Perspectives 170: Cruz Ortiz July 4, 2010

San Antonio artist Cruz Ortiz believes he may have missed his calling. 'I should've been a honky-tonk singer,' he says. But because he can't croon like a Conjunto or Country music star, Ortiz more than compensates by deploying a broad range of media-prints, paintings, sculptures, video, installation, and performance-to speak about life, love, and the struggle for equality. Among the humorous, oftentimes rattletrap devices Ortiz uses to enable the Spaztek-his post-Chicano, post-punk antihero alter ego-to express human yearnings for companionship and communal action are 'balladic broadsides, transient architecture, life-size flying contraptions, megaphones, pushcarts, rockets, maps, banners and flags, and siege machines.'