It’s been a busy and prolific few months for multidisciplinary artist, essayist, and longtime CalArts Photo and Media faculty Harry Gamboa Jr.
Just after graduation in May, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles screened a retrospective of his films; and over the summer, he released two books: Dawn/Eclipse of a New Era, which features new digital photography of “performed portraits,” and X’s Party, based on a 1982 fotonovela that featured 35mm slides, a live presentation, and accompanying audio cassette. Coming up later this month (Oct. 19), the Los Angeles Center of Photography honors Gamboa Jr. with the Alfred Stieglitz Award that recognizes his “immense contributions to the shaping of visual culture in SoCal, and specifically, the rise of contemporary Chicano.”
Gamboa Jr. is founder and director of the international performance troupe Virtual Vérité (2005-2017), as well as the co-founder of Asco (1972-1985), the Los Angeles-based performance group. He currently serves as the director of his latest group, Troupe Non Grata, founded in 2020.
The setting for the images in Dawn/Eclipse of a New Era may seem familiar to CalArtians. Gamboa Jr. photographed in various locations in downtown Newhall, near CalArts, as part of commissioned work from the city of Santa Clarita. The resultant summer exhibition at The Main in Newhall, as well as the paperback, features striking, mostly black-and-white closeup portraits of Gamboa Jr.’s 29 performers captured while in action, with additional group shots that imply spatial relationships between people and objects, marches, or protests.
Though he worked with more than two dozen people for Dawn/Eclipse of a New Era, Gamboa Jr. doesn’t use an open call or flash mob process. During a recent conversation with the artist, he noted that he hand-selects the actors and subjects who appear in his works and has an established relationship with each of them. And while Gamboa Jr. refers to “ephemeral actions” of the performers in Dawn/Eclipse of a New Era, he leaves little to chance. There’s no improvisation involved as he directs, stages, and poses the subjects himself.
X’s Party, released in August, is a fotonovela featuring images from 1982 of performers Therese Covarrubias and Daniel Villarreal. The fotonovela, originally created on 35mm slides, was presented before a live audience at UC Santa Cruz, Hispanic Urban Center (LA) and in alleyway screenings in East LA. The book is similar in many ways to a comic book or graphic novel, with large text placed above, next to, or superimposed on images.
In the introduction, Gamboa writes:
The pre-digital year of 1982 initiated a shift in performance art when ideas and ephemeral actions competed against the pervasive cultural void of television.
Late night TV viewing was often accompanied by excessive indulgences involving disruptive consumption of artificially enhanced sweets, smoking menthol cigarettes, drinking toxic carbonated soda pop and/or 100 proof liquor, reading endless pages of print media, playing mindless board games, breathing in irradiated smog, and defying the push/pull of intimacy while establishing higher levels of “cool”.
The volume dial was set to maximum as personal interactions contradicted the effects of social isolation, cultural neglect, and the insinuation that existentialist threats and death could be denied.
The winding down of confidence in the actual moment of perpetual youth enhanced the personal/collective desire to kill the flickering screen.
The Chicano urban experience would take on experimental modes of artistic expression during the Asco era to counter 20th Century angst while affirming the concept of Aztlán.
