Pop life: David Rimanelli on Los Super Elegantes

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by David Rimanelli

The "art crumminess" that Kelley speaks of comes out directly in Los Super Elegantes's renditions of songs. One standard was "Viole Moi," their cover of Nirvana's "Rape Me," sung in French. "We didn't really know how to speak French or Italian, but we did our first play, Pietro and Paola, in Italian, as a loose adaptation of Nights of Cabiria reduced to fifteen minutes," Muzquiz elaborates. "A lot of what we were doing then was based on escapism. Europe represented an escape from the trauma of Latin American culture. At the same time, Nirvana seemed like the most 'French' thing to do, because the French have always fetishized American pop culture." But Los Super Elegantes do not lack for more "refined" art-historical precedents either. Gilbert & George did The Singing Sculpture in 1970, which George later described as "our first solid idea. Before that, we could have gone anywhere--we could have been pop stars or anything else." The British pair's all-encompassing pronouncement that they were "living sculptures" might even be compared to the various musical, theatrical, and lifestyle experiments that Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet conduct under the umbrella corporation of Los Super Elegantes.

Art bands are nothing new, of course. A disparate field of references would include Mayo Thompson's Red Krayola, whose mutating lineup from the late 1960s to the present has included the writer Frederick Barthelme, Gina Birch of the Raincoats (Kurt Cobain's favorite group), Lora Logic (cofounder of X-Ray Spex), as well as the painter Albert Oehlen and Conceptual artists like Art & Language, Stephen Prina, and Christopher Williams. During the '70s, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw were active in the Detroit psychedelia/noise band Destroy All Monsters. The East Village art scene of the early '80s was also notable for the heavy presence of punk, New Wave, and No Wave sounds that gave the moment as much of its flavor as the art did. There was John Lurie of the "fake" jazz combo the Lounge Lizards. Ann Magnuson, doyenne of the kitsch-camp bower of bliss Club 57, started several "fake" bands, like the girl group Pulsallama, the mock-metal Vulcan Death Grip, and Bongwater. More recently, the art world has nurtured the electro-trash sounds of Fischerspooner, who after early performances at Starbucks moved on to become regulars at Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Deitch Projects. But when I mention Fischerspooner as a point of comparison, Muzquiz demurs: "We know we're doing an imitation. Fischerspooner believe in the imitation; they think they're glam rock: glitter plus feathers plus drag plus nudity equals we are David Bowie/T. Rex."

Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz underscore that while they do perform in art venues like the Schindler House in LA and at the Whitney Biennial, they continue to play at trendy clubs in Hollywood, Silver Lake, the Lower East Side, and Williamsburg. "I've heard Los Super Elegantes live at the Viper Room, and it was very clear that they were trying to be a completely professional pop band, with a very tight backup rhythm section," recalls Prina, who knows Muzquiz from Art Center and has attended numerous Super Elegantes performances. "A few days later I'd see them at Vaginal Davis's club, and it was obvious that they weren't interested in any kind of professionalism. They lip-synched to recorded music.... They're locating the extremities of possible performances. I'm interested in that range."