Interview with Gary Garay
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Decades ago Harry Gamboa, Jr., a forefather of Chicano conceptual art, wrote about the “phantom” culture of America, condemning the conspicuous absence of Mexican-Americans. Then, in 1972, the Chicano art collective Asco executed the guerrilla “Spray Paint LACMA” performance that mocked the museum’s blatant exclusion of Chicano artists by tagging members’ names– Herrón, Gronkie, and Gamboa — on its edifice. Upon LACMA security’s immediate graffiti paint-over, the artists’ phantom statement about the “phantom” culture of America was complete. Asco’s witty action exposed and condemned the conspicuous absence of Mexican-Americans from mainstream media, public exposure, and,not surprisingly, from large art institutions. So when the same museum opened a twenty-week exhibition entitled Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement just this past April, I approached the project with skepticism: with this kind of history, this institution’s background, certain pressing questions necessarily arose. Personally, it seemed that LACMA’s race-based framework was particularly ballsy for a museum oft accused of cultural negligence.

The sum of LACMA’s affirmation that Chicano art fits the international [read, Western], high art paradigm in the context of the institution’s shamelessly belated acknowledgment of contemporary Latino artists and the exhibition curators’ approach came across as forced, excessive and ultimately defensive of what, to me, is clearly a vibrant, varied, and prolific local Chicano contemporary art scene independent of such Establishment recognition. The show’s subtitle, too — “Art after the Chicano Movement” — is simultaneously expansive and exclusive, at once pronouncing the Chicano movement as a finite period of recent history (which seemingly frees “Chicano Art” from ethnic stereotype), and yet perpetuating the racialization of a current art movement. It was with these reservations that I first met this exhibition; and with such perplexities and new curiosities aroused by that first viewing that I made my way to Phantom contributor Gary Garay’s studio in Los Angeles, eager to get his take on participating in a show distinguishing a post-Chicano contemporary art movement – a bold curatorial concept sprung from an institution infamous for excluding Chicano art.

Born in the United States to a Mexican family with a Basque last name; and an artist from a family of practical, hard-working women and men for whom the fine arts may be perceived as a luxury, Gary Garay does not lend himself to labels. He is a self-proclaimed “first-generation Mexican born in the United States” who deliberately pauses at his own descriptor, which is distinct from “Mexican-American”. And he recognizes the irony — “… since we inhabit Alta California, [which] was historically considered Mexico, in that sense, I’m easily just a Mexican” – he is indigena. Why, then, does he feel like a phantom; like he is allá (“over there”) when he is here; but like he is allá when he is in Mexico? As he does in life, Garay reckons with dualities in artwork that celebrates mezcla (mixture) and consciously assimilates pop capitalist culture, drawing a delicate dichotomy between the alluring and the diagnostic.

For Gary, the “phantom” quality is less about invisibility than about the complexity of being a Mexican in America an American in Mexico, and an inhabitant of Los Angeles, a locale marked by a tenuous sense of place that affects the psyche of Angelenos Mexican or Asian, African or South American or European in descent, first or seventh-generation. Gary’s reluctance to adopt identifiers including “Chicano” illuminates his “phantom” of mixed identities. He acknowledges the relevance of “Chicano” to his culture, but because neither he nor his parents participated in El Movimento, the Chicano Civil Rights Movement during which Mexican-American Californians re-appropriated the derogatory “Chicano” label, he does not claim the name.

Gary Garay’s body of work displays the most diverse modes of expression among all the pieces exhibited in Phantom Sightings. As there is fluidity of identity in concept, there is fluidity in his media. Manipulating vernacular culture to question blind consumption and challenging the “low brow” status of mural signage and street graphics, Gary celebrates the proletariat, the pop, and craft in his installations. When he is struck with an idea, the vision dictates a medium that, familiar or foreign, he is then driven to master. Whether it’s acrylic on wood, painted cardboard, or souped-up ice cream cart imported from Mexico bearing fresh-squeezed mango popsicles, this artist’s practice is characterized by experimentation, meticulousness, self-education, and independence (no art-making underlings in sight)). Gary is emphatic that the learning process is just as critical as the final product. Case in point: Not surprisingly, he used cardboard for the first time for his delicate, detailed “Zapatos” sculptures which include a set of cardboard Nike Cortez Classics, shoes donned by West Coast cholos in the 1980s and 90s. Gary’s execution there ison point, giving the crisp blue, red, and white pairs a consumable allure juxtaposed with the coupling of those forbidden Crip and Blood colors. The widespread rocking of a shoe that memorializes the colonizer who pitted Mexico’s indigenous tribes against one another to gain domination is the shocking realization intended by “Zapatos.” For Gary, the artwork is not complete without cowboy boots and huaraches; all together, propped in “For Sale” position, the piece’s elements have a quiet anonymity that gains potency as the viewer considers the stories, stereotypes, and sources of identity that these vacant shoes convey. It is the elevation of the common paired with the wit (without the didactic) that makes Gary’s work equal parts accessible and provocative giving way to allegorical resonance.

Rounding out Gary’s Phantom Sightings installation, “Desert Eskimo” (a la neighborhood commercial street scene) is a vintage carrito de paletas oxymoronically depicting Eskimo dweller and palm trees silhouetted against a pastel desert LA-esque landscape. Filled with Gary’s home brew of mango, strawberry, and pineapple-coconut popsicles that take the shape of cassette tape, Aztec warrior, 40-bottle, and a Westside hand sign, one can liken cultural consumption to the ease of popsicle-sucking. “I want my work to evoke the ‘wow’ where people pause and realize that they’d never perceived an object or an image in a similar way,” Gary says.His artwork is as enticing as it is biting, its recognizable street imagery neither idealizing the ordinary, nor shaming it. Rather, the everyday is re-interpreted, elevated, and packaged to elicit the “wow”-sparked contemplation of cultural and identity constructs.

When I revisited the exhibit a month later having after interviewed Gary, I came to a new understanding of the self-conscious curatorial approach taken for this exhibition, an approach whose trajectory was deliberately drawn from the Asco-born milieu of conceptual interventions and low-budget, radical performance which left genre, racial branding, and movement strategically ambiguous. In Phantom Sighting, artists from across the Southwest whose socially-minded work takes on a range of equally well-executed and experimental forms also invites the audience to take a closer look. Many probe the nature of “phantom” in relation to historical amnesia or the immigrant plight, while others expose social inequities or mixed identities through comedic, ironic, and often, ground-breaking artworks. It is inevitable that any contemporary exhibit not only anchored by race, but produced by a traditionally white institution for a traditionally white audience, is prone to doubt, misreading, and controversy whether it projects a message of pride and solidarity or of a post-ethnic art world. I know that I am not the only one who read the show’s subtitle and content as a potentially presumptuous and pre-mature historicizing of the Chicano art movement and a guilt-ridden reclamation of Chicano art via contemporary artists. Nevertheless, it is this curatorial daring that excites me. Phantom Sightings does not attempt to acknowledge a new movement in art, nor attempt to fill a gap in the story of Chicano artists — as co-curator Rita Gonzalez put it, the exhibition is meant to showcase artists who convey complex and diverse identities in both loud and subversive, as well as subtle and intimate, ways. Gonzalez acknowledges, too, a young generation of Phantom Sightings artists with varying relationships to “Chicano.” As she explained , “they have concerns similar to those of Chicano artists and activists of the 60s; however, those concerns are articulated differently.” In other words, Phantom Sightings stems from a like origin of social critique that interrogates conventions and taboos of the day, but does so now with the contemporary vocabulary of photographic mural, video, serape threads, freeway canvas, and sewn vinyl with chrome car parts that, according to Gonzalez, have an “allegorical quality to them.” The curators also admit that the museum’s re-objectification of the art piece is antithetical to many of the artists’ intentions to displace and de-materialize the art object. Indeed, this very act of exhibition itself perpetuates LACMA’s curatorial power over public perception and artistic legitimacy. But while this dynamic can be off-putting, the artworks are so good that I’ve gotten over it.

Phantom Sighting is a refreshingly risk-taking exhibit with important and challenging work set in a context that has brought me to far deeper contemplation than any other recent exhibit. For that, it is among my favorite thematic group shows so far this year, and Gary’s work, with its smart, legible, and subtle yet fierce presence is among the show’s best. As Gary himself humbly articulated, “The Chicano art that precedes us is the Firecracker and we [the Phantom Sightings artists, among other contemporary artists emerging from the Chicano movement] are the Sparks” – sparks that have their own individual trajectory, visibility, and flare. Gary is one of many enlightened artists who proves that there is no quintessential Chicano art, just as there is no generic Chicano, Mexican, Mexican-American, or American; no one way to process and assess visual, personal, urban, socio-economic, and folk culture. At the nimble age of 31, Gary Garay is going to keep on watching the world for a long time. In the meantime, I’ll keep watching what he makes of the place. And I’ll start by getting over to his bi-weekly Mas Exitos melodies at The Verdugo, where he plays Selector as “Ganas”, along with fellow Phantom Sightings artist “Lengua,” among other unassumingly hip friends.

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For more on Gary Garay, check out his site: http://garygaray.com/index.php?/news/