Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed’s one-off collaboration Stereomongrel, 2005, is a neo-psychedelic film in the vein of Isaac Julien, complete with a hallucinogenic trip through a museum (as in Julien’s Baltimore, 2003, which took a spin through the Peabody). Here, the museum is the Whitney, tricked out with blue-chip objects, cyber-geishas posing as curators, and security guards doubling as DJs and crooners. While sections of the film’s narrative feel as hackneyed as the stilted dialogue in a bad music video, the idea of the artist as DJ, remixing culture, still works, particularly as Gispert and Reed mine the spiritual effects of both pop culture and art. A series of photographs reach even deeper into the spiritual realm of Ninja-Kung Fu-Hip Hop-Surreality. Some of them, like Senioritas Suicidio, 2005, a photo of five nude women lying in a pool, are quite beautiful.
