HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW WORK by Shepard Fairey? You know, he’s the cat what did the famous and iconic Obama HOPE poster. I guess the high of being Everyone’s Favorite Poster Guy has worn off and someone’s looking for another hit!
I don’t mean to knock Señor Shepard unduly. So let me dust the powder off my wig and proceed to tell you coolly what bothers me personally about this image. I’ll start with what I like.

Striking color palette. Smart to avoid bright whites and go with vanilla/creme/offwhite background. Interesting choice of turquoise. I like that. Nice lines and style. Warmth in the eyes and in the tones of the “immigrant girl.” Strong central image, rays accentuate positive energy. I consider it a tip of the sombrero that Fairey’s hat text copies the choice of font I used here.

What don’t I like?

Trying too hard to be “ICONIC.” Fitting too many elements. Flowers, T shirt, Hat text, Fist…too crowded. And in all of that, no family. It is tradition in México/Latin America as well as in so many immigrant families to be centered around the family. That is so much of what the fight is about here. And she is all alone. And happy to be alone!?

Put the fist up. Look at this humble person. She won’t even meet your eyes. Put the fist up. It feels awkward to have her with a fist halfway raised, turned toward her own body, and looking off camera. This seems to me someone trying to tame the scary image of Latin American protest traditions and make it palatable to the masses of US political junkies, with whom S. Fairey is trying to score points.

Finally, the part that really bothers me. We Are Human?? Really? I don’t know. As I said on a list ayer, I know that immigrants are in the fight for Human Rights…but I didn’t think the “human” part was really in doubt!

What I also said on that list—and you may sniff this leaking through my comments that point toward a chasm in cultural connection—is that the Latin@ comunidad has a very rich and powerful history of political art, not only protest. So I look forward to seeing what gente create. Someone on this “brown” list I’m on said “I hope this becomes the icon for immigration reform!” I am sure that Shepard Fairey hopes this as well. I do not.

To me, this image is what happens when an outsider-looking-in accidentally projects their own alien view on an Other, even meaning well.

The bottom line is that the Whiteness Problem presents in various ways, even when attempting beneficence. And co-opting another culture and speaking for them is a common. I am not here to tell Mister Fairey he cannot express himself. There is always room for more art and nobody’s going to stop Fairey, anyway. He is a very well known artist and involved in a number of good causes. He has even defended himself in the past against somewhat similar criticisms:

It’s not like I’m just jumping on some cool rebel cause for the sake of exploiting it for profit. People like to talk shit, but it’s usually to justify their own apathy. I don’t want to demean anyone’s struggles through casual appropriation of something powerful; that’s not my intention.”

Intention…I seem to recall a few discussions online centered around this concept.

Personally, I think the intention was simply cash and fame, or more of it. But maybe I’m being too…sensitive.

IT’S NOT DIFFICULT TO FIND A MOVIE that portrays the indigenous of this land as heartless brutal savages. Be they Apache or Mayan, be it by a John Wayne movie or a Mel Gibson flick. Even a long-honored children’s game (Cowboys and Indians) continues to celebrate that same genocidal conflict. Words we use: “settlers,” “pilgrim” and “pioneer” to begin with, completely mask the truth of history—as do “Thanksgiving” and “Columbus Day.” We can look to our current law and even our modern day dialogues and find out which people are to be called “looters” and which ones we shall describe as “liberators” and there will be no doubt as to who is tagged a “gang” when they gather vs a “group.”Going back to those movies we began with, I don’t know about you…but I know growing up how the movies painted Mexicanos and Chicanos and Latinas and México and all of Latin America, as well.  And how the media very often still does.

Doing all these things is legal, usually acceptable, and in some cases, revered.

Which is why the indigenous as well as today’s Latino/a comunidad have the traditions of telling stories and histories in song as well as with art, and with no mind to what the dominant culture is singing to itself. Not that we don’t have to take care. After all, a little pride is allowed in the dominant culture. But too much solidarity or collective voice and men in body armor begin shooting rubber bullets into crowds and dropping canisters of mace on kids. That is legal, too.

What is “ILLEGAL”? (You know…aside from people migrating to areas that can economically sustain them)

Emigdio Vasquez is about as mainstream an artist as you’ll find in Orange County. His murals documenting county and Chicano history span walls at Santa Ana College and Anaheim City Hall, restaurants and liquor stores. Individual works hang in the living rooms of United States ambassadors and among the collections of universities, museums and millionaires. Vasquez—who grew up in Orange’s historic Cypress Street barrio—has been discussed in multiple art history books for, as one critic calls it, his “hard-edged, unblinking textures and an unerring eye for the seemingly commonplace detail.”

So imagine the 69-year-old’s surprise when a nephew called him with the news that the Orange Police Department was claiming his work promotes, glamorizes and inspires gang violence.
—LAW-ENFORCEMENT CLAIMS HISTORIC CHICANO MURAL IN ORANGE SENSATIONALIZES GANGS-30 YEARS LATER

Now, this is 30 full years after these murals were painted. Murals of Chicano pride and storytelling.

Orange Police Detective Joel Nigro asserted in an expert declaration included in the injunction that Vasquez glamorized his home barrio’s gang.

“Vasquez is a muralist who grew up in the Cypress Street neighborhood and portrays rebellion against a perceived oppressive government through art,” Nigro wrote. “Emigdio Vasquez has also painted several other murals reference [sic] the OVC gang and the gang lifestyle, including pieces such as ‘Vatos Locos,’ ‘Sunday Morning In OVC,’ ‘Vatos Locos de Barrio’ and ‘Cypress Street Pachucos.’”

But what truly set Nigro off was a mural titled “Tribute to the Chicano Working Class” painted on a Cypress Street duplex. It wraps around the building’s exterior with successive images of an Aztec pyramid and eagle warrior; Mexican laborers including boilermakers, miners (a tribute to Vasquez’s father), orange pickers and strawberry pickers; strikers waving a flag calling for “huelga” (strike), Cesar Chavez, a convenience store, and scenes of pachucos and homeboys in a Chevy Special Deluxe. A small vignette shows two teens next to a wooden fence that bears the image of Che Guevara.

Nigro claimed that gang members had claimed the mural as “their flag,” frequently posing for photos with the mural as a backdrop. He also criticized the inclusion of the strikers and Guevara, whom the detective wrote was “a politician, Marxist, revolutionary and guerrilla leader” whose image “became a ubiquitous symbol of rebellion worldwide.”

Aside from the entire load this is, we have that Sexy Queen’s English, again, eh? “A perceived oppressed government.” Really, I could end this whole post right there because that says it all! The law cites this “perception” as they make your art illegal. The irony is so thick you could wad it up on a paintbrush and drag it across ten criminal canvasses.

The art is not only illegal, but morphs into an actual crime when you place a body in proximity of that illegal art.

Easter Sunday. A kid from the Cypress neighborhood in Orange lounges just outside his apartment building where a huge, sprawling mural by influential Chicano artist Emigdio Vasquez is painted on the exterior walls. Bring in the sirens and the Orange PD. Minutes later, you have an arrest. The crime? The teen was standing in front of artwork that the Orange PD and DA’s office claim promotes, glamorizes and inspires gang violence.

Nice.

How does the artist feel about it?

“They never asked me shit,” Vasquez replies, when asked if [Detective Joel] Nigro ever called him to explain his art. “[Detective Nigro] is full of it that it promotes gang violence. The mural has never been a problem until now. I don’t know why now. Christ, I don’t know what to think.”

—LAW-ENFORCEMENT CLAIMS HISTORIC CHICANO MURAL IN ORANGE SENSATIONALIZES GANGS-30 YEARS LATER

I’ll not the one to tell you what to think, honored vato. But I thank you for your marking history and making your art, and giving love to la comunidad, and helping us remember what it cost for us to make it this far, and whom we owe thanks to, and what we must not forget.

I FIRST WATCHED KOYAANISQATSI when I was 19, it was the end of the 80s and I was meeting new artist/musician friends. This was before I went to film school, before I studied cinema, and before I was exposed to a bunch of art and culture I’ve been lucky enough to trip upon since then. But just coming to this film with an open mind was enough. It was deep, and I felt it, and it rang out within me for a long time.

From the imdb.com summary [my emphasis]:

This movie was designed to have no plot. Meaning is to be created by the viewer, and only the viewer can give value to the images and music. That said, there is a central idea behind the movie, and according to the director it is this:

The greatest event in the history of mankind has occurred recently, and has been largely missed by both the media and academia. Beyond the headlines and every day crises of international events, a deeper shift in human affairs has occurred: Humanity no longer exists in the natural world, we are no longer connected to it. It is not that we are now users of technology, but rather that we exist within technology, we are part of it and it is part of us. The natural world now exists only to support the artificial one in which we live.

—Adam on imdb.com

The way these fims use cinema is poetic, brilliant, and while it may at first test the average U.S. moviegoing mind (or be “slower” than one is used to absorbing and certainly less linear and less narrative than mainstream USA cinema) they really are worth gearing over to appreciate. They are profound—though not for the short attention span—and they tell a truth that commerce and capitalist societies like ours are not really allowed to teach because the message directly attacks commerce and the most voracious of capitalism’s benefactors. (Even the scientists, who are much more literal and authoritative than artists or filmmakers, were hushed from telling some of these truths in the past few years.)

Shot by Ron Fricke, scored by Philip Glass, and directed by Godfrey Reggio, this trilogy is essentially montages of music and imagery. They have no dialogue and so use form, sound, juxtaposition and music quite to tell a story and issue their warning. They are like…impressionist art that you can breathe in and hear making a sound as it wraps around your understanding. I mean that…if you haven’t peeped these yet, watch this clip as if you would take in a piece of abstract art. With patience and love. Wait for it to reveal itself to you, the light shimmering on the planes, the curvature of negative space, the clusters of color and tone, the human emotion given shape not by facial expression so much as the taut mounds of bodies, the slumped figure of a collapsed worker being hauled on someone’s back, the legs and legs and legs angling up, the mud-streaked muscles straining in a pack.

These films will speak to you in sometimes unexpected and deep ways. They just ask a little time and room.

This clip is introductory scene to Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation [Hopi: Way of living/life that consumes other life in order to advance its own], the second film in the trilogy that begins with Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance and ends with Naqoyqatsi.

UPDATE: Full film Koyaanisqatsi [gracias, smartypants].

And the trailer to Koyaanisqatsi:

AS HISTORY IN THE USA pointedly picks favorites and leaves some of us out of the books and movies and stories and truths (unless we are positioned as lessors, or alternately kick up hella ruckus), it is very important for raza to continue to tell our own stories through art, poetry, song, and performance. This is one of the reasons that arte is so integral to nuestra cultura. My own familia has been a part of this, and I do my best to carry it on today.

The art exhibit Chicana Art and Experience: Mujeres con Garbo that opens today in DC is a good example of what I mean. As a side note, I can personally speak for one of las mujeres whose art is being featured in this show, and she definitely is una mujer con garbo!

So if you’re in DC, stop in and check out the show, give up some support for la comunidad and the artists, and if you see Molina, tell her Nez said hola.

If you’re in Washington, D.C., in the next four months, make sure to stop by the AFL-CIO to view a dynamic and rich art exhibit by Chicana artists. The exhibition includes more than 30 prints, paintings, posters and photographs by women who reflect on the experiences and struggles of Mexican Americans.

In the late 1960s, inspired by the civil rights and labor movements, Mexican Americans coined the name Chicano/Chicana to describe an individual’s self-identification with a rich, complex fusion ancestry and culture. The name expresses pride in the culture of the indigenous, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo people of Mexico and denotes support for struggles against discrimination, brutality and poverty.

The Chicano/Chicana movement spawned a dynamic and creative arts community that includes many of the most prominent artists in the nation. Some of their work will be on display at the AFL-CIO in Chicana Art and Experience: Mujeres con Garbo (Women with Attitude).

This exhibit focuses on the struggles of working Chicanas—organizing, immigration, women’s rights, health care, workplace safety, housing, community and cultural identity. The title of the show comes from Juana Alicia’s poster, “Mujeres con Garbo/Women with Attitude,” shown above. Click here to see more of the exhibit.

The artists represented include Barbara Carrasco, Ester Hernández, Cecilia Concepción Alvarez, Laura Álvarez, Favianna Rodriguez, Yreina Cervántez, Juana Alicia, Irene Simmons, Delilah Montoya, Laura Molina, Tina Hernández, Yolanda López, Carmen Lomas Garza and Kathy Vargas.

The exhibit will run from Nov. 19, 2008, to May 31, 2009. The exhibit was organized by artist, independent curator, writer and educator Rex Weil.

—Chicana Art Exhibit Opens Today at AFL-CIO