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Ephemerality in an Urban Desert:
An Interview with
Harry Gamboa Jr.
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Jennifer Flores Sternad
[For over thirty years, Harry Gamboa Jr. has been creating art that traverses and hybridizes media: conceptual video, photography, performance, installation, fotonovelas, radio drama, poetry, fiction, and essays. Gamboa, whose work is at once formally experimental and cuttingly political, is a critical figure in avant-garde art in the United States.
Gamboa was a co-founder of the conceptual performance group Asco (1972-1987). Asco, which was based in East L.A., fused activism and art performance. Its members used guerrilla tactics to expose and resist the exclusions that undergirded the urban experience in Los Angeles. Gamboa’s art career developed alongside his involvement with the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. From his observations of the media’s biased reporting Gamboa learned of the media’s power to project a version of reality. C. Ondine Chavoya, Ph.D, has remarked how this understanding deeply influenced the members of Asco whose mail art, media hoaxes and “No-movies” manipulated the mechanisms of representation—the same mechanisms by which young Chicano/as had been put under surveillance, stereotyped or erased from the public view. With their “No-Movies” the artists used the city as the set in which they staged conceptual performances designed for Gamboa’s still camera. They then distributed single images of the performances as if they were stills from actual films. By mimicking the representational codes of cinema, the artists of Asco created the affect of film without creating the film itself. Gamboa writes, “We realized that martyrs, miracles and massacres could be created with images, icons, little money and very few resources.”
This conversation took place on October 27, 2003 in Los Angeles. It is part of an ongoing research project on Chicano/a art and avant-gardism. Gamboa’s has been a critical voice in the history of Chicano/a art. As Chon Noriega, Ph.D., has noted, Gamboa’s work documents Chicano experience while challenging ethnographic romanticism, the stereotypes of mass media and the essentialism of Chicano identity politics. In this interview Gamboa discusses how the calculated ephemerality of his work mimics personal memory and toys with the academic penchant for obsessional documentation. He explains how the publication and dissemination of works has changed his relationship to writing and how it has changed the works themselves. Gamboa describes how first-hand experience with violence has affected his work, and developed his conception of language as a potential weapon. He considers the increasing levels of surveillance within the United States, and how it will affect artists’ willingness to wield this weapon.
As he describes in the interview, Gamboa is influenced by the theatricality of the everyday. For him the urban theater of Los Angeles is marked by extreme and random violence, which becomes absurdist and sometimes surreal in Gamboa’s stylizations. Although often disorienting and humorous, Gamboa’s work also provides nuanced readings of those stories, people, and even postures of aggression and vulnerability that most often go unnoticed. In conversation, he discusses how this skill relates to his own experiences living in L.A.
Gamboa was the editor of Regeneración and co-founder of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. His work has been shown in celebrated international fora,including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Smithsonian Institution. Among his works are more than thirty videos and numerous conceptual dramas for radio and theater. Gamboa’s video project L.A. Familia II is currently in production and is sponsored in part by a 2004 Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship. Gamboa is featured in the newly completed documentary Los Angeles Now, directed by Phillip Rodriguez. Many of his performance texts, photography, fiction, essays and poetry are collected in Urban Exile and his more recent work, including fotonovelas, videos, and exhibition announcements can be found on his website: http://www.harrygamboajr.com. Gamboa lives in L.A. and teaches at California State University, Northridge.
Thanks to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center for institutional support. – Jennifer Flores Sternad.]
Jennifer Flores Sternad:
In Urban Exile many of your performance texts are published alongside your fiction and essays. They are so compelling as written works that it’s easy to forget that they may have been written to be performed, not necessarily read in a book. A performance cannot be reproduced or circulated as a text can, and the ephemeral nature of performance affects the way its meaning is created. Could you talk about the difference between your work that was written to be seen by an intimate audience and/or performed once, and work that is published?
Harry Gamboa Jr.:
I think one of the things about works that are designed to be presented only once, performed and possibly never read, is that all the mechanisms of spoken language and action take precedence over the work. Also, short-term memory plays a role in the audience. So the mechanics of persuasion and many things that one can do with a live audience are not the same on the page as in performance. With an audience I can leave them the script, as it were, to retrace and realize the techniques with which I have attempted to hypnotize people.
Since I’ve begun my website, many of the works that I have created since the publication of the book have just immediately ended up online. So, it has gone from being an ephemeral kind of work to a quasi-ephemeral kind of work on the internet. But you can print it, so it can become tangible. But if you don’t bother to print it, it can be removed or erased just as easily, which I’ve done, over and over again. For instance, the website I have right now with all the work I’ve put into it could just as easily disappear tomorrow if I decide to do it. Oftentimes I’ll put something up, people look at it and really want to refer to it, and then it’s gone and there is no way to access it. That, for me, is also part of my approach to myth-building: to introduce things into the universe, into the lexicon, and then remove them and see if there is any ripple effect. Some things, for example, can be referred to in print, and yet the source material is now gone. So, it’s playing a little bit with memory, but also with the whole mechanism of academia, which is so inclined to document and footnote. But what happens when it is only the footnote that exists?
I’ve known Chon Noriega since 1991. Over time I have given him copies of works I’ve written just because I thought he’d like them. I wasn’t thinking about permanence. I went through a period where I pretty much destroyed all my materials. I tore papers up, threw negatives away, erased videotapes…. I really wanted to streamline what I was going to leave behind, and wanted to basically erase my trail. In the meantime it seemed like Chon had become more interested in the work. I went to his house and he had assembled my book. He had located things I hadn’t seen in twenty years, things I didn’t want to see, things that were never designed to be shared, materials I had destroyed and had hoped would never be seen. But all throughout this period I had developed a trust in his judgment, because I respect his approach. I said, “Chon I really don’t want to even see it until the day before it’s going to go to print. Then we’ll cross the Ts, because if I see it now I’m going to tear up half the pages.” So, I read Urban Exile from beginning to end and then I stopped writing for about two years. Many of the pieces that are in the book were really designed for publication with a circulation of fifty or an audience of ten. And here and there in the book are pieces that were never meant to be heard two times in a row. So, some of the lines that I have are repeated over and over again because I thought these were lines that I wouldn’t share initially with other people. Then to go through the book and see so much repetition in my work made me reconsider my approach to writing in the sense that I suddenly was in a situation where if I did write something there was the possibility that it could be juxtaposed with another piece I could write in the future. So I have to think of the work in the context of future works that don’t exist.
JS:
The language of your work is dense, and the printed work invites re-reading. It therefore lives in a very specific temporality. How different is that from the temporality of the performed work?
HG:
The effect is like here in L.A. when you’re driving through traffic. Do you ever drive with your windows down a little bit? It’s like when you’re driving through traffic and you’re at a red light and you get hit with this blast of rap music and then it drives away. Yet you were somehow or other affected by that, and the next thing you know you’ll say something absolutely outrageous that you got from the rap song and you don’t even know how it got there.
JS:
With avant-gardist or political work there is the risk that in its circulation it may be defanged. Because it can be bought and sold like any other commodity or because, within academia perhaps, it can be re-circulated as a discursive commodity. Is the way you embrace ephemerality a way of resisting that?
HG:
It’s a commentary on the way that I look at the whole system. I might as well play along and play with it at the same time. I’m both resisting and playing the game. When I was young here in Los Angeles, I would rent cars sometimes and get on the freeway and step on the gas and step on the brake at the same time to see what would happen. I think that’s really how I approach life, because it tends to generate unexpected responses, chaos, and it has a tendency and a possibility to break the machine.
One of the things I have always been interested in is establishing decoy art and decoy ideas that are designed to send people off on a wild goose chase. On some level that’s also kind of performative. I can then incorporate the reader, the viewer, into performing an act that otherwise would have not taken place but is sort of bouncing off of an element in a script that affects their lives.
JS:
Can you give me an example of a decoy?
HG:
You can go all the way back to the word ‘No-movie,’ or even the name ‘Asco’ where it’s a joke and not really meant to be taken seriously and before you know it, it’s art history. Depending on the kind of feedback you get from the other artists in the group, they might be laughing still at this whole notion that people took it seriously.
JS:
In interviews and in your own writing you often address how violence has been a part of your life, including how it has affected your aesthetic sensibilities. Could you talk about that element of your work?
HG:
I guess my understanding of violence has just changed slightly. For instance, I don’t think art in any way could really comment on the current state of violence in this world. The amount of official extrajudicial torture, extrajudicial disappearances, the massacres that have taken place, the genocide taking place around the world, the suicide bombing, the militarism, the fascism that’s around this planet—for artists to really make a comment on violence is a luxury. My understanding of violence has been from first hand experience here in an urban setting. I believe I have the same level of awareness of violence as someone who has been in a war because, to a great extent, in L.A. County there are numerous ongoing wars of different types. One is gang war; there are class wars, environmental wars, social wars, psychological wars. The way that I travel around this city I have actually witnessed numerous fatalities. I have witnessed people going from being alive to being dead. I’ve seen the process of people going from sane to insane; the process of people being fairly well-off to being destitute; people knowing exactly their place to being completely lost. On one level that has tended to fuel my work. But a lot of my work tries to retrace the missteps of these victims and tries to offer a map by which to avoid these multivariate landmines. And if you are totally tuned in to an urban landscape, as we are, you might actually be able to make it to as old as I am. If not, there’s a good chance you might get hit one day. Or step on the wrong twig that’s going to send you someplace else.
JS:
Do you think the formal qualities of your work effect a certain type of violence in themselves? I don’t know if ‘violent’ is the right word, but your work, especially your use of language, can be very jarring or disorienting.
HG:
Language can be used as a weapon. There are a lot of different types of weapons. With some you just want to stun them and some you want to kill them and some you want to just destroy. I have always thought of language this way: as a means to defend and offend others. It’s something I’ve always used it for, and using language as a means to persuade. If I weren’t the one speaking out I’m not sure I would exist. Seriously. Physically or artistically or socially. Definitely socially—I wouldn’t exist or persist in the realm that I do without my occasionally doing something that involves language. For instance, there was a three to five year period when I spoke at all the major museums in Los Angeles. The museums were having some kind of survey show about Los Angeles in one way or another in which they totally excluded Chicanos in the work that was being exhibited. And as an afterthought decided to incorporate a Chicano in the dialogue about the process of creating art, in which I was called at the last minute. But each and every single time I was basically the only Chicano present in the situation, and I then had a major confrontation with five hundred people at a time. Several times I was chased in the parking lot and verbally assaulted ‘til I was out of their reach. People screaming out, “Gamboa you’ll never have a work purchased in L.A.!” “Gamboa you’re not like such and such artist, he would never say such a thing!” It was me basically inserting a certain idea and certain terms that confronted where they were coming from. It was for me great fun because I think I’m capable of fighting with five thousand people at a time. But after going through that experience I am firmly convinced that I will never ever do that again. I will never speak in front of a museum again.
JF:
What bothers you particularly about museums?
HG:
Museums are basically display cases for the wealthy and for a particular audience. The museums here in L.A. are particularly anti-Chicano and so are their audiences. And I’m not about to waste another breath on them.
The way that capitalism causes cultural amnesia it will be amazing if anyone remembers that our ancestors were from Mexico to begin with! There are mainstream films out there, for example, with blatant anti-Mexican sentiment, and the majority of people supporting these movies with their dollars are Mexicans or Latinos. Everyone refers to the “Hispanic market,” because there is political savvy at work that understands that there is a big wallet out there. Everyone is just interested in pick-pocketing that wallet without giving anything in return. I could view the Latino population in the U.S. as a victim, but I don’t, because to be a victim you have to be an active participant in your own victimization. I can only do what I can do. As an individual artist, I can only produce my work when I’m ready and put it out there, and that is all my contribution can really be. Because I don’t have that much energy and I have even less money and, as it turns out, I have even less time, and whenever I do work it is usually designed to affect an audience, and you have asked me who my audience is and sometimes I don’t even know who they are. For me it’s just the fact that I know it’s going to be out there.
JS:
Many artists I’ve spoken to have talk about being excluded from ‘mainstream’ institutions. The idea of the mainstream implies access to certain audiences and of course, access to certain markets. But with subversive or political art, there can be a conflict between socio-political or cultural effectiveness and the rewards that can come with success in the ‘mainstream.’ What would you say about that conflict and the risks that artists will take?
HG:
Well, there are actually artists who have made a career out of calling themselves ‘terrorist artists.’ There are some artists who have really gone out of their way to be considered angry artists, and they are some of our most successful artists. But again, some artists suffered the consequences of calling themselves that. Some who were really on the forefront maybe fifteen years ago had to absolutely retreat and remain silent because they were actually able to address the people they wanted to address. Others just wanted to do their work, and were called “un-radical.” I tend to not say what I am. Let the work say it. … But I sure have heard what other people think I am.
JS:
Like ‘avant-garde.’
HG:
I don’t really know. There are a lot of different people out there doing things, they get called certain things, and it’s specifically geared to who their agent is.
JS:
Do you think that the idea of an avant-garde is still tenable? Is it possible for art to be effectively subversive?
HG:
In this period that we live in--I think we’re very quickly approaching a very solidified fascist state, technologically superior and thoroughly supported by brilliant think-tanks on the right-wing--it will be very difficult for artists to step out of line. Because they will be attacked on multiple fronts, and be completely excluded not only from art, but possibly be put in jail, not allowed to work. They’re already establishing different categories of travel and credibility.
I think it’s similar to what happened in Argentina in the seventies. The first people that were lined up were the students and the creative people. And they just killed them. Here I don’t know if it will be that blatant but they can make it very difficult for you to support yourself, and make sure that you are just a minor participant. In the long term there will be artists who will be forced out of doing their work because there will be little chance of getting anything done.
JS:
I’ve read your comments about the theatricality of the everyday. How does that factor into how you understand identity?
HG:
The majority of people that live in L.A are trying to neutralize and blend and be non-specific on many levels. The only people here that really stand out are the Japanese nationals that are students here. In the majority of L.A. you can’t tell males from females. All the clothes are the same, the hair color is the same, the sunglasses are the same, even the language is the same. There’s no difference. These are people that want to be taken off the stage, as it were. They are a critical subject of my work because I am interested in people who try to remain invisible. What happens when you remove all the elements that could serve as visual cues and clues? Other things come into play and become almost magnified: certain behavior quirks, phrases, position of stance, various activities that they are engaged in. I’ve been invested in looking at people in that way lately. The way they approach, the way they walk, eye movement, and even tonality of voice. It’s all subjective, from me as someone perceiving this because I don’t go around and ask people, “Did you really mean this? Did you really mean that? Why did you do that?” to correlate with what my findings are. That’s not my role. I can only go by what I perceive and feel, and I also operate quite a bit on instinct. I have a way of categorizing people, and I can sense danger. I can sense a lot of things. A lot of it is actually learned from years and years of experience, just having seen so many activities repeated, by total strangers. On some level there is predictability, but every so often I am proven wrong and I find myself in situations where I should have known better but I didn’t. And every once in a while I’m completely on target and I’m able to benefit from things that other people can’t see.
JS:
That expression, “wanting to be taken off the stage” is so true.
HG:
I think it has to do with where you are, in Southern California. You can drive forty miles to the desert and you can walk through the desert and go, “Wow there’s nothing here.” But if you’re able to actually see what’s there, there are a lot of living creatures there. Except they all blend in; they all camouflage; they remain motionless; they do not want to be noticed. And people are like that here. It’s kind of an urban desert. What you find is that the people who are really flashy are the people who are either putting up a totally artificial threat, or the people who are totally threatening. Sometimes you really can’t tell. If you stand out, the people who are going to notice you are the gangs or the cops, and if you want to avoid that entirely then you have to be totally unnoticed. For instance, there are people who are out there who are totally covered with tattoos. Very decorative but it actually has a lot of meaning. For some people it has a very jarring effect. A lot of people wear it on the outside. On some level it’s like the way a cactus has spines. If you can get past the spines, the cactus is very succulent and very tender and very vulnerable. Often the things you’ve got to watch out for are the things that look pretty normal. It’s that little smooth rock that’s going to cut your hand off. It’s that thing that doesn’t have a glow, but when you touch it, it’s going to poison you. So, in reality the most dangerous people are the ones that look like they won’t bother you at all. Usually when I walk into a building I scan everybody and if I feel danger then I won’t go in. And I won’t go in a place that doesn’t have a backdoor and a window because those are two ways out. That’s only because in my lifetime I have gone through a window because I broke the window because I had to get out. That also serves as a metaphor for a lot of situations that I’ve been in: if there are not two or three ways out, then I’ll not engage.
Gronk, Willie Herrón III, Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval were the other original members of Asco. Many other artists were affiliated with the group during its lifetime.
C. Ondine Chavoya,“Social Unwest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.,” Wide Angle 20.3 (1998): 54-78. This interview also can be found at <http://www.harrygamboajr.com> (cited 2 October 2004).
See C. Ondine Chavoya, “Psedographic Cinema: Asco’s No-Movies,” Performance Research 3.1 (1998): 1-14. For a discussion of No-Movies also see David E. James, “Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of ‘Avant-Garde’ Film in Los Angeles,” October 90 (Fall 1999): 3-24.
Harry Gamboa Jr., “Survival Technology,” Technological Rituals: Stories From the Annenberg Dialogues, ed. Rosanna Albertini. (Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication, 1999), 29.
Chon Noriega, PhD, introduction to Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr, by Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon Noriega. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 7.
See Chavoya, “Social Unwest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.”
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publication notes: Harry Gamboa Jr.: The Journal of American Drama and Theatre The Graduate School and University Center to order copy: Circulation Manager The Journal of American Drama and Theatre |
http://www.harrygamboajr.com
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