Hija de LA

Besame Baby!! A TRIP Through The Musical Barrio

2006-09-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

Randy and Scott Rodarte of Ollin at their August 30th show in honor of the journalist Ruben Salazar(RIP) at the Airliner in Lincoln Heights. These boys played a smokin’ set that took us from 40’s Big Band Lalo Guerrero bluesy corridos, to swingin’ Richie Valens songs, to Cumbias, Pogues covers. (Ollin is the Chicano Pogues!) and ending the set with their punk “Tale of Two Cities”. They can seamlessly move across musical time, space and geography with mad musical skills and a true punk fire that ignites rather than tames the musical style they’re playing. I first saw Ollin when we all had moved back from Berkeley soon after the riots. They were learning to play Jarocho music. At that time I was going through some growing pains trying to find, create a space back home where I fit after wrestling with the world of academia for 5 years, witnessing my generation decimated by Iran-Contra imported crack, and experiencing the pocha in Mexico dilemma during a year of studying and traveling in Mexico. It was healing to go to Ollin gigs at 50 bucks, backyard parties in CT, Al’s Bar, the Clubhouse, Aztlan Cultural Arts Foundation, and the Peace and Justice Center where they sonically fused these different worlds that at that time seemed irreconcilable. Looking back, I am proud of my generation and I can very humbly see the vibrant marks that we have left on the political, cultural and social landscape of this city. So, it is affirming and grounding to go to an Ollin gig 13 years later, having witnessed their evolution and see them today still at it (even if they don’t get the recognition that they deserve) and pushing the work in many directions.
http://myspace.com/eastlosollin

Puppetistas in Boyle Heights

2006-09-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Jessica Gudiel performing her puppet show to a beautiful crowd of ninos at the Caracol Marketplace at Proyecto Jardin in Boyle Heights. This puppet show inspired b Gudiel's visit with her family in Guatemala touches on water privatization in Guatemala and housing evictions in LA through the stories of Gata Negra and Agua Azul.
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=18573895

Such a Little Man

2006-09-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Writers Luis A. Vega and Harry Gamboa at their summer play reading at the Ford Theatre. August 26th.

"In the 1960s there was no oasis in the urban desert. The still lifes were painted among the still dead. No one cried over spilled paint. Children finger painted/pointed as their older brothers and sisters danced in the shadows of global atrocities. Napalm bombes were no match for the palms that lined the streets of L.A. Blank-faced mobs surfed on heat waves that crashed onto concrete shores. Police clubs kept the beat to a repressive rumba Love beads got lost among the hate mial. Many could not float upstream on the dry bed of the L.A. River."
(excerpt from Harry Gamboa's essay "In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or Asco Was a Four-Member Word)" in the CARA catalogue. LACMA is curating a show called "Phantom Sitings" that will open in 2008. The show's name comes from Gamboa's notion of a Phantom Culture. People!!! Read the essay, do your homework. Prepare so that this "phantom culture" (whether you accept the term or not) is justly represented inside and outside of the official show.
http://www.harrygamboajr.com

More Graff/Street graphics

2006-08-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

View of Sao Paolo and Centro

2006-08-03T07:51:00.000-07:00

Graff

2006-08-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

There´s a unique style of lettering in Sao Paolo that I´ve never seen anywhere else. The words are coded and their meaning only known by those who know the language. This style of lettering is all over Sao Paolo, on the top of 30 story buildings and other spaces that are really difficult to get at. Im told that these tags are done with rollers and not aerosol cans and that´´s why the straight, linearity of the style.

Collectives

2006-08-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

Daniel from Frente do Tres de Diciembre, Jen and Rodrigo from Bijari. Went to Bijari´s awesome studio in Villa Magdalena.Bijari is a collective that~s been working for 10 years. Most of them have architectural backgrounds. They do design work to pay their bills and fund their more political interventionist work. They´ve been doing a lot of work around the issue of gentrification and use a variety of strategies go engage the public in a dialogue about this issue. They are also very conscious of the distortions around such issues are disseminated through mass media, and do much work to use mass media and find ways to insert counter messages in the media.From conversations with Daniel from Frente, Geandre and Rodrigo from Bijari, artists/activists workilng in collectives and doing interventionist work in Sao Paolo is very alive and parallel to what is going on in Buenos Aires. Some other collectives to check out are The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Contrafile

Street Graphics in SaoPaolo

2006-08-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

Signs\flyers in Sampa 2

2006-08-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

Sampa

2006-08-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

Im in San Paolo. Brazil definitely ´has got some funk. The city looks lived in in a way that Buenos Aires doesn´t.Some amazing architecture. Brazilian colonial, standing next to skinny towerlike 40 story functionalist buildings next to 70~s style futuristic minimal block concrete mall structures. The first night we stayed in a funky hotel in the centro. So many people have warned us about the dangers of being a foreigner in this area at night but as far as I can see it ain´t as harsh as parts of downtown L.A. The sure don~t have the money that the Avenida Paulista has it reminds me of Broadway where the working class shops, hangs out in the day and the streets become a sort of ghosttown at night. Right next to the hotel we stayed in the first night I stumbled upon one of these dank malls filled with hip hop, reggae, skate, graffiti shops pumping out some dope music. Here´s some pics of some of the store signs. I love the black nationalist brazilian flavor.

goodbye argentina

2006-08-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

Above,Artist Andrea Cavagnaro, was gracious enough to organize a dialogue;exchange at her apartment with me and several Portenos doing interventionist work. I showed them my own work and other work in public spaces in LA from the files I~ve gathered teaching Chicano art and popular culture: murals, graffiti, performznces, actions, interventions. It was an amazing, inspiring exchange as they bounced off the work I showed in relation to their own works and the specifics of their own, political, economic, social contexts.
The artists here are really vigilant about all aspects of art/cultural production: historiography, curation, funding, their relationship with or not with institutions. The question of working ìnside`or òutside´art institutions came up in almost every conversation. Some argued that within Argentina, there is an òutside´ space that artists have carved out in the last 10 years, and especially within the last 5 years after the crisis, in which individuals, groups have abandoneds art institutions and act outside through numerous tactics, performative acts, actions, interventions, etc. creating a vibrant space of dialogue with the larger society. Others argued that this paradigm is a false one, and there is no real inside and outside, asserting that working òutside´the art circuit does not mean the work is more or less political. Regardless, I did feel that I got a taste of an important moment in political art and street art. Some artists groups to check out: Taller Popular de Serigrafia, Etcetera, Eduardo Molinari´s Archivo Caminante, CAPATACO/Gastar, Arde Arte, GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero), and Silhuetazo. (thkanks to Jennifer Sternad Flores for some of these recommendations)

Archive to the Left

2006-07-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

"Let them call our work propaganda, terrorism, or guerilla warfare. We hope to be able to participate in all this and even if we´re unsucessful, at least there is more creativeness, more life more love in the mere attempt than in all the ´works of art´which only serve to lull the mind and sensibility."
Coordinating Committee of the Revolutionary Imagination, Buenos Aires 1969

From the archives on Tucuman Arde at CeDINCI. Spent the day at this space which holds an amazing archive on movements, history, philosophy, literary production of the left. In ´68 in protest to the censorship of an artwork in a show on the avante garde, called "Experiencia 68" organized at the Del Di Tella Institute, artists burnt, destroyed and threw work into the streets in protest. After this show artists formed a collective and decided to abandon art institutions and work in solidarity with social movements. This collective spent time in a province in Argentina called Tucuman. working with the local population, they produced photo murals, handwritten signs, banners, tape recordings,films, slideshows, distriuted flyerersand encouraged dialogue in an exhibit called Tucuman Arde which transformed an exhibit into a political act. Police shut down the show and the collective decides to operate in both a legal framework and in a clandestine manner as a strategy to prevent the suppression of their work.

http://www.cedinci.org/principal.html

Party in Chacaritas

2006-07-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

Party at curator Santiago Navarro´s

Arte, Vino y Risas

2006-07-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Sternad Flores has been an amazing hostess. She's introduced me to a number of artists, curators, writers in Buenos Aires. Most doing actions and public interventions. Jen's been doing amazing research about political art, street actions in Buenos Aires. Watch out LA, when she goes back in September she´ll returned well armed.
We´ve gone to dinner a few times, had great food,wine and conversation.
Photo #1: Jen and artist Alicia Herrero. www.aliciaherrero.com.ar
Photo #2
Luis Lux Lindner, artist writer contributor to Ramona a journal of contemporary art criticism in Buenos Aires. www.ramona.org.ar and public interventionist, Andrea Cavagnaro.

San Telmo Part 2

2006-07-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

San Telmo

2006-07-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

San Telmo´s an older neighborhood. In one of the plaza they have an antiques market on Sundays. The plaza and surrounding street get packed with vendors, street performers, portenos and tourists.

Argentinos have clean asses

2006-07-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

Pop Art in Latin America

2006-07-24T08:03:00.000-07:00

Jennifer and art historian, Ana Longoni in a cafe near the University of Buenos Aires. The night before I attended a talk Longoni gave in conjunction with a show on Litchenstein at MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires). Longoni's done much work on street art, art as action, and the relationship of art groups/colletives to larger liberation movements in South America from the 60's to the present. She works with a number of cultural and art critics wh are rewriting Latin American history not as an echo of Europe's vanguard, but are developing other parameters of discussing/exploring this relationship between the "centers and peripheries" such as looking at this relationship in terms of conflict and simultaneity. In this talk she focused on what she called three examples of "subversions of pop" in Latin America:1) Argentina in the 60's: media interventions, graphics that used the language of pop and spaces of publicity, a sort of anti-happening--a fraudulent media hoax, etc. 2)Chile in the 60's-70's--silkscreen-aesthetics of repetition, popular iconography, the dissemination of images in mass that complimented, fed a growing popular radicalization/ critique of power that had relations with the communist party. Longoni pointed out how this use pf pop forms and aesthetics was embedded in larger social movements. 3)Peru in the70's- Longoni showed the work of a collective who utilized the form of comics to reach to indigenous campesino that addressed issues like agrarian reform. Another important overiding theme was the relevance of looking at the work of these artists and collectives in relationship to the political contexts of dictatorship, repression, and emerging social movements. The use of pop, was a strategy embedded with an optimism, a populist approach to art. There are so many exciting, relevant possible conversations, connections and parallels with this history and Chicano Art. Longoni's lecture and conversations with Jennifer have made me realize that Chicano art needs to be talked about in relationship to political art, aesthetics and practices happenning internationally. Chicano art really has a lot to contribute to these vibrant conversations that are very much alive and active here in Argentina.

Escrache

2006-07-24T08:03:00.000-07:00

Performers at an escrache. In the mid 90's activists developed this tactic to denounce government members of the dictatorship guilty of kidnapping, torture and the murder of dissidents. A number of collectives arose, such as HIJOS, Etcetera, mesas de escrache and these actions have developed into visual and sonic spectacles. Protestors gather in front of the business, or home of a businessman, a politician or some other abuser of power and basically "out" them in a fun carnivalesque manner:theater,performance, music/noise, chants, banners, signs. This was a smaller escrache. I'm told sometimes there are over a thousand people participating. This one happened outside of the offices of a company named Telefonica and it's owner (yes power has names and faces) was being denounced for labor abuses.

More graff

2006-07-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

Mercosur, Fidel, Chavez and the Blockade

2006-07-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

Today's headline in one of the Buenos Aires newspapers:
a selected translation:
The Mercosur cumbre: Accord is signed to relieve Cuba from the economic blockade. This is the first accord Cuba has achieved with a commercial block since the times of the Soviet Union. With this accord, Mercosur mocks the blockade imposed on Havana by the United States in 1962. Some believe that if US displomacy, now trapped in the war in the Middle East, was more attentive to their backyard this accord wouldn't have passed. The Cuban economy has grown 11% in the last four years according to it's own statististics and 5% according to Cepal. The nickel industry, tourism and the exportation of medicines are the driving forces for the country who has it's worst harvest of sugar in a century. Chavez is sending oil at $25 a barrel to the island where as the international rate of oil is at $75.

Graffiti in BA

2006-07-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Not much wildstyle influenced graff here. much of the graff here is straight up political, denouncing violence internally and externally (plenty of anti yanqui graff) and anouncing actions..more use of stencils than letters.

The Death of the Belmont Tunnels

2006-07-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

Tractors tearing down the walls of a vital cultural monument in LA, the Belmont Tunnels, a home to many graffiti artists on the Eastside..a vital form/ language sprung amidst the devastation of crack and guns in our neighborhoods which wiped out many of our brothers and sisters from the mid 90's on. Let us not forget how that wuz funneled in by US backed Contras (check out http://www.albionmonitor.com/9811a/copyright/webbcrackup.html for more info.). I strongly believe that graff needs to be talked about in relation to the political, economic and cultural shifts going on in L.A. at the time. The importance of the pink, blue, toxic green jagged, swilrly visual words and letters that transformed our landscape takes on new meanings.

Meanwhile on the other side of downtown, in the parking lot of the American Hotel (next door to another LA landmark, Al's Bar, the crew, UTI has just covered ta yard they've been occupying for 15 years and busting new ...brighter, louder, more vibrant than ever.

Fort Worth to Buenos Aires

2006-07-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

Left L.A. on Monday. I had a 2 hour stopover in Dallas/FortWorth. wuz plannining on entertaining myself by drinking beers with cowboy business men in the airport bar, but was very mistaken. no three piece suits and cowboy hat fashion, instead I ran into a swarm of troops just about to be shipped out to Iraq... the airport lobby filled with fresh faced
Woke up to an incredible sunset above vast uninhabited land. wuz reminded of how much space, land and resources there are in the americas.

East LA's on Fire

2006-07-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

Joe of Aztlan Underground at the Farce of July, Self Help Graphics. AUG's back as a full band, lots of distortion mixed with indigenous noises and Aztlan Undergrounds always strong and relevant lyrics.