Asco,Chris Burden,and the Politics of the Misfire

Abstract

This article draws out the ‘politics of the misfire’ as a process constituted in part by discursive articulations of the ‘misuse’ of guns, and in part by mediated visual narratives of criminality cultivated in American visual culture. Specifically, the author examines how the decades-long historiography of artist Chris Burden’s iconic artwork, Shoot (1971), relies upon and perpetuates spatially racialized and gendered notions of innocence and safety. She argues that the conceptual art collective Asco’s theorizing of misfires in response to their vulnerability as Chicanos in America provides a vital framework for recognizing how the neutralized archetype of white masculinity, simultaneously innocent and lawless, animates and sustains the legacy of Shoot. Through consideration of geographies of cumulative vulnerability, access to resources, and systemic racism this article links processes of art historical canonization to discriminatory practices that structurally oppress people of color in the United States.

Keywords

art Chicano/a critical theory misfire policing racism whiteness

Contexts and Circumstances of ‘Misfires’

It is not insignificant that the definitions constituting a ‘misfire’ encompass both the failure of a weapon, and of language to make its intended mark (Oxford English Dictionary, 2018). This article examines a number of historic ‘misfires’ occurring between 1970 and 1971 in order to reveal the manipulation of force and language at work in representing gun injury and death in America. The artwork of Southern California art contemporaries Chris Burden and the Conceptual art collective Asco (established in the early ‘70s by Harry Gamboa Jr, Patssi Valdez, Willie Herrón, and Gronk) make tangible the stakes of the discursiveness of gun violence that both precedes and exceeds the moment of harm and prompts its interpretation. In an art work titled, Shoot (1971), which has become arguably the most infamous misfire in art history, Burden invited a friend, and fellow artist, Bruce Dunlap, to graze his arm with a .22 caliber rifle at F Space in Santa Ana, CA. Dunlap misfired, resulting in a trip to a nearby emergency room. While Shoot has become one of the most iconic and widely discussed pieces of performance art, a different reading of the work and its historiographical imprint emerges when contextualized within the wielding of guns and narration of misfires then informing the social and political landscape of Southern California. Asco’s engagement with the paradoxical innocence and lawlessness constituting white masculinity, and their strategies for negotiating their vulnerability as Chicanos, re-frame how we might understand the historical significance of Burden’s confrontation with a ‘misfire’. Together, the work of Burden and Asco brings to light a series of neglected enabling conditions – privileged access to professional, social, and personal opportunities and spaces – that have deeply informed interpretations of experimental contemporary art, and which continually reproduce racialized notions of risk-taking in American art today.

Consider Gamboa’s illustration of a cycle of ‘misfires’ in his cartoon ‘Genocide Patrol’, appearing in a 1971 issue of the avant-garde Spanish-language newspaper, Regeneración, the same year that Burden enacted Shoot. In it, a newspaper reads, ‘Police commit Murders Mistakes’ (Figure 1). This altered headline epitomizes the issue at the core of the double-page comic: the knowing culpability of Anglo policemen in gun-deaths of Mexican Americans in the United States and authorities’ ability to rewrite and normalize the logic of white supremacy embedded within these events. The subsequent vignettes of the comic reference the various crimes committed by policemen ‘only following orders’, as they enter homes without a warrant, violate civil rights, and murder Mexicans in order to ‘help’, euphemistically, ‘with Mexican overpopulation’. As the numbers of racially and ethnically motivated deaths multiply, the courthouse verdicts remain the same for perpetrating white male citizens: ‘We find you GREAT AMERICANS innocent of all charges.’ As one white policeman at the start of the comic’s cycle assures his partner, ‘Don’t worry, I have connections. Besides, there has never been a conviction and sentencing of a cop for killing a Mexican.’ These words illustrate the ways in which whiteness operates as a network of connections, abetted by national imaginaries of male heroism, citizenship, and patriarchal tropes of protectionism (Lipsitz, 2006: 73).

Figure 1

Harry Gamboa Jr. Mexican Murder Comix presents Genocide Patrol. 1971. Ink on paper (27.9 x 43.2cm). Courtesy Department of Special Collections, Stanford University. Reproduced with permission.

Gamboa created ‘Genocide Patrol’ and the larger series Mexican Murder Comix in 1971 in response to a particularly volatile cycle of police riots and Mexican American injuries and deaths. The riots occurred in East Los Angeles, the predominantly Spanish-speaking area of the city, then the largest barrio in the nation, during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations organized by the Chicano Moratorium Committee to raise awareness about, and demand an end to, the disproportionate number of Mexican American deaths in the Vietnam War (Diaz, 2005: 50). Indeed, at this time, Chicanos as a group suffered the highest death rate of all US military personnel despite being only 5 percent of the population (Guzman, 1969, cited in Chavoya, 2000: 203).

In August 1970, Gamboa was one of 30,000 people participating in a Chicano Moratorium demonstration when 1500 LAPD officers descended on the crowd gathered in Laguna Park using guns, clubs, and tear gas, arresting 400 participants and injuring countless others (Chávez, 2002: 69–70). In the midst of the chaos, a deputy officer fired a high-velocity, 10-inch tear gas missile into the Silver Dollar Café, immediately killing Rubén Salazar, a well-respected Chicano reporter of the Los Angeles Times and news director of the Spanish-language KMEX-TV station (Tejada, 2011: 74). Gamboa described the horror of reading how in the mainstream newspapers the next day the LAPD was victimized, while the injuries and deaths of demonstrators (two more had been killed) were effaced (Benavidez and Vozoff, 1984: 48). After the LAPD concluded that the canister incident was ‘an accident’, and no charges were pressed, many argued that the ‘misfire’ ending Salazar’s life was intended to silence and discredit the Chicano community (Lopez, 1970; Tejada, 2011: 74). In 1971, Gamboa was present when LAPD officers again opened fire on anti-war Chicano demonstrators, this time wounding at least 10 and killing 1 (Gamboa, 2018; Roberts, 1971: 1). Afterwards, LA County Sheriff Peter Pitchess asserted, ‘This was entirely a Chicano activity and they cannot control their own people’ (Roberts, 1971: 3).

By showing that such violence was not isolated, but part of an ongoing series of physical and discursive encounters in which Chicano victims of state-sanctioned violence were blamed, and the perpetrators exonerated, Gamboa’s ‘Genocide Patrol’ emphasizes both the physical danger and psychological disorientation caused by experiencing a ‘misfire’ – the normalization of injury enacted intentionally, but legitimized and reframed by the establishment as an accident. It is from this crucible of concerns, informed by state-sanctioned deaths in Vietnam and lethal ‘misfires’ resulting in Mexican American deaths in the US, that Asco began experimenting with performance and conceptual art in an attempt to name the violence, while literally and figuratively dodging predictive shots.

Before forming a collective, Gamboa, Valdez, Herrón, and Gronk shared a political consciousness born of their shared experiences as Chicanos – ‘Mexican-American[s] with a non-Anglo image of [themselves]’ – growing up in East LA (Salazar, 1970: B7). The artists had met during their Garfield High School days, during which Gamboa in particular had taken a leadership role in the now-famous 1968 student protests decrying substandard East LA education. His participation in the ‘Chicano Blowouts’, called the ‘The Birth of Brown Power’, landed Gamboa on a FBI watch-list ordered by director of the Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover, to prevent the formation of alliances between minority nationalist groups (Chavoya, 2000: 191). On the list identifying the top 100 militant threats to national security in 1970, Gamboa’s name appeared alongside radical black intellectuals and revolutionaries, such as Angela Davis and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver (Senate Committee of the Judiciary, 1970: 22–24, 38).

Encounters with surveillance and the police were not limited to moments of protest, but were pervasive in the barrio of East LA on a daily basis as a result of racial profiling and over-policing – practices extending from anti-Mexican American prejudice that was amplified during and after the ‘Zoot Suit’ riots of the 1940s. In 1972, for example, there were approximately 3 police per square mile in the West Valley area, a 95 percent Anglo surname population, and 13 police per square mile in East LA, home to a 50–60 percent Spanish surname population (Germann, 1972: 420). Valdez, reflecting on the ways this landscape limited her mobility, recalled, ‘because of the way we looked, I must have gotten stopped by the cops twenty-five times in one year alone in my neighborhood’ (Burnham, 1987: 58). Over-policing not only put East LA residents at greater risk for field interrogations, but also led to a disproportionate number of arrests, as evidenced by the 10,000 drunk-driving arrests in East LA compared to 1,500 in West LA in 1972 (Germann, 1972: 420). These geographically discrepant crime rates seemingly corroborated stereotypes of Mexican deviance and criminality portrayed in film and reported in the news, that were also domesticated in consumer culture as seen in Frito-Lay Corporation’s personification of the gun-toting Frito Bandito (Noriega, 2000: 35–50). Such widespread representations of Chicano criminality exemplify a component of what Black Studies scholar George Lipstiz has identified as the pervasive apparatus of white supremacy since these derogatory images also contributed to long-term manifestations of racial inheritance (Lipsitz, 2011: 3-9); the stereotypes, for example, were so pervasive that they informed the landscape of the art world as well, manifesting in collecting habits that excluded Mexican American artists from mainstream art institutions. As one curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art told Gamboa in 1972, Mexicans were not serious ‘fine artists’, but instead made ‘folk art’ or ‘were in gangs’ (Chavoya, 2000: 195). In response, Asco created one of their earliest collaborative performances, Spray Paint LACMA (1972), for which Gronk, Herrón, and Gamboa tagged their names on the museum’s entrances, transmuting the institution and their exclusion from it, into a temporary conceptual artwork soon white-washed from view.

Asco operated with the shared understanding that as Hollywood and American television ‘repeatedly made attempts to assassinate the image of Chicanos with cinematographic weapons … Chicanos will have to shoot right back’ (Gamboa, 1978: np). For them, ‘shooting back’ took the form of No Movies: comical, often theatrical privately staged performances, mail art, and media hoaxes that sought to satirize the constructedness of dominant narratives misrepresenting Mexican Americans as militants, bandits, or deceased gang members. The name, No Movies, addressed the dual absence of Chicanos in Hollywood films and in art museum collections, as well as the lack of access to the funds necessary to produce counter-narrative movies and TV programs (Noriega, 2000: 200). As an extension of this practice, Gamboa created low-cost Xeroxed flyers, such as Pistolwhippersnapper (1976), that he mailed to 500 addresses in Europe, Mexico, Argentina, and Africa (Kosiba-Vargas, 1988: 77–78). Pistolwhippersnapper included images of Gamboa as a bandana-wearing rebel, his elementary school portrait (his avatar, a ‘boy of the “50s”’), and photographs he’d taken of Valdez’s ephemeral performance as an armed, yet bound-and-gagged hostage. These images accompany an illustrated index for loading a pistol (Figure 2) that upon closer inspection, aligns not with instructions for operating a firearm, but with each line of a poem below:

A severe blow to the skull of a

Boy in the ‘50s has the

Chilling effect of

Destroying, dislocating his

Everyday perceptual abilities.

People who are victim to

injustices of a political, economic and/or

social basis also suffer from/the same perceptual disorder.

Observe: (a)void blows to the skull.

Live in the ‘70’s.

Figures 2 and 3

Harry Gamboa Jr., Pistolwhippersnapper, 1976. Xerox on paper. M0753, Harry Gamboa Papers, Box 2, folder 22. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries. Reproduced with permission.

Although the flyer’s poem references Gamboa’s recent experience when he was assaulted during his shift as a bus driver and later blamed by his employer for his injuries, it also offers up ‘perceptual disorder’ as a name for the condition afflicting people who bear witness to the erasure of their experiences of violence through its re-naming and effacement (Gamboa, 2018). This experience of perceptual disorder resonates with what essayist and cultural historian Elizabeth Alexander (1994: 94–95) has named ‘counter-texts’, the ‘white-authored national narrative[s]’ that deliberately contradict ‘the actual lived experience of African-Americans’ and ‘the histories our bodies know’. In her essay, Alexander draws a connection between the ongoing state-sanctioned violence enacted on black Americans, extending from slavery and lynching during Reconstruction, to the police shoot-outs leaving Black Panthers dead in the 1960s and 70s, and the 1992 acquittal of police guilty of beating Rodney King.

Gamboa’s disjointed mélange of information presented in Pistolwhippersnapper solicits the disorientation wrought by a ‘white-authored’ culturally imposed perceptual disorder. While the incommensurate histories of physical and psychological violence inflicted upon African Americans and Latinos are not to be conflated, Gamboa’s naming of perceptual disorder, as that which afflicts ‘people who are victim to injustices of a political, economic and/or social basis,’ connects his experience of discrimination as a Chicano man to a larger system of power and anti-black racism. Gamboa’s work, thus, materializes the visual and textual processes that re-name violence to protect notions of innocence and safety that privilege whiteness and secure, through representation, the normative, entitlement of white national subjects. In much the same way that Gamboa created ‘the boy of the ‘50s’ series as an avatar positioned to face-off with national narratives employed to silence and eliminate the perspective of Chicanos, Valdez reflected on her experience as a Chicana woman and (2014) described the toy gun she wielded during her performance (Figure 3) as a ‘metaphor’ and a ‘dare … to the world to insult me again or put me down or say something negative’. Gamboa and Valdez’s ruminations on the censorship, silencing, and misrepresentation of Mexican Americans, reinforce art historian Chon Noriega’s (2013: 364) observation that Asco was not invested in identity politics, but in exposing how Chicano identity in America, ‘constituted within a set of social relations largely defined by the mass media and the corporate liberal state’, was a question not of form but ‘of the context for speaking and being heard’.

Asco’s work underscores how the ability to bend narratives and revise national memories was understood to be a significant form of ammunition wielded by those in positions of power. The stakes were high, when, for example, the idea of gun marksmanship was deployed as a gate-keeping tactic reinforcing discriminatory conceptualizations of citizenship. In 1970, for example, when speaking publicly about US national security, Hoover asserted, ‘You never have to bother about a [US] President being shot by Puerto Ricans or Mexicans. They don’t shoot very straight. But if they come at you with a knife, beware’ (Fischer, 1970: 16). While most likely referencing the failed assassination attempt on President Truman in 1950 by two militant Puerto Rican nationalists (who reportedly failed due to a lack of skills),¹ Hoover’s remarks lumped together two nations of Spanish-speaking individuals, conflating an unincorporated territory of the United States with a foreign federal republic. Moreover, he implicitly constructed a hierarchy, not only geographically but also in terms of being armed with weapons (knives) construed as less sophisticated. In so doing, Hoover insidiously suggested that Puerto Ricans and Mexicans’ mishandling of guns was a mark of their mental inferiority, as well as a symbol of their under-developed industrial militarization with respect to the might of mainland America.

In this talk of misfires, Hoover wielded what scholar of comparative urban studies, Teresa Caldeira (2000: 2) calls ‘talk of crime’, a discursive technology promoting the ‘symbolic reordering of the world by elaborating prejudices and creating categories that naturalize some groups as dangerous’ and others as innocent. As such, Hoover’s articulation of poor marksmanship in ethnic and nationalist terms implicitly privileged the embodiment of the ‘straight shooter’ as one equated with Anglo-American men. And yet, as ‘Genocide Patrol’ and Pistolwhippersnapper make materially manifest, the ‘straight shooter’ mythology directly contradicts another American founding myth – that of the humanized imperfection of ‘misfiring’ white men. In their theorizing of the misfire, Asco engages the paradoxical bounded logics of innocence and lawlessness inherent to the universalized archetype of white masculinity in order to survive. Their work consequently presents a vital framework for revisiting the misfire in Shoot, and its larger political implications.

Shoot: Whiteness, Space, and Control

In the wake of the ‘misfires’ that ignited Asco’s collaborative work, Burden staged Shoot at 7:45pm on 19 November 1971 at F Space, a collaboratively run co-op art space in Santa Ana established by him and 11 other University of Irvine MFA grads. Burden explains his motivations for the piece as a rumination on the mediated and therefore, in his mind, mythic quality of gun violence:

You see people getting shot on T.V. everyday, so I wanted to find out how it would be to receive a bullet in my body. But it wasn’t really the violence or the pain I was interested in, but the mental experience of being shot at. (Wrange, 1999)

To achieve this, Burden’s plan was simple: from a short distance of 15 feet (Figure 4) ‘the rifle man [was] to knick my arm with a bullet and literally scratch it so that one drop of blood rolled down my arm’ (Sharp and Béar, 1973: 53, cited in Jones, 2010: 38). But either Dunlap was out of practice (drafted and trained by the US Army but never deployed to Vietnam) or the .22 long rifle (known for its low-accuracy) amplified imprecision (Kunter, 2015). Dunlap’s shot fully entered and exited the artist’s left upper arm, producing a bullet wound that required Burden to seek immediate emergency attention at a nearby hospital since ‘no one [had] even brought a first aid kit’ (Ward, 2001: 124).

Figure 4

Of the 13 surviving photographs of Shoot taken by Alfred Lutjeans, the images (such as #8) that circulate most widely tend to depict the moment just before Dunlap pulled the trigger. Oftentimes, these images are accompanied by photograph #5 of the series, which depicts Burden post-shooting, stunned in a chair, as an unidentified hand (that we now know belonged to Dunlap) tends to his wound. Taken as a suite, however, the sequence of images portrays the familial looseness of the evening, as the 10 or so invitees shift from documentarians and gallery-goers, to marksman or witnesses, and then, concerned caretakers. In one image (#6) that rarely circulates, taken before the gun was fired, Burden stands atop a chair and trains the eye of Barbara T Smith’s super 8 film camera on the spot where the shooting would soon take place; in another hardly seen photograph (#11) taken in the minutes just after the shot was fired, Lutjeans captures the efforts of Dunlap and others to assess Burden’s injury (Figure 5). The distinctions between the controlled and comfortable environment of F Space, as opposed to sites of violence where asymmetrical power dynamics involve conditions that in no way resemble Burden’s encounter with a bullet, such as political demonstrations and war zones, have not gone unnoticed. As art historian Kathy O’Dell rightfully asserts, the enclosed art-sanctioned space and a private audience vastly mitigated the bodily danger solicited by Burden and the type of empathetic encounter he experienced (O’Dell, 1998: 12). Perhaps most famous in naming these discrepancies was art critic Peter Plagens’s 1973 New York Times article, ‘He Got Shot – For His Art.’ Baptizing Burden a ‘novitiate Franciscan’ desperately seeking artworld acceptance and devotion, Plagens prodded, ‘But isn’t it small potatoes … comparing [your] bullet wound to a real one, suffered by a Vietnam vet or a street-gang member?’ to which Burden readily answered ‘Yes’ (Plagens, 1973: 3D). Given how different the stakes of Burden’s ‘face-off’ with a gun were in relation to the risks incurred by activists, such as anti-war Chicano demonstrators or members of the Black Panther Party then being targeted by the US government as national security threats, it is understandable that Burden’s experimentation with bodily harm has been taken up by critics and scholars as a metaphor for violence occurring elsewhere. At the same time, there is a tendency in the scholarship to over-reach in this regard, eradicating social context entirely. Burden’s ability to control the parameters of his self-injury is evidence, curator Paul Schimmel writes, of the artist’s creation of ‘pure action’ indicative of an ‘individual’s empirical investigations, uncluttered with religious, literary, or historical references’ (Schimmel, 1988: 15). Or as critic Robert Horvitz puts it, ‘Burden’s got control to burn. He’s no fool. He knows his limits and he limits his risks accordingly’, and, as a result, remains unrivaled by ‘another living artist whose work projects such visceral intensity and bite’ (Horvitz, 1976: np).

Figure 5

When situated alongside ‘Genocide Patrol’ and Pistolwhippersnapper, however, it becomes clearer that Burden’s Shoot did not merely ‘test’ his limits or ‘limit’ his risks. Rather, Burden performs a deep knowledge of the societal protections he and his collaborators inherently felt they possessed. This is not to suggest that scholars have not already analyzed some of the larger social and political implications of Shoot. As art historian Frazer Ward has insightfully articulated, Burden’s work points to the self as an ethical category (Ward, 2001: 129). Asserting that Burden’s wound ‘establishes nothing more than the brute fact of the shooting’, Ward shifts attention from the violence of the act to lay the groundwork for rigorous considerations of the historicity of Burden’s piece, situating it within minimalist phenomenology, as well as spectatorship informed by the Vietnam War (Ward, 2012: 96–100). And yet, as art historian Huey Copeland contends, ‘casting the primal scene of American violence as occurring elsewhere [in Vietnam] rather than at home again leaves the white artist’s body racially unmarked’ (Copeland, 2013: 55). Copeland’s comment reverberates with an even larger lacunae: art historical studies analyzing the ‘visceral intensity’ of conceptual and performance art tend to discuss ‘the body’ in universal terms only when the artists are white, and routinely remain silent on the topic of whiteness, which, as critical race theorists and curators have articulated, is the very function of its power – to remain unmarked and naturalized (Cassel Oliver, 2013: 14; Dyer, 1997; Wang, 2012; Lipsitz, 2006). For example, while Schimmel’s interpretation of Burden’s ‘pure action’ performances of the 1970s helped in some ways to institutionally legitimize body art, his framing of Burden’s self-harm epitomizes how an investment in the apolitical nature of such actions obscures and disfigures context central to the very making and meaning of Burden’s work. Schimmel writes:

Burden had himself shot, electrocuted, impaled, cut, drowned, incarcerated, and sequestered not to make a grand social, political or religious statement or to reveal a deep psychological meaning, but just because he knew he could. These risky acts revealed much not only about Burden’s psyche, but that of his viewers. (Schimmel, 1998: 97–98, emphasis added)

By valorizing Burden’s actions as ‘risky’ and simultaneously free-wheeling, Schimmel contributes to the idea of the white male artist who benefits from socially constructed paradigms of safety generated by societal, political, and religious institutions without being held accountable for his privileged relationship to them. By naming his solicitation of self-harm ‘pure’, without qualifying the racial, class, and gendered conditions purifying Burden’s actions of ‘grand social, political, or religious statements’, Schimmel’s interpretation privileges Burden’s actions precisely at the same time that gestures of willpower and endurance enacted by artists of color, like Asco – especially those who named and challenged the exclusionary logics of American institutions – were recognized by gatekeepers of the art world and US government as calculated threats, used to justify FBI surveillance and police encounters, which heightened the artists’ need for relatively less spectacular tactics of intervention. As Gronk explained, reflecting specifically on Burden’s 1972 Deadman when the artist feigned death by laying in the street wedged against a car tire beneath a tarp in the gallery district of West LA:

Somebody of color, at that same time would have been implicitly told ‘how dare you think you could do a performance piece by lying down in the middle of the street … Only Chris Burden can do something like that. [We, in Asco, always felt] … that a hierarchy did exist. (Jones 2012: 126).²

Whereas the lower stakes of Shoot have been previously noted as a measure of the work’s insoluble distance from reality, the routine erasure of the neutralized white privilege enabling Burden to seek out violence, control the terms, and gain art world prestige for it, underscores the non-metaphorical aspect central to the piece: Burden’s incongruent, lived proximity to limits operating as opportunities for some and barriers for others. ‘Opportunity’, American political theorist and feminist, Iris Marion Young insightfully asserts, ‘is a condition of enablement’ when ‘the rules and practices that govern one’s actions, the way other people treat one another in the context of specific social relations, and the broader structural possibilities produced by the confluence of a multitude of actions and practices’ dictate choices that are made (Young, 1990: 26). Following Young’s formulation of enablement, Burden’s recourse to test his limits, is more telling of the ‘control’ he had to ‘burn’ as a result of cumulative, inherited opportunities to explore injury in contexts that would allow him to be seen and heard at F Space, located in the predominantly lower-income, Spanish-speaking area of Santa Ana (Mendez, 1970: 8). Tellingly, within the historiography of Shoot, the emergence of F Space in 1971 during a period of increased crime rates and urban development in this region remains seemingly inconsequential. And yet, these conditions limn a particular set of economic and social shifts that animate the historical significance of Shoot and its afterlives.

The subdivision of 1514 E Edinger Avenue, home to Burden’s own studio and F Space (so named after its suite label ‘F’), had been citrus groves before 1964, when rapid changes spurred by the establishment of the University of Irvine, led to the economic upheaval, as well as the suburbanization of the area made the industrial park available for use (Orange County Archives; Harwood and Myers, 2002: 72). Burden, Dunlap, and their UCI peers sought out the warehouse in Santa Ana as a kind of safe space for experimentation at a time when UCI’s campus, situated in wealthier, predominantly white, English-speaking Irvine, lacked space for art students. In a 1971 Los Angeles Times editorial highlighting F Space, Dunlap explained, ‘We wanted to go beyond the visual and get away from something on a wall or something on a pedestal. We wanted a place where we could do what we wanted to do without restriction, and without the need to conform to someone else’s idea of art’ (Driscoll, 1971: 68). Within the context of urban development in Santa Ana, however, artists commuting to Santa Ana from Los Angeles or Irvine participated in the complex relations of the neighboring towns and their entangled access to regional resources. As political scientist and urbanism scholar Kristen Maher Hill observes, the commute of service workers going from Santa Ana to Irvine to serve the collegiate can be thought of as a ‘border crossing’ (Maher Hill, 2004: 784).

Burden and the UCI artists’ reversal of the commute of service workers, to escape rules and spaces of governance on campus in Irvine, operates within the hegemonic imaginaries of safe and un-safe spaces promoted by American authorities with privileged access to mobility, time, and material resources. F Space, briefly active during the early 1970s, cannot be named as a significant gentrifying force in the area. The artists helped galvanize interest in nearby alternative spaces such as Newspace and Floating Wall Gallery; they also invited in laborers working in the industrial park to view their experimental art, thereby even challenging elitist exclusionary practices of museums, like LACMA, and forging untraditional models and audiences for art-viewership (Driscoll, 1971: 68–69). Nevertheless, the artists did benefit from larger structural mechanisms of privilege already in place – admittance into art school and connections to resources forged by affiliations with the university – which ostensibly allowed them to find, rent, and envision the space in Santa Ana as one of safety and freedom. While preferences of these rentals may appear random, the ownership of blocks of the subdivision by Floyd A Blower, a major financier of UCI and President of Santa Ana National Bank, supports Lipsitz’s contention that rentals often reflect coordinated manipulation of market forces by wealthy corporations and their government allies, in turn deepening an inherited racial wealth and health gap from which Burden and his fellow F Space co-founders benefited (Lipsitz, 2011: 31).³

The artists’ participation in the emerging ‘border crossing’ also carries larger implications in the 1970s, as the borders between Santa Ana and Irvine, like those distinguishing East from West LA, became palpable through police over-enforcement. Santa Ana, then home to the largest of 27 barrios located in Orange County, had become a particular site of interest for criminologists because of increased crimes rates amplified by urban renewal and the construction of a highway bifurcating Southern California (Mendez, 1970: 8). Police officials sought to optimize ‘beat patrol’ structures by calculating the need for additional police units based on ‘incident load’ (the number of reported acts of violence) per square mile in Santa Ana (Mitchell, 1973: 579). When Burden visited a hospital nearby F Space, he supplied a lie (‘about going hunting and the gun being on the table and a bottle of vinegar falling on it’, see Ward, 2000: 124), to protect himself and Dunlap from arrest. Although police questioned him, no criminal investigation ensued (Sharp and Béar, 1971). Instead, a police report, then mandatory for all medically treated gun-related injuries would have entered a crime database. Thus, depending on which hospital in the nearby vicinity of F Space Burden utilized, Dunlap’s misfire had the potential to directly impact the incident load in and around Santa Ana. Within an expanded framework of culpability, the afterlife of the misfire troubles contentions that Burden’s wound verifies nothing more than its physical fact, establishing instead a possible connection to future patrols, arrests, and the ongoing stereotyping of Chicano criminality.

Collateral Damage and the Archive

While seemingly ancillary to the fetishized moment of ‘misfire’ that has historically anchored Shoot, Burden’s sensibilities of safety, risk, and access to resources, arguably mobilized Shoot. Furthermore, Burden’s decision to ‘test his limits’ by getting shot, and Dunlap’s voluntary participation in the act, underscore how they each understood that various American institutions, from security enforcement to medical care, remained at their disposal even as they ‘tested’ the scruples of the art world. As such, the physical and psychological limits tested by the misfire were not theirs but, as Asco’s work suggests, the boundaries of control set in place by a society ordered around the protection of paradoxically lawless and innocent white masculinity. It is therefore not insignificant that one of the most spectacular media events of 1971 pertaining to possession and use of a firearm, namely the postponement and relocation of Angela Davis’s trial in California for the purpose of a fairer hearing, was making national headlines in the days leading up to Shoot but remains absent from art-historical accounts attempting to historicize the work’s cultural stakes.

Between the ‘misfires’ of the 1971 Chicano Moratoriums, and Davis’s trial attesting to the significance of place, race, and gender in determining innocence, it becomes clearer that Burden’s and Dunlap’s racial positionality and not merely the proper name of ‘art’ lent them their own ‘elsewhere’ – their gestures as white men perceived as apolitical and unconnected from larger cases of being armed, and ‘shooting back’, then informing American history. It is these realities inherent to the making of Shoot (controlled proximity to state-sanctioned violence, prevailing land use practices, inheritance of benefits of urban renewal, and access to health care) that Asco’s work makes legible as the collateral damage of Dunlap’s misfire: the perpetuation of a racial inheritance of risk that condones and encourages whites to orchestrate the terms of safety and endurance while bending the law and inflicting harm.

In contrast, the members of Asco exercised an acute knowledge of such inheritance with the understanding that societal limits were not there for their protection, but defined through their physical, professional, and social exclusion from the protection offered by full American citizenship preserved by and for whites (Ahmed, 2000: 70). The work of Asco, motivated by anticipating and evading future injury was necessarily comparatively less legibly ‘risky’, and has thus remained relatively unacknowledged until only recently, with exhibitions such as the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time (2012). Unlike Burden, Asco, Herrón once explained, wasn’t ‘romanticizing and glorifying what the streets were like … we saw the problem and saw it as a problem because we were right in the middle of it’ (Benavidez and Vozloff, 1984: 51). At the very same time and to this day, Burden and his fellow co-founders of F Space accrue profiles as ‘free radicals’ for having found ‘an industrial space 10 miles off campus,’ an act that has amplified their mystique as risk-taking ‘babes in the barrio’ (Frank, 2015).

In light of these social mechanics that depend on the transversal alignment of resources and relationships, the original box holding Smith’s recording of Shoot carries an alternative, and I contend, more fitting title that brings forward the artists’ collectively coordinated dimensions of the piece. Whereas the title Shoot, just like the images that so often accompany it, emphasizes Burden’s perspective and his interest in the mental and physical experience of being shot, Smith instead labeled her footage, ‘Bruce Shoots Chris’ (Figure 6). Her label thus carries a record of an agreement that came before and exceeded the experience of the event. In some ways, this title advances the claim made by performance scholar Peggy Phelan (2012: 28) that it is the ‘errant bullet’ and the unexamined relationship between Burden and Dunlap that makes Shoot ‘utterly compelling.’ The relation articulated in Smith’s title, however, also draws out how the friend–collaborators’ relationship was informed by more than mutual trust or their subsequent interpersonal connection. Rather, the unremarkable quality of the label belies a belief in the safeness of F Space shared among those present. Smith’s perfunctory notation captures not a mythologized error but the success of a plan that came to fruition, the kind that typifies what cultural theorist Nikhil Pal Singh identifies as the threat of violence that affirms the sociality of the state (Singh, 2004: 204). Tellingly, even decades after the shot was fired, Burden and Dunlap sustained control over the narrative of Shoot as testament to the work’s exploitation and reinforcement of their ability to manage the story: despite appearing in the widely reproduced images of Shoot, Dunlap maintained his anonymity as the ‘unnamed marksman’ until 2015 when he voluntarily gave an on-camera interview with the New York Times in homage to Burden’s career (Kunter, 2015). As these examples suggest, the canonical stature of Shoot, as well as the international acclaim Burden accrued, and the privacy afforded Dunlap, cannot be disentangled from the dis/placed, in/visible, a/historical and a/social whiteness that the piece recruits and maintains via its production and historiography.

Figure 6

Chris Burden - Piece at F [Space] / Bruce shoots Chris / 1972 / Recorded on DAT tape #6. 1 audiotape reel: analog; 5 in., 1/4 in. tape, original case in box 303. Barbara T. Smith Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. © Photograph: Faye Gleisser (2018).

To be clear, this analysis does not suggest that resolution will be found by abandoning Shoot or by merely foregrounding Asco’s contributions belatedly within the canon. Such subtractive and additive strategies tend to implement cosmetic rather than structural change. The politics of the misfire instead calls for greater attention to the assumptions bolstering asymmetrical evaluation of risk-taking, control, and injury, in art and beyond, within the collective scope of its making and impact. What does it mean to confront the ethics and politics of art-making and art historiography that sustain and amplify the collateral damage of whiteness when assessing endurance? Talk of Shoot in art history does not simply reflect the ‘talk of crime’ that Asco theorized and lived, but participates in it. When the right to mishandle a gun as a sign of validated imperfection, and the ability to shoot straight has historically belonged to white men, this normalized contradiction exercised in discussions of Shoot, consolidates the whiteness of media narratives. Today, these narratives reverberate with reports of white men responsible for terroristic gun violence in schools described as misunderstood ‘lone wolves’, and white police continually acquitted for the abuse and murder of people of color because they ‘felt unsafe’. Cumulatively, these narratives work together, upholding the structural privileges of white masculinity made ‘an elemental right’ in American ‘law and order’ society (Wang, 2018: 83).

Burden and Asco’s distinct but entangled reception histories make tangible how risk-taking, so central to the legacy of experimental art practice and activism of the 1970s, is informed by racial, gender, and class-based notions of innocence that align places and bodies. Through structures of safety and threat connecting their vastly different negotiation of misfires, it becomes clearer how policing, emergency management, and racial stereotyping are not merely reflected in the work but encoded and produced within its conceptualization, display, and ongoing interpretation. Together, the artists’ asymmetrical relations to state-sanctioned violence, and the discursive narrativizing of its aftermath, demand that the meaning assigned to injury, endurance, and risk be understood as an always-already socially coded metric, when for many to challenge societal limits means anticipating and side-stepping around the bullets rather than embracing them head-on.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the artists of Asco, and Harry Gamboa Jr in particular for sharing his personal insights about Los Angeles, his artwork, and his memories of misfires, which helped make this article possible. I am also grateful to Jasmine J Mahmoud, Erin Reitz, and Delia Solomons for incisive comments on early drafts, as well as for the assistance of Linnea West, and Dylan Almendral, archivist at the Santa Ana History Room. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous readers of the special issue, and the editorial team at journal of visual culture for their constructive feedback.

Notes

Faye Gleisser is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she holds joint-affiliations in Cultural Studies, and Critical Race & Postcolonial Studies. Her research focuses on race and gender in 20th- and 21st-century art, with an emphasis on performance, photography, and institutional critique in America and the African Diaspora. In 2017, as an Academic Research Fellow at the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, she continued work on her book manuscript, which analyzes guerrilla performance art, criminality, and the cultural domestication of militancy in the US during the 1970s and ‘80s. In addition to her research and art criticism, which has appeared in exhibition catalogues, Artforum, ASAP/J, Aperture, and is forthcoming in Art Journal, Gleisser maintains an active curatorial practice. Prior to arriving at IU, she was the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she curated The Making of a Fugitive (2016) and co-organized Above, Before & After (2016–2017).

Address: Department of Art History, Radio & TV Building, 1229 E 7th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. [email: frgleiss@iu.edu]

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