Movements in Art & Activism: Radical Practice in California & Beyond

Panel co-chaired with Dr. Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, featuring discussant Dr. Jennifer A. González and panelist Dr. Erin Reitz

CAA Conference | Los Angeles | February 2018

This panel reconsidered California’s most well-defined corners of the art historical imaginary. While mid-twentieth century idioms including the Cool School, Light and Space, and Finish Fetish garnered widespread attention, a much different artistic vocabulary was developing in lockstep with locally emerging social movements. Rather than being defined by shared formal concerns, these practices clustered around their affiliations with movement-building across the state.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, a wave of organized resistance swept across California in the forms of the Chicano Movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, among others. These movements ignited radical practices from Oakland to Los Angeles and beyond. They drove artists to reassess their roles within the public sphere: from the interventions Asco; to the pedagogical public art of the Black Panther Party; to the lecture-performances that arose from the protest speech of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. As many practitioners redefined themselves through the figure of the artist-activist, they engaged the socially transformative possibilities of their output. Conversely, several movements placed the aesthetic at the forefront of their political organizing, arguing that art-making is endowed with the capacity to produce palpable change on the ground. This panel reflects on the premises and legacies of radical practices in California, with an eye toward how they continue to inflect aesthetics of resistance in the present.

My presentation, “Disruptions in the Network: Asco’s ‘No Movies’ Photography,” focused on photographs produced as part of the performance-based series titled “No Movies,” begun in the early 1970s, by Asco. Each no “No Movie” started as a live-action tableau that Asco members publicly staged and mediated through film and still cameras in various locations across Los Angeles. In some instances, they posited photographs of their performances as film stills from non-existent films, reproducing them on postcards, flyers, or posters. These images would both pay homage to and mock the manufactured allure embedded in visual codes of Hollywood and Chicano cinema productions. In other cases, the group (falsely) claimed their performance photographs to be documentation of newsworthy local events. Asco distributed these images through mail circuits—adapting strategies in dialogue with histories of mail art that developed out of the Fluxus movement of the 1950s and 1960s—to convince local and national news media of their authenticity. In so doing, they easily exposed journalists’ prejudices by playing upon Chicano stereotypes. Through an examination of the various strategies of photographic production and reproduction that Asco employed for “No Movies,” I highlighted the group’s reappropriation of photography as an evidentiary tool historically mobilized to perpetuate damaging cultural myths and legitimate state-sanctioned discriminatory practices. By successfully “hacking” multiple forms of American media distribution channels, Asco disrupted networks of power whose influence would typically uphold and propagate the racial, cultural, and socioeconomic stereotypes to which they were consistently subject.