ART : How Do <i> You </i> Spell Gronk? : Having moved from guerrilla art to the mainstream, he remains a paradox after 20 years of reinventing his persona and his vision

Sitting in an open courtyard at the 7th Street Marketplace in downtown Los Angeles, painter and conceptual artist Gronk pauses a long time to consider certain questions. He seems almost uncomfortable with the effort to define himself. “Basically, I like to create worlds for other people to enter, places where they can encounter their own imagination.”

Quite an understatement from someone who has, for more than 20 years, invented one fictional realm after another, each of them replete with a unique and complex visual language. The latest in the continuing series, “Fascinating Slippers/Pantunflas Fascinantes,” is at the Daniel Saxon Gallery.

In the early 1970s, he created one such world collectively, with the three other members of ASCO (Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herron and Patssi Valdez), the late, great Chicano avant-garde art group whose name was derived from the Spanish word for nausea. First, there were the murals depicting themes of police brutality and community turmoil. But unlike the typical cultural bromides that emerged from within the barrio, ASCO’s walls concentrated on the violence, oppression and self-loathing that defined life on the Eastside of L.A. Often created in just a few days, these colossal wallworks served as a kind of crystal ball, a passport by which to view the world not so much as it looked, but as it was felt by people forced to live it day in and day out.

It was also with ASCO that Gronk first experimented with live performance. With each of its “No Movie” collaborations, the collective produced non-celluloid dramas that were played out late at night on some of the most dangerous streets and alleys of the city. Each performance resulted in a self-contained universe filled with culturally relevant in-jokes and self-referential symbols.

As Gronk says: “It was making something out of nothing. We carried on as if they were films. We even made storyboards and developed characters for what were basically staged photographs. We were mimicking Hollywood with its million-dollar budgets, using the city as our movie set. It was our way of saying Chicanos had no access to the film industry.”

There were also the “Instant Murals,” performance pieces that sometimes bound ASCO members to walls with electrical tape. These quick-paste jobs, with their obvious sadomasochistic edge, simultaneously parodied what was fast becoming an impotent mural culture as well as commented on the unsettling impermanence of life.

One of ASCO’s most infamous acts was to spray-paint the front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the collective’s names before a small but select audience of fans and followers. As Gronk tells it, “Since we couldn’t get inside, we decided to sign the whole building and call it our piece.” In the process, he and his guerrilla art comrades forced open a crack between the world of so-called fine art and the underground street scene that shamelessly strove to crash LACMA’s frustrating elitism.

During the early 1980s, the original members of ASCO started moving in different directions: Herron into graphic design and music, Valdez into photography and painting. By the mid-’80s, the group had become a loose-knit association of artists and performers headed by Gamboa and Gronk, ASCO’s resident theologians. And then, little by little, the two old friends began to drift apart.

At the same time, Gronk was rapidly becoming part of the “fine art” establishment he had once railed against. At first, he emerged as a talent to be watched (and watch out for) in various group shows throughout L.A. Then, in 1984, came his first big solo splash, the “Gronk” exhibition at the now-defunct Molly Barnes Gallery in West Hollywood.

Next came “Summer 1985” at MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary, where he took a massive, nearly building-length space and created an extravagant installation of disembodied skulls, faces and objects colliding in furious absurdity. Suddenly, it seemed the street artist was being accepted by the mainstream. It made sense. After all, as Art in America magazine noted earlier this month, Gronk has been able to translate Chicano iconography into a postmodernist idiom. Just as important, the rest of the society was catching up to the ironic disillusion born of barrio life.

That same year also brought “The Titanic and Other Tragedies at Sea” (at the now-defunct Ocaso Gallery), in which he used that huge man-made folly of the Industrial Age as his metaphor for the sinking U.S. ship of state. In what would become a recurring obsession in his work, Gronk took viewers on a satirical voyeur’s tour through the world of opulent excess.

It was also during this period that he perfected his renowned temptress, La Tormenta, the always faceless femme fatale who has glided through a number of Gronk’s imaginary worlds. At times, she appears irresistibly elegant and invitingly alone. Other times, she is the sleek seductress, an inscrutable beast of prey.

Several critics have speculated that La Tormenta is really none other than Gronk himself, or at least one of his more exciting alter egos--which points to perhaps the most alluring element of the artist’s success. Above and beyond, before and after the outrageousness of his work, there is the mystery of who Gronk really is.

In a recent interview, he acknowledged that people “become more fascinated with Gronk the persona than with the work itself.” But, in all fairness, he does foster a certain aura of mystery. He says: “I live a simple life. I ride the bus. I go to a simple coffee shop. The real me is the person looking at a blank canvas for 10 hours, preparing myself to make a work of art.”

Nevertheless, he is certainly a paradox of his own making. From the source of his moniker, Glugio Gronk Nicandro (the middle name he says in utter seriousness comes from an obscure Brazilian Indian language and means “to fly”), to the date of his birth or his latest incarnation as an artist, Gronk is always in the process of changing, of making something new of himself.

Even his signature changes and reflects his metamorphoses. To have seen it inscribed on the wall in his second solo show in 1987 was to see a raw and jagged edge to the letters of his name. Now, five years later, his autograph flows with fluid confidence. No longer a calculated and scrawled in-your-face imprint, it is now rounded and assured, almost like a Zen brushwork. The rough edges have been filed down and tempered.

This level of refinement is, of course, reflected in his more recent work. Leaving the glossy world of ice and folly behind, Gronk has begun to reach for a more abstract and even muted style. In 1988, for example, he put forth the first in a series of exhibitions based on the concept of hotels. Using this prototypical symbol of life’s transience, he created worlds of both empty luxury and underclass misery.

His initial inspiration was the time he spent living in the Grand Hotel, a way station in downtown L.A., not far from the warehouse loft where he now lives. “I did research,” Gronk explains. “I needed to know what it was like to live there. I had to absorb the essence. You’ve heard of Method actors. I am a Method painter. The preparation for that show was like being an archeologist, digging and unearthing the hotel’s reality.”

The resulting show at the Saxon-Lee Gallery, “Grand Hotel,” still found Gronk gnawing at the edge of high society, but here he also explored themes and images that he has honed into a very distinctive aesthetic: part afternoon cartoon and part gauzy finish. Combining an obsessive vision with a bravura brush stroke, he began to strip away illusion’s veneer to present the raw essentials, discarding the surface reality that so often mesmerizes us to expose the true hurt and pain beneath it.

With the “Hotel Senator” show at the Saxon gallery in 1991, Gronk reached a new plateau as an artist. Based, again, on an actual hotel--this one across the street from his studio home--he sharpened the interplay between media, form and content. This time, though, he used actual doors as his canvases, portals into underworlds in which the deepest primal disquiet resides.

To his credit, Gronk took a big chance with this show. For the first time in a long while, he moved away from the pat and predictable caricatures of life that people expected from him, and presented the utter pathos of human existence.

The market was unimpressed. The show sold only four out of 13 works, albeit one to the Denver Museum of Art. The signature work of the exhibition tells all. Perhaps Gronk’s most discerning take on the disillusionment of our age, it is a translucent midnight-blue entity wearing a grimace of violated pain. The creature stares out imploringly from the painting, its head on yellow-white fire and its arms spread as if in crucifixion. Its psychic suffering seems too great to endure. Yet, as the depiction of the inner self as victim, it is an apt symbol of history’s latest catastrophe. This is Los Angeles during the riots, Sarajevo being bombarded or Bangkok exploding with rage.

With his current show at the Saxon gallery (through July 4), Gronk has come full circle. He’s has gone back to the streets for his inspiration, taking the Ruscha-like ghostly letters on an ad sign on 7th Street near Olive as the starting point for the creation of new worlds.

To announce the show, the gallery sent out a large, foldout postcard picturing the artist in an oversize checkered suit, standing like a Chaplinesque waif in misshapen, paint-splattered boots. It seems that in classic Gronk fashion--which brilliantly combines the spontaneous with studied intention--he has taken Pantunflas from the show’s title as his newest persona. “The word reminds me of Cantinflas,” he says, “the Mexican comic actor.” And he laughs as if to mock anyone’s effort to squelch his compulsion for would-be multiple personalities.

“With the paintings in this show,” Gronk says, “I was trying to find a vocabulary to express what I see around me in the city. I see the divine in the mundane. To see that something written in the dirt, grime and smog of the city can be beautiful and leave a mark is to see that beauty can hide under ugliness.

“It was a painful show for me and a struggle to come up with ideas. I learned that signs can lie. They can point in the wrong direction. The city is like an archeological dig for me. With this show I think I am mapping my city, and the signs are like graffiti in the way that they both mark off territory.”

All the pieces in the show are shaped liked signs displayed throughout Los Angeles, especially on such streets as Beverly Boulevard--which stretches from West Hollywood into downtown--the bus route between the Saxon gallery and Gronk’s loft. In addition, each piece is titled by numbers alone. The first piece, reminiscent of earlier cartoon-styled work, is simply “1st” for 1st Street, and on and on until “13th.”

Business is good (seven pieces have sold), and there are many standout works. In “13th,” a luxurious green figure is wrapped unto itself against a blue-black background. It seems to be in profound meditation or perhaps protecting and holding itself against the world, but longing for something lost. As an added touch, Gronk drew in chalk a bare outline of a house. These chalk markings are found on most paintings in the show. They are, he says, in homage to his early beginnings when he was so influenced by the graffiti sensibility.

Gronk has traveled a long distance from his origins on the street. Now, for him to find his work exhibited in top museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe and Mexico and bought by such collectors as director Oliver Stone and TriStar chief Mike Medavoy, must be to see life as essentially a circular contradiction of itself.

Taken together--from his early murals to La Tormenta to Pantunflas the clown--Gronk’s work might best be described as Baroque surrealism with Dadaist intentions. There is, at its base, an intense, almost overabundance of ideas and media. This is typically camouflaged by the juxtaposition of opposites with playful imagery and influences. And, finally, there is the need (no doubt a remnant of his days with ASCO) to belittle tradition through derision, irrationality and wild intuition. Amazingly, Gronk has proved that he can carry it all off and be, at times, nothing less than brilliant, and always intriguing.