Cars line up at night on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico, facing
their headlights toward Tijuana. The leader of these California-style
vigilantes, the ones who would vote for proposition 187, claims they are
illuminating the issue of illegal aliens. A hundred cars participate, more and
more as people hear about the weekly vigil on a radio talk show. Then, artists
Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez arrive with a video camera, asking questions.
Later, Lou and Sanchez organize a group of friends with mirrors and objects
wrapped with reflective foil to wait by the border for the cars to return. When
the headlights are turned on next time, the light reflects back on the U.S.
side of the border. Drivers and passengers trying to focus on the “other” are
forced instead to see themselves more clearly.
– “The Border Project,”completed for Sin Fronteras: Chicano
Arts From the Border States of the U.S.
Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez have been invited to Austin by MexicArte
Art Museum to present their installation, Los Anthropolocos: New Digs
at Mission Viejo – In Search of the Colorless Hands. It is both a
tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious look at issues of affirmation, reclamation,
and assertion of cultural identity. The artists assert that the power to define
the “other” by displaying and labeling their artifacts gives a culture the
“upper hand.” “How can we be the definers?'” asks Lou. And then he and his
partner show us how it might be done.
The Nazis understood this concept of power when they warehoused stolen Jewish
artifacts for a future museum of objects belonging to a dead race. Their
unrealized, final solution included not only killing off the remnants of a
people, but also in defining who they had been through carefully catalogued
remains. Could it be that the dominant culture in this country devalues the
lives and histories of other peoples through the way we regard their remains?
Lou, who grew up in Tijuana and was schooled in the United States, says that
the artists’ intent is to address this issue by using a kind of edgy humor that
fits squarely within the Mexican tradition. The artist’s father was Chinese and
his mother Mexican, which, he says, put him in the role early on of being a
cultural (as well as language) translator for others, a role which prepared him
in a unique way for the current exploration.
Both Lou and Sanchez live and work in San Diego, California. Sanchez was born
and raised in Austin. He paints surrealist-style canvases and teaches at Mesa
College, where Richard Lou is Chairman of the Art Department. According to
Herlinda Zamora, Director of Mexic-Arte, the two have opposite, but
complementary personalities. They have collaborated since 1988 on an ongoing,
conceptual “White-fying Project.” Their work weaves a tale of two fictional
scientists from the mythical Aztlan University – Dr. Ritchie Lou and Dr. Bobbie
Sanchez – who theorize on the disappearance of the “Colorless People.” Los
Whites. Their theories are based on excavated remnants from a lost
civilization, which they’ve preserved and considered carefully. The
scientist/artists display the artifacts of the lost civilization in
pseudo-scientific museum style. Pudgy white hands (latex gloves filled with
sand and tied with cord) supposedly found during an archaeological dig are
methodically mounted on huge boards divided neatly into grids. They evoke
memories of hundreds of wolf skulls pul-led from the Labraya Tar Pits and
displayed symmetrically in endless rows on the wall in a museum in Los Angeles,
or mummies stacked in cases in the mid-dle of a museum in New York City.
Plexiglas signage boards inform the Mex-icArte visitor of current/future
scientific theories regarding Lou and San-chez’s anthropological finds. Theory
4 states:
A large number of Colorless created a grisly welfare scam. They would
sever one of their hands in order to qualify for disability money. This tactic,
though extreme, aptly reflected their social profile which characterized them
as notoriously lazy. This is a trait for which they should not be blamed for as
individuals, particularly since their culture did not value work nor did it
encourage ambition or initiative.
There are six theories in all. So far. The “scientific inquiry”
continues. This configuration of Los Anthropolocos has been preceded by
earlier versions and will no doubt be followed by others. At MexicArte, the
gallery seems uniquely right for the exhibition and vice versa. Zamora says the
museum is looking for a way to refurbish the space which, for more traditional
exhibitions, would be wonderful. For this show, however, the dramatic
black-and-white, pseudo-somber presentation works perfectly. The plummy white
hands, mounted as specimens on the wall, gain their strength through
repetition. There is a veritable army of hands. Lou says that when he tried to
retrieve the hands after an exhibition in California, he discovered they had
been appropriated by the gallery director, stacked, and used as sandbags to
hold back flood waters threatening the building. He described the hundreds of
little white rubber fingers valiantly fighting back the water with obvious
delight.
The installation in Austin includes a series of videos created by the
“scientists” that document their discoveries. Routine visitors to the
exhibition must ask for help in playing the videos. They feature interviewer
Alejandro Misterioso, Drs. Sanchez and Lou, and a host of other characters,
none with obvious professional acting skills (with the exception of Juan Valdez
IV, who played to the camera like a champ). The videos are artful documentary
Revenge of the Mummy-style parodies, with two (Chicano) good-old-boys in
the roles of Wayne and Garth. The humor is occasionally so broad, it doesn’t
fit right on the screen. They are both poorly rehearsed and self-indulgently
edited.
But the humor is there. The artists’ touch is so light that you don’t fully
realize you’ve been assaulted until you leave the room. Even then, you’re not
certain what to do about it. The first video, “Los Anthropolocos versus the
White Mummies,” begins with alternating visions of “dominant” versus “damage”
culture. Nazi treatment of human corpses, bodies bulldozed like so many pebbles
into a collective burial pit, is prominently featured. The storyline then takes
our heroes, the scientists, to a newly discovered burial pit near David Duke’s
Transmission Shop in El Cajon. For some reason these Colorless people, we are
told, like to bury their dead near transmission shops. The Anthropolocos and
their crew wear masks to keep the poisonous fumes from the decomposed bodies at
bay. The digging tools they use and some artifacts are displayed in the
galleries.
Artifacts retrieved on the video include a golf club (“Boy Toy” – Theory: wife
avoidance) and a Barry Manilow album. The words “Buried Manilow” flash briefly
on screen, one of a dizzying assortment of subtitles and captions. The
scientists’ theory on the Manilow is “White God mood music: torture. Listening
to Manilow’s music as part of the video promotes audience empathy for that
point of view. After digging up and examining two white mummies, the scientists
conclude that Los Whites’ flattened buttocks indicate they sat around too much
(no manual labor). We are told they also had little brains. At the end of
“White Mummies,” the bodies are arranged and displayed for the camera while a
crowd of onlookers point and stare.
“Discovering Columbus and Other White People” involves our heroes in pursuit
of a tip that leads them to the bones of Columbus. They find the bones in a
labeled box that Dr. Sanchez drags out of a garbage dumpster. The quest is
punctuated by a number of encounters with mysterious strangers of color (an
Indian man, a Chicana, and a black woman) who hint at where the body might be
found. Our heroes follow the clues, and their find is lauded by interviewer
Alejandro Misterioso on his TV Aztlan news show just before he moves on to
President Eddy Olmos’ 133rd birthday party celebration.
The third video provides the most drama. In “Los Anthropolocos in Search of
the Lost Colorless: Captives of Fate,” Drs. Sanchez and Lou capture what was
once thought to be extinct – a living pair of Colorless people. They lure the
dirty, naked white couple out of the bushes with a jam box playing country
music. At first the “savages” poke at the thing like primates dancing around
the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And then they try to steal the
tape player, dragging it off toward the trees. The scientists pursue their prey
with nets, trap, and tranquilize them. Finally we see the captives, wrapped in
net, huddled together, comatose.
My own flat buttock was sound asleep by the time I’d finished watching the
third video. They are too long and too full of cheap and easy shots and
occasionally, political rhetoric. On the other hand, the concept of role
reversal as a method of educating audience ultimately works. The installation
as a whole, which includes slides, photographs, “theories” and lots of the
sand-stuffed white hands, is an ambitious attempt to make a difference. Asked
if Los Anthropolocos and their antics were art, politics, or science
(fiction), Richard Lou responded that they were all three. “My understanding is
that all art is political,” he says, “because artists don’t conform. They break
the mental sets we have about each other.” The artists insist that the
installation is not meant to be “reverse racism” but rather to make the
dominant culture more aware of its current value system as a prelude to change.
“Los Anthropolocos,” no less than Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez’s earlier
performance with mirrors along the border, attempts to [[pi]]help the audience
to see its own reflection in the headlights. n
Los Anthropolocos: New Digs at Mission Viejo – In Search of the Colorless
Hands is on view through June 24 at MexicArte Museum.
This article appears in May 26 • 1995 and May 26 • 1995 (Cover).