Futurism’s Aftermath: Extinction & Survival

Project M.A.S.A. could be viewed as a contemporary Chicano/a interpretation of early 20th century Russian Futurism, (distinct from the Chicanafuturism, scholar, Catherine Ramirez explores in her work), as many works reflect a fascination with violence, time-space velocity, and technology. In fact, artist, Diego Rivera, was a proponent of Marxist penchants relative to Futurism’s communist roots, positioning himself as an artist of the proletariat, painting public murals to educate and inspire greater society. Artists effectively communicate with and educate la comunidad within a highly culturally specific set of didactics, contradicting mainstream assumptions that contemporary Chicanos/as are non-critical recipients of our history as ‘oppressed peoples’. These artists create their means of production, and as in the case of Gallista Gallery, their means of exhibition and sales. Futurism’s influence on Project M.A.S.A. vastly diminished once the human rights issues took their quintessentially Chicano/a position. However, lingering intersections between Futurism and Project M.A.S.A., offered images depicting an aftermath to Futuristic obsessions gone awry.

Post? Quinto Sol/2012—(the Aztec’s predicted end of the world) scenarios and stories where Chicanos/as make a mass exodus to a new life on another planet, or face extinction, abounded within Project M.A.S.A. Perhaps technology, industry, war, and globalization accelerated the inhabitability of planet Earth. In the case of San Diego, CA, artist collective, Chicano Aeronautic Space Agency’s (C.A.S.A), Time Capsule and Time Capsule Data, a conceptual sculpture dignant of a performance piece, cleverly uses wordsmithing, character sketches, and hypotheses, in constructing a world where seven Chicanonauts discover artifacts from their ancestors on the ‘Brown side of the moon’ (during the first exodus). This groups plays with notions of artifact, excavation, and alternative historicity in to frame Chicano/a contributions to humanity on Earth. Foods, low-riders, Mexican revolutionaries, and even saints are described within a text saturated in a new outer space Chicano/a lexicon.

Meso-American culture has always been deeply rooted in the observation and recording of cosmic events and cycles. This is evident both in the art and mythology of Meso-America. Familiarity of and use of outer space iconography (partially influenced by The Space Race) in the new millennium has provided yet another vehicle for Chicano artists to use for their purposes. Many young Chican@s were inspired to pursue the sciences because of this. Chican@ artists have also been inspired adopting and using outer space iconography to convey issues of identity, immigration, racial prejudice, politics, etc. The styles and manners are varied, but the thread is universal. Project M.A.S.A. is a national collaboration of Chican@ artists that reaches across time and space to represent yet anther side of "La Raza Cosmica".

Revealing the presence of :

• Chicana@ Issues
• Chicana@ Culture
• World issue as related to Chicana@s
• : in a modern global society through the use of modern outerspace iconography.
  

Review-
Project M.A.S.A: MeChicano Alliance of Space Artists
Gallista Gallery, San Antonio, TX
By Irma Carolina Rubio

Project M.A.S.A: MeChicano Alliance of Space Artists, a group exhibit held from October 1-31, 2005 at one of San Antonio’s premier Chicano/a art spaces, Gallista Gallery, engaged viewers with multiple angles of Chicano/a culture’s relationship to outer space. Artists were offered an alternative site to manifest perspectives on border-identity, U.S. xenophobia, science, technology, Pre-Columbian cosmology, spirituality, and pop-culture. In this diverse show curated and conceived by artist and art educator, Luis Valderas, over forty-five artists, of which nine were women, contributed pieces running the gamut of painting, drawing, text, paper sculpture, photography, video, conceptual sculpture, metal smithing, and found objects. Valderas stated that artists of Project M.A.S.A straddled, "across time and space to represent yet another side of "La Raza Cosmica". Artists from San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley, Austin, and Dallas, Texas joined the work of artists from Los Angeles, San Diego, Califas, New Mexico, and Colorado.

In genuine community spirit, participating artists were not sifted through a curatorial process based upon technique, notoriety, collector’s tastes, age, gender or ethnicity alone. While Valderas expressed the exhibit’s mission was to "establish an awareness of outer space as an integral part of the Chicano(a) Modern Mythos/Reality/Iconography," rigid limitations were not set regarding the voices represented. All artists were considered experts on their relationship with the cosmos, self-taught and formally trained artists, non-Chicano/a artists, curators, community activists, architects, historians, and physicists were among those who participated.

Opening night was an intergenerational fusion of community, outer space Chicanidad, and Mesoamerican ritual. San Antonio based, Danzantes Teocali, blessed the gallery space and those in attendance. These danzantes honored four corners of the universe filling the air with sacred drum, copal incense smoke, and plumed Aztecan baile. Audience members participated in a communal dance, accentuating the paradigm that Chicano/a art spaces son del pueblo: accessible, relevant and dynamic.

Project M.A.S.A., a play on N.A.S.A (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), and the dough, masa traditionally made of ground corn, and a staple in many Chicano/a diets, afford several layers of interpretation by artists and viewers alike. Cornmeal has a mythological locus within numerous indigenous creation myths of the Americas. The Maya, Dine, and Quechua are among many Indigenous cultures that revere cornmeal as a scared substance, essential to well-being and a healthy society. Similarly, art making and viewing, is a malleable and nourishing cultural practice which sustains and energizes Chicano/a heritage by articulating alma, psyche, voice, and our physical experience as peoples beyond the mainstream’s grand narrative, binarisms, mono-linguism, and fronteras. In reference to our creative ability to reconstruct history and heal wounds through the arts, Chicana cultural theorist, Gloria Anzaldua wrote in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, "Encrucijadas, haunted by voices and images that violated us, bearing the pains of the past, we are slowly acquiring the tools to change the disabling images and memories, to replace them with self-affirming ones, to recreate our pasts and alter them—for the past can be as malleable as the present," (xxvii). Artists in Project M.A.S.A., women and men alike, form their vision of Chicano/a post-colonial experience and identity, with dexterity comparable to veteran tamaleras/os.
Strong and prevalent conceptual threads throughout Project M.A.S.A. included the following: Futurism’s aftermath: extinction and survival; Great Mother Goddess: Creator, healer and protector spirit; Tongue-in-cheek interrogations of legal/illegal alien status; and Recontextualizations of found objects and traditional Mexican crafts.

Deborah Kuetzpalin Vasquez’s mixed media work, Cortando Chile y Hechando Tortillas en Outer Space.

Self-taught San Antonio artist, Angelica Gomez, uses toothpicks and q-tips in executing her figurative oil and acrylic paintings.

San Diego, CA, artist collective, Chicano Aeronautic Space Agency’s (C.A.S.A), Time Capsule and Time Capsule Data

Recontextualizations: Found Objects and Traditional Mexican Crafts.

Nearly 90% of Project M.A.S.A entrees were paintings or drawings, leaving a narrow margin of Chicano/a artists who explored untraditional media in their work. Those who employed found objects, recycled materials, and traditional Mexican art forms, such as papel picado and sculpture, tapped into the aspects of "La Raza Cosmica" previously unexplored.

Via unexpected assemblages of found objects and reuse, San Antonio based, deconstructionist architect, Gabriel Quintero Velasquez, made Raza Cosmica: Appraritions I-II, using red and blue bandana cloths, evocative of opposing street gang culture, superimposing a burned flour tortilla on each. Juxtaposed against the boldness of paisley patterned cloths, the tortillas allude to solar and lunar disks, one at high noon, and the other in late evening sky. Velasquez invites viewers to imagine the sacred or secular within the tortilla’s burned patches, similar to finding a face on the moon, or witnessing the milagro of La Virgen de Guadalupe appearing in the water stains of an urban underpass. Here, the viewer’s imagination and relationship with barrio life is the greatest contribution to interpreting this work’s simple, yet eloquent depth.

San Antonio artist, Felipe Vasquez’s Paper Spaceship, takes an ancient indigenous art form practiced by the Otomi Indians in the mountains of Puebla, Mexico to form a well-crafted pop-culture rendition of a space ship. This medium, is not related to the Chinese papel picado associated with fiesta banners. Rather, amatl paper or other natural pulp papers are used to create relief-like sculpture that like Paper Spaceship, produce elegant shadows when properly lit. The fact this space ship is made of paper adds a dimension of temporality and non- technological aggression to the piece.

Luis Chispas Guerrero, San Antonio, based metals artist, transformed junkyard metal scraps and engine parts to produce, Red Rocket, a slightly phallic sculpture with a red bullet like bodice toped with a drill like tip that could penetrate, not only the earth’s atmosphere, but, her crusts as well. The piece has a robotic aesthetic, and seems to function via remote control, leaving human hands out of its potential expedition. While this work is not flamingly tied with Chicano/a identity, connections are still discernable between a Chicano/a’s relationship with technology, the industrialized world, and exploration, geographical and intellectual.

Conclusion

While the breadth of this exhibit was refreshingly non-elitist, perhaps future Project M.A.S.A exhibits should zero in on significant didactic and thematic strains, or at least make clear for the viewer, the artist’s intentions in relation to those themes. Audiences less familiar with Chicano/a and Mexican American use of indigenous mythology, barrio pop-culture, and other culturally specific matters, will benefit from a more organized distribution of work, along with more descriptive wall-text. Furthermore, the abundance of men in Project M.A.S.A. is highly disproportionate to women, therefore a stronger effort should be made in attracting Chicana /Mexicana artists to next year’s show, particularly due to their keen awareness and analysis of women in globalization, technology, science, creation stories, spirituality, and as transmitters of tradition.

Aside from these curatorial details, Project M.A.S.A successfully engaged the public with multiple facets of Chicano/a issues at once: from those intimately narrative to those situated within larger contexts of contemporary border identity, philosophy and metaphysics. The search for our reflection in artwork of "La Raza Cosmica" is meaningful and serves as an umbilical chord with founding elders of Chicano/a movements and our contemporary progress towards liberation.

Project M.A.S.A # 2 will coincide with the Fall Equinox in 2006. If you are interested in submitting work for this exhibit, please contact Luis Valderas: valderas@projectmasa.com. The themes sought parallel or expand upon those presented in this article. To view more work from Project M.A.S.A. #1, visit, http://projectmasa.com.

Participating artists: Arturo Almeida, Jesus Alvarado, Rolando Briseño, Jesus ‘Chista’ Cantu, Enrique Fernandez, Jorge Cinseros, Ruben C. Cordova, L.A. David, José Esquivel, Celina Hinojosa, Marie Garza, Xavier Garza, Angelica Gomez, Carlos Gomez, Quintin Gonzalez, Ray Gonzalez, Daniel Guerrero, Luis Guerrero, Serg Hernandez, Paul Karam, Joe Lopez, The C.A.S.A. Chicanonauts from San Diego, Califas, David Martinez, Laura Molina, Sandra A. Moreno, Cristina Nava, Cruz Ortiz, Carlos Harrison-Pompa, Larry Portillo, Felipe Reyes, Alex Rubio, Mary Agnes Rodriguez, Mauricio Saenz, Anna Salinas, Shawn Saumell, Raul Servin, Victor Tello, Lawrence Trujillo, Luis Valderas, Deborah Kuetzpalin Vasquez, Felipe Vasquez, Ramon Vasquez y Sanchez, Gabriel Velasquez, y David Zamora-Casas.

In Un Sueño Cosmico, a mixed media painting by San Antonio artist, Joe Lopez, depicts an Indigenous girl, pensive and alone, as though she is the last of her "Raza Cosmica" left on desolate planet. She wears a protective glass orb over her head. The possible decimation of Chicano/a and Indigenous peoples is articulated in this work and in others which emphasize our people’s capacity to survive and transcend all obstacles, whether colonial holocausts, financial inequity, or the lack of oxygen. Her voice remains present, going beyond her protective helmet and into the atmosphere, in red speech scrolls also present within ancient codices.
Luis Valderas’s bold serigraph, United States of La Muerte, replaces stars on the U.S. flag with abstracted calaveras, and leading four white trails of exhaust across red stripes of flowing blood are four war missiles.

Valderas’s commentary on U.S. foreign policy and global war on terrorism speaks to the U.S.’s militarized government use of cutting edge technology to violently insurrect governments and impose democracy upon nations with comparatively poorer defenses. His work also alludes to the use of outer space as a launching point for missiles of mass destruction. Simplified graphic replacements of symbols such as the 51 stars per state, invert concepts of U.S. patriotism, eulogize the lives lost in imperialistic invasions/insurrections, and find rent, all serious interest in human lives. The U.S. symbol of ‘liberty and justice’ transforms into a macabre emblem perhaps foreboding what has long been the destiny of every major empire in history: death, a disintegration of society, and loss of global power.

San Antonio based Chicana Feminist artist, Deborah Kuetzpalin Vasquez’s mixed media work, Cortando Chile y Hechando Tortillas en Outer Space, shows two Chicanas, perhaps 3rd generation immigrants to the planet they casually go about their culinary business on. The Earth pulsating red in the distance, suggests an environmental crisis and consequent inhabitability. La cocina is set-up, complete with comal, appliances, and a ceramic image of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Vasquez graciously illustrates feminine cultural resilience, imagining the possible relevance Mexican cultural heritage and tradition would have if we migrated to outer space. The women tortean, prepare chile, and seem at ease that their vegetables drift into the universe, aware that they are nourishing the cosmos with the finest fruits of planet Earth, cultivated by the hands of Chicanos/as/ and Latino/a immigrants. These women are survivors, a theme that translates into Project M.A.S.A’s pieces of the Great Mother Goddess.

Great Mother Goddess: Creator, Healer and Protector Spirit

The resonating and universal cultural reference within Project M.A.S.A. is the Great Mother Goddess whose energy as creator, healer of the world, and sacred ancestor dominated the exhibits. She is represented in the form of Aztec goddess Tonatzín, mestiza, Virgen de Guadalupe, and super-women who’s genius lies in adaptation, survival, and curative abilities. These feminine archetypes exist in depictions of planet Earth and of the cosmos, indicating that within the Chicano psyche, her presence synthesizes space and time within Indigenous worldviews and Catholicism.

Self-taught San Antonio artist, Angelica Gomez, uses toothpicks and q-tips in executing her figurative oil and acrylic paintings. In Estrellas Para La Bandera, a determined Chicana plucks stars from the night sky to mend a U.S. flag. According to Angelica, the women she paints represent all beautiful and sacrificing Latina women who heal the wounds of their families disrupted by natural disasters, violence and poverty. Estrellas Para La Bandera speaks of a rip within the U.S.’s sense of security following Hurricane Katrina and the loss of human lives in the Iraq war. The woman dons enormous Virgen de Guadalupe earnings, an intense gaze, and her work is lit by the universal feminine symbol, la luna.

David B. Martinez’s, of Austin, TX, has long created what he terms, ‘new mythology’, drawing from physicists and global goddesses. His painting, Ozone Prayer, reminiscent of the flat profile rendering of Pre-Colombian figures found on Mayan and Teotihuacanan murals, shows a powerful youthful woman harmoniously dancing on a hill teaming with wildlife. Numerous indigenous peoples of the Americas built their cities on hills or mountains and evoked spirits at such altitudes, as they were believed to possess refined cosmic vibrations. Healthy communities prospered on higher elevations protecting them from torrential floods, and invasion. The young woman points a healing rod of herbs towards Earth’s atmosphere to heal the ozone layer’s hole, thus protecting all humanity and honoring the planet’s need for recovery.

San Antonio Artist and director of Centro Cultural Aztlan, Ramon Vasquez y Sanchez’s La Niña Cosmica depicts the Virgen de Guadalupe as a child, dressed in her white primera comunión dress, resplendent with a halo of white daisies and radiating blades of light. She smiles with adult maturity while hovering over a swirl clouded planet Earth. A flat image of La Virgen de Guadalupe projects out from earth behind the girl. A human fetus enveloped by aqua and pale yellow layers of cosmic placenta floats next to the near explosive face of Ollín, the Aztec god of earthquakes and movement. This character often represents the sun, whose tongue is a sharp obsidian blade, thirsty for the blood of humanity to keep it shining. Chicano, Mexican and Pre-Spanish invasion iconography are combined in this celestial depiction of creation, where the feminine energy of La Virgen de Guadalupe is the protagonist. Here the Chicano and Mexican belief that women can emulate the sacred spiritual life of the Virgen, surfaces, in the little girl who is one more incarnation of the Virgen’s refined spirit and sacred female attributes.

San Antonio community activist and artist, Mary Agnes Rodriguez, portrays a contemporary Tonatzín like mother in her acrylic painting, Chicana Vision. This sunglass-wearing woman could also be a self-portrait where the artist surveys and protects the Earth’s atmosphere. She catches pebbles strewn towards her at the split of Quetzalcoatl’s tail; the great plumed serpent, a unifying entity of heaven and earth. Sun burns in close proximity to Earth where nearly all the surface is under water, aside from a few red patches. Similar to Ozone Prayer, a female protective energy interacts with Earth’s atmosphere; only here she is watched not by butterflies and rabbits, but by three alien spacecrafts far smaller than her extraordinary proportions.
There is a sophisticated sense that even if we are deported or choose to leave planet earth, our spirituality, icons, traditions and ancestors remain present in the universe, a space free of borders, ethnic categories and human struggle.

Tongue-in-cheek Interrogations of Alien Status in the U.S. and Outer Space

In light of recent legislation: Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, passed in December 2005, Chicano/a art discussing the racist and irrational polemics of anti-immigration laws is all the more imperative. According to Marcel Sanchez, with the Washington Post, "The bill, one of the harshest in decades, would fund the building of nearly 700 miles of new high-tech fences along the U.S.-Mexico border and make illegal immigration a felony." The U.S. presently shares over 2,000 miles of border with Mexico with over 37 points of entry. Tongue in cheek interrogations of illegal and legal alien status in the U.S. are comically yet candidly offered in Project M.A.S.A.

L.A. David’s Space Alien Eating Tacos, combines a myriad of colores chillantes evocative of the patterns on Oaxacan wooden animal sculpture, the spontaneity of graffiti art, with comic book text. He references the late Ram Ayala, owner of Taco Land, a punk rock venue known throughout the Texas music scene. Ram was killed in robbery in the summer of 2005, devastating many in the music and art world of San Antonio and beyond. L.A. David’s comical treatment of a burrito loving, peace loving, yellow and violet pair of aliens, who speak in Chicano Caló, vividly vibrate with otherworldliness. The fact space aliens without green cards are welcome into Taco Land, reflects how open the venue was to people of all walks of life, while deflating U.S. immigration policies as intergalactically irrelevant.

In War of the Worlds, L.A. artist, Sergio Hernandez, depicts a frenzied xenophobic reaction to "Mexican invasion," not by traditionally humble means of river crossing or dessert trekking, rather, by violent technologically advanced space ships. This work along with that of Larry Portillo’s acrylic painting, Who’s the Alien, satirizes the excessive dehumanization of politisized ‘aliens’, too often paralleled with scientific notions of ‘alien’ equating with a creature not native to planet Earth. The spaceships in these works also serve as symbolic metaphors of the often-undermined intellectual capacity of Chicanos/as to create our own significant progress and strategic means of defense. Larry Portillo, an artist raised in New Mexico, shows a vato driving his carrucha under a turquoise moonlit sky. Above him hovers a curious yellow alien peering down below. Both spaceship and carrucha bare an image of Aztecan earthquake/movement god, Ollín, humorously reclaiming anti-immigrant stereotypes and questioning the mainstream’s fears of ‘Otherness’.

East Los Angeles born, Chicana activist and artist, Laura Molina’s, Amor Alien, Oil, fluorescent enamel & metallic powder on canvas, inserts the artist as protagonist of an alien drama. The image, stems from residual issues with a former lover and reinterprets Jesus Helguera’s 1954, calendar painting, Amor Indio, not to be confused with his legendary painting of Popocapetl embracing his deceased beloved, Ixtaccihuatl. The stunning green alien woman is perhaps sleeping or unconscious after being stunned by some ravenous event. Given the solitude of their ‘moment; perhaps the extinction of her people was a hand. The man holding her is alien to her planet. He gazes down at her as though she were a curious specimen that he somewhat relates but fails to understand. This piece comments on postcolonialsm, racism and the dehumanization of Chicanas and Illegal immigrants as objects of government surveillance and economic theories of labor/consumption.

Larry Portillo’s acrylic painting, Who’s the Alien, satirizes the excessive dehumanization of politisized ‘aliens’, too often paralleled with scientific notions of ‘alien’ equating with a creature not native to planet Earth.

San Antonio artist, Felipe Vasquez’s Paper Spaceship, takes an ancient indigenous art form practiced by the Otomi Indians in the mountains of Puebla, Mexico to form a well-crafted pop-culture rendition of a space ship.