Amalia Mesa-Bains: Artists Working in Social Space: A Theoretical Appro

I realize you have had a very full series of days, so I will try to move through some material, some of which is theoretical, by paraphrasing. I seem like I don't know what I am doing, but I do. I work like a jazz musician. I really do have a main line, but I riff far sometimes. For those who have high anxiety about closure, you'll just have to suffer through it.

I am thrilled to be here with my friends Judy Baca and Suzanne Lacy. We are working together in a project they established at California State University in Monterey Bay. Because of being drawn into that process, I have had to examine some material that I have been interested in for a long time, but not centrally involved in, which is public art and social space. My background as an artist has always been in a context of what others call altars and shrines, but I think of as community spaces, sacred spaces. Over the years, I've had the occasion to get a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. In my years working through that, I was looking at issues of identity. At that time I looked at identity purely from the position of people. But in the last years, I began to look at place, how we know ourselves from the places we have lived, and how that demarcation of space is a geographic and social one in which we have lived experiences, memories and ways of relating. In longstanding communities, the history is tied to where the dead are buried. There is a sense of belonging to places. Those interests came out of clinical work and interest in theory around social development and ideas of human geography.

Most recently, I have been helping to establish this new program at California State University at Monterey Bay, which we will talk about later. It establishes itself in a counterpoint to traditional arts making programs and, in some ways, asks us to think of ourselves as artists, as those engaged in constructing social space. I will quote a bit from works around the idea of social space, but I wanted to give you a sense of how I got here. I also worked in public education for twenty years as a public school teacher, as a professional staff development person, and a curriculum developer under court ordered desegregation. I was in that first generation of people who established, in public education, new ways of learning, cultural learning styles and cooperative learning styles, trying to get past the festival mode of understanding culture, trying to move deeper into what kinds of histories and practices and memories existed in the diverse cultures of this country.

I am giving you this background so you will know that when I talk about these ideas, they don't necessarily come from my own experience in creating public art. But I think the way our program is being developed will help create an understanding in which installation work and ceremonial work would be, in part, a way of developing a public and responding to a public. Some of those ideas about reciprocity and the distribution of work, commitment, analysis and practices of community building will be discussed on the panel. That is the context of my interest in trying to anchor lived practices in existing theory. Often, we get it backwards. We think we study theory and learn to make a practice out of it. I think people make practice and other people derive from that their theories. In our generation, there are many artists who have had to move between both. My Ph.D. is in clinical psychology and my M.A. is in interdisciplinary studies in education. I am severely over educated on some level for making altars. I was at a conference the other day and Coco Fusco was talking about Chicano artists and used the term "autodidacts", that they were not educated. I was too polite to jump up and say that is not true. But the truth is that, in our first generation of Chicano artists coming out of communities of struggle, to have an education was a goal. We developed the first ethnic studies, the first bilingual studies. Our job was to make apertures in higher education for ourselves and for others. Most of us have had to move between our community bases, our lived experience and our families, developing practices and strategies that were not part of the fine arts world, and establishing institutions in which to develop those practices. Then we had to educate other people about them. Beyond that, we had to develop theorizing about what we'd done. I think practice begets theory, theory begets practice, if it is healthy. I think the last ten years have seen a real growth in the transformation of the role of the artist as not just a maker, but a thinker and an activist, a person who operates at an intersection of a variety of roles and disciplines. That is what we are aiming for.

I wanted to anchor some of the later discussion within some of the theorizing about social space and I have found a number of people, whose work I am attracted to, who are using Marxism as a foundation to look into the idea of social production. (I have never been an ardent Marxist, although the concepts of production, surplus and capitalism have everything to do with how we Chicanos have been part of the U.S. economy–exploited, produced, and surplussed.) How do we make our lives? Where do we make our lives? Who makes our lives with us? Who do we allow to make a life with us? And who do we keep out of making a life with us? I drive by farm workers every day. When I was a child that was what my parents did. My father was a farm worker and a ranch hand when I was small, then moved into town to be a cannery worker. My mom was a domestic, a maid and governess. I had skewed ideas. My mother was a governess in a wealthy family in Beverly Hills, so her version of whiteness doesn't match much of reality.

In the process of reliving my agricultural years in Salinas, I've been thinking a lot about the private/public space issue. I also have to deal with people in Carmel and Pebble Beach and Monterey. I drive by the artichoke pickers off Highway 68, the road called "Blanco" or white road, then drive to pay my money to get into Pebble Beach, a gated community, to drive the seventeen-mile drive. I started thinking about things like why it is that some people are living their public lives in private, behind gated communities, never seen at the grocery store or a mall, while other people are forced to live their private lives in public because there is not sufficient housing or decent recreational space for children or adequate school yards. It is very troubling because what I see happening now in Salinas is longstanding Latino communities trying to keep immigrant communities from moving closer to them. There is a resistance to farm worker housing. It's as though people would like someone to work there from six in the morning to six at night, but don't want to know where they go after. Those kinds of notions about production, particularly in agribusiness, such as who inhabits what space, what are our connections through culture and memory and who is controlling that space, are pertinent questions for any of us who are going to be working in those areas.

The concept of public art is now breaking apart. It had become quite corporate and monolithic. One of my experiences before I came to work at CSUMB was as an art commissioner for San Francisco. I have the distinction of being the first Chicana to be appointed to be an art commissioner. I was on the other side of the table. I learned that part of public art was being codified into a system of surveillance and ground control. Some artists were being rewarded for being able to develop decorative gates that would close certain people out and protect other people. They were being developed within inner cities to bifurcate working class people from being seen by those who were tourists. These notions of what constitutes public space and how it is social by its nature are some of the things I want to talk about today. I also want to show some slides.

Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear did a book called The Power of Geography, which is quite dense, in which they talk about social practices as inherently spatial at every scale and at all sides of human behavior. Geography is thus an important element in social reproduction. The relationship between space and human activity is very subtle and constantly evolving. On the screen now are images from graveyards in Mexico, which have to do with traditions of the Days of the Dead. It is the practice of remembering the dead on particular days, like All Soul's Day in the Catholic calendar. November first and second are two days in which people recognize and remember the dead. In many ways it embodies the theories that observe social space as not being empty when we reach them. All space has been lived prior to our encounter, and within that space there are ghosts, memories. I live now on a military base that is being transformed into a university. That military base was the staging ground for World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War. Besides the obvious toxic waste dumps we are trying to get rid of, there is embodied in that space a kind of anxiety. Many of our students and faculty experience it. I think what you experience in that space is the regimentation and discipline of the military. The way the roads are constructed, the way the buildings are placed, and what you experience is the desperation and fear of young men leaving and their families who are letting them go during times of war.

When we talk about land, we must talk about history and memory and, consequently, death. The notions of the recognition of death are often constructed around particular social spaces. One question that comes to mind when looking at the Days of the Dead as a practice of popular culture is what happens when you have to move? What about all those families who have left places like Oaxaca or Guanajuato, places where there is a large tradition of honoring the dead. Who watches over their dead and how do they transform the next space they move to in order to work as agricultural workers. They are displaced from their families and homes, and in the new territory that they enter.

Sonja and Lefebre have posited the idea is that no space is empty when we reach it, that there are a multiplicity of spaces, that we somehow encounter space in singular fashions. The truth is that we live in many spaces at one time. These traditions of the Days of the Dead were both public, in that they took place in the graveyards, and private, in that they took place in homes. That distinction, or boundary between the private and the public is like the distinction or boundary between the living and the dead. The making of the altar is the reconstructing of the life of the dead person, and it is how they live again for you. The altars are a recognition of your unbroken relationship to the dead. In that sense they are continuous practices that inhabit space.

In that same way that we talk about locales and sites, we have to talk about the popular practices that mark those sites. One of the notions of marking a space is the idea of privatized but public geographies. This is the tradition of the yard shrine, which in many respects blurs the distinction between what is private and what is public. The vernacular in this sense is a kind of intersection of the devotional, the sacred, the abundant. It is a place of display. It marks your relationship to a shared community with others who hold some of the same values about family and history. If you think about contemporary and spontaneous expressions of theses sites, you can think of Polly Klass. When her body was found in California, it galvanized people. Many children have been kidnapped and found dead, but for some reason, this death captivated people, and they spontaneously went to where she was found and left flowers, teddy bears. It also happened at a freeway exit after the San Francisco earthquake. It also happened after the death of Princess Diana. Those outpourings of flowers and notes are offrendas, offerings. People needed to mark a space. Some marked the space where the car crashed in the tunnel in Paris. Some marked the space in front of Kensington. Some went to her family home. People felt a need to mark a space. That devotional space is what organizes us in many ways as creating a social space.

When we go to the movie theater, we are creating a social space. How we move in malls, what happens in public parks, the parking lots of grocery stores, corporate and civic centers in downtowns construct social space. Who we let into those spaces has to do with what kind of social goals we have. Sometimes, people are rendered by their economic class in a set of social restrictions, so they have to develop their own spaces. One of my most interesting experiences was installing an altar at the Queens Museum, which has a high Latin American population, in 105° temperatures without a fan. While at the window, I observed that the leftovers of the great World's Fair, the globe and the empty fountain, had become a passeo, a circular walk with men going one way and women going the other way that happens all over Latin America. It's a kind of social greeting and encounter. That is what happens when latino youths go low-riding in their cars. I saw them opening a hole in the gated section of the park at Queens, taking their hibachis, strollers, and children, and going to sit around the outside of the circle, of the empty fountains, and routinely walking around the circle. They had reappropriated in that unforgiving space a tradition of spatial and social movement.

We are continually elaborating space. Spaces are sometimes thought of spaces of contemplation. There is a term, "descanso," or resting place. I don't know if it happens here. When an accident occurs on a freeway, you will see a cross and flowers. Descansos appear all over the southwest, in any major area where Latinos live. Like the yard shrines, they are vernacular markings of space. The need to mark space is like a cartography of human beings. It's a way of anchoring ourselves and marking the places we've been, the things that have happened to us, the areas we remember. For Latino communities, since we are invisible, there is a great irony in living in the southwest in cities like San Jose, San Francisco and Palo Alto, and learning to say the Spanish city and street names as they have been Anglicized. It is a linguistic cartography. You have to respond. But when you are seven, you don't correct the teacher. You do go home and ask your parents why. Then you begin to ask an even more profound question, how did it get called that? Who named it? Where are they? If we are here, did we name it? If we named it, why can't we say it the right way in Spanish? It opens up the notion that this social space was once inhabited by us, even though we are no longer in control of it, even though we are seen as newcomers who have no right to inhabit it, even though we are made invisible, excluded, and socially estranged from the cultural and linguistic history that is present

Somehow in the marking of these places and spaces, we are participating in reclaiming them. I like remembering by separating the (re) in parenthesis, so you know it is about taking things apart and putting them together again, creating a spatial history. I have often said that as Latinos, we do not suffer from a absence of memory, we suffer from a memory of absence. We know what is missing. We know what we have lost. We only have to look at the street signs to know what we have lost. In a certain sense, this spatial memorializing through traditions of the Days of the Dead and yard shrines became an important practice for Chicanos who were establishing their own family histories, having been dislocated from those family histories through the institutional practices of education and public life. They had to be reconstituted, and they had to be done in a way that could use humor, could use popular culture, could subvert the traditions that had exploited us, such as agribusiness.

Sunmaid is a very famous raisin company. Esther Hernandez did this piece, "Sun Mad", from the mid-eighties to the early nineties, first using the poster (chased incessantly by the Sunmaid advertisers). The Sun Mad image was at first a kind of counterpoint to her own lived experience. This is a woman who grew up around Delano, whose family were farm workers. Her mother was the first woman to drive a car in the camp they lived in. Two of her three sisters have died of cancer. Many of their community members believe that is a result of the toxic pesticides that are abundant in the water table of the region she grew up in. It began as a personal investigation into issues of her own health and the health of her family, but it also moved into a larger understanding to our right to the land of that kind of human geography in which migrant workers are displaced from one area to another. There is a sort of irony in California because we have just lived through Proposition 187 which prohibits public education and public health to undocumented workers. I like the second word, workers. That was followed by Proposition 209 which is the anti-affirmative action bill that disallows any affirmative action programs of any nature, including identification programs in public education for girls in math or recruitment. We have just suffered from Proposition 227, which passed by a 70% vote, that prohibits the use of bilingual education from kindergarten through university. It will dismantle many of the programs in which many of us developed our intellectual, cultural and artistic life. It will be fought in the courts, as all of them have.

I keep going back to that because I think when we are talking about concepts like human geographies and social spaces, about how space can be constrained and mediated, then you have to look at concepts like the border and policies around immigration that have to do with keeping people migratory. If you don't have housing for them, they can't stay. If you don't let them have health care, they can't stay. If you prohibit them from going on in education, they can't stay. If you don't let them use their native language to learn English, they can't stay. Why don't you want them to stay? Because you want to be able to cycle through a continuous pool of labor that has no other choice but to work for you. "Sun Mad" also became a ritual celebration for her father, and a memorial to his death.

There is an area, not far from where she lived, which has the highest cancer rate in the U.S., especially for children. Children are bathed in the water table. A lot of farmers don't wear gloves. The methyl bromides we have in our region to protect the strawberry growers are at the top of the list of ozone depleters. At the Toronto conference on environmental toxics, methyl bromide is the number one topic. We have had legislators who have protected the use of methyl bromide for the agribusiness when it has been on a list of restricted toxics for years. The idea that the landscape is an innocent spatiality needs to be examined. Our representations of landscape, which I will talk about later, have something to do with how we see land, especially agriculture, as abundant and magnificent, part of the cornucopia of life. We don't want to see how that land is controlled and who is working in the land.

One of the bigger issues that came up around 1988 was border politics. That is only one manifestation. There have been many post-colonial politics discussing transnationalism and dislocation and deterritorialization. They come out of very real social stratifications of land and space, a demarcation of borders. This is a piece I did at the Studio Museum of Harlem. When I worked on this piece I used narratives from my grandparents, and from the grandparents of a friend. Near me was another Cuban painter who was doing a kind of boat piece that also talked about dislocation. We had some wonderful discussions over the idea of how it was that we came to look on these geographic memories, and how Cubans, like some Mexicans, remain in a kind of suspended animation. We are locked into a memory because we say we are going to go back, but we never do. Our whole identities are framed around a place we don't go to. Mexicans of my parents' generation had some of that.

My father came in 1916, my mother in 1925 on a day pass as the daughter of a domestic worker. Neither one ever returned, neither had papers. They didn't get their legal green cards until they were in their seventies. My parents just became citizens a year ago. My dad was 84 and my mom was 77. We decided it was probably best, since it looked like the way legislation was going, even though they had worked in this country all their lives and paid Social Security and had never been on unemployment, they would probably end up with very little. They stayed out of citizenship here because in some way they wanted to maintain a duality. I find it ironic, because now you can have dual citizenship. It has finally happened. My father waited more than 70 years because to cross that border is so fluid that you never are really not there. If you are in downtown Los Angeles or San Diego, you are still there. Mexico is just making its way into the U.S. despite that damn Taco Bell chihuahua.

What is a dog? An animal. What is a female dog? A bitch. What is a female dog that is very happy to see a male dog? In heat. Those are the personifications of Mexican people that you get on television. I don't think it's an accident that the chihuahua campaign ran simultaneously with the campaign against bilingual education. It's harder to see it and understand it if you are from the East Coast because it is a different world on the West Coast. Much of our thinking about politics emanates from Washington, much of our thinking about culture and art emanates from New York. So when you talk about Chicano and Latino experience on the East Coast, you are talking into a vacuum. That is why I wanted to show some of these images. With "Borders," I talked about migration, deterritorialization, the dislocation of people, the use of memory as a bridge between the past and the present, from one locale to another. I recreated parts of my grandmother's altar.

The altar is the permanent, ongoing record of a family's life. It is where the dead are remembered, where the newborn are celebrated, where the personal papers are kept. It is the space that documents the continual life events of a family. The offrendas for the Days of the Dead that I showed you at the beginning are impermanent, transitory offerings to the dead. They are not the same thing. Often they are collapsed together. I do it, other artists do it. But if you talk about it from the traditional trajectories in which that space is created, one is permanent, one is transitory. The transitory nature of the dead and the remembrance of them gives more meaning and intensity to the permanency of what you have. On the altars is the only time you can mix the living and the dead.

This Saint Anthony hanging upside down is from my commadre Judy Baca, who once told me a story about her grandmother, because both our grandmothers came into the U.S. from Mexico during difficult times. My grandmother came in during the revolution. Her husband had been executed and she had my father and my uncle, who were under the age of three, and two brothers. Judy's grandmother told stories of the boys, like my grandmother's brothers, lost during the revolution. Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. So late at night, Judy can help me with this.

Judy Baca: They hung Saint Anthony upside down in the closet. I think it had to do with an irreverence for Catholicism. It was an Indian sensibility, that hanging him upside down could make him return the brother. The folklore in the family is that Saint Anthony stayed in the closet five years, knocking every night at the same time. He did return the brothers.

Mesa-Bains: Our Saint Anthony must not have worked. Our two uncles never returned from the revolution. These are my favorite pair of slides. On the left is a Bierdstaadt painting in the great tradition of landscape painting of Santa Cruz, California. On the right, from exactly the same period of time, is a lynching of two Mexicans in Santa Cruz. When we talk about how landscape can be constructed and represented to us in benign and innocent spatialities, they were hand-in-hand with the representations that allowed people to colonize. The cartographers, explorers and the renderers of landscape images were all part of the same movement of people who were quantifying land and dividing it up. In the landscape paintings, there is a sense of what is not there. It was a construction of an empty paradise, a wilderness waiting to be filled, an opening for a manifest destiny that is part of what we struggle with today.

What we now know is that at the same time that those images of innocent spatiality were being constructed, there were other social experiences in that space that had to do with the aftermath of the annexation of all of the Southwest. 51.2 percent of Mexico's empire was taken during the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848, after which they miraculously found gold and the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, which had protected the rights of Mexicans in the territory to land, culture and language, was disavowed and rendered useless. But in the twenty and thirty years after the annexation, there were guerrilla wars that continued, similar to the guerrilla wars in the Third World, to take back the land. Although the history texts show an even progress, there were in fact some gaps, regressions, battles and struggles.

This is the work of John Valadez. It is part of a Frontera Border series he did for a show that Judy and a number of others were in that I curated, called "The Art of the Other Mexico," which was the first major show of Chicanos in a number of years that traveled to Mexico City. What was important about it was that it established a kind of visual trajectory of the unfolding quality of the border. It's very mythic and emblematic, and captures some of the struggles and fantasies around the border, and like many of the works that deal with contested space, they began to investigate how we have lived in those spaces. The work of Carmen Lomas Garca is another manifestation of how the land has been represented. When you posit Carmen's images against the images of Bierdstaadt, or you think of how farmworkers are depicted now as almost criminals, you see how essential it was to reaffirm through these traditional forms of painting a kind of spatial respect, a kind of memory of productivity and labor, a dignity that could not be found in any other way. The use of space, the history of space, the representation of space is a project in which artists intervene. These pictures are pictures that healed. They were seen by generations of Chicanos, they continue to circulate.

"Piscandos Lopalitos" was first exhibited in 1981 at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. It circulated in traveling shows. It is part of children's books. It has become a kind of icon for many people who have left behind the rural life, but still have memories of that communal space. At the counterpoint is always the contestation, the struggle. You see the women battling in the camps. I like to imagine that is my grandmother as she raised her children in the migrant camps and was quite famous as a healer and as someone who fought for the rights of the farm workers in her camp. When my father's last brother died about three years ago, at the funeral was one representative of every single one of the families that my grandmother and her children had lived with in the migrant camps. Somehow these people who had lived in camps together had intermarried, been godparents to each other's children, had maintained a connection that was anchored in their shared work in the land.

The images of the repatriation, which is a nice word for deportation, of 500,000 Mexicans from Los Angeles and San Antonio in the Depression era, is a kind of response to the fear that America's economic problems were because Mexicans were taking jobs. It is a similar theme as is heard today. Somehow these jobs that no one else wants to do that are being done by Mexicans and Latinos have something to do with why America isn't successful. It is why we had to reform welfare, why we had to develop Proposition 187. This deportation process was sanctioned by the U.S. and Mexican governments. It was a process in which people were led to believe that they could return to Mexico, that there might be land there for them. In that antic, anecdotal way that we contest history, my uncles were repatriated with an older man who had owned a shoe store to see if they could find land for the family. When they got to the other end in Mexico, the campesinos came out of the hills with machetes, saying there was no land for them. The Mexican and U.S. governments didn't really care where they ended up. The older man eventually committed suicide. He had used all his money to close up the store and leave. My uncles were left in the southern part of Mexico, far from any family, and they made their way back because my uncle was a boxer. They staged boxing matches all the way back to the U.S. It took them two years. It became a source of fabulous stories told in my family for years. When my brother was born, he was given a tiny pair of boxing gloves. Boxing and, later, baseball were the two avenues, besides movies, through which Mexicans could make their way out of the barrio.

The repatriation is one view of land, land that is transmigrated, that is excluded. But then there is the image of the poster of the late seventies by Yolanda Lopez which asks whose land is it. Judy Baca, whose work you saw earlier, revitalized land. Sometimes spaces seem to be dead or fixed. Or sometimes it seems to be abstract. Rarely do we treat it as a concrete, lived, social reality. In "The Great Wall of Los Angeles," Judy re-naturalized a natural landscape. The river of Los Angeles has been cemented over. By re-citing/sighting/siting the histories of those who had occupied the space, she brought the river to life again. She brought the landscape back into its own lived memory. It had been the same site of all those histories and struggles. At the same time, she cited within the site a long-known story of the displacement of Mexicans for the development of Los Angeles. Los Angeles redevelopment is really Mexican relocation. There has always been a way to get prime real estate by moving Mexicans further and further out. It is a city founded by twenty-two so-called Spaniards. Of the twenty-two, three-quarters were indigenous mulattos. There were only two Spaniards. Judy brought back that history in the image of the division of the barrios and Chavez ravine. The concept of the division of barrios is this understanding that without advocacy and representation for our land in Southern California, we have been at the mercy of penitentiaries and freeways. Anytime they wanted to put something where there might be a hue and cry, they simply moved it to a Mexican district.

Judy worked with diverse communities, used their histories, their narratives, their language to embed in the reclaimed space the knowledge and wisdom of their own social practices. At any moment, anyone waiting for the Metrorail can look down and see the statistics of Native life, see the dance patterns of traditional dances. They can walk the dances. They can remember, along with the population, what that space was once about. For those who are intervening in the public space, it's of great importance to look for the stories. Walter Benjamin always said that the anecdote is the antidote to history. It is the way we know what history has never told us. Those narratives and voices are at our fingertips. Judy worked across a variety of differences in constructing an intersection of social space that could activate for the public its own narrative and popular practice.

I have been working for a while on a piece called "Private Landscapes and Public Territories." This is the first installation of it, which took place in Copenhagen, in a show called "Interzones," which was about the idea of interstices, the spaces between dichotomies. I was looking for the space between what is private and what is public. I was using my family history to talk about the history of annexation. The narrative I am developing in a three-dimensional sense, the human geography runs from 1998 to 1848. I am only part way through the process, up to the 1860s. I have been documenting, through public records and family interviews and materials, the places they have lived in. I talked earlier about how identity was for so long seen as forged in a sense of peoplehood, but now, I think, there has been an interest in identity framed within geographies. My human geography has to do with every place from Mexico City to Guadalajara to Xacatecas to Blythe, California to Pueblo, Colorado. My family transmigrated the border many times as workers and laborers. I have found the rivers and mountains, trees and plants, healing cures that were part of their natural landscape and narrative. That is juxtaposed, eventually, to the social politics of the annexation and the reality of what we exist in now as a deterritorialized people.

The same quotes that I use to talk about an innocent spatiality and how human geographies can be corrupted, how stories can be hidden, are written on the walls of my garden. Within my armoire is an altar, much in the tradition of the early altars that took place outdoors in a landscape. I am collecting and honoring the histories of many families, not just my family. Eventually, I hope to do a garden project with it, where I begin to collect the stories of families whose plants and indigenous healing traditions have been part of that human geography of displacement. One of the difficulties in doing this kind of work is that it doesn't sit completely within a museum or gallery tradition. It doesn't sit completely within a public art tradition. For that, I think it is important to start looking at those blurred distinctions and boundaries, and not continue to see public art as a process that comes out of civic concepts of commissioning or corporate notions of spatial control. We should start thinking back on the tactics that artists used from all the early social movements to take space and work through space with families and neighborhoods.

Some individual artists are inclined in special ways to inquire through their own bodies and their own spiritual life to the spaces they have come from. I feel lucky that Anna Mendieta was on this earth for some amount of time. Many of you know that she died in the eighties. It was a scandalous and controversial death that involved the artist Carl Andre. What is important is the legacy of work that she left behind. Her silhouette series is probably one of the most important works done by any artist, but particularly from the point of view of gender and space. She left Cuba as a young child, without her parents. She was in a foster home with her sister for many years in Iowa, found her way to New York, was a prolific artist, questioning in performance and other installation spaces some of the most important issues women were facing then. Through it all, she saw the reclaiming of her own family history. At one point she went back to Cuba, worked in Mexico, and went back to Iowa. In each place, through the silhouettes, she re-embodied herself in the earth. Are these metaphors of mother earth? Are these the paradigms of nature and culture? Woman and man? I think, in fact, she captures the idea of the corpus of culture and excavates and unearths. She makes the public place of women, who for so many years were controlled by private spaces.

Only after the advent of the metropolis were women finally allowed out of sewing rooms and drawing rooms. If you read Edith Wharton or Henry James you get a clear picture of how women couldn't even appear on the street talking to a man late at night, unaccompanied, without having her entire life ruined. Women's lives were controlled by interior spaces. They were considered private material. This breaking of ground in the public space, which we know only in terms of modernity, has been requestioned in the terms of post modernity. Anna's work has caused us to question the temporal, the permanent, what is nature, what is landscape, history and memory, the politics of identity, dislocation.

I like very much the work of Griselda Pollock. I am sure many of you know her Vision and Difference, in which she talks about how art is not just a reflection of ideology, but a construction of it, that art can construct identities, reproduce them, and distribute them. Women can remake themselves through traditions like art making and language. The spaces of femininity operate not only at the level of what is represented in the drawing room or sewing room. The spaces of femininity are those from which femininity is lived, as positionality and discourse and social practice. They are a product of a lived sense of social relatedness, mobility and visibility in the social relation of seeing and being seen. Shaped within sexual politics of looking, they demarcate a particular social organization of gays, which itself works back to secure a particular ordering of sexual difference. Femininity is both a condition and the effect. So if you think about Anna's work, you recognize that she creates an absence of her body. In each space there is something missing. The absence of her body is the presence of her history and her femininity. It calls into question other issues about culture and gender that we have not been able to make in feminist discourse, a really strong intersection between gender and culture. Consequently, we have had a kind of division and separation around issues within the art world and other aspects of academia in feminist discourse. It is only the new generation who is beginning to pull back those divisions and create those intersections. I think we are inspired by the works of someone like Anna because they ask us to investigate our own landscapes, our own interior spaces.

I would like to finish with the notion of everyday life. Some would call it the vernacular. LeFebre's critique of everyday life talks a lot about alienation as an artifact of modernity and how it was that people found their way to the balance of that alienation by constructing practices in popular culture and everyday life that would give them the sense of meaning, of being connected. Once again, when you look into a Mexican or Latino community, you see histories like the "America Tropicale," the Siquieros mural, on one side and the burgeoning mural tradition of Los Angeles muralists on the other side. Murals have been another space of marking those human geographies. At the same time, the vendadores, those who sell the fruits and ice cream cones, are part of the flow of everyday life that helps people mark themselves and see themselves connected to others, remember the vendadores in the countries they came from. Once again, I think of the surveillance notion that one of the habitual practices of LAPD is to spend their time trying to arrest people who sell food to other people, confiscating their carts, trying to clear the space. Sometimes when I take the shuttle from LAX into downtown LA I see a continuous unfolding of different neighborhoods and watching as one blurs into the next; in each of them the quality of everyday life is different. Who is fixing cars? Who is selling food on the streets? Who is playing boom boxes? Who is dancing? Whose walls are painted? All those aspects are the creation of a social space in which public discourse takes place.

The commodification of everyday life, what is sold, what is being bought, who is engaged in the transaction are all part of making visible what is invisible. Someone called it the spaces of spectacle, the idea being that without access to the larger social and public spaces, ethnic communities create their own: smaller, more informal, more intimate. Consequently, they are their own version of the spectacle, of street life and everyday life. Circling through those manifestations of popular culture are materials that some would say are part of the stereotype, but they get liberated periodically. Judy's liberated the panchos, the sleeping Mexicans, and turned them into a series on land, family and afterlife. In claiming the vestiges and residue of everyday life, we engage in a practice that we call rasquachismo. When you were young, if someone scruffy would be at an event, someone would lean over and whisper, "Aiee, so rasquache." That would mean he is so downtrodden, so down, but at the same time it became a way of talking about survival and resiliency.

Tomas Ybarra Frausto has written a profound, foundational article on this that is in the Chicano Art Resistance and Affirmation catalogue by the Wide Art Gallery. In it, he talks about the traditions of the street theater, yard shrines being made from broken plates, old marbles, leftover Clorox bottles. When he is talking, he is talking about a conversation he is having with Peter Rodriguez, the founder of the Mexican Museum. They are talking about who's really rasquache, naming people who are and aren't. They had made lists of high and low rasquache. Finally, Peter said, "I think you and I are the only two people who aren't really rasquache, and I am not even sure about you." Rasquachismo then became appropriated by Chicanos, theorizing out of practice. It is not like kitsch, which is one class looking into another. Rasquachismo is coming up out of your own class and appropriating from your own class techniques and strategies which you then place in another context. It means making the most from the least, taking what is available and recycling it, using humor and irony, and it is a sign of resiliency.

Among the artifacts of the practices of everyday life and popular culture are the signs of resiliency that help people to survive. Within the yard shrine and the decoration of low rider cars, within the cotillions, the Quineciners, for fifteen-year old girls, all of those traditions are constantly the struggle for resiliency, for abundance, for aesthetic pride, for cultural iconography, for all the things that signify to a community that they exist, whether or not anyone else acknowledges it. Chicano artists took that tradition and brought it out into the mainstream museums of the country. Judy Baca's piece is a form of rasquachismo. There are milagros, pennies. She cast a version of a tourist milagro. Yolanda Lopez used the materials from the grocery store, the kind of reselling of Mexican identity, things I never told my son about being Mexican, and turns it into an installation in the "Decade" show at the New Museum: how identities are formed and framed by cultural experiences that transcend the border. In David Avelos's work on the border crossing, the tourist photography that people take with donkey carts, the donkey carts then become scenes of murder and mutilations of Mexican migrants by the border patrol. These artists take the popular culture and the general understanding of tourism and replace it and restate it.

I'd like to end with this piece which is one of the pieces we study in our class in ways of seeing in the program I am working with. It has to do with the idea of how public space is constructed through mass media devices, our representations of landscape have given way to representations of fast food ideas about culture. David Avalos takes the bus poster, Welcome to America's Finest Plantation, San Diego in 1988 at the Superbowl when San Diego was host to the greatest number of tourists it has ever had. David Avalos traveled on 100 buses around San Diego. A bus bench series that I didn't show are also part of it. What is significant about it is how much he used the very mass media traditions that he was subverting, and how he used the spectacle that is so much a part of the Superbowl as the site for interrogating the nature of San Diego's civic life. He made the invisible visible. These are images from the newspaper and television. It was extremely controversial. It was at the beginning of the controversies in NEA and led to other important pieces, one of which is "Rebate," in which he took the money that he was given in a commission and redistributed it to workers who were willing to sign their rebate form.

At all times and in all places, we are engaging in the making of space. We may call it social, or geographic or physical but, at all times, we are in the process of making that space. Somehow, we are called to inquire into where that space changes from the public to the private. Is there private space within public space? Are we privatizing public space for a particular group of corporate people in many of the cities of this country? How are we inventing space? How are we reclaiming the memories of those spaces? What are the varieties of means and strategies that artists are engaged in? I think that when we talk about public art, we have to have a broader vocabulary. In the last few years we have been locked in. I know the people who have spoken about community in context, about race and class and gender, about issues of place and historical meaning, and those who will talk about rural and urban identities; all will be talking about the making of art and the constituting of the civic dialogue. One of the big discussions going on now in the foundation world is the idea of civil society. I never think it is very civil living in California. It is a word that comes out of notions about the failure of government, the collapse of cities, and the idea that communities and individuals will take on the responsibility for creating a more humane condition.

I think it is more complicated than that. In order to create that civil society, we have to interrogate the past history of those spaces and look at the practices we engage in as civic processes in those communities. Who makes up the panels? How are communities that engaged in transforming space funded? Is there a way to move into the space between the spaces of the public and the private? What role will artists play in connection with other disciplines, such as environmentalists, policy makers, academics, demographers, social architects? There has to be an investigation and accountability and history making in the way in which we attack this notion of public and private space. We have to make for ourselves a space that we would be willing to share with someone else. We don't talk enough about the sincerity of our own lives. Sometimes, especially with the advent of post modernity and the sophistication of critiques that had to do with community life, we have lost the thread of sincere community making that the vendadores are part of, that yard shrines reflect. We should have our bags always packed with good theory, and our glue guns and maps, but should also carry with us in our hearts some sense of the space we would like to have had for ourselves. Thank you.

Synopsis by Leigh Anne Langwell

Amalia Mesa-Bains views installation and ceremonial work as a reciprocal way of working with the public and anchoring lived practice in existing theory. She states that Latino artists have to move between many ways of working as well as between family, community and the fine arts arena. For Chicano/a artists, the goal is to create and define community space, educate the public and to create a theoretical framework for what is accomplished so the role of the artist as maker and thinker can be expanded to include activist and educator. There is an attraction to Marxism with capitalism serving as a ground for social production. Who is allowed into social spaces and who is kept out is often an issue of economics. Who inhabits and controls agricultural spaces and how are these extended into the private realms of the individual, also, has a great impact on Latino communities.

Public space is social by nature, just as social practices are spatial in nature and constantly evolving. The Chicano revitalization of "Dia de los Muerte," in particular, embodies theories that embrace spaces as experiential and that contain history and presence before they are encountered. Questions relating to what happens to these spaces when people leave or move, and who maintains watch and transforms these spaces when they are vacated are central to these issues. Death in relation to social space is open-ended as no space is considered empty and a multiplicity of spaces can exist in one location.

Practices that mark an event occurring at a particular site serve to privatize public geographies. Sites such as yard shrines and offrendas behave as a crossroads where personal sacred display meets and defines a relationship to the community. The need to mark a devotional space where an event of importance has occurred organizes people to create a social space, however, class creates restrictions so alternative social spaces often need to be created. For example, the fountain at the Queens Museum was closed to the public, yet the Latino community transformed it into a ritualized social space for public encounter that served to renovate more traditional Latino forms of social interaction.

Much is in the process and change and loss with the Anglicization of traditional Latino language and social practice, which eventually excludes Latinos from their own culture. It is imperative to recreate and reclaim culture through the redefinition of space and the recreation of history and memory. Many Latinos are dislocated from their own family histories by immigration policies and economic institutions that keep people migratory to ensure a continuous pool of labor. Land rights, health issues and exploitation by agricultural institutions are also major issues in their history. Humor and popular culture are often used to expose these issues in works such as "Sun Mad" by Esther Hernandez.

Bains states that there needs to be an examination of the notion that landscape or open space is "innocent." Memory acts as a bridge between past and present and between one location and another. Transient actions and events add intensity and meaning to permanent locations and traditions. Open land often is portrayed in white European tradition as pristine and without previous history or cultural occupation, ready for the superimposition of a manifest destiny. Contest and struggle over land rights is central to much of Latino history and has to do with resistance to the takeover of land that was home to people, history and traditions ignored by newer political and cultural agents. Judith Baca’s community mural project, "Great Wall, LA", renaturalizes the river/border landscape and brings it to the center of history, experience and memory. Displacement is the primary theme in the work as it relates to all cultures and their respective histories, but touches specifically on the founding of Los Angeles as rooted in the displacement of the Latino/Mestizo peoples.

Bains states that in her altarpiece installations, identity is framed within the geographies one inhabits. Geographic and political borders are crossed many times over so that landscape and narrative are juxtaposed with annexation and the loss of land. Because of this loss, guerrilla tactics of taking a space in order to reclaim it are sometimes used. Ana Mendieta’s silhouettes were mentioned as an example of artwork used to reclaim a more public space for women, challenging the earlier relegation of private space as the only acceptable space for women to occupy.

Bains quoted Henri Lefebre on the idea that alienation is an artifact of modernity, and suggested that new practices of everyday life need to be created to reestablish connection and meaning. Within Latino neighborhoods, social spaces are created by signs, language and commodification. In Latino artwork, mundane and sometimes stereotypical materials are liberated to reclaim the vestiges of everyday life. Rasquache describes objects or materials that are worn from use, but are resilient and retain the history of their use. Rasquachismo is the appropriation of techniques and materials from their own culture, not only to reinforce older traditions but, also, to add new insights to them.

Mesa-Bains concluded her presentation with a call to broaden the vocabulary in public art and public dialogue, to examine the histories and practices that are incorporated within public space and to define the role that artists can play in the construction and reclamation of public spaces.

Analysis by George Kimmerling

In the effort to define meaningful critical practices in public art, Amalia Mesa-Bains added a critical component: the connection between identity and place and the understanding that place and identity influence each other.

By expanding the terms of analysis beyond the understanding of public space to the historical importance of place as a location for the creation of cultural identities over time, Mesa-Bains broadened the seminar’s inquiry from one concerned with art that serves communities to art practices that can mark and reclaim territory, uncover masked or forgotten histories and testify to personal as well as community experience.

Part of Mesa-Bains’ success in bringing these issues to the foreground is her Marxist-based emphasis on material practice. Thus, the critical understanding of space lies in understanding who controls space and its use, and who is allowed to inhabit the space, for how long and for what purposes. Farmworker history, she noted as an example is often hidden in dominant culture not because of vague notions of cultural hegemony, but because housing laws keep workers from settling down in certain areas.

In addition, she maintained that theories relevant to community-based art, as for all social-change strategies, derive from practice, not the reverse. Similarly, for her, one of the most critical areas for public-art practice is communities’ historical, economic and social positions, and whether those histories and cultural contributions have been erased, as the Latino roots of California city names have been obscured.

History is also at the heart of Mesa-Bains' claim that Ana Mendieta’s "Silhouette" series is one of the most important artistic investigations of gender/space relationships. In this work, Mendieta’s personal history dictated the siting of the pieces in Iowa, Cuba and Mexico. On a more embracing level, the work also inserted women into public space at a time when women’s space still largely meant domestic space. Mendieta marked this territory as a place where she once lived and challenged the notion that outdoor space was gendered masculine. The work thus re-formed the sites and announced the interconnections among the meanings of individual identity, gender and ethnic identity, and place. Mendieta left the sites of her work changed, reclaimed.

Public art, then, can make explicit a hidden presence, whether historical or current day. Rather than introduce a new element into the physical or cultural landscape, art like Mendieta’s uncovers what has been there already. "Her work is the absence of her body. In that, it is the presence of her," Mesa-Bains said. Similarly, Judy Baca’s mural re-inserted into the Los Angeles landscape the presence of Latino, Asian, African-American and other struggles that shaped the modern city.

Mesa-Bains called for broadening the context of public art. She urged a joining of art practice and civil dialogue, so that artists work with historians, demographers, economists and social workers in recording a history accountable to all communities present. Her emphasis on the historical understanding of place and identity provides one example of how such cooperation can work in practice.