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Dead girls, monsters, and assholes: marginality in the practices of Asco and Marnie Weber in Los Angeles

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Dead girls, monsters, and assholes: marginality in the practices of Asco and Marnie Weber in Los Angeles

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i
DEAD GIRLS, MONSTERS, AND ASSHOLES:
MARGINALITY IN THE PRACTICES OF ASCO AND MARNIE WEBER IN
LOS ANGELES

by

Ilana Daphne Milch

________________________________________________________________

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 PUBLIC ART STUDIES

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Ilana Daphne Milch

ii
Dedication
To the space in between.

iii
Acknowledgements
This has been a mystifying, harrowing, enlightening experience. Thinking about
writing this page evokes emotions there is no language to describe. I am utterly
indebted to the lovely and brilliant people who have helped me.
To my readers, Karin Higa, Rita Gonzalez, and Anne Bray.
Thank you to Noura Wedell for guiding me through this with immense generosity
and care.
Thank you to Elizabeth Lovins for constantly checking in with me and for her
deep support.
Thank you to Rhea Anastas and Joshua Decter for your exceptional minds and
for the helming of this enterprising art curriculum. I am so honored to have been
a part of this program. To Dwayne Moser for allowing me to ambush him in his
office to talk out early ideas.
Thank you Dean Rochelle Steiner for your encouragement and passion.
Thank you to the tigress Emi Fontana and the West of Rome ladies, Caren and
Maria.
To Nathan Edelman for reading and editing, such a gift. Thank you to Robbie
Dewhurst for editing my thesis, giving me confidence, and sharing pie with me.
Thanks to Will Fowler for having good words and for being lovely.
To my family. I am so proud of us and feel more loved than I can even express.
Thank you to Joanne and Nick and Alie and our precocious cats for allowing me
to share our beautiful home. Thank you to Dan for keeping my mom grounded
and happy. Thank you to Tara Danielle for the heartache and the exuberance.
I’m sure that we will oscillate this way forever. I am wholly indebted to the care
and diligence of my brilliant mother Janis. I am lucky beyond measure to speak
artalese with my amazing father Mario.
To Marnie Weber, the bear creature, my Muse. To Asco, and especially to
Gronk, for taking the time to talk to me and to make me fancy coffee.
To my dearest most amazing friends. I will go by alphabetical order for ease and
for arbitrary aesthetics. Time is a construct. I cannot, CANNOT, thank you
enough. There are no words. My heart, my love. Erika Deacon, Jenny Durbin, Mo
Hyman, Kelly Leffler, Megan Sallabedra, Geneva Skeen.

iv
Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Chapter 2: Asco
Mural Makers are Assholes 8
Chapter 3: Marnie Weber
Dead Girls Have No (Eternal) Hearts 28
Chapter 4: Conclusion 44
Bibliography 47

v
Abstract
This thesis focuses on two Los Angeles artworks—Asshole Mural (1975) by Asco
and Eternity Forever (2010) by Marnie Weber—that encourage a revaluation of
the traditional conception of marginality as a negative quality or location. Asco
and Weber both play with the genre boundaries of cinema by weaving expansive
narratives that go beyond the physical plane of the screen into performance,
sculptural production, music, and formal constructions that serve as both props
and historical evidence of their works. In Asshole Mural, Asco creates a work
that pushes against the stereotyping of Chicano artists as mural makers. Weber’s
Eternity Forever (the final act of her Spirit Girls Cycle) challenges viewers to
reconcile an anachronistic narrative about a fictional ghost band from the 1970s
with contemporary art strategies of installation, multimedia, and gender
performance. Both Asshole Mural and Eternity Forever refuse the typical
understanding of marginality as undesirable in the context of contemporary art,
and instead revel in marginality as a generative and flexible site for avant-garde
artistic practice.

1
Chapter 1: Introduction

It is not the least of America's charms that even outside the movie
theaters the whole country is cinematic. The desert you pass
through is like the set of a Western, the city a screen of signs and
formulas. […] An American city seems to have stepped right out of
the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the
city and move inward toward the screen; you should begin with the
screen and move outward toward the city.
1

This remarkable quote by French theorist Jean Baudrillard suggests that
to understand the historical veracity and cultural weight of America, one must
start with its cinematic presentation. Los Angeles is a cinematic capital of the
world. Social critics and urban historians such as Mike Davis and Norman Klein,
for instance, argue that in cultural imagination the famous notion of “Hollywood”
often subsumes Los Angeles’s actual nonfixity as an ever-expanding metropolis.
2

Many of Los Angeles’s nicknames identify the city by its relation to the film
industry and the noir genre: Hollywood, La La Land, Tinseltown, City of Angels,
City of Lost Angels, and so on. Writers Chris Kraus and Jan Tumlir take a
comprehensive look at art in Los Angeles in their book, LA Artland:
Contemporary Art from Los Angeles. The book opens with an epigraph by the
late Giovanni Intra which expands upon Baudrillard’s characterization:
LA is not so much a city full of alternative spaces, but an alternative
space in itself, a perpetual frontier, peripheral to the financial and

1
Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1989), 56.
2
This can be further examined in the following: Mike Davis, City of Quartz
(Vintage, 1992) by and Norman Klein, History of Forgetting (Verso, 1998).

2
museological center of the US art world, New York, but still
possessing a vitality that would be embarrassing to ignore.
3

Los Angeles art has often been left out of dominant art world discourse,
generally in the form of benign neglect, following an historical precedent which
insisted that artists make their way eastward to gain credible attention. Some of
this bias may derive from the fact that New York City ascended to dominance as
the capital of the marketplace and critical establishment of the United States art
world early on in the twentieth century, while Los Angeles’s own art scene
developed later. Compared to New York, it is more difficult to establish historical
context in Los Angeles, a place that denies the need for looking back in order to
move forward. Los Angeles moves forward like a blindfolded bull. Curator
Howard N. Fox writes of Los Angeles’s contentious relationship to maintaining its
past that: “Perhaps it is Southern California’s ‘newness’ and its lack of a sense of
history that provokes this aura of vacancy and this palpable yearning for meaning
in so much of its seminal art. It is an often unfulfilled desire.”
4
With its habit of
razing historical buildings, undoing and fictionalizing its own history, Los Angeles
is actually quite a fertile place for artists to unspool narrative works that look
forward to alternate, future histories rather than becoming embedded in a
concretized past.

3
Chris Kraus, Jan Tumlir and Jane McFadden, LA Artland: Contemporary Art
from Los Angeles (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005), 6.
4
Howard N. Fox, “SoCal Content: The Big Picture,” in Catalogue L.A.: Birth of an
Art Capital 1955-1985, ed. Catherine Grenier et al. (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 2007), 47.

3
This thesis considers two Los Angeles-based artists, Asco and Marnie
Weber, who use the cinematic imaginary of Hollywood to dispute the notion that
marginalization is always somehow negative or undesirable in the context of
contemporary art. Mike Davis argues that the actuality of Los Angeles’s identity is
infinitely decentralized, because the city is so multiply and variously imagined in
mass cultural consciousness.
5
Asco’s Asshole Mural (1975) and Weber’s Eternity
Forever (2010; the final work in her Spirit Girls Cycle) exemplify Davis’s notion,
and in fact require Los Angeles’s “infinite decentralization” in order to participate
in the art world on their own terms. As represented in recent Hollywood movies,
Los Angeles is a city comprised of body builders at Venice Beach, bars on the
Sunset Strip, and freeways and parking lots. In actuality, the sprawling city
comprises 468 square miles, and contains not only beaches, concrete, and strip
malls, but also mountains, farm fields, small lakes, and bucolic hideaways. If you
start with the screen, as Baudrillard advises, and move outward, the city of Los
Angeles is a place that has myriad identities, therefore permitting myriad
reactions to and interpretations of its aesthetic impact.
Asco, a Chicano arts collective created by a core group of four artists—
Patssi Valdez, Gronk, Willie Herron III, and Harry Gamboa Jr.—was active in Los
Angeles from 1972 to 1987. The group struggled against received notions of
how one could be an artist and be Chicano, in addition to the general

5
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York:
Vintage Books, 1992.

4
discrimination against Los Angeles as a viable hub for serious art. Asshole Mural
is a humorous and pointed example of Asco’s efforts to reconfigure accepted
cultural codes of the 1970s. Asshole Mural (or Asshole Mural/Ascozilla) is a
group of works in the form of photographs and mail-art postcards, ephemera
associated with a performance project wherein Asco presented themselves as
East Los Angeles municipal officers concerned with redefining the territorial
divides that seemed to arbitrarily marginalize the vibrant and active East Los
Angeles Chicano population from the rest of Los Angeles. Marnie Weber’s
comprehensive five-year long project, The Spirit Girls Cycle, is a recent work that
retrospectively raises similar questions about identity and marginalization in the
1970s. This work transfigures feminist narratives and social codes by using
multiple media to narrate the tale of a girl band that has been fictionally
“resurrected” from the 1970s, when all of its members died before making it big.
Actually formed in 2005, the Spirit Girls play music and have adventures before
finally returning to the spirit land in 2010 for the final chapter of Weber’s cycle,
Eternity Forever. With the 1970s serving as both an actual backdrop for Asco
and as a fictional one for Weber, this thesis will focus on how these artists play
with similar cinematic tropes to emphasize the flexibility of their narratives—a
flexibility that makes particular sense in relation to Los Angeles. In writing about
Asco, C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez write that “Los Angeles existed on
the periphery of American art history in the early 1970s. The broader artistic
production in California was—and remains—under-documented, particularly that

5
done by feminist artists, queer artists, and artists of color, as well as work that
defied or evaded the demands of the art market.”
6

Chavoya and Gonzalez implicitly connect the artists whose works exists
on the periphery. Looking to this art-world notion of periphery, the pairing of
Asco and Marnie Weber is not a casual alignment; important parallels draw these
artists together. Asco and Marnie Weber are examples of artists that situate their
works in Los Angeles, a perpetual frontier. I put forth Asco’s Asshole Mural
(1975) and Weber’s Eternity Forever (2010) as exemplars of how these artists
employed Los Angeles’s sense of infinite decentralization in order to participate
in the art world on their own terms in a city in which they were doubly
marginalized by the politics of art in general as well as by issues of gender,
ethnicity, and local geography. Further confounding easy categorization, both
employed selective aspects of cinematic production into their performance
practices.
Asco member Harry Gamboa Jr. wrote about the status of the peripheral
artist as having to operate as a collection of phantom identities—identities
considered marginal to institutional and cultural arbiters of meaning, taste, and
relevance. This thesis aligns the practices of Asco and Weber based on the
parallel premise of their phantom identities. Asco’s members addressed their
cultural invisibility and racial limitations in works that expanded the definitions

6
C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita González. Asco: Elite of the Obscure : a
Retrospective, 1972-1987. (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of
Art, 2011), 18.

6
and conceptual possibilities of the Chicano body. Asco’s strategic and tactical
approaches to enacting subjectivity within the marginal realm of being both
Chicano and young transgressive artists in the 1970s in Los Angeles demand
elucidation. What is striking about Weber is that she chooses marginalization
itself in the 1970s as her subject matter. For five years, Weber spun tales about
a fictional girl band, the Spirit Girls, which asked audiences to reconcile 1970s
misogyny with contemporary feminism. Weber boldly employed the marginal
realm as the mainstay of her practice by making her subjects anthropomorphized
specters, ethereal entities, phantoms. The idea of creating a phantom band was
a response to women being relegated to the periphery of rock n’ roll and punk
music. Weber resurrected the Spirit Girls to the corporeal world to spread a
message of emancipation through musical performance. This project forces a
critical engagement with ideas of the feminist identity in contemporary art and
pop culture. Without actually being grounded in any specific city, the Spirit Girls
are absolutely informed and shaped by their Los Angeles home base, forlorn
ethereal creatures haunting galleries and performance spaces without having to
locate themselves, just like any Los Angeles transplant.
As working artists in Los Angeles, Asco and Weber play with the
constraints of the Hollywood system in creating their transgressive art works; in
this system, heightened visibility and essentializing validation were not a viable
compromise of artistic freedom and intelligibility to these artists. The works of
Asco and Weber offer a different possibility, a use of the traditional idea of

7
cinema in the service of narratives that extend beyond the physical plane of the
screen and into structural production, live performance, and ephemeral
constructions. Recognizing the disadvantages of marginalization but also finding
inspiration in that underground status, Gamboa coined the phrase “elite of the
obscure,” to describe the cast of characters, the “collection of the anonymous,
the undocumented, and selected barrio stars” that made up a parallel, alternative
construction of glamour.
7
Asco’s Asshole Mural and Marnie Weber’s Eternity
Forever are excellent examples of how these works construct those parallel and
alternative spaces in Los Angeles.

7
Ibid., 21.

8
Chapter 2: Asco
Mural Makers Are Assholes

On September 4, 2011, Asco: Elite of the Obscure opened at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA), the first retrospective of the Chicano art
collective. Part of the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time
8
, the Asco show has
been hailed by critics for finally giving historical credence to this much neglected
art group
9
. A close examination of Asco’s exhibition history reveals a career
pockmarked by prejudice, racialization, and blatant exclusion by the mainstream
art world.
10
Ironically, the counterpoint to this chronicle of mainstream invisibility
is the historical fact of Asco’s dynamic participation in that very world. Asco took
ownership of their exclusion by incorporating it as an integral part of their subject

8
Pacific Standard Time, http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/, (accessed October
17, 2011).
9
A perfect example of this is Christopher Knight’s last remarks in his L.A.
Times review: "’Asco: Elite of the Obscure,’ as the handsomely installed
show is wryly called, is a prime example of the importance of the Getty-
sponsored Pacific Standard Time, charting L.A.'s 1945-1980 art history --
itself a kind of No Movie, now coming to a museum near you.” Christopher
Knight, "Art Review: 'Asco Elite of the Obscure, 1972-1987' at LACMA,”
Culture Monster, September 9, 2011,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/09/art-review-asco-
elite-of-the-obscure-a-retrospective-1972-1987-at-the-los-angeles-county-
museum-of-a.html, (accessed October 14, 2011.)
10
For a full history of Asco’s exhibitions, please see the Asco Catalogue by C.
Ondine Chavoya and Rita González. Asco: Elite of the Obscure : a
Retrospective, 1972-1987. (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of
Art, 2011). To list a few places that showed Asco: LACE, LAICA, Concillo de Arte
Popular, Mechicano, Self-Help Graphics, Galeria de la Raza, Hispanic Cultural
Center in LA.

9
matter; it was only in this slippery space of marginalization that Asco had the
freedom to make their impactful and important work. The collective’s
performative practice is grounded in a Los Angeles-specific cinematic imaginary.
This conclusion is predicated on Asco’s close proximity to and fraught
relationship with “Hollywood,” a relation that casts their conceptual works in a
filmic context. In addition to film, Asco’s conceptual works involve and reference
a multiplicity of other art forms and media including: performance, ephemera,
collage, sculpture, photography, music, and writing. Asco’s conflation of
imaginary with real spaces and histories allowed for alternate trajectories to be
drawn—fantastical and unconventional narratives—where their historical
correlates actually took place. Asco responded to specific urgencies and
conditions of the social and cultural unrest of East Los Angeles in the 1970s. The
group’s interventions were realized through a strategy of performing imagination
and absurdity, challenging the notion that urban blight and destitution
encapsulated the only reality available to Chicanos. In consideration of Los
Angeles’s identity and history of artifice, this chapter examines how Asco was
able to enact flexible and transgressive art practices within a space where the
real and the imaginary became conflated. I will map this out by specifically
analyzing the work Asshole Mural/Ascozilla, which even in its title perfectly
exemplifies how Asco negotiated this realm of the in-between. Asshole Mural is
the photograph; Ascozilla is the reproduction of the photograph as part of a “No

10
Movie.” The word “Ascozilla” is printed above a sewer hole that appears in the
photograph, and the dates “August 4-21, 1975” are printed the bottom.
Officially banding together as an artist collective in 1972, Harry Gamboa
Jr., Gronk, Willie Herron III, and Patssi Valdez christened themselves Asco,
meaning “nausea” in Spanish. The name was intentionally politicized, indicting
both the white authority that persisted in ghettoizing Chicanos as well as their
own East LA community for what Asco saw as its complicit passivity. In the
1970s Asco was one of the few groups within the Chicano community that
actively challenged pernicious Anglo racism.
Asco started as a collaboration of artists wanting to create and show
works that legitimately represented themselves as well as their complicated and
pluralistic cultures and styles. At this time, murals were seen as the great
Chicano style and contribution to public art, well popularized by the international
fame of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco.
Through this medium, institutions were cunningly able to support minor folk
artists without having to bring them into the high-art space of the museum.
Muralism is endemic to Chicano culture, which art institutions have and continue
to marginalize, thereby denying folk artists legitimacy.
During the Vietnam War era, neighborhood violence was a modus
operandi in the East LA Latino community. The level and degree of violence was
so unfathomable that Gamboa now recalls it as being essentially absurdist-

11
theater.
11
Indomitable East LA high school students responded to the apathetic
allowance and ignorance of the American public by reminding them that a war
was happening on native soil. Gronk even dubbed East LA “Viet/barrio.” In an
interview with Asco historian Chon Noriega, Gamboa remembers:
I grew up in East L.A. and the environment there was so violent that
it was almost like absurdist theater . . . I had seen instances where
the police came on campus and beat the shit out of kids . . . But of
all the things I had seen I was always constantly amazed at how
people could manipulate material—your story—and change it. And
I guess it was right after high school that it kind of clicked that they
had pictures, and I didn’t have pictures to prove my point.
12

This realization of the hierarchy of power was the catalyst for Gamboa’s
fervent documentation and art-making through photography. As a group, Asco
relied heavily on the photographic medium to amass pictures as records proving
their existence beyond the 1970s Chicano paradigm of East LA. Chicanos were
culturally invisible; compiling an extensive pictoral record gave them legitimacy
by providing concrete evidence of their existence. Photographs served to
announce: We are here! See us! Any sidelined representation Chicanos did
receive was overwhelmingly negative. Mainstream news media portrayed East
LA as a gang-inhabited barrio, sensationalizing the coverage of gang warfare,
while doing nothing to improve the situation. Disgusted by the transparent tactics
that journalists used to flatten the vibrant Chicano community rather than eliciting

11
Chon A. Noriega and Harry Gamboa Jr,, Ed. Urban Exile (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 2.
12
Ibid, 2.

12
aid for it, the four Asco members joined together in protest. As educated and
curious artists, the members of Asco were aware that simply by nature of their
race, geography, and culture in the 1970s, Chicano artists like themselves were
expected to conform in order to achieve success and relevancy. Chafing against
the established grammar of said style, Asco made works that deliberately
reconfigured Chicano identity. If Chicanos could only participate in the art world
as muralists, then Asco would stretch the limits of muralism to its farthest
reaches. No matter what style or medium the group employed, it would be laden
with its own intrinsic political connotations. Furthermore, whatever Asco
produced in whichever manner would always be bracketed under “Chicano art”—
a label that presupposed the content was racialized or ethnic, thus compelling
the work to wave the flag of a political agenda without the artists necessarily
choosing to do so. In order to resist this pigeonholing, Asco made works which
troubled boundaries. Their playful manipulation of language created a model for
which they could subvert the political limitations of their marginalization.
Actively engaged in this argument was Gloria Anzaldúa, a prominent
scholar of marginal identities vis-à-vis her borderland and poetics theory. A
bilingual scholar, Anzaldúa wrote prolifically on the mixed-minority identity using
Spanglish to interrupt her own passages. Spanglish is a language resultant from
the hybridization of English and Spanish, and is thus a kind of linguistic
borderland. Using a blend of feminist and queer rhetoric, Anzaldúa was

13
particularly interested in the marginality of the borderland
13
as a distinct and
fertile realm:
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to
distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip
along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined
place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It
is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are
its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the
perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the
half-breed, the half dead: in short, those who cross over, pass over,
or go through the confines of the “normal.”
14

Occupying this borderland, Asco engaged this marginal status as a fecund
platform, a grand stage, for manipulation and creative alternatives to the status
quo of Chicano art production. By actively disrupting the normal Chicano
relationship to murals, Asco forced the Chicano community to confront the spatial
and topical limitations of how their culture was being represented. Asco chose to
perform the typically painted portrayals of indigenous Mexicans in murals often
commissioned to uphold the whitewashed rewriting of the history of Los Angeles
and California. In Walking Mural, from 1972, Asco enacted a confluence of
actual, contemporary Chicano bodies in order to disintegrate the border created
by the outmoded version of the imagined Aztec. The “solemn subject matter” to
which these bored observers responded was an update of age-old Chicano

13
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).
14
Amelia Jones, “Traitor Prophets” in Chavoya, C. Ondine, and Rita
González. Asco: Elite of the Obscure : a Retrospective, 1972-1987
(Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 2011), 117.

14
imagery: Herron regally embodied a multiheaded Aztec god made out of
cardboard and tinfoil, Valdez dressed as a gothic version of the Virgin of
Guadalupe, and Gronk paraded around as a flamboyant Christmas tree in
inverted chiffon dresses, with the entire procession photographed by Gamboa.
This act was a protest against the blithe compliance with which the static mural
medium continued to depict what Asco viewed as dead and mute representations
of Latino folk influences. By subverting both the medium—making it a living,
breathing, moving entity—and by reinventing the Aztec image, Asco confronted
observers’ perceptions of their own history and their everyday surroundings.
Although the group often used humor in their flamboyant actions, Asco never
made work with the intention of negating the importance of muralism in their
cultural and artistic history. Instead, Asco sought to rethink and revitalize the
form, and unflinchingly wrested muralism from static and diminished positioning
into dynamic and active engagement with city space and audience. It was
commonly believed that murals lasted in perpetuity. Since it was also thought
that Chicano street murals could be their only means of self-historicization, Asco
deliberately created ephemeral works to emphasize temporary movement and
action—the unfettered crossing of designated borders. Chavoya and Gonzalez
observe:
In Walking Mural Asco performed as characters in a mural who had
become so bored with the solemn subject matter that they

15
extricated themselves from the wall and took off down the street.
15

Walking Mural also exploded the blatant stereotyping that the mural medium
reinforced in the Chicano community—a reinforcement of the conventional roles
that delimited the plurality and richness and complexities of Latino
representation. Asco produced murals that stemmed from suspicion of the
medium’s stagnation—a condition especially reprehensible in the dynamic
melting pot that was (and is) Los Angeles. Aiming instead to represent all the
artistic possibilities of the Chicano culture and to break down the walls of ethnic
stereotyping, Asco asked: why must Chicano artists only be mariachis and mural
painters?
A later work in this series, Instant Mural (1974), was made by Gronk
simply using thick white tape to affix Patssi Valdez and frequent Asco
collaborator Humberto Sandoval to a wall on Whittier Boulevard in East LA. In
their catalogue essay, Chavoya and Gonzalez write about this piece as
“temporarily enshrining Valdez’s body, transforming her into an icon. She then
burst forth from the tape, the embodiment of self-awareness as a mutable and
transgressive image in the urban landscape.”
16
By literally taping Chicano bodies
to the wall, Instant Mural furiously asks: what does it take to represent a complex
contemporary image of Chicano identity?

15
C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita González. Asco: Elite of the Obscure : a
Retrospective, 1972-1987. (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of
Art, 2011), 52.
16
Ibid, 52.

16
These mural performances exemplified Asco’s stake in addressing the
general problem of representation. In taking on the collective identity and history
that was universally understood to be Chicano as artistic subject matter, Asco
purposefully tested the limits of authenticity. A typical example of this was Asco’s
response to the annual Dia de los Muertos performances: refuting the notion that
the Chicano community should only commemorate this day once a year, Asco
noted that “every day was Day of the Dead in East Los Angeles.”
17
Fully aware of
how thoroughly misinformation was disseminated to the Los Angeles public,
Asco chose to make art that mimicked the flimsy systems that circulated
information: news outlets, mail flyers, film posters, TV ads, and so on. This
playful but critical practice resulted in the creation of their original “No Movie” art
form.
Asco created the “No Movie” as a conceptual platform to paradoxically
assert themselves by drawing attention to their absence. No Movies were
performances which danced around the periphery of a Hollywood film, employing
still photography as the capturing medium instead of a film reel camera. Asco
members impersonated movie characters, dressing in costumes and staging
scenes. The resulting photographs were disseminated as if they were artifacts
from an actual film production. These performances were commensurate with
Asco’s collective mission of asserting a Chicano presence where none could be
found. As Chavoya and Gonzalez observe, “No Movies appropriated the

17
Ibid, 55.

17
spectacle of Hollywood even as they critiqued the absence of Chicanos in the
mass media.”
18

Asco’s Asshole Mural from 1975 perfectly exemplifies the irony of the No
Movie. Asshole Mural exists in many forms; the most famous are two small
postcard-sized photographs that depict the four core Asco members (Harry
Gamboa Jr., Willie Herron III, Patssi Valdez, and Gronk) surrounding a large
seeping sewer hole. Asshole Mural is one of Asco’s most aggressive
presentations of disgust regarding the limitation of Chicano artists to mural-
making as their only form of art-world legitimacy.
According to Gronk, the 1970 publication of new media scholar and
theorist Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema was hugely influential to Asco in
developing their artistic practice
19
. By presenting examples of a broad spectrum
of films utilizing new technologies, Youngblood traced the evolution of cinematic
language, appropriating scientific methodologies to substantiate his theoretical
assertions. Youngblood used 1960s scientific terminology and popular communal
sociology as a groundwork for a new way of engaging the genre of experimental
film. Stating that works engaged with expansion of the creative mind need only
title themselves within a cinematic lexicon to be considered within that realm,
Youngblood writes:
When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded
consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films,

18
Ibid, 57.
19
Gronk, Interview with the Author, Los Angeles, Calif., January 6, 2012.

18
video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded
cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming,
man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness
outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can
specialize in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a
clear picture of its relationships in the environment.
20

No Movies draws from Youngblood’s conception of life (and art) as processes; in
doing so, they deconstruct hegemonic borders and allow Asco to cultivate
discussion about the whole variety of Chicano experience.
In strategically placing their Chicano bodies around the vile yawning
drainage pipe, a mural was enacted. Gamboa photographed it and then it was
immediately dismantled. Asco deliberately inverted the concept of the mural as
Permanent by offering up photographic evidence of the mural as a migratory art
form. In another version of the work, Asshole Mural/Ascozilla, Asco printed the
title Ascozilla onto the piece, as if to suggest that such a mythical creature would
emerge from the sewer. Simply by titling the piece with multiple names, Asco
again eschewed the classical muralistic properties of singularity, rigidity, and
permanence. Mimicking the look and feel of film posters, Asshole
Mural/Ascozilla is an example of Asco’s engagement with expanded cinema. The
date at the bottom of the work indicates the day it was made, but it could just as
well be read as a release date for this No Movie.

20
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.,
1970), 41.

19
In his seminal book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and
Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, film scholar David E. James
describes Asco as critical filmmakers who helped define the expansive and
creative methods developed by artists proximate to, but outside, Hollywood.
James states that: “Instead of looking to the mythic past as the source for an
authentic identity, [Asco] negotiated the general project of the mural and street
theater movements through the vocabularies of contemporary popular culture
and autonomously generated versions of contemporary art’s strategies.”
21

Although Asco did not produce traditional films, James considers their work’s
relation to the history of cinema and discusses the No Movies as works that were
made in retaliation to Hollywood films, partly in an effort to make evident the
almost complete absence of Chicano narratives in Hollywood movies, but also to
rail against the paucity of representation of legitimate Chicano characters (the
dominant depictions being the Cholo gang member, the indigenous rustic, and
the conniving cartoon mouse “Speedy Gonzales”).
Asco member Harry Gamboa insisted on theorizing the “phantom culture”
of East LA Chicanos in an attempt to document the simultaneous experience of
being hypervisible (in the repertoire of ethnic stereotypes) and invisible (on an

21
David E. James, "No Movies: Projecting the Real by Rejecting the Reel," in
Asco: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972-1987, ed. C. Ondine Chavoya
and Rita Gonzalez (Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 181.

20
institutional level).
22
The No Movies serve as a tactic whereby Asco pointed to
the extreme cultural absence of Chicanos in cinema and in high-art institutions by
expanding the void; instead of making films to fill the empty ethnic space, Asco
pointedly did not make films—maintaining that such a reconciliatory action would
ultimately need to be made by the mainstream film and arts industries. In an
embrace of the ephemeral, Gamboa’s images and writing existed in dialogue
with his notion of phantom identities—identities considered marginal to
institutional and cultural arbiters of meaning, taste, and relevance.
23

Gamboa’s assertive casting of phantom identity presented a sympathetic
connection to identity-based claims for “resistance and affirmation.” Rather than
championing the familiar uplifting images and words of the folkloric, the
communal, or the ethno-national, Gamboa chose the urban, the discordant, and
the stateless as articulated by Rita Gonzalez.
24
The No Movies served Asco as a
platform through which themes of identity could be both vacated and infused with

22
Rita Gonzalez, “Strangeways Here We Come,” in Recent Pasts: Art in
Southern California from the 90s to Now, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich:
JRP/Ringier, 2005), 89.
23
Partly because of this embrace of the ephemeral, it is important to note that
one of the ways that a scholar can gain access into the history of Asco is through
writing. Because of Gamboa’s prolific writing practice, his account has become
dominant in the Asco narration. This poses certain historiographical problems.
For example, in the case of organizing and culling together accounts for the 2011
Asco Retrospective, the core members were not on speaking terms with each
other, making it the job of curators and scholars to corroborate the history
beyond personal and professional connections.
24
Rita Gonzalez, “Strangeways Here We Come,” in Recent Pasts: Art in
Southern California from the 90s to Now, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP/
Ringier, 2005), 88.

21
meaning within the same work. This acceptance of marginality as an embedded
theme in their work is an assertion of how Asco took advantage of Los Angeles
as an open stage on which to act out different forms of identity and as a place
that left room for the manipulation of the ephemeral. Starting with the frame of
cinema, the city streets became the screen Baudrillard identified. Asco was
always working from the lens of their neighborhood and extending further into the
greater expanse of the city as their set, and transposed themselves as
characters on this activated backdrop. Particular emphasis was given to
characteristics that were more culturally accurate to Asco’s experience of being
young Chicano artists living in East LA, than to what Asco considered to be
outdated and limited folklorico. The group was much more steeped in avant-
garde strains of art history, looking specifically at Dada’s generous address
towards nonsense and assemblage as an ameliorative measure to construct and
enact identity. Patssi Valdez declared: “Asco is really a concept. Asco will never
die. Dada didn’t ever die. It was a strong statement; new people will keep it
alive.’”
25
Valdez’s robust declaration aligning Asco with Dada exemplifies exactly
how knowledgeable East LA Chicanos were about their own inscription into art
history, as well as the depth of Asco’s impact on the art world. In light of all this,

25
C. Ondine Chavoya, “Art and Life: Dreva/Gronk,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure,
ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, 287. Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag,
2011, 80.

22
through Asco, we can rethink marginalization as a generative platform wherein
artists are able to raise sociopolitical issues with nuance and flexibility.
In merely asking that their practice be taken seriously in both the Chicano
and mainstream art worlds, Asco pushed linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Using Spanglish prose and as a mode of description, Asco forced a
consideration of why English was given primacy in Los Angeles. Using No
Movies to deny the movie medium, Asco highlighted the supposedly
impenetrable inaccessibility of cinema to Chicanos—an effort that has
maintained dynamism to this day, forcing the art world to come to terms with the
lack of recognition and critical art-historical discourse that was denied to this
resistant art group. Appropriating the predominant medium of filmmaking in the
city regarded as the movie capital of the United States, Asco and Weber treaded
the complicated terrain of style in making works that were more like arrows than
destinations. Asco was interested in not wanting to create a representation of
Chicano art or lifestyle, in part by refusing to actually make commodities.
Expertly toying with grammar and language, the No Movie openly negates itself,
asking viewers to pause within the paradoxical space of encountering familiar
advertising ephemera like movie posters, press releases, and the like, along with
the dawning realization that such images are advertising nothing, or rather,
something that doesn’t materially exist.

23
No Movies, in Asco’s words, were to be a body of work that “projected the
real by rejecting the reel.”
26
This pithy phrase encapsulates what was at stake for
these artists: exploiting the generative space of possibilities available through the
No Movies meant that Asco was able to produce what could have been
potentially endless ways to present real Chicano stories. Interested in disrupting
how these stories are actually represented, Asco played with the narrative form
and with the notion that city space defined racial boundaries. The No Movie
Asshole Mural exemplifies this fictional reimagining that Los Angeles allowed of
itself. As legend goes, Asshole Mural documents a day in the life of Asco as
role-playing self-appointed municipal officials in East Los Angeles. The group’s
duties in this line of work were to make random site visits to places they had all
grown up. As this largely Latino part of the city was actually unincorporated, the
fact that the photograph had actually been taken in Malibu only emphasizes the
arbitrary notion of borders and territory.
27
The four Asco members were dressed
to impress as they casually but purposefully situated themselves in relaxed
stances around a giant sewer hole. Their elegant dress cast against the gaping
and dripping orifice of the storm drain accents the theatricality of posing so
aggressively around an actual void, an ass-hole. “The picture’s title, Asshole

26
Harry Gamboa and Chon A. Noriega, “Interview: Gronk and Gamboa,” Urban
Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), 27.
27
Chavoya, C. Ondine, and Rita González, Asco: Elite of the Obscure : a
Retrospective, 1972-1987 (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of
Art, 2011), 111.

24
Mural, turns a scatological joke into a high-concept variation on muralism, which
in the early 1970s was perceived as the dominant mode of Chicano art.”
28
Taking
the piece at face value, Asshole Mural can be interpreted comically as Asco
mooning the camera—and by extension, us, the viewers. As Amelia Jones
remarks:
With Asshole Mural, Asco produces Artmoreorless (in between art,
politics, propaganda), providing “false information.” They turn away from
the black hole of our ego to the black hole of a collective social space, a
borderland space (in Anzaldúa’s terms) void of individual personal identity
or overt signs of singular artistic agency as generally defined in Euro-
American art discourse. They literalized this black hole (fittingly) as the
debased rectum of Los Angeles’s sewage system, the abject underside of
its “glamorous” (and at the time entirely white-dominated) entertainment
industry and art world.
29

The great, circular entrance of the drainage pipe, in isolation from the
“characters” posing around it, conjures the image of a camera, the pipe as the
lens aimed directly a the viewer, as if to ask are you ready for your close-up?
Drawing the viewer into its sludgy expanse, it is also reminiscent of a mouth, the
sewage as a murky tongue spilling out its bile toward the viewer; a sly
commentary on the pristine, exclusive city of Malibu, which no matter how hard it
tries cannot escape from the filth that runs beneath it. When taken in context
with the fancy characters posed around it, the gaping hole becomes a challenge,
an entry into a dark underworld, or at least into the idea of the distant and utterly

28
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Orifice Baroque,” Artforum (October 2011): 279.
29
Amelia Jones, “Traitor Prophets” in Chavoya, C. Ondine, and Rita
González. Asco: Elite of the Obscure : a Retrospective, 1972-1987
(Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 2011), 117.

25
foreign Chicano world. Asshole Mural reminds Malibu that it is adjacent to a city
that had been recently tainted by the Watts race riots and the Manson murders,
and that the hidden enclave of stars and surfers was not safe from infiltration by
Latino “gangsters” staking their claim—not to wealth and ostentation, but to filth
and detritus. Asco’s anachronistic costumes of three piece suits, complete with
flowers and handkerchiefs, signify immigrant inroads against sanctioned WASP
commerce, accessorized by Valdez as the “moll,” nonthreatening and powerless,
but necessary to complete the ruse. Jones observes:
In Asshole Mural these four stylish individuals are staking out territory both
literally and on a visual register. They are claiming an in-between or
“borderland” space (and an insalubrious one, as ironicized in the title of
the photograph) in the city of Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. They are
making culture.
30

In addition to the displacement of physical borders, the use of ellipses following
the date at the bottom of one print of the Ascozilla/Asshole Mural is a formal
element that opens up a conversation into how Asco applied to time the same
mutability with which they treated space. Though the artists made efforts to
historicize themselves within the established culture, they did so with a
consciousness that the real chronicles of Asco bordered on fiction. Their
strategy of making a “muralistic” documentation a No Movie was an overt nod to
the fabricated geography of Hollywood.
Asco jettisoned Ascozilla into the atmosphere, sending it through space
and time as a postcard. In fact, Asshole Mural is not a mural at all but part of the

30
Ibid., 114.

26
physical documentation produced for the No Movie, reproduced on 3 x 5 inch
postcards that were then sent out as mail and later framed and preserved in that
strange middle-ground between art object and photo documentation of the art
performance. This is in part what makes this work so compelling. Its diminutive
size as a physical object can be explained by the limited monetary means
available to Asco at this time. Intermittently able to print large-scale images, the
group relied heavily on Gamboa's 35mm photography to serve as the concrete
aspect of their practice that would exist after the moment of action. Asshole
Mural especially forces the viewer to reconcile the piece’s conceptual
implications with the conventional snapshot form. The shrinking of muralistic
space into a handheld object is a deliberate gesture. Asshole Mural boldly
asserts that the mural can be a concept that is mutable, even removable from the
building wall, and further still from the borders of the barrio.
The No Movies were a perfect vehicle for Asco to put forth any manner of
complex and radical ideas, meaning that no matter the media—or lack thereof—
the work could be understood within a broad conceptual realm when titled as a
No Movie. Asco’s attention to the title as a conceptual frame exemplifies the
extent to which the group operated decades ahead of its time in its positioning of
Latinos as cinematic filmmakers, ignoring the fact that they never created an
actual film and yet recognizing their influence in the filmic community. Their
much-documented relegation to the in-between has been traditionally considered
negatively as marginalization. However, it is precisely this marginalization that

27
not only prompted Asco to form but also fueled every aspect of their work, which
simultaneously employed and exploded the imposed camouflage of the margin to
demand legitimacy. In this slippery space of marginalization, Asco had the
agency to make their impactful and important work outside the expectations of
galleries and patrons, and were thus able to make alternative, experimental, and
ephemeral works.
31

31
Gronk, Interview with the Author, Los Angeles, Calif., January 6, 2012.

28
Chapter 3: Marnie Weber
Dead Girls Have No (Eternal) Hearts

Recently in the hills of Griffith Park, Lauren Kornberg and her mother hiked with
nine dogs towards the iconic Hollywood sign that overlooks the dreamscape of
Los Angeles. One dog broke away from the pack and found an object in the
brush. Rather than prance with his find, he quickly dropped the mysterious
object and it rolled into a ravine. A few of the other dogs curiously went after it,
only to have the same strange reaction. It wasn't until the two walkers edged up
to the ravine that they realized it wasn't a film prop, as they had assumed, but a
human head.
32
Where else in the world would a decapitated human head ever,
even for a second, be mistaken for a film prop, other than in Los Angeles? The
Hollywood sign—each letter of which looms thirty-stories-high above the brush of
Beachwood Canyon—protected as a landmark, epitomizes the intrinsic and
integral part of Los Angeles “where dreams are made”: the Film Industry.
With murder and glamour rolled up into one grotesque anecdote, I use this
tale to introduce the importance of Hollywood—both fictive and real—as a major
element of Marnie Weber’s art. Although often labeled a neo-gothic artist, Weber
uses animism as a constant thread in her works wherein all kinds of objects, from

32
Gale Holland, "Dog-walker is hounded for doing the right thing," Los Angeles
Times, January 27, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0127-
holland-20120127,0,4595364.story (accessed January 27,2012). This story
caused much uproar in the media, including controversial sensationalizing about
the event and those involved.

29
stuffed animals to blow-up toys, are shamanistically imbued with life and
character. This treading of the line between the realms of the imaginary and of
the actual is intended to invoke disquiet in viewers; Weber deliberately uses fear,
horror, and the grotesque as modes in her work. As Francesca Gavin explains,
“Marnie Weber’s work is often described as surrealistic, which is both undeniable
and inadequate. For it is possible that she cares little about these classifications .
. .”
33
This disregard for classification is part of what enabled Weber to operate in
a marginal space, allowing her freedom to move between mediums. The Spirit
Girls Cycle (2005–2010) is composed of myriad works, music, and “films that
disrupt the spacio-temporal continuity between the sphere of reality and that of
her [sic] dream world where the story lets itself be carried along by the interplay
of living objects.”
34

Raised in Connecticut and the daughter of an art historian, Weber initially
chafed against her parents’ wishes that she become an visual artist. Instead,
Weber pursued music and performance, creating elaborate narratives to cope
with moving around frequently after the age of ten. Finally settling in Los
Angeles, Weber joined the punk/alternative band the Party Boys in 1979, making
records and touring with them through 1987. Weber began working as a solo
performance artist in the 1990s, working with movement and sound, and

33
Francesca Gavin, Hell Bound: New Gothic Art (London: Lawrence King
Publishing, 2008).
34
Ibid, 20.

30
documenting her work in video and photography. Weber’s multifaceted art
practice can be seen as a reconciliation of some of the same cultural
discrepancies that underlie Asco’s practice. Weber uses the imaginary and the
absurd not to draw attention to cultural ghettoization, but to address issues of
female invisibility in music and art. Weber’s narrative-based works take form in
any medium that will serve her stories: sculpture, film, performance, installation,
music, photography, and collage. Weber diffuses the primacy of celluloid by
extending cinematic space into her live performances, recorded music, static
collages, and in her sculptural representations of props and other objects
connected to the Spirit Girls narrative.
In her catalogue essay “Marnie Is Not A Bunny Nor A Dummy (A Western
Song),” Moisdon declares that Weber’s films could well have “fallen from the
sky.”
35
By this Moisdon means that Weber’s ethereal and fantastic films are so
otherworldly that they seem to have appeared as a gift from the ether. Weber’s
practice functions in the imaginary realm to provide new possibilities for
recalibrating social codes in reality. Moisdon’s elegant reading of Weber’s work
negates the supposed impenetrability of her imaginary world, because her work
is so thoroughly rooted in the language and visualization of myth and folk tales.
Weber places her viewers in situations where they are drawn in by what is
familiar, especially by her use of an Americana aesthetic vernacular, only to then

35
Stephanie Moisdon, “Marnie Is Not A Bunny Nor A Dummy (A Western Song)”
(Magasin, Grenoble, 2007), 19.

31
rupture this familiarity with nightmarish creatures, dead spirits, and oversized
animals in costumes. Weber destabilizes the primacy of the real by placing her
work in the actual site of her mythological signifiers, the cemetery. In his essay
“Missing Things,” Gregory Williams identifies Weber’s motley crew of animal
characters as being especially dark and awkward:
These inanimate, decidedly uncuddly characters are the polar
opposites of the Disney bunch; they are misfits that never would
have passed the first round of auditions at the Magical Kingdom.
Weber’s fairy tale more closely resembles one of the Grimm’s Black
Forest nightmares than any Bambi-esque romp through the trees.
36

Williams’s reference to Disney emphasizes how much the Southern Californian
cultural behemoth has managed to seep its way into a reigning position as the
dominant code for the childhood aesthetic. That Williams feels it is necessary to
explicate exactly how dissimilar Weber’s animal characters are from Disney’s
eponymous creatures exemplifies the inherent element of the unnatural in
Weber’s art works. Having been interested in death and ritual throughout her
practice, Weber’s early piece Lost in the Woods exemplifies this attention to the
macabre. In the piece, Weber recreated a burial scene placing her fantastic
characters as doting mourners. Paper-mache animals were circled around an
open grave with a television rested at its head, looping the a Super 8 film (also
titled Lost in the Woods; 1997), wherein a character named Happy, played by

36
Williams, Gregory. 1997. "Missing Things". Performing Arts Journal. 19, no. 2:
94-99.

32
Weber, is shown staging her own funeral.
In essence, Weber uses the Spirit Girls as an attempt to repair a problem
she identified in her youth: the lack of visibility for female musicians in the punk
and rock scenes. This chapter considers Weber’s insistence that the imagination
can transform reality. The Spirit Girls are mute, masked, doll-like entities that ask
their audience to reconcile their female-bodied presences with their characters’
status as fictional. The Spirit Girls weave a complex narrative about a group of
women who are not women at all—because they represent incorporeal spirits
rather than sexed bodies. They are ethereal, spirits, ghosts; yet they are also
elemental matter, real people performing. Weber, in her own words, illustrates
the significance of this narrative fluidity:
I do think of the Spirit Girls as sort of formalistic vessels because
they were so blank, that they didn’t have facial expressions, they
didn’t have words so in a way they were formalistic. Maybe the
spaces they moved through and the characters they came upon
gave them some sort of landscape, definition, but just standing
there on their own, it could be considered like a piece of marble
with a dress on.
37

Weber developed a major project around these blank “formalistic vessels,”
creating a unique Spirit Girls aesthetic—the girls wear long prairie dresses,
masks, and wigs, and in some instances are even portrayed by men for certain
shows disguised in the same costumes as the women and Weber herself.
Because the characters’ images are not anchored by time or gender, the
identities of the Spirit Girls can only be reconciled based on Weber’s audiences’

37
Marnie Weber, Interview with the Artist, December 15, 2011.

33
own referents, resulting in a mutability that defies Hollywood clichés of the female
form.
The notion of a punk girl band that died and has been resurrected is
indicative of Weber’s brand of feminism, in which the feminine body is rendered
secondary to the spirit. However, just as Asco repeatedly rejected the Chicano-
cum-mural-artist expectation for art-world acceptance, Weber used and then
rejected the corporeal female form as an art form in itself as so often perpetrated
by mainstream Hollywood film. Weber rather invited audiences into her
narratives, and by doing so forced participants to confront notions of femininity
and gender identity. The Spirit Girls are “girls” in name only, all shapes and sizes
and both genders being represented beneath formless dresses and
expressionless masks. The “Spirit” dominates the “Girl.”
The feminist story of the Spirit Girls has been partly told through five films:
Songs that Never Die (2005), A Western Song (2007), The Campfire Song
(2009), The Sea of Silence (2009), and finally Eternal Heart (2010), in which the
Spirit Girls return to the spirit ether and end the project. On November 11, 2010,
Weber hosted Eternity Forever, a large-scale show that combined a live
performance of the Spirit Girls with a viewing of Eternal Heart and a retrospective
of photographic prints and video. Curated at the Mountain View Cemetery in
Altadena, the fall season perfectly underscored the show, fall signifying death:
the death of seasonal vegetation and the death of the Spirit Girls Cycle.
The Eternity Forever exhibition situated itself outside the white cube

34
gallery even more than Weber’s films, positioning itself instead in the actual
Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum. Weber made the gravesite the
gallery, turning the mausoleum’s interior into a realm in which the real space of
death was blended with the art production of Eternity Forever. Weber illustrated
her own fascination with Hollywood fictions, stating:
I am forever inspired by the state of fantasy and fiction this town
constantly lives in. Supplies, costumes, makeup, props; everything
is available year-round. The Mountain View Cemetery is used both
as a movie set and a place of interment on most days. Sometimes
you don’t know if you are seeing a real funeral or one created for a
movie. I love it when reality is flipped over and turned into a surreal
situation. The fact that the owners of Mountain View were open to
having the performance, which was basically the equivalent of a
rock concert, in their mausoleum along with fake grave diggers and
monsters in their cemetery speaks a lot for the people in this town.
Los Angeles tends to be a very open minded place. Everywhere
you go fantasy is intertwined with reality to the point where they are
one and the same.
38

Eternity Forever depended upon the identification of a specific place as much as
the availability of space. The attitudes prevalent in Hollywood brought this work
to life as much as the artist herself; Hollywood was not merely an important
backdrop for this work, it was the only possible location for this project’s
realization.
Eternity Forever was so convincingly located in the Mountain View
Cemetery that it was rendered nearly indivisible from the cemetery grounds. Akin
to a Renaissance church, the ceiling of the mausoleum is decorated with
paintings, elaborately wrought chandeliers, and marble crypts. Visitors to the

38
Ibid.

35
exhibition would proceed through this entry, and up a massive staircase that
meanders around the second story to finally reach the gallery—a brightly lit,
carpeted rectangle of white walls. Urns of all sizes sat behind glass vitrines and
eerie fluorescents flickered. Produced by West of Rome Public Art
39
(a nonprofit
organization founded by Emi Fontana and invested in supporting artists’ projects
in Los Angeles), Eternity Forever’s exhibition in the cemetery and mausoleum
bolstered the narrative of the Spirit Girls returning to the ether, ending their days
as Weber’s muses and their hovering within the physical world. Fontana and
Weber were able to gain access to the mausoleum art gallery, a large hall that
had been boarded up and relegated to its own death of disuse, which, when
opened, revealed a neglected room frozen in time. This accidental find gave
Weber the idea to hang her Eternity Forever collages unframed. The last series
of images devoted to the Spirit Girls, these works surrounded a modest television
set showing a loop of The Eternal Heart.
Cemeteries are marginalized spaces, taking up hundreds of acres for the
very limited functions of memorializing the dead and providing the living with a
place to pay tribute to their loved ones. Hollywood movies have used cemeteries
as backdrops for slasher movies, zombies, vampires, psychopaths, evil homicidal
monsters, and the like. Weber turned this trope on its head, populating the

39
West of Rome, http://www.westofrome.org/about, (accessed October 23,
2011).

36
cemetery with benevolent creatures and making it the literal final resting place of
the Spirit Girls. Where else would a ghost band play their final show?
As soon as visitors arrived at the cemetery they were greeted by a troupe
of Weber’s creatures—anthropomorphized animals, monsters, crones with
craggy noses—leading a fictionalized tour of the grave sites. This initial
interaction was the first indication that this somber space was being transformed
into a festive one, as if the participants were children in a Hans Christian
Anderson fairy tale entering an enchanted forest. The cast of un-Disney
creatures then lined the path to the mausoleum, awaiting the arrival of their
creator. Weber, accompanied by the Spirit Girls, coasted up in a silver classic
Cadillac convertible, part beauty queens in a parade, part seminal girl-band of
the 1970s. Weber was not masked—unusually for her performances, and an
indication of her emancipation from this narrative.
The Spirit Girls led the participants into the mausoleum where Eternal
Heart, the final of five films, was projected above the viewers’ heads while the
Spirit Girls played the accompaniment. Allowing the narrative to come to a close,
viewers could pay final respects in a mausoleum to a group of ghost girls that
never truly existed. This raised a question: can the fictional Spirit Girls actually
be laid to rest? The centerpiece of the show was The Eternal Heart, a twenty-
eight minute silent film with music composed by Weber. The film introduced a
new character, played by Weber. There was a parallel between the movie and
the live performance—Weber’s character’s departure from her home and the

37
Spirit Girls’ departure from this plane of existence. Weber’s appearance in the
film as herself signified the release of Spirit Girls. The simple plot of the film
centers on the heroine, Sweet Peaches, who makes futile attempts to please her
disapproving and taciturn Poppa. Beginning in black and white, the sad girl
consoles her lonely self by conjuring up friends in the form of fantastical hybrid
creatures, costumed monsters, and demons. Switching to color, the film ends
with the heroine leading a procession of creatures across the land into an
overexposed bright white that envelops the marchers into eternity. Traditionally
eternity is a euphemism for death, but Weber uses eternity as a construct in
which her creatures and the Spirit Girls exist outside of beginnings and endings.
The Spirit Girls may have been laid to rest, but their stories become part of
cultural mythology, enmeshed in the foothills of Altadena.
The elements of the performance were a jumble of anachronistic
elements, challenging viewers’ perception of time. First, the film Eternal Heart is
soundless, interspersed with dialogue cards, like a classic silent movie. The Spirit
Girls played the live musical accompaniment, recalling the role of the piano
player at a silent movie showing. The Spirit Girls themselves were costumed in
their customary prairie dresses, which can be dated back to the 1800s. Finally,
the mausoleum itself is an amalgam of Gothic architecture, Renaissance
tableaux, and modern features—made all the more contemporary by the
projection of a movie and the performance of a punk rock band. After the film,

38
the Spirit Girls played their last gig and presumably returned to the ether, their
dream of “making it” as a band finally realized.
After the live performance, a pagan processional of characters then led
the visitors to the second floor of the mausoleum to view Weber’s collages,
seventeen of them simply pinned to the walls of the space. The show was in
stark contrast in every way to the spectacle that preceded it. First, the room
could not have been plainer. It contained fluorescent lighting, white walls, green
commercial carpeting, and large urns filled with fake flowers—elements
reminiscent of an office lobby or a hospital waiting room. It evoked awkwardness,
displacement, and distance, confirming that the dream was now over. The
photographs injected into this awkward space evidenced Weber’s punk rock
aesthetic, by using a commercial space as a gallery as opposed to a sanctioned
art space, and forcing the viewer to rectify the incongruity of these elements.
(There was also a small TV—pointedly undersized for viewing Eternal Heart, and
with a chair set too far away from it to properly see the film.)
Mismatched antique wooden chairs placed at random intervals against the
walls, oddly positioned not for sitting or viewing the artwork, added to the feeling
of displacement in this final room. While the chairs beckoned viewers to sit, they
were in fact situated too far away for “successful viewing” of any of the collages.
They therefore became engaged as installation objects—a part of the show,
rather than the gallery. The empty chairs, the urns of plastic flowers, the baby
grand piano draped in black cloth, the ceramic busts in the corners all contributed

39
to Weber’s manipulation of time, embedding the fictional Spirit Girls narrative into
real space. The objects in the room—the pieces of the installation—themselves
referenced the installation’s chosen site, a mausoleum.
Weber’s use of the mausoleum forced the collages to serve as docu-
mentation of an imagined world rather than simply fetish objects in a commercial
gallery. The main subject of the collages was the Spirit Girls, and the display
served as a retrospective of their existence. The photographs were taken in a
cemetery in Valencia, California, with gothic headstones, towering pine trees,
and puffy clouds in the distance. This backdrop does not look like Southern
California—there are no palm trees or strip malls, no traffic, no smog. In one
photograph there is even snow. The collages are photographs, some of them
computer altered and then layered with other images. All of them are taken in
daylight, again a stark contrast to the nighttime performance. The daylight makes
one think the Spirit Girls and friends are merry residents of the cemetery, the
gravestones and monuments their playground. The collages served in the
exhibition like family portraits; the mausoleum their subjects’ “home,” where one
could look out the window and see them frolicking in their “yard.”
One collage shows a Spirit Girl hugging a tombstone, her head and limbs
layered at odd angles on top of the photo. On the tombstone hangs a poster of
the Spirit Girls, like a band poster for an upcoming show. Another photograph is
of a woman in a long white dress holding a bouquet of flowers—a bride perhaps.
It is winter. The sky is stark blue, the trees in the distance are leafless, and there

40
are patches of snow on the dead grass. To the bride’s left is a line of fantastical
animals and monsters. One might think they are a receiving line in the wedding
party; however, there is no groom. This wedding is about Sweet Pea leaving her
repressive and lonely home. The procession of the bride leading her monsters
and demons represents the emancipation awaiting them on the ethereal plane.
They stare into the lens, whereas the bride looks just left of center, a dreamy
gaze on her sad face, her wedding representing the death of her oppression. As
with the prairie outfits, Weber draws from the feminism of late eighteenth-century
women writers like Kate Chopin and Emily Dickinson, who likened marriage to
death. The cemetery backdrop completes the image of a bride on a mock
wedding day with the specter of death hanging over her. Weber also explicitly
draws, however, from Hollywood images in which women—in advertisements
and billboards and on celluloid itself—look away from the camera, submitting to
the (male) gaze of the audience. The bride is able to subvert this gaze and its
objectification, as well as the subjugation promised by marriage, through death.
In another collage, a photo is crowded with growth, vegetation burgeoning
to escape the frame. Tall grasses crowd the headstones beneath the shadow of
an expansive tree. Layered over this photo are scores of butterflies and moths,
blending into the flora and adding to the sense of overcrowding by taking up
every inch of free space. A squirrel climbs on a rock. An oversized bird perches
on a headstone. Weber then frames some of the headstones with the faces and
arms of the Spirit Girls, as if they are standing behind the granite. Half of them

41
have their arms wrapped around the stones in an awkward embrace. The other
three have forced their arms through the granite, reminding us that they are
ghosts. There is no room to breathe in this collage. Unlike the others, there is no
sky in this image; the colors are ochres. The headstones look like they are
marching toward us, like a solid, unstoppable parade.
In an interview on Eternity Forever with Tanja M. Laden, Weber clarifies
what is so significant about the Hollywood/Los Angeles confluence that allows
her practice to be as potent and flexible as she can make it:
I know there's been a lot that's been said about the light and
weather," she says. "For me, it's more about the freedom. There is
something spontaneous about being able to go into a costume
shop and walk out with, say, a pair of bunny ears, a fake meat
cleaver, plastic trailer-park teeth, red fishnet tights, and a blond
pigtailed wig which creates a juxtaposition that otherwise wouldn't
exist. It immediately sets up a narrative that wouldn't spontaneously
occur if I were working in Santa Fe buying things on the Internet.
40

Interested in the immediacy of creative possibilities, Weber crafted Eternity
Forever inside her Altadena studio, just blocks from the Mountain View
Cemetery. With the support of friend and curator Emi Fontana, Weber ventured
to make the site of the Spirit Girls’s ethereal world accessible to a real Los
Angeles public, extending the filmic plane out into the tangible California
landscape. In her article about the Mountain View show, Laden writes:
As much a product of California art as one of its creators, Weber
continues to draw inspiration from the region's lifestyle, imagination,

40
Tanja M. Laden, “Marnie Weber’s Eternity Forever,” Huffington Post, October
25, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tanja-m-laden/marnie-
weber_b_770973.html (accessed November 13, 2011).

42
and sense of limitless possibility. "I think Los Angeles has a lot to
do with the freedom to step aside and let the subconscious do its
work," she says. "The real world doesn't quite exist so strongly
here; there is this sense that you never have to grow up and join
the real world.
41

Weber herself highlights the role narrative plays in the LA landscape. The
narrative she creates draws attention to both a local fascination with cemeteries
as centers for both remembering (as people visit Hollywood Forever and the
various Forest Lawn locations as tourists attractions) and forgetting (as local
memory moves from one media construct to another seamlessly). In this sense,
Los Angeles memory and constructed narratives are ethereal like the Spirit Girls
themselves. This shifting of geographic memory allows for marginalization, and
fostered a resistance in Weber toward surrendering to the demand of
consistency from one performance to the next.
The Spirit Girls performed live as a band, sometimes swelling up to seven
members, even though we still understand that they are the real version of the
five Spirit Girls of the films and collages. Sometimes, a Spirit Girl was played by a
man; yet again, our understanding of the character is that it is still, in fact, a
female, one of the five girls who died before her time, come back as a spirit to
play her music. Weber mobilizes the occult in her representation of the Spirit
Girls as ghosts, in her use of animals as personified beings, and especially in her
deoiction of monsters as empathetic creatures. As such, all aspects of Weber’s
work connected to the films—the sculptures, the collages, the music, the actual

41
Ibid.

43
performances, and so on—should be acknowledged as extensions of the filmic
experience, thus blurring the delineations of reality and fiction for the participating
viewer. Angelinos willingly participate in such fictions in part because this
blurring is normal in Los Angeles. Like Asco’s practice, particularly their No
Movies, Weber’s holistic project exemplifies Gene Youngblood’s groundbreaking
argument in which he first put forth the definition of expanded cinema. According
to Youngblood, “The effect of synaesthetic cinema is to break the hold that the
medium has over us, to make us perceive it objectively. Art is utter folly unless it
frees us from the need of art as an experience separate from the ordinary.”
42

While it is rather ordinary to experience art in a gallery space, it is quite
extraordinary to experience it in a cemetery, where viewers are forced to become
participants in an aesthetic narrative. In this way, Weber’s work embodies the
concept of expanded cinema while simultaneously addressing the position of
women in Hollywood film, the position of Hollywood in the American psyche, and
the emancipatory potential of the ethereal plane.

42
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.,
1970), 90.

44
Chapter 4: Conclusion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most
obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so
radically that he remakes it in his own image.
43

Joan Didion
What is one’s image if one’s identity is a phantom? Asco and Marnie
Weber strove to answer this question, oscillating between the realms of
hypervisibility and invisibility and the importation of phantoms to the physical
realm. If one makes the phantom quotidian, thereby demystifying the “other,”
then there is a recalibration of the marginal as fertile ground. It was no small task
for Asco and Weber to wrench Los Angeles from itself. The artistic fissures they
created simultaneously reidentified and reflected the Los Angeles cinematic
landscape, articulating local geography as a personal backdrop for their work.
Employing the surroundings of their neighborhoods, Asco and Weber made work
that recontoured Los Angeles as a phantom playground. Asco and Weber used
marginality as a means of reconfiguring identity, and thereby treated identity as a
mutable and charged entity. Looking at Asshole Mural and Eternity Forever
forces a reconsideration of marginality as only connoting a negative otherness,
and instead asks us to understand marginal space as a site where truth and
fiction, fantasy and reality, collide, and therefore as a potent and flexible space
for avant-garde art practices.

43
Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

45
In 2006, the Parisian contemporary art museum Centre Pompidou
launched the show Los Angeles 1955–1985: The Birth of an Art Capital,
44
curated
by Catherine Grenier. Though a greatly positive gesture by an international
institution, Los Angeles had to acknowledge the latency of its self-historicization.
This issue became the catalyst for Pacific Standard Time, the Getty Foundation’s
own initiative to exhibit the importance of LA art from 1940–1980 within the
broader narrative of post-WWII art history. Partly through funding made available
by this initiative, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) was able to
put on the already-in-the-works retrospective Asco: Elite of The Obscure, co-
curated by Asco scholars C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez. It bears noting
that Asco: Elite of The Obscure exhibited twenty-four years after the group
disbanded, a significant gap of time that reaffirms the degree to which
institutional marginalization has been synonymous with Asco.
45
Asco’s
egalitarian approach to all media made them both extraordinary and
simultaneously difficult to institutionally categorize. Weber’s work similarly defies
easy categorization. Her assignation of equal weight to her various works and
her knowledge of how this approach continues to be marginalized by institutional

44
Catherine Grenier, Howard N. Fox, and David E. James, Los Angeles, 1955-
1985: Birth of an Art Capital (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006).
45
Though not the subject of this thesis, the concurrent timing of this long overdue
exhibition and the writing of this paper begs the question of whether or not a
retrospective means the end of marginalization forevermore in critical texts.

46
protocols incited her to curate her own retrospective of the Spirit Girls Cycle in
Eternity Forever.
If art is a response to mortality, Asco and Weber defied death by remaking
the image of Los Angeles. Both artists’ works exemplify an embracing of death,
of the phantom, which serves to defy death and provide a reinterpretation of what
death can look like. With Asco, invisibility equaled death, not only on a personal
or artistic level, but on a community level that compelled them to create works
about the peril of Chicano cultural extinction. The result was active, performative
work; living, breathing bodies engaged in kinetic performances that reinvented
the perception of what it meant to be Chicano. Asco melded the muralistic with
the cinematic, bringing the excluded to presence and preservation in still images.
Weber similarly refused to accept finality by resurrecting dead bodies–
transforming them from the static to the electric, the forgotten to the celebrated.
In both artists’ works, phantoms both literal and metaphorical are defibrulated,
given a second life, an endless life, eternity forever.

47

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis focuses on two Los Angeles artworks—Asshole Mural (1975) by Asco and Eternity Forever (2010) by Marnie Weber—that encourage a revaluation of the traditional conception of marginality as a negative quality or location. Asco and Weber both play with the genre boundaries of cinema by weaving expansive narratives that go beyond the physical plane of the screen into performance, sculptural production, music, and formal constructions that serve as both props and historical evidence of their works. In Asshole Mural, Asco creates a work that pushes against the stereotyping of Chicano artists as mural makers. Weber’s Eternity Forever (the final act of her Spirit Girls Cycle) challenges viewers to reconcile an anachronistic narrative about a fictional ghost band from the 1970s with contemporary art strategies of installation, multimedia, and gender performance. Both Asshole Mural and Eternity Forever refuse the typical understanding of marginality as undesirable in the context of contemporary art, and instead revel in marginality as a generative and flexible site for avant-garde artistic practice.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Milch, Ilana Daphne (author)

Core Title Dead girls, monsters, and assholes: marginality in the practices of Asco and Marnie Weber in Los Angeles

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 07/31/2012

Defense Date 08/30/2012

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

Tag Asco,Asshole mural,cinema,Eternal heart,Eternity forever,Fiction,Gronk,Harry Gamboa Jr,Los Angeles,marginality,Marnie Weber,Murals,No movies,OAI-PMH Harvest,Patssi Valdez,performance,Sculpture,The spirit girls,Willie Herron III

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Higa, Karin (committee chair), Bray, Anne (committee member), Gonzalez, Rita (committee member)

Creator Email ilanamilch@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-78213

Unique identifier UC11290113

Identifier usctheses-c3-78213 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MilchIlana-1075.pdf

Dmrecord 78213

Document Type Thesis

Rights Milch, Ilana Daphne

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