Pop life: David Rimanelli on Los Super Elegantes.

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."

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In 1997, Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet moved to Mexico City. "Milena starts calling BMG," Lopez-Crozet tells me. "She would say, 'Hi, this is Monica, Los Super Elegantes's secretary, and I just wanted to let you know they're in town and would love to meet with you.' We started very folklorique, doing traditional Mexican music, '40s corridas, but the San Francisco musicians on our demos and home videos were punk. So the music was mariachi-punk." BMG signed Los Super Elegantes, and they seemed destined for a mainstream career, at least in the Latin American market. "We went back to San Francisco to record the songs, but by then we were more interested in other kinds of music, and we added three hardcore punk songs. BMG hated it and canceled our contract." They did complete the album, Devorame, but Hollywood, their proposed telenovela, never progressed beyond the pilot. Soon thereafter, in 1998, they decided that Los Angeles might prove more congenial territory. Muzquiz pursued an MFA at Art Center in Pasadena, and Los Super Elegantes thrived in LA's art and alternative-music scenes. But when Chrysalis, a major UK-based publishing label, signed them, their abortive experience with BMG was weirdly repeated.

"KCRW [the Los Angeles pop/alternative radio station] played all of our songs as soon as we finished recording them," Lopez-Crozet relates. "Two executives from Chrysalis heard them and thought they had made a discovery." But their find turned out to be rather at odds with their expectations. "This coincided with the Latin-music trend in mainstream American pop," Muzquiz says. "When they heard us they thought, Perfect, more Ricky Martin shaky-shaky-boom-boom sounds. But with the advance, we bought all of this sophisticated musical equipment and started writing very different, electronica-inspired dance-hall songs. We were getting tired of the shaky-shaky-boom-boom thing; it was always a parody for us, but maybe a really good parody because it did reflect our 'culture.'" Needless to say, Chrysalis was exceedingly disappointed when the duo finally turned in their songs.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic early Super Elegantes fan and promoter in LA was legendary performance artist/drag queen Vaginal Davis, who wrote a short article about them for Index magazine in 1999. Davis's account is, appropriately, replete with prima facie unbelievable stories mixed up with the truth. This doesn't preclude some astute comments on the Super Elegantes style in its "early LA" period: "Their basic structure for writing songs is a musical retablo. You're never sure when one song has officially ended. Most are sung either in Spanish or Italian, but it doesn't matter if you can't understand what's being said word for word. The lyrics are abstract, they act them out." Mike Kelley, one of Muzquiz's most steadfast supporters at Art Center, comments: "The aesthetic is pure pop, but it has a degraded side--slightly punk.... The crumminess of their performance technique is less satire (or Jack Smith-style countertechnique) than an additional coat of degradation to sweeten the mix." Kelley speculates further, "I am left wondering if it is only crumminess that makes it art, that separates it from pop culture--and what, then, crumminess means. Is it a kind of populism? A sign that everybody can make pop culture at home?"

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."

Much of the performance work of Los Super Elegantes grows out of their lived social reality in Los Angeles. Their second play, Angie and Eric (2000), is a version of the sitcom Frasier, minus punch lines and laugh track. "The plays are abstract, but they have themes," Muzquiz suggests. "In Angie and Eric, Marti and I are gossiping on the phone, talking about the social scene, so cool and banal and superficial. There's a bizarre realism to it, though. It's about the life of LA, meeting people and never seeing them again." Oddly, Los Super Elegantes now seem on a collision course with the Joan Didion of The White Album and Play It As It Lays. "The California thing has become so important to our projects," Lopez-Crozet says. "Surfers, beatniks, hippies, the Manson family, LA Satanism, '60s gurus, drugs, orgies ... and the Beach Boys. So many of our friends here are total hippies, or they're like archivists of the subculture, living in Silver Lake, obsessively collecting strange records. People who don't have normal jobs."

The duo's most recent plays, The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre (2003) and Tunga's House Bar: A Group of Kids Sitting Around Talking About the End of the World (2004), derive, however obliquely or tortuously, from this countercultural fascination. Some of the dialogue of the former is taken verbatim from the English subtitles to Porcile, Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1969 film about fascism, cannibalism, and pig loving, for example: "Penny: I am going to Berlin to piss on the wall and joining the comrades of the German peace demonstration, are you going to be a part of the youth?" But the protagonist is St. Pierre, "a fashion designer that is slowly losing his mind," modeled on Yves Saint-Laurent as he with-draws from the world of haute couture. "Two of the characters in The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre take their names from Areski and Brigitte Fontaine, early '70s folk singers in Paris who collaborated on this blend of ethnic folk and revolutionary pop music," Lopez-Crozet says, attempting to provide more interpretive glue for what otherwise seems like pure theater of the absurd. "Also, the music we wrote for St. Pierre has some basis in other really obscure hippie-psychedelic music of the late '60s and early '70s, like the Turkish band Mogollon, who did this bizarre Anatolian rock."

The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre reflects other aspects of Lopez-Crozet and Muzquiz's social reality, like the real Hollywood actors and stars that shared the stage they had created at Peres Projects on Chungking Road in LA's Chinatown. "We met Frances McDormand, Alessandro Nivola, and Emily Mortimer and became friends with them," Muzquiz says. "They would come to our concerts to research playing rock stars in preparation for Laurel Canyon, which is sort of funny because they were basically imitating an imitation. Then we had the idea that they should all appear in The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre. 'You guys have to be in our play, because if you're onstage with us that either makes us real actors or it makes you real people.'" Lopez-Crozet played Areski, "St. Pierre's sex toy and personal assistant"; Muzquiz was Penny, "the reliable seamstress and assistant to the House of St. Pierre" and an anarchist. Nivola was cast as St. Pierre, and Mortimer played Anouk, "the starved maid of St. Pierre, that becomes addicted to eating condoms." McDormand, winner of the best-actress Oscar for her performance in Fargo, was to play Gina Fontaine, "a thirteen year old super model, that is out of her mind," until she learned that E! Entertainment had heard about the production and planned on sending a film crew to the play's single performance.

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.

A few nights after the performance I ran into a screenwriter friend of Muzquiz's, who confessed that he felt utterly befuddled by the play and that some of the indie-film types who accompanied him were outraged that a major museum would sponsor such a travesty. "Everything was so inept, and the acting was terrible." His comment reminded me of the way otherwise sophisticated people sometimes react to Warhol's films, complaining that the writing's bad, no one knows their lines, the film's over-or underexposed, etc. It's boring to explain that the superstars aren't "acting" in an Inside the Actors Studio sense or that the crudeness of the cinematic technique and the come-what-may attitude to both boredom and shock is precisely what makes them art. German "art house" auteur R.W. Fassbinder comes no less forcefully to mind, especially the ways he exploited the conventions of Hollywood melodrama while strategically deforming them; ever-so-familiar stories become excruciating or indigestible counternarratives. Thomas Elsaesser concisely describes this breakdown: "The shabbiness of the decor and the tinsel glamour of the actresses, their comic and touching incongruity, manage to convey the sense that the film one is watching is the melancholy echo of an ideal world yet to be shamed into existence.... Fassbinder shows himself a realist with critical intentions precisely insofar as his films are documentary records of what one might call an outcast's starvation fantasies." Appropriately enough, in The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre, the lunatic couturier's maid Anouk reveals her own starvation fantasy. Fed only St. Pierre's leftovers, she is reduced to eating his used condoms, a diet that leaves her improbably knocked up. Yet still she dreams: "Dear diary, it's autumn and it is brown outside.... I have been eating his condoms for three months now. He seems to notice me more lately.... I must be discovered, I have to be the new face of the house of St. Pierre." The absurdity of Anouk's situation doesn't mitigate its histrionic, self-imposed viciousness. Perhaps she--like Muzquiz and Lopez-Crozet--understands that the obsessively manicured cultivation of persona may yet promise a certain freedom before the concupiscent void of pop culture.

David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Artforum.