Urban Exile

Urban Exile

Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr.

Harry Gamboa Jr
Edited by Chon A. Noriega

$30.00 paper
ISBN: 0-8166-3052-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3052-3

An essential overview of the work of a pioneering figure of multimedia and conceptual art.

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."

"The history of American Conceptual art cannot be properly written without the inclusion of the work of Harry Gamboa Jr. and the Los Angeles-based performance group Asco, of which he was a member. Urban Exile provides the first substantial documentation of Gamboa's' writing and begins to fill the historical lacunae that currently exist in scholarship on the art of the twentieth century in the United States. A perceptive introduction by UCLA Professor Chon Noriega situates the work of Gamboa in a uniquely Chicano avant-garde, and expands conceptions of this experimental art practice beyond a European intellectual inheritance and, refreshingly, beyond narrow or simple identity politics." —Art Journal

"In Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., editor Chon A. Noriega collects ephemera gathered from Gamboa's three-decade-long dadaistic career. The book includes interviews with artists, poetry, fiction, collaged images, documentation of public and staged performances, photographic portraits of Chicano men, and political writings, including an essay on public schools reflecting his son's first year in kindergarten. Taken together they effectively portray Gamboa's extreme articulation—as sharp as the switchblade in a cholo's pocket—of the "phantom culture" of Chicanos in East Los Angeles. Like a loud banging on trash cans, screaming questions into the urban landscape, Gamboa asks "Why live in these conditions? Why produce? Why live?" In the context of urban hysteria, he is an observer of the extended-play apocalypse who refuses to become numb. Urban Exile should be viewed as a primer for avant-garde practice in the shadows of the decay and celebration that are simultaneously pushing urban America into the new millenium." —LA Weekly

"This book is vital for those invested in mapping the intersections between performance culture and political activism. In a wide variety of expressive forms, Gamboa critiques the forces of domination which subjugate the brown bodies that populate the urban Los Angeles landscape." —Theatre Journal

"By assembling the writings of Gamboa from the last 25 years, Urban Exile provides access to the diverse projects of the Asco collective and to Gamboa's later solo and group projects. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in Asco's work, thanks in part to the efforts of scholars like Noriega. Urban Exile performs a service in bringing together essays, photographs, experimental writing, performance texts, fiction and poems, some never before published, some previously only available in hard-to-find magazines." —afterimage

Harry Gamboa Jr. lives in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Seminar. Chon A. Noriega is an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the editor of Chicanos and Film (1992) and The Ethnic Eye (1996).

568 pages | 75 black-and-white photos | 7 x 10 | 1998



Urban Exile *Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr.* Harry Gamboa Jr Edited by Chon A. Noriega		$30.00 paper ISBN: 0-8166-3052-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3052-3
An essential overview of the work of a pioneering figure of multimedia and conceptual art. 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." "The history of American Conceptual art cannot be properly written without the inclusion of the work of Harry Gamboa Jr. and the Los Angeles-based performance group Asco, of which he was a member. Urban Exile provides the first substantial documentation of Gamboa's' writing and begins to fill the historical lacunae that currently exist in scholarship on the art of the twentieth century in the United States. A perceptive introduction by UCLA Professor Chon Noriega situates the work of Gamboa in a uniquely Chicano avant-garde, and expands conceptions of this experimental art practice beyond a European intellectual inheritance and, refreshingly, beyond narrow or simple identity politics." —Art Journal "In Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., editor Chon A. Noriega collects ephemera gathered from Gamboa's three-decade-long dadaistic career. The book includes interviews with artists, poetry, fiction, collaged images, documentation of public and staged performances, photographic portraits of Chicano men, and political writings, including an essay on public schools reflecting his son's first year in kindergarten. Taken together they effectively portray Gamboa's extreme articulation—as sharp as the switchblade in a cholo's pocket—of the "phantom culture" of Chicanos in East Los Angeles. Like a loud banging on trash cans, screaming questions into the urban landscape, Gamboa asks "Why live in these conditions? Why produce? Why live?" In the context of urban hysteria, he is an observer of the extended-play apocalypse who refuses to become numb. Urban Exile should be viewed as a primer for avant-garde practice in the shadows of the decay and celebration that are simultaneously pushing urban America into the new millenium." —LA Weekly "This book is vital for those invested in mapping the intersections between performance culture and political activism. In a wide variety of expressive forms, Gamboa critiques the forces of domination which subjugate the brown bodies that populate the urban Los Angeles landscape." —Theatre Journal "By assembling the writings of Gamboa from the last 25 years, Urban Exile provides access to the diverse projects of the Asco collective and to Gamboa's later solo and group projects. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in Asco's work, thanks in part to the efforts of scholars like Noriega. Urban Exile performs a service in bringing together essays, photographs, experimental writing, performance texts, fiction and poems, some never before published, some previously only available in hard-to-find magazines." —afterimage Harry Gamboa Jr. lives in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Seminar. Chon A. Noriega is an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the editor of Chicanos and Film (1992) and The Ethnic Eye (1996). 568 pages \| 75 black-and-white photos \| 7 x 10 \| 1998