Starting its storytelling in the 1980s, this documentary film charts the lives of two Chicano (Mexican-American) men from Los Angeles. Mark Machado (Mister Cartoon) is a graphic artist who creates a name for himself making tattoos, and Estevan Oriol is a photographer who also makes videos. Their emergence as a creative force coincided with (and in fact depended on) the rise of hip hop.
LA gang culture has its own chroniclers, for example moviemakers. Such cultural products as ‘End of Watch’ (2012) and ‘Training Day’ (2001) illustrate, in a way that ‘LA Originals’ also does, the formation of an aesthetic argot, a demotic register born of a combination of drugs, music, and violence, particular to a specific place and time, that can have international appeal. Richard Poplak’s ‘The Sheikh’s Batmobile’ (2009) also describes how such things can take place in an era of global Capital.
The scenes in ‘LA Originals’ set in Iraq at the time of the 2003 US invasion – the second time in a generation such a war had been waged – are especially telling as to how this process can work. Such scenes made me mindful of George Gittoes, an Australian artist and filmmaker. In 2006 and 2007 on this blog I looked at his work, some of which is inspired by what he saw in the war zone.
Mr Cartoon’s art was readily absorbed, reified, and sold by big business. The influence of two people from a marginal US demographic achieving agency struck me as somehow emblematic of our times, even though their art perhaps represents more evolution than revolution. Migrants often turn out to be, either in themselves or through their children, among the most productive members of any pluralistic democracy they enter. But Tom Wolfe, in a 1963 essay included in his 1965 book ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’, chronicles the appearance of a similar type of art and its attendant subculture a generation before Estevan and Mr Cartoon started out on their respective trajectories.
Their kind of art combines kitsch with menace but its influence might, in the long term, be transient. The jury is still out as to its importance; time will tell. Nevertheless the movie, which uses thousands of photographs as well as clips of video footage, is worthwhile spending time with. It charts a phenomenon that sums up so much about today’s world and can be profitably watched by anyone interested in understanding how art and money can, under the right conditions, operate in tandem rather than (as usually happens) in parallel.
Before getting to the end of this review I want to quote a passage from journalist Michael Lewis’ ‘Trail Fever’ (1997; the book will be reviewed shortly on this blog). Here, Lewis is accompanying a failed Democratic presidential candidate on a working tour of Las Vegas. The man’s name: Jesse Jackson. At a hospital, where Jackson had gone to see Tupac Shakur, a hip hop artist who had been shot and who would die of his wounds, they meet promoter Don King.
LA gang culture has its own chroniclers, for example moviemakers. Such cultural products as ‘End of Watch’ (2012) and ‘Training Day’ (2001) illustrate, in a way that ‘LA Originals’ also does, the formation of an aesthetic argot, a demotic register born of a combination of drugs, music, and violence, particular to a specific place and time, that can have international appeal. Richard Poplak’s ‘The Sheikh’s Batmobile’ (2009) also describes how such things can take place in an era of global Capital.
The scenes in ‘LA Originals’ set in Iraq at the time of the 2003 US invasion – the second time in a generation such a war had been waged – are especially telling as to how this process can work. Such scenes made me mindful of George Gittoes, an Australian artist and filmmaker. In 2006 and 2007 on this blog I looked at his work, some of which is inspired by what he saw in the war zone.
Mr Cartoon’s art was readily absorbed, reified, and sold by big business. The influence of two people from a marginal US demographic achieving agency struck me as somehow emblematic of our times, even though their art perhaps represents more evolution than revolution. Migrants often turn out to be, either in themselves or through their children, among the most productive members of any pluralistic democracy they enter. But Tom Wolfe, in a 1963 essay included in his 1965 book ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’, chronicles the appearance of a similar type of art and its attendant subculture a generation before Estevan and Mr Cartoon started out on their respective trajectories.
Their kind of art combines kitsch with menace but its influence might, in the long term, be transient. The jury is still out as to its importance; time will tell. Nevertheless the movie, which uses thousands of photographs as well as clips of video footage, is worthwhile spending time with. It charts a phenomenon that sums up so much about today’s world and can be profitably watched by anyone interested in understanding how art and money can, under the right conditions, operate in tandem rather than (as usually happens) in parallel.
Before getting to the end of this review I want to quote a passage from journalist Michael Lewis’ ‘Trail Fever’ (1997; the book will be reviewed shortly on this blog). Here, Lewis is accompanying a failed Democratic presidential candidate on a working tour of Las Vegas. The man’s name: Jesse Jackson. At a hospital, where Jackson had gone to see Tupac Shakur, a hip hop artist who had been shot and who would die of his wounds, they meet promoter Don King.
Like Tupac Shakur, he wears not one but two gold watches, one on each wrist. An absurd display of wealth, on the one hand; on the other a funny parody of mainstream success culture: if you are going to turn your wristwatch into a status symbol, why have only one?Most people under the age of 50 today, of course, know who Tupac Shakur was, but almost no-one would know, if pressed for an answer, that Bob Dole lost the presidential race in 1996. To underscore this point, on the day before this post was published, at around 11.05pm Pacific Time, a Californian resident with the Twitter handle @Andrew714 tweeted, in reference to this movie, “Can anyone tell me who does the song that starts at the 1hr 8min 16sec mark? It's not in the credits, been searching for days.”
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