Blog 2: Alicia Gaspar de Alba

Alicia Gaspar de Alba Readings

In “Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore’s Mask”, Alicia Gaspar de Alba takes a three part feminist view in her critique of the CARA exhibition. She critiques the exhibition in terms of Anglo/European, Third-World, and Chicana feminism. She reveals the unequal presentation of male and female artwork and the exhibition’s failure to use a feminist approach to curating. Although women were being depicted in some of the artwork, most of it was done by males and focused around their ideals for Chicana women. It seem that out of the few artworks created by women in the CARA exhibition, most of them found themselves appropriating still under the trilogy of the three Marias and the Virgen de Guadalupe, Malinche and Llorona. Although Frida Kahlo can be brought into this pool of female icons (even though she wasn’t added to this pool by a woman but by a man), aren’t Chicanas still limiting themselves to only these three possibilities of being even if adapted to mean something else? Why do you, Prof. Gaspar de Alba, believe that they hadn’t transformed themselves into new characters for this social-political cause?

                In “There Is No Place Like Aztlan: Embodied Aesthetics in Chicana Art”, Alicia Gaspar de Alba explores the concept of Aztlan as an aesthetic category and a cultural myth of origin. She derived a seven types of “place-based aesthetics” of which the first four can be included in the Aztlan Aesthetic, but, here, the place is imaginary but it acts at a virtual gallery for presenting and remembering a colonized history. She argues that while others turn to a place of origin for self-determination, Chicana artist look to themselves and to find that place of origin with in them. Thus, Aztlan aesthetics for Chicanas is an embodied aesthetic which uses the body as the signifier for place. Why do Chicanas appropriate iconography and embed themselves into it like Yolanda Lopez’s wearing “the Virgen de Guadalupe’s cloak” during her MFA presentation? It seems that many times Chicana artist see a part of themselves in icons like the Malinche and Guadalupe, instead of seeing the Malinche and Guadalupe inside of themselves. How, then, can we tell which relationship it each artist has, whether it’s internal or external embodiment?