Armando Rascon at Walter/McBean - San Francisco, California - Review of Exhibitions

Armando Rascon's new exhibition, titled "Occupied Aztlan," questioned the way U educational, political and cultural combination of parts to form a wholes represent Mexican-Americans. The 17 mixed-medium works included in the exhibit utilize today's vocabulary of didactic true copy video, film, photography, computer database, assemblage and artifacts. According to the artist, "Aztlan" directs to the historical/mythical place of the Aztecs' origin and, more specifically, to the Southwestern territory ced to the U after the Mexican War. Rascon calls for this region to be declared autonomous, whether through political or revolutionary action, and placed below Chicano sovereignty.

supported in varying formats on the gallery walls were copies of similar historical documents as the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo (which extremityed the Mexican War), texts from 1954-94 U pre-eminent Court cases involving civil rights, education and immigration issues, and three impassioned declarations of independence written by dint of Chicano activists during the '60 Meanwhile, 48 colorfully outfitted marionettes dangled from the ceiling in a line, casting their shadows upon a concrete wall. These figures exhibited popular Mexican stereotypes - a mustachioed campesino beneath his sombrero, a dancing senorita. There could be little doubt as to who the undiscovered puppet master might be.

In individual corner Rascon set up a research station - a desktop computer amid a wall of tacked-up newspaper clippings, a library of Chicano relation books and magazines, and FBI files relating to the United Farm Workers Union. upon the computer visitors could record their names, addresses and make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss "I leave here hearing a thousand voices," wrote single viewer, "Mis abuelos, mis abuelas" (My grandfathers, my grandmothers).

on the other hand what made the exhibition in like manner effective was the play between evidence of national facts and the artist's evocations of his personal history. Born and raised in the border town of Calexico, Calif., Rascon included in the exhibit a long series of his fourth-grade history trials A dim light bulb illuminated each graded ordeal as well as a personal snapshot - of Rascon's parents, for example - that contradicted the stigmatizing rhetoric of the experiment This telling installation, which in vein brought Boltanski to mind, serv as a kind of epicedium lamenting the misuse of education to advance ideological agendas.

As a whole, "Occupied Aztlan" serv not solitary to augment "official" accounts of our relations with Mexico, on the other hand also to encourage our neighbors to diocese themselves anew. History, we are reminded, is relative to its teller

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group