Lizzi Bougatsos

The American artist Lizzi Bougatsos (b. 1977) works with sculpture, collage, text, installation and performance, and with themes often dealing with a kind of beauty that is somehow marred. In addition to producing visual art, Bougatsos is a vocalist and musician in the bands Gang Gang Dance and I.U.D., both frequently found performing at art-related events. She is involved in the young New York art scene along with artists such as Nate Lowman and Dan Colen, and with Gardar Eide Einarsson and others, participated in the prestigious Whitney Biennial (2008) in New York.

Bougatsos’ artistic materials usually consist of things she picks up on trips or finds on the streets of New York. Recycling these finds into art, she ends up twisting the meaning of established cultural symbols. We see this technique used in Untitled (2007), which belongs to a series of works made from found advertisements. Through Bougatsos’ cunning interventions the pictures of beautiful, smiling people change. Untitled shows a poster of a beautiful young woman showing off her dark, luxurious hair. The poster’s colours are however faded, and partly occluded behind the frame we see the logo for Wella, a popular shampoo brand. Maybe this advertisement used to hang in the window of a hair salon or shop. On the model’s perfect white teeth Bougatsos has affixed little blocks and run wire between them to create dental braces!

Braces have become a standard element in many a young person’s life. Although some people get them for medical reasons, braces are usually mounted for cosmetic purposes. In a society where other beauty-related operations and changes in appearance are hotly debated, most people think it is perfectly fine to use braces to change the position of one’s teeth. By putting braces on the apparently perfect model, Bougatsos questions our conceptions of beauty and perfection. The girl in the shampoo ad might call to mind the main character in the American sitcom 'Ugly Betty': a girl who wears glasses and braces and therefore does not meet the standard for perfection and outward beauty set by today’s society. Having said this, it is worth noting that a phenomenon in parts of rap culture is for rappers to wear braces because they lend a certain status. Gold-plated braces imply wealth and prosperity. Thus one could say that dental braces have also succumbed to the world of fashion; today there are many varieties and colours and one can pick and choose according to personal taste. Bougatsos’ strategy seems to hark back to classic appropriation artists of the 1980s and ‘90s. For instance, she follows Richard Prince in using advertisement photos as source material for her works. But in addition, she makes an important change by adding a fictional element from the beauty industry. The result is a humorous and yet critical scrutiny of today’s conception of beauty and the world of advertising.

TK