Nice Dreams:
Ex hippie-vato, Cheech Marin, goes on a Chicano art trip
By Will K. Shilling

If anyone has had a longer, stranger, or funnier trip than Cheech Marin, we'd be surprised. Certainly, no one is more loved amongst at least two generations of counter culture freaks and mainstream comedy lovers.

Frat boys, surf rats, hip cats…heck, even your mom and your dad are probably on a first name basis with Cheech and his partner, the surname-toting, herb tokin’ Tommy Chong.

Beginning with live performances and tours in the 1970s, and eventually writing, directing, and acting on the big screen, Cheech & Chong have made names for themselves as their burnt-out but lovable public personas.

Nowadays, Cheech has a slightly incongruous reputation—as a serious art collector. In fact, Marin boasts perhaps the largest collection of Chicano art in the United States, and possibly the world.

Selections from his huge, broadly-sampled collection—taken from the Chicano School of painters—are now shown in an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego called Chicano Visions. The exhibit forms one part of a multi-faceted tour simply called Chicano, which is currently on the road and will reappear in California soon. The tour plans on traveling the country for at least five years.

I spoke with Marin via cell phone as he traveled along the same stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu where he and Tommy filmed the opening scene to their first major motion picture,
Cheech & Chong Up In Smoke.

Tinta Latina:
One particular phrase is used repeatedly within the Chicano art collection and in press materials for media: code switching (alternating between languages and cultures, both spoken and visual). Now, be honest, isn't this just a PC description of the old urge to mess with the gringos’ heads?

Cheech Marin:
[laughs] No, not really. It's more a matter of combining all your influences simultaneously. It’s communication in two languages. Many times it’s unconscious. When you're painting, you're putting in symbols what you've learned from world art or classic forms. You're just combining the two. It’s like wearing a reversible jacket.

TL:
Or having Hewlett Packard and Target sponsor an art tour called Chicano?

CM:
Exactly. I mean, we had to go into the boardrooms and do our little dance to get this funded. And in the end, it benefits both of us. We gain from switching our codes to corporate interests, and the companies gain by knowing who their target audience is and hitting with something positive. They could be putting their money behind a lot worse things than an art show.

TL:
When and how did you start to collect art in earnest?

CM:
Right after I finally had a regularly paying gig—the Nash Bridges [television series] job. It was always hand-to-mouth before that. I'd go out on tour with the traveling show back in the old days, and once in a while I'd find artists I was into, and I'd buy pieces here and there and send 'em home while I saw the world as a starving artist myself. But, as an actor, a regular gig means so much. It gives you a solid foundation, finally, to do what you want.

TL:
Wow! A mainstream TV cop show funded the radical art collection of an ex hippie-cholo icon? That's an ironic code switch.

CM:
Yea…but, hey, it always cracked me up that the two icons they picked for stoner culture [Cheech & Chong] were a low-rider vato and his Chinese Canadian friend!

TL:
How do Chicano artists deal with issues surrounding violence, compared with, say, traditional European painters?

CM:
Some people [from the Chicano school] deal with it in art and some don't—just like in Chicano and Mexican-American communities. The great thing about the Chicano school is that there are so many different viewpoints. After the World Wars and Vietnam, Chicano artists really moved into more personal modes of expression and subject matter. That's when it gets really interesting and alive. We don't want to be just Chicano, or believe in the same one thing for all Chicanos…It's never just one way, and that what's so endlessly interesting.

For more information about Cheech Marin’s Chicano Visions art collection, visit www.chicano-art-life.com