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January 11, 2008 9:39 am
The flash of bling signals new money. But as the artist Luis Gispert has been demonstrating for more than a decade, bling’s aesthetic origins have roots that stretch way past Marie Antoinette’s regal decadence. The Jersey City-born Yale MFA graduate’s photography, sculpture, and films brilliantly illuminate the class prejudices and racial stereotypes that haunt 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
gangsta ethics, and the imperial elegance of inch-long jewel-encrusted
airbrushed acrylic nails. On January 12, Gispert opens sister shows, one at New York’s iconic star-maker space the Mary Boone Gallery, where his film “Smother” will be shown, and another at today’s contender for the cultural-impresario crown, the Zach Feuer Gallery, where his photos and sculptures will be on display.
What are the deeper implications of bling beauty?
Well, blinglike fashion is mostly surface—a not very interesting, one-dimensional signifier, but the psychology or socioeconomic reality of the wearer is fascinating.
Are you referring to psychological insecurity? It seems that the more secure individuals are in their privileged status, the more subtle they make their status symbols.
Bling points us to popular urban notions of beauty. I’ve never really understood why, but baroque styles have always captured the imagination of emigrant communities in the U.S. It plays to some kind of popular understanding of what “wealth” or success looks like. The new work investigates questions I’ve been asking about the tension between auspicious wealth and cultural naïveté. For this show I took as a point of departure a drug dealer’s mansion, which was inspired by mansions I frequented in Miami as a child. The film part of the exhibit is semi-autobiographical, as an imagined past of Miami in the early
eighties. As a little boy, reality was many times more exciting and strange than “Miami Vice.”
Is the film narrative semi-autobiographical, or is it based on your visual memories?
“Smother” is about an 11-year-old boy named Waylon who lives with his mother, Nora, in a dilapidated drug dealer’s mansion left to them by his deceased drug dealer father. Nora is a mother who loves too much and controls every aspect of Waylon’s life, never allowing him to leave the house. Occasionally, he escapes on bike journeys, exploring the city that he’s not allowed to see. On one such trip he discovers a slaughterhouse, where he meets Carl, a butcher.
So far, so literal. But there are allegorical aspects to the film too, right?
Toward the end of “Smother,” the boy turns into a German shepherd (I grew up with a German shepherd). Carl, who appears to be a villain, facilitates one final, painful transformation of the dog into a boom box. Carl then steals the radio and gives it away to Rastafarians driving by in a truck. In this way, Carl liberates the boy from his mother.
That depends on one’s definition of liberty. I recently saw Jerry Orbach on a rerun of “Law & Order” make a joke about “bling.” As a word, it seems to be our generation’s “groovy.” It meant something once, but now older people have co-opted it into a joke at our expense. Is there any rebellion left to the term?
No, it’s gone the way of the dodo. When I used it for a show title in 2001 it was already on life support, just a few clicks from flat-lining.
Given the cash, would you surround yourself with elegance or opulence?
I grew up in a densely baroque Cuban household. My work tends to tap into opulence and the aesthetics of excess. Conversely, I’m personally attracted to minimal design and lean toward simple elegance. In my personal life I seek a quite well designed space that’s the polar opposite of the busy, hectic environment I grew up in. Some kind of rebellion, I guess.
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