Quiroz Merges the Heroic With Comic Book Crudity

Next year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art will host “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,” an exhibition exploring the crosscurrents between this century’s new forms of art and its more mundane, popular forms of expression.

This summer, the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park is offering a stimulating taste of the same in a show of the work of Alfred Quiroz. A Tucson-based artist, Quiroz merges the grand tradition and heroic scale of history painting with the crude cliches and exaggerated gestures common to comic books.

His “Medal of Honor Series,” at the Centro through September 11, scrutinizes actual incidents of war and the heroes they produced. Unlike traditional paintings on the theme of war, which glorify the soldier and idealize the battle, Quiroz’s paintings and tableau installations portray war as a chaotic, messy event. Misguided arrows and bullets fly through the air, and blood splatters freely in these scenes charged with hateful, destructive energy.

“Bad Guys Good Guys” sets the stage for the Medal of Honor Series in its representation of two soldiers, each a mirror image of the other: helmeted, eager for battle, fingers on triggers, sporting broad grins and bulging eyes. Although interchangeable in stance and expression--and, by extension, malicious means--each fights for a different cause. One, American, fights for the love of his woman, Dorothy, whose name is tattooed across his arm, and the honor of his country, whose flag flies behind him. The other, German, fights for the love of his Helga, also identified by tattoo, and the honor of the Third Reich, as symbolized by the swastika behind him.

Which is the good guy, and which the bad? Quiroz repeats the obvious answer by labeling the Nazi bad and the American good, but the image itself lifts the issue above the realm of oppositional politics into a more general, humanistic level of inquiry. The soldiers’ countries are different, their causes and eras, too, but the viciousness and cold violence in their eyes is identical. Each is driven by a fervent nationalism that justifies any means. And the inhuman ruthlessness of those means, Quiroz suggests, makes them both bad guys in the end.

Quiroz’s work, although explicitly anti-war, is also the vehicle for a multitude of more subtle and varied meanings. Racial stereotypes targeting blacks, Indians and Asians are exaggerated to the point of ludicrous parody, and are thereby undermined. Some works are titled by cliches, such as “Good Injun Daid Injun,” and “Good Commie Daid Commie,” but the images they accompany force us to reconsider--and ultimately, discredit--the sources of such nasty epithets. Quiroz renders violence itself dynamic to the point of artificiality, and caricatures the pain it evokes.

By sheathing the ugliest of subjects beneath a veneer of humor, Quiroz makes them palatable and even amusing. But the intrinsic horror of these events always prevails.

Quiroz’s paintings, like the plethora of contemporary ‘action’ movies, are long on visual entertainment. But, unlike those films, whose violent plots are dismissed as harmless fiction, Quiroz’s works are burdened by the weight of historical fact. Each work in the Medal of Honor Series is based on the exploits of an actual recipient of the medal, and Quiroz is careful to dress and arm his figures in gear appropriate to the era, whether it be the Civil War or the recent invasion of Grenada.

To further intensify the drama of the scenes, Quiroz exaggerates the action so that it bursts out of its contained, two-dimensional setting and intrudes, life-sized, into the physical space of the spectator. In “Got There Jus’ ‘N Time . . . Grenada,” plastic plants dot the shoreline and real sand pours out onto the floor, where a cutout of a bikini-clad medical student puts down her book to raise the American flag before the onslaught of ogling troops. In “Nail It Ta Da Mast,” a painted sailor grips a real nail between his teeth as he hammers a flag to the mast of his sinking ship.

These elements from the physical, tangible world punctuate the dramas and help root them in reality. They lessen the distance between comic exaggeration and brutal truth.

Quiroz insists repeatedly on the ugliness and horror of war, regardless of its time or place, but, much to his credit, he depends on visual richness to tell these tales and not dry didacticism. He paints with vigor and an acute sense for texture and detail. Tiny glitter squares define a hippie’s 5 o’clock shadow in “Aw-dee Aw-dee;” boxing gloves sent flying in “Meriken No-How Shows Dose Peking Boxers . . . 1910” are collaged pieces of flocked wallpaper; and the swastika used as a backdrop in “Bad Guys Good Guys” is formed of swarms of tiny black plastic skeletons.

In each of Quiroz’s paintings and installations, a complex historical situation is condensed into a single feverish instant, a moment when bloodthirsty passion and a grotesque sense of superiority overlap, motivating these men to commit their ‘heroic’ acts. Quiroz has deftly captured both the tragedy and the absurdity of such times. Most important, his work makes us uneasy about war, for it bypasses the conventional rationales for such conflicts and exposes their essential brutality.