Urban Exile: Collected Writings Of Harry Gamboa Jr. - Hardcover

Gamboa Jr., Harry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816630518 ISBN 13: 9780816630516

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Synopsis

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 pioneered multimedia formats for nearly three decades, influencing the work of artists such as Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gumez-Peoa, and Daniel J. Martinez. This work gathers Gamboa's diverse creations in a collection that reveals a rich vein of Chicano avant-garde production reaching back to the early 1970s.

About this title

From the Publisher:

An overview of Gamboa's multimedia and conceptual art.
Harry Gamboa Jr. has pioneered multimedia formats for nearly three decades, setting a precedent for the work of artists such as Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 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.

"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

"No story of Chicano art and politics is complete without Harry Gamboa and Asco. Each has played a central role in refiguring U.S. conceptual and performance art since the early 1970s. And both are wickedly funny and savvy—always filled with surprises, always in-your-face, never predictable. Urban Exile makes available for the first time the full range of Gamboa's brilliant and biting oeuvre." Bryan Wolf, Professor of American Studies, Yale University

"Harry Gamboa’s art captivates, challenges, and enlightens." Dolores Huerta, Secretary Treasurer, United Farmworkers of America

"Harry Gamboa Jr. is, as Chon Noriega forcefully argues, a unique figure within both the Chicano community and the alternative arts. The presentation of this rich archive of material challenges the too-often limited academic and museum- supported historical representations of conceptual, film, and performance art. Gamboa's Asco projects and No Movies confront and contest the art world's predetermined parameters of art history and practice. Urban Exile is an important resource: I will return to it often." John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

About the Author:

Gamboa's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Seminar.

Noriega is an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0816630518
• ISBN 13: 9780816630516
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 568