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Asco: No Movies
Geoffrey Farmer: Let's Make the Water Turn Black
Nottingham Contemporary 12 October to 5 January
Bit parts accorded to Asco, the Los Angeles art collective, in the survey exhibitions 'Pacific Standard Time' in Berlin in 2011 and Tate Liverpool's Glam!' last February (Reviews AM366), as well as the two-part film programme at the South London Gallery in April, made dear that a European audience deserved deeper knowledge of this radical and productive Conceptual Art group. Nottingham Contemporary has delivered that opportunity with a show indirectly derived from a much larger retrospective seen in LA and Wiltiamstown in Massachusetts last year. In a sense, the recent institutional interest in the group demonstrates the success of its original project 40 years ago: to highlight tiie marginalising of Chicano artists and to bring Chicano identity into the cultural mainstream The art world's embrace has not been universally welcomed by former collaborators, but this exhilarating exhibition does pose the pressing question of whether art can ever again have the will to ally itself so creatively with political causes.
The four artists at the core of the collective (they collaborated with many others but this group remained consistent into the 1980s) were not alone in challenging the ingrained prejudicial landscape. Asco, which translates as 'disgust, loathing, a desire to vomit' and by which the group became known accidentally and enthusiastically, was part of the larger struggle for dril rights among minorities which, in the Mexican-American neighbourhoods, generated diverse cultural expressions, especially in murals, figurative painting and agitprop theatre. Asco, however, stood out by taking a conceptual route, adopting a pronounced performative element and by not being limited to specific locations. Instead, the group's activism was mobile, choosing symbolic sites for 'pop-up' events, such as tagging the LA County Museum of
Art, dining on a traffic island on Whittier Boulevard and creating an instant mural by taping two members to a city wall. They agreed that time was too short ever to seek...