Urban Art Wallpaper

The art of Harry Gamboa Jr. encompasses photography, video, performance, installation, essays, fiction, poetry, and lesser-known forms of his own creation. Working in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, Gamboa has pioneered multimedia formats for nearly three decades, setting a precedent for the work of artists such as Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and Daniel J. Martinez. Urban Exile gathers Gamboa's diverse creations in a visually compelling collection that reveals a rich vein of Chicano avant-garde production reaching back to the early 1970s. Gamboa was a founding member of Asco (1972-1987), the East L.A. multimedia art group that critically satirized high art and cinema while parodying the utopian nationalism of the Chicano Arts Movement. Urban Exile comprises works Gamboa created with Asco as well as solo efforts -- Mexican fotonovelas rewritten as performance pieces, mail art, No Movies (images presented as stills from nonexistent movies). Firmly grounded in the megalopolis of Los Angeles, these texts present a unique perspective on the bizarre racialized and class-stratified fabric of that city -- the "urban desert in ruins". Gamboa's work is crucial to an understanding not only of Chicano art but also of the post-1968 avant-garde in the United States; he consistently debunks traditional categories, creates innovative alternatives, and reveals a history rendered invisible by the dominant art institutions and media industries. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes dreamlike, always unexpected, these texts present a compelling critique of urban life at the end of the millennium and are essential reading for all "orphans of modernism".

By the 1990s, public art had evolved far beyond the lonely monument on an open plaza. Now public artists might design the entire plaza, create an event to alter the social dynamics of an urban environment, or help to reconstruct a neighborhood. Dialogues in Public Art presents a rich blend of interviews with the people who create and experience public art -- from an artist who mounted three bronze sculptures in the South Bronx to the bureaucrat who led the fight to have them removed; from an artist who describes his work as a "cancer" on architecture to a pair of architects who might agree with him; from an artist who formed a coalition to convert twenty-two derelict row houses into an art center/community revitalization project to a young woman who got her life back on track while living in one of the converted houses. The twenty interviews are divided into four parts: Controversies in Public Art, Experiments in Public Art as Architecture and Urban Planning, Dialogues on Dialogue-Based Public Art Projects, and Public Art for Public Health. Tom Finkelpearl's introductory essay provides a concise overview of changing attitudes toward the city as the site of public art.