The Active Visible

Guillermo Aurelio Bejarano

Biography

In 1969, I enrolled at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). My introduction to the Mexican American Studies Department subsequently led me to the study of art and mural painting. In the summer of my first year, I painted an 8 by 16-foot mural on the interior wall of the CSUN Student Union building. The mural represented the Aztec idea of "El Quinto Sol" (The Fifth Sun).

In my quest to encourage Chicano artists to enroll at CSUN, I went to meet members of the MeChicano Art Center & Gallery in East Los Angeles.

In the late sixties, the Mexican American community mobilized thousands of people to march through the streets of East Los Angeles against the Vietnam War. The Chicano anti-war movement held three marches: The first in 1969, the second early in 1970. On August 29, 1970, after the third Chicano Moratorium March that attracted 20,000 – 30,000 participants nationally. I witnessed the killing of Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter, by the Los Angeles Sheriff's patrol. On September 16, 1970, after a peaceful Mexican American Independence parade, the police had rushed in on many marchers carried placards blaming the police for the murder of Salazar. A local family offered me protection in their home. Inside, the parents, children and I became under attacked and the police forced us to the floor. I was handcuffed and transported to the Los Angeles county jail, where jailed medical trustee sewed up a severe cut to my scalp.

In 1970, Mr. Bert Corona, a community union activist had advised me to study mural painting in Mexico and gave me with a letter of introduction for muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros. I applies ththis study with the Art and Mexican American Studies departments that allowed me two semesters' elective credits to study mural painting in Mexico City. In Mexico City, Maestro Siqueiros agreed to include me on the team extending his 1945 incomplete mural Patricians and Patricides at the former Academia de Santo Domingo in Mexico City. There, I could study the Maestro's ideas, constructive spirit, modeling, primary masses, and the use of space and volume. I saw the Maestro Siqueiros pointing at the gigantic allegorical human figures, a woman symbolizing wisdom and a man on horseback yielding a saber; "See how the figures, along with their volume and space moves in relationship to the observer!" We all followed him moving from one section of the mural to another. Then, in an authoritative voice, said, "I want dynamic uses of theme, composition and color in mural painting!" "…without those three would lack power." Maestro Siqueiros then grabbed rolls of drawing paper spreading some in front of us. There on the table were his preliminary mural drawings describing his compositional ideas for developing monumental mural scale, the use of polyangular methods for composition, and creation of dynamic energy through motion "The active visible" he described composition, mass, space, and volume. The Maestro spoke of the possibility of new mural developments in the United States and the use of technology in art. He also discussed "The March of Humanity" mural, an in-progress work at the Polyforum of the Hotel de México. By 1971, I returned to the United States and my university study.

In 1972, the MeChicano Art Center offered me an opportunity to paint a mural with neighborhood youth. That year, the MeChicano Art Center and the East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital announced an art competition to paint a large interior wall at the hospital. Receiving the project award, I painted "Medical Science," a 4 by 40 foot mural.

In 1973-74, I joined a collective mural project (four artists) sponsored by the Mexican American Studies Department. The group proposed to create a mural measuring approximately 8.5 by 300 foot in an area located in the Sierra South building of California State University, Northridge. We chose to spray paint the walls in a free-line style—without using preliminary drawings. The idea was to build shapes upon the line in which we could individually work out our images. After spray painting the walls' surfaces, we painted: the myth of creation; the Aztec gods; the Spanish conquest; and the revolutionary struggles. The mural design presented a collection of images to unify one theme; of a new consciousness, of a "New Man." I was not very happy with the finished result. The mural had become too indeterminate and coarse.

Months later, the art students had agreed to organize a Chicano art show at CSUN arts department gallery. The proposal for the Chicano Art exhibit was meet with administrative resistance. We sensed attitudes of elitism and racism. Our exhibiting committee therefore approached for support the liberal arts professors at CSUN and the project was approved.

Administrators and professors had previously criticized our enthusiasm for Chicano arts and for murals with political or social values. Using the existing mural in the Sierra South as an example, they claimed that visual expression had to be detached from "theories that conceive of art as a tool that helps to advance some moral, religious, political, or psychological purpose."1 My art history instructor argued that: great art had to go beyond nationalist tendencies to have 'quality,' and that Mexican-Chicano art did not achieve the necessary 'quality' for American contemporary arts. To these remarks, I responded that his criterion of artistic excellence was an Anglo racial bias, ignorance and bourgeois.

At the conclusion of the CSUN–Chicano art exhibition, most of the exhibiting artists decided to establish a CSUN/Artists Outreach program for a community arts center in Pacoima, which we named, El Jardin de Flor y Canto. (The Garden of Flowers and Song).

I had developed an admiring the works of Umberto Boccioni, Sebastián Antonio 'Matta' Echaurren, Gorky, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Mexicans Leonardo Nierman and Rufino Tamayo. Excited by what I had seen in Mexico. I took increased interest in techniques and the application of new paint media. While experimenting with the use of acrylic lacquers, (adapted to artistic use by Siqueiros in the 1940s), I developed a fascination with the surface effects that these paints could produce in accidental and controlled painting situations. I became interested in the theories of color and expressionism in painting and in the work of the Futurists who sought to show motion by multiplying the problems of the moving object. Lyrical excursions into fantasy and surrealism also interested me.

In Spring of 1976, I graduated receiving a combined Bachelors Degree in Art and Mexican American Studies. I followed Professor Howard Warshaw, University of California, Santa Barbara, Fine Arts Graduate Department as an understudy until Professor Warshaw death in 1977.

By 1977, I was in contact with Carlos Almaraz who had work with the United Farm Workers. Almaraz discussed his work at the UFW and the Peoples's Law Center, he later invited me to join the Red Star Commune in Highland Park, Los Angeles. A few months later, Almaraz and I had join the Tenth Venceremos Brigade to Cuba. There in a small rural area and factory, we were prepared to help build for the factory worker housing, a three story high apartments. Carlos presented a mural in the name of the Brigade. Upon our return to the United States, we stayed a couple of months in New York City visiting the New York's art museums and galleries. When I returned to Los Angeles, our relationship with the Red Star Commune had dissolved due to personal difficulties with the group. Almaraz and I went our seperate ways, but because of our political and artistic and befriending Richard Durado we lanched together the establishment for the Public Art Center (Centro de Arte Popular), Highland Park. And, because of the formation Concilio de Arte Popular, a California state-wide non-profit org., Carlos and Victor Valle and myself undertook to CAP mission in publishing ChismeArte Magazine, about the arts and literature of the time, 1977-80.

Almaraz introduced me to his keen and lyrical artistic observations. I learned by his example the importance of observing the Los Angeles urban scene. and into the political nature of Chicanos in-community..

By 1980, I was substained by Self-Help Graphics of Los Angeles, and by the end of doing several issues on the project ChismeArte, I aware of my too overly involvement iin my publishing efforts and personal-family needs, I left it and took on a hiatus, 1981-.

Some years later, I became interested in graphic arts, desktop publishing in the use of computers.

In 1994, a company having an electrostatic digital color printer offered to produce two of my images. Their equipment employed a printing process using colored ground pigments on paper up to 52 by 120 inches. With the system, I made "O.J. Simpson," a diptych on two 40 x 40 inches, on three-eighth inch Sintra boards, with the surfaces laminated to protect and preserve the images.

That same year, I entered the "O.J. Simpson" artwork into competition for the "First Biennial of Mexican y Chicano Painting" sponsored by the Institute of the Mexican Consulate of Los Angeles." The exhibition jury awarded my work a "Special Mention" for a digital technique that could be accepted as painting. The artwork was first exhibited in Los Angeles and had traveled to different cities of Mexico.

I remain interested in the use of machine 'binary code' that creates a homogeneous electronic visual image. I've used imager of manipulations or displacements or color modifications filters for new exploratory interpretation of the arts. The art process of including traditional oils or acrylics mediums inconjuction with digital artistry.

1. Edmund Burke Feldman. Varieties of Visual Experience—Art as Image and Idea. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York: 1970.

2. Members of the Public Art Center included Carlos Almaraz, Guillermo Bejarano, Barbara Carrasco, Leo Limon, Juan Gryer, Richard Durado, Frank Romero, Victor Manuel Valle and George Yepes.

3. Electrostatic color printer manufactured by Xerox Corporation.