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Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

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Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

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Performative Futurity: Transmuting the Canon
through the Work of Rafa Esparza

by

Hannah E. Grossman

________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty of the USC, Roski School of Fine Arts
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

August 2017
Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the members of my advisory committee for their invaluable
guidance, expertise, and investment in challenging me to specify my argument and to craft each
word of this text carefully. To Amelia Jones, Ph.D. for her extensive knowledge of contemporary
art history and theory. To Noura Wedell, Ph.D. for lending me her critical lens and
interdisciplinary insight. To Andy Campbell Ph.D. for his intrigue, his criticisms, and his
confidence.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abstract

Sections

I. The Impossible Typology of Chicano Performance: A History in Revision

Introduction

II. Transfigured Phantom Sightings: the Chicano Retrospective Reimagined

III. On the Formation of a Different Canon: Decoloniality and Radical Phenomenology

IV. Rafa Esparza: (Re)Performing Adobe

V. Performance and Subversion in the Museum: The Institutional Paradigm as a Site of
Rupture

Considering La Chica Boom

Counterpublics in Public: implementing José Esteban Muñoz’s third strategy

VI. Performative Futurity: Transmuting the Canon through the Work of Rafa Esparza

Conclusion

Bibliography

Abstract

This thesis addresses the writing into history of Chicano performance art and, as a related
question, what it means to make work as a Chicano artist in relation to a range of art institutions,
exploring how strategies of resistance can connect, challenge, and transcend notions of what it
means to develop a practice rooted in the politics of identity. Rafa Esparza is a queer Chicano
performance artist from Los Angeles, whose work has recently been featured at the Bowtie
Project (Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Hammer Museum, and
most recently the Whitney Museum at the 2017 Biennial. The narrative arc of Esparza’s practice
in the past five years is used here as a case study of a contemporary critique, one working both
inside and outside of the institution. With consideration for the site specificity of his work
alongside historical and conceptual readings of Chicano performance in and around Los Angeles,
most notably in the work and exhibition of Chicano collective Asco, as well as the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art’s Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008)
exhibition, I argue that Esparza’s practice demonstrates a shift in socially engaged performance
art and its exhibition. Underpinning my analysis of Esparza’s practice, I draw on the scholarship
of seminal queer, performance and decolonial theorists José Esteban Mùnoz and Achille
Mbembe in considering ideas around the creation of counterpublics and the decolonization of
knowledge and being more broadly.

I. The Impossible Typology of Chicano Performance: A History in Revision

Introduction

Drawing on the scholarship of seminal queer, performance and decolonial theorists José
Esteban Mùnoz and Achille Mbembe, I aim to analyze ideas around the creation of
counterpublics and the decolonization of knowledge and being more broadly, through a close
reading of a select trajectory of Rafa Esparza’s recent performances and installations.
Considering histories of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, performance art and the
intersection between the two, my intention is to discuss what the impact might be of
contemporary Chicano artists making work within institutional spaces, exploring how strategies
of resistance can connect, challenge, and transcend homogenous contextualization. I will discuss
Los Angeles based, queer Chicano artist Rafa Esparza, whose work has recently (but not
exclusively) been featured at the Bowtie Project (Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions, The Hammer Museum, and the Whitney Museum at the 2017 Biennial. By
considering site specificity in his work, alongside historical and conceptual readings of Chicano
performance in and around Los Angeles, most notably in the work and exhibition of Chicano
collective Asco, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Phantom Sightings: Art
After the Chicano Movement (2008) exhibition, I argue that Esparza’s practice demonstrates a
shift in socially engaged performance art and its exhibition.
The Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s set into motion a range of
sociopolitical and cultural production and activism, driven by “Chicanismo,” or the political
consciousness that formed within the Mexican American community as a unifying theme for
groups advocating for a range of causes focused on race and class equality, access, civil rights
and justice. The Chicano civil rights movement addressed an expansive cross section of
issues—from restoration of land grants, to farm workers’ rights, to improved quality and access
to education, to voting and political rights. The Chicano art movement that formed in tandem
with the civil rights efforts developed out of questions of what it meant for a community to
advocate for and represent itself.
Within the movement, distinctions were made among Mexican, American, Mexican
American, Latino and Chicano identities. The resistance to a hegemonic classification of identity
comes not only from those who maintain Mexican national affiliation as immigrants, no matter
their status and even in the case of dual citizenship, but also from those whose national identities
are culturally complicated by the inherent precarity of what it means to locate somewhere in
between. The specificity of language, and the inherent political nature of language, in this case in
understanding the particularity of political and historical positionality, agency, and engagement
attached to Chicanismo, is reflective of an urgency and need for cultural and political
recognition, affirmation, and agency. The movement resulted in a new determination of
nationalism for Mexican-Americans, referencing the erased but not-so-distant history of
Chicanos in lands that were previously Mexican, and creating a typology in connecting ancestral,
shared histories of Meso-America.
The emergence of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in 1968, which was centered in
Los Angeles, came out of various strands of Mexican American rights movements, and was
responding to heightening social, political and institutional racism (particularly of the Los
Angeles Police Department), marks a distinct burgeoning of Chicano artists and collectives such
as the conceptual visual and performance art collective Asco (founded in 1972 with original
members Gronk, Harry Gamboa Jr., Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herrón III), with affiliated artists
such as Mundo (Edmundo) Meza (1955–85) and Robert Legoretta (also known as Cyclona).
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a seminal Chicano performance artist, activist, writer and educator, who
also works in video, photography and installation, as well as a range of other experimental
mediums, openly dissects his own relationship to complicated ideas of identity politics relating to
the complexity of Chicanismo. In his book Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back,
an anthology of his performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, Gómez-Peña
discusses his thoughts on globalization, the commodification of identity, and ongoing culture
wars. The book, similarly as explored in his artistic practice, eludes to notions of a borderless
future and a poetics of hybridity. Within the introduction, in a section titled “La Migrant Life,”
1
he writes that “nomadism and migration have become central experiences of millennial
post-modernity. As our (cultural) continents collide and overlap in the rapid process of
‘globalization,’ the ongoing migration of South to North and East to West redefines not only
geopolitical borders, but also language (the currency of lingua francas), identity (national and
personal), activism, art and popular culture.” He references Roberto Sifuentes (aka CyberVato,
2
the Information Superhighway Bandito ), a colleague, collaborator, and friend, in order to identify
what Gómez-Peña refers to as the two important borders that separate them, clarifying cultural
and generational distinction in the efforts to understand the ideological underpinnings of
Chicanismo. Gómez-Peña writes, “[h]e is a Chicano in the process of Mexicanization (which
1
Guillermo Gómez-Peña , Dangerous Border Crossers: the Artist Talks Back (London: Routledge, 2000).
2
Ibid, 11.
means that he is looking South) and I am a Mexican in the process of Chicanization. (Will I ever
become a ‘real’ Chicano? Will I ever ‘arrive’? Will ‘they’ – the border guards of identity – ever
let me?)” Sifuentes is eleven years younger than Gómez-Peña, which further demonstrates the
3
nuances that exist even amongst those engaging in collaborative practices, perhaps often in the
same spaces for the same audiences, distinguished by a number of factors and circumstances.
The idea that subjectivity, even in instances prone to frequent conflation, varies so vastly
from person to person, no matter the commonalities, is one that Gómez-Peña uses to complicate
narratives around identity (politics) in provocative ways. He goes on to then define performance
as “an artistic ‘genre’ […] in a constant state of crisis” and thusly “an ideal medium for
articulating a time of permanent crisis such as ours […] Traveling, both geographically and
culturally, becom[ing] an intrinsic part of the artistic process, particularly for those [of us who
see ourselves] as migrants or border crossers.” Gómez-Peña emphasizes the importance of
4
simultaneously honoring and acknowledging difference, while also recognizing and reconciling
with the potentiality for intersection.
Central concerns of how to write on a history of Chicano performance art in Los Angeles are
directly tied to a line of (ethical) considerations for what it might mean to attempt to contribute
to a history that has largely been excluded from a canonical Western art historical record, either
by those who deemed it unimportant, irrelevant, or perhaps, more optimistically, preventatively
as a means of refusal in response to its under-representation and exclusion. Early Chicano
performance art in Los Angeles between the 1960s and 1990s was in many ways responding to
the refusal of institutional spaces in granting access and resource. The use of the body as medium
3
Ibid, 12.
4
Ibid, 9.
in these instances was both intentional as well as essential and necessary, and speaks to the
realities of socio-economic conditions experienced by performance artists within a specific
community at the time, the urgency in which the work was being created, and the spaces that
were most important and relevant for the work to be seen, heard, and experienced. The ethical
questions surrounding the attempted historicization, be it additive to the pre-existing canon or
historically revisionist in nature, perhaps similarly have to do with a consideration of who it is
aimed to serve, and on what terms it is intended to do so. Revisionist historical practices serve an
essential role, particularly in the cases on women, queer people and people of color, in creating
visibility for previously underrepresented histories within the dominant canon, which has in turn
shifted the ways in which these histories are documented and regarded. What then becomes
paramount is the consideration for what comes next, in how contemporary histories are
constructed, and whether the legacy of revisionist historical practices has paved the way for the
formation of new terms from which to attempt to understand and define the multitude of
intersections that will inevitably continue to develop. Working to include and make space for
histories that have previously been excluded from the dominant canon intervenes not only as a
means to include previously underrepresented histories of the past, but also as a means of
inciting more methodological change in how contemporary histories are constructed. As opposed
to homogenizing Chicano art history, for example, so that it fits in alongside dominant canonical
history, there is instead an opportunity to reconfigure the ways in which the canon itself actually
functions. This intervention is not only by way of addition, but rather as means of changing the
ways in which history is actually written.
With both conceptual and formal heed, along with deliberately selected insight from art
historians, theorists, artists, and organizers, this account is an attempt to interrogate the
inherently political, and thusly colonialist, language, knowledge, and documentation surrounding
a history of Chicano performance in Los Angeles. My goal is to explore earlier strategies in
Chicano performance briefly in order to consider contemporary works being performed in their
likeness, examining the salience of repetition, and the potency of time (lapse) and memory,
questions of access, the archive, inaccuracy, and iteration alike. Through this analysis, I make a
case for rupture through refusal, or abjection as genesis.
Rafa Esparza’s practice engages with ideas having to do with repetition in a variety of
ways. Perhaps with the intentionality of making and remaking, be it of performances informed
by other artists or iterations of his own performances, Esparza’s work speaks to a critical
framework that aligns his work in a more complex system of interconnected, even if at times
seemingly disparate, analyses and critiques of how historically, Chicano art and performance art,
at times in overlapping ways, resist or intervene in the structures of institutions, including art
history, museums, galleries, as well as performance art discourse. As a result of revisionist
practices that have ultimately made space for artists the likes of ASCO and Gómez-Peña within
art and performance art histories and institutions , artists like Esparza have become the inheritors
of this inclusion, though not without bringing to light the shortcomings of that integration into
the dominant canon. Esparza, as a result, rather than allowing his visibility and inclusion within
the institutional spaces that his work has predominantly existed to be complicit in its positioning
defined by the institution, he instead chooses to be included on his own terms. By inviting artists
to work with and contribute to his installations and performances within these predominantly
institutional spaces, he is asserting how he wants to be included; contextualized within a specific
trajectory.
Esparza’s semantic specificity, in choosing to how to refer to his inclusion of others in
his work, is demonstrative of his ideological positionality within institutional space. In an
interview with Clara López Menéndez in Bomb Magazine on July 28, 2016, López Menéndez
inquires about the “conceptual and structural participation” of his family and community
members (both social and artistic) in his work. The process of making adobe bricks with a
community, López Menéndez writes, is a process that works “with historical legacies and
practices that complicate the idea of ownership.” Because learning how to construct adobe
bricks, in this instance, is part of a cultural legacy, and is thus inherently collaborative.
Collaboration, a word she uses to describe the communal effort in both teaching to make and
making the adobe bricks, in that they require a “lineage of people to perpetuate them.” By
5
inquiring about a component of Esparza’s work that she refers to as inherently collaborative,
López Menéndez directs him to speak about ownership and authorship. Esparza’s reply resonates
not only within the context of their conversation, but within a larger consideration for his
inclusion of artists within installations and performances. He responds that the “word,
collaboration, in art spaces, clashes so much with the feelings around ownership and authorship.
When we are making adobes, it’s about access, survival. It’s about working with what you have,
an immediate access to a resource. Working with the land. And working in a community with a
community.” The concept that Esparza touches on here, specifically in reference to adobe, about
6
resisting categorical language that implies singularity in ownership or authorship, speaks to his
5
Clara López Menéndez , "Artists in Conversation: Rafa Esparza, What a brick can do," BOMB (July 28, 2016);
available online at: bombmagazine.org; accessed April 7, 2017.
6
Ibid.

relationship with and regard for community (building) as a pivotal conceptual throughline. He is,
at once, acknowledging the role that legacy plays in his work, while simultaneously working
with a community of artists, friends and family, in contextualizing his inclusion within
institutional spaces on terms that he defines.

II. Transfigured Phantom Sightings: the Chicano Retrospective Reimagined

In an effort to comprehend the scope, complexity, and nuance of the Chicano art
movement and its history, the preliminary research one might typically conduct immediately
yields the fraught conditions within which the history has been composed. As in all historical
record, there is first inherent bias on the part of the producer of scholarship. This is where the
record initially fails in the case of Chicano art history, in that much of its history remains either
unwritten (oral histories) or underrepresented in larger institutional contexts. While Chicano
Studies departments within academia have grown exponentially since the 1970s, for example, the
daunting task of configuring curriculum and programming in an effort to amend significant
absence is substantial, with consideration for the fact that the unrecorded (oral) and
underrepresented portions of the history itself likely resists and rejects conflation with a
dominant canonical history in both form and content.
In Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983 , Suzanne Lacy and
Jennifer Flores Sternad begin their essay entitled “Voices, Variations, and Deviations: From the
LACE Archive of Southern California Performance Art” by describing performance art as “…a
durational act…always in the process of being forgotten…” stating that, as a result, “…its history
is therefore of necessity a continual attempt at reclamation.” While this claim refers, in some
7
ways, to a condition of performance art more broadly, or in an overarching capacity as a means
of critiquing a postmodern classification of ephemerality, it simultaneously elicits a particular
condition in the case of a Los Angeles based Chicano history of performance and the politically
fraught climate within which it exists. Lacy and Flores Sternad speak to this condition, stating
that, “[f]or some artists who emerged in an era when political consciousness had been raised
dramatically, performance art was strategized within a larger set of identity politics. Linking
their practices to cultural forms and traditions outside the US arose from a desire to create a
cultural archive that was not delineated by Eurocentric hegemony” (73). The political climate
within which a number of Chicano artists were making performance art in the early 1970s was
being engaged with directly, formally, and conceptually, and with consideration for the
socio-political concerns impacting the East Los Angeles neighborhoods in which these artists
lived, attended school, and worked, as well as concerns of identity politics within the
communities themselves.
Within an institutional art context, two particular museum exhibitions, Phantom
Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008) and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A
Retrospective, 1972-1987 (2011), both organized at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the
second in collaboration with the Williams College Museum of Art), can be referenced as ways in
which curators and artists have attempted to reconcile the institutional critique within Chicano
art with the configuration of exhibition making as retrospective. The Los Angeles County
Museum of Art (LACMA) has hosted and organized a number of exhibitions since the inception
7
Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations: From the LACE Archive of
Southern California Performance Art,” Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983 , ed. Peggy
Phelan (New York, Routledge, 2012), 61.
of the Chicano art movement, including Los Four (1974), Chicanismo en el arte (1975),
Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors (1987), A Tribute
to Carlos Almaraz (1992), Gronk! A Living Survey, 1973-1993 (1994), The Road to Atzlán: Art
from a Mythic Homeland (2001), and Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection (2008).
8
While not all of the exhibitions included in this list would be regarded as Chicano art exhibitions,
they create a historiography within which to contextualize and analyze LACMA’s Phantom
Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008) exhibition, which (unlike other institutions)
has attempted to include shows of Chicano, Latin and “Hispanic” art.
The linguistic shift from describing Phantom Sightings in the catalogue first as the largest
exhibition devoted to Chicano art in LACMA’s history, and then as an exhibition that “explores
art by Mexican American artists who have come to artistic maturity in the 1990s and beyond” is
indicative of a reflexive lack of specificity and clarity about how to address Chicano
identification, a theme touched on by the curatorial team in the introduction, and explored at
more length in their accompanying catalogue essays. Govan writes that if the artists included in
Phantom Sightings “are grouped together [here] as Chicano artists after the Chicano movement,
it is not by their own volition or consensus; it is a curatorial artifact, a device to reflect and
speculate on the interests and issues facing Chicano artists [today].” In taking the Chicano
9
movement as a historical framework and as a curatorial point of departure, the curatorial team
(Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega) develops an exhibition cartography that
8
Michael Govan, “Foreward,” in Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon A. Noriega, Phantom Sightings: Art after
the Chicano Movement (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2008), 11. Another hugely influential exhibition of
Chicano art was the “CARA” show ( Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation , which originated at the Wight Art
Gallery at UCLA in 1990, and travelled nationally.

9
Ibid.
“privileges conceptual over representative approaches, and articulates social absence rather than
cultural essence.” Absolving themselves of organizing in the style of a survey or biennial or
10
focusing on the more recognizable forms of Chicano art (muralism, painting, etc.), Gonzalez,
Fox and Noriega choose instead to focus on conceptual art and urbanism, and ideas about the
space between inclusion and exclusion. Invisibility, as explored in Phantom Sightings , is a
determinant of an overarching lack of representation of Chicano art in museum collections
resulting from historical and institutional racism and bias. The double-edged sword then is
predicated upon being able to generate visibility and awareness without doing so in a tokenizing
or homogenizing way.
Chon A. Noriega, one of the most important curators of Chicano art in the country ,
begins his essay, “The Orphans of Modernism,” with a section titled “Chicano, a Usage
Problem.” He expounds on the name of the exhibition, Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano
Movement, as an unnaming of its contributing artists. The word Chicano only appears in the
subtitle, which in turn establishes that the artists in the show are coming after the Chicano
movement. Noriega, instead of attempting to assign the term “Chicano” to artists or art works as
an identifier, chooses to use it as a way to discuss the “sociohistorical context for artistic
production.” Importantly, Noriega asserts that it is not his intention to co-curate an exhibition
11
that aims to fill the void, but rather to “examine the conceptual dimensions of invisibility.” The
12
possibility of what the “phantom sightings” in the exhibition title might refer to is explored
through a triangulation of interpretation and contextualization. The first of three phantoms
Noriega discusses is one he refers to as Chicano art. He writes, “This category produces
10
Gonzalez, Fox, and Noriega, “Introduction,” in Phantom Sightings, 13.
11
Noriega, “The Orphans of Modernism,” in Phantom Sightings, 18.
12
Ibid, 20.
something that can be seen , that has even generated its own canon and corresponding debates,
but that otherwise does not exist in the art world, from the museum to the academy.” This form
13
of invisibility, he notes, is linked to what Harry Gamboa Jr. refers to as “phantom culture,”
“urban exile,” and “orphans of modernism,” and is distinctly present but without recognition or
incorporation into a conversation as part of a larger whole. His problematization of the term
14
and category of “Chicano art” paradoxically correlates directly with the public, visible culture of
so much of what is recognized as being characteristic of Chicano art—that which is intertwined
with social protest in public space.
The second phantom is what Noriega refers to as “art by self-identified Chicanos who
refuse the category, even if they also engage many of the same critical issues,” and is a phantom
of the first phantom. What is perhaps most compelling about the way in which the second
15
phantom is described is in its “subversive” mode of making conceptual art; as Noriega notes, it
recodified public protest, graffiti, and print ephemera (namely posters and fliers) into sites of
performance. Using public and exterior spaces acted both as reclamation of streets and plazas
that were becoming increasingly inaccessible due to the policing of demonstrations, and as an
opportunity to engage the community in a public discourse. Noriega asserts that, “Asco’s
performance art broke with the didactic realism that undergirded cultural nationalism, with its
search for the real Chicano and the right politics, and instead presented Chicano identity as
performative.” He enunciates the conditions surrounding a pivotal moment in Chicano art
16
history. The performance of identity, for Asco in this instance, refers to the contexts within
13
Ibid, 21.
14
See Gamboa’s collected writings in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon A. Noriega
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
15
Noriega, “The Orphans of Modernism,” 23.
16
Ibid, 24.
which they could be seen and heard, contexts they constantly grappled with; within their own
community, the history of mural art, and corporate liberalism and mass media, to name a few.
The third and final phantom is one that Noriega describes, unsurprisingly, as the phantom
of the first two phantoms. He defines it as follows:
[The final phantom]… is heard in the the homonyms for sighting:
Siting: To situate or locate something in a particular place or position.
Citing: To mention something or somebody as an example to support an
argument.
17
These are the actions that turn the apparitional into something real (or socially
grounded), that locate it within a context and reference it within discourse.
Without such siting and citing, we fail to see how the artists themselves
engage – intellectually, aesthetically – the very artistic genealogy from which
they have been excluded.
18
In defining the homonyms, Noriega points to the underlying polemic present in the exhibition,
and more significantly in considering larger questions about the past, present, and potential
future of Chicano art. While a desire to see Chicano representation in art history certainly exists,
many Chicano artists also situate themselves within art discourse and history across genres,
mediums, and geographies. A significant number of artists included in Phantom Sightings are
informed by and engage with modernity. Noriega then posits that revisionist Chicano histories
would likely fail to challenge canonical history if added alongside but not into the historical
narrative as has happened with so many histories of women and minorities, who in this way
17
Ibid, 30.
18
Ibid, 30.
become an installment as an afterthought. The question that remains is whether or not there is
potentiality for Chicano art history to “shift the paradigm” with its inclusion in a dominant
canonical history
19
A few years later, in 2011, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in partnership with
the Williams College Museum of Art, organized Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective,
1972-1987, first on view in Los Angeles, and then Williamstown, Massachusetts the following
year. The exhibition outlines the trajectory of the collective’s collaborative history and practices
as they navigated the political precarity and subsequent formation and evolution of the Chicano
Civil Rights Movement, complicating and expanding on previous scholarship and exhibition
making in relation to the Chicano art movement. Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective,
1972-1987 (2011), focuses on the theme of artistic collectives. Deborah Cullen, in her essay in
the exhibition catalogue titled “A Part and Apart: Contextualizing Asco,” writes:
(By) the late 1960s in East Los Angeles, the precursors of Asco were
already appearing together in gender-bending street actions and
performances. The trio of Cyclona (Robert Legorreta, Gronk, and
Mundo (Edmundo) Meza knew how to generate public reaction with
dress and pose. Their early performances played against type by
contrasting with Chicano nationalist ideology, which generally
affirmed traditional roles and family structures.
20

By the time the collective formed, many of its participating members had experienced similar
reception within their practices, which allowed for a collective organizing that confronted many
19
Ibid, 38.
20
Deborah Cullen, “A Part and Apart: Contextualizing Asco,” Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective,
1972-1987 , ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag and Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011), 208.
of the biases they had suffered with a particular vigor.
The founding core members, Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III, and Patssi
Valdez, met in and around Garfield High School in East Los Angeles in the late 1960s. The
collective’s name, Asco, which means nausea or disgust, reflected their shared sentiment of the
sociopolitical conditions of the time–especially the Vietnam War, which saw a disproportionate
number of Chicanos drafted–but also spoke to a characteristic incorporated into much of their
work. In resisting and critiquing normative cultural standards, ethics, and aesthetics, both within
their own Southern California Mexican-American communities and popular American culture at
large, Asco often performed in public spaces by creating interventions and spectacles. Their
21
first public performance, Stations of the Cross (1972), took place during the Christmas holiday,
and was performed as a procession down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. C. Ondine
Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, in their catalogue essay titled “Asco and the Politics of Revulsion,”
describe Stations of the Cross as a transformation of the Mexican Catholic tradition of Las
Posadas into a ritual protest against the Vietnam War and remembrance of those who had died.
The procession consisted of Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón, who carried a fifteen-foot cardboard
cross layered with paint. This performance was one of many unsanctioned public
22
performances—and technically took place before they called themselves Asco—and would be
followed by many collaborations informed by both the individual practices of its members as
well as strategies of other civil rights movements of the time.
Asco was not fully recognized within the mainstream U.S. or Chicano artistic
21
C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, “Asco and the Politics of Revulsion,” Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A
Retrospective, 1972-1987 , 50.
22
C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, “Asco and the Politics of Revulsion,” Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A
Retrospective, 1972-1987 , 50.
communities, as they were not having their work accepted into or exhibited in institutional
museums, and were also at odds within the Chicano artistic community as they did not adhere
exclusively to more traditional mediums (murals, paintings, etc.), existing both as a part of and
apart from the prevailing discourse. While a number of Asco’s members also had developed
practices in more traditional mediums, the collective became widely known for their
nontraditional performances and interventions. To this point is Gamboa’s story about Asco’s
famous “Spray Paint LACMA” action, in which while on a date at LACMA in 1972 Gamboa
sought out a curator to inquire about the glaring absence of Chicano or Mexican artists on view.
(See figure 1) What Gamboa recounts is a response that likened Chicano art to graffiti, stating
that it had no place in a contemporary art museum. Outraged, Gamboa returned that evening with
Gronk and Herrón to tag the exterior of the building. Gamboa returned with Valdez in the early
morning to document the tagging, which the collective began referring to as the first Chicano
conceptual artwork in the museum, later titled Spray Paint LACMA (or Project Pie in De/Face) .
In Instant Mural (1972), responding to and engaging with traditional Chicano muralism
in Los Angeles, Gronk taped Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval to a wall. With this political
work, Asco aimed to force the general public to confront the Chicano body. (See figure 2) The
use of the performative body in much of Asco’s work is something Chavoya and Gonzalez
explore at length. Later in their co-authored essay, they write:
According to Amelia Jones, one of the tenets of body art, especially
situated within an activist practice, is the enacting and assertion of the
self within the social. Asco’s strategies often used the body propelling
through cityscapes, a performative mode in sync with a particular
strain of processional pieces in Los Angeles in the early 1970s that
involved urban confrontations or exorcisms. Performances of walking,
trespassing, or temporarily transforming public spaces in Los Angeles
allowed artists from diverse backgrounds a corporeal, agitational move
away from didactic or prescriptive modes and methods of enacting
identity. As Jones notes, the performers “negotiat(ed) absence by
claiming public space for bodies that are now made embarrassingly
visible and exaggeratedly particularized.”
23
Asco was not only challenging the structures of the institutions that excluded them as a means of
dismantling them; a considerable amount of the work they were making simultaneously
attempted to make inroads into the dominant cultural sphere often running parallel to
contemporary art being shown in museums. Cited by Chavoya and Gonzalez, Jones also
contributed an essay entitled “’Traitor Prophets’: Asco’s Art as a Politics of the in-between,” in
which she argues that, “[t]heir work crosses and confuses categories that remain entrenched in
the dominant discourses of contemporary art….” She then notes that Asco’s No Movies are key
24
to this confusion of categories or “in-between practice,” referencing Noriega’s following
description of the No Movies: “[t]he No Movies isolated a single 35mm image—as if it were a
still from an actual movie—and thereby conjured up the before and after of an implied
narrative.” Because Asco could not be easily codified, their inclusion in scholarship and
25
23
Ibid, 53. Chavoya and Gonzalez are citing Amelia Jones from The Artist’s Body, ed. Tracey Warr (London:
Phaidon Press, 2000), 33.
24
Amelia Jones, “‘Traitor Prophets’: Asco’s Art as a Politics of the in-between,” Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A
Retrospective, 1972-1987 , 108.
25
Chon A. Noriega, Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xxix, and Jones, “Traitor Prophets,” 108.
exhibition making was easy to discount or ostracize. Jones writes:
Asco made [what Gronk called] “Artmoreorless”; the Asco artists were
exiles at the borderlands that muddy the boundaries between one
cultural formation and another […] This mispronunciation, this
working across borders has made it easy for art criticism, art history,
and institutions of contemporary art to ignore or sideline Asco’s
practice. The aim of noting this is to argue the paradoxical point that,
precisely because of this confusion of “borders” that contributes to its
omission, Asco’s practice can very productively be addressed in
relation to histories of modern and contemporary art. Doing so actually
shifts the terms through which art since 1960 can be viewed and,
retrospectively, through which modernist concepts of avant-garde
critique can be understood, especially as they became increasingly
reified in discussions of postmodern art. It is this in-between nature of
Asco—its making of Artmoreorless, its calling upon familiar tropes and
signifiers from a range of white dominant and Chicano cultural forms,
crossing them over, perverting, and deliberately mispronouncing and/or
mistranslating them-that situates this work among the funniest, darkest,
most sharply political art practices since 1960.
26

This analysis implies that shifting the terms through which contemporary art is viewed would
allow for the formation of a different configuration of (canonical) history. Revision, on the scale
that Jones proposes, incarnates the catalyst in order to carve a different critical framework that
resists moving beyond the unresolved inherent and insidious legacy of colonialism (and
imperialism), and instead moves through it as a means of reimagining discursive and institutional
spaces.
26
Jones, “‘Traitor Prophets’: Asco’s Art as a Politics of the in-between,” 109.
One way to understand how Asco might effect, and might have informed, these spaces is
to look at a specific example of how the work of the group has been institutionally positioned
and displayed in the retrospective at LACMA decades after the core Chicano Civil Rights
Movement dissolved. In the same ways that Jones proffers the potentiality for a shift in
27
thinking around art history and theory by employing Asco’s tactics in reconsidering the
contemporary canon, so too can this ideological shift be applied to exhibition making. By
theoretically transfiguring the retrospective, we might then be able to reorganize narrative
formation and the subscription to binary notions of time, the retrospective reimagined.

III. On the Formation of a Different Canon: Decoloniality and Radical Phenomenology

The case study of Rafa Esparza’s recent work, explored in relation to these histories and
examined in relation to its navigation of art institutions and art histories, requires an
understanding of how earlier Chicano performance has been exhibited and written about—hence
the brief discussion here of Asco. The work of Achille Mbembe offers a theory of “decolonizing
knowledge” that might help us establish a theoretical framework for examining how Chicano
performance art in Los Angeles has been historicized and theorized. As well, Jones’s theory of
28
body art—which focusses on how it opens up a “radical shift in subjectivity… informed by
phenomenology” assists in understanding how specific performances work. Jones differentiates
29
27
Others carried on into the 1980s and even into the 1990s.
28
“This document was deliberately written as a spoken text. It forms the basis of a series of public lectures given at
the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, at conversations with the
Rhodes Must Fall Movement at the University of Cape Town and the Indexing the Human Project, Department of
Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. The nature of the events unfolding in South Africa,
the type of audience that attended the lectures, the nature of the political and intellectual questions at stake required
an entirely different mode of address - one that could speak both to reason and to affect”
29
Amelia Jones, Seeing differently: a History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge, 2012).
between performances we experience through historical representations or reenactments and
those we experienced “in the flesh,” a distinction that also informs the larger relationship we
have to Chicano performance, now that it has an extended history going back to the early 1970s
with the work of Asco and others.
Here I want to put into conversation the tensions that arise within intertwining accounts
and experiences of Esparza’s performances and installations, and histories of preceding Chicano
performance art, all examined through pertinent critical and theoretical analysis. In turn, an
ephemeral Chicano performance art history from which to analyze Esparza’s work develops; one
that contains aspects of refusal and critique, acceptance and participation, present in the
conditions of the pieces themselves, as well as within the larger contexts within which they are
located, including the global artworld, histories of Chicano art, and histories and theories of
performance. Jones’ notion of transfigured subjectivity, one informed by phenomenology,
applies to the ways in which one must reconsider a Chicano art history, as well as its subjects.
Art historian and theorist Mathias Danbolt, in an article for the Nordic Journal of
Feminist and Gender Research, focuses on an excerpt from the conclusion of the fourth chapter
of Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects, posted as an entry on her research blog in response to the
circulation of “yet another post […] in which feminist/queers/antiracists are dismissed under the
sign of ‘identity politics […]’.” Here, Ahmed writes, “[t]o bring up the question of racism or
30
sexism—even just to put words like that on the table—is often described as a form of identity
politics. This is interesting: pointing to structure is treated as relying on identity. Perhaps we are
30
Mathias Danbolt in “Seeing Relationally,” a review of Amelia Jones’s Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of
Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (May 14,
2014); available online at:tandfonline.com; accessed March 27. 2017. Referencing: Sara Ahmed, “A
phenomenology of the vanguard,” posted December 1, 2013 at Feministkilljoys website, available at:
Feministkilljoys.com; accessed March 27, 2017.
witnessing the effacement of structure under identity not so much by those who are involved in
what is called ‘identity politics’ but by those who use ‘identity politics’ to describe the scene of
an involvement ” (Ahmed 2013: np). Danbolt explains that “the necessity of such a critical
re-reading of the overlapping histories that have structured and keep structuring beliefs and ideas
about art, individuality, and difference is acute, given that these histories keep being erased and
ignored in post-identity debates […] and also remind us that the desire for disinterested,
disembodied or universal critical positions depends on binary models of identity that are nothing
if not political.”
31
In order to reconcile with the modality of thinking that develops around an attempt to
rectify the polemic of absence and exclusion, as Danbolt interprets Jones’s project, she makes an
argument of enduring salience, one that acknowledges efforts to move past or beyond critical,
social and even academic infrastructures that perpetuate a reliance on binary identification
tactics, as potentially dangerous, violent, and counter-intuitive. By presenting extensive historical
examples of how binary structures have informed and shaped the reception of both art and
identity, Jones works to revise non-binary ways of thinking about identification as a means of
countering (in Danbolt’s words) the “pervasive gestures of post-identitarian beyondings” and
that “issues of identification [...] still guide and even predetermine every experience we have in
the contemporary world.” With this, Jones proffers a way in which to critically engage in a
32
practice of dismantling reductive models of identity by acknowledging and engaging with the
hope of providing what she terms “a provisional new model for understanding identification as a
reciprocal, dynamic, and ongoing process that occurs among viewers, bodies, images, and other
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid and Amelia Jones from her book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual
Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), xxi.
visual modes of the (re)presentation of subjects.” Considering temporality as a contributory
33
aspect in engaging with and enacting this provisional method feels of particular importance, as
the notion of beyonding (being “beyond” identity politics) that Jones rejects relies on a narrative,
binary sense of time, one that can be moved through and then beyond, assuming that a psychical
shift alleviates the inherent residual traumas of experience, freeing a subject from any previously
embodied experience, subjectively and phenomenologically speaking.
The cyclical nature of iterative performance, the act of incorporating fundamental
methodologies, ethics and even materiality into multiple works with the intention of creating a
conceptual throughline. This is done as a means of constructing an evolving narrative that
challenges notions of historical temporality, and is exemplified specifically in the work of Rafa
Esparza, and more specifically in four of his recent performances in Los Angeles and New York:
building: a simulacrum of power (2014) with Rebeca Hernandez at the Bowtie Project; i have
never been here before (2015) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; tierra (2016) at the
Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial; and finally Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field
(2017) at the Whitney Biennial . All of these works lend to an analysis that opens up questions of
repetition and history in relation to Chicano cultural history and Chicano performance art in
particular. Esparza’s work relates to what Frantz Fanon speaks of as a subversion of the law of
repetition, and what Achille Mmembe elaborates on as difference and repetition in relation to
theories of decolonization. In defining decoloniality, South African scholar Sabelo J.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, in an essay titled “Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century?”, writes:
Decoloniality ‘struggles to bring into intervening existence an-other
33
Jones, Seeing Differently , 1.
interpretation that brings forward, on the one hand, a silenced view of
the event and, on the other, shows the limits of imperial ideology
disguised as the true (total) interpretation of the events’ in the making
of the modern world. Decoloniality is distinguished from an imperial
version of history through its push for shifting of geography of reason
from the West as the epistemic locale from which the ‘world is
described, conceptualised and ranked’ to the ex-colonised epistemic
sites as legitimate points of departure in describing the construction of
the modern world order.
34
With consideration for ideas around the coloniality of power, knowledge and being, Esparza’s
work aims to directly engage with these ideological limitations identified at the root of
decolonial theory more broadly. Where these analyses raise questions of how (art) work can be
made (presently) in an effort to locate decoloniality as a central conceptual and structural
concern, Esparza answers by employing a practice of making, unmaking and making again. His
use of adobe bricks as indexical reference to and as a symbol of cultural history, legacy and
heritage, as well as his decision to invite and work with members of his (familial, social and
artistic) community, work to decenter his inclusion within dominant institutional
contextualization by shifting his contextualization from within the institution itself. The process
of repetition then is employed as a method of reconfiguring temporality by collapsing the
histories of past and present, by creating context informed by his peers, mentors and elders, as a
34
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, "Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century?," The Thinker 48 (February 2013); available
online at: thethinker.co.za; accessed June 12, 2017.
Referencing Mignolo, W. D. 2005. The Idea of Latin America, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, p. 35.
and Maldonado-Torres, N. 2007. “On Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.”
Cultural Studies, 21 (2-3), March/May, p. 243.
means of repositioning himself within both chicano and performance art history in order to shift
the paradigm. His making of space visible and accessible within the institution functions as a
disruption; a call for new ways to construct and perform legacy, history and futurity. Drawing on
Mbembe and thus on the earlier work of Fanon, Derek Hook writes on temporality in an essay
titled “Indefinite Delay: On (Post)Apartheid Temporality” as follows: “…[it is in] how we might
read temporality—that is, the psychical and social experience of time—as an index of the
prevailing impasses, both political and (inter)subjective in nature, that characterize a given
society.” Hook intends to “… draw attention to how paradoxes and apparent distortions of
temporality might express a variety of underlying (psycho)social contradictions…” and in turn
expose the limitations of an adherence to the construction of a dominant canonical history as a
means of ascribing value, meaning and understanding. To locate these particular performances
35
by Esparza within a larger construct of temporality and phenomenological relationality presents
the notion that potentiality or possibility for a shift in subjectivity might in fact be activated
through subversion of repetition within the performance itself.

IV. Rafa Esparza: Performing Adobe
Rafa Esparza, multidisciplinary artist born, raised and based in Los Angeles, works in
mediums ranging from sculpture, drawing and painting, to installation and performance. Born in
Pasadena, to Mexican parents, Esparza attended East Los Angeles College before earning a BFA
degree from UCLA. His work addresses his interest in navigating ideas on performance, kinship,
personal and cultural histories, and memory. Esparza’s work is site specific, and makes use of
35
Derek Hook, “Indefinite Delay: On (Post)Apartheid Temporality,” Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on
Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism , ed. Stephen Frosh (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 49.
materiality and draws on memory; he eschews documentation in examining and critiquing
ideologies, power structures, and binaries that define the writing of historical narratives and the
sites wherein individuals and communities traverse and socialize.
36
In 2012, in an effort to resolve a fraught relationship to ideas of “home” within the
context of Los Angeles but also within culture and community more broadly, Esparza began
making adobe bricks under his father’s guidance. Esparza’s father hand made the bricks to build
his first home in Durango, Mexico. The bricks created during Esparza’s apprenticeship with his
father were later incorporated into a performance, where they were destroyed. This practice of
destruction, particularly of objects that are ascribed with their own violent colonialist histories, is
one that artist employs in his work often. The adobe bricks, which have become a signature of
Esparza’s, are, not coincidentally, made with water from the Los Angeles River, further
assigning meaning to an already heavily symbolic object—both for him personally and in
relation to Mexican and thus Chicano heritage. In the March 2017 issue of Frieze Magazine ,
artist and writer Travis Diehl authored perhaps the most comprehensive historiography of
Esparza’s work to date, “ Land Rites: In the work of Rafa Esparza, colonialism, family history
and sex collide with the landscape of Los Angeles.”
Diehl describes the artist’s use of adobe
37
bricks as a way of connecting “blue-collar drudgery and artistic ‘practice’ with a sense of tierra,
a word with poetic reflections of soil, earth, land and dirt.” Diehl draws attention to the politics
38
of both the practice as well as the language used to describe it, tools Esparza uses to create
36
A term frequently used in describing Esparza’s installation and performance, as he often uses ephemeral materials
and temporary sites in his work.
37
Travis Diehl, "Land Rites: In the work of Rafa Esparza, Colonialism, Family History and Sex Collide with the
Landscape of Los Angeles," Frieze (March 20, 2017); available online at: frieze.com; accessed May 19. 2017.
38
Ibid.
meaning within his work.
Along the Los Angeles River, paved in concrete in the 1930s, at the “Bowtie Parcel,” the
site of a former railroad yard, in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Frogtown, Esparza
situated a site specific work titled building: a simulcarum of power (2014) while in residence
with local arts nonprofit Clockshop, and later in the site-specific construction of two
“intersecting adobe walls which were used as a canvas by invited artists in order to highlight a
history of displacement along the river and to provide an open sanctioned space for painters and
graffiti artists to create temporal artwork,” Con/Safos (2015), at the same location (see figures 5
39
and 6) . The site, in addition to being an 18-acre post industrial lot that has been owned by the
California State Parks since 2003 (and is soon to be transformed into a public park and
greenway), is curated by Clockshop through artist residencies to create temporary artworks and
performances in an effort to engage the community and facilitate conversations about the site and
the future of the LA River. East Los Angeles has long been the subject of displacement and
40
gentrification debates, with recent development being no exception, and while Esparza’s
residency at the Bowtie Project otherwise suited the intentions of Clockshop’s curatorial
initiative, it also provided a platform from which the artist could conceptually consider the
specificity of the site from within his own practice. At the edge of the Bowtie Project property,
where the river and the commuter railway form a sort of triangle, another artist project—Michael
Parker’s The Unfinished (2014)—is carved into the asphalt. The work is a 137-foot-to-scale
replica of the Ancient Egyptian archeological site known as “The Unfinished Obelisk,” where
the largest commissioned (granite) obelisk lays broken and unfinished to this day a few miles
39
From the press materials provided by Clockshop for the Bowtie Project about Con/Safos (2015)
40
Reference: Clockshop website; available online at: clockshop.org.
from the Nile River. In his project, Esparza installed hundreds of abode bricks along the surface
of Parker’s The Unfinished, emphasizing the power and labor dynamics implicit in Parker’s work
but made explicit in his own. For weeks, Esparza and his family made hundreds of adobe bricks
to install along the obelisk’s surface, a work he titled building: a simulacrum of power.
Upon concluding the installation, Esparza staged a performance in collaboration with
Rebeca Hernandez, who choreographed the four participating dancers, at sundown (see figure 7).
While the dancers move fluidly in and out of the trenches of Parker’s The Unfinished , Esparza
performs a traditional Danza Azteca its base. Dressed in a loincloth and decorated in feathers and
ankle rattles, he drops to his hands and knees and then onto his stomach and painstakingly drags
himself across the bricks along the surface of the obelisk towards its pointed head. Esparza then
removes the clothing around his waist, and in a jock strap he cautiously positions himself at the
tip of the obelisk. Then, maneuvering to find balance in a straddled pose, Esparza lowers himself
bare-assed onto the tip. The act evokes Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle
(2004-2005), wherein Athey lowers himself onto a wooden pyramid as part of a performance
that elicits relations of desire, connection, and repulsion, pleasure and pain. Diehl, in describing
41
the concluding performance of building: a simulacrum of power proffers the following
interpretation:
this is not only a performance of labour, construction/erection,
masculinity and paternity: it’s a ritual work that aims to help the
father come to terms with his son’s sexuality. And, if the phallic
imperial obelisk figures domination, Esparza turns this same symbol
41
See Amelia Jones. "Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper's Judas Cradle." TDR: The
Drama Review 50, no. 1 (2006): 159-169.
towards his own pleasure. Indeed, in that prone moment, were the
obelisk suddenly to rise, the artist would end up on top.
42
Esparza concludes the performance by dressing himself in a suit and tie, feathers hanging out of
the bottom of his coat, and ritually burning sage around the tip of the obelisk.
In later describing his process of learning to make adobe bricks, Esparza revealed that
one of his initial impulses came from a desire to connect with his father; he had been largely
estranged from his father due to his discomfort with Esparza’s queerness. Esparza also noted his
desire to explore the ways in which he could perform masculinity through the physically rigorous
practice. The artist uses performance and installation to do a range of work at once, often
43
layering signifiers (ephemerally), a decision Esparza attributes to his desire to challenge the
relationships that knowledge and history have to colonialism and cultural erasure. Diehl notes
that in Esparza’s practice, “marginal sites become contested ones.”

44
Esparza was selected for the 2015 summer residency at Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions (LACE), during which he performed a time based installation of 5,000 adobe bricks
that he produced for the piece at the Bowtie Project. The installation, titled i have never been
here before (2015) and several live performances that accompanied it were curated by Shoghig
Halajian, then Assistant Director of LACE and supporter of Esparza’s work for many years. As
noted, Esparza worked with his father and other family members to build the traditional adobe
bricks using Los Angeles river water, in this case transporting them to LACE and composing
42
Travis Diehl, "Land Rites: In the work of Rafa Esparza, Colonialism, Family History and Sex Collide with the
Landscape of Los Angeles," Frieze (March 20, 2017); available online at: https://frieze.com/article/land-rites;
accessed May 19. 2017.
43
Carolina A. Miranda, “ Artist Rafa Esparza is using 5,000 adobe bricks to make a building-inside-a-building in
Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times (July 23, 2015); available online at: latimes.com; accessed February 23, 2017.
44
Travis Diehl, "Land Rites: In the work of Rafa Esparza, Colonialism, Family History and Sex Collide with the
Landscape of Los Angeles," Frieze (March 20, 2017); available online at: frieze.com; accessed May 19, 2017.
interior walls along the periphery of the elongated rectangular gallery, which is located on
Hollywood Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood. In describing the exhibition, Halajian discussed
how woven into Esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and
kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that
come forth as a result. Esparza makes work deeply rooted in his phenomenological experience of
space and time, with attention to his body as medium and the narratives it implicitly invokes. By
consciously rejecting an institutional formalism in the majority of his practice, Esparza aims to
resist being further commodified. His pursuit of negotiating with memory and eschewing
documentation, as described by Halajian, speak to Esparza’s interest in exploring oral histories,
cultural histories that have been excluded or erased from more normative, binary recounts of
time(lapsed) in his practice more broadly.
45
Esparza’s participation in LACE’s summer residency program and his production of the
exhibition, installation, and performances in this relatively mainstream arts space were no less
purposeful than his decision to stage a site specific performance at the location of a former men’s
bathhouse in an effort to reclaim and relocate the venue’s queer identity and history (See figure
8). Dry: East Los Sauna, performed in the summer of 2014, was a participatory intervention
co-sponsored by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at University of Southern California,
LACE, and Native Strategies, and was meant to work towards making space for the “mostly
obscure queerness in mainstream representations in ELA [East Los Angeles …] despite East Los
Angeles’ queer history made visible through artists such as Robert Legorreta/Cyclona, the late
Mundo Meza, and Gronk.” Drawing from a lineage of Los Angeles based queer Chicano artists
46
45
Shoghig Halajian, in an abstract that was electronically published in correlation with Esparza’s i have never been
here before (2015), and has since been modified on the LACE website.
46
"Rafa Esparza: Dry: East Los Sauna," ONE National Gay Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries website;
who precede him, Esparza utilized the politics of place in forming both a spatial, contextual
history from within which his 2015 i have never been here before originates or is rooted, while
also challenging its potentiality for engaging a range of publics.
In commenting on the materiality of the installation of i have never been here before ,
Halajian notes that “[a]dobe brick building has both a personal and a cultural significance to
Esparza. In addition to serving as a symbol for the Esparza family work, adobe highlights a
history of labor, land, and poverty.” Over the course of the residency, Esparza filled the gallery
47
with adobe bricks, built up along the walls in an ovular formation, rounding the corners of the
space and coating the floorboards in straw and a thick reddish brown dust. The air grew thick
with an earthy musk, and the ambient sun streaming in from the front entryway absorbed and
dissipated into the dried mud structure (see figure 9).
In describing the process-based practice and its customary uses, Halajian explains that
“[t]he vernacular design and available resources for adobe building evoke owner- and
community-built architectural practices that use inherited knowledge and customary
technologies. Prioritizing utility over aesthetics, adobe construction often reflects local
environmental and cultural needs. Within the project—and entering the gallery—adobe serves to
question the established value systems of the exhibition space.” In this way, Esparza’s i have
48
never been here before works to recodify the contemporary “white cube” gallery space and
instead write into it an alternative history, one of reclamation and proclaimed belongings. This
gestural taking back of space, subverting the inherently colonial narrative around the politics of
available online at: one.usc.edu; accessed April 14, 2017.
47
"Rafa Esparza: i have never been here before," Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. July 8, 2015; available
online at:welcometolace.org; accessed March 6, 2017.
48
Ibid.
the (predominantly western, Eurocentric, white, hetero, male) institutional art museum or gallery,
by rounding its corners, coating its walls in dust and caking its floor in earth, is one that evokes
the critical musings of José Esteban Muñoz, performance studies scholar and theorist, who
influentially theorized the process of disidentification as a modality of “managing and
negotiating historical trauma and systematic violence” enacted by those who have been
excluded, chastised by, and/or erased from normative (heterosexual, cisgender, white, middle
class, male) socio-political structures, publics and histories. Muñoz describes this process as the
development of a third strategy , one that is neither rooted in acceptance or rejection of identity,
but rather one that "tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form."
49
He asserts that work being made by those entangled in this ideological framework is inherently
engaging in political practice, which will remain inevitable insofar as the terms remain the same.
Disidentification then also serves as a process of creating new terms from which to self identify
within the existing framework as a means of survival in addition to being a process of creating
new terms from which to develop notions around (queer) utopian futurity.
Muñoz discusses queer futurity by referencing Ernst Bloch’s ideas on utopia, in his three
volume text The Principle of Hope, as being the critical and communal longing that is relational
to specific histories of human suffering, particularly those of minoritarian communities. He
proposes that the potentiality of queer futurity is made visible through the performance of artistic
production, and that queerness as an aesthetic methodology functions to manifest a refusal to
accept “ objective” reality and its implicit hierarchies. Muñoz writes that:
queer culture makers are interested in art-directing the real. They
49
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12.
offer new systems of knowing and organization. The call to end
groups, hierarchies, and families is a call to replace those previous
systems of classification with new circuits of belonging [...] We can
call this new temporality (that no longer adheres to standard
trajectories of temporality, where art moves between a circuit of
sites, friends and acquaintances, being altered at every point in its
journey), one of queer futurity, where the future is the site of infinite
and immutable potentiality.
50
As a queer person of color, Esparza uses his body to perform and re-perform in opposition to and
with consideration for systematic exclusion, erasure, and violence that historically subjected and
made abject bodies that look like his. Using repetition, in the performative, physical process of
making adobe bricks, as well as in iterative reconfigurations and manifestations of adobe bricks
repurposed from previous installations and incarnations, Esparza employs Muñoz’s third
strategy, which ”tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form." This
repetitive act of “managing and negotiating historical trauma and systematic violence” is perhaps
more vividly depicted in Rafa Esparza’s work in this context, as Esparza’s adobe brick building
seems to directly, both figuratively and literally, work towards making “communities and
relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant public sphere,” as Muñoz claims for
disidentificatory practices.
51
A practice that Esparza employs in the majority of his work is one of collaboration.
Similar to his work with his family and then Rebeca Hernandez at the Bowtie Project, his 2015
work at LACE, i have never been here before, was inherently collaborative. LACE became a site
50
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York
University Press, 2009), 22, 123, 126-127.
51
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12, 146,161.
for performances curated by Esparza throughout its installation, beginning with a work by
longtime collaborator Dorian Wood and followed by a weekend long series, Resonant Forms ,
which included performances by Simon Scott, Bethan Parkes, Lawrence English, Allesandro
Cortini, Raquel Gutiérrez with Adam Garcia, Nikki Darling, and Esparza himself, among others
(see figure 10).
This practice of making space is admittedly derivative from the practices of other
Chicano artists, performance artists, and activists who fought to be included in the very
institutional spaces in which artists such as Esparza now receive invitations to exhibit and install
their work. Notably, the fact that the invitation might be extended does not resolve or absolve the
underlying polemic of a fundamentally binary, and thusly hierarchical—even
colonialist—ideological framework in which contemporary exhibition making and programming
remains rooted. Even in his inclusion, Esparza is inevitably and unavoidably implicated in a
far-reaching history of colonialism for as long as the majoritarian investment in notions of
normative (heterosexual, cisgender, white, middle class, male) socio-political structures, publics
and histories remain intact. By this I mean that any work that is exhibited or presented in a
museum or gallery is implicitly part of these histories, that the connection between art
institutions and institutional racism exists as an inherent contextualization of work exhibited, no
matter the subjectivity.
This brings to the fore a two-fold critique of an increasingly visible (albeit potentially
volatile) placement of Esparza’s work, as he has over the course of the past few years been
invited to exhibit in two major institutional museum biennials: at the 2016 Made in L.A. Biennial
at The Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial at The Whitney Museum of
Art in New York. The question then is whether or not Esparza’s adobe brick based installations
have the same scale of impact, or translate in the way in which both he and Halajian discuss their
meaning, from the Bowtie parcel along the Los Angeles River in Frogtown to the foyer and
public gallery at The Whitney Museum or elsewhere.

V. Performance and Subversion in the Museum:
The Institutional Paradigm as a Site of Rupture

Considering La Chica Boom

Xandra Ibarra, an Oakland-based performance artist from the US/Mexico (El Paso/Juarez)
border performing under the alias of La Chica Boom, describes her practice as “using
hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own
body and colonialism, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad.” Ibarra’s self stated primary
concern in her performance work is with “problematizing the borders between proper and
improper ethnic, gender, and queer subject, teetering between degeneracy/abjection and the
spectacular/joy.” Ibarra’s inclusion in guest curator Jennifer Doyle’s “Tip of Her Tongue”
52
programming series in the Spring of 2016 at the Broad museum is of particular interest due to its
relevance and cogency within larger arguments being presented here, and in conversation with
Esparza’s practice. Doyle’s program series stems from an engagement with works such as
Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989), as well as other similarly
discursive feminist art works in the Broad museum’s permanent collection.
In line with the assertion of a Kruger-esque examination of the politics of representation,
52
Xandra Ibarra, Nude Laughing (2014), at Xandra Ibarra website, available online at: xandraibarra.com; accessed
March 22, 2017.

Doyle as a curator and by Ibarra and other participating artists as contributors, one might
question the signification of the inclusion of such a program series. The somewhat revisionist (in
this case identified as feminist) practice of inserting artists and art works into an institutional
(private, in this case, which is an important distinction from public museums such as LACMA)
art museum to contribute to or engage with the permanent collection with work that is not
already contained within it as a means of enriching or broadening the public’s experience and
access, be it for socially conscious/ethical and/or (cultural) capital reasons alike, is at once
progressive and precarious. Precariousness, as it corresponds here, largely in its potentiality for
perpetuating a cycle of commerce that fails to invest in the work of an artist like Ibarra, who
works largely in performance, with any real commitment. The appearance being that museums
are seemingly developing and investing in programming and temporary exhibitions to alleviate
any criticism of or consideration for the (limited) scope of a given collection, rather than
reconfiguring and acquiring artworks by underrepresented artists into permanent collections
more broadly. Insofar as this line of criticism of the museum industrial complex underlies the
ways in which one ultimately comes in contact with all other aspects of the museum experience,
be it programming related or otherwise, there is still reason to attempt to consider programming,
for example, in its own right and on its own terms.
And at the very same time, the “Tip of Her Tongue” program series uses the Broad as a
platform for visibility, access and resistance. While there is an inherent hierarchy implicit in this
type of an exchange, with the institution functioning as a (transactional) facilitator, Doyle is
certainly not lacking authorship or impact. The exchange or transaction, then occurring between
Doyle and the participating artists, takes on new meaning; under the auspices of the institution,
and then of Doyle as a curator with regard for her level of engagement with the institution and
artists alike. The artists similarly are obliged to negotiate their choice/willingness to and
interest/intentionality in accepting the invitation to participate/contribute in the program series.
53
Ibarra’s performance of Nude Laughing (2014) at the Broad Museum begins in the lobby,
La Chica Boom clad in a pair of mustard yellow heels, exaggeratedly robust fleshy brassiere and
a nylon sack filled with “white lady accoutrements" (blonde hair, ballet shoes, furs, pearls, and
fake breasts) in hand. The audience trailing behind her as she makes her way towards the
54
stairwell, swarming into the upper level gallery, and then spilling out along its edges as the
procession builds towards its climax. As La Chica Boom careens along the periphery, her
laughter becomes increasingly hypnotic, resonating against the architectural gashes filled with
fragments of the night sky above and the works of the likes of Jeff Koons and Christopher Wool
below. With her head reared back, arms outstretched, Ibarra’s laughter turns to moans, gasps for
breath (see figure 3). And then she is on the ground, pulling the nylon over her face, around her
body. She climbs in, crawls out and begins to unpack the opaque vestige of white womanhood ,
all the while performing a sort of self-flagellation with its contents. Her laughter continues,
transmuting between exclamations of seeming pleasure, amusement, anguish and exhaustion.
She is surrounded, as the audience has closed in on her, to get a better look, to ogle or to shield
her, in the final moments of her performance, which concludes with her prostrate and completely
53
Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom) not only accepted the invitation to perform as part of Doyle’s “The Tip of Her
Tongue series, but did so by (re)performing Nude Laughing (2014), which she debuted at the Asian Art Museum in
2014, then again at the Broad museum in 2016, at Maccarone Gallery as part of the re-staging of seminal exhibition
Coming to Power: 25 Years of Xplicit Art by Women (2016) curated by Pati Hertling and Julie Tolentino, at Brown
University in the same year as part of an artist lecture and performance program, as well as at the “Quiebre: Festival
Internacional de Performance” in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico (2016).
54
Xandra Ibarra, Nude Laughing (2014), at Xandra Ibarra website, available online at: xandraibarra.com; accessed
March 22, 2017.

naked in a strewn heap of ephemera (see figure 4).
Ibarra’s description of the work articulates the theoretical nuances that might be used to
contextualize the performance within the Tip of Her Tongue program series, as well as within
larger discursive conversations within which her work might exist. The performance is described
as follows:
draw[ing] from John Currin's painting Laughing Nude, 1998…and
engag[ing] the skin and skein of race. Nude and encased in a nylon
skin cocoon, Ibarra examines the vexed relationships racialized
subjects have to not only one's own skin, but also one's own
entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white
womanhood. From Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Hortense
Spillers' theories of flesh, and W.E.B. Dubois' double consciousness,
racialized subjects have continually dealt with the contradictions of
skin, interiority, and being. By filling this nude cocoon with ‘white
lady accoutrements’, Ibarra visualizes and embodies the skein of race,
negotiating the simultaneous joys and pains of subjection, abjection,
and personhood.
55
It would be a missed opportunity not to muse over Ibarra’s decision to perform the second
portion of Nude Laughing alongside Jeff Koons’ towering Tulips (1995-2004) and beneath
Christopher Wool’s sprawling Untitled (1990), artworks that unabashedly claim space in the
museum’s collection, both in their (central) placement as well as in their monetary value. The
55
Ibid.
contrast of Ibarra’s body to these works evoked a nearly visceral response, one that rendered the
audience of Nude Laughing (2014) visibly shaken, either implicated in the critique, acutely
aware of their own relationship to it, or a combination of the two.

Counterpublics in Public: implementing José Esteban Muñoz’s third strategy
In calling attention to the understood value of the works that surround Ibarra as she
performs Nude Laughing, another aspect of the function of her performance emerges.
Historically, Chicano performance art, its materiality and form, was not only determined by the
intentions and preferences of the artists, but was also derivative of a lack of resource and access.
Artists like those who formed the collective Asco discuss the economy of making art and the
realities of the socio-economic conditions within which they lived as a hinderance overcome by
the use of accessible and inexpensive materials. The use of public space, be it the streets or
public plazas, was similarly a reality of the conditions of institutional exclusion. While much of
the work being made by artists during the Chicano Civil Rights Movement utilized public space
as a platform for engaging with their communities as well as within larger political contexts in
impactful and effective ways, it is important to note that there is also an inherent critical
relativism that speaks to the actualities of scarcity and exclusion. This implicit history, when
considered alongside contemporary Chicano performance art and the artists that produce it,
might inform the decisions of artist like Ibarra and Esparza, to intentionally employ the medium
of performance as both a gesture of resisting commodification as political, and to contextualize
their work, even within the very institutional spaces previous generations of Chicano artists were
long excluded and within which they are now being invited to exhibit and perform, within a
lineage of Chicano art. Esparza and Ibarra, in various capacities, demonstrate their investment in
dismantling and critiquing the politics of the racialized body, often by reflexively interrogating
conceptual formalism, ephemerality and (art historical, theoretical, decolonial) discourse.
Art historian and critic Andy Campbell, in Artforum ’s Best of 2016 performance review,
discusses Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing (2014) as an antidote to contemporary political
malaise, arguing that, instead of opting out of spaces and circumstances where social
architectures that are largely complicit in perpetuating systematic and institutional racism,
homophobia and the like, she chooses to dig in and work to “propose vital new ways of forming
and claiming space.” In Campbell’s analysis of Ibarra’s act of climbing in and out of her nylon
56
cocoon in Nude Laughing alongside her photo series Spic Ecdysis (2014-2015) , both evidencing
Ibarra’s “visualization and embodiment of the skein of race, negotiating the simultaneous joys
and pains of subjection, abjection, and personhood,” he calls on the late performance studies
scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of disidentification . Where Muñoz’s formulation
seems particularly relevant to Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing, as well as in relation to Esparza’s
performances at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Hammer Museum and most
recently at the Whitney, is in the speculation around how this performance has and will continue
to change, how the work will be codified and recontextualized, how it will be made accessible,
on what terms, and to what end. Muñoz describes a third strategy; where the work becomes as
much about content as it is about context insofar as it is used to create and perpetuate
counterpublics that aim to disrupt social scripts and create through their work an opening of
potentiality for visions of the world that map alternative, utopian social relations. Muñoz argues
56
Andy Campbell, “The Year in Performance” Artforum, December 2016, 117-118.
that an essential component of his theories on disidentification result in the formation of
counterpublics, or “ communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant
public sphere.”
57
With Muñoz’s theory in mind, Ibarra might be choosing to locate the performance of
Nude Laughing within an institutional space as a means of activating a counterpublic that uses
the visibility and presence within the museum as an opportunity to force an engagement between
the community formed to contest the dominant public sphere within which the work exists, and
it’s more mainstream public. Utopian futurity might not be an aspiration or fantasy for an artist
like Ibarra, one whose expectations of the conditions needed for survival have shifted. In the
ways that Ibarra’s work future thinking, there perhaps emerges a strategy that reimagines the
relationship of a queer woman of color in 2017, for example, to temporality, phenomenology and
performance that is wholly embodied and completely present. Ibarra, in “working on, with, and
against, a cultural form”, aims to reclaim space—by force, if necessary.

VI. Performative Futurity: Transmuting the Canon through the Work of Rafa Esparza

Inclusion is necessitated by an unavoidable presence, particularly when the accountability
of the party in a position of power (the one who determines what or who to include) is predicated
on the party’s ability to perform as an unwavering resource for privileged access and knowledge.
Rafa Esparza’s inclusion in the 2016 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, for this
reason, should come as no surprise. One of 26 artists included in the second iteration of Made in
L.A., organized by Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi and guest curator Hamza Walker, Esparza
57
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), 146.
fits the bill, an emerging or under-recognized artist making work in and perhaps even about L.A.
While it can be argued that the parameters of what qualifies artists to participate in the biennial
might not feel totally resolved, Esparza’s inclusion is no contest. In addition to swiftly becoming
a recognizable face and name in the Los Angeles art world, Esparza is an L.A. native who even
attended UCLA as an undergraduate student. His work is also about L.A. in a major way, one
that sheds light on queer Chicano identity and the aggressively gentrifying neighborhoods of
East Los Angeles.
Esparza’s installation, entitled tierra (2016), is reminiscent, in part, of a distinguishing
materiality that he has employed in a number of earlier works: the adobe bricks. And so for the
Made in L.A. biennial, Esparza tiled a portion of the mezzanine at the Hammer Museum with
adobe bricks, along with a collection of objects that he had buried in Elysian Park (see figure
11). Those that Esparza invited to unearth the buried objects were given the choice of whether or
not to lend them to the Hammer for the biennial. The bricks used in tierra are made from the dirt
of Chavez Ravine, a previously working class area in Elysian Park that was notoriously
demolished in the 1950s in order to create space for what is now the Dodger Stadium, along with
water from the LA River. In the press materials for the biennial published on the Hammer
Museum’s website, Esparza’s practice is explained as confronting the notions of foreignness and
appropriation that are at the heart of museological culture. Travis Diehl, in writing on tierra,
expounds on Esparza’s intentions with the work when he writes, “Esparza doesn’t try to undo
so-called progress, but rather decks that urbanism with the symbols of what it paved over.” He
58
goes on to mention that one of the buried/found objects, the tattered armchair, featured in tierra
58
Travis Diehl, "Land Rites: In the work of Rafa Esparza, Colonialism, Family History and Sex Collide with the
Landscape of Los Angeles," Frieze (March 20, 2017); available online at: frieze.com; accessed May 19, 2017.
makes other appearances, first impaled on a snake made of rebar, in A Post-Industrial Snake
(2016), a collaboration with Timo Fahler for Los Angeles gallery Club Pro, and once more for
Art Los Angeles Contemporary. Diehl aptly states that “[i]n his practice, marginal sites become
contested ones,” emphasizing that the work demands attention through repetition in making
memory visible, viable, and activated. Where gentrification operates in topographies of erasure,
59
Esparza poignantly insists on remembering.
Esparza, along with Robert Crouch and Yann Novak, performed a durational work
titled mas gestos y mas caras within the tierra installation, on July 8, 2016 (see figure 12). The
work is described as having narrated the “conditions of invisibility and presence through sound
and the process of masking and molding.” Esparza formed a series of plaster masks on his own
face, configured around the constricted formations he made with his features in order to breathe
from beneath the casts. Crouch and Novak worked together to collect and record ambient sounds
produced by Esparza’s body and within the adobe brick installation, which they then mixed
together, “at times signaling it back to Esparza, as a chance for intimate exchange, within an
expanding public auditorium of recorded and fleeting gestures.” In this performance, Esparza
60
further emphasizes conceptual underpinnings within the larger installation, hinging on the notion
that through cyclical repetition, in this instance of Crouch and Novak recording, re-recording and
amplifying the sounds of Esparza’s breathe, heartbeat and surroundings, a multitude of gestures
could be generated. Calling on Muñoz’s notions of queer futurity, Esparza, Crouch and Novak’s
creation of new circuits of belonging, literally in how they transmute temporality as a means of
making alternative connections, expressions and signals, but also in how Esparza’s body and its
59
Ibid.
60
"Rafa Esparza: mas gestos y mas caras ," The Hammer Museum. July 8, 2016; available online at:
hammer.ucla.edu; accessed June 14, 2017.
corporeality are repeatedly captured, released and reformed. Immutable potentiality, in this case,
refers to the limitless configurations and iterations that might have been formed, and the
expansive possibility for connectivity, intersection and intimacy.
Esparza’s Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field (2017) at the Whitney Biennial was
created with the assistance of Rooster Cabrera, Maria Gargia, and Zena Zendejas, “a group of
Brown, queer-identified individuals,” in a gallery on the first floor of the museum, not
coincidentally the only space aside from the lobby that is accessible to the (unticketed) public.
61
The gallery, laden with adobe bricks, smelled strongly of earth, as the air weighed damply,
clinging to the small bits of straw and loose soil protruding from their forms (see figure 13). The
bricks were transported from Los Angeles, where they were laboriously created by Esparza,
along with his family and friends in preparation for the biennial. The gesture, of transporting the
bricks, is one that intended to be “ mimicking of American colonization, but in reverse: while
historically colonization progressed from east to west, imposing European structures on the land
in the process, here Esparza has transformed land from Los Angeles into bricks and transported
them to New York.” As in much of his work, the artist employed the adobe bricks as a tool in
62
evoking a critique of the institution within which his work is placed. The corners of the gallery
were rounded, forming an adobe rotunda and creating a new space within the gallery, which
subtly critiques the concept of the white cube and alludes to its exclusionary practices while
simultaneously reclaiming the space.
In culmination of what has been a swift ascent to recognition within the realm of the
institution, Esparza persists in his deeply collaborative practice, and invited a number of artists to
61
Rafa Esparza, Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field, 2017; 2017 Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York; available online at: whitney.org; accessed April 11, 2017.
62
Ibid.
contribute within his installation. Beatriz Cortez’s pyramid-shaped formation made from
volcanic rock loomed in the center of the space, adorned in the vibrant blues, reds and
shimmering gold of Eamon Ore-Giron’s site-specific painting resembling a sun deity with
glorious outstretched limbs. Gala Porras-Kim’s reconstructed artifact sat on the ledge of a
hollowed out encasement, surrounded by pages of research and playfully doctored authenticity
certificate, provoking the viewer to consider not only the authenticity of the “artifact” presented,
but more expansively about the concept of cultural authenticity, rife with historical and
sociopolitical precarity. Dorian Ulises López Macías’ large-scale full color photographic
portraits of Mexican men from his series titled “Mexicano” wrapped around nearly half of the
rotunda, hung on the adobe walls with binder clips and exposed nails. There were bricks that had
distinct imprints left by fingers along their edges, while a sound work by Joe Jiménez trickled
through the small, imperfect gaps in the wall. One guest reported hearing the words “some of our
bodies are always under attack” streaming through a hole between bricks, while another
simultaneously said they couldn’t quite make out the words, but felt a distinct presence
emanating from within the walls themselves, as though inhabited by a specter.
Ramiro Gomez Jr.’s collaborative residency as an extension of Figure Ground: Beyond
the White Field was realized by making paintings from photographs he took while at the museum
of employees performing their jobs. Once each painting was completed, they were delivered to
the subjects either by the artist or someone the artist had asked. In a concluding performance,
Esparza invited Nao Bustamante, a performance artist, mentor and friend whose practice has
inspired Esparza and Ibarra alike, and together they performed Floating Gardens No. 2 (2017),
an iteration of a performance that closely resembled The Mexika Eagle, Space Navigation No.0:
XIMAMPA (2015), performed at the Getty Museum (see figure 14). Diehl describes The Mexika
Eagle, stating that “Esparza treated the space as an unknown and hostile planet: wearing Azteca
loincloth and anklets over a homemade space suit, he ventured around the museum’s plazas on a
handful of adobe bricks, never once setting foot on its famous white travertine. The work was not
an outright rejection of the space, or of (white, Western) institutional priorities, but a
contextualization – layering the hubris of one culture with the pride of another.”
63
Conclusion
Floating Gardens No. 2, performed on June 10, 2017 at the Whitney Biennial , traversed
the lobby of the Museum with adobe bricks borrowed from the floor in Esparza’s Figure
Ground: Beyond the White Field installation. Dressed in the same homemade space suit, the
helmet’s opacity fading in and out with the rhythm of his heavy breathing, Esparza configured
and reconfigured a shifting platformed ground upon which Bustamante, dressed in a sheer black
floor length coat, wrapped around the waist in what looked to have been celophane, white gloves
and a gauze-like lace band strapped around her chin and across her eyes, shuffled with vision
obscured, intermitenly clutching an adobe brick to her chest (see figure 15). Esparza published
documentation on social media from Floating Gardens No. 2 in which, in a caption beneath the
image, he elaborates on a particular aspect of the performance that resonated for him, one in
which Bustamante repeatedly summoned the audience as she cautiously navigated her way along
what he refers to as the “shifting brown floor underneath her feet, blindly, eyes veiled behind a
ribbon of sequins,” only to shout “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” the moment they drew near. He
describes the reactions of the audience, mostly shock or fear, and how the proclamation was
63
Ibid.
imbued with so much meaning. This play, between inclusion and exclusion, desire and
64
revulsion, speaks to elements of Esparza and Ibarra’s work that intervene in the institution’s
ability to contextualize their presence and inclusion without also recognizing that the work itself
will continue to perform while being exhibited and presented, as well as long after its gone.
By creating counterpublics, communities and relational chains of resistance that contest
the dominant public sphere, by inviting his community into the museum to work with him, by
creating an installation of adobe bricks as a means of connecting his communities, emphasizing
the presence and politics of labor and of the marginalized brown body, especially within the
context of an institution riddled with the inherent racism written into the (if not colonial) history
of the institution itself, Esparza performs toward a queer futurity, one where the future is the site
of infinite and immutable potentiality. Esparza’s inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial comes
by way of a constantly transmuting paradigmatic shift, a product of generations of artists,
activists and agitators making space inside and outside of the institution for new formations of
community and temporality. Esparza works to reposition himself within both (queer) Chicano
and performance art histories, and their overlaps, by creating visible, accessible and disruptive
counterpublics within the institutions in which he exhibits in an effort to call for the
reconfiguration of temporality so to perform and engage with a third strategy , one that is neither
rooted in acceptance or rejection of identity, but rather one that tactically and simultaneously
works on, with, and against, a cultural form . Esparza’s practice, and within selected works
specified here, functions to both invite communities in and push them away, to dismantle notions
of temporality while simultaneously investing in the preservation of history and legacy, to look
64
Rafa Esparza, in a post on social media described his experience of performing Floating Gardens No. 2 with Nao
Bustamante. Posted on June 18, 2017 on Instagram. (Additional documentation has yet to be made accessible via the
Whitney Museum, and as a result, most documentation exists on social media platforms.
to a queer past in efforts to anticipate a queer future, to call for (queer) collectivity, in all its
reflexivity and repetition, in working toward limitless futurity.

Figure 1

Image: Asco, Spray Paint LACMA , 1972, courtesy Harry Gamboa, © Asco, photo © 1974 Harry Gamboa, Jr.

Figure 2

Image: Asco, Instant Mural , (detail) 1974, photo courtesy: Harry Gamboa, ©

Figure 3

La Chica Boom, Nude Laughing, 2016 , performance documentation at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles.
Courtesy: the artist; Photography: Jonathan Velardi.

Figure 4

La Chica Boom, Nude Laughing, 2016 , performance documentation at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles.
Courtesy: the artist; Photography: Jon Tain.
Figure 5

Installation view of Mariel Capanna & HOODsisters, December 6, 2015 at the Bowtie Project.
Photograph courtesy of Clockshop.

Figure 6

Installation view of Timo Fahler & Vyal, June 28, 2015, at the Bowtie Project.
Photograph courtesy of Clockshop

Figure 7

Rafa Esparza, Building: A Simulacrum of Power , 2014, performance documentation at the Bowtie Parcel,
Los Angeles. Courtesy: the artist and Clockshop, Los Angeles; photograph: Dylan Schwartz.

Figure 8

Poster from Rafa Esparza’s Dry: East Los Suana (2014) , a site specific performance, reclaiming the location of a
former men’s bathhouse, part of a chain named Glen’s Turkish Baths. Image courtesy: ONE Gay and Lesbian
Archives, Los Angeles.

Figure 9

Rafa Esparza, i have never been here before, 2015, documentation of installation in progress at Los Angeles
Contemporart Exhibitions. Courtesy of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; photograph by Mario Mesquita

Figure 10

Rafa Esparza, i have never been here before , 2015, documentation of Esparza performing at the closing of his
summer residency at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Courtesy of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions;.
photograph by Chris Wormald.

Figure 11

Rafa Esparza, tierra , 2016, documentation of installation at the Hammer Museum Made in L.A. 2016 biennial.
Courtesy of the Hammer Museum; photograph by Brian Forrest

Figure 12

Rafa Esparza, mas gestos y mas caras, July 8, 2016, documentation of site specific performance at the Hammer
Museum Made in L.A. 2016 biennial. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum; photograph by Barbara Katz.

Figure 13

Installation view of Rafa Esparza, Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field , 2017, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Photograph by Matthew Carasella.

Figure 14

Rafa Esparza, The Mexika Eagle , 2015, performance documentation at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Courtesy:
the artist and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; photograph: Julia Pham Vu.

Figure 15

Rafa Esparza and Nao Bustamante, Floating Gardens No. 2 , 2017, Whitney Biennial; performance documentation at
the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; photograph courtesy: the artist; photograph: Savannah Wood.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Grossman, Hannah E. (author)

Core Title Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 07/24/2017

Defense Date 07/18/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Achille Mbembe,Chicano art movement,Chicano performance art,counterpublics,decoloniality,José Esteban Muñoz,La Chica Boom,OAI-PMH Harvest,Performance,performance art,queer futurity,Rafa Esparza,Xandra Ibarra

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jones, Amelia (committee chair), Campbell, Andy (committee member), Wedell, Noura (committee member)

Creator Email hannahegrossman@gmail.com,hegrossm@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-465072

Unique identifier UC11266721

Identifier etd-GrossmanHa-5610.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-465072 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-GrossmanHa-5610.pdf

Dmrecord 465072

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Grossman, Hannah E.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA