Asco
1972–1987
Fueled by the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and the punk underground of the early 1970s, the collective Asco was founded in East Los Angeles by the artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez, and included other artists over the course of the group’s fifteen-year history. Asco means disgust or nausea in Spanish and aptly expressed the young artists’ aversion to America’s unjust social and political landscape. The group developed a highly stylized body of work that reflected their avant-garde sensibility and activist impulses. They staged guerilla performances in the streets in protest of mainstream establishments, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Catholic Church, and Hollywood.
It was LA’s all-pervasive movie industry that provided rich source material for Asco’s important “No Movie” series, conceptual works that existed as carefully staged photographs, performative actions, published texts, mail art, and media hoaxes. The “No Movies” satirized the Hollywood machine while interrogating both the lack of Chicanos in the media and the stereotypical depictions of them when they were present. For Decoy Gang War Victim, Asco mailed a photograph of Gronk posed as a casualty of gang violence to several local press outlets, one of which broadcast it on television as a real incident. The simulated event exposed the media’s bias toward East Los Angeles’s barrio community and revealed the ways in which the press helped perpetuate not only these racial, social, and economic stereotypes but the violence itself.
