Oral history interview with Gronk, 1997 Jan. 20-23

Oral History Interview With
Gronk
In Los Angeles, California
January 20 & 23, 1997
Interviewer: Jeffrey Rangel

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Gronk on January 20 & 23, 1997. The interview took place in Los Angeles, California, and was conducted by Jeffrey Rangel for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

G: Gronk
JR: Jeffrey Rangel

[Session 1]

JR: Okay, this is an interview for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, with Gronk. Today is January 20, 1997, at the artist’s studio in downtown Los Angeles. The interviewer is Jeff Rangel and we’re ready to get started.

G: Okay, good.

JR: Welcome.

G: Thank you.

JR: Like I said, normally we like to start out with any recollections about family and kind of where you grew up, where your family was from, things of that nature.

G: Okay. My parents were both born here in Los Angeles, and my grandparents came from Mexico. I grew up, basically, with a single parent, my mother. I grew up in East Los Angeles. Early on—at five years old—I can remember that the things that I did best was to make things. And those were the most exciting times, I believe—when somebody gave me a pencil and a sheet of paper—was to create a world for myself, basically. It sort of made everything fall to the wayside. The environment where I was growing up, the poverty—all of that just sort of fell to the wayside, and I was able to create these worlds and enter into it. And I think that sort of isolated me a lot from other kids in the neighborhood, even isolated me while I was going to school. And my earliest recollections of entering school was the times when it was art time, and they had easels and they had paint and they had brushes.

And I remember that they used to have a competition every single year at the school, and the best drawings were usually picked and they would give awards to the students who did the best artwork. The school I went to was this school called Rowan Avenue Street School, and I was never picked for any of those awards—or even to be included in those exhibitions of art. And I always wondered why. [laughs] What is it about my stuff that is just not quite right?

And early on I was just fascinated by television. Because TV was sort of my babysitter. Growing up with a single parent, the TV set was on constantly. I was bombarded with cartoons on Saturdays, and also the rest of the week I was watching things early in the morning. And I think a lot of my early sensibilities sprang from the sense of a TV monitor in close proximity to me. Now, in the household where I grew up, it sort of had a very conservative atmosphere, a small house in this neighborhood—Gage Avenue was the street that I grew up on—relatively small house.

But the thing I remember the most about the living room was the day that what was brought into it was a boomerang coffee table. Now, for me that was "Space age has just entered into my living room!" In the fifties, you know, that is the time of kind of space-age sensibility. I remember sitting on top of it and I would be watching on television War of the Worlds or Devil Girl from Mars. But in War of the Worlds, in particular, the shape of the flying saucer in that movie was also the shape of the boomerang coffee table. And I would sit on top of the coffee table and just pretend that that was my flying saucer or my spaceship.

I think I’ve been intrigued from my earliest recollections with the sense of TV, and I can see it as something that directed me in my direction as an artist, even later on in life looking back now and see[ing] what a big influence TV or even film have had on my early beginnings. Just thinking about the fact that I could make something. When I saw something as silly or stupid as a film like Devil Girl from Mars, inside my head clicked the fact that, "Somebody actually made this. That’s what I want to do. I want to make things." There’s nothing else really that important to me at this point in my life—five, six years old. It’s to make things. It finally clicked in my head that somebody had to put a costume on that person. Somebody had to make those people do those certain things that they were doing. I want to do those kinds of things. But it was easy for me to see that, "Well, I don’t have access to Hollywood, so I can’t be like, at five years old, making movies, but perhaps I can create those images on a sheet of paper." I could create that ship floating in the ocean with a boomerang coffee table floating above it—shooting down rays and destroying the whole sheet of paper—by creating this image of this War of the Worlds kind of sensibility early on.

JR: Was this something that your mother encouraged you to do?

G: Actually, no. I had an uncle and he, allegedly—it’s like I never really found out the truth about this—was going to work for Walt Disney in the forties, but the war interrupted his career. He went into the army. But he was always somebody that was around that drew, and he would do drawings and stuff. And I always thought that was the coolest thing, that there’s someone that knows how to draw cartoons. I didn’t know how to draw quite like him. It was like he was good at what he did. What I was doing was like really very primitive. So I would always be so envious of the way he could draw actual cartoon kind of imagery. So I think that had an influence on me.

My mother sort of, I think, saw it as an activity that occupied my time—that kept me away from outside influences, basically. So I think for her it was good that I had concentrated on something other than hanging out on the streets or anything along those lines, that I could occupy my time by getting a sheet of paper and just spending the whole day drawing.

JR: What about friends or brothers and sisters?

G: Well, my father populated other places, and I have brothers and sisters who I run into and they say they’re my brother or sister. And I say, "Oh, really?" [laughter]

JR: I have cousins like that.

G: But I think friends that were in the neighborhood and people that I met when I was going to school always called me an artist, for one thing. It was because I was constantly drawing. So I was always referred to that idea. It’s like being called that already: "You’re an artist."

JR: It’s like your [calling]. [laughter]

G: "You’re an artist, this is what you do." I didn’t have any ideas as to, "Well, how does an artist make a living?" Or, "How does an artist become an artist? Or become someone that people see their work?" I had no notion of that. I knew that when people saw what I did, [they—Ed.] would not necessarily say, "Oh, that’s good." They would always say, "Oh, that’s interesting." [laughs] So I think even that kind of a response was, I think, calling attention to myself, basically, by showing, "This is what I could do." And I thought I could do it better than the person next to me or the other kid. The other kids had, I guess, a more . . . like, they would do a circle that was green and then the red dots and that was the tree. And two sticks for a trunk, and that was brown. And for me it was always so simple, and I would look at that and say, "Well, he’s doing it, he’s doing it, she’s doing it." It’s like, "I don’t want mine to be like that. So maybe I’ll do a triangle tree or maybe I’ll do an imaginary tree." And I think it was early becoming aware that I had an imagination. I think that was an important thing, that I was able to play with things.

Early on I was an avid reader, and I think that’s one of the saving graces for me as a kid as well. Books. . . . I could hardly wait when I was learning how to read the Dick and Jane books. "I can hardly wait till I grasp this and I can go into a library and I can read the big books that the adults carry with them." They could go out and they would check out a stack of thick books and it had all these words in it. And I’m struggling to learn how to read these Dick and Jane books. I can hardly wait till I’m able to grasp the larger subjects. So I had an impatience, I guess, as a kid. I wanted to know things, because I probably felt at the time that if you’re an adult you know everything—not realizing that when you do become an adult you still don’t know a lot. But as I kid I think I was excited about going into the library, reading things and the things that. . . . You know, one thing led into another. Another book led into this other fairy tale or this story, and it became more [involving, evolving], and it’s like, "Wow, dinosaurs!" It’s just like another direction. It’s like, "Oh, yeah, I got to learn about all these dinosaurs. They look so cool." It was learning about ships. It was learning about everything, like the world was just opening up and expanding for me. And that thrill and excitement just. . . . I became the avid reader. When you sat around in a circle and the teacher would point to the different kids, and some would have reading problems or they would read real slow, I could hardly wait till they pointed to me and said, "Okay, your turn." And then read, you know, like theatrical with feeling and emotions. [laughter] All that I could muster up at six or seven years old into these simple little stories of Dick and Jane. [speaks melodramatically:] "Yes, they’re going to the grandmother’s house. They’ve got cupcakes. These cupcakes look good. I can taste them."

So it was all of that enthusiasm of just beginning to learn about things. I think the world just opened up and kept on opening up for me. I wanted to do as much stuff when I was a kid just growing up—painting, drawing, whatever material was around. Like paintbrushes were non-existant for me at an early age. Only in the school kind of situation. And then the only thing was the Peechie folders, which I used to cover from front to back, all over. It was the most elaborate scrawls on Peechie folders and inside of books—in classes I was a lot of the times not listening but actually drawing—and on borders of papers that I would have for the math there would always be little drawings and doodles that would litter all over the pages. So I think from a very early age I was always creating and having fun, I guess, with making things.

JR: Already I’ve heard a couple of the major themes in your work—the sense of fun or sense of humor, some the performance aspects, and the imagination, the creativity—of the very earliest memories of yourself as a child. I think that’s pretty interesting. So when we talk a little bit later on about some of the specific bodies of work, it’s going to be interesting to hear how that comes out.

G: I think film was another thing and TV.

JR: Pop culture.

G: Yeah, that also had an impact. And I realized later on when I was doing my work that I was cropping my imagery as if it was on the screen. But not on the screen of the movie screen, but cropping it as you take the film and put it on a TV and things get cropped in a different way. Like heads don’t quite fit into the format of the TV, and sort of like you see half the face talking sometimes because it doesn’t quite all fit onto the TV screen. So in a sense I was making sort of cinematic and TV kind of choices in my painting, and that they were as if they were camera angles. And so they had crane shots, close-up, and different kind of angle-type shots. So if you look at my work and someone’s eyeballs are cut off but the nose and maybe the big red lips are in there, well, you look at a film like War of the Worlds and when the woman screams it’s Technicolor and big red lips. So from the earliest sources you have something called No Nose, which is like a cinematic close-up of someone’s face. So the reocurring [sic] things go all the way back to the past.

And I [tended, tend] to do that because a lot of my work tends to have a biographical or a source that goes back to history for me, in some way or another. And so I tend to use, perhaps, the shape of that boomerang coffee table or the War of the Worlds shape. But it’s floating through a landscape of more recent kind of work that I’m doing. And it’s just a sense of the familiar for me being tossed into what I’m doing now in the present. So it’s pulling something from the past and placing it into the present, but it has a biographical source to it whether it’s just a shape but, you know, you don’t read it as a coffee table or the spaceship from The War of the Worlds.

JR: Right.

G: So I think early on there was all of these things that cropped into my work.

By the time I entered into junior high school, I gravitated to a teacher—her name was Miss LaDuke—and she, for me, was my first encounter with what I thought was a beatnik. She wore a black turtleneck sweater, a black skirt, black stockings. She had hair that was really long and she had these sort of African beads around her neck and she had odd bracelets and stuff and she wore flat shoes. And everybody else wore pumps and had like the teacher kind of outfit on, the simple dress. And here was this woman that looked a little bit different than the rest and more casual. She was my ceramic teacher, and one thing she asked me was to spend time with her to talk after class or during lunch if I wanted to. It was interesting for me because it was like I was always intrigued by adults. I mean, as a kid it was like, "Yeah! This is life. You know, this woman who looks like a beatnik, and we’re talking, we’re having adult conversation." You know, it was sort of like where I wanted to be as a kid. And of course I was like [makes a babbling sound] stupid as everybody else around me. But as a young person then she asked me, "Okay, your ceramic sculptures that you’re making, why are you doing what you’re doing?" And I said, "Well, I’m making these African masks, and what I’m doing is, I’m burying them in East L.A. in different locations." And she goes, "Hmm, why are you burying these African masks throughout East L.A.?" "Well, in the future, maybe in 500 years from now there’s going to be an archaeologist who will discover these African masks all over East L.A. and will wonder, "How the hell did they get there? So that’s what I’m doing." And she said to me, "Look, you are going to take an awful lot of shit from a lot of people all your life. Don’t listen to them. Just do what you want to do." And I think that really left an impression on me. It was like, "Well, what I’m doing is okay." And it was like, "I’m having fun. I’m doing these things and burying these African masks. . . ." Well, I thought they would look like African masks. They were elongated-type mask shapes and had these patterns painted on them.

JR: Does that mean you weren’t getting that kind of encouragement many other places?

G: I think it was like hearing it from this adult who was in a sense an oddball herself—in a way—because she didn’t quite fit into the school structure of things and how other people looked at that particular moment of time in your life. And it was like somebody who just looked like she dressed comfortably and simply, and it was like everybody else was all dolled up with their hair stacked on their heads, spray—you know, hair spray—and just done to the nines. And here was somebody that didn’t fit that mode at all, and saw something in my work that, if I thought at the time was kind of silly, she said it was okay to be that way. So I think for me that was an important . . . and plus the fact she was an artist who was saying this to me. It wasn’t like a parent saying this. It wasn’t like the kids that I hung out with saying this. It’s like, "Don’t take anything from anybody. Just do what you want to do." But here was somebody who was an actual person that I believed to be an artist was telling me this.

And it was, I think, a very encouraging thing for me. Despite the fact that this was Stevenson Junior High School in East LA, and I think even at that time I felt sort of oddball in a way because I wasn’t into sports, I wasn’t into hanging out with the rest of the kids. I would walk around with a book that was on the New York bestseller list. It was like I thought that was going to be important for me to like . . . if I’m going to learn it’s like I have to see the ten most read books in the United States. And it’s like I have to know what other people are reading. So I would be walking around with this books and stuff that I’d be reading, and they would always say, "Why are you reading that? It’s not part of the curriculum for getting out of school or anything." But everything else seemed kind of boring, in a way, for me. It was like teen-romance and Clearasil and pimples, and just like, "Come on, let’s go further than that." [laughs]

JR: Let’s hurry up and get through that, huh?

G: Yes. I didn’t want to hear teen problems for the next seven years or so.

JR: But at the same time you really cued into things that were happening in popular culture, things that might be focused at youth, when you were in junior high. So that’s kind of feeding your imagination as well as these books on the bestseller list or books that you were just grabbing out of the library.

G: What happened, I think, for me was the expansion of the world in a way because of film. It was learning about things that other people were making and doing. I think at that point in time also [I] was learning that beyond the world I lived in there was this other world that existed as well. It was somebody in France doing something. There was somebody in Russia doing something. There was like some people all over the world that were making things—and not necessarily something that was like a painting that hung on a wall. There was somebody else that was making film that looked different than a Hollywood movie. I became intrigued by, like, "I don’t understand it. I have to go back and see it again. Come on with me! Let’s go see it again." And my friends and people that I knew it was like, "That’s got subtitles. What do you want to see that for?"

JR: [laughs]

G: "I have to. Because it’s this movie, and it’s like these people are doing things in it and they’re from Sweden, and this man’s name is [Ingmar—Ed.] Bergman, and I don’t understand what’s going on." "Well, then why do you want to see it again if you don’t understand it?" "Because I’ve gotta find out." It’s like, "Why don’t I understand these images? Why don’t I understand the situations of these people and what they’re doing?" So, again, it was like wanting to know what was out there. Why [Federico—Ed.] Fellini was doing something, why Bergman was doing something. And it was like, "These are about lesbians. What’s a lesbian, you know?" [laughter] "That’s about two women who love each other." "Oh, that’s what that movie’s about." [laughter]

JR: Oh, I get it now.

G: "Oh, that’s like the librarian." [laughter] And they were like, "Who?" And I, like, "Margaret, the one who has the library on Gage Avenue where I grew up." "What about her?" "Well, she’s like this. . . . Well, she looks like. . . . She’s big. She looks like a man. She’s got short-cropped hair, she wears Pendletons, she’s got her hair slicked back, and she’s always wearing pants and men’s shoes. And all of our parents told us that, "Well you know, kids, she can’t afford women’s dresses; that’s why she dresses like a man." And we all, "Oh, yeah, sure." And so we sort of like put one and one together and came up with five. So it was like here was a woman, her name was Margaret, she was the librarian, she was single, she lived at home with her mother, and she was always tough. She just looked like this tough guy behind the counter there. [Deepens his tone of voice:] "What are you doing over in that section? The kids section is over there." "Yeah, but I. . . ." "No, no, no. What you have to do is learn how to read in a direction. You don’t just go into the big kids’ books and start anywhere. You have to go to the classics first and then you build it up." So it was like this woman who was real aggressive and strong. And I thought, "Wow, she’s so cool. I think I saw a movie about her." [laughter]

So it was all of these kinds of things early on that set off, I think, the input . . . just like constant curiosity about what I didn’t understand. To me it was important to, like, "It’s got to make sense. Somebody did it for some reason. But it looks so beautiful. Why did they do it? Why did he do that?" It was always sort of like taking things apart, basically in a way, and trying to understand it. And not having the capacity to fully understand it because there was empty spaces. It’s like, "I want to see the adult movies."

JR: Where would you going to see these movies?

G: I would have to catch a couple of buses to go to Santa Monica, because that’s where they usually played. Or sometimes even in downtown LA. I remember ditching high school and going to the Los Angeles Theatre to see a movie called Peeping Tom. And it was by the same man—later on I found out—that did Black Narcissus, did a lot of different films, The Red Shoes, Tales of Hoffman. He did this movie, but it was like, "Wow, this is an adult movie!" And, you know, I go in there and of course there’s all these elderly men with their overcoats looking at this movie and I remember buying a chocolate cake and going into the theater and just sitting there. It’s like, "Okay, this is an adult movie. I got by. Like I’m in here so I guess they’ll take anybody to come into this movie house." And I still can remember the title of the movie and I’ve seen it later on and it’s an interesting film. But it was those kinds of things that took me out of my environment. I wasn’t a person that went to museums or galleries.

JR: I was just going to ask you that.

G: I didn’t know they exist[ed]. . . . Well, I knew that they existed. I knew that as a kid you go on a field trip, you go to a museum. You walk with a bunch of people and they show you paintings and stuff, and you would see the Picassos, you would see the different timeframes of art. And I think at that age I was more intrigued by the different cultures—like art from India, art from China, art from different countries and stuff—as opposed to looking at a Picasso or a Matisse and saying, "Ooh, wow, this is so cool!" That didn’t come till later—like, I think, at probably end of high school when I became more fascinated by painters and other artists. But in the earlier stages it was more gravitating to different cultures that made art.

And I think what happened was in that library that Margaret was in it was like, "Okay, there’s the art history book." You know, it’s like, "This is what the Greeks did, this is what the Romans did, this is what. . . ." You know,

all of this. So it was like going back and looking at what other people had done, and in some way I felt myself limited because, "Okay, I can draw, I can paint. But it doesn’t quite look like what I see that has been in the past. Now, why am I doing what I’m doing?" It’s beginning to question, "What is it that I do? Why do I do it this way?"

JR: How old were you when you were asking yourself these questions?

G: Those are like the end of junior high school into high school. In high school, again it was taking and gravitating to the art classes. "I want to be a part of the art class." It’s like, "I don’t care about these other studies. I just want to do art and make things." Unfortunately, in high school I ran up against Mr. Ramirez, who was the local high school teacher, and we just did not hit it off.

JR: Art teacher?

G: Art teacher. And we had major run-ins and stuff. I was sort of like the rotten apple in his view, and I would talk back. And I was doing things that he just didn’t feel was the way I should learn art. And it was like, you know, "Draw your hand." And I [would say—Ed.], "Draw my hand?!" [laughter]

JR: In high school, they’re having me do this?

G: "I’m gonna draw my hand. . . ."

[Break in taping]

JR: Okay, we’re back. This is tape 1, side B, interviewing with Gronk in his studio on January 20, 1997. And I was just commenting about how amazed I am about your self-consciousness, really, at such an early age. And one of the things that I notice going sort of through some of the profile material is that at fourteen years old you’re writing plays already. Which to me. . . . I mean, I can kind of understand the response of maybe some of your peers. Like, "Wow, man, what are you doing with that top ten best-seller book right now? Don’t you want to go do these other things?" But if you wanted to comment on that, I think. . . .

G: Well, I was saying that I felt so small in comparison to what was taking place all over the world. I mean, so almost insignificant that I was relying just on a sheet of paper and a pencil or a tool of some sort to make something. And here other people had access to film and actors and they can create a world also, and their world was unique and different and excitingly visual for me. And I think that’s probably another key element is that I’ve always tended to have a visual sensibility that was imaginative in some way. And I guess, again, it comes from early . . . coming from an environment that was . . . you know, we weren’t wealthy, we weren’t rich. But in a sense, in comparison to other people around me, sometimes I was better off than other kids that I knew. An example was that every Christmas you would collect canned goods and then we would deliver them to different families that couldn’t afford a Christmas dinner and stuff. And end up knocking on the doors of these people—because they would give us a list of who was in need—and then the kid that I sat next to in school was the kid that answered the door. And like, "Wow, I didn’t know you were poor." And "poor" meant "poor of the poorest." And I felt like, boy, I thought I had it easy and stuff in comparison to a lot of other people around me. I think a lot of other people gravitated to gangs or to other sources for that reinforcement or validation. And for me it was listening to Margaret, the librarian, or listening to LaDuke, who was the art teacher. It was sort of like, "I’ve got something that I can do and that I can share, that other people seem to like and look at." So at a very early age it was, like, "Look at what I could do." And I guess it was just . . . you know, there was nothing else. Physically, I was just a skinny, stupid-looking kid, just like nothing that anybody was going to get excited about. But I did have talent. I did have something that I could pick up and share. And it wasn’t like, "No, I couldn’t hit the home run. No, I couldn’t catch the ball with a glove. No, I couldn’t swim the Channel. No, I couldn’t, you know, like do any of those kinds of things, but look at how good I can make these things," and have other people look at them and enter into something that I’ve created.

JR: Right.

G: And so I think from early on it was like that curiosity of seeing what other people can do and make. And when I say it’s like film was an important thing, because it was the most accessible kind of thing. It was going to the movies on Saturday and Sunday. And like just watching a movie from the time you entered till like, "I’m going to see it three or four times." And it’s like watching things and just being transported somewhere else or another time frame or another place. And I think all of that influenced me when I started to do even the performance pieces. It was going back after seeing a horror movie. "Okay, let’s get the neighborhood to restage that movie. I saw this wonderful movie the other day," and explaining it to all the kids. "Okay, you’re going to be the heroine, you’re going to be the monster. And, of course, you’re going to fall down and he’s gonna pick you up and carry you off." And it would be like staging this in the front yards of all the neighbors’ houses. And we would take over the neighborhood, run down the streets like wild kids, and create this monster movie that we would even add the music to. [sounds a verbal drumroll] You know, like all these sources. So, early on I had that sense of. . . . I mean, I didn’t know it was performance art or happenings or anything, because you’re just a kid growing up. And so to me it was just like this was play, but this was like I can direct this and stage these things in the neighborhood. And as I got older it’s like, well, that sense of play, I think, is something that I’ve utilized. Now meeting other people who had similar experiences or similar kinds of sensibility I tended to gravitate to. After high school it was hanging out at East L.A. College, and one of the things was was like, "Wow, people drink coffee, they smoke cigarettes; they’re adults. "These are like all the foreign films I’ve ever seen in my life."

JR: [laughs]

G: "It’s like the smoke coming out of the people’s faces. Wow, these are the big kids. They’ve got adult problems. Ooh, I wonder if it’s going to be like Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon in The Apartment?" It’s like "Things like that going to happen to us now?" So it was like all of those kinds of things that I think I was intrigued by growing up. I ended up hanging out there, taking a class in . . . I believe, like art survey class. Thomas Silleman was the instructor. And, again, it was art about architecture. It was about magazines, it was about film, thank God. It was about like a whole survey of what people had made and stuff. And here it is, okay, it’s like making connections. It’s like, "Oh, that’s that whole school of abstract people. Oh, here’s this other school. Wow, what happened before them? Oh, it’s like this whole school of surrealism. Oh, New York is the center after the War. It’s like all the Europeans ended up here." It’s like all of sudden things started to make sense. It’s like there was a clarity, sort of a cloud lift. It’s like, "Oh, the dadas." It’s like, "Hmm, those constructivists. That’s what I’m doing. I’m painting and doing things that are like on the streets in Russia. They used to paint these trains and the trains used to go into the provinces and let people experience art by painting on the sides of the trains. That’s so exciting! That’s like things I would like to do." So it was like all of sudden putting things together. Like looking, "Oh, here’s this Art in America. Oh, this is my new hangout. This is the library in here that has all these movie reviews, Art in America, all these art type of publications. "Boy, I’m going to have to. . . ." It’s like, "How far back does it go? Okay, now I’m going to have to start reading from the first publications all the way to 1966 or so." And so, again, it’s like the library became the place that was the hangout for me. And taking in a lot of the information about other people that were making things. And then the thrill for me was, "There are people out there that are even stranger than I am. Oh, that is so wonderful." It was like. . . . [laughter]

JR: Yeah, what was strange about some people at that time. So this would be about the mid-sixties that you would be hanging out?

G: Yeah. It was about ‘66, around that timeframe.

JR: What kind of stuff were people into at East L.A. College that made them strange in ‘66?

G: Actually, probably it was much later than that. About ‘67, ‘68, around that timeframe. And there were people who are doing things like happenings and they did it in the fifties. And then there’s like, "Oh, that whole beat era. I wonder if my junior high school teacher was a beatnik! She used to look just it!" [laughter]

JR: That’s it!

G: "She used to just look like that. And she used to mention some name that I just never like realized. Oh, yeah, On the Road, Jack Kerouac, that was a footnote!" [laughter] "Now I get it." So it was like piecing things together that were just thrown out and then now realizing. You know, you break out of puberty, and it’s like, "Oh, yeah," a whole ‘nother world has opened up for you. And so it’s like a lot of things that. . . .

Like the kids that I hung out with in high school. There was a thing that took place at that time. It was the dropping of the dress code. Where you could sort of like. . . . Like the codes were sort of dropping. It’s like before, the girls could not wear jeans, they had to wear dresses. But now it’s like the dress code has relaxed. You can wear a T-shirt and blue jeans, and that’s it, you know, like and tennis shoes. And you can look, like, long hair, do whatever you wanted to do with yourself. And so things like that were falling to the wayside. So there was a lot of options now to sort of like, "Let’s see how far you can push this—the buttons on this." And since I was intrigued by theater also, I think in a sense my outfits are going to be very theatrical and maybe sometimes even exaggerated in a way. And the rule is, "If you can walk, wear it."

JR: [laughs]

G: There are no rules here. [laughs] So I think early on, when I was going to high school, there was a table that only these guys used to sit at. And it was the queer table. Now everybody used to make fun of these guys, and they had to sort of like leave school because they were sort of identified as being gay in high school.

JR: They had to leave school, literally?

G: Yeah, because at that time that was not really acceptable, and so they had to not stay in school. Or else they had to go to continuation school . . .

JR: Right.

G: . . . which was to continue it, but they were ostracized outside of a bigger population of the school.

JR: I see.

G: And for me that was like, "God, this is so weird, because it’s like . . . you know, look at these foreign films and look at how these people look. It’s like, who should care about these things?" And so it’s like I used to hang out with them. They were always identified as artists, also. And I thought, "Well, there’s nothing really deprimental to anybody. These are friends. These are people I know, and that I hang out with." And to me it was like they were funny and witty, and yet I never felt like really a part of that. And I think what it was was that it just seemed so odd because I didn’t have their same kind of language and the same kind of notions about things. And they were always talking about guys for some reason. Like, "How would you talk about guys when you’re a guy?" [laughter] I mean, you know the physicality of it. It’s all the same, isn’t it? [laughter] "Oh, Gronk, yeah, yeah. Grow up."

JR: [laughs]

G: So I think I was sort of lumped into that group, but I was saved from it all in a way, because I could make art that the toughest cholo would like. So in a sense I was protected by the gang guys that were in the neighborhood or the school. It was like, "Yeah, Gronk’s strange but he can draw." [laughs]

JR: That’s interesting that they really respected that.

G: And I tried to figure that out later on, how they protected me in a way even though I would sit with the gay guys and hang out with them and everybody like tell jokes and have fun and stuff, and yet I was not considered gay, in a way. They said, "Well, he may be, but he really can draw. Did you see the tattoo he did on Joe?" [laughter] "He can draw." And what I think it was, was at that time they kind of felt that I was going to be able to leave that neighborhood, that school, that environment, and they never will. They would have to stay within their neighborhood where their gang was. They couldn’t venture past a certain area. So their life is going to be limited. And if they protected me in some way me leaving, they left, too, because they had that sense of protection. So in a sense I think it was very helpful that I wasn’t threatened or punched-out or anything along those lines. And so I think was a thing that allowed me to maneuver within that arena.

And in the art kind of beginnings for me and realizing that I want to do things, but I’m going to have get people that are like-minded or that actually I can say, "Can we do this piece called ‘Cockroaches Have No Friends’ "? And like I’m going to take over this park and say it’s a children’s puppet show, and you’re going to go dressed like this woman, and you’re going to get this guy and he’s a high school guy and he’s wearing a poncho and he’s going to have these raw eggs in a Coke bottle underneath him, and you pull and you squeeze the eggs and crush ‘em, and then you lick it and then you get the bottle and you throw it at the audience."

JR: [laughs]

G: And he would say, "Okay." And everybody else, "Okay." And I would do and stage these things in a park, and then a couple of years went by, but one of the people I had asked to be in that piece was someone named Patssi Valdez. And I had heard about her. She had an exotic look to her, sort of like a Sophia Loren kind of quality to her at the time, but in high school. And she had a boyfriend and his name was Willie Herr?n. And her best friend was Sylvia Delgado, whose boyfriend was Harry Gamboa [Jr.—Ed.]. So we sort of like . . . I did the piece Cockroaches Have No Friends. Patssi was in it. Her sister was in it—Karen—as well. And she said, "Well, my boyfriend’s like really upset that I’m doing this thing, but that’s why I’m going to do it because I’m getting him upset." "Who is your boyfriend?" "It’s that quiet one over there." And here was this guy with long hair and wearing like a Sgt. Pepper outfit. [laughs] And I said, "Oh, he looks like Rod Stewart." [laughter]

JR: "Oh God, he’s going to want to hear that. [laughter]

G: And then Sylvia, her best friend, came to the performance—and Harry. And so they saw this production of Cockroaches Have No Friends, and they were like, "What the hell is that?!" There were like all these kids running around on that stage, somebody banging a drum and somebody getting a coke bottle and crushing eggs underneath somebody’s serape and all this activity going on on this stage. And then somebody got these fried eggs and threw it on somebody’s back and it burned the kid. Just like all of these activities going on on the stage. And then the show ended and, all of a sudden, it’s like, "I think we’re going to take this on the road. We’re going to do it at a couple of other places." And then I got asked to do it at an East L.A. College art class and it turned out a disaster. The lead person got drunk and was just like foul-mouthed and fell and everything just collapsed. And I’m like, "Oh man, should I do this again?" And the rest of the people that were around were sort of like. . . . You know, everybody was taking acid and drugs and reds or r.d.s., downers and uppers, and so it was like all this activity of the drug culture, in a way, surfacing. I’m like, "Oh, my God, I can’t really work with these people. But maybe something else will come along."

And then one day I get a phone call from Harry. "I’m putting together a magazine. It’s called Regenerac?on. And I’m asking Patssi and Willie to work with me on this publication. And Willie right now is doing a mural in City Terrace. Do you want to go take a look?" And I said, "Sure." So we went into this alley, and he was doing The Wall That Cracked Open. So I went and saw it, and at that time I had been asked by the Chicano Studies at Cal State L.A. to do a mural in the Chicano department there. And I ran home to find, "What the hell is a mural?"

JR: [laughs]

G: And then ran back, "Oh yeah, I can do it. Yeah, it’s easy. Just a wall, right? I can paint something on it. Okay." I did this piece there, and it was like—I don’t know—just a concoction of all kinds of stuff, and they just like, "What the hell is this?" And it was [a] very grotesque kind of looking mural. I don’t know if any photographs of it exist any more, but I did the piece and went to go see Willie’s piece in [say], "Oh, that’s so refined, that kind of work there. It looks cool, though." And Harry introduced me to Willie, and we talked and one thing led into another. It’s like, "Well, let’s go to Willie’s garage and we can do our drawings there." Harry would give us illustration boards that. . . . It would all be laid out. The articles would be already written. All we had to do was the illustrations for them. But we couldn’t afford to shrink or blow up, so we had to do it to the particular square that was there. And we would do it in ink and that would be the drawing that we would do for that publication.

So we would go into Willie’s garage and sometimes Patssi’s mother’s garage. They both grew up with single parents as well. Willie was raised by his mother and Patssi was raised by her mother. And so they had the garages and so we would go into the garage and draw and talk and time would just fall to the wayside. Again, it was just like, "We’ve got a lot of things in common. We’re sort of, all four of us, sort of outcasts in a way. We look slightly different than a lot of people out there. The drawings and stuff that we’re doing is a lot different than what we saw [in—Ed.] other peoples’ work and what they were doing. The magazine— Regenerac?on—was for me, I guess, early stages of—this is probably about ‘72— early stages of my journals, in a way. It was just pen and ink. And it was beginning to get a style, as I would later call it. But it was the beginnings of a way that I was drawing at the time. And when we finished the first publication, we spent so much time with one another drawing that we said, "Well, there’s a lot of other possibilities for us to do. I mean, look at the way we look. Our look is part of who we are, in a way. And it is something about us that Harry would document a lot of our activity, and we would look at the slides and say, "Gee, that looks like a movie." Or, "We sort of look like characters. I mean, like very young . . . that we can make a lot of different imagery, just ourselves, utilizing just us."

And I think that was the very beginnings of ASCO’s development and figuring things out as to what we were going to do. Harry and I tended to gravitate to one another, because I think what happened is that we became sort of the theoreticians of ASCO, in a way. We started hanging out with each other, and I think after a while it was like, "Gee, I think we should probably call ourselves something." And either Harry or Willie were the ones that came up with the name ASCO. And they said, "Yeah, it’s nausea." And it’s like, "Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re doing nausea."

JR: Let me ask you. This is when you guys were first getting together. It’s the late sixties, early seventies?

G: Early seventies.

JR: Early seventies?

G: Yeah.

JR: When did you do the mural at Cal State L.A.?

G: About ‘69.

JR: About ‘69?

G: Yeah.

JR: So there’s a lot of political activity taking place in Los Angeles, on the east side in particular. Yet you guys are meeting in the garage and sort of hashing things out together. Was there any particular response that you guys had, individually or collectively, to the politics that were taking place?

G: I think the person that, for me, that had a very political edge to him was Harry Gamboa, because he was the leader of the walk-outs at Garfield High School.

JR: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.

G: And so I think he had a more thought-out political agenda to his sensibility early on. And for me I don’t think what I was doing fitted into that kind of sensibility. It’s like Cockroaches Have No Friends, and having somebody with in a serape and a Coke bottle and raw eggs, you know, just wasn’t a part of it.

JR: Right.

G: I think during the course of time, being with these other people and, I guess, sensing that some of what we were doing was reflective of that time frame. Now in that time frame still the Vietnam War was going on. So what happened was, once you got out of high school, a lot of people we knew were of draft age, which is eighteen years and older. And what happened was—in proportion to the rest of the population; that was a big push, that whole group of people—Willie and I found ourselves in that position as well. For me, I could have just said I was gay, and that would have been it. But I thought, "Boy, this is going to be something that in some way. . . . Perhaps to make things, for myself, a little bit more difficult, I said, "Well, if they take me in, they’re going to have to throw me out. Because I can’t conform to this sensibility." And that’s exactly what happened. I was taken in and then I was thrown out because it was. . . . I was there for maybe about two weeks. I got a haircut and that was. . . . I came back with a new hairdo, and everybody said, "Oh that’s good, because it’s going come in fashion. Everybody’s going to get their hair cut short." And I said, "Oh, I’m glad I went in then." [laughter]

But the serious side of it was that a lot of our friends were coming back in body bags and were dying, and we were seeing a whole generation come back that weren’t alive anymore. And in a sense that gave us nausea—or "nauseous." And that is ASCO, in a way. It was like, "God, our generation is getting wiped out. This is a horrible situation." I think for myself after two weeks, they gave me a train ticket. I caught a bus ride back to L.A. and I was out. And I just felt like, "Boy, that was an interesting experience." I didn’t have to do anything. I was sort of separated and talked to and counseled. And they were saying, "Yeah, you’re a nonconformist."

JR: You’re not army material. [laughter]

G: "You just don’t fit in." You know, it’s like what could they do if you don’t listen to them or do what they want you to do? To me it was like I was. . . .

JR: The military has a whole structure built on. . . .

G: If you believe it, though. [laughter]

JR: Well sure, but, I mean, it’s meant to impose structure on people who otherwise wouldn’t listen.

G: And they force you to conform, in a way.

JR: Right.

G: And they put peer pressure on the other people to make you conform. But it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working.

JR: It just didn’t work, huh. So you were at boot camp?

G: Yeah.

JR: Where was this?

G: Fort Ord, which is up north in northern California. It was a two-week trip. That’s all I remember is like, okay. . . . And one of the things, I got counseling from a lawyer, and he said, "It’s either this or jail because they’ve singled you out as somebody they’re going to make an example of. And so it’s either you’re going go to jail or you’re going to go into the army. But if you go into the army you’ll only spend two weeks; if you go to jail you’ll spend a much longer time. So that we advise you to go in

because they’ll kick you out but they can’t kick you out of jail. So you go in."

JR: They sent you a lawyer before you went into boot camp?

G: Yeah. [laughter] Does this blinking mean something?

JR: It means we’re almost there, yeah. Why don’t we stop and then I’ll get another tape.

G: Okay.

[Break in taping]

JR: Okay, this is tape two, side A, continuing on January 20th, an interview with Gronk in his studio in Los Angeles. We left off on the last tape talking about your boot camp, [which was short-lived. Boot camp experience.

G: My experience in boot camp. Yeah, I left, I guess, a schizophrenic. [laughter] I got back to Los Angeles with a new haircut, and everybody was asking, "Well, how did you do it?" I said, "Well, my lawyer said if I go to jail I could spend a long time there. If I go in, the only thing they can possibly do to me if I don’t conform to them is to throw me out. So that’s what I opted for, was to get thrown out." And then Willie was going through this similar kind of situation also. And I forget how he resolved his, but we were all sort of like gonna write things and stuff to prevent him from going in. I forget, though, how he ended up. But he didn’t go in.

JR: Did Harry have to face that?

G: No, Harry I think was in. . . . I think they had a lotto at that time. I think he was in a kind of far-off kind of situation so he didn’t have to. And I believe also that he was going to university or college. Seems like there was a deferment.

JR: Okay. He had a deferment and then. . . .

G: He had a deferment.

JR: So when the Moratorium rolled around in 1970 did you have any particular response to that, seeing as how you had. . . .

G: Well, I participated in it, and I was at the park when the unrest took place and the tear gas came and the police marched in. And I think at that time for me I was shaken by the fact of being tear-gassed. And a lot of kids and people running and things happening. I think for me that was, again, another realization of a situation that I was in. In the neighborhood I was in, the people that were being affected by this were people of color. All of those kinds of things were fitting into place. We talked about it afterwards, and Willie and I did a painting together called the Black and White Mural. And it was sort of a newsreel of that particular moment in time and it was black and white imagery, one of it which was the police marching on Whittier Boulevard. It was people being tear-gassed. It was a jail. It was like different images. Sort of a document of what that neighborhood experienced in Estrada Courts—part of East L.A. So I think a lot of things propelled our work in a way as well.

JR: And as far as murals go, that one, in terms of, I guess, style, was and still stands out as a very unique mural in Estrada Courts, or in terms of Chicano murals in general. It’s interesting that you guys chose a different sort of way of depicting that event rather than . . . a different narrative style.

G: Right.

JR: Different images.

G: I think for myself and in doing work with Willie that was one of our first kind of collaborations together. We had done other things, collaborating in a painterly fashion where he would start at one end and I would start at the other end and then we would join it in the middle. And it wasn’t like saying, "Gee, I think that needs a little bit of blue or green." It was like, "He knows how to handle paint. He knows what to do. Let him do it." It was that element of trust in a collaboration in a way. It was, in a sense, like playing music in a band in a way. You rely on your other musicians and you feel comfortable and confident that they will hold up their end. And paintingly Willie and I worked well together. Patssi was doing her own paintings on her own—and drawings—and Harry was doing mostly photography and wasn’t really a painter. But Willie and I had that painterly kind of sensibility. And I think how we worked on that piece was to select visual imagery that came from that particular time in 1970, and to utilize even our own imagery of ourselves and we placed it inside the piece as well in certain images. But, again, it’s, for me, cinematic in a way, because it has a documentary kind of style to it.

JR: Very.

G: And even for me, growing up in the sixties and this piece being done in the seventies, there’s a movie called Battle of Algiers, which is a black-and-white movie, and, you know, I had no access to Hollywood or to do a Battle of Algiers, but perhaps I can utilize that kind of information and place it into this piece. And my earliest take on things did not have Sacred Hearts. That’s Willie’s image in the piece. Anything religious I did not include—and consciously so—in my work. I felt, "Nietzsche settled that for everyone a long time ago. Let’s move on." He, like Wagner and the rest, "Let’s defy the gods," you know? "It’s over with, we’ve already settled that. Spengler already said that—the decline of Western civilization. It doesn’t exist anymore for me. I don’t need that imagery in my work or to dwell on it so it’s not going to be a part of my language." So I didn’t do Sacred Hearts or necessarily "mi familia" kind of imagery. It was like I didn’t come from that kind of sensibility either. It was a broken home.

JR: Which is so prominent at the time, this sort of new indigenous spirituality.

G: Right.

JR: So it was a real conscious effort on your part?

G: Yeah. For me, it was, "I don’t do Virgins of Guadalupe. I don’t do corn goddesses. I can only do what I’m about, and I’m an urban Chicano living in a city. I can’t impose upon my work other things. I can be influenced by a war that’s taking place, that’s killing off people. I can look at the world and say, ‘Yeah, yuk, it’s disgusting at times as well. And how being tear-gassed in your own country.’ " All of those kinds of different things that took place, I think had an impact. And it was like reading Sartre and Camus and all those kinds of things early on in my early development as a person, and seeing, "Yeah, it is pretty disgusting out there. Yeah, we do live in an absurd kind of world and things like this happen." And so I think those were concerns for me in my work early on. It was even like. . . . You look at the early stuff and there is an attraction to the grotesque, in a way. There’s a lot of imagery of grotesque kind of situations in the pictorial pieces. And I think for the the Black and White Mural I was attempting more to give it a cinematic, documentary kind of thing—almost like a time capsule for that neighborhood. Like, this is what was experienced here at a particular moment in time. I intentionally wanted black and white as opposed to color. I felt that, to me, it was—well, documentaries are in black and white—usually—at that time. And that this was like a way to give some intensity to the piece. And it was interesting because it was fun working on the piece. It was like, "This is turning out pretty good. I like the scale. I’m up here on a scaffold, and it’s like this grid that I’m not really used to working in but now we’re deviating from that grid, and Willie’s working on his own and I’m working on my own." And then working on that whenever we had time to do it. And then doing the other things, which were like nighttime activities and tagging or going into the streets and doing different kinds of graffiti and stuff like that with political slogans. All kinds of different things that we sort of like did in the middle of the night.

JR: This was you and Willie? Or is this all ASCO?

G: This was all ASCO. Yeah, it was all of us working on stuff like that. It was kind of sad because Patssi didn’t participate initially on a lot of that activity. And one was because her boyfriend was Willie, and Willie was very protective: "No, Patssi, you can’t run fast enough. If we have to run, you’re probably going to trip and fall and they’ll catch you." So I think she had to deal with stuff like that. She had this macho guy who was like. . . . A lot of people never even realized Patssi was doing work at the time. One day I was at her house, and she goes, "You know, I have my closet filled with some paintings. Would you like to see them?" "You paint, too?" [laughs] "Yeah, let’s see what you do." And she brought out these things and I go, "Wow! These are cool." She goes, "Well, you know, I really don’t show this stuff." And I think part of the problem was that there was Willie who was an excellent painter, there was me who could paint, and [she—Ed.] was sort of inhibited about bringing things out. Until she developed her own way of doing things—and I think then she sort of took off in her own direction of making things. But early on I think she was inhibited to share a lot of the stuff, because she had two cohorts who were also painters and were producing an interesting body of work. And Harry was clever with words and writing, and we would. . . . I think Harry and I gravitated to one another because we have like a black sense of humor to things, and we were able to laugh at a lot of different situations. And a lot of the times everybody took things so seriously that they weren’t able to laugh at things or make ridicule or use wit in any way. And our whole forte was to be able to talk, to use wit and to use those kind of tactics in our work. So I think we sort of on a daily basis were constantly on the phone talking, "I’ve got this idea, blah, blah blah." "Oh, yeah, that sounds exciting. Let’s do it!" So it was having a support group and sort of like people interesting enough to work together and collaborate.

It was unlike another group called Los Four, which had sort of like, "Oh, we have this Marxist agenda here." And like, "Let’s vote as to how we are going to go about retaining what the streets have into our artwork. We’re going to take the graffiti, and now we’re going to put it on a piece of canvas." And it was like, "Who votes yes and who votes no on that idea?" And for us it was a lot looser. It was like we didn’t have that kind of like Marxist agenda or sensibility. And it was more spontaneous. And instead of having to take from the streets and put it into our work, we were in the streets doing our work. So it was a completely separate group. We once went to Los Four to show what we were doing, and we showed them all these slides of our work. And it was Frank [Romero—Ed.] and it was Carlos [Almaraz—Ed.] and Gilbert [Luj?n—Ed.], and they looked at our stuff and were like, "This is what we’re doing." And it was a lot different, their sensibility. It was like a younger generation to them doing something, and I don’t think they really gravitated to it. They couldn’t quite figure it. "They’re not even going to the universities, they’re not going to college, they’re not. . . . Look at their stuff. It’s just like . . . you know, like what is it? Oh, they’ll die off in a couple of years, they’ll disintegrate and burn up." And I think, pretty much across the boards, a lot of other Chicano groups perhaps thought the same way as well. We were just a rumor to a lot of people for the longest time, and sort of thought of as drug addicts, perverts. All kinds of names were hurled at us by other Chicano artists. And I think that sort of not being a part of it—the Chicano art scene in general—isolated us from that. But we were not accepted by the mainstream art gallery kind of westside thinking of art either. So we were sort of on our own to develop our own way. We weren’t thinking, "We’re going to end up in museums and galleries and stuff." Just to do the work was important. I think for Los Four it was like, "Art sells. You can get into museums. I want to be a part of the mainstream of the art arena."

JR: How was that jibe with the more Marxist ideology?

G: I think they compromised an awful lot in order to see it through, but not necessarily in successful ways. I mean, you look at Gilbert Luj?n and [Beto—Ed.] de la Rocha’s work, and they’re not mainstream, a lot of ways, in museums and galleries. And it’s occasional shows here and there, hit and miss. But I think Carlos Almaraz is a great painter. I mean, I think his work is stunning, especially the early stuff as opposed to the later stuff. But I think he was a very good painter and a terrific artist.

JR: You know what I find interesting is despite these differences there were moments that either you showed. . . . ASCO would show with Los Four, like at the Point Gallery in Santa Monica, or, if I’m not mistaken, you guys did work together on Con Safos?

G: Actually, Con Safos was a magazine that Gilbert Luj?n had come up with and, again, I was a rumor on the streets. One day I’m walking down First Street, and Gilbert Luj?n approached me. And he was, I think, going to school at the time—college—and I was just like this young kid walking down the street and everybody would go like, "That’s Gronk. He’s a like a [punk] artist."

JR: There he goes! [laughs]

G: And so he came up to me and asked me to do a drawing for Con Safos magazine, and I just thought, you know, like, "Here." And it was a very simple pen-and-ink drawing, and he utilized it in the magazine. But it was not something that I collaborated, really; it was just being asked to be in. I was more like, I guess, enamored by what was going on with these other people that I was doing work with. I always thought them very old-fashioned, in a way. You know, their sense of, you know, "Sage has to be in everything." It’s like all of that kind of stuff. Just like, "What is this?" And the work, like, "Oh, they’re painting on tortillas. Great. Clever." [laughter] "He’s got a low-rider? Oh, cool." And like, "Oh, Frank Romero can do big butts? Oh, great!" [more laughter] "I wonder if that’s his wife." And it was like, "If he can paint so good, why does he do that?" [laughs] We always used to make fun of them, in a way. And it was just sort of like, because we always thought them so stodgy. We couldn’t hang out with them, basically, because they were like a different world to us in a way. Our sensibility was in a different generation, basically. They were already like married, they were having kids, they were wanting to go to New York and do their thing there. And us, we were just like, "Everything’s brand new. We can do anything we want!" And they were like, "Chicano art is this."

JR: So there’s no sense like you’re kind of picking up a torch or anything like that? It’s like a whole different race, man, we’re just. . . .

G: Oh, no. No. What it was was that we were producing work at the same time. I mean, it wasn’t as if they were doing it before us.

JR: Right.

G: But our work, we knew, was a lot different than what they were up to. It was interesting, I think, that there was other groups that were doing things, and we would hear about these conferences, these Chicano art conferences, but we were never invited to any of those things to participate. It was Malaquias Montoya in Sacramento, Jos? Montoya in Sacramento, the Royal Chicano Air Force, CACA [C_____ A_____ C_____ A_____—Ed.], San Diego. It’s like all these different organizations had their own little thing going, and we didn’t feel a part of a lot of that, because the work had a different look to it, in a way. And we were using ourselves in these pictures and photographs, and we would mail them off to people: "This is what we’re doing." It was like sending things off in the mail. And they were getting these things, announcements to stuff, and we were never really truly, I think, accepted by them—initially. And I think, like I said, in a sense they felt we would just burn out and disappear. But we ended up out-producing them and every other kin that we had at the time and continually doing work. And so I think what happens, too, is they had their own sensibility. We had no by-laws. It’s like, "Oh, this is ASCO’s way of doing stuff." We eventually started to add more people to come into the group so that we can develop more things and do other things with other people. So it kept on growing as people heard about us, and I don’t believe it was till the early eighties, late seventies, that we were asked to go to a conference. And we said, "Yes." And it was Willie and Harry and myself. And Harry made one remark and it just [upriled] everybody at the conference. And then there were other people who supported us, and so there was this big battle as to like, "What is Chicano art?" And Harry had just said we would be doing art even if there was no Chicano movement. And it was just like, "What?! How dare you? You would never get anywhere unless there was that." And his idea was that no matter what, we would still be producing. We would still be inclined to do our artwork no matter what. That was our goal or that was what we wanted to do with ourselves was to create.

JR: Two things. One, you mentioned mail art, so that reminded me to ask you about Jerry Dreva. And the other thing is, if you don’t feel necessarily that your sensibility—well, obviously, your sensibilities with ASCO were much different than sort of more traditional, more recognizable Chicano art—were there other groups or other artists, other movements happening at the time to whom you felt sort of affinities with?

G: At that time?

JR: Yeah. In L.A. Anywhere, for that matter?

G: Well, like I said, earlier on I felt an affinity to the Russian constructivists.

JR: Yeah, I remember that.

G: I mean, I felt an affinity to the dadas or the German expressionists, who were also social critics of their particular moment in time and observers of what was taking place within the culture. To me, those were like. . . . Looking at Max Beckman and saying, "I like his work." I mean, what he did, what he sort of left behind, and those imagery [sic] of George Gross depicting the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and twenties. I mean, those were intriguing kinds of aspects, that perhaps I pulled from that as well, incorporated that kind of sensibility into my own work. So I think art history had an impact on my work early on. Also, it’s like looking at Siquieros’ pieces and Diego Rivera’s and Orozco and finding myself intrigued by more so maybe Orozco than Diego or Siquieros. And sort of like looking at certain things that he was doing that like, "That has an impact, and it’s really very graphic," or "I’m intrigued by that." I think more people had an affinity to, perhaps, Siquieros’ work. And early on it was reading the fabulous life of Diego Rivera and saying, "Hey, who’s this woman he married? She sounds cool! She sounds better than him."

JR: [laughs] Right.

G: And it was just like, "She’s only in a couple of chapters. Why isn’t there anything written about this woman?" It’s like, "I don’t see her in any publications or magazines." And the earliest tip of the hat to her came, I believe, in about 1974 when Harry was doing the Regenerac?on magazine, and I put a stamp that said, "[A, A.] Frieda Kahlo." And that was in the magazine. And I don’t think there was too many people that were familiar with her work at that particular moment in time or that were using that reference to her. But she, to me, was the more intriguing. I read this big, thick book all about Diego Rivera, and the most interesting character is his wife. And he only wrote a small thing about her. And I’m thinking, "God, there must be more to her." And it became just like, again, for me like curious. "Who is she? What does she do? Why are they talking about her?" All of those things were very intriguing for me.

JR: It’s kind of interesting—if I can interrupt here a second—that Chicano artists and Chicana feminists would really sort of invoke her life and her experience as being sort of like a precursor to the work that they were doing, yet it’s invoked in a very, quote-unquote, "Chicano art" sensibility, once again. I wonder how that sat with you.

G: Well, for me it was more the character and the person and an attraction to her as a person initially. And it wasn’t to imitate her style or to evoke, "Well, I’m going to do two portraits. It’s going to be like "Dos Friedas" or something along those lines." That was a simple stamp that said Frieda Kahlo. Then in 1978 I do another reference to Frieda Kahlo, and I do it but a man is playing Frieda. And it’s this guy named Teddy Sandoval, who was another artist. And so, "Well, I’m going to do the disco version of Frieda Kahlo, and. . . ."

JR: She’s perfect. She’s got the style, right. [laughter]

G: "But, Teddy, you’re going to play her in the photographs." And so here is Teddy with his eyebrows pushed together, and I make him go through several images for photographs and utilize several of the photographs for a show called The No Movie, which was at LACE--Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions [see Gronk explanation on next tape side—Ed.] in 1978.

But early on, also, in ‘74 I went to a lecture at Otis Art Institute, and there was this guy that was there and he was wearing a black leather jacket and he was sitting down and sort of like pounding on the table. And then there was this person who was from New York showing The New Media videotape. And he was explaining, "Yes, this is my videotape and it’s going to be . . . you know, it’s this and it’s that." And Jerry’s heckling him, "Ah, come on, show us photographs of your girlfriend. You know you want to. Come on." And I’m like, "Who is this guy?" And as soon as it was over, he came up to me. And I think one of the reasons is I was the only brown person at that lecture and the person was this man who had this magazine. His name was Willoughby Sharp. He had a publication called Avalanche magazine from New York, and it was the hip underground kind of magazine—or zine—at the time. And he [Dreva—Ed.] asked me, "Who are you?" And I said, "Gronk." And he goes, "I’m Jerry." And I said, "Oh." And he asked, "What do you do?" And I said, "Oh, I send things in the mail." And I had just sent out this whole. . . . Like I sent Magu [Gilbert Luj?n—Ed.]. . . . I sent several people pieces, and I would tell them to do something with it. And Magu sent me back a pie, and he had burnt the piece and put it inside the baked pie and sent me back the piece. And so a lot of different people sent back things to me, as I would initiate the thing and then say, "Do something with this piece. Tear it up, destroy it, kill it. It’s ugly and it wants to die." That was the title of the piece: This Piece Is Ugly and Wants To Die. Please Destroy It. And so people cut it up, chopped it up, tore it up, did different things to this piece that I’d made. And so I said, "Well, I send things in the mail." And he goes, "Well, so do I." And he said, "I have a group," and I said, "So do I. Mine’s ASCO." And he goes, "Mine’s Les Petit Bon Bons." And he says, "We’re a conceptual rock ‘n roll group. We’ve never performed anywhere, but we’re in to all these magazines and

publications. We were in People magazine and they photographed us in front of Rodney’s Disco, and we’ve announced that we’re going to be in all these different cities, but we’ve never picked up a guitar or played a musical note ever."

JR: That’s like a rock ‘n roll swindle.

G: [laughs]

JR: Malcolm McLaren even thought of it.

G: His friends were like Patty Smith and Lou Reed and all of like New York underground, and Andy Warhol, and The Factory and stuff, and he was like a part of that whole scene. And he was this person that did all of that work.

JR: Let me take a break here so we can switch the tape over.

[Break in taping]

JR: Okay, this is tape 2, side B, January 20th, with Gronk. Okay, I’m sorry.

G: So Jerry and I met—Jerry Dreva—and he was going to be here in Los Angeles for a length of time and so we. . . . Well, actually, what happened was I gave him my address, and Jerry was . . . well, he was an intriguing guy. He’s still an intriguing guy. He’s still in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And when we met I had written down my address on a paper and gave it to him, and about a week later I was back at Otis and I was inside the same lobby of where that lecture took place and he was there also. And he goes, "Oh, I’m so glad I ran into you. Your number. . . ." And I said, "Yeah?" He goes, "Well, something happened to it, and I couldn’t figure out the lettering because the ink just smeared." I said, "It smeared?" He said, "Yeah, I masturbated on it." [laughter] And I said, "Oh really?" And I thought, "Boy, this is like somebody I’ve never really encountered before." And he was, "Do you want to go out? Do you want to do something?" And I’m like, "Okay." And so he would show me another side to things. It was art gallery situations and stuff. And he was like this talker and this . . . you know, like, inside of situations and stuff and he would jst take control over a situation. So I was like in the background to him, which was good for me because I would just like be in this other world of lifestyle and stuff. And like, "Well, this is kind of interesting. I never knew that all of this really existed before and this is very interesting."

JR: What is this? Where are you guys going and checking out?

G: We’d go into this place called Butch Gardens, which was a gay club. And we were going to other kinds of clubs that he would show me, because he knew the ins and outs of rock scenes and stuff like that that was taking place. It was like people that were into rock, people that were doing music, and like the characters that were from The Factory and all that sort of stuff. So he was always immersed in that. So he sort of showed me into that kind of an arena. And I was always somebody that felt awkward about it because it was like there was nobody, usually, brown in those kinds of places and activities. It was like usually I was the only one that was there, and it was like, "This is nice to look at, but I really like the fact that I’m buffered by him." It’s just like he was in control of this kind of scene and stuff. And as time went on we kept on seeing each other and stuff and going out and doing things.

And then about a year later he’s going to go on a tour with the Bons Bons. They’re going to New York, and they’re traveling on this major tour, and he’s going to end up back in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And then he started sending me things of different things that he was doing. And he had a stamp, and his stamp was called "Art Gangster." And he would go around stamping these things. And then he would support different things that were happening in the art arena. The person that spray-canned G?ernica, he’s like all in support of that. The person who smashed the Pieta, he’s in support of that. It’s like, "Yeah, art should be dismantled and torn down and from the ashes something new will rise," you know. So he had these very radical opinions about things, and I liked that. So we corresponded for almost six years on a daily basis, practically—just back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And the accumulation of what we had was—in 1978—called the Dreva-Gronk show, which opened up LACE. It was the second show LACE was doing at its new location in downtown Los Angeles. And this was in 1978. We made buttons that said "Dreva-Gronk, 1968-1978." And it was an accumulation of what we had been doing biographically, but also our correspondence. And so we had two big rooms filled with images plus giant notebooks that had plastic, and we would put in our letters, our correspondence, our notes. And so we just had this big accumulation of different things on tables that were in this room. And for the opening night we had four punk rock bands play for the night. And it was subtitled "Dreva-Gronk: Art Meets Punk." And what happened on the opening night was that everything got trashed. People were like ripping things off, tearing things up, the books were shredded, thrown out the window, people were stealing things, putting them in their pockets. The bands were playing wild. The police came. They stopped the disturbance—as they called it—and got LACE put on the map. [laughter] And other people thought, "It looks like a punk band in a gallery. Ah, it’s just a passing fancy," and stuff.

And Jerry left back to Milwaukee after he arrived for the opening. Maybe he stayed here a week. And then we stopped our correspondence. We did our show. From there I sort of moved back into doing the painting and the drawing. And all the while, during the time of our correspondence, I was still with ASCO, still working through a lot of other projects that we were doing, and Jerry was always fascinated about ASCO. It’s like, "Yeah, Harry and Willie and Patssi—they look so glamorous. They’re like stars," you know. And so he was always such a big supporter, enthusiastic about ASCO activities. So I still have a lot of correspondence, a lot of different things that survived that evening of the show, the Dreva-Gronk show.

JR: What was your response to seeing everything ripped off the walls in the mayhem and all that?

G: We knew we were taking that chance because of what it meant—Art Meets Punk—something is going to take place and if it’s going to be trashed, it’s going to be trashed, and we’re willing to deal with it. I think for me initially it was seeing an end to something for me, in a way. It was like the period or the exclamation point to something—a story that was taken or a sentence that was being made for me. And I just like . . . I knew that this was like the end of something. Because it ended so dramatically in a way. And I thought, "God, this is such a relief. It’s over," in a way. It’s sort of like a lot of things that I did and was concentrating on, it’s like the end of this. And now something new is going to happen. And, again, it was like. . . . ‘78, then I was still with LACE, ‘79.

And then I left, and ‘80, ‘81, ‘82, and then 1983 I get an NEA Fellowship from the National Endowment, and it’s a fellowship in performance/conceptual work. And I was so surprised because it was, I think, my second application for an NEA, and both of them had been not in painting but performance/conceptual work. And so I was really surprised that I did get one. I got one of the top fellowships. And I think that really allowed me the opportunity to concentrate on my work as far as painting. I didn’t have to worry about supplies, I didn’t have to worry about material, and I could just do as much as I wanted to. And just like, "Wow!" It was like for me, it seems now I look at that particular moment and feel that it really allowed me to develop, to really push my work in a way, and to like. . . . It wasn’t like something, not like, "Gee, I’m going to buy a car, I’m going to take a trip, I’m going. . . ." It was like, "Wow! This is so much money to make art! I can buy film. I can buy a camera. I can buy all this material that I wanted to work with," finally was allowed to happen.

That’s ‘83. Now, ‘85 comes along and I’m at MOCA, and so it was like one thing, and then the next thing is a big show. They’re picking nine artists and this is going to be summer of ‘85, MOCA. They picked Jill Gingrich, Bill Viola, Mary Course, Gita [Conte, Cont?]. Several, maybe about nine artists in the exhibition. And it’s all these artists that are surfacing, and Willie and I were picked. And we could either do like a collaboration together or separate works, and we chose to do separate pieces. And I wanted to do something the size of a football field. I wanted to do something 300 feet by 30 feet high. And they said, "Fine. We’ve got Frank Gearhy’s Temporary Contemporary. What does it take to do what you do?" And I said, "A lot of doughnuts and lot of coffee."

JR: [laughs]

G: And they said, "Okay, fine. Where do you want your doughnuts from?" And stupid me said, "Winchells," when I could have had any doughnuts delivered to me. And they just kept on coming in, and I did this piece. What happened afterwards is the dealers started coming to me as opposed to me going to them to show them my work. And I finally ended up with the dealer that I’m still with today, so a lot of the momentum happened after the Dreva-Gronk show—the NEA fellowship, MOCA—and the work, I think from that time-frame just evolved. In ‘84, I believe, I did Cabin Fever and a lot of those large paintings—figurative kind of, almost very pop kind of figure kind of painting. And so a lot of those things I think were important steps in my career.

And all the while, still in the eighties, was still hanging out with Harry, primarily, because Willie had gotten married and was having a family, Patssi was going back to school. So it was like Harry and I sort of orchestrating ASCO, and utilizing someone like Marisela Norte, Sean Carillo, Daniel Villareal, Armando Norte, Consuelo Flores, and getting a lot of different people to come in and interact with us and to present new pieces like staged kind of plays. Harry started to write plays. In ‘85 he wrote a play called Jetter’s Jinx, and it was done at the L.A. Theatre Center. It was the same year I was at MOCA. I was also directing the play and starring in it, and then having a show at MOCA at the same time.

JR: Wow.

G: And I don’t think anybody in the world can say that. [laughter]

JR: Can we backtrack for a second?

G: Sure.

JR: I wanted to ask you about LACE and its beginnings. It seems to have been a really important institution in L.A., while it got its beginning right there with your show. Can you tell me a little bit how began and who was there and what was going on?

G: LACE was initially started as a CETA project, and it was the city funding artists for the first time to produce artwork. Initially, it was to bring art to a community that they felt lacked in its art. And so they picked the city of El Monte to start it off in. But the city of El Monte’s fathers didn’t want us, because who were hired were performance artists, conceptual artists, video artists and they just didn’t know how to deal with the kinds of work we were doing. And so we were asked, like, "We don’t want this. Art is usually in the malls, and it’s like somebody who puts an easel and sells their paintings." And that’s not what we were doing, so we had to find a new location to house ourselves in because we had this program and it was funded, so the next location was in downtown Los Angeles. We found a studio space. Actually, it was an empty space above a wedding shop, and they would have like the wedding dresses. And one of the people—her name was Marilyn [Campenian]—came up with the name LACE, because we all were asked to come up with names for the place, and since we were above a bridal shop, she said, "What about LACE—Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions?" And so that became the name of the place, and it had a bureaucratical name so that people in the future could apply for grants. It’s like, "Oh, LACE—Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions." There was another place called LAICA [Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art—Ed.], which was also here in Los Angeles but that didn’t last very long. And LACE had perhaps maybe twelve people who were the early people who started it. Harry Gamboa was also hired. Willie Herr?n was also hired to work at it. And it was sort of divided up into different camps of thinking or wanting to do work. Here was this guy named Roberto Gil de Montes, a couple of other Chicanos who were also aboard LACE. And then here was this other camp which was like Cal Arts. And it was another grouping of people. And over the years it shifted into like more Cal Arts kinds of sensibility, and the Chicanos sort of were pushed out of the whole area of LACE—or left—because it just was going more in that direction. They had the swing vote, so they can, "We want Mike Kelly." [both laugh]

JR: What is the Cal Arts sensibility?

G: Well, it was more like the John Baldessari kind of school of art. It had its sensibility to . . . as opposed to it being a little bit more open to community kinds of situations.

JR: I see.

G: Or community artists, or people trying to make a difference in a real situation as opposed to a manufactured one like a gallery kind of situation.

JR: I see. It’s kind of interesting since you would think with a CETA grant it might, necessarily, be more community-based.

G: Um-hmm. Well, initially that was the idea. And it shifted and made its move into that arena. I left as soon as I felt that it was like, "This is beyond helping any more. It’s just like I need to move on." I think Harry stayed on just slightly longer and Willie also, and then we left it. Once it sort of established itself, it’s like no more community kind of stuff. It’s going to be strictly like anybody coming out of Cal Arts or the universities that the art is going to gravitate to. And so we all left it.

But in the early stages of it we did the Dreva-Gronk show and Harry and I did the "No Movie" exhibition show. And so we did do a few things. We had a mural conference there as well. And then we went on to continue to do more of the ASCO kinds of activity. But it had its moment in time, and I think I was with it perhaps about three years. And it was from the inception of it being in El Monte and then going on to downtown LA. And it went through many transformations as who was the head of it and finally it was like Cal Arts was. . . . You know, like the head of it was the person that was going to Cal Arts or just got out of Cal Arts, and we were like, "Oh, well, that’s it. It’s like we can no longer. . . . I can no longer work in this kind of a situation ."

JR: Was it a multi-media sort of venue that would encourage all that kind of stuff? Or was it more paint and visual arts?

G: No, I thought of it as. . . . The term for that time was "alternative space." And that’s exactly how I thought of it—as a place where you tried things out, as opposed to it being necessarily something that is painterly in fashion. The No Movie show, I added my piece where these three big red banners that hung from the ceiling down to the floor and went onto the floor and there were these mirrors that were placed on the floor and these plaster cobra snakes looking as if they’re just about to attack one another and piles of loaves of bread. And that was my piece for the No Movie show.

[Phone rings; interruption in taping]

JR: Okay, we just took a brief interlude.

G: I like that word. "Interlude."

JR: "Interlude." Yes, because now you don’t know what we did. [laughter]

G: That makes it even more exciting. [laughs]

JR: But what we thought we would do at this point is go back and talk a little bit more about the performance work that you did with ASCO. And you can start pretty much wherever you like.

G: When I first met with Harry, Willie, and Patssi—which make up ASCO. The initial group as opposed to in the late seventies and early eighties when we incorporated a lot of other people to work with—the initial group, I think Harry and I were more intrigued by the performance aspect of ASCO. Willie primarily was concentrating on his mural painting and doing murals and creating work along those lines. Patssi was either being. . . . Her focus was more in the photographic and transformation of different characters for film—or for photographs, actually. And also doing spray can painting and doing different types of work. So their focus had been in that kind of mode, whereas Harry and I, I think, were more intrigued by the aspect that we can possibly do different kinds of performance pieces.

And one of the things that we devised in the early seventies was what we called the No Movie. And the No Movie was a concept that we came up with—making movies without the use of celluloid. And the idea was to reject the reel—r-e-e-l—by projecting the real—r-e-a-l. And we did an interview initially sort of stating what the No Movie was. And it was sort of creating an image that looked as if there was a preceding image and an image that went after it, almost like a still that was taken from a film or a concept of a film. And we would imitate, in some ways, different films that we would see in movie houses, but also create our own body of film or cinema. And what we thought initially was that we had seen a lot of different filmmakers doing films—especially like our fellow Chicano filmmakers, and we always thought it was an imitation of what already existed as filmmaking. We wanted to do an alternative cinema and, coming out of no access, really, to Hollywood, the only way we could do that was to utilize ourselves and create many different characters for a camera. And we would think up a title. For instance, A La Mode. And it would be an image of Patssi sitting on a table but underneath her—which wasn’t visible—was a piece of pie. So in a sense, she became a scoop of ice cream sitting on a piece of pie. Hence, the title A La Mode. So it was ideas like that that we were playing with initially with the No Movie. There were times when we did pieces that were staged in front of people. And then there were the earlier pieces which we would do on the streets. One of the early examples was called Stations of the Cross, and that was with Willie and Harry. And it what it was was a large cross was made by Willie and he carried it through the street almost like a Christ-like figure. Harry went almost like a Catholic schoolboy who was an usher in the church, and I played this character I called Pontius Pilate, which is this guy that I devised wearing this sort of burgundy robe and a bowler hat. And we paraded through Whittier Boulevard with the cross, and the end of the procession was an induction center for the Marines, and we put the cross up against the building and threw all of our objects that we carried with us, sort of blockading the entrance of the induction center so that no more Chicanos could be inducted that day at least. And so that was our first piece that was recorded. There was a super-eight of it and also photo documentation.

Then the following year we did what we called the Walking Mural, which was. . . . Willie devised this piece that was like a large wall with his head sticking through it. Patssi was the Virgin of Guadalupe, but done up in this see-through outfit. And I was a Christmas tree. And we walked down the city street again, the same street that we had done the procession the year before. And Harry documented this particular piece in photographs.

And so we did these kinds of activities during the course of the seventies, our earliest pieces. One was a dinner party on a traffic island, traffic going in both directions, and we set up a dinner table and ate a meal. And then a thing that I was interested in is the temporal nature of things, so I wanted to do what I called the Instant Mural, which was to tape Patssi and this other person—Herb Sandoval—to a wall on a city street. And I think one of the important things about our activities was the idea that we didn’t ask for permission to do any of the work. It was just immediately to go into the street and to initiate these events and activities that we did—or performance pieces. I don’t think we really called them performance pieces at the time we were doing this, and this was in the early seventies. It was an activity that we did or an action that we did but we didn’t use those art terms to describe what it was that we were doing. As things evolved, Harry started to write more of a performance kind of piece, and a lot of the times the pieces were intended to be done in front of an audience. And at this time we were being asked to do something maybe at the University of Santa Cruz. Rene Ya?ez from San Francisco invited ASCO. One of the first people to invite us out of Los Angeles into another city was Rene, who invited us to go to the Galer?a de la Raza to do one of our pieces. And he was excited because in San Francisco there was nobody really doing things like the No Movies or the processions or the performance kind of aspect of work that we were doing. And all of the stuff was heavily being documented by Harry, who had the camera, so he was the one who was documenting the different types of work that we were doing early on.

JR: So what kind of receptions or reactions were you getting on Whittier Boulevard or when you went up to the Galer?a in San Francisco?

G: Some of the early reactions were people screaming and yelling at us and wondering what the hell we were doing. And other times it was just people curious as to what we were doing, and we would explain, "This is a procession." Or, "I’m taping somebody to a wall, making a mural but it’s not going to use paint. I’m going to use tape and somebody’s going to photograph it." So it was explaining early on, I think, the process. And I can see that those were like the early stages of what I eventually went into when I was doing the large-scale on-site installation pieces when I paint directly onto the walls. Because I’m actually painting but I’m also engaging the viewer and talking during the course of the time that I’m actually doing the work. So I think the early performance pieces actually influenced me in the direction that I would later take in the larger on-site pieces when I started doing those pieces.

JR: So the way that. . . .

G: Okay.

JR: Let’s take a break here, because we’re almost on the end of the tape.

G: Okay.

[Break in taping]

JR: Let’s see, we’re back again with Gronk on January 20, 1997, in his studio. This is tape number 3, side A. You were explaining to me a little bit about ASCO and how the performative [sic] pieces later figured into your installation and museum work a bit later on. But I wanted to ask you a bit about the way that members of ASCO collaborated, what particular expertise or interest each one of you brought to the group and how that worked into a final product.

G: With ASCO—and I think with each person in it—the collaboration was different. With Willie and myself working on a piece or painting. . . . I believe in 1980 we did a piece for the Folk and Craft Art Museum, and it was called Murals of Aztl?n, was the title of the exhibition. And Willie started at one end. I started at the other end. We met in the middle. The piece—after the show was over he got his section, I got my section. And to me, painting with Willie was like playing music, in a way, but using a brush instead of a musical instrument to do it with.

JR: How’s that?

G: In that we didn’t have to question one another’s role. We allowed each other a lot of freedom to work out the piece. It was having that element of trust but also knowing full well that what he did he did competently. And he would not come in and say, "Gronk, I think you need to do this." It was just being allowed the freedom to do imagery that you wanted to do, and to almost, in a sense, play jazz, because there was a sense of improvisation in working with him. A lot of the times there was no set drawing or no set plan as to how this piece was going to end up. It was, in a sense, improvised, and allowing that freedom to allow things to happen. Of course, there were times when you would step back and you would take in the full picture of the piece and see how it was working, and maybe you would sort of with just a sense of balance or how things can connect in some way, making decisions or intellectual decisions about the piece. But we both worked completely different, and our imagery was different. Willie had a really stylized kind of sensibility to his work and a refinement. Mine was a lot more rougher with a more quirky kind of quality to it. He added a lot of things about family and about religion in his work, and that was minus in my imagery. He would have a pattern, but his pattern would probably be shapes, lines. Mine would maybe be hammers and sickles. And so we were coming from two different things or sensibilities. I would do a pattern, and it would be the hammers and sickles on this particular piece. And we called the piece Illegal Landscape, was the title of the piece. What I wanted to do was create a pattern of hammers and sickles, but it was to present hammers and sickles as just as a sense of design in a way, because that’s what it initially was made for. Agriculture and industry. And it was like that whole idea of a pattern and a design and not so much, "Well, it means Communism," or something along those lines. It was more like in a sense of it being design for me. So a lot of the times our conversation was not conversation that was verbal. It was more visual.

JR: Is that something that was there from beginning?

G: I think intuitively, yes, because we were very visual, and we didn’t speak the same kind of language as I speak with Harry Gamboa, more about ideas about ASCO or more like the conceptual component of the No Movies or along those lines. It was a different kind of relationship with each other. He I think also was coming from a musical background. His early ideas were also from music. So I think we sort of fit together and complemented one another. And sometimes we actually didn’t. I mean, the work was so different, and I think at times that it was kind of jarring and people could easily recognize, "Uh, this is Gronk’s work, and this is Willie’s." Willie’s is a lot more refined and flowing and stuff, and mine was sort of more aggressive and, I guess in a way, brutal kind of image. But I think for us it worked well, and we enjoyed the effect or the piece once it was finished and completed.

With Patssi it had a different kind of intuitive thing. To me, Patssi was somebody that had a sense of glamour coming out of East L.A. But it was also a glamour that was thrift store kind of glamour to it—that there was beauty that was found in things that were just our surroundings, and taking them to a sense of like beauty or glamour. I was attracted to that, because even later on in the choice of using a character like Tormenta. . . . Well, that is early Patssi, that is like Sylvia, that is Marisela Norte. That’s a lot of the women that I knew at an early time and they had this . . . coming out of East L.A., but there was a sense of glamour to them. There wasn’t just the hard-core worker or somebody. It was something of elegance and beauty that also came out of our environment as well. And I wanted to tap into that, so like Patssi and I would devise different photo shoots, or I would ask her to be in a photo shoot with me, or we would collaborate on things along those lines. So it was a different kind of working structure than it was with Willie.

And then with Harry it was, I think, more verbal and idea-oriented. The excitement was Harry coming up with ideas—or I’ll come up with an idea—and trying to see it through as a finished piece. And so I think it was more challenging in a more conceptual kind of arena for us to develop a No Movie and the ideas of like, "Let’s develop it and see it where it goes or what it leads to"—and actually for nights on end just talking about a concept or a idea that we wanted to perhaps develop. And in his imagery, since he based himself very in an urban kind of setting, a lot of his written pieces had a dark edge to them, and I gravitated to that because I loved the imagery—the verbal imagery—of his written text. And when we started to develop it even further, he would write pieces and I would perform some of the pieces live on a stage. Or else there was a time when we were traveling to different cities and we did a piece that he wrote, a piece that Marisela wrote, and I did a play with Consuelo Norte and, at another place, with Kate [Vosof]. And another time with a guy named Adam Leventhal, and it was a two character play called Strip Tease, that was written by a Polish playwright. I liked the fact that this play was about these two big huge hands that pointed—like pointing fingers—that would come into this room and demand that these people give up their clothing. And so we had to keep constantly relinquishing our clothing—in the process, our dignity. And in Poland’s case, it was Russia coming in and the Left and Right arguing and not doing anything about the situation so that finally they get crushed by it. Well, here it’s sort of in the same situation of other forces coming in, and you keep on relinquishing until your Left and Right fight over, "What’ll we do about this problem?", never settling anything, and the problem finally crushing you. I liked that idea, so I did that play several different places that I took it to. We staged it in different kinds of venues and situations, finally sort of just lambasting even the play. We did it with three people, and instead of them being in a room they were in a lifeboat, and instead of it being two hands it was two big sharks. So I did that at this place called Gallery Ocaso—and I believe that was in 1984—where it was staged once again and we wrote a whole new character into the scenario.

So our pieces sort of evolved and changed over the years, and the collaborations continued with Jetter Jinx, which we did at the L.A. Theatre Center. And Harry wrote Jetter Jinx for me and Herb Sandoval, and it’s a two-character play. And that play—at the time when we did it—we didn’t want to mention the word "AIDS" in the play, and it’s only called some disease, or a virus of sorts. But what happens in the play is that this man, whose name is Jetter, gives a party, and—one of the worst things that can happen when somebody gives a party—nobody shows up. And finally somebody does, and his name is [No Pal]—or Nopal, and he comes with a gun that is given to him to give to the person called Jetter, and it’s to blow his brains out because he had maliciously spread this disease among all his friends, knowing that he had it. And what he does is sing a swan song and then blows his brains out. And all the balloons come down and the place turns funeral green in a way. Daniel Martinez, I believe, did the lighting, and this man named Curtis Gut?errez did the set, and I think Diane Gamboa also worked on the set, and Herb Sandoval and I were the two people in it. I played Jetter.

And the thing about Jetter is that it’s a term that came out of East L.A. in the sixties. It was sort of like what the Mods were in England. But in East L.A. there was a term that most people think, "Oh yeah, East L.A. and pachuco, cholo." But there was another subgroup, and it was the fast-talking sort of like party-going animal, and they were called "jetters." And a jetter was the one who knew where all the happenings were, all the parties, all the clubs, all the dope, all the. . . . You know, just like everything. It was like he had to be at the forefront of all of that activity. So Harry—remembering that term—called the play Jetter Jinx, and Jetter became the name of this aging jetter who still wanted to continue to party even though your lifestyle really has to change or else you’re going to die. So I think with Harry it was like writing it so that we could do this piece, and it was sort of this free-flowing language. It was just very exciting to work in a situation with all these people involved in it.

JR: You did this at the LATC?

G: L.A. Theatre Center. We performed it several times there, and then a couple of other times I performed it. Not in the same kind of capacity because at L.A. Theatre Center we had the lighting, and it was a theatre kind of situation. Then I staged it in other places, and with less tech to the performance of the piece.

JR: Can you say a little bit about the difference between doing something like Stations of the Cross, which seems to be much more open-ended versus doing something . . . you know, the evolution of doing something that’s more of a production like Jetter Jinx at the LATC?

G: Yeah. In the performance pieces early on on the streets, it was using a hit-and-run kind of tactic. It was to do things in a spontaneous way. But also it was done to do it very quickly, because a lot of the things we were doing was against the law on the streets. So it had those tactics of still doing it very, very quickly and then getting away from there because we would probably get stopped by the police or things would happen to us if we did something. And in the performance pieces that later sort of. . . . We started staging things not necessarily in a theatre-type setting, but perhaps at Self Help Graphics. They would have an auditorium. Or in this place called the Hispanic Urban Center. And it would be this old almost church-looking kind of room, and we would have an area that would be the stage, which would be sort of like the altar in a way, and we would perform our pieces in these different kinds of settings with very relatively low tech. There was nothing elaborate about these kinds of pieces that we were doing. And then the evolution from that into like, "Oh, now it’s inside of an environment where people are actually having to sit down and watch, and there’s a thing about memorizing a text, and it’s all the cues and stuff—where early on it was in the streets and whatever the environment was to alter a situation or the environment outside of an indoor kind of setting. And so there was a shift, a gradual shift where. . . .

JR: Was that because your aesthetics were moving in that direction or was it because you had access to use certain resources that would allow you to stage something like that?

G: I think both. I think for Harry and myself, it was to see or to do something that was set in front of people. Now, earlier I had talked about Cockroaches Have No Friends, which was done at a park, and the people sat on the lawn and watched onstage to see this performance piece take place. And I hadn’t done anything like that since then until we started working in the seventies with ASCO to do these performance pieces and then into the eighties at these different locations. And I think what we needed to do was in a venue. What we did was our own publicity for those shows to bring people in to see what we were doing, and it was to send out the announcements or the flyers to this particular performance that we were going to do. And so people actually . . . okay, it starts at a certain time. It will end at a certain time or around a certain time. And we will have like maybe several different pieces take place in front of an audience. And I believe we sort of. . . . Harry was working in text, so it was, I think, a change in that now it’s, "I have to memorize that text. It’s going to take a little bit longer to do these pieces." So they were beginning [to get—Ed.] a little more structure to the pieces. It wasn’t so open-ended as it was initially. And there is going to be a group of people out in front of you and there is this memorized text. So I think the text is the thing that really shifted it in another direction. Before, in the Walking Mural or in the Stations of the Cross or in the Dinner Party on a traffic island, there was really no words. We weren’t talking to an audience. Unless we were explaining what we were doing. But it was not a written text. And the written text, I think, is what made it go into a different kind of environmental situation.

JR: Unless you’re tagging a building and creating your texts.

G: Creating the tags on a wall like, "Yankees deported. Europe sinks"—which is one of Harry’s pieces that he wrote. It was like an answer to the murals that were being put up for the Olympics that were held here, and there was like several Olympic murals, but ASCO decided to do their own and Harry stopped in the middle night and Marisela and Diane Gamboa and myself were coming from Hollywood after going out to a club or something, and Harry saw a wall and goes, "Oh, I think I’ll do my Olympic mural." We pull off the freeway. He goes, "Do you have a spray can?" "Yeah, yeah, we got spray cans in the back in the glove compartment, blah, blah, blah." So we brought up the spray can, and he wrote—sort of like as a newspaper headline—"Yankees deported. Europe sinks." And the police actually caught us on that piece but let Marisela, Diane, and me go and kept Harry, because they said they had seen him. Actually, the rule of the street for us was to immediately throw whatever we have out of sight or out of our way. We had our hands filled with spray can paint. [laughter]

JR: "I didn’t do anything, officer." [laughter]

G: Keep your hands in your pocket.

JR: Right, right. I was also referring to the Pie in Deface.

G: Oh, yeah. The Pie in Deface was done at the L.A. County Museum, and that was after Harry had gone there to check out the museum, and he was told by a museum director there that, "Well, Chicanos they don’t make art. They’re usually in gangs." So—in gang fashion—we went to the L.A. County Museum—Harry, Willie, and myself—and we spray-canned our names on all the entrances and exits to the L.A. County Museum, claiming the entire museum as ours and all the contents within, sort of like an artist signing his name to an art object. And Patssi showed up the next day to take photographs in front of it as sort of her signature to our signature. And so that was the project Pie in Deface.

JR: Nothing ever came back to you on that? I was always sort of curious about that.

G: No, nothing. I mean, they never. . . . I think they just thought it was hoodlums that were out there doing that, and nobody ever said anything. Harry took photographs and recorded the visuals. But, no, we were never questioned about that action at all. I don’t think they really realized who we were at the time. It’s like they were not familiar with who we were or what we were doing. That was 1972, so I don’t think they were familiar with what we were, or what our activities were. And I think for me, I guess, the interesting thing is to twenty years later to be on the inside of the L.A. County Museum and doing a piece, sort of a reference to it, called Project Pie in Deface, with using actually a defacement of a clay facial mask that’s slapped onto a wall that I paint. It’s sort of defacing on the inside of the museum, and I doubt very much if they understood or got it—or want to get it or understand it. So that came when I did my survey show there twenty years later.

JR: One other ASCO piece that I wanted to ask you about was the Day of the Dead. Self Help was really active—or has been, still is—really active in putting on Day of the Dead celebrations and ceremonies and things like that. And wasn’t there an ASCO performance connected to that? Or a number of them, for that matter?

G: We initially were asked to come in to do a piece. We went to a meeting at Self-Help Graphics, and they were talking about Mexico’s Day of the Dead and how they did this kind of skull heads, and they’d showed a movie about the Day of the Dead, and we sat through it. I mean, we were like nice people. So we sat through it but we sort of rolled our eyes like, "Are we gonna repeat that?" Just like, "That’s fine for somewhere else, but that’s not for us. Day of the Dead can mean a lot of different of things, and it doesn’t necessarily mean paper cutouts, skull heads. We can invent it, what it means to us." And so, of course, Self-Help Graphics did a procession in a cemetery. We showed up in a truck, and it was a big envelope. Inside the envelope—which is a big sheet of white paper, basically—I painted a stamp and then addressed it to Evergreen Cemetery. Inside, as I tore open the envelope in front of everybody, was a bolt of lightning, which was Harry; the universe, which was Patssi; a tri-plane, which was Willie; and a tank, which was Herb Sandoval. So here was the universe, a tank, a bolt of lightning, and a tri-plane, and that was delivered sort of to the cemetery. So we did that piece. That was our piece and, of course, again, you know, like, "That’s not Day of the Dead." But what we were attempting to do was invent our own version of the Day of the Dead in a way. And so that was an early piece.

We did another one where we strolled down a city street a float that Willie and I made. And it was cardboard on a [scaffolding] unit, and two people could ride inside of it like a parade float going down a city street. So we created that for another Day of the Dead. So there was a lot of different things that we did, giving sort of like, I think, new imagery for that. And again, later on it sort of wore off on us. It was like, "Let’s go on our own again. They’re doing the Day of the Dead and it’s the same thing. It’s like the altars and all of those kinds of things." And it’s fine. I mean, I think there’s room for everybody to do things. But for us I think it was important to stretch the bounds of those notions and possibilities. And I think to experiment, for me, was an important thing, and I think it still is, to attempt to do things that I’m not quite sure of and to have fun along the way, as well. Because I think, again, like, an integral part in the work is that it’s coming from a sense of humor in a lot of ways. Or to be able to laugh I think is a very important thing, and I think satire and humor is a pivotal element in the work. If you go into seeing the work that I’ve done, and you’re trying to get the edge or the angst or the ax I’m trying to grind in some way or another, you tend to miss the point because, for me, a lot of it stems from a sense of humor in a lot of respects. I like the term "wit," and I want my work to have that sense of humor behind it in a way or a. . . . I tell people it’s like sometimes when I talk about my work, it’s giving the punchline before I’ve told the joke. So sometimes it’s kind of difficult, because it’s like there’s subtleties and there’s things involved in the work that I’m playing with. I read off titles like Josephine Boneapart. Don’t take it too seriously. It’s a joke. I mean, it’s a bad pun. I like that, you know. That was a series that I was doing called Bone of Contention so everything had some kind of bone element to it. So, you know, I feel strongly about the fact that it’s coming from a sense of humor in a way, too, as well.

JR: So, let’s see, you mentioned the Bone of Contention series. Is there a moment that you can identify when you started moving more in . . . concentrating on the painting versus the collaborative work with ASCO? How did that sort of come about?

G: The painting element was always there. Like going back to the Black and White Mural, the mural at the Chicano Studies. The pieces that I was doing in the performance pieces had an element