V.2.2 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 847134
This is an outstanding interview of Rupert Garcia (born 1941)—one of the leading artists in the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s—conducted by San Francisco-based Mexican performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña (born 1955). Garcia discusses his views regarding Chicano art, particularly vis-à-vis postmodern theoretical trends, describing the multifaceted strategies he employs to escape being pigeonholed as just a “radical poster-maker.” Also, the interview offers a more complete context for Garcia’s work at a turning point in his career as he moved between his early political posters and his much more subtle, but no less political, production of the mid-1990s. Excerpts are taken from the interview’s original publication in the catalogue for the exhibition Aspects of Resistance: Rupert Garcia held at the Alternative Museum in New York (on view December 7, 1993–February 19, 1994) [Rupert Garcia and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Turning it Around: A Conversation,” Aspects of Resistance: Rupert Garcia, (New York, NY: Alternative Museum, 1994), 13–35].
THE CHICANO COMMUNITY, like many other communities in the United States, is currently suffering from serious intergenerational conflicts. Many veteranos [old people] see my generation as too theoretical, eclectic, and experimental—we are perceived as irreverent, politically confused and ungrateful. For us, nothing is fixed or sacred. As a reaction to this typecasting, we tend to stereotype our padrinos [godparents, sponsors, connections] as unnecessarily nationalistic, morally righteous, and aesthetically conservative. Rupert Garcia, however, defies all stereotypes. An unquestionable veterano of many cultural wars, his rigorous artwork and challenging ideas have never stopped speaking to us, nor has he stopped listening to us.
I first met Rupert in the summer of 1984, during an ambitious “intercontinental art conference” that took place in San Francisco. Artists from throughout Latin America, the U.S. and Canada gathered to compare notes on the various aesthetic and political tendencies coming out of the multiple arts communities in the Americas. I was there as a journalist for La Opinión (Los Angeles), and my English wasn’t exactly great. I met him at a party. We spoke in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. I was impressed by his generosity of spirit and by the breadth of his vision. At a time when nationalism was relatively rampant, Rupert was talking about the need for Chicanos to define themselves in relation to all the people of color in the Americas. He was opposed to simplistic ideas about identity, art making, and the social role of the artist. His thoughts resonated very strongly in my irreverent psyche. Since then, we have been friends, and his philosophical, aesthetic and political ideas have continuously influenced my work and the work of many of my colleagues.
Nine years later, Rupert and I sit at a table at San Francisco’s Café Picaro in the heart of the Latino Mission District. It’s early May. I hope our conversation will reveal those other sides of Rupert that are often ignored—mainly his work as a social thinker and cultural critic. Comenzamos. [Let’s get started!]:
GP: What are you up to?
RG: The most important thing for me is to continuously produce works of art.
GP: ¿Por qué…? [Why?]
RG: For the same reason it was so important to me as a youth living in Stockton (California)—because it gave me and still gives me a great sense of spiritual and political power and connectedness to something larger than myself. As a maker of objects, I need to continuously experience this undivided relationship between a profound spirituality and my socio-historical self. It allows me to feel existentially safe, to think critically, to want to continue living. If I lose the sense of wonderment and skillful accomplishment when I make art, I feel disjointed, disconnected. I fall apart.
GP: When critics approach your work, they often overlook its philosophical and spiritual dimensions and concentrate on the political content. Are you bothered by the art world’s general inability to understand the multiple facets of your work?
RG: I’ve been pigeonholed since the late 1960s because of my involvement with the Chicano and Civil Rights movements. It has taken me almost twenty years of “contestation” to alter somewhat the stereotype of Rupert Garcia as the “radical poster-maker.” Of course, I’m bothered by this pigeonholing, especially when it objectifies me, reduces me to a simple-minded thinker. But I don’t mind that people consider me a critical Chicano artist, as long as they understand the complexity of the term. To be “Chicano” is above all to be a concerned human, and to be this means to be complex and multifaceted. It is true that my work is sometimes explicitly and suggestively political, but I am also concerned with many other things. A democracy demands that its citizens be critical, political, and vociferous, or in my case, also visce-ferous.
GP: Besides constantly having to fight the stereotypes that the dominant culture has conveniently assigned for us, we also have to face another dilemma. When the dominant culture expresses interest in our work, what it really wants is to commodify it; again, to strip from it its aesthetic and political complexities to make it palatable and marketable. In our case, what is wanted from us is Chicano art without thorns or chili.
RG: The commoditization of ethnicity, or of anything else, for that matter, is a big business in America, que no…? Euro-America loves to “embrace” other cultures, but this embrace can be fatal. It can make us spurious and plain. Works of art by “successful” artists of color, curated by and for major institutions, generally appear very “beautiful” and “different,” but to succeed in that context, they must be sufficiently disconnected from the “not so beautiful” socio-political and aesthetic complexities that characterize the everyday life of most people of color.
Don’t misunderstand me! I’m not saying that works of art that do not clearly reference social reality in a certain way are wrong or incorrect, while work that does is correct. I am saying that despite a few recent, partially successful exhibitions, the tendency of some major museums and galleries is to curate more shows that include “inoffensive objects.” The representation of the artistic community by mainstream institutions is unbalanced. Artists usually make what they must, but curators select what they will.
“Artists of color,” whether Chicano, Latino, African American, Asian American or Native American, who create genuine works of contestation and great beauty are often talked about within extremely limiting parameters of “ethnicity” or “identity,” and always with the critical discourse of the so-called “Other.” The “ethnic artist” is often written about as existing and creating in a context unconnected from American history and culture, as if we were never part of it until now. We have always been part of American history and culture. We have always been part of the global cultural movements. The unspoken goal of the commoditization of ethnicity may be aimed at discrediting this fact and making us forget why these works of art exist in the first place.
The question of “identity” and ethnicity” is not only a problem for “people of color.” All people contend with these issues. Why? Because—and in addition to the intrinsic presence of the human spirit—human beings map and praxis their identity, and do so in a sociocultural context through time and space. It almost makes me crazy when I hear or read that we have a problem with identity, as if it fell from the sky directly on us and somehow missed so many other folks, and hence, that we alone created this problem.
As I see it, human beings are globally defining what it means to be a human being enigmatically hovering on a rotating, living sphere in the mysterious and wonderful cosmos. However, the way things seem to be going, and if we want to live peacefully together, we must work together nationally and internationally to creatively and critically mediate with those different and specific historically based material and ideational circumstances that have given rise to and perpetuate our present global crises.
GP: Rupert, give me a few examples of the commoditization of ethnicity.
RG: The Mexican icons of Emiliano Zapata and Frida Kahlo. For the U.S. dominant culture, Zapata seems to be always connected to a romanticized heritage of Mexico and to a Hollywood-ized portrayal of him by Marlon Brando, but to various Chicanos, making a picture of Zapata is something much more complex. It speaks to the indigenous and mestizo raíces [intermingling roots] of our direct identification with Mexico, but also speaks of Zapata’s social struggle, and how that struggle impacted our own Chicano and Mexicano families and communities inside and outside Mexico. It helps us understand the reasons why and when many of our families came to the United States in the first place. Similarly, Kahlo seems to represent to many Americans the ultimate “Other.” Miss Exótica, a Mexican trinket, something reified to be consumed. For me, Frida represents artistic and social commitment. Her intense and beautiful paintings and the will to make them are inspiring. Her dedication to things Mexican and to social justice is empowering. Despite the fact that our umbilical cord with Mexico has been politically severed, icons such as Zapata and Kahlo can give us a multi-faceted sense of continuity. But of course, this entire critical dimension is basically irrelevant to many in the United States. What the culture industry really wants is to simplify potentially perplexing cultural icons of any sort so they can be easily consumed. We are a society of cultural consumers. Here, anything can be made into a commodity. If you put on enough jelly and sugar, anything, absolutely anything, can be consumed—even “political art,” most of the artists who are openly critical of the state are currently being shot by the seemingly invisible arrows of commoditization. To what extent will they be diluted? Time will tell.
GP: Many of us are not even aware we have been wounded by these arrows. To me the tricky discourse of “the Other” is a very effective strategy of exclusion and separation. There are other equally effective strategies. You have talked about how the so-called “post-modern” discourse has been used to exclude Latin Americans and US-born Latinos from the topography of contemporary American art.
RG: Absolutely. Some U.S. theoreticians say that postmodernism began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they forget to say that it began at that time mainly for them. For the oppressed people of the Americas, it really began at the outset of the European conquest of this hemisphere, in 1492. Why do I say this? Because, as far as I can tell, modernism since the European Renaissance clearly defines a path of unprecedented ideas and practices of exploitation as well as a mechanical and disenchanted science and an exaggerated ego fractured from the collective. It is also the artistic expression of capitalism, Western humanism, and Euro-centrism understood as the measure of all things—the universal pretense,1 the disconnection of the spirit from the body and nature. Modernism’s ultimate objectives apparently are to “purify,” to collect, to quantify, and to separate the “Other” and nature from the dominating cultural and economic institutions and their supporters. And the result is the convenient historical amnesia that usually informs the mind of the colonizer.
For our indigenous and African ancestors, things were quite different. The moment that the Native Americans were colonized and Africans enslaved to be shipped to this continent, I mean, five minutes after they were captured, they began to protest. That’s when post-modernism began. The battle against the conquest, colonization, and enslavement was and continues to be a critique, a “deconstruction” of the dominant social and cultural structures. When someone says, “I’m not going to accept your bullying me into believing that I am nothing, so you can believe you are everything,” to me that’s post-modernism. If you believe that you are nothing, as the modernists would have liked, then you are effectively objectified and then, the only job left for you as a colonized artist is to uncritically emulate the European and Anglo-American aesthetics—avant-garde or not—rather than produce from what is truly a hybridized context.
GP: Let’s talk about how the post-modernism of the late 1970s and early 1980s effectively excluded other forms of post-modern practice and thought. This post-modernism reigned in the U.S. academy and “mainstream” art world, which is the art marketplace, until the mid 1980s when it was made more complex by the debates on multiculturalism. When I first came to the United States from Mexico in the late 1970s, artists and critics were talking about their version of post-modernity as if it were a universal condition. To them, all Mexican art was caught in the spider web of pre-industrial romanticism. I was always raising hell and reminding them that only a handful of countries on the entire planet were undergoing the severe crises of advanced capitalism that produced their culturally specific version of post-modernism.
RG: You are right. “Writers and artists of color” have been talking about the re-mapping of European-based post-modernism. The fact is that the European and Anglo-American theoreticians of post-modernism rarely and insufficiently addressed issues of race and ethnicity. They infrequently recognized that many U.S. “artists of color” were by definition opposed to modernism, and a number of us saw modernism as historically based but a historical—as non-regional and as mono-disciplinary. Much of our recent artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, and its continuing legacy, have always contradicted many aspects of modernism. Chicano artists were almost always historical, regional, and figurative. We used the figure as connected to our particularities, specific regions, and heritages. We made pictures that created illusions of space and time that ignored the flatness of the canvas, if you will, and that spoke about the politics of protest and change. And this is, in many ways, a variety of post-modernism. Modernism is not only about art and ways of seeing, it is also, in part, about the international and national subjugation of and defiance by “non-European people,” and of their cultures, and about the oftentimes victorious attempts to control us and our natural resources, to exclude and push us away from the centers of power. Thus we have been variously opposed to modernism for centuries to save our very lives.
GP: Since the 1960s, Chicano and Mexican artists have been using such techniques as borrowed imagery, quoting, juxtaposition of image and text, and so on. We knew we were critiquing aspects of modernism, but we didn’t call ourselves “post-modern.”
RG: Sure. To us it was a mere strategy of critique and resistance. We didn’t make art to be just “intellectually interesting” or “aesthetically fashionable.” Our concerns— though at times essentialist and unfulfilled—were genuine. It was a popular and populist form of post-modernism connected to our social and cultural struggles, and it existed in various aspects all across the United States, and was, in many instances, “internationalist.”
Some critics have written that painting died and then came back to life, and, to paraphrase Kenneth Baker, that the restoration of American figurative art happened about the late 1970s, early 1980s. These critics must be talking about that narrow slice of American culture called the “art marketplace.” Many Latino and other “artists of color” have been involved with the figure since at least World War II. If I read this right, when we do “A” it is seen, if it is seen at all, as insignificant by the culture industry, but when “A” is done by the Euro-Anglo-American artist in the context of the “art marketplace,” it is perceived as not only spectacular but somehow “universally meaningful.” What’s going on here? Is this the old wine of the racist “white man’s burden” in a new bottle?
GP: You always talk about the importance of regionalism as political and cultural praxis. The “discourse of universality” has also been used to exclude the art of Third World people inside and outside the U.S.
RG: Before I became more discerning, I used to believe in the pretense of universality as we know it and which I believe came out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It’s a very elitist French, a very elitist German idea. European bourgeois intellectuals were obsessed with a self-seeking definition of what truth and beauty is, of what science is. What they actually did was to develop a paradigm, “determining” the origin, nature, method, and limits of human knowledge, and then they imposed it on other cultures. They “forgot” to consult the people in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Though the ideas of the Enlightenment were extremely regional and historically specific, Europeans saw them as “universal” and “timeless;” their particular identities and idiosyncrasies were turned into a hegemonic banner that everybody else was supposed to unquestioningly carry around. Paradoxically, their most sinister contribution to universal thought was the fictional construction of a point of view and an ideology that determines who exists inside the human sphere of universality and who is outside it, “the Others.”
You know, Guillermo, some wonderful ideas and practices have unquestionably come (and still come) from Europe. Many of them stimulated revolutionary and national liberation movements worldwide and Western science has both saved as well as destroyed innumerable lives. The problem lies for me in the binary application of European epistemology—they are right and others are wrong. This Eurocentric arrogance and dominating point of view and behavior for one-sided economic and socio-cultural profits and power are what drive this vulgar praxis. And by the way, and obviously, one need not be Anglo or European alone to be greedy and exploitative. What I’m talking about is a certain point of view of the world. And that can potentially be internalized by any human being.
GP: But this philosophical arrogance existed even before the Enlightenment. I mean Columbus, Cortés & Company were already major practitioners of “universality.”
RG: Even before them. The Christian crusades of Europe in the Middle Ages went on a bullying tour around the Middle East for the “recovery” of the “Holy Land” from the Muslims. They successfully bullied other cultures and religions into believing they were not universal, simply because they didn’t look and think or behave like “Europeans.” They managed to physically and psychologically persuade other peoples into believing they were ugly, unintelligent, primitive, and therefore that they were inherently slaves. Of course the Europeans who created this mythology proposed themselves as the only saviors, the teachers and impresarios of truth and beauty.
GP: Many people still think like this nowadays. You are describing the mentality of a Hilton Kramer or a Jesse Helms as well as many “patriotic” and Christian American neo-conservatives. You are also describing the U.S. international policy. This country has inherited and expanded European colonial practices.
RG: Yes, and it frightens me very much to know this. The notion of universality is still used along with guns, economic pressure, and psychological suppression of “minorities.” The idea of universality still informs the myth that Western civilization is the one and only civilization. The only way to become human is to uncritically accept the paradigms of Western civilization, thus to be “willingly” colonized. It informs contemporary racism, sexism, and homophobia. It distorts our sense of self; it mutilates our dignity. Those who perpetuate this transcendental pretense of social and cultural being are also causing damage to themselves. This arbitrary binary construct must be dismantled if the idea of a diverse human family is to be affirmatively realized.
GP: What gestures and strategies do you use in your own work to dismantle all these various discourses of exclusion we’ve been talking about?
RG: The spiritual endurance to carry on is one such gesture. The perseverance of the work of many cultural practitioners testifies to this kind of persistence. In terms of aesthetic strategies, the multi-panel—or the divided space of a single panel—format offers me a platform to dialectically address ideas, experiences, and cultural artifices that are usually perceived as contrary. The multi-panel field allows me to bring together these apparently “different” images, ideas, feelings, and colors into one visual and conceptual space. This synthesis reveals the mythology and danger of rigid, binary thinking.
I am determined to do my best to denounce the falsehood of the traditional binary construct of human understanding that, I believe, goes back to Plato. If we indiscriminately accept the existence of binary thinking, we are also accepting the fact that there is only a right way and a wrong way. While an either/or binary may be true for some things—either you eat food and drink water and live or if you don’t you will die. But it is quite another matter to say that a certain perspective on life as a whole is absolute and that differing points of view are not only irrelevant albeit unworthy of consideration!
Limiting constructs were obviously created to keep one side “pure” and in power, since the other side is seen as mongrel and weak. As Mestizos y Mulattoes how can we possibly subscribe to this refuted belief?
Another useful strategy is the mobility across disciplines. I am always moving from painting to drawing to posters to prints and back to painting again. This constant going back and forth from one medium to another is a great strategy to escape simplistic definitions, to remain in flux and therefore gather more freedom. I never feel that I am fixed to only making one kind of art. I love to move around just as in life. I mean, one is not just a cab driver, or just a father. The same cab driver might also be an aspiring actor or a labor activist, and many other things. By practicing a variety of media, I try to represent this multiplicity of identities.
Another strategy is what you call “expropriation,” o sea [I mean,] the subversive appropriation of images from multiple sources, both “dominant” and “marginal"; I constantly borrow images from history, from the media, from politics, from Pop culture, from Mexican folk culture, you name it.
GP: That’s fine, but nowadays everybody is into borrowing images from multiple sources. So what’s the difference between what you and other Chicanos do, and what some commercial post-modernist artists are doing?
RG: I think that many artists don’t really understand the sources from which they draw, nor the original context of the images they borrow. They seem to not research the sources. They often blindly use this or that image because they find it cursorily striking, and that’s all. They don’t really “expropriate,” they merely do pastiche. Pastiche is a very surface-oriented conglomeration of elements superficially borrowed from different cultures and eras, without an understanding of their profound implications. You know, the “post-modernist thing” that everything goes, and everything equals everything else. While everything is everything, they are not necessarily all equal in significance.
GP: What about the notion of multi-contextuality…? To exhibit or perform in multiple contexts and sites can also be very empowering and a very effective strategy to dismantle exclusionary discourses.
RG: I exhibit my work in major museums in the United States and other countries as well as in civic, university, and local community spaces. To me, all are possible venues. I show in all kinds of places because it counters the notion of exclusion and exclusivity. The objective is to always be open, to go wherever you want to go. The exclusionary notion is also a product of binary thinking: if you can do this, you can’t do that. If you want to dismantle that dangerous notion, then you show wherever you want to show. From MoMA (New York) or the Tamayo Museum (Mexico City) to the Galería de la Raza (San Francisco). I mean, the value of human experience and the quality of art aren’t exclusively determined by the exhibiting context. In other words, the context of MoMA alone shouldn’t make my paintings more valuable than the context of the Galería.
GP: How do you see Chicanismo in the 1990s? I don’t expect you to speak as a representative of all Chicanos. I am fully aware that yours is only one among a myriad of opinions.
RG: My perspectives on the historical “Artes Chicanos” (there existed more than one perspective) haven’t changed much. To me, some of the ideas and practices of Chicano art continue to be concerned with the complex demand of art making and a complex struggle not exclusively about Chicanos. It is about the various struggles of the human family. However, the provincial and restrictive binary cultural models historically developed by some Chicano theorists and artists can be un-prosperously used by any artist living and working in a context of adversity, but Chicanos with both a critical eye on the “outside world” of influence and domination and the “inside world” of Chicano culture and an inclusive consciousness can produce singular visions—culturally specific visions—that at the same time accept and acknowledge the profundity and plight of other cultures. To repeat, what I see as very important for Chicanismo in the 1990s is to not emulate the example of the limiting and essentializing cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Given its context that kind of Chicanismo was affirming but it only partially worked then, and will only partially work now. Why? Because this particular discourse held the notion: there this is a single and unchanging “authentic Chicano-ness” hovering above history. It is intolerably exclusionary. It also creates “Others” not only between Chicanos and non-Chicanos but also among Mexican Americans themselves; it reproduces the same dominant and divisive paradigms that must be re-evaluated, dismantled and carefully reconstructed.
1
I am indebted to Robert C. Solomon’s book The Bully Culture (Lanham, Maryland: Littlefield Adams Quality Paperbacks, 1993), in which he critically examines Enlightenment and the idea of universality.