Growing up as the weird, gay, artistic kid from Lincoln Heights, gangs surrounded the neighborhood, and my family was a part of that. ASCO taught me how to channel that raw energy into creating images that could be funny, horrific, and political without being too on-the-nose. They were the anti-traditional Chicano Art movement, the opposite of Lowriders, Day of the Dead, and Frida. They were the anti-Los Four, who eventually got into LACMA and were very conventional in their artmaking. ASCO was punk and queer, made up of renegades. I watched movies and thought differently about the world. I did not know I was different until community college, where I learned about them in classes.Eventually, Harry Gamboa, Jr., became my mentor when I went to CalArts. After that, I worked with him on collaborations with others throughout the years. I met Patssi Valdez when I worked at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. At lunch together, she told me to get my MFA because she and others had not been able to. This was around the same time I began working for Laura Aguilar, who said the same thing to me. I met the rest of ASCO at different points in my artistic career. Both Valdez and Gamboa, Jr., are the most influential to me. They both represent many aspects of my artistic practice. I took everything ASCO did and created my own path that fragmented reality. I realize I cannot separate myself as an artist from the documentary. The documentary worked well, especially in getting scholars and participants from the different versions and the original group to speak about their experiences. It is wonderful to see Valdez get her flowers and to see how important she was to the group. She is the icon, the legend, and the moment. Gamboa, Jr., is the myth-builder who spins tales of both truth and illusion. I lived both. I think what took me out was the sections on contemporary artists creating heavily art-school-inspired projects in response to ASCO. It felt too pretentious and too commercial, too distant from the spirit of what ASCO was doing. Granted, ASCO has been canonized in the history of conceptual art and Los Angeles. Many Chicana/o artists in the conceptual vein cite them as influential. But the documentary unconsciously highlights that being avant-garde now means being popular with galleries and curators, producing work that still offers a glossy version of what it means to be Chicana/o. There are other documentaries about ASCO, but WITHOUT PERMISSION offers something specific: a neutral lens for an outside audience to understand what ASCO represented. More than that, it is a documentary for every kid who grew up feeling different and didn’t have a word for it, as well as for others who feel different, showing that anything can be done without anyone’s permission.
