Dislocating Dreams

Luis Gispert (b. 1972) is a Miami-based artist whose considerable talents have earned him a show, called “El Mundo Es Tuyo (The World Is Yours),” that occupies two prestigious galleries. “Smother,” a 26-minute film, plays on a vast wall in Mary Boone’s Chelsea gallery, while related photographs and sculptures occupy Zach Feuer’s gallery across the street. This two-gallery scheme, however, spreads Mr. Gispert’s talents a bit too thin.The show turns on the axis of the disturbing and extraordinary film, which takes place in Miami, and ostensibly explores the relationship between an 11-year-old boy named Waylon and his young, blond mother. It opens with a dream-image of the boy lying on his back in an inflatable pool, holding a cardboard-and-construction-paper boom box on his chest, as the pool fills with urine. Waylon awakes to find he has wet his car-shaped bed. When he tries to wash the soiled sheets, his mother scolds him, saying, “You can’t hide anything from me.” On the table by her bed stand prescription bottles, bourbon, and cigarettes; it soon becomes clear her troubles are emotional as well as chemical. When the boy greets her in the morning, she tells him she too has had a dream, a nightmare in which her son was a giant, and in which she put him in the dryer and shrank him. “I’m little, like a mouse,” he says. “That’s right,” she replies, “you’re little, forever.”Alternately sweet and sadistic, the mother is not just the smothering kind; she’s also degrading. While sitting on the toilet, for instance, she pulls her son onto her lap and admonishes him not to pee all day until he returns home. What follows is a bizarre and yet affecting sort of escape fantasy — or perhaps just a continuation of the dream that began the film.The boy sets off with his cardboard boom box strapped on like a backpack. Eventually, he wanders into a slaughterhouse and witnesses a pig being killed. “None of us want to be hogs. But we all want to be hog splitters, don’t we?” says the sleazy butcher, magnificently played by Steven Bauer, whom movie buffs will recognize as Manny Ribera from the classic Miami film “Scarface” (1983). Both the butcher and Waylon end up back at the boy’s home where, having held it in all day, the boy pees in his pants — and abruptly turns into a German shepherd. After the mother and butcher spend some time seducing each other, the butcher dumps the dog into a vat of boiling water or acid. This causes a magical transformation in which the dog’s carcass splits open to show a boom box in its entrails.Lushly rendered and expertly paced, the film is far more compelling than a schematic recounting of its narrative can suggest. Various leitmotifs — and music is certainly the right metaphor here — such as the boom box and scars tighten up what on paper sounds like a baggy, dreamscape story.Indeed, boom boxes, speakers, and amplifiers recur throughout Mr. Gispert’s work, and though they amplify “Smother,” they muffle the effect of the show at Zach Feuer Gallery. There, prop-like sculptures mingle with some jazzy photographs in a haphazard manner that suggests the gallery and artist wanted something more tangible than a film to merchandize.A number of speakers — in the 1980s faux-Deco style used in the film — with heart-shaped apertures form an installation, which at times plays a few seconds of thumping, bass-heavy music. Slightly more interesting is “No I’m Not” (2008), a tall magenta plinth, reminiscent of a John McCracken sculpture, with a heart-shaped speaker inserted in the top.I’m usually a fan of Mr. Gispert’s sculptural pieces, but in this outing they don’t get any better than the anodyne plinth. “Let Them Lose Their Souls, They’re Animals Anyways” (2008), a glass coffee table sitting on pyramidal cigarette-box legs and adorned with two rubber versions of the scorched canine carcass from the film, is more embarrassing than menacing. And “Sexy Battleship I” (2008), a deliberately tacky Deco-esque mirror with black lights, does succeed in calling to mind the nouveau-riche furnishings one might find in a Miami mansion; though hanging in your home or in a museum, it will not reflect exquisite irony so much as lack of wit.Happily, in the accompanying photographs, Mr. Gispert returns to the gorgeous, sly, and dislocating visions that make the film so unforgettable. I was especially taken with a series of vistas seen from inside the cabs of tricked-out trucks. This dual view exposes both the burled-wood paneling and black leather of a flashy ride in “Untitled (Escalades)” (2007), as well as in the world beyond its windshield, a desert ghetto of tract homes and the pricey SUVs to which their inhabitants aspire. At times, as in “Untitled (Gerlla)” (2007), the outlook becomes surreal: a groovy, blue-and-white truck interior juxtaposed with a wall of amps set in front of an ancient ruin.With a distinct ability for combining revelry and sadness, Mr. Gispert is at his best when depicting the colorful ironies of a place divided between the haves and those who have way too much of everything except restraint. In his eyes, ours is a world of hogs and hog splitters.Until February 16 at Feuer (530 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-989-7700); Until March 1 at Boone (541 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-752-2929).

Dislocating Dreams

Dislocating Dreams

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