Asco (art collective)

Asco was an East Los Angeles based Chicano artist collective, active from 1972 to 1987. Asco adopted its name as a collective in1973, making a direct reference to the word’s significance in Spanish ("asco"), which is disgust or repulsion. Asco’s work throughout 1970s and 1980s responded specifically to socioeconomic and political problems surrounding the Chicano community in the United States, as well the Vietnam War.Harry Gamboa, Jr., Glugio "Gronk" Nicandro, Willie Herrón and Patssi Valdez form the core members of the group.

A lot of our friends were coming back in body bags and were dying, and we were seeing a whole generation come back that weren’t alive anymore. And in a sense that gave us nausea… that is Asco, in a way. --Gronk

The term Asco functions as a means of contextualizing and responding to the effects of the Vietnam war. This era, which art historian Arthur C. Danto has described as an era of revulsion, compelled young people to seek a new vocabulary for opposition through the growing importance of media, the impact of public mobilization, and new modes drawn from Happenings and spontaneous “be-ins”. Socio-economic and regional factors additionally gave cause for revulsion. The shifting landscape of East Los Angeles during the 70s was particularly influential in Asco’s work. The construction of freeway interchanges and the retention of walls dividing formerly connected neighborhoods fostered a hostile environment. Asco as a group was part of what Raul Homero Villa deems the “expressway generation”, a generation aware and affected by how public policies and urban planning could create conditions of disparity and stratification both economically and geographically.

Last year at this time I was very active in the affairs of my community. I was deeply bothered and disgusted with the condition of my community and of the Mexican American people. I learned to distrust and dislike everything that was pro-establishment.—Harry Gamboa Jr., 1969.

The members were, as Mr. Gamboa has described it, “self-imposed exiles” who felt the best way to exercise artistic freedom and express solidarity with the Mexican-American cause was, paradoxically, to run screaming from most Mexican-American art at the time, or at least from its political structures and the stereotypes imposed on it by mainstream culture. Asco’s emphasis on the street in their work and media hoaxes they manufactured illustrated the mergence of performance art with activism and protest. Asco occupies a unique place in the cultural landscape of Los Angeles. It deviated from the Chicano Muralism movement which was heavily nationalistic, instead occupied a balanced position between the mainstream and its counter-movement.

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