Art Official Histories

Chon A. Noriega

Of every hue and cast am I, orevery rank and religion,

.. I resist any thing better than my own diversity.

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I've been looking for Chicano art, not just in the museum,
though that is hard enough, but in the history book. Not sur-
prisingly, neither considers Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban
American, and other Latino works of art part of "American"
art or of the U.S. national culture. The major American mu-
seums and galleries have resisted the n~ssary shift toward
a curatorial agenda that embraces the diverse cultural and
artistic practices within the United States. l Consequently.
Latino artists are excluded from "American- exhibitions, or
included at an affirmative level, without a significant reorien-
tation of art history's central concepts and aesthetic criteria.
An even more troubling trend has been the brokering of Latino
artists into U.S. museums byway of exhibitions of Latin Ameri-
can art. What could be provocative explorations of pan-national
aesthetics, of ·Our America,· become another form of the de-
nial of citizenship.
Latino cultural expressions have been, for the most part,
constituted as the other side of the "critical distance- of mod-
em or postmodem belonging. Latino artists are seen as too
"sincere-; and, as such, critics assume there is no mediation
or attention to the signifier in their cultural expressions. But
sincerity is no simple matter, since, like irony, it is asserted
in mUltiple contexts; both are hybrid discourses. Tellingly, Jose
Marti's last book of poetry, Versos Sencillos (Simple verses,

Azt!dn 23: I Spring 1998 1

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 Noriega
1891). written at the same time as his essay ·Our America;
begins with the famous line. "Yo soy un hombre sincero- (I
am a sincere man). But the simplicity and sincerity of these
poems are misleading if taken at face value. Thus, when Marti,
e! hombre sincero. proclaims "Our America: irony becomes
an article of faith-as Tomas Ybarra-Frausto has noted about
Latino art-rather than a calculated, distanced, intellectual
pose. 2 More Quixotic than Brechtian, Marti engages in a future-
tense performative discourse. in which a pan-national"Amen-
M
can identity is sincerely proposed against an ironic awareness
of present-day realities. Such a "differential identity" consti-
tutes itself as the negotiation between two sets of contexts-
the present and the future; the national and the pan-national.
Two observations are important to stress about such a dif-
ferential identity. lest we slip into theoretical abstraction. First,
Latino art is a cultural. political. aesthetic. and market phe-
nomenon. For better or worse. it does exist. But. given the dif-
ferent registers within which it is produced, exhibited. spoken
about. and acquired. Latino art remains entirely distinct from
other aesthetic categories. But neither exhibition history nor
scholarship provides the basis for understanding "Latino" art
as an aesthetics-in-process that has critical mass, intertextual
associations, internal complexity, and, above all, a consider-
able range that overlaps with other types of art. So, rather than
always starting with the premise of cultural or racial other-
ness (that is, positing Latino art as a genre equivalent to its
exclusion), I want to propose that we start with general ques-
tions about an art genre, where the consequent analysis will
not be so bound by ethnicity nor by denying cultural and so-
cial determinants. In even a cursory survey of Latino artists,
for example. one can't help but be struck by the complex and
contradictory nature of their work, whether charted within an
individual career or across categories of aesthetics, ethnicity,
and national origin. In fact, in some instances. it may not make
sense to foreground ethnicity over genre. Unfortunately, such
subtleties are lost on many in the art world, where Chicanos,
Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Latinos-despite their cul-
tural differences from each other and aesthetic similarities with
installation artists more generally-share a history of being
excluded that is as persistent as it is unspoken. 3
Second, Latino-identified artists often break the rules of
two cultures, two traditions, without blurring the boundaries
between them. Instead, their iconic overlays and hybrid forms
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Art Official Histories
are always made with an eye toward the unequal power rela-
tions that exist between and within cultures. In this sense.
their art reveals the need to sustain, not an essential truth or
an underlying coherence, but contradictory images, shapes.
languages, and frames of reference. The paradox of my essay.
then, is that I have been making declarative and definitive
statements about what Latino artists do-aJl the while insist+
ing that what they do is undo declarative and defiqitive state-
ments in order to re~map social space by performing hybridity.
Thus, to expand upon my modest proposaJ, we might con-
sider an ~other" American art, not for what it says about it-
seU, but for the way in which it allows us to reconsider
American art as a national project within the academy. art
market, and public sphere. Rather than provide a supplement
that chronicles artists of color because they were excluded.
and uses identity politics as the rationale for such a method-
ology. why not re-examine issues related to the avant-garde,
postmodern art, art collecting. and governmental support-
using artists of color as the main examples?
Such an attempt is more difficult than it first appears,
since the discussion of non-white artists occurs within a highly
politicized and circumscribed set of parameters. In Robert
Hughes's recent PBS documentary series. American Visions
l1997j, for example, the art critic as born-again Westerner
relives the myth of the frontier, ending with a belated and
highly coded acknowledgment of racial minorities. 4 Rather than
consider such artists, in fact, Hughes equates them with a
question about "identity" that he answers by focusing on Bar-
bara Kruger and Louise Bourgeois. Positioning these two white
women as synecdochiaJ for all those who have been excluded.
Hughes then offers the West itself as the proper anodyne for
race and identity politics. ending his series with paeans to the
Southwestern landscape art of Susan Rothenberg and James
Turrell, and then walking, quite literaJly. into the sunset.
Hughes is not alone in his assessment of contemporary Ameri-
can art: it is the logical outcome of strongly held modernist
principles that render vast sectors of the art world invisible.
Ironically, the very work excluded by the Franco-German~
American modernist triumvirate offer a compelling aJternative
history that also explains their exclusion. Cesar Martinez's
"Mona Lupe: The Epitome of Chicano Art," for example, invokes
Duchamp's "Mona Lisa with a Mustache'" in order to insinu-
ate himself-as Mona Lisa cum Virgin of Guadalupe-into the
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 Noriega
canon of Western art. Other artists-such as Raphael
Montanez Ortiz, Yoko Ono, Robert Colescott, Adrian Piper, and
the East Los Angeles conceptual art group Asco-allow us to
re-vision the "start" of postmodernism in the 1950s, and re-
trace its development through various genres: recycled cin-
ema, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and
photography. These artists fall though the cracks between
modernism and postmodernism, since their work does not fit
easily within either Eurocentric modernism or its bete noire,
identity politics. In effect, these artists are precisely what the
canon had to exclude in order to become the canon.
At the same time, however, Chicano art has acquired the
status of a sui generis aesthetic category, one that is part and
parcel of an ethnic social movement seeking both sodal eq-
uity and cultural difference within the public sphere. It is only
natural that such work should not sit well with the museum,
let alone within it-in {act, it would seem to have been pro-
duced {or just such a confrontation. Two recent exhibitions
offer some support for this stance: "Chicano Art: Resistance
and Affirmation" and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, dubbed the
"Multicultural Biennial" in the popular press.$ Critics should
have seen these exhibitions as resulting from a curatorial
agenda articulated within the institutional setting of the art
museum. In other words, critics should have asked why mu-
seums-seemingly antithetical to such political art-should
suddenly embrace it in the early 1990s. Instead, they attrib~
uted the curatorial agenda to the art itself, and not to just the
works in these exhibitions, but all "minority" art.
This was not just a neoconservative response. Consider Hal
Foster's comments in a roundtable on the 1993 Whitney Bi-
ennial held by the October editorial collective. He calls atten-
tion to a "pervasive [tendency] in contemporary art and
criticism alike; a certain turn away from questions of repre-
sentation to iconographies of content; a certain tum from a
politics of the signifier to a politics of the signified."6 Having
just got the hang of the notion that all expression, all language
involves a play of signifiers, a continual deferral of the refer-
ent-and that as goes language so goes both the unconscious
and society-we are now informed that, in fact, some art is
attentive to this process, while other art is not. Apparently,
this "other" art goes against the nature of language itself. While
Foster raises this as an aesthetic observation, he does so as
part of an academic group with deep ties to the Whitney
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Art Official Histories
Museum itself, a group whose semiotic and psychoanalytic
definition of the "political" was seemingly ignored by the 1993
biennial. So, it is not too difficult to see the roundtable as more
of an insider dialogue with other critics and curators than as
an outside critique of the artists in the biennial.? In addition,
the few close readings undertaken during the roundtable are
curious for their selective formalism-that is, they engage only
select portions of a work, deeming the rest "irrelevant."8 St.i1I,
there is an assumption at work here that Foster shares With
the curators and critics he takes to task (and even the
neoconservative critics both sides oppose). If we were to patch
together a statement out of these different positions it would
have gone something like this:
The barbarians are at the gate with their multi-
cultural demand. We must tolerate their necessary
inclusion, but, at the same time, their work is dif-
ferent-it is politically correct, identity-oriented, and,
as an aesthetic malter, merely illustrative. In some
ways, it's not really art as we have come to know
art [as an aside, it is here that everyone's Green-
bergian premises peek through!, and, hence, it is
work that cannot sustain a close reading.
In such a milieu, the lines were drawn bctwccn the ethnic artist
and everyone else in the art world, even as a civil libertarian
overlay held everything together in a strategic coalition against
the forces of censorship and reduced federal funding.
As you can see, it is difficult for me to talk about censor-
ship in the usual sense. Whereas others might be. righteous,
and rightfully so, I find myself ambivalent, wantmg to take
more into account. Other things are going on behind the
scenes, things for which the language of "censorshi~ ~ers.us
free expression~ is inadequate. Think of how the te!evls~on I.n-
dustry protects its tight control of a medium from mmonty
demands for access by invoking the rights of both free speech
and the free market. Needless to say, I find it hard to get
worked up into a frenzy to support the "free speech" of a tele-
vision network or film studio. And I imagine some groups must
feel the same way about cultural institutions from which they
remain excluded.
It is with this in mind that I turn to the most radical
Chic<.\no artist a Chicana artist, Carmen Lomas Garza, an
artist so dang:rous that she brought down a museum's cul-
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 Noriega
tural elite. Lomas Garza. produces gouache paintings called
monilas that provide an alternative chronicle of communal
Camilial, historical, and cultural practices as refracted through
personal memory. Her monitos respond to the institutional
histories ofTexas-of the Alamo and Texas Rangers-but not
at the level of documenting racial oppression and violence or
political resistance. Instead they tell of traditional custo:ns,
communal events, local Colk heroes. Given the folkloric or na-
ive elements of the monitos, it is crucial to note her anistic
intention and choice over the past twenty years. In other
words, her ongoing commitment to a singular form and area
of content must be seen at each tum as an innovation in an
aesthetic.domain where the one constant is continual change.
The momtas are the product of a compromiso or promise to
re~ember for her community, a project that is by no means
fimshed, and one whose pleasing and deceptively simple ap-
f'ea~ance bears the weight of more violent and exclusionary
institutional histories. Her retrospective, then, provides a strik-
ing instance of an art exhibition becoming the site of political
struggle at the municipal level. Organized by the Laguna Gloria
Art Museum in Austin, Texas, in Fall 1991, ~Pedacito de mi
corezon· (a little piece of my heart) traveled first to the EI Paso
Museum of Art, where it was on display from December 14,
199I,untilFebruary2,1992.'
The exhibition came amid a national power shift in the role
of the museum and the Cunction of art in civil society, one
aspect of which was publicly debated in terms oC"cultural di-
versity" versus ~quality.· What was less reported was how the
reSUlting changes-of demographics, of funding policies-im-
pacted the internal structure of the art museum, such that
the board of trustees, the museum director, and the various
curatorial departments came to have different, and often con-
flicting constituencies. And this is what happened in EI Paso.
The year previous to Lomas Garza's exhibit, Becky Duvall Reese
had been hired as the new museum director and given a man-
date to bring about change for the first time in twenty-five
years. The museum was 100 percent municipally funded and
yet ~as not re~ponsible to t~e local community, especially the
MCX1can-Amencan commumty that made up 70 percent of the
local population. Instead, the museum reOected the city's cul-
tural elite, which oversaw the museum via the EI Paso Art
Museum As~ociation. Duvall Reese set out to open the mu-
seum to the general public, starting with an exhibition oC Mexi-
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Art Official Histories
can colonial art in the permanent collection, Collowed in quick
succession by three Chicano exhibitions: the Lomas Garza
retrospective; ~Chicano & Latino" organized by the Daniel
Saxon Gallery in Los Angeles; and the ~Chicano Art: Resistance
and Affinnation~ exhibition. These exhibitions turned around
declining attendance, raising it from a low of 20 people a day
to 100 a day. with the Lomas Garza retrospective setting a
record attendance of 6,500 people during its six-week run, and
the "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation· exhibition at-
tracting 4,000 people to the opening-alone.
The Lomas Garza retrospective, however, initiated an all-
out public battle between the director and the association. In
a Cront-page newspaper story published in late JaJ1uary 1992,
the president of the EI Paso Art Museum Association an-
nounced that he had taken a personal survey of the popular
show and found that no one liked it. ~I've asked people to rate
the exhibit from one to ten: he told the El Paso Herald-Post,
"and didn't find a single person who rated it above a one. To
me, it's an embarrassment.~loOfC the record, the association
complained about the ~brown art and "brown faces· that now
M
filled the museum. Lomas Garza. responded to the press state~
ments by saying, "There is a strain of racism in that attitude,
which is also a Conn of censorship. I'm not threatened by it. I
think it's sad"llbid.j.
Were it to end there, this story would not be that unusual,
a sad-but-true tale of thwarted ideals and expressions. But
Duvall Reese and Lomas Garza went one step further. If the
association could take the high road of eternal values as held
by a cultural elite. they took the low TOad of political repre-
sentation. They went to Freddy's Breakfast. That is where the
town leaders met in the mornings before session. Lomas Garza
worked the room, meeting with the mayor and council mem-
bers, explaining her work, answering questions, and so on.
To make a long story short, the city government moved to le-
gally disenfranchise the association. That is, while the asso-
ciation continued to exist, it no longer governed the museum.
Instead, the mayor and city council now appoint an advisory
board, and the museum director reports directly to the mayor.
To look at this case strictly in tenns of censorship or even
"reverse censorship: misses the point. It's not just a matter
of discourse-that is, who gets to talk-but that discourse
correlates to governance-that is, who gets to make adminis-
trative decisions. In this light, then, we need to ask why re-
 Noriega
cent anticensorship struggles in the arts have proceeded on
the assumption that expression and censorship are the mir-
ror image of each other, not just in a given case, but in all
instances. In other words. all would-be censors are alike and
can be lined up on one side of the border, while the art "com-
munity'" is all alike and can be lined up on the other side of
the border. There is an epic and manicheaen quality to this
scenario-and it is not without effectiveness in the struggles
for control over exhibition spaces and federal funds. But what
happens is that any censorship case is read as metonymic of
the natio.nal struggle between the forces of censorship and free
apression. The local and intra-institutional struggles-and the
possibility that they can point in a number of directions-is
lost to analysis, except to the extent that local events can serve
as an allegory of the nation.
What is interesting is that art supporters did not always
need to seek recourse to the idea of free expression; in fact in
the 1960s-in, for example, the censorship struggles over Jack
Smith's Flaming Creatures-free expression was fought for in
the name of art, rather than vice versa. I I It was the rubric of
"art" that provided protective cover for controversial works.
Since the late 1980s, however. we have seen this argument
reversed: art has been fought for in the name of free expres·
sion. Here. it is important to note that I am talking about the
public debates taking place. In the courts, it was and is an-
other matter, with "obscenity'" as the touchstone for free ex-
pression. More recently, we have seen another shift in the
terms of public advocacy, with fr~ expression taking a back
seat to economic rationales for the arts sector and its govern-
mental support. The National Endowment for the Arts annual
budget is equivalent to the amount spent by the Pentagon in
five hours, yet provides a needed stimulus to the $3-billion
nonprofit arts industry. an industry that employs 1.3 million
workers and generates $5.4 billion in local, state, and federal
tax revenues. Function determines existence. Framed in this
way, such an economic argument is congruent with that of
groups against affirmative action and immigration. In all three
instances, any notion of a social function or of the commonweal
is replaced by the market. Indeed, when you start arguing for
art on the basis of its tax revenue, your appeal, while directed
at the political representation system, essentially links aes·
thetics to corporate liberalism. And this congruence, more than
anything. explains why the arts establishment rejected the
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Art Offtcial Histories
1993 public arts work, "Art Rebate,· in which David Avalos,
Elizabeth Sisco, and Louis Hock refunded $10 bills to 450
undocumented workers along the border between San Diego
and Tijuana. An editorial in the New York Times made this
trade-off explicit, arguing that whereas Mapplethorpe was an
"outrageous but legitimate artist,· Avalos and company were
a "small bunch of loonies· who threatened to undermine lib-
eral efforts to defend the rights of real artists like Mapple~
thorpe.11 What was unreal about this art-that is. what made
it "non-art"-was that it raised issues of racism and immigra-
tion in relationship to cultural capital at precisely that mo-
ment when the art world was subordinating its advocacy of
free speech to the same economic rationale used for nativist
and nationalist ends.
Censorship efforts are notable for their refusal to read the
work in question, and that was the case with "Art Rebate" as
well. Close readings constitute a form of dialogue (not always
an exalted form, mind you, but dialogue nonetheless) and cen-
sorship is about monologue. This monologuJ:-Can, however,
take some twisted forms, as with the invocation of political
correctness, wherein majority groups' silence minority groups
on the basis of their supposed hegemony. But for all its pre-
sumed power, political correctness cannot stop the assaults
on women, racial minorities, and queers that it is said to have
made taboo. If anything has changed, then, it is merely the
protocol for discrimination. which now requires a pro forma
dismissal of the "pc. thought police. a rhetorical strategy that
recodes sexism or racism as free speech rather than as a vio-
lation of someone else's civil rights.
And so the need for modest proposals .... The function of
art in contemporary U.S. society has been one of the focal
points for public debate in the last decade. serving in many
ways as the symbolic battleground for underlying questions
of community, citizenship. and identity. In short, art history
matters. Unfortunately, these complex issues are now often
defmed by entrenched "us-versus-them" positions: quality ver-
sus diversity. conservatives versus liberals, the art world ver-
sus the state, the politics of the signifier versus the politics of
the signified, and so on. As a result, "minority· issues are not
seen as an integral part of national categories and debates,
but rather as an unsettling set of outside demands. In address-
ing issues of racial and cultural diversity, most criticism and
scholarship focuses on what's at stake in an immediate sense:
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 Noriega
funding, censorship, protests, lawsuits. In the process, how-
ever, the exhibition spaces being fought over are assumed to
be homogeneous entities. Thus, debate unfolds without a con-
sideration of the wide range of exhibition spaces, intended
audiences, and aesthetic orientations, or of the curatorial pro-
cess that traverses these social spaces from a number of shift.
ing positions, such as generation, gender, geography, race and
class. Indeed, debate often unfolds as if it were limited to two
sides-ours and theirs-that remain constant despite the shift-
ing terrain of American politics.
If I began this essay by looking for Chicano art, I have
found it mostly in assorted exhibition catalogues outside main-
stream venues and academic scholarship. Earlier this year,
however, Alicia Gaspar de Alba published an extended cultural
study of the ~Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation" exhi-
bition: Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's HouseY In
looking at the above issues from the perspective of the cura-
torial choices made within aesthetic, exhibition, and funding
frameworks, Gaspar de Alba provides an interdisciplinary ex-
amination of the relationship between cultural politics, aes~
thetic concerns, and policy-related issues. Here one can begin
to see both the contradictions as well as the possibility for dia-
logue about museums and their audiences. Even more, Gaspar
de Alba provides one model with which to articulate the com-
plex relationships between a "minority" art and larger socio-
aesthetic formations. More is at stake than simply being seen.
Indeed, without paying attention to context we lose an oppor-
tunity to see others and to see differently. Such an approach
can set new terms for art history, ethnic studies, and national
public discourse in which ~minority" and Umulticultural" are
something more than outside demands. But there is, as Gaspar
de Alba suggests, no simple ~alter-Native"except the one danc-
ing between outside and inside. Herein lies the paradox: It is
not enough to name oneself without also challenging the art
official histories that occasion such naming. But who dares
step through that looking glass?
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Art Official Histories
Notes
I want to thank Kathleen McHugh and Bryan Wolf for helping me
round out and clarify some of the arguments presented here.
I. For a critical overview of Latino and Latin American exhibi-
tions, see Mari Cannen Ramirez, "Beyond the 'Fantastic': Framing
Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art," Art Journal (Win-
ter 1992): 60-68. Reprinted in Gerardo Mosquera, ed., Beyond the
Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism/rom wtin America {Cambridge,
MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996),229-46.
2. Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, in conversation with the author.
3. As a curator, 1 have tried to take a genre~based approach that
also acknowledges and speaks against the prior exclusion of Chicanos
or Latinos by focusing on a particular practic<:: installation, photog-
raphy, film, and video. If my goal was to situate the artists within
both their medium's history and their specific Latino cultural back-
ground, critics inevitably saw the exhibitions as limited to ethnicity.
See the exhibition catalogues: Revelaciones/ Revelations: Hispanic
Art 0/ Evanescence (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993), Raphael
Montanez Ortiz: Early Destlllction., 1957-1967, Collection in Context
Series (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), From the
West: Chicano Narrative Photography {San Francisco: The Mexican
Museum, 1995 I Distributed by University of Washington Press),
and Cine Chicano (San Sebastian, Spain: Euskadiko Filmategia-
Filmoteca Vasca, 1993).
4. See also Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of
Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
5. See Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and
Yvonne Yarbro~Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Resistance an.d AfJinna~
tion, 1965-1985 (Los Angeles: UCLA Wight Art Gallery, 1991); and
1993 Bienn.ial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 1993).
6. Hal Foster et aI., ~The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation
on the Whitney Biennial," October 66 (Fall 1993): 3-27, see p. 3.
7. I am not arguing for some sort of critical purity, as if inside
and outside are discrete categories, but rather pointing to the failure
of the roundtable members to locate themselves within their critique
of the museum. To be fair, [ was an ~outside· advisor to the biennial:
I had quite a different critique of the museum, not for including "mi-
nority" artists with a limited understanding of the signifier (as if the
two were the same thing), but for the politics signified by the limited
selection of "minority· artists. Chon Noriega, letter to Elisabeth
Sussman, September 5, 1993.
8. See Rosalind Krauss's reading of Lorna Simpson's Hypotheti·
cal? (1992) in which Krauss equates the catalogue texts with the art
itself. Simpson's piece consists of three walls: one wall covered with
mouthpieces from various brass instruments appears opposite an-
11