This interview was conducted over email with Tania Picasso from November to December 2006.

1. What are your artistic influences (artists, environment, theory, etc.)? What is the fuel for your creative engine?

A. I live with artists- they are a constant influence in my life. There’s an older form of education that has existed before institutional academia. It’s non-hierarchal, spread out and not based on capitalistic models of time and money. We learn from each other always—meaning constantly, consistently and interchangeably.

B.Environment is art—it’s turbulent and flashy, existence and experience do more than oscillate like a strobe (dark and light, dark and light…)—they work like Kinemacolor movies (red, dark, blue, dark…) The experience of life; Love, family, close friends, voices on telephones, personal dramas, bills, financial distress, physical and psychological violence, middle-school students, car problems, cat vomit on the rug, all these things act as buoys, elevating… heightening experience. My eyes are dazzled and my hands shake.

C. Conspiracizing, multiplying points of view, oscillating, submerging meaning within meaning and overlapping ideas are the sub-processes that drive the creative engine—these are the techniques of my work. 

D. Theory is no-theory. Loose and based on complex, open and uncoded interrelations—the virtual counterpart of letter E & F above. Theory is monolithic and didactic and I’d rather operate under its shadow than conform as its laborer in isolated and lonely art practice.

2. How have these influences shaped your persona and overall artistic choices?

It’s hard for me to separate the process of creating work and the experience of living.  As cliché as this might sound, I strive toward that unity. I guess that the attempt to do away with anything one could call “influence” (which presupposes duality, one thing influencing the other) is an influence in itself. Or I suppose it might be called purpose and not influence. Is there a difference?

ASCO so thoroughly got to the heart of urban Chicanismo that the whole LA basin is still fresh with their blood and teeth. They integrated themselves into the street, into the psychology of the cement. The thing about ASCO was that they embraced fluidity and fecundity. They seemed to see the rotten ripeness of their times, their streets, their culture (how ASCO saw their multivalent culture is a whole other topic) their identity, their peers, the media, the other, their oppressors etc. They saw it, they used it, they presented it—just like that. By doing so, they constructed the model of city as alembick (incubator). That’s genius. All that they did (and maybe more importantly, all that they implied) is a great inspiration to me.
Another thing about ASCO is that they created a type of Chicano artist that was affirmatively Chicano, self critical, brave, idiosyncratic, anarchistic, operating always from the fringe, autodidactic, well read, romantic, adventurous, intellectual but not academic, independent and unapologetically of their world.
(By the way murals and journal illustrations by ASCO were also entryways into the conceptual and performative.)

4. How would you classify your art (if at all)? Why?

There are some things that I’m not really interested in and there are others that I’m very interested in:

5. You are currently exhibiting at the Orange County Museum of Art Biennial. Please discuss the significance of this in regards to your artistic career

I was invited to show at the Biennial. I don’t think at all about how it influences my career. The same goes for any other show I participate in. I’m very happy and grateful that I am asked to show work in these exhibitions and that people are interested in what I do but never do I make any decision based on following a predetermined or prescribed trajectory of a generic “artist’s career.”

Exhibiting work is important however, and each exhibition informs the process of art-making in a very technical way. But this relationship of exhibiting and creating has little to do with the “inspiratorial” nature of the artistic process itself.

6. It seems like there has been a split since the late eighties to the present within Chicano art, as some (Latino) artists are rejecting this term to classify their work. What are your thoughts on this?

I see the split also, although there have always been artists who have worked without the label Chicano. The word Chicano when first used affirmatively was just that—an affirmation. Using it is an affirmation of one’s total resistance to dominant, oppressive society and total embracing of heretofore demonized traits; indigenous culture, hybrid culture, broken tongues, fractured histories—in short, bastardized life. Chicanismo and Chicano art by extension is a less about simple notions of cultural pride and more about a total revolution of ideals—a sharp, conscious refusal to be dominated and silenced by fabricated shame.
I mention this only because I see a different (that is a non-generational) split in Chicano vs. “not chicano” artists. Many artists who were part of the so-called original school of Chicano art didn’t go to art schools or went to school for technical training and remained apart from the theoretical trends of the school or went to school and chose to draw their influence from the “street scene.” In all scenarios, whether by choice or circumstance, these artists remained apart from the so-called mainstream art world. (I see art schools as an integral part of the so-called mainstream art-world, which in turn is part of  mainstream American/European culture)
I see a difference in my contemporaries, many of whom have gone to art schools with rigorous theory and concept-based programs. Being immersed in that environment--I can say from experience--beats the Chicanismo out of you. It’s that the whole road of success for an artist is laid out in the first few months of school—within the first critique—and nothing about Chicanismo or Chicano art leads to success. At its most innocuous, art schools see Identity Politics, including Chicano Art, as passé. One learns quickly to be ashamed of things labeled passé. At its most disgusting, art schools see those same political voices as a real threat to their still very capitalistic, white male dominated power structure.
The question that’s always being asked is: what do we think about Chicano/not Chicano labels. I feel a more constructive question would be: Why do many of the current Latino artists go out of their way to avoid the label Chicano art? What are the cultural, social and economic pressures that influence artists to conform one way or another?

7.How important do you think it is to have a canon of art that is based on ethnicity?

Canons go hand-in-hand with schools—they historicize creative output as soon as it’s made. I try to avoid canons and rigid schools of thought—they do more harm than good. Plus, they’re not particularly interesting to me in terms of my practice.
Ethnicity connotes some type of culture. The question of ethnicity is Eurocentric because “ethnic” people are assumed to be non-white, while “white ethnicity” is invisible and therefore deemed to be the omniscient “default culture”. What’s more, this “default culture” has a history of erasing peoples and cultures that don’t conform. Because of this, the question of the validity and importance of art whose subject is based on ethnicity is problematic. That question seems to really ask whether one should continue to make work that comes out of one’s own culture or accept conformity and disappear into a genocidal “default culture”. It’s impossible to create work that doesn’t come from a particular cultural context so questioning ethnic work is really questioning the validity of one culture’s right to expression over another’s.
To paraphrase something I read by Michael Taussig: for existence to be vivid, free, rid of oppressors, oppression and forced coercion, the representation must come from the represented.

8. What are your thoughts on the term Post-Chicano art? Do you think a term like this could exist within institutional categorization?

Well, what does the word “post” really bring to mind? Decay, flux, simultaneity? Or does it bring to mind terms like “after”, “end of”, “new”?  
The term has been thrown around quite a bit without any type of clarity. I get a sense that it's one of those terms where everybody assumes that their understanding of it is the same as everybody else's. I'm interested in any term that still has fluidity; the problem I see with it is that while it's trying to pin down a very fluid movement with a very fluid term, the motivation is still to pin-down, to isolate and to sever. I see this as a negative.
Where the term Chicano was an affirmation of a culture long shamed into silence, the term post-chicano is less affirmation than marker of decay or change. Where "Chicano" encompasses a mythos that comes from diverse peoples, post-chicano comes from a context of Post-Modern jargon, dialogs and theory. "Chicano" was created to be of service to people, a liberating term. I'm not sure what the intention of coining the term post-chicano is. Maybe the intention or motivation in creating new terms and definitions should be looked at more.
Furthermore, I wonder why Chicano Art as a term, movement etc. can’t be widened to include more diverse trends. The title has been around for no more than 30 years and already it’s being split into a classic and post-classic phase… I'm skeptical about the term.

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