Pop life: David Rimanelli on Los Super Elegantes

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by David Rimanelli

Tunga's House Bar premiered during the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the museum's satellite space at Altria. Like The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre, it originated in Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet's obsession with cult figures and gurus. "We were trying to re-write the story of Funny Face, thinking about the guru that Audrey Hepburn hangs out with in that film," Muzquiz explains. "In Funny Face, Audrey Hepburn becomes a beatnik. It was supposed to be about the tragedy of becoming a cult leader or about California cultism." The writing didn't come easily, and Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet decamped for a Brazilian holiday. One day, they were hanging out on the beach in Rio de Janeiro with some Brazilian friends. "After a while, our friends said we should join them at Tunga's house bar," Muzquiz says. "So we catch a taxi and ask the driver if he knows where Tunga's House Bar is and give him the vague directions our friends left us." As the taxi makes its way through the suburbs of Barrinha, Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz start worrying that the driver has the wrong address: The neighborhood of sprawling mansions, often with armed security guards, doesn't look like the sort of place you would find a bar.

Finally, the cab stops at the entrance of an all-glass house perched on a promontory overlooking the jungle. Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz tentatively ring the buzzer. "Uh, hi, we're looking for Tunga's House Bar," they say to the woman at the door. "Come in, come in," she intones. "We have everything for you here!" This is Cornelia, Tunga's wife. The living room is the epicenter of Tunga's scene, and Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz realize he's this very famous Brazilian artist they've never heard of. Tunga sits in an ornate thronelike chair while assistants write down everything he says on little pieces of paper, as if he were an oracle. Everyone indulges liberally in substances licit and otherwise as he orates on subjects ranging from Novalis to Bataille. "With all these bizarre antics and Tunga worship, Marti and I discover that we've found the material for our Funny Face play. We start writing down everything we hear, and we took a lot of the dialogue of Tunga's House Bar directly from these notes." Curiously, a play that Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz had conceived as a commentary on California culture finds its literal embodiment in Brazil. The wound of the "Latin American trauma" starts seeping again, purulent and rich.

The Whitney's annex at Altria, a narrow atrium like a shopping arcade, proved a difficult space in which to stage the play. Nevertheless, with thrifty ingenuity Los Super Elegantes managed to use the most obvious deficiencies of their "stage" for theatrical effect. The audience was forced into an almost uncomfortable proximity with the actors, and the various potted plants scattered around the atrium were gathered to manufacture the play's torrid South American ambience: Voila the jungle, Brazil! Tunga's excessive persona provides a model of the artist genius that is no longer credible in the US or Europe or even Latin America. His character functions as an ambulatory archive of cliches. And more-or-less living cliches remain the humus of Los Super Elegantes's explorations of global pop--and global Pop art. In their music and theater, as in their own personas, Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz try to inhabit the cliche: girl, boy, mariachi, Mexican, radical, rock star, genius. In Tunga's House Bar, they play themselves as Tiago and Luisa, innocent by standers to the florid mayhem of Tunga's fanatical clique. The master expatiates: "Tungaism is about the invention of a language. It is not about the work, but making use of this language to discuss it.... I call my house, 'quasitropical Tunga space.' I wanted to surpass the open with the supra-open.... The bathroom: notice that the floor is made of straw. I had Japanese workers design the flushing system. Each day I release my bowels into this pit of excrement." The cast erupts in song, singing, "It's Tunga's House, Tu-Tu-Tunga's House. I've been walking down these corridors ..." Perhaps the corridors represent the whole panoply of Latin American postwar vanguardism: the titular genius joined by Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, Lygia Pape, and above all the sublimely cracked Helio Oiticica. The twenty-minute play reaches its comedic apogee with this monologue delivered by Tunga's mother while washing the dishes: "Another birthday together with Tunga. All those kids ... they are so creative so intellectual, but I see a fault.... Tunga keeps expanding, but he doesn't realize that he is actually working against the ideas of the supra-open. And who am I? In 1967, I wrote a famous essay, 'Concrete Feminism in Tropicalia.' I need to get back to my career." Los Super Elegantes's casting of Ellen Taylor, a psychiatrist and the mother of one of their LA artist confreres, Stephanie Taylor, is a dazzling touch. Reciting her monologue just a few feet from the audience, Taylor begins to crack up; she can't stay in character. It's as if she literally doubled Tunga's mother, reflecting as much on Muzquiz, Lopez-Crozet, and their own arty clique--so creative, so intellectual.