LACMA East: "Phantom Sightings" Chronicles the Rise of Post-Chicanoism

Comments (0) By Christopher Miles Wednesday, Apr 30 2008

...continued from page 1

Walking through “Phantom Sightings” feels not so different from visiting the current “Biennial Exhibition” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where three of these artists (Ruben Ochoa, Eduardo Sarabia and Mario Ybarra Jr.) are among the 80-plus artists included, or the just-ended “Unmonumental” exhibition that inaugurated the New Museum’s new building in Manhattan’s Bowery neighborhood, or the Hirshhorn Museum’s 2006 exhibition “The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture.”Though filters regarding ethnicity, nationality and genres shaped these four exhibitions differently, the fact remains that you could take much if not most of the work from any of the four shows and plop it into any of the others, and it would fit nicely. That might attest to the contemporary art circuit’s capacity for rapidly internationalizing just about anything, but it might also speak to something the artists in the exhibitions, as well as the curators, variously tapped — or backed into.

Pondering whether it might be a “biennial for a recession-bound time,” the New York Times’ Holland Cotter indulged the Whitney’s curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, in their invocation of “lessness” — a turn away from spectacle and toward sustainability, collaboration, ephemerality and nonmonumentality. But it seems in each of these shows something even less comfortable than that is afoot — a kind of collective conflictedness about where to stand in the world, as individuals and as groups, with regard to participation in the production and consumption of material, popular and high culture, particularly within the context of an urban experience.

Carlee Fernandez, Self-Portrait: Portrait of My Father, Manuel Fernandez (2006)

Carolyn Costaño, Tropical Baby (Self-Portrait) (2008)

More About

You get an extra helping of such conflict in “Phantom Sightings,” seen not so specifically from a Chicano perspective, or a post-Chicano point of view, but from the assorted vantage points, contexts, backgrounds, preoccupations, enthusiasms, neuroses, acuities and skills of artists who share variously overlapping experiences, and who happen to have surnames of a shared descent.

It’s disappointing that artists who passed on this exhibition for fear of a label didn’t have the faith that their work could participate in the terrific hijacking this show turns out to be. And the exhibition might well have been more untidy in an interesting way if the curators, in what might have signaled that the complexity of all that falls under the Chicano umbrella goes beyond surnames, had included works by artists whose parentage might hail from just about anywhere, but who, as living and breathing malleable and responsive beings in contemporary America (certainly in contemporary Los Angeles), give evidence through their work of the influence of Chicano culture on the production of contemporary art. All this said, LACMA shows via this exhibition that it does indeed have an edge, and as the three curators contend in the introduction to the exhibition catalog, this is an exhibition “you need to see.”