by Jerome du Bois
I found two letters on the Internet that reveal more about the psychology of two people featured in some recent posts on "The Burgeoning" -- ASU Associate Professor John Leaños, and Phoenix Public Arts Program Director Greg Esser. The letters -- from Leaños to Esser, and Esser's reply -- stem from an October First Friday drama: Leaños and twenty of his obedient, politically-brainwashed students wheat-pasted a bunch of antiwar posters which they made on buildings Esser owned. Esser objected and tore the posters down. I won't go into details -- if I can find the letters, you can -- but both missives support our previous judgments: that Greg Esser is a dissembling, dodging bureaucrat, who won't stand up for private citizens; and that John Leaños is a racist megalomaniac, with no regard for personal private property, and is dangerously consumed with a messianic vision of bringing America down and replacing it with some Mexi-Indigenous-ooga-booga social order, undoubtedly with obedient women bent over metates (and other things). He joins two other racist ASU professors we've identified so far, Beverly MacIver and Neil Lester, who also trash white people, "the dominant paradigm." Your tax dollars at work, Arizonans. Am I exaggerating? No, I quote pseudo-Zapata, writing to Esser:
[Update 10/22/04]: Since some readers are googling that jerk Leaños, they might be interested in what the Army Rangers -- Pat Tillmans's compadres -- think of the Professor.
I think you must be aware of the value of doing public art both with and without permission. You are probably aware that Indigenous and Chicana/o visions of public space differ most definitely from predominant paradigms. We believe that the southern border, for instance, is a temporary expression of a failing social order. The hegemony of Private Property may be seen in the same vein. Chicana/o and Indigenous peoples have occupied this territory for many generations and have been told over and over that our concerns, ways and aesthetics do not matter. Many Chicana/o residents of the Downtown and Garfield Districts view the downtown arts community as paving the way for gentrification, a whitewashing of diverse cultural expression in order to replace it with an aseptic, "sponsored" and paid for culture. It seems that your actions are in tune with this project.
Ooh, meet El Presidente/a/o! Tell you what, Jota, every Chicano I've met, and I've worked side by side with many, same work, same pay, would take exception to you getting your skinny hands on their private property. And if I see you or any of your robots around my place, be ready for blood in your eyes, pendejo.
And Esser, for his part, hides like the limp weenie he is, dodging the whole brown issue; but -- oh, you bitch! -- he does offer some nice inside dish about Mr. MayanAztecMestizoMofo:
. . . I would like to respond to your inaccurate implication that the City of Phoenix was in any way not open to dialogue or participation with the Department of Chicana/o Studies at ASU. As a city employee, I generally do not respond to individual artists’ requests for information about public art. This is typically a function of other staff in the Office of Arts and Culture. POAC staff were in fact in contact with you. You were recently selected as a finalist to develop a proposal for a public art project. You received an honorarium for that proposal in the amount of $500 from the City of Phoenix that you cashed on September 16, 2004.
Five hundred bucks for writing up a proposal? Haysoos Marimba, where do I sign up? Hell, we just wrote up a spoof proposal, two posts down. Gimme da ting! (Listen, Greg, while you've got the ledger open, where can we find the audit trails for all those $5000 mentor grants down the years, hmmm? It isn't on your website, or Phil Jones's. Why not? . . . Oh, never mind, we'll do our own research. Sorry to interrupt your asskissing.)
We, too, sent an open letter, and several emails, to Mr. Esser, about the hermetic, mute, antipublic presentation of his art gallery. But he hidin in a spidey hole from us. In his letter to JJL he takes pains to distinguish his public and private roles, and wants to avoid their "conflation." I can see why he wished to maintain this artificial, bureaucratic, cowardly distinction. Our points had to do with the man being a human being who was supposed to learn from his role as public art presenter to present his own art venue as if it presented art -- dig?
eyelounge sounds like a bar. eyelounge looks like a bar. It looks like a closed, condemned bar. Who puts plywood behind barred windows on someplace open for business, you dick? You waiting for a hurricane? The words "art" and "gallery" appear nowhere on the puke-green facades of your precious stucco walls. If we had to judge your public art credentials by the presentations of your own projects, we certainly would not have hired you.
Now we are wondering if you're behind the sculpture that was made from the melted-down guns. For those out of the loop, the damn thing looks like a steel Gumby raising its hands high and frantic in surrender. "Release From Fear," it's called, but it looks like "Take My Wallet." From melted guns. Was that you, Esser? It sure looks like your style.
A Greg Esser pose, practicing for when the banditos take over.
But you're both banditos, aren't you? pseudo-Zapata and The Denver Kid, misrepresenting your ethical and fiduciary responsbilities to the citizens of Phoenix and Arizona, cashing your tax-supported checks by fraud, and stealing the simple souls of the students and young artists in your charges.
Posted by Jerome at October 18, 2004 04:14 PM | TrackBack