It’s no secret that hip hop and luxury go together like a horse and carriage, but sometimes the carriage is a bit reluctant to admit the horse drives his business. When New Jersey Nets owner (and legendary rapper) Jay-Z banned Cristal from his 40-40 Club upon the champagne company CEO Frédéric Rouzaud’s regarding of the hip hop market with “curiosity,” an embarrassed Rouzaud backpedaled, saying in a press release, “I welcome this opportunity to set the record straight and express our gratitude that people from a diversity of cultures and countries have been enjoying our wine.” In an AP article about the subject: “Louis Vuitton, which tied with Cristal at No. 8 on the list [of most-mentioned brands in hip hop song lyrics], declined to comment on the association.”
    Luis Gispert has long been enamored with hip hop culture’s prevalence in society. His early films, sculptures, and photographs often integrated ghettoblasters, booty bass, and hardcore rap with reflections of his Miamian upbringing. Just as he was shifting away from hip hop themes—his works from 2008-2010 focused on unusual vehicles hurtling towards Badlands and cityscapes—Gispert stumbled upon a car with a fully kitted-out Takashi Murakami x Louis Vuitton collaboration interior.
    Upon further exploration, Gispert, 39, realized that there was a thriving sub-sub-subculture of folks who’d not only become obsessed with logos, but had gone so far as to bootleg their own designer brand car interiors and ephemera. Gispert quickly recognized this practice as a continuation of a hip hop historical application popularized by a man named Dapper Dan in the ’80s, who outfitted kingpins in custom logo-heavy duds from his Harlem shop.
    Gispert gained access into an underground world of fabrication, and Decepción was born, a body of work featuring the fetishization of brands in a very documentarian sense: Gispert has captured a subculture buried in history, latent but for a very few, and still relevant to ideas of brand loyalty, fetishization, and luxury fashion. He juxtaposes these ideas with images of nature—landscapes that remain untouched by branding—to make something off-kilter and strange, like you’re at a scenic lookout in the passenger seat of the weirdest person you’ve ever met.
    Decepción debuted with a show of 10 digitally manipulated C-prints at Mary Boone Gallery in September, and Gispert will launch a book published by OHWOW Gallery in Miami during Art Basel in December. The book will be an expanded study of Gispert’s vast documentation. Meanwhile, he’s in New York, pondering about his new projects. I caught him on his cell phone while he was looking at crystals.

So, you’re looking at crystals?
Luis Gispert: Yeah. I’m looking at crystals trying to get some ideas for some new sculptures I’m starting. Always good to start in the mineral room at the Natural History Museum.
I love that room so much. It is the best room in history. I just like going in there and touching all the precious stones.
The wall-to-wall carpeting and the ’70s shapes and design.
There’s almost a little mood lighting in there, too.
The light is totally down; it’s super hot and romantic.
And there’s all those benches you can sit on and make out.
All those curvilinear shapes to lean up against. [Laughs.]
Decepción is an interesting show for you. One of the things that I think is really different about this work is it’s almost documentary, whereas a lot of your work prior to this has been very narrative or magical realism or dreams manifesting themselves, and this is really straightforward, and you’ve taken yourself out of the work and made it about these subjects.
I’ve never even tried to do something that is remotely a documentation of anything. Other projects that I’ve done start with real information, but then it gets synthesized and turned into something else, so it was very strange to be doing this for two years. I kind of stumbled upon it, because it did start as these landscapes, which were completely fabricated. It did start out as somewhat of a documentary project, but immediately I designed a way to add artifice to it, because I was looking for unique vehicles—like the guy who made a reproduction of the Knight Rider car, guys who collected WWII airplanes, lowrider cars—and I would shoot those and then I would go find a landscape, and then marry them. But then, one of those trips, by accident, I find this man who had done his car in Louis Vuitton Murakami print. It took a while for it to sink in, but then I thought, ‘Wait, these people are really interesting.’ I fell down that rabbit hole, and two years later I’m obsessing over this, and trying to catalog or collect as much of it as I can find. As I was shooting it, I knew I didn’t want it to fall into that straight documentation photography. It’s real, but it’s something that’s been affected.
The landscapes really take you to this other place. But, in a piece like ‘Dreaded MCM’ [a man with dreadlocks dressed in a full MCM logo vinyl bodysuit and MCM logo hat stands facing an MCM logo printed wall], those are real people. That’s got a little bit of straight documentary style into it.
The ‘Dreaded MCM’ guy, he’s a DJ in Montreal who I found by chance online. He’s an avid collector of all things Gucci, and he had a roll of bootleg MCM vinyl, and he was making these jackets and these pants—the hat, he said, was real—and that background is just the material tacked up on the wall of his apartment, and I just had him stand in front of it.
There’s a lot being put into eradicating bootlegging of fashion brands. It’s illegal. Why are these people risking it?
Well, for different reasons. For example, the guy with the MCM and the dreads, he is a fan and a collector of [certain logos]. He is a white Quebecois guy, but he reinvented himself as a hip hop kid, so he ties into it culturally that way: the nostalgia and the garb. So, he clearly knows it’s fake, but he enjoys it—he’s aware. I didn’t have in-depth conversations with the subjects, because I always approach it from a celebratory position when taking the photographs, but it was clear that people were extroverted. They wanted to show off, they wanted to create. Some of them did their own knock-offs, but they wouldn’t really wear the knock-offs as much, and now they were finding raw material and making their own interpretations, and that’s what got me: they were creating something else. They weren’t trying to mimic or copy something they would see at the store.
    And the thing is that it got really weird. There were backpacks and shoes, but then some people were making covers to slip on their Playstations, or housecoats, or bathroom garbage cans, or a liner for a Kleenex tissue box—I could go on and on. It was very fetishistic. There was combination matching—the guy with the Coach car had matching sneakers.
My favorite thing is ‘The Bedroom’ [a bedroom decorated with a Versace theme]. That’s phenomenal. It really shows a real dedication to the logo.
It is a dedication to the logo, but I think also, the room had been built quite a few years ago—I’m assuming late-’80s or early-’90s—and the guy, at some point, had money. I think he is a retired drug dealer, but at his height he had built his house with this garish design emulating Versace. That baroqueness really spoke to him. He had Versace shirts with the print, and there was this Italian baroqueness throughout the house, but in the room itself, that’s the only place I saw the logo.
Weird. I mean, obviously, with Versace, he’s feeling a certain aesthetic closeness to the brand—it being this very luxuriant thing—but some of the other brands have a more complicated reputation in America.
I can equate it with my grandparents when they would talk about TV shows. Like, ‘my show.’ Or we would only watch TBS back in the day when there was no remote control. The first guy who had the Louis Vuitton truck, he didn’t even know who Murakami was. When I brought it up, he just nodded his head like, ‘That’s cool.’ But what he was really interested in was the color.
    A lot of these people are into the design, because it’s pretty DIY. It’s pretty budget. These are working-class people. Some people will splurge and save up to pay a shop to do it, but a lot of guys are doing it in their garage with their cousins, working at it little by little. The level of craftsmanship, it’s not at a high level, it’s homemade, but they’re really into the color, the pattern, the design.
    Take Coach: Coach is a fairly entry-level brand, and not long ago making baseball mitts. Burberry, I guess they imagine it to be British or European. It’s interesting. A lot of the cars are older luxury brands. The Burberry is an older BMW, a mid-’80s 5 Series. It’s a piece of shit, but again, these are cars that once were something, and they’ve passed 10 hands, and 450,000 miles later, this guy does it up as good as he can, and it looks like a giant wallet.
MCM, too, was big in the ’70s and ’80s as a luxury brand. Their brand was being knocked off wholesale. And it killed them. They were in dire financial straits because of the fakes. They’re reinvigorating themselves, but it seems for ‘Dreaded MCM’ it’s this antiquated idea of ripped-off luxury that he is synthesizing again.
The entry point, for me, a lot of it is this connection to urban culture and MCM was. Particularly at the show—so many affluent art world people can’t identify and don’t really remember MCM, but all the black dudes are like, ‘Oh shit! MCM!’ Everybody remembers MCM—and the [dreaded] guy had MCM—because of that connection to early hip hop. Somehow Gucci survived that. Do you know that whole story about Dapper Dan’s, the shop that used to be in Harlem that was a 24-hour boutique?
Refresh my memory.
In the ’80s, when crack takes a stronghold on Harlem and Washington Heights, the drug dealers started to take over and become the contemporary Superflys. They were going to Dapper Dan. I don’t know how we was sourcing Gucci and Louis Vuitton fabric—maybe he was buying bags and dismantling them—but he was outfitting luxury car interiors for drug dealers and making custom one-off jackets, jumpsuits, sneakers. So that started in Harlem in the early-’80s. The drug dealers were paying seven or eight grand back then for a jumpsuit or a jacket, and then what happens was that the early hip hoppers like Kool Moe Dee, LL Cool J, Eric B. & Rakim, and then eventually Mike Tyson start to become clients. They are starting to mimic drug dealer style, because it is street cred that they’re trying to get as performers. So, that is what brings it to the broad audience in ’84 when record covers and pictures of these guys start to appear across the country with hip hop spreading.
    But somewhere in the late-’80s, Mike Tyson gets into a fight with this boxer named Mitch Green. Tyson was in this big fight being promoted by Don King. They both were clients of Dapper Dan. They meet there at two in the morning to pick up jackets, this altercation happens, and basically Mike Tyson punches the shit out of this guy and busts his eye open, and Mike Tyson breaks his hand. The fight’s called off. It gets this huge media coverage; Dapper Dan gets on the map.
Have you always known about Dapper Dan, and did you see the car and were like, ‘Oh, that’s like Dapper Dan’?
I’ve known about Dapper Dan since buying an LL Cool J record back in the day. If you were growing up in Miami, you knew that whole thing. I had stopped seeing it. I remember in high school, in the late-’80s or early-’90s, that whole style fell off, and now I’m finding out that people do it in cars. Even Googling, you start to see a lot of people still do it. Have you seen that picture of that guy who tattooed the Gucci pattern on the side of his face? I was trying to find that guy. I couldn’t find him. There are pictures of strippers’ asses that have the Louis Vuitton pattern on them, and on and on. So, it hasn’t really gone away, it’s just spread out. It’s become a trope for urban style.
When I was teaching in Japan, some of my students would take dates with older men for money, save up, and they all bought Louis Vuitton bags. I don’t know if it’s still happening, but I was like, ‘First of all, don’t prostitute yourself out, but if you’re going to prostitute yourself out, do something better with the money than buy a Louis V bag.’
It relates to this project, because these people, again, they’re working class. I mean, people are saving up a lot of money to dump into their cars. They put more money into their cars than they put into anything else—they live in these small rentals. It’s all of this effort and money into this stuff. But it’s a big deal; it’s like a badge that identifies them.
It’s all on the ‘outside.’ You take your car outside, you take your clothes outside, but your house doesn’t have any furniture.
Yeah, the title of the show is Decepción, which means ‘to be disillusioned.’ You forget about it, then you see it, and it’s like, ‘Ah shit. Right. This is what’s going on.’ Again, I was not trying to pass judgment. I wasn’t trying to take a position. I was trying to be as neutral as I could, and the photographs were always made in the celebratory atmosphere. They’re very proud of these things, and I was amazed how these guys laid out to design these cars. I could relate to that, because at some point in my high school years, I was tricking out cars, and there was a level of obsession and detail and anxiety in making these things that was similar to how obsessive I get in the studio making something. So, there was a creative process; they were expressing something.
Did you ever worry at all that you were taking pictures of ‘the other,’ that some people could see it that way?
Well, when I started it, I was very comfortable just shooting the cars and inanimate objects. Throughout the cars, I never turned the camera on the owners. In the last couple of years, I’ve had anxiety taking a picture of anybody, much less someone of color or someone different. It was so problematic, I didn’t want to do it. I was like, ‘I’m going to shoot landscapes and these tableaux, these cars.’ And more than a year-and-a-half into it, I somehow reconciled it, and I was around the people enough, and I started to have more access to see the people who were making the garbs and the shoes. And I said, ‘Can I turn the camera on them?’ A lot of them didn’t want to be identified, and a lot of times I chose not to show faces.
    I was worried, by showing the people, that problem starts to come up where you’re pointing the camera at ‘the other,’ and so I tried to show a diverse group of people, because they were pretty diverse. What I thought was interesting was when you looked at the cars, you would have to deal with your own preconceived notions about who you assume owns these cars. It was neutral enough where it put the onus on the viewer. For a while, I debated whether to even exhibit the figures—they are in a separate room from the cars—but I felt at this point I was so far into it, I was documenting a whole universe. I had to show the people, because it was pretty broad—it wasn’t only black and Hispanic guys, there were white guys doing it and Asian dudes were doing it. So, it’s an American phenomenon. The show only has 10 images up; the book will have the rest of it.
So, the book has more people in it?
More people, yeah.
That’s very interesting. The show has the one woman in it, right?
There are two women. There’s a white lady with the Louis Vuitton dress and purple background and the black lady with the Dolce & Gabbana and golden background.
And then the dreaded dude.
He’s a white guy, and then the estraña guy with the asymmetrical boots.
I asked the questions about turning the camera on people and documentary, but you’ve conflated it with these images of ‘Spiral Jetty,’ for instance, which is on this issue’s cover, and these images of glaciers and mountains. I know this idea started around 2008, of juxtaposing the interior of a vehicle, moving towards something or stationary, like watching scenery or a landscape. I’m wondering, what is that to you?
It’s partially intuitive, and partially thought out. A lot of it is left to chance. I did, from the beginning, start with a clear idea of capturing a sublime landscape. It started out with, ‘Okay, how do I make an interesting landscape photograph?’ It is such a cliché, it’s so boring, to see a landscape. I thought, ‘I’ll create a device of framing it through the windshield of a vehicle.’ So, that was there in the beginning of this dichotomy, this dialectic between the sublime, natural, the picturesque, the beauty, and this very urban, handmade, manmade, fetishized, socially-problematic interior. That’s a pretty broad contrast.
Is there something codified in ‘Spiral Jetty’ versus Chanel?
I wanted to go and shoot Spiral Jetty just on my own, because the landscape project was a thinly veiled excuse to get out and travel and check out the landscape. So, I’m going to ‘Spiral Jetty,’ I hang out all day, I shoot a bunch of frames, and I actually got a mysterious, dark, gloomy sunset. Later, I find this black Chanel Ford Explorer that had been tricked out. When I got the negatives back, I was like, ‘Oh, this is really a dark interior.’ I started beatmatching, sandwiching the image in front of it. I was like, ‘Wow. The blacks in the rocks of the “Spiral Jetty” have something to do with the black in the pattern in the car.’ Of all of the images, there’s a direct reference to a certain art history—Land Art and Robert Smithson. I’m interested in that, but then again, that’s not important, because anyone may not notice ‘Spiral Jetty.’ It’s an added bonus.
But, you do imbue these artworks with a superficial art historical sense. You have Stephen Sprouse, you have Murakami, you have ‘Spiral Jetty.’ Is that something you were looking for?
No. I consciously tried to shut off the art history button, but it’s subconsciously there. It’s funny, as I was running into a lot of Louis cars, I’d get a lot of the standard brown and beige and gold Louis. I run into the Sprouse, and to be honest, when I found it, I didn’t even know who Stephen Sprouse was. Basically, this car was this bowling ball green on the outside, and it had this insane interior with the green. I said, ‘Wow. This is just visually insane.’ So, I captured it, and it happened to be Louis, too. With the Murakami, it was chance stumbling upon it. So, I guess, just the fact that these were designed things, that history is going to be there anyway.
It’s this weird collision of art and fashion that comes up time and again, and it’s a really tricky subject to dance around, and you’ve found a way to talk about it without having to enter into it yourself.
All the time I was doing this, I didn’t have any dialogue with fashion people. I was approaching it from a naïve way, because I’m looking for these things—I’m not looking for these brands—and I’m identifying with them more from the position of the consumer or layman, as I don’t know that much about the history of each of the brands. I do know, but not from the point-of-view of the connoisseur or a fashion or design person, so I was trying to assume the position of a fan as the owners of these cars and clothes were. We’re both celebrating it.
    Granted, I had some kind of critical distance, and I have my ideas about what the social implications are of all of these labels and what they mean with socioeconomic issues. I was aware of that. I know it’s fucked up, and there is an issue, but I tried to turn that off, too, when I went into make these pictures because I had to also gain access. A lot of these photos had to do with getting access to these subcultures and learning their language, meaning the argot of lowrider car talk, going to these car shows, going to these car clubs. Right off the bat, they’re asking me, ‘What magazine are you with? Are you with Lowrider Magazine?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, why do you want a picture of my car?’ And then I explain to them what I’m doing, but then I let them know that I’m not just a tourist: ‘I participated before; I respect what you’re doing; I’m taking a picture as a fan.’
Do you find that’s easy to turn your critical instincts off and just go into these things with a clear mind? Also, I wonder if you think it makes the process more enjoyable.
It makes it more enjoyable. It’s kind of a schizophrenic process, because I’ll be 10 days out West, wandering around from the border of Mexico all the way up to the Dakotas, not speaking to a person for 10 days, smoking pot in the middle of nowhere, shooting hundreds of rolls of film, and then I’ll find myself outside of Detroit dealing with a car club and talking super urban lingo. Maybe that reflects the way I am in the studio, too, because, after shooting this stuff for two years, I’m so glad it’s over. I’m looking forward to going back in the studio and becoming a hermit and making sculptures, and not making any pictures out in the world. So, is it easy? I don’t know. It’s really intuitive. It’s survival I guess.
It sounds like you’re done with it.
I am done with it. The final nail will be the book that will be completed. OHWOW in L.A. is the one who that’s putting the book together, and they’re going to put it out in December. I’m very finished with it. I’m already thinking about the new work.