SCRATCH by Ana Finel Honigman
Luis Gispert talks about making ghetto-fabulous art for the art ghetto.
Luis Gispert presents contemporary pop-culture in congress with art history. His photography, sculpture and films beautifully illuminate the class prejudices and racial stereotypes underpinning our cultural notions of beauty, vulgarity, sexuality and luxury. He highlights the historical heritage of hip-hop's fashion aesthetic - bringing out the Baroque and Byzantine in bling, the operatic ethos in gansta ethics and the Imperial high elegance of inch-long jewel-encrusted airbrushed acrylic nails. In his Cheerleaders series (2001), his models' thick bodies look overripe and inelegant by today's beauty standards, which equate wasting away with the ultimate hedonistic luxury of wasting food, but they recall eras when wealth was associated with flaunting plenty instead of feigning austerity.
In Gispert's 2002 photograph, Car Toes‚ chosen by the Brooklyn Museum as its leading image for a 2004 exhibition featuring work by more than 200 Brooklyn-based artists, a woman leans her smooth leg out the window of a red convertible, dangling her decadently long and sharp, blue lacquered toe-nails out the car's window. To the ancient Chinese, her finger- and toe-nails would signify that, like an Empress, she never needs to do manual labour. Yet long, painted nails are now associated with the aspirational class vanity of poor, urban kids who squander their money on empty status symbols. Ironically, if she were a wealthy woman today, her nails would probably be chic and short.
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, but raised primarily in Miami, Gispert graduated in 1992 from Miami Dade Community College before earning his BFA in Film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2001. Gispert, who is now based in Brooklyn, has contributed to a number of shows championing the borough's unique creative culture. For the Public Art Fund project 'semi-precious' in 2005, Gispert produced Laid Back in the Cut, three buffed, bronze boom boxes stacked into a park bench, to be displayed outside the business and educational MetroTech Center's Flatbush and Jay Street location. He has also exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, Art Pace in Texas, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Palazzo Brocherasio in Turin, and The Royal Academy in London.
The crisp, glossy photograph of two cheerleaders with another levitating beside them, taken from Gispert's Cheerleader series, was the image used for the advertisements for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, where Gispert presented photographs and a sculptural installation. In his sculptures, Gispert pumps up his semi-functional furniture designs with gold turntables, chrome tire rims, gold-plated jewellery, rhinestones, fake fur, and boom boxes. His sleek pieces have a cleanly designed visual simplicity that effectively carries their conceptually loaded details. On the smooth surface of some of Gispert's hardwood, leather, fur, resin and rhinestone speakers are the clear forms of a melting gun and a few ice-cubes. In hip-hop argot, 'ice' means diamonds and the glistening resin forms are stand-ins for hip-hop's most self-indulgent/ self-destructive obsessions and their temporal impermanence.
In 2005, Gispert collaborated with music producer and photographer Jeffrey Reed and presented their ten-minute 35 mm experimental film, Stereomongrel, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and then at Zach Feuer (LFL) Gallery . The film's protagonist is the twelve-year-old daughter of a Latino gallery guard and a Caucasian art patron. After her father misses her birthday party, she searches for him in the Whitney, where Gispert and Reed were granted permission to film. Along the way, she encounters various cultural divisions and collisions between high and lo culture. Using 3-D animation, stop-motion animation, and highly choreographed tableaux, Gispert and Reed evoke the hyper-stylized films of directors such as Nitrato D'Argento, as well as the extreme surreal beauty of hip-hop music videos and fashion photography. Here as elsewhere throughout his work, Gispert crisply samples and remixes from history and contemporary culture to amplify the corollaries and ironies in our aesthetic values.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: Do you consider art as a subculture?
LUIS GISPERTt: If you mean the "art world" the answer is yes. And "sub" is the operative word. A sub-sub culture inhabited by misfits of other sub cultures. For as much "power" as the art world claims to have to preside over material culture, I believe it to be hermetic and anaemic. The sub-culture of home made pornography probably has more resonance across culture. Artists as individuals are a different thing. Artists are part of another sub-culture that I would like to believe can operate outside of the "art worlds" weak grasp.
AFH: Which other sub-culture is that? Is it the sub, superior or side-culture of the intellectual?
LG: I was thinking about the sub-culture of the art student. The sub-academic, sub-athletic kids from the marginal sub-cultures in high school that end up in art school.
AFH: Ideas about sub-culture are central to your work. When creating art referencing hip-hop, are you engaging hip-hop as a sub-culture, or do you think hip-hop is the part of general culture that most defines our era's aesthetic or ethos?
LG: I think hip hop started as a counter-culture giving voice to a disenfranchised sector of American society. It questioned, and attacked with a native tongue, the mid-tone gray American hegemony. Eventually, like everything, it's been absorbed into general culture. I mean, it even appears in art now.
AFH: Do you think art is the last organ in culture's digestive track?
LG: To a certain degree - Yes. It seems as if all art being made today can't escape "Pop".
AFH: Why is that?
LG: It seems to me since the 60s it's impossible for artists to make anything relevant that doesn't relate to pop culture in one way or another.
AFH: There have been recent books, like Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, which argues that the notion of a 'counter-culture' has become so absorbed into general culture that Capitalism has successfully neutralized the possibility
of revolution by turning dissent into fashion. Do you believe there are still areas of culture, like art or hip hop, where intelligent protest is possible?
LG: I agree that Capitalism neutralizes counter forces by implementing them into its own ideology and Pop culture is probably the easiest way to do that. Power lies in the creation and manipulation of images. When counter-cultural icons are appropriated by consumer culture, their weight and political prowess is subdued. It's funny when writers and critics announce the death or end of something. It just means they don't know what's going on, and have to wait for something new to materialize. The modern notions of an avant-garde or underground have not gone away, they just wear new uniforms. As art and the everyday become more indistinguishable the artists' role as a critical voice becomes imperative. An artist can be a smuggler that infiltrates pop culture, consumer culture and disrupts the Capitalist manipulation of images. It's not enough to illustrate those intentions on gallery walls or museum project rooms anymore.
AFH: How does this relate to your work?
LG: Well, it's hard to say. I'm an artist and my work mainly operates within an art world context. If anything, it takes a critical stance on the creation and distribution of images.
AFH: Are you concerned your work's surface beauty distracts viewers from your critical engagement with issues such as the creation and distribution of images and the class constructs crafting cultural notions of beauty?
LG: Not at all. I love the surface beauty of things, but I'm obsessed with the bilge that lies beneath. Like when you meet someone and assume who they are by the way they look, and then they surprise you by being the complete opposite. Listen, everyone is assigned a uniform; the trick is to steal a few others and keep them handy. I despise didactic "critically engaging" artwork. We're still recovering from the fallout of overt political and identity art from the late 80s and 90s. Look, shiny surfaces are designed to seduce and mesmerize. Audiences that get too distracted to scratch and see what's underneath, don't interest me.
LUIS GISPERT is one of the artists featuring in 'USA Today' which opens at London's Royal Academy in October.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic and PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University.
Works by Luis Gispert:
Car Toes
Three Asian Cheerleaders
Still from Stereomongrel
Blaster
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