Customized Hybrids: The Art of Ruben Ortiz Torres and Lowriding in Southern California

Low riders are the ultimate hybrid art form: beginning with the abandoned materials of one tradition (that of mainstream America), they are then transformed and recycled . . . into new and fresh objects of art which are distinctly Chicano. Through obsessive attention to detail they are customized into new forms, which are coveted and jewel-like. . . . [L]ow riders attain the rare trait of articulating the new urban myths which are the bridges between past, present, and future in our rapidly changing times of today's moving society.

—Wiro, "Low and Slow—Arte Hablado"

Rubén Ortiz Torres's diverse work includes paintings, photographs, video, multimedia collage, and a series of customized commercial products from baseball caps to a Nissan pickup truck that challenge the traditional division between the reified art object and the degraded curios of popular culture. This blitz of extraordinary media traverses multiple systems of signification; however, a pervasive interest in hybridity and conjectural combination sustains the artist's work. Customization characterizes the art of Rubén Ortiz Torres in almost all media and offers an alternative avenue for approaching the issues of globalization so central to our current "New World Order" and the various, sometimes conflicted, responses to this newest form of Euro-American dominance.

This essay analyzes Rubén Ortiz Torres's customized hybrids and their formal and conceptual "style politics," while focusing on methods inspired by the traditions, techniques, and style of lowrider automobile customization. In order to foreground the critical role of customization, this study also explores the impact of Chicano lowrider practices and aesthetics on U.S. American public culture, and examines the various public responses to this cultural tradition. Alien Toy, the artist's 1997 video installation in the form of a lowrider pickup truck, is examined in detail, as is his 1999 Power Tools series. Bothartworks incorporate the traditions of lowrider customizing, and thus Chicano vernacular aesthetics, in a contemporary installation format. Consistently, the original forms, which ultimately suggest the final installation art format, were created and used outside of a specific fine-arts framework. In this way, Rubén Ortiz Torres has worked with independent customizers, who have produced lowrider automobiles and leaf blowers, and through collaboration recustomized the objects for museums. This framework is crucial for understanding how the Power Tools installation, for example, situated debates over quality of life and dependence on immigrant labor in the museum, and exposed a functioning network of democratic self-organization carried out by the disenfranchised working poor of Los Angeles. Ultimately, I find this saga concerning leaf blowers and the city of Los Angeles exceptionally powerful in its suggestion of the role design and aesthetics, and particularly methods of customization, may hold in mediating conflict and in our understandings of quality of life in an increasingly postindustrial, globalized sphere.

Rubén Ortiz Torres is a transnational artist officially recognized by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services as an "alien of exceptional abilities." The multiple intersections and tensions between nationalism, transforming global capital, multicultural democracy, and hybridization impact the life and work of Rubén Ortiz Torres in profound ways. Raised in Mexico City, Ortiz Torres moved to Los Angeles in 1990 as a Fulbright fellow at California Institute of the Arts, where he received his M.F.A. two years later. A chilango living under the shadow of the Hollywood sign, Rubén Ortiz Torres is a transient citizen who recognizes that the coordinates of place and identity are often tenuous and constantly shifting. The lived experience of more and more people, including transnational artists, migrant workers, diasporic communities, and exiles, occurs outside the cultural norms idealized by the state, and this situation often results in transnational cultural formations that move beyond ethnic and national lines.¹ These transnational cultural formations "are changing the way we understand the North...