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The emperor's new guitars
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June 30, 1999 |
La Chapelle photographs freaks: not burn victims, not black midgets, (too Joel-Peter Witkin). La Chapelle's monstrosities are that breed of gaunt, blemishless human built and enslaved by heavy makeup, lighting and the glorifying voodoo of photographic attention, e.g., models, transsexuals and Leonardo DiCaprio. La Chapelle is both aided and hampered by his status as a creature of Hollywood. He believes the hype -- his own, and everyone else's. As a result, many of the photos are very clever and many don't work at all, like the photo of Pamela Anderson Lee emerging, baby-chick-like, from a large eggshell: an apparent attempt to suggest her fresh, newborn beauty, her radiant delicacy, her special innocence. Instead, and unintentionally, the photo only serves to accentuate the slatternly and sullied qualities of Ms. Anderson Lee, the nude, tattooed, box-bronzed, rubber-breasted emblem of pornographic American bleach-blondness. La Chapelle seems to be operating under the assumption that if he says Pam looks innocent and Pam's people say she looks innocent, then therefore she's a little baby chick, which is how it happens in Hollywood but not how it worked out in the end. Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives
Several of the shots are of transsexual Amanda Lepore, one of La Chapelle's favorite models, who came to the opening naked, wearing nothing but painted bikini-tan lines. One particularly shocking photo from the "Surgery Story" series in the show was a photo of Ms. Lepore doggie-style on a gurney inside a closet, receiving a hypodermic shot in the ass from a big, black nurse. This art is strictly imitating life: Lepore is among the large and growing number of transsexuals and New York makeup artists who have been receiving illegal cosmetic silicone injections from an unlicensed "nurse" at her home in Harlem. The "nurse" allegedly buys the compound from Kragen Auto Parts and injects it directly into their lips, breasts, buttocks, etc., and has been providing instant gratification for those who want a rounder whatever for the pool party this weekend at a fraction of normal procedure costs. "She is an artist," the believers gush. Those "in the know" have been flying in from San Francisco to have her shoot their parts full of polymers; the "nurse" is a legend, and her new backyard surgeries are all the rage. Those who opt for the treatment don't care if this risky body modification turns into lumpy rubble in 10 years and can never be removed. Everybody wants lips like Amanda's, which are enormous to the point of deformity and look like an inflatable sofa, Right Now. What does one say, in the end, about the work of David La Chappelle? His stuff is fun to look at, it's all colorful and taut and pneumatic and shiny as a fishbowl full of novelty dildos, but there is something wholly rotten and sinister about the visual world he is cultivating. You can just picture a restless La Chapelle in his stark home in Los Angeles, clots of sarcastic, clammy people drunk on his Italian leather couch, really hungry for some kind of weird action -- the kind of people who would root through Madonna's garbage in their peg-legged Gucci suits, looking for old Band-Aids and bottles of nasal spray. The work is utterly devoid of connective energy or human feeling, it just fucks you slickly in the eye hole; it left me feeling empty and used. Then later in the week, I watched as clammy people rooted through Christie's for Eric Clapton's old guitars.
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