ritualized action under a freeway overpass near the Los Angeles Convention Center.
By staging actions in the obscure, unspecific, nearly invisible spaces of freeway
underpasses and traffic islands, these artists served to draw attention to certain
social structures constructed around identifiers like gender, race, and location.
Taking a more ironic approach to the reverence for ritual found in Nengudi and
Jones’s performances, Asco pushed up against the conscription to celebrate the
folkloric and authentic. Instead, they memorialized the violence of the present. In
Ricardo Valverde’s photographs of Asco’s participation in the 1976 Dfa de los Muertos
festivities,32 Willie F. Herron Ill, Humberto Sandoval, and Alfonso Trejo, a muralist also
based in East Los Angeles, appear as irreverent revenants in Three Causes of Death
(PLATE 018). Rather than exalting the cultural symbols associated with death in Mexico,
such as calaveras (skull heads) and flowers, the performers took on the forms of a
switch blade, a pharmaceutical drug, and a hypodermic needle, parading with a collection of young boys roped together and made up to look like zombie Cholos. In a brazen
statement, Asco noted that “every day was Day of the Dead” in East Los Angeles.33
Gamboa used the phrase “el camino surreal” (the surreal road/path), a play
on El Camino Real, the historic highway of colonial California, to describe Whittier
Boulevard as the setting where everyday reality could quickly devolve into absurdist,
excessive action. While a number of the photographers documenting East Los Angeles
during the era, such as Oscar Castillo, Seymour Rosen, and Ricardo Valverde might
be seen as making street photography or photojournalism, Asco’s performances and
the staged scenarios captured in their images convey the elevated reality, or surreality, of living during a moment of political upheaval, rampant police brutality, and
the daily need to be in survival mode. As Gamboa commented, “Instead of creating
55 PLATE 018 RICARDO VALVERDE,Asco Performance: Three Causes of Death (Humberto Sandoval,
Alfonso Trejo, WIiiie Herron), 1976, color photograph. Courtesy of Esperanza Valverde and
Christopher J. Valverde
Social Realism protest art, social surrealism seemed more to the point.”34 In Asco,
we witness individuals negotiating both their social environment and the built environment, making art in unlikely circumstances and out of unexpected materials.
Art by Any Means Possible
Asco’s experimentation within and across media challenged conventions. For example,
they agitated mural ism by making it active and mobile and incorporating the body
directly into it. They worked with performance and movement to make it still. Their
still photographic images known as No Movies function to record the work and
represent it after its completion, thus serving as both evidence and art object. This
deliberate blurring of the lines between the art object and its photographic documentation is an essential part of Asco’s contribution to contemporary art.
Beginning with Stations of the Cross with its processional and elegiac qualities
gleaned from street protests, the artists segued into the calculated derangement
of a cinematic narrative and setting. Attendant to this performative transition was
the concoction of a mise-en-scene that instantly amplified or intensified a public or
familiar (e.g., domestic) setting. As Gronk states, “I started peddling the concept
of No Movie on 7th and Broadway in 1974 trying to create an atmosphere where the
No Movie could flourish among the masses.”35 No Movies provided limitless possibilities to transform location. If a sense of mobility in day-to-day life was impaired by
their geographic and economic conditions, then the appearance of freedom and movement could be manufactured; there was no better format or vehicle for this than
the No Movie.
The No Movie was Asco’s signature invented medium: cinema by other means.
The No Movie is a conceptual performance that invokes cinematic codes but is created
for a still camera. It is a staged event recorded without motion picture technology,
in which artists play the parts of cinema stars, and the resultant images are then
disseminated as if they are 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,
56
PLATE 019 ASCO, Asco stamp, 1974. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
(CSRC) Library
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandR/taGonzalez
including film distributors, and reached an international audience through mail art
circuits. Thus, No Movies appropriated the spectacle of Hollywood even as they
critiqued the absence of Chicanos in the mass media. Developed in response to a
representational regime of absence, Asco’s make-do tactics mediate an ethics of
interjection through which the artists were able to impersonate institutions in which
they wished to participate. By integrating the strategies of performance and photography, Asco sought to expose and critique the structural absence of Chicanos in media
representations and interject a creative structure that would make visible Chicano
absence, thereby creating a space for representational presence.
Film scholar Chon A. Noriega has described the No Movie format as an “intermedia synesthesia” that used one affordable medium (the still 35mm camera) in
place of another more expensive medium (a 16 or 35mm motion picture camera).
36
Fluxus cofounder Dick Higgins proposed the term “intermedia” in the mid-1960s to
describe art practices that crossed the boundaries of recognized media and as a
means to investigate the interaction of structures originally composed in one medium
onto those in another, including those that had not previously been considered art
forms. Asco’s No Movies are exemplary of such an innovative and creative fusion.
Asco more broadly applied the term No Movie to encompass other forms of
performance documentation, published interviews, mail art, and media hoaxes that
allowed their use of cinematic discourse while forgoing the apparatus of cinema.
In this regard, the No Movie designation was contingent upon how the work was circulated and distributed rather than the specific form or content of the image. For
example, Asco street actions such as Walking Mural (1972) and First Supper (After
a Major Riot) (1974) were photographically documented, generally by Harry Gamboa,
Jr. and multiple versions of the images, with different texts, were then distributed
through the mail art network and sent to individuals, publications, and organizations
in Canada, Cuba, France, Italy, Mexico, Uruguay, the U.S., and elsewhere. Other nonPLATE 019
photographic image-text pieces, such as
Gamboa’s No Slapstick (1977) from his extensive
Young Boy in the ’50s series, were circulated as
mail art and bear the red imprint of Asco’s
rubber stamp “No Movie” or “CHICANO CINEMA/
ASCO.” (PLATE 019)
Prior to launching the No Movie concept, the Asco artists articulated their desire
to communicate in a filmic sense. In the earliest interview with the nascent art group,
Gronk, already positioning himself as a “superstar,” exclaimed, “I’d like to do movies
rather than just limit myself to drawing and paintings. I find to expand propagandawise, I have to get into cinema.”37 (PLATE 020) As the No Movie genre developed over the
course of the mid-1970s, the cinematic took on increasing significance, influencing
both their personal and artistic style. Gamboa described the effect when asked to
define the No Movie, “It is perceiving life within a cinemagraphic context.”38 The manifestation of this cinematic orientation informs Cinearte 76 (PLATE 021), a photographic
collage that assembles various Asco performances into a graphic lexicon presented
as cinematic montage. This evocative piece indicates how Asco began to historicize
their own production and imagery. Still photographs of the artists in and out of performance have been sequenced as if in an imaginary film and organized in the style
of montage, with disjunctive pairings and a non-linear chronology. This photographic
collage serves as a visual compendium of early Asco performances, imagery, and thematic interests, covering the years from about 1972 to 1976, and including the
group’s important play with masquerade and the production of glamour through
camp impersonation and thrift-store chic. The handmade, do-it-yourself construction
of the piece is readily discernible in its technique and materiality. Using scissors and
glue, the are grouped and pasted together like a storyboard and framed by two Super-8 filmstrips on the right-hand side. Using No Movie
imagery and outtakes from No Movie scenarios, including A La Mode (1976) and the
Slasher Victim Interview (1975), the collage also incorporates still imagery from performances recorded on Super-8 film, such as the footage of Gronk shaving his
eyebrows from a compilation of performance documentation (PLATES 022-02s). Above
the grid of smaller images is a larger four-by-six inch photographic print of A La Mode
bearing the bold red imprint of the “CHICANO Cl NEMA/ ASCO” rubber stamp.39 At
bottom, the black letterpress text identifies genre, title, and individuals posed in the
image: “No Movie A La Mode Gronk, Patssi, Gamboa.”40
The original photographic collage was the mock-up for a full-page insert for the
journal Chismearte, where it appeared in the premiere fall 1976 issue.41 In the context of the journal, whose title means gossip+art, the piece serves as a visual primer
that illustrates a scripted interview with Gronk and Gamboa on No Movie theories and
58
PLATE 020 ASCO, Asco/No-Movle button, 1982. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections,
Stanford University
PLATE 021 GRONK, Clnearte 76, 1976, in Chismearte l, p.30. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies
Research Center (CSRC) Library
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandR/taGonza/ez
practices. This accompanying text outlines key concepts of the No Movie, including
its genesis and development, modes of production and distribution, and form and
format. It functions as a false manifesto that is filled with jokes, implausible scenarios,
and hyperbolic language, and flirts with undermining its own aspirations with its
quest to sabotage seriousness and contest Social Realism. Taken together, the text
and collage is a tale of self-fabrication: the artists interview themselves as part of
a publicity strategy in which they cast themselves as producers and directors. It also
includes the artists positing artworks that exist only in their conceptualization and
articulation, as relayed by Gronk:
I would like to realize a no-movie that I was unable to exhibit: it involved a movie projector that was left running without reels, a block of ice wou Id be placed in front of
it, and a screen in front of the ice. Facing the projector-ice-screen would be two pushpins tacked to a letter that asked for my explanation of the no-movie concept. Next to
the letter, two more push pins and an empty page with a microphone facing it.42
In addition to the anti-cinema of the No Movies, the art group invented the Asco
Awards, also known as the Aztlan or No Movie Awards, a spoof on Hollywood’s selfcongratulatory spring ritual. A gold spray-painted plaster cobra award was given by
Asco to its members and associates in honor of their No Movie achievements.
PLATE 020 PLATE 021
59
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ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandR/taGonza/ez
60
PLATES 022-025
61 PLATES 022-025 ASCO, From the Slasher series, lncludlngAscozil/a and Capltallsmo, 1975,
black and white photographs by Harry Gamboa, Jr. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
(CSRC) Library
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C. Ondlne Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
The identical award was used for all categories and all recipients, and the event and
its staging provided the occasion for still another No Movie series.
A La Mode was shot on location at Philippe’s, the iconic landmark downtown
Los Angeles restaurant founded in 1908. The sawdust floors were the site of innumerable Asco encounters and late-night conspiracies over hunks of pie and countless
mugs of ; it was also a favored site for No Movie productions. In
1976, A La Mode won the lion’s share of Aztlan Awards including Best No Movie, Best No
Movie Direction, Best No Movie Editing, Best No Movie Art Direction, and Best No
Movie Actress for Patssi Valdez. According to Gronk, A La Mode “was a runaway hit.”
The other nominees for Best No Movie 1976 included:
Eat Art, Dreva Productions, B&W
Little Boy in the ’50s, Gamboa Productions, B&W
CooCoo for God, Z2 Productions, Tape 43
Pistolwhippersnapper, Gamboa Productions, B&W
Mu}eres tndocumentadas, Pando Productions, Color
Valle de Lagrimas, Sandoval Productions, Color
Tina’s Story, Torres Productions, B&W 44
As the No Movie Awards ceremony highlights, Asco’s motivations to combine
media and blur the lines between what constitutes art and its documentation were
as much aesthetic and conceptual as they were practical and economical. The Asco
artists have described this intermedia development as an aesthetics born out of
poverty and nurtured by a make-do and do-it-yourself ethos. Over time, they harnessed
the creative possibilities of photography, maximizing visual effect with the most
minimal of material means. Asco’s cinematic and glamour-oriented No Movies, such
as Fountain of A/oof(1974), The Gores (1974), and A La Mode (1976) demonstrate
their seductive play with self-transformation, camp, masquerade, and androgyny.
Through a series of bold and stunning creations realized through an incredible of economy of means, or what Gronk has described as Asco’s “aesthetics of poverty,”
the No Movies channel the group’s desire for and critique of mass media representation and, in the process, creatively negotiate exclusion. Asco’s chameleon-like No
Movie personas, particularly those performed by Valdez, were invariably constructed
62
PLATE 026
with little more than thrift store clothes, colored crepe paper, scraps of shimmering
fabric, glitter, platform shoes, and mascara.
The key to Asco’s aesthetics is a play between the utterly bereft and shopworn
and the possibility of glamour. The crafting of the marvelous out of this aesthetics
of poverty, or rasquachismo, often involved a syntax and fabrication taken directly
from the streets of the barrio. Artist and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains’s description of
Valdez’s later installation art practices would also apply to Asco’s “blend of influences, including store display, Chicano theater, dress-up, domestic residue, Pop art,
and Surrealism. [Their] tropes of glamour and ruin can be understood through the
accumulation and dispersal of make-believe and illusion, party supplies; discarded
movie sets; the detritus from the edges of downtown Los Angeles; and bits and
pieces from the bazaar and mercado. Economics dictated the use of netting, glitter,
plastic statuary, foil papers and paint.”45
No Movies direct our attention to the special and significant role played by
photography and photographic reproduction (including slides and publication) in Asco’s
varied output. They allow a flexible format of production and reproduction that provided Asco the opportunity to explore all sorts of mediums as well as ideas about the
mass media. Slasher No. 9 (1975) (PLATE 02s) signals some of the interrelated points of
63
PLATE 026 ASCO, Slasher No. 9, 1975, color photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. From the collection of
Patssi Valdez
PLATE 027
64
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C.OndlneChavoyaandR/taGonzalez
convergence that inform the group’s formation and output, as in its motifs of violence
and revulsion, publicity and scandal, and impersonation and simulation. As Mesa-Bains
has written, “Asco’s performance trajectory was established by the age and generation of the members, and it was set out against tinsel town, B-movies, race riots,
rampant discrimination, play, and fantasy.”46 For Slasher No. 9, Asco staged a multimedia press event as a No Movie in Herr6n’s City Terrace garage-cum-artists’ studio.
The artists posed between two enormous artificial roses in the foreground with a
painted backdrop of a celestial expanse. In one from this event
(PLATE 021), Gronk is poised before the microphone ready to speak while Gamboa
appears with a Super-8 camera. It is a mock press event in which the victim of a notorious rampaging serial killer is interviewed. Gronk stands in for the victim, who is
known through the Los Angeles Times headline that screams, “SLASHER: NO. 9 Victim
Found Dead in Hollywood,” but here he speaks back to the media.47
Instigated by the news article, the performance and the series of images it produced engage differing postures, from the pseudo-documentary to the markedly
outlandish and theatrical. While they are simulations of an impossible scenario, the
up portrait refers to photography as a documentary tool for
procedural testimony and evidentiary accounting, while the other image can only relate
to the surreal. Through this impersonation of a multimedia event, Asco conflates
the fictive with the documentary.48 Here, the document is rendered as “unreliable
evidence, a masquerade on at least two counts,” like the performance photographs
associated with the work of artists such as Adrian Piper, Lynn Hershman Leeson,
and Bas Jan Ader.49 This production of unreliable evidence, of false or questionable
documents, purports to present a scenario or image as something other than what it
is. The artists pose as what they are not while parodying and emulating the very
means of myth making and publicity, scandal and illusion, horror and fascination that
they seek to unsettle. The layers of masquerade and different degrees of engagement with the viewer suggest the staging of the scenario as a simulation. Exposing the
interplay between fact and fiction, self-creation and concealment draws attention
to the critical engagement waged with journalism and opens up a space for the viewer
to question claims to truth and objectivity.
In the more theatrical color photographs, a folded copy of the Los Angeles Times
appears in the left-hand corner. ASCO is stamped in red across the word “Dead” on
65
PLATE 027 ASCO, Asco Goes to the Universe, 1975, black and white photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University
the headline so that the banner now reads: “Victim Found ASCO in Hollywood.” At once
a strategy of detournement and linguistic play, this substitution suggests multiple
interpretations and scenarios: the victim may have found disgust and nausea in
Hollywood, or he may have found the Asco group in Hollywood, or he may have found
the Asco group dead in Hollywood. The alteration positions Asco in Hollywood both
geographically and metaphorically, thereby inserting Asco within the symbolic economy of Hollywood that is at once cinematic and journalistic.
By transforming headlines as the basis for a No Movie series, Slasher No. 9
develops a subtext of gender play and sexuality, publicity and scandal, the sociological
and the phantasmagoric in a manner playfully reminiscent of Hollywood Babylon.50
The Slasher series condenses many of the strategies and performative devices that
Asco effectively generated over the course of their practice including an interest in
scrutinizing the purported objectivity of photojournalism and responding to the media
and its narratives of urban violence. This play with the noir genre and the police procedural, as drawn from literary and cinematic narratives about Los Angeles, features
prominently in No Movies such as Stranglers in the Night, The Gores, Chicano Cinema,
and Pistolwhippersnapper as well as later fotonovela projects such as Blessed Bag
Bombers and Don’t Not and their cable-access videos such as Agent X and Blanx. Such
stylizations involved a glamorous fusion of the campy exaggeration found in midnight movies with the unapologetic bawdiness of underground cinema.
A gothic tale spotlighting the underbelly of Hollywood and its potential tragic
consequences, Slasher No. 9 taps into the paranoia of a serial killer on the loose. 51
As dubbed by the press, “The Skid Row Slasher” murdered nine men in the span of two
months, targeting men in the downtown area of Los Angeles before moving to
Hollywood. As Time magazine characterized the paranoia at the time: “The anxiety
was almost palpable along Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Businessmen who work in the
gleaming new office towers nearby hurried home along the Harbor Freeway.”52 The
slasher was repeatedly represented in the press as a homosexual preying on gay
men and ritually posing his victims in death. Thus Asco’s Slasher series enlists the
sensationalist noir coverage of urban violence, crime, and paranoia while confronting
the looming specter of brutality and murder directed on gay men by an unknown
assailant. As early Asco historian S. Zaneta Kosiba-Vargas has suggested in a reading
of the Slasher image, “At times the city and ASCO’s art production was inseparable;
66
ASCO AND THE POLITICS OF REVULSION C. Ondlne Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez
the sexual violence and decadence of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard paralleled police
violence and brutality and the irrational gang violence of the barrios.”53
Gronk’s impersonation of a homicide victim in Slasher No. 9 has a conceptual
companion in the better known Decoy Gang War Victim (1974). This No Movie production was also ripped from the headlines and made in dialogue with media portrayals
of Chicanos, the city, and violence, functioning as a forceful confutation of this relationship. In Decoy Gang War Victim, Asco staged a gang retaliation murder in which
Gronk posed as the victim, lying on an East L.A. street illuminated by guttering hazard
flares. As one member explained, “We would go around and whenever we heard of
where there might be potential violence, we would set up these decoys so they would
think someone had already been killed.”54 According to this conceptualization, the
decoy preempted an anticipated act of violence and had the potential to cancel out
or forestall a cycle of violence. The photo document of the guerilla street action
was then disseminated to press outlets and broadcast on a local television newscast
as a legitimate example of a real scenario of violence. Just as Asco’s morbid simulation
of the representations of death and violence sought to intervene into the sensationalist methods through which urban violence was covered and sold as journalistic
fare, so Asco mimicked the stereotypes they sought to negate that equated Chicanos
with violence. In this way, the No Movie functioned as media intervention and hoax
by replacing actual violence and death with a representational substitute.55 Through
the performance of body, action, and tableau, Asco brought attention to the spectacles of violence, exploitation, and discrimination that played out in the urban barrios,
and coupled these recurrent scenarios with forms of representational violence carried out in the mass media.
In Sr. Tereshkova, a Super-8 film directed by Humberto Sandoval, an early Asco
performer, a shop window becomes the site of a frozen trauma. In a nod to The
Twilight Zone, the mannequins-played alternately by Herron and Sandoval-absorb
the random acts of violence that propel the short narrative. A family (Gronk, Herron,
and Valdez) is stalked by a man seeking to steal the giant camera, prominently
marked with the word ASCO, that they unsuccessfully attempt to pawn. Similarly, in
The Gores, a No Movie from 1974, shop windows flank the action of a paparazzo
being hunted down by an evil family (or cult), the apparent alien offspring of the perky
adolescent pop singer of the 1960s, Leslie Gore.
67

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