Hans Theys

 

 

 

___________________________

Hans Theys

 

 

Wallace Berman, Raquel Welch, Joan Baez, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, the Chicano Moratorium, Rasquachismo, Dracula and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

 

Some words on visiting Vincent Ramos’s studio

 

 

Yesterday I had the honor of visiting the studio of Vincent Ramos (b. 1973), currently assembling and collaging found images and small objects into multi-directional visual narratives, poetic and political, personal and public. The studio is packed with books, magazines, posters, collages, drawings, assemblages and hundreds of colorful objects. The first object I see is a frame with six fruit crate labels from Yakima, Washington. Next to it I find charts that explain the immigration and migration of Mexican farm workers in(to) the United States. Ramos’s father, for instance, was born in Denver Colorado in 1937, but spent his childhood in Wapato, Washington, near the Yakima Valley, known for its apple orchards and hop fields, where Ramos’s family picked fruit and worked the land.

‘I clasped my father’s hand and promised to do as he asked. A man who would not defend his father’s grave is worse than a wild beast,’ said Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph). And some other time he said: ‘Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises.’

I believe it was Jimmie Durham, somewhere in his fabulous essays on the uselessness of writing (for who would read his words? academics? Europeans?), who evoked a native American starting a speech with the word ‘we’, describing who ‘we’ were, where they came from and what they stood for. Without such an introduction, words were vain, fluttering on the eerie flagpole of an individual existence.

Today, there is no more unified ‘we’. ‘We’ has become dispersed, fragmented. We are has become we is like you are has become you is. We is everywhere and nowhere. Jimmie Durham also wrote that the Cherokee were inclusive: they adopted people from all descents. Later he was accused of posing as a Cherokee, not really ‘being’ one. Let’s assume he adopted himself. 

On both sides of our family me and my brothers stem from foundlings that got married with each other, as was customary. The foundlings sprang from the nearby capital city, where maidservants were impregnated by their employers. We grew up in a small European country, created as a buffer zone between The Netherlands, France and Germany two centuries ago. As a result of this artificial intervention, reminding us of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 where Africa was divided arbitrarily, three languages are spoken in our country: Dutch, French and German. If there is a ‘we’, it is a jack of all trades, unattached, enjoying the liberating absence of a ‘real’ identity. 

Looking at Ramos’s collages, I remember the sweet ailment of my childhood caused by endless musings about the nature of my tribe. Who were we? On my father’s side of the family, we stemmed from poor farmers. We loved playing in a nearby orchard turned wild, we loved roaming through the nearby woods, we loved building huts in the trees, we loved building subterranean dwellings in the orchard. Much later the 104-year-old sister of my maternal grandmother told me that her grandfather’s family had lived in holes dug in the ground.

Who you are, said James Baldwin, is determined by the price you have paid for your ticket. You are what you paid to stay alive. You are your sufferings. You are your deeds. None of these have a color. They are nothing but pain, effort and experience. They are not determined genetically, they are conditioned by a rigged game and by the intensity of your resistance, by your perseverance.

Vincent Ramos’s collages show Jewish and Italian American musicians who posed as Mexicans (Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass) and Latino-American movie stars and singers such as Anthony Quinn (born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and a first-generation Irish-Mexican father, who impersonated Italians, Greeks, Arabs, Frenchmen, Jews and the Hunchback of Notre-Dame), Raquel Welch whose father was an aeronautical engineer from La Paz Bolivia, Linda Ronstadt, whose father was of Mexican descent, and Joan Baez whose father was born in Puebla Mexico. We also see Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian lead actor of the first Dracula movie. During the night a Spanish language version of the same film was shot, in which the Spanish actor Carlos Villarías played the role of Count Dracula. We also recognize Orson Welles, who didn’t get the permission from the film studio to shoot Touch of Evil in Tijuana, Mexico and settled for Venice Beach in Los Angeles (Ramos’s hometown) as a suitable location. Mexican and Mexican-American singers and actors, political figures, body doubles, impersonators, copycats, heroes, models, unattainable women portrayed in newspapers, on record sleeves, in advertisements, everywhere and nowhere. Everything omnipresent, in an everchanging Chicano rasquachismo jigsaw-puzzle with damaged, faded, reversed and missing pieces.

Apart from these ‘cultural references’, we find links to political protests, such as the 1970 Chicano Moratorium at Laguna Park in East Los Angeles: the largest anti-war protest organized by people of color in the United States, convened to protest against anti-Mexican-American racism and the disproportionate number of deaths of Chicano soldiers in Vietnam (leading to a violent response by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and, amongst others, the death of the Mexican-American journalist Ruben Salazar.)

Ramos’s passion for thrift stores, eBay, flea markets, found footage and the cultural heritage and history of US citizens of Mexican descent (known as Chicanos, Chicanas or nowadays LatinX) has, in the work, met his other long-standing cultural interests like beat poetry; Alan Kaprow’s happenings and teachings; Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers; the Assemblage movement with folks like the pioneering artist Wallace Berman (assemblage, collage and mail artist, experimental filmmaker and publisher of the magazine Semina), Ed Kienholz, Betye Saar and George Herms; the omnipresence of rock ‘n’ roll; the Chicano Art Movement; and, above all, rasquachismo: a specific esthetic sensibility described by scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as the capacity to ‘make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’ or ‘making do with what you have’, for instance when decorating a garden with pieces of mirror and crockery, tricking out a car, preparing a festive meal with tidbits or creating the backdrop of a theatre play with stitched together produce sacks.

As a CalArts alumnus, Ramos is familiar with ways of doing art without making obvious commodities: floundering, gleaning, finding, collecting, assembling, musing, doubting and dreaming of a nest that wouldn’t be endlessly spreading, but would come to rest, in collages, assemblages, drawings, installations and an occasional performance. Or the opposite: dreaming of a way to settle in an infinite sprawl, an everchanging environment, a twirling flock of unlikely we’s.

 

 

Montagne de Miel, 9 August 2024