Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art [REVIEW]
Installation view, Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art, on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, April 30 – July 30, 2022. Photo by Monica Orozco. Artist: Luz Maria Sanchez
It’s hard to know where to begin. Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art at the Vincent Price Art Museum covers so much ground and sound so well and so wonderfully that any point of entry will lead to a richly resonant experience. As it justifiably claims in its introductory didactics, this “is a major exhibition of Latinx sound practices, extending from the early avant-gardism of sound art to new interdisciplinary art forms. This exhibition, which features an intergenerational roster of 30 artists and collectives, aims to establish new directions in the field of Latinx art history by foregrounding the conceptual and experimental nature of Latinx sound practitioners.”
The exhibition is organized into three main segments—Constructing and Deconstructing Sound, Sound as a Site of Resistance, and Art and Music Crossovers—and sprawls across three floors of the museum, offering the visitor a striking abundance and diversity of artists, period, media, geography, and identity. It thrums with emotional and political density, in turn uplifting and galvanizing, meditative and heartbreaking. This wealth of material and affect is a potent reminder of the power that has emerged from Latinx makers and musicians over the last half-century and reminds us all that these contributions are long overdue for this kind of concentrated showing and celebration.¹
Upon entry into the first gallery space, you are met with the monumental grandeur of composer Pauline Oliveros (b. Houston, TX, USA) through her recordings, performance documentation, ephemera, and writings. Such tactical groupings not only create a fully dimensional understanding of an artist whose work can be strange and difficult for the unfamiliar, but they also emphasize the value of archival materials within art exhibitions, as both reference and works unto themselves. Setting the stage with a playlist-loaded iPad and contextual documents is a savvy, audience-friendly curatorial decision. Adjacent, the remnants of Rafael Montañez Ortiz’s (b. Brooklyn, NY, USA) Piano Destruction Ritual: Cowboy and Indian, Part Two (2017) scatter across the gallery floor in a kind of delightful autopsy accompanied by documentation of his 1966 performance Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert at London’s Destruction in Art Symposium. These works are a powerful one-two punch and prime the viewer for the show’s constant oscillation between the cool conceptualism that undergirds so much of this work and the visceral and visual cacophony embedded in its execution and material presence.²
Installation view, Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art, on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, April 30 – July 30, 2022. Photo by Monica Orozco.
Artists (from left to right): Gerardo Velazquez; Raphael Montañez Ortiz; Ruben Guevara; Pauline Oliveros.
Installation view, Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art, on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, April 30 – July 30, 2022. Photo by Monica Orozco.
Artists (from left to right): Jimena Sarno; Raphael Montañez Ortiz.
Nearby, María Elena González’s (b. Havana, Cuba) 2022 Forest, uses the patterns of Skowhegan Birch trees in a three-channel audio installation where sound triggers as if in a player piano, clattering away beautifully and moving the viewer into the second phase of this section of the exhibition. I almost felt guilty for not being as excited by Guillermo Galindo’s (b. Mexico City, Mexico) sublimely subversive Juan Jaula Cage Variations II (2012), which recasts mariachi as the usual classical musicians “performing” the piece, or Raven Chacon’s (b. Fort Defiance, AZ, USA) 2018 American Ledger no. 1, which presents a score as a large-scale flag, obliterating the boundaries between musical notation, geometric abstraction, graphic design, textiles, and painting. Perhaps the simple truth is that it is difficult to stand out in so bright a constellation.
The rear of this first floor space is the most joyfully irreverent, with a selection of works, ephemera, and footage of/by Rubén Guevara (b. Los Angeles, CA) and Gerardo Velazquez (b. Mexico), the latter as a member of the otherworldly 1980s LA punk/electronic band Nervous Gender.³ Guevara’s 1970s work with Ruben and The Jets is showcased alongside performances collected under the title Aztlan, Babylon, Rhythm & Blues. Both negotiate the intersections of underground and local (sub)cultures, the whiteness of the American recording mainstream, and the deep traditions of music as protest throughout the Latinx diaspora. Nervous Gender’s excerpt from Live at Target: A Video Album might be a dark horse candidate for MVP. Before visiting this show, I thought I had a decent handle on the best of early SoCal punk, but Nervous Gender proved me an utter amateur, shocked at my own ignorance and craving more of their gloriously abrasive, politicized musical mayhemscapes. I can only imagine what the group’s influence on me would have been had I heard it sooner.
Nervous Gender, Documentation of the synth opera Homily, 1981. Set design by Gronk. Black-and-white photograph. Nervous Gender Archive.
The second section, Sound as a Site of Resistance, begins more introspectively, with Penelope Uribe-Abee’s (b. Los Angeles, CA, USA) gorgeous 2016 video Distant Lover. The video is a collage of footage from around LA soundtracked by phone conversations in which callers to a radio station dedicate songs to their incarcerated loved ones. Wistful and elegiac, this video also demonstrates the strength of will required to endure the current landscape of America’s prison-industrial complex, which we all know disproportionately persecutes Latinx and other BIPOC communities. Its R&B/soul palette reaches back through American history, adding another episode to our longstanding use of music as both cathartic balm and instrument for social protest.
The main body of this section is nothing short of magnificent, with a grouping of videos that lead us to the Afro-Caribbean terrains of Latinx sound. Tania Candiani’s (b. Mexico City, Mexico) 2019 Del sonido de la labor, Cantos de Trabajo draws upon the songs once sung by slaves on sugar plantations in Cuba and Trinidad. Built on the form of a classical sonata, the piece collides European aristocracy and Caribbean indigeneity in ways that are strikingly ritualistic and meditative, haunted and healing. Juxtaposed with images of jungle and the ruined barracks in which these singers were once housed, the visual abundance contrasts with the stark sadness of the voices with deeply-moving solemnity.
Candiani’s meditation gives way to a series of films that offer more boisterous, enervated voices of protest. Nyugen E. Smith (b. Jersey City, NJ, USA) and Marvin Fabien (b. Dominica) are represented by 2018’s LEST WE FORGET (Puerto Rico Edition), a blistering indictment of the cultural vampirism and exploitation that propels so much of the contemporary international art fair circuit. Complicit in this ecosystem as we all are, I could not help but squirm uncomfortably as Smith performed his piece. But the discomfort reminded me that we must all always be conscious of how we move within the larger socio-political networks imbricated in the arts. Every action is one with consequences and our choices are always a question of ethics.
Nyugen E. Smith and Marvin Fabien, LEST WE FORGET (Puerto Rico Edition), 2018, Site-specific performance with an original soundscape. Video by Roberto G. Rivera Sanchez, 15 minutes, 43 seconds. Courtesy of the artists.
Luz María Sánchez’s (b. Guadalajara, Mexico) 2014-15 V. [u]nnecessary force_1.01, dominates the transitional space in the middle of the room, a multi-channel asynchronous sound installation that chronicles 40 unique examples of gun violence from Mexico’s militarized gun war sourced from cell phone videos posted on YouTube. It was simply too much to handle three days after the shooting in Uvalde Texas. The cold, white, minimal aesthetic of the piece and its didactic text elements collide abruptly with the full-body nausea created by the sound bites. It feels quite perverse to find a silver lining in that I remain repulsed by gun violence, though it was no salve against the ongoing magnitude of this epidemic across the Americas. Rarely have I encountered work so deeply and immediately impactful.
The neighboring work of Guillermo Galindo (b. Mexico City, Mexico), takes a quieter, more intimate tone. Like Raven Chacon’s work in the first gallery, Galindo employs graphics to reinvent the musical score, here on a beacon flag used by the humanitarian aid group Water Stations. His 2016 musical performances, played on instruments built of objects found along the US/Mexico border, continue the exhibition’s focus on vernacular deconstructions of European music and instruments, laden with the psycho-kinetic energy of the Borderlands and those who dare cross its deadly expanse.
This tension is released by the works positioned at the rear of the gallery. The Sonic Insurgency Research Group’s installation Mariachis on Mars (after Greg Barrios) draws upon a 1976 production of the futuristic rock opera Stranger in a Strange Land by Mexican American high school students in Crystal City, Texas. The installation’s bright colors and metallic fringe are a welcome blast of joy, but the ephemera and source material nearby steal the spotlight, begging for a resurrection of this work. The frenetic DIY Latinx futurism that would emerge from such a revival would be massively exciting.
The two 2018 performances by Muxxxe, the third gender visual artist and rapper from Tijuana, Mexico, filmed at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, made me an instant fan. Rapping over reggaeton beats to an utterly bewildered crowd of drivers and vendors, their performance emphatically queered the entirety of the border crossing, demolishing the binaries of gender and geopolitics through dance, costume, and breathtaking fearlessness. Absolutely brilliant.
MUXXXE, Chula, 2018, Site-specific intervention, San Ysidro Port of Entry, Video directed and edited by Diego San, Three minutes, four seconds. Courtesy of the artist.
Guillermo Gómez Peña (b. Mexico City, Mexico) appeared by way of a small video monitor showing his El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000, A.D., 1994. Both welcome and inevitable as one of the show’s O.G.s, the installation felt a bit incidental, lost between the squawking radios and lights of the Cognate Collective’s 2018 installation California Mía and the projection of Dorian Wood’s (b. Los Angeles, CA) exquisite performance of Song for Brown Children from 2020.
Happily, the third space, Art and Music Crossovers, provided an excellent diminuendo after which I left feeling reenergized and galvanized. Tania Candiani again makes a powerful impact with Ríos antiguos, ríos entubados, ríos Muertos, thirteen custom music boxes from 2019⁴ that takes the trace of 21 dead rivers that once crossed the territory of Mexico City, returning us across time and geography, recalling the extent to which geoengineering has been a constant in the history of the Americas from antiquity through to the present.
A room of projected music videos from Muxxxe, Martine Gutierrez, XUXA SANTAMARIA, Nyugen E. Smith, and San Cha created a space somewhere between the club and the protest (are they not the same?), harmonizing the tones of triumph and resistance that bind the entire exhibition. Gary Garay’s (b. Apple Valley, CA) 2022 Abalone Disco Ball hides behind a blue industrial tarp in an adjacent room, blandly quotidian from the outside and entirely transcendent on the inside. It is a hypnotic, transportive experience, again situating the club as a space of otherworldly ecstasy and possibility, escape and solidarity. Marcus Kuiland-Nazario’s (b. Los Angeles, CA) ongoing project MACHO STEREO shares the room, continuing the dance club vibe of this floor, but with an irresistible invitation to the viewer to join in and play selections from the offered records. I shared a rather touching moment with a younger guest as they spun Michael Jackson’s Thriller and rattled both of our cages with a bit of Alice Coltrane. The opportunity to actively engage the work and become a participant in the exhibition sealed the deal entirely.
At the risk of sounding trite, Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art is a huge triumph. As always, there are details and choices over which we might fuss endlessly, but none of them strike me as large enough to detract from what should soon be a touchstone exhibition of Latinx Art. Those who have been following the field closely will see familiar works. Those who are new will have a revelatory experience, rich with all the depth and nuance embedded in Latinx America. With any luck, the forthcoming catalog will spark interest from more venues and those outside of Southern California will have the opportunity to explore its excellence.
Footnotes
¹ Exhibition Intro Section wall texts, graciously shared by the Vincent Price Art Museum. Thanks are due to Associate Curator and Programs Manager for this generosity.
² I could not help but think of Susan Sontag’s invocation of hermeneutics and erotics in her 1964 essay “Against interpretation.” However, rather than positioned as antagonistic tension, here they seem to offer a greater force of mutual emphasis and reinforcement.
³ Those with deeper interest in this scene should look to the work of C. Ondine Chavoya and Roberto Tejada, both of whom have done important archival excavation and interpretation of these intersections.
⁴ The materials provided by the VPAM date conflicts with the 2018 date given on the artist’s website.
Adrian R. Duran is Professor of Art History in the School of the Arts at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). He is also affiliated faculty with the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies (OLLAS), Medical Humanities, and the Goldstein Center for Human Rights. Duran has published extensively on mid-20th century Italian Modernism and is the Committee Chair for the UNO/OLLAS ArteLatinx exhibition and program.