On being non-white and an artist

It's a lazy Friday here at Sound Taste. Well, not lazy exactly, but relaxed and reflective, so I wanted to catch up with a couple of thoughts rattling around my head.

A couple of weeks ago, Daniel Hernandez wrote a story for the L.A. Weekly on ASCO, a contentious and mischievous avant garde Chicano art collective. There were lots of comments to his blog entry about the piece.

Beefs of readers and interview subjects aside (some more deserved than others), Daniel's article got me thinking about the bind of non-white artists. ASCO, from what I know about it, did some really fresh work that challenged Anglo hegemony in the art scene of a city that's 50% Latino. And yet, because it was irreverent and focused on the ephemeral, it was marginalized both by nationalist-with-a-capital N Chicanos, who had a clear (and sometimes stifling) aesthetic program that favored social realism, and by the white art establishment, who thought because they dealt with Chicano subject matter and expression did not rate as "real" art.

Our communities are so downtrodden (still) that we have a hard time letting our artists have a sense of humor, when we let them exist at all. There are lots of artists who, like ASCO, wanted to go another way, unsubscribe from any constrictive notion of identity, art or social justice. There's so little information, for example, on Latino artists of the late- or post-Nuyorican era in NY, even on the work of prankster Pedro Pietri. Outside of some circles, no one knows about Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornes, who was the mother of many NY vanguardistas. Where is the story of Carmelita Tropicana? Who are the predecessors to Dominican dancer-performera Josefina Baez?

I did a piece for WNYC (aired last week, but link wasn't posted till yesterday) on a show currently at the Queens Museum of Art, "Generation 1.5.". It's a great show, the artists in it range broadly and smartly on issues of memory, belonging, who gets to interpret whose culture, being critical from within and from without.

A few things I didn't get to say about the show in the short radio piece (which is where writing has an advantage): most of the artists in the show have individually made it into the mainstream, which is great, gets them out of the immigrant ghetto, but that doesn't mean that we should lose what's fed them, what they're reacting to. Which is what often happens when a brown artist "makes it" -- we see them in terms of how they've become intelligible to the art literate, not in terms of how the pain of migration or always-difference shapes their obsessions. The artists in this show modulate real well -- a special skill of the 1.5er. Their vocabulary, the way they handle materials and mode, moves easily between "here" and "there." It's not enough to have an image from your "home culture." It's about values you've picked up.

You can listen to my WNYC piece below.

[picture of Pedro Pietri via PRDream.com]