09.01.2018 - 01.02.2018
Art Los Angeles Reader is a biannual newspaper published by Fair Grounds Associates, the production firm of the art fair Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which features Los Angeles writers writing about Los Angeles. In the frameworks of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA they invited us as co-editors of their 4th issue in order to conceive together this special project entitled Soñadores.
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ALAC’s exciting invitation to co-edit the fourth issue of their Reader under the auspices of the Pacific Standard Time comes as a welcome recognition of the critical work that Terremoto has been engaging in within the United States’ artistic and academic scenes since the inception of its bilingual, commissioned content in early 2015. Since then, Terremoto has been advocating the Americas not as the simple sum of separate, distinct national narratives and problematics, but rather as a complex network of shared histories and joint cultural production possibilities. By introducing each other’s commissions within our respective editorial letters, we extend this vision to a practical exercise of understanding and translation, a modest step towards a steadier intellectual exchange between US and Mexican practitioners. Not exempt from a critical questioning about PST itself, the present issue affirms both Terremoto’s and the Reader’s projects participating proudly in the art criticism of their time, in the most uncompromised possible way.
Alma Ruiz then reminds us that the novelty of Pacific Standard Time is not as much to have triggered investigation about Latin American & Chicano Art within Californian institutions as to have made preexisting and ongoing ones thoroughly more visible for the greater public —with the aid, most of all financial, of the institutional giant that is the Getty foundation. Suzy Halajian underlines the contemporaneity, almost forty years after, of the artworks, performances, and street interventions of the Chicano art collective Asco, and the way they pioneered drawing attention to the multiethnicity of the United States, whose public face of the time aspired to unequivocal whiteness. Eunsong Kim and Gelare Khoshgozaran (creators of the platform Contemptorary. org) explore through Monica Rodriguez’s project Las Antillas para los Antillanos how artists can use the archive, both personal and public, in order to map more accurately logics of diasporas and historical parallels often unnoticed by the larger, individual official narratives of the Americas. Finally, through an examination of Taco Bell’s architectural and visual identity from the 1960s until nowadays, Anthony Carfello and Brian Mann draw our attention to the ambiguities of the famous fast-food chain towards its own declared bicultural identity, framing their intertwining of colonial and marketing logics within the wider corporate restaurant industry architectural production of the time.
These anecdotes, archeologies, and gallery of characters compose tales, landscapes and memories that are playing a hide and seek game with the fixed notions of identity that conservative forces aim to affirm. What the present Reader demonstrates is the unstoppable fluidity of mankind’s development and the relentlessness of the forces working behind every single destiny: for no human being is illegal. The claim of the Dreamers to defend their right to live and fulfill their destiny in a country that they maybe didn’t choose, but grew up in and got to consider as home, is an inalienable right that art accompanies through the material, as diverse as it may be, that it currently produces, and for which it will be remembered at least for one part of it, as the culture of our times. Even if we succumb under the attacks, a tribute to our resistance will remain in such endeavors as the modest sheets of paper you actually hold in your hand—from any side of the border, they may flip through it.
Download the PDF here.
10.5
2018
Sandra Eleta; Edita (la del plumero), Panamá (Edita [the one with the duster], Panama), 1977. From the series La servidumbre (Servitude), 1978–1979. Black and white photograph, 19 × 19 in. Courtesy of Galeria Arteconsult S.A., Panama. Artwork © the artist.
10.5 2018
09.01.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" Borderlands, California, Los Angeles, USA
Suzy Halajian
Asco’s ephemeral actions reconfigured the patterns of public space.
10.5 2018
13.01.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" California, EE.UU., Los Angeles, USA
Anthony Carfello
From Missions to Mission-style to Mission-branded cubes: how Taco Bell architecture tells us the history of Southern California.
10.5 2018
15.01.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" California, Los Angeles, Mexico-US border, Sonora
Natalia Mendoza, Miguel Fernández de Castro
When the concept of the frontier touches down at the border between Mexico and the US.
10.5 2018
20.01.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" California, EE.UU., Los Angeles, USA
Gelare Khoshgozaran, Eunsong Kim
Monica Rodriguez’s research as practice explores international and intergenerational struggles for Caribbean independence.
10.5 2018
22.01.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" California, EE.UU., Los Angeles, USA
Alma Ruiz
How Los Angeles Can Make PST Stick
10.5 2018
27.01.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" California, EE.UU., Los Angeles, USA
Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Eduardo Abaroa
Eduardo Abaroa and Rubén Ortíz-Torres talk about the art scenes in LA and Mexico City framed by globalization in a neoliberal era.
10.5 2018
29.01.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" California, EE.UU., Los Angeles, USA
Arden Decker
10.5 2018
01.02.2018
Issue 10.5: ALAC Reader "Soñadores" California, EE.UU., Los Angeles, USA
Joey Terrill
A cross-generational narrative of queer Chicanx and Latinx artists finds a common space in LA.
