My feature on the history and legacy of Asco is published this week. When you first see an Asco piece, there's that moment where your eyes widen. It's surprise at the unusual and new, but at the same time, a feeling of recognition:
Long before flash mobs, Gamboa began perfecting the practice of the spontaneous art action when he and three other East L.A. artists formed the venerated avant-garde performance group known as Asco, named after the Spanish word for “nausea.” Here you had, in the middle of the 1970s, four style-conscious art jesters — three men, one woman — cavorting in outrageous outfits around the streets and empty lots of East L.A., making a scene, actions sprinkled with cutting social commentary, then disappearing. A Dada daydream in Chicanoville, USA.
I want to thank the many, many people I interviewed over several months for this piece, for their frankness, insight, encouragement, and help in pointing me toward crucial primary and secondary research sources. It was a very intense process.
* UPDATES: Here are transcripts of interviews Jeffrey Rangel of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art conducted with Gronk, Harry Gamboa, Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herron III between 1997 and 2000. The interviews are extensive.
Here is an image of "The Black and White Mural" by Gronk and Herron, at Estrada Courts in East L.A. I paid a visit to this site one night, and also to Herron's seminal "The Wall that Cracked Open," in an alley in City Terrace, behind a very fragrant panaderia.
One point I did not expand upon in "The Art Outlaws of East L.A." is the growing academic and curatorial consensus that Asco functionally consisted of five core members. Early on, actor Humberto Sandoval participated in many key Asco actions and films. He's collaborated with Gamboa on later films as well.
* Photo above is courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr.