Grasping Conceptual Art trough the Net.
I bumped in to article about Luis Gispert’s (http://www.luisgispert.com) “All Oyster, No Pearl” exhibition in OHWOW Gallery on Huffington Post. There was an image about a chair and after some clicking I ended up on the artists site attempting to figure what the work is about. Bio on his site offered little if any information on what the chair pictures relate to… But there was a link to a video called Block Watching (2003) which I think is brilliant.
There is a greenscreen in the background which makes it possible to imagine any background or no-background to the girl confusing car alarm sounds to dubstep. I think she is dressed up like a cheerleader and the artwork addresses many of the same features of north-american youth culture as Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” (1998). I saw that on MTV when I was a kid. Apparently the joke is that youth from black and hispanic groups see young white kids, identifying to rap and street culture to be pretentious or just lost. White kids identifying to rap culture are in the wrong context.
Gispert’s exhibition in OHWOW is analyzed to a degree on the Huffington Post article and the Wikipedia article does not fall short either. Particularly the artist style of combining items from different cultural contexts together is talked of. This re-mediating process it a common practice for post-modern artists. The strategy is that when gold-is-merged-with-shit and ghetto-brought-to-museum the end result offers the audience a possibility to reconfigure their values. Seeing a cheep chain (used as material in iconic rapper gems) pushed trough a design chair allegedly gives the audience the possibility to deconstruct previously fixed notions of social class and taste.
“..objects we all recognize are removed from their usual function and relabeled as art. The works bring a conceptual resonance to the cliche "one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” (Huffington Post)
There is a clever joke going on with these new works: The gesture of placing grayish stuff into a grayish background is laughing at the clichés of fine art. The green non-context backdrop he has used previously was useful in separating the dancing girl from her historical space. To show that this figure has no background to anchor her self to – North America youth clishé. In these new works, arbitrary objects (chairs) are photographed agains a gray background and these photos presented as art. In the gallery setting they function under the same mindset as the dancing girl.
If you have a grayish backdrop you may put anything in the frame and it’ll look smart. Just like cheep golden chains make anyone look lost.
So instead of playing with the binaries oppositions of stereotypes (ghetto-to-museum) he’s amplifying the existing conventions of post-modern art.. A little bit like what he did with the “hip-hop baroque pictures” (show on website under projects 2003-2004). He is clearly criticizing the hip-hop culture for glamorizing materialistic and consumption based lifestyles with those works.
In these new works… I guess the reasoning is to illustrate how western taste if crafted and manipulated. Hope he sells the work. This is how much you can figure out of conceptual art trough the net.
“The works play with cultural currency and the invisible hierarchies that divide art from low culture and utilitarian objects”. (Huffington Post)
Anyway. Love the golden ghetto blaster chair he made back in the day.