Turns out that this is a collective of artists. Each one’s name is Patssi Valdez, Gronk(Glugio Nicandro), Willie F. Herron III and Harry Gamboa Jr. The collective name is called Asco and the facial expression seems to be a common thing in their photographs. It’s a form of presenting a statement. In another image that Julia Bryan- Wilson showed, they show them posing with the black hole of the sewer in the middle. This image is named Asshole. The name is a political statement but also humorous. This is a way to catch the viewer from the start. This also made me think about the first image I talked about with the hoodie. Was the hoodie also a political statement or was it a form of humor? According to C. Ondine Chavoya (2020) in the article “Fleeting Asco, Ephemera, and Intergroup Exchange in LA”, the group of artists did not refer to themselves as a collective even though other catalogs call them that. According to Harry Gamboa Jr., he felt the word “collective” made them sound like they were just focused on one thing but in reality the group ASCO was focused on “historical avant gardes , of the twentieth century, especially Dadaism, Futurism, and Russian Constructive” (Chavoya 2020). The rise of ASCO came from the disgusting social conditions and injustice including racial discrimination, inferior public education, police brutality, mass media stereotypes and the war in Vietnam and South Asia. In the early 1970s, ASCO started to form their own way of protest through murals.
