Thread: An artist's whim finds great legs in the current immigration

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Bordering on politics


An artist's whim finds great legs in the current immigration debates
By Robert L. Pincus
UNION-TRIBUNE ART CRITIC
September 17, 2006



It all started with a competition for the California state quarter four years ago. Perry Vasquez had a design in mind.

You have to think his rollicking satirical image had no chance of prevailing against images of John Muir gazing lovingly at Yosemite's Half Dome (the winner) and idealized scenes of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Gold Rush. But Vasquez was inspired by the prospect of seeing a stereotypical looking Mexican in his sombrero and huaraches on the coin, towering above the Earth with a foot planted on each side of the border.
Though the competition is long gone, the image is not. He added a slogan: “Keep on Crossin.'” And his icon has assumed multiple guises: a cloth patch, a poster, T-shirts and a ceramic figure made by one of the artisans who creates figurines for the Tijuana vendors who cater to tourists along the border.

Vasquez's figure has his own Web site – keeponcrossin.com – where T-shirts and the like are available. And it has a manifesto, written by Vasquez's friend and writer Victor Payan (available on the web site), which begins, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to cross borders of political, social, linguistic, cultural, economic and technological construction ... we will cross.”

“Call it agitprop, maybe agitpop – or just some other form of communication,” says Vasquez of this project. “It reaches an audience that might not otherwise see what I do.

“The message is directed in a way that fine art may not be. Yet somehow it remains an art project. I like being an artist that has two or three dimensions to what I do.”

Stephanie Hanor, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego,believes in the artistic significance of his work. She's asked the 47-year-old San Diego artist to create an installation in the museum's Axline Court for its major fall exhibition in La Jolla, “TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art,” a display of 50 works by 48 artists that opens today.

Vasquez's contribution will include the various manifestations of the “Keep on Crossin'” icon that the museum has acquired for its collection: Plaster-of-Paris figures, posters and color digital prints. There will also be large versions of the patch, along with Spanish and English texts of the manifesto on panels that mimic the look of tortillas.

“He has a great graphic sensibility,” says Hanor, “and a new take on the border. He is less interested in an us versus them idea. He looks at the situation as a whole, the border as a shared space. So it's important for us to collect his work.

He fits the spirit of the show too.

There is such a broad scope of work that the terms Latino and Latin American art encompasses and Perry, like the de la Torres and Enrique Chagoya, has been stretching the definition of those terms.”


Jaunty icon
Vasquez first dreamed the design for “Keep on Crossin'” as a lark.

“I wasn't even thinking about responses. I thought of myself as creating a patch for friends who have to cross the border a lot, who have to try to explain their art to a customs agent, which is an absurd undertaking. I partly did it just to make my friends laugh.

“A couple of years later, when things started heating up, people would say: 'Are you promoting illegal immigration?' It's as if I was being accused of a thought crime.”
Explaining the project, though, is “like asking a comic to explain a joke,” Vasquez adds. A labored explanation would cancel out its weird charm.
Some of that charm comes from its overlay of one jaunty icon on top of another. Robert Crumb's “Keep on Truckin'” figure from 1967, with the same oversized legs and stretched frame, is the direct source for Vasquez's R. Carumba.

Humor is a lasting interest for Vasquez. While studying art and political science at Stanford University, he also worked on the school's humor magazine, The Stanford Chaparral.

Some of his earlier art displayed a taste for aesthetic high jinks.

In the 1990s, when Vasquez began to make a name for himself locally, he and artist Randy Evans exhibited work under the moniker A-Pollo 13 at Balboa Park's Centro Cultural de la Raza. (Though they no longer collaborate, Vasquez still maintains the Web site – www.apollo13art.com – to disseminate educational materials.)

The term illegal alien isn't used much these days, as Vasquez will remind you, but back in the mid-1990s, when it was, they had a lot of fun spoofing the term with “Plan 9 From Aztlan.” It's a painting that parodies a sci-fi movie poster, picturing a towering robot who's invaded a metropolis through “a hole in thin air.” “Peligro! Gente de la Tierra,” it declares, “Alien Art Threat.” The painting bills Edward James Olmos as The Fiend and Charo as Queen of the Aztecs.

The “Keep on Crossin'” project offered new opportunities to inject humor into the debate about immigration. Last year, when he and Victor Payan, periodic “Keep on Crossin'” co-conspirator, were asked to make a presentation in a workshop on NAFTA at California Western School of Law, they offered a modest proposal for vastly shrinking the number of illegal immigrants in San Diego County: move the border about 20 miles, to just north of Highway 94.
“Joking about this topic seems to get some people more angry,” Vasquez sayss. “We seem to have attracted Andy Ramirez as a nemesis.”

Ramirez, who heads the Chino-based Friends of the Border Patrol, was on the roster in the same California Western class as Vasquez. He saw little humor in the patch or in Vasquez's and Payan's proposal.

At a subsequent press conference, Vasquez recalls, Ramirez condemned the patch. While referring to it on his blog, Ramirez declares, “Sedition is alive and well in 2005.”

Vasquez does say, on the project's Web site, that “'Keep on Crossin' is a political provocation.” But in conversation, he points out that it doesn't advocate any specific set of ideas on illegal immigration. Like an earlier local work that Vasquez admires, “Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso” (1993) by David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco, his means to stir discussion; it is not a kind of position paper.

“It's about getting a new perspective and crossing borders of all kinds: technological, geographical and mental. George Orwell talked in his essay 'Outside the Whale' about getting outside established ideas and 'Keep on Crossin'' is about that.

“Lately there seems to be a hardening of people's views on immigration, which is a sign of a rigid political debate. Fluidity of thinking is at the core of this project.”


Menudo and chitlins
Like most artists, Vasquez's ideas are rooted in his own experience. He was raised in Escondido until age 7, and his father still lives there. But he and his brother Randy, now a well known TV and film actor as well as a documentary filmmaker, moved to his mother's home turf of High Point, N.C., when his parents divorced. His father's heritage was Mexican; his mother's, South American.

“I call myself an Appala-Chicano,” he says.

A painting he made a few years ago, “Menudo and Chitlins,” seems a metaphor for his upbringing.

“The area was born-again, fundamentalist. There was a lot of racial animosity since it was the time of the Civil Rights struggles.”

Vasquez was happy to leave for college, though he says “I've made my peace with the area.”

His mother moved back to Southern California while Vasquez and his brother were still in college – she lives in La Crescenta – but he still has relatives and friends in North Carolina and occasionally visits.

If Stanford brought him back to California, graduate school in the visual arts at UC San Diego brought him back to his hometown. He graduated with an MFA in 1991 that emphasized paintings and criticism.

His time at UCSD, he recall as “positive and negative.”

But he took away an insight that stays with him.

“I learned to immerse myself. To survive at UCSD, you have to do that. To be a good artist, you have to immerse yourself in any subject to a great degree.”

San Diego, the region, interests him as much as ever.

“I never exactly intended to stay in San Diego, but nearly 20 years later, I'm still here. I probably could have gotten more attention as an artist if I had gone somewhere else, but I found my voice here.”

He's made a life here too. He and wife Rondi, a graphic designer, bought a house in Encanto three years ago, and have a 2-year-old son, Trey. Last year, he became a full-time member of the faculty at Southwestern College in Chula Vista and teaches drawing, painting and printmaking.

In his studio work, he's concentrating on painting.

“I'm working in a kind of academic style, using anatomical imagery and technology. The subject is a post-urban vision of things.”

But like the “Keep on Crossin'” project itself, Vasquez's career seems destined to remain multifaceted.

Until recently, he maintained a space in North Park that had a studio in the back and a public exhibition space (ICE Gallery) in the front. Vasquez is never reluctant to collaborate, particularly with writers, and one of his recent paintings filled the cover of the 2005 anthology “Sunshine/Noir: Writing From San Diego and Tijuana,” the debut volume of San Diego City Works Press.

Also, in the early 1990s he began making arresting prints from motor oil – and still does. They evolved from something he learned from Allan Kaprow at UCSD: to value discarded materials, stuff never intended to make its way into art. He took the oil from his leaking car and turned it into a medium for his art. Vasquez can afford a better car now, but the value of the insight lingers in images of San Diego, Borrego Springs, dragsters, “Plan 9 From Aztlan” vignettes and subjects to come.


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Robert L. Pincus: (619) 293-1831; robert.pincus@uniontrib.com

That looks like the "Keep on Truckin'" guy.......except with a Sombrero. Kind of stealing an idea......

See the guy is wearing "Felony Flyers" the footwear of choice for those that seek "a better life" :P