
Bubble Murals and Muralist Jokes
Asco’s Skyscraper Skin
Mariana Fernández
“With their wide stances and face masks, Herrón and Gronk transformed the air itself into an artistically rendered mural, one that, like a bubble in high winds, was dynamic, unexpected, and short-lived.”
Volume One, Issue Two, “Air Bubbles,” Essay
Air, and what it carries, is dangerous: a notion Mariana Fernández examines as she looks at the “in-betweenness” of Los Angeles’ late twentieth-century Chicano artist network, Asco. Asco’s liminality was threatening to the Los Angeles status quo, evoking convergence among Chicano artists as they collaborated to produce pieces hybrid in language, body, and experience. This also bubbled their already marginalized presence within Los Angeles, denoting further separation in identity and artistic temporality. Looking toward Asco’s temporary public intervention, Skyscraper Skin, as a mode of example, Fernández argues that the intrinsically bubble-like quality of Asco as both Chicano community and artist group challenged the privatization of Los Angeles’ airspace and allowed minorities to take up space — transforming photography, performance, and muralism from static mediums into a uniquely dynamic entity that sifted through the air enacting movement, action, and change.
- The Editors
The day that Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón III, and Gronk shot Skyscraper Skin, 1980, was a particularly unsafe day to be breathing outside in Los Angeles. Congestion and smog in the city was so bad between the 1950s and late 1970s that newspaper articles called the air “choking,” “agonizing,” and “strangling.”
It was also a day of Santa Ana winds, one of the twenty or so days of the year during which Southern California is overcome by the hot, dry, incendiary winds that blow down from the northeast through to Los Angeles. “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, “to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.”
Figure 1. Asco and Harry Gamboa Jr., American, 1972-1987 (Asco) b. 1951 (Gamboa), Skyscraper Skin, negative 1980; printed 2012, Gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm), Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA: Museum purchase, Kathryn Hurd Fund (M.2012.7.10).
In their 1980 photograph, Herrón and Gronk (along with Gamboa and Patssi Valdéz, two of the four founding members of the Chicano artist network, Asco), extend a sheet of plastic in a deserted downtown Los Angeles street. They each wear a face mask, an eerily timely reminder that the air — what it carries — is dangerous. In the wind, the plastic sheet blows like a sail, a lone bubble amidst towering skyscrapers.
The work belongs to Asco’s signature invented medium of No Movies, or film stills created for non-existent movies. By invoking cinematic language for the still camera, their staged events, or conceptual performances, “filmed” throughout Los Angeles, called upon and perverted a range of tropes from Hollywood cinema and Chicano media (like the telenovela). The resulting images were disseminated and advertised as stills from “authentic” Chicano movies, allowing the artists to envision the possibility of Chicanos starring in and producing Hollywood films while critiquing their invisibility from them.
“I’ve watched a million movies,” Gamboa said, “and I came to the understanding that when I leave the movies I usually only walk away with a single frame in mind. I realized I could afford to take that single frame without having to produce the rest of the movie.”
The hybrid medium of No Movies, which were neither movies, photographs, nor documents of performances, are what scholar Amelia Jones calls quintessential examples of Asco’s “in-between practice.”
Gamboa self-identifies as belonging to the second wave of Chicano artists, the age group that grew up influenced by the Chicano Civil Rights Movement — of which Gamboa was a student leader — and critical of that very movement’s static iconography and nationalist political rhetoric. Beginning in the early 1970s, Asco intervened in situations overdetermined by displacement, police violence, surveillance, and military recruitment through guerilla-style street performances and “media hoaxes” often set against a backdrop of Hollywood glitter and excess.
Skyscraper Skin, though one of their later works, is a testament to the group’s continued rage at the notion that Chicanos had to make affirmative murals. By replacing static imagery with live bodies and transitory materials, the performance quite literally inserted the lived experiences of Chicanos into the movement’s political rhetoric. With their wide stances and face masks, Herrón and Gronk transformed the air itself into an artistically rendered mural, one that, like a bubble in high winds, was dynamic, unexpected, and short-lived.
In a recent article, C. Ondine Chavoya points to the persistent practice in recent literature of misidentifying Asco as a collective. Chavoya refers to Asco instead as a “collaborative artists’ group,” pointing to the ways in which they operated as “a platform for collaboration and experimentation rather than a static entity.”
At the same time that the city was undergoing a new wave of transformation and “urban renewal” in the mid-1970s, downtown Los Angeles began emerging as a frequent backdrop for Asco projects.
Figure 2. Harry Gamboa Jr., Asco, 1975, ©1975, Harry Gamboa Jr., 20 inches x 24 inches, FujiFlex Lightjet Print, Edition of ten. Performed by Willie Herrón, Humberto Sandoval, Patssi Valdez, Gronk, and Harry Gamboa Jr.
The city’s plans for a new wave of urban renewal in the Eastside, finalized in 1974, was to eliminate the historic Bunker Hill neighborhood and engrave its “creative-destructive achievement” on the landscape in the form of the new Music Center complex, the Department of Water and Power headquarters, and the “first generation of trophy-building skyscrapers” that figure so prominently in Skyscraper Skin.
Despite impaired day-to-day mobility in a rapidly changing Los Angeles, movement, as Chavoya mentions, was both a significant theme and a method in Asco’s work.
Movement also had to do with how No Movies were distributed. Though the works advertised films that essentially did not exist beyond the images that were being circulated, No Movies reached international audiences through mail art networks and local and national news outlets. Skyscraper Skin, Gamboa’s play on the notion of banks and legal firms “skinning people alive,” was originally published in the Downtown News and wound up distributed in the very banks and legal offices Asco was taking aim at.
Artist David Avalos had written about how, in California, there exists a situation in which “the Mexican worker as a group seems to exist in a public realm, is in fact a media celebrity, while, actually, little, if any, opportunity exists for social interaction of dialogue between them and those of us comfortably occupied in front of our television sets.”
Gamboa once said that “Chicanos are… viewed as a phantom culture. We’re like a rumor in this country.”
And still, the bubble’s most magical quality is its disappearance. The entire event lasted less than a minute, collapsing into itself in the fluctuating weather conditions and leaving no permanent mark on the Los Angeles landscape. Gamboa, writing about the futile attempt to sift through the rubble of Asco’s performances, warns that the “works of Asco were often created in transitory or easily degradable materials that crumble at the slightest prodding and fade quickly upon exposure to any glimmer of hope. It is unlikely that the objects, historical accuracy, or spirit of Asco will ever be recovered.”
Asco’s performances are lost works, but they continue to circulate and evolve in the public imagination precisely because of their evanescence. It was the fleeting nature of those public interventions, their impermanence and unreliability, which allowed them to flourish in Los Angeles’s weather — to transform muralism from a static medium into one of movement, action, and change.
In a 1976 interview, a little over a decade before the fatal burst of Asco in 1987, Gronk was asked, “What’s in the future for Asco?”
“Bubble murals. More muralist jokes.”
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Mariana Fernández is a Mexican writer and curator. She has a degree in journalism and cultural studies from New York University and is currently a graduate student in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. Her work focuses on the entwinements of race, gender, and labor in contemporary art, with emphases on performance studies and intermedia art from Latin America. She currently works as a curatorial intern in contemporary projects at the Clark Art Institute.
- Daniel Nussbaum, “Bad Air Days,” Los Angeles Times (July 19, 1998). https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jul-19-tm-5206-story.html ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 220. ↩
- C. Ondine Chavoya, “Pseudographic Cinema: Asco’s No-Movies,” in Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 292. ↩
- Harry Gamboa Jr., conversation with the author, July 16, 2020. ↩
- Amelia Jones, “Traitor Prophets:’ Asco’s Art as a Politics of the In-Between,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure : A Retrospective, 1972-1987, eds. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), p. 108. ↩
- Some of these performances included Stations of the Cross (1971), Spray Paint LACMA (1972), First Supper (After a Major Riot) (1974), and Decoy War Victim (1975). Chon A. Noriega, “Your Art Disgusts Me: Early Asco 1971-75,” east of borneo (November 18, 2010). https://eastofborneo.org/articles/your-art-disgusts-me-early-asco-1971-75/ ↩
- C. Ondine Chavoya, “Fleeting Inscriptions: Asco, Ephemera, and Intergroup Exchange in LA,” in Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020). Click here for catalog ↩
- Noriega, “Your Art Disgusts Me.” ↩
- Chon A. Noriega, “No Introduction,” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 7 ↩
- Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 98. ↩
- C. Ondine Chavoya, introduction to Asco : Elite of the Obscure : A Retrospective, 1972-1987, eds. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), p. 45. ↩
- Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos, 98 ↩
- Ibid., 82, p. 137. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Chavoya, introduction to Asco: Elite of the Obscure, p. 72. ↩
- Gamboa added that another reference was the popular myth of Aztecs “ripping people’s skins off and wearing them.” Harry Gamboa Jr., conversation with the author, July 16, 2020. ↩
- David Avalos, “The Donkey Cart Caper: Some Thoughts on Socially Conscious Art in Antisocial Public Space,” in Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 316. ↩
- Harry Gamboa Jr., “Harry Gamboa, Jr., No Movie Maker.” Interview by Marisela Norte. El Tecolote Literary Magazine (July, 1983), 3, p. 12. ↩
- Harry Gamboa Jr., “Light at the End of Tunnel Vision,” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 101. ↩
- Gronk and Willie Herrón, “Three Interviews,” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 43. ↩