Pop life: David Rimanelli on Los Super Elegantes

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by David Rimanelli

The scene: downtown Los Angeles, summer 2002. Milena Muzquiz and Martiniano Lopez-Crozet, aka Los Super Elegantes, are crashing the VIP opening of the Warhol retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Lopez-Crozet has a hairdresser friend who's styling models that are supposed to dance around the dinner and "make it look like the Factory." "We go in the service entrance pretending to be hairdressers too," Muzquiz relates. "We're given these wristbands, which Marti and I assume signify we're hairdressers. So we take them off and become regular guests and get some champagne. We're socializing; we know people; and I'm trying to explain to Marti who Charlize Theron is. At this point everyone just assumes we're supposed to be there--obviously." After dinner, LA art-world impresario Irving Blum takes the podium and announces that a few Andy intimates will speak, including Dennis Hopper and Angelica Huston. Huge montiors simulcast their images around the hall. "It's as if the same lightbulb simultaneously lit up over our heads; Marti and I both think we can just go up there and get our pictures screened everywhere too. It's this really dumb, monkeylike imitative mentality. We on stage. We be famous." After the speeches Blum is about to step off the dais, but Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz stop him short: Hey, give us the mike! "And he just does," Muzquiz continues. "'Hi everybody, we're so happy to be here tonight. It's been such an extravagant and fabulous evening. Thanks for all your support!' Then Marti says, 'Let's raise our cups to toast Andy! Andy, thanks for everything. We love you.' Sort of a perfect Warholian moment, no?"

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The Warholian moment enacted by Los Super Elegantes updates the original art/life/insanity meltdown on the infamously dirty couch at the Factory. Andy relished casual mix-ups of the Social Register and the Hustler Index. Such permissiveness abetted the radicalism of his Pop spin. He created superstars through illocutionary acts and pointing the camera: You, Susan Bottomly, are henceforth International Velvet, because I say so. Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet no longer need the magical-real superstar halo that Warhol conferred on his retinue of wayward debutantes, drag queens, speed freaks, and general miscreants. Fueled by attitude and desperation, they elaborate ad hoc stardom, working off serendipitous social moments and brushes with real stars like Hopper and Huston. They're their own brazen and cunning version of Mickey and Judy declaring, Hey, let's put on a show!

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Muzquiz (originally from Tijuana) and Lopez-Crozet (from Buenos Aires) met in San Francisco in 1992, where they were both art students. They began collaborating with Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann, whom they had met through mutual friends. Their new associates encouraged the cultivation of an anarchic performance-based practice capable of exploring their sociological interests and formed a loose collective called Creative Community Seriously I Swear. "The idea was that each of us, in turn, initiated something and the rest participated," Guttmann recalls, "CCSIS was not based on order and duty.... We would shoot movies during our parties." For Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet, the group served as vivid primer in making art from given social circumstances, in this instance the wild or derelict partying lifestyles of art students. Being at a party necessitates a kind of performance in any case, and CCSIS took the raw material of these events and used it to create performances, photographs, and videos in which the very same party participants played invented characters and, more or less, performed memorized lines.

The directed anarchy of CCSIS provided Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet with the impetus to inaugurate their own collaborative project, Los Super Elegantes. "The band started as a complete fabrication, in 1995," Muzquiz recalls. "We met this guy who ran the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, where very big mainstream acts play, and we convinced him we had a fantastic act. He invited us to play one night and paid us fifteen dollars each. So we had to invent a band for a single show in one week." The band itself consisted of people they knew who all worked at an "artsy restaurant" where they used to hang out. "We performed mariachi songs and three songs we made up for the occasion. My seamstress in Tijuana created this insane drag-queen dress for me to wear, red glitter and blue ruffles, hideous but dramatic. Even though we had no experience, we were sure about the main thing: Make an incredible entrance. We learned this from watching it so often on TV ... like Liza. No matter how terrible the actual performance, the grand entrance sort of covered for the performer. So we entered from the rear of the auditorium, saying hello to everyone as we went down the aisle. 'Thank you so much for supporting us and coming out to see our show!'"

Their inaugural stage performance was less than sparkling. "We were so bad, because we had no experience," Muzquiz remarks. "But we had this yearning to be loved, and we used that to convince the audience that we really were the most fabulous act. What made it really strong was the sense of desperation and hysteria. I would show myself as weak so that people would have compassion. I would collapse, like Violetta at the end of La Traviata. Is she all right? people asked. And Marti was trying to sing vibratos onstage, horribly. It was so embarrassing, but people fell in love with the effort." Within a week they were local stars; they started getting booked everywhere, although they had no background to speak of. "So now we had to do it," Muzquiz recalls. "We had to pull it off, because here was an opportunity to enjoy a certain kind of stardom."