2 posts tagged “art”

I don't know why I remembered an awesome concept that I had learned in one of my art classes in undergrad:

Rasquachismo---

"Very generally, rasquachismo is an underdog perspective--los de abajo . . . it presupposes a world view of the have not, but it is a quality exemplified in objects and places and social comportment . . . it has evolved as a bicultural sensibility."

It is this great idea that while kitsch art is the art of the tacky, the simple, the cliche... there is a space to reappropriate the kitsch aesthetic within a chicano context...it is no longer kitsch, but rasquachismo there is a difference between the mass produced and the singular creativeness of personal space.

"Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials such as tires, broken plates, plastic containers, which are recombined with elaborate and bold display in yard shrines (capillas), domestic decor (altares), and even embellishment of the car. In its broadest sense, it is a combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity. The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.

The political positioning of Chicanos emerging from a working-class sensibility called for just such a defiant stance. Raised in barrios, many Chicano artists have lived through and from a rasquache consciousness. Even the term "Chicano," with all its vernacular connotations, is rasquache. Consequently, the sensibility of rasquachismo is an obvious, and internally defined tool of artist-activists. The intention was to provoke the accepted "superior" norms of the Anglo-American with the everyday reality of Chicano cultural practices. Whether through extensions and reinterpretations of the domestic settings, the car, or the personal pose, rasquachismo is a world view that provides an oppositional identity."

showing pride in art/cars/homes/kitchens pulled together from bits of this and pieces of that, concurrently defies both the standard of kitsch art and the standards of what mainstream (upper class) high art should be.

while kitsch art is the appropriated mass produced art of the masses, rasquachismo is the art of affirmation-- we aren't buying Thomas Kinkade light switches, or good replicas of Louis Vuitton handbags...no! We are putting together badly made replicas knowingly, we are piecing together from sobras...

one more excerpt:
In the counterpoint between kitsch and rasquachismo two major differences are apparent. First, kitsch serves as a material or phenomenon of taste through mass-produced objects or style of personal expression in decoration, while rasquachismo contains both the material expression but more importantly, a stance or attitudinal position. Consequently, the meaning of each is inherently different. Secondly, its usage reflects a radically opposed instrumentality for the artists. Kitsch as a material expression is recuperated by artists who stand outside the lived reality of its genesis. Conversely, rasquachismo for Chicano artists is instrumental from within a shared barrio sensibility. One can say that kitsch is appropriated while rasquachismo is acclaimed or affirmed. Rasquachismo is consequently an integral world view that serves as a basis for cultural identity and a s ocio-political movement. As such, rasquachismo has not been limited to the visual arts, but in fact has been used as a major sensibility in theatre, music, and poetry. The tragicomic spirit of barrio life, as Ybarra-Frausto details, has been a present form in the early actos of Luis Valdez's "Teatro Campesino," in the poetry of Jose Montoya, in the works of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF, a conceptual artists' collective), in the urban street pageantry of "ASCO" of Los Angeles, and in the border spectacle of Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Rasquachismo can thus be seen as a redemptive sensibility linked to a broadbased cultural movement among Chicanos. As the first generation of their community to be educated in universities (after hard-fought battles in the Civil Rights period), these artists employed a bicultural sensibility. Operating as an internally colonized community within the borders of the United States, Chicanos forged a new cultural vocabulary composed of sustaining elements of Mexican tradition and lived encounters in a hostile environment. Fragmentation and recombination brought together disparate elements such as corridos (Mexican historical ballads), images of Walt Disney, Mexican cinema, and mass media advertising, and even Mexican calendario graphics and American Pop art. This encounter of two worlds could only be negotiated through the sensibility of rasquachismo, a survivalist irreverence that functioned as a vehicle of cultural continuity. In many respects, the rasquache defiance of Chicano art production has served as an anecdotal history for a community repudiated and denied in institutional history within the nation as a whole.

read the entire article here

Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache by Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ph.D.

Barbara Kruger, known for her advertisement art, is one of my favorite artists. Check her out: