High Pink: Tex-Mex Fairy Tales.

Capozzola, Christopher

High Pink: Tex-Mex Fairy Tales

by Franco Mondini-Ruiz

Distributed Art Publishers. 126 pages, $20.

Susan Sontag opened "Notes on 'Camp'" with words that make sense of Franco Mondini-Ruiz: "many things have not been named, and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described." Every object in High Pink is a known thing, but it is hard to name this art. A San Antonio-based artist and former ironic botanica owner, Mondini-Ruiz uses found objects, antiques, and food to assemble the 56 linked stories and images here. Objects happen to each other: "Taco Belle" wraps an 18th-century French figurine in a tortilla and sprinkles her with cheese; gooey chocolate cakes peer out of a purse while Mondini-Ruiz spins a tale of his dessert-stealing grandmother. Words and images collide, too. Ceramic figurines, onions, and cherry vanilla yogurt accompany the artist's reflections on Cherry Vanilla, a minor star in Andy Warhol's "fierce galaxy of queer superstardom." "I wonder what Warhol would have thought of me. You must admit, the Factory was pretty much a white thing." Like the images, his words masterfully display the art of the deliberate accident: puns, overheard conversations, witticisms, with a soupcon of insight that endures after the smile of the bon mot fades. And bitchy--bitchy in the way that makes you keep turning the page, bitchy enough that I'm a little afraid to review this book. In academic art journals, High Pink would be greeted with hosannas to "interpositionality." The "Vassar-educated, art history major" and "Linda Ronstadt-look alike" that Mondini-Ruiz snarks so mercilessly offer easy prey for facile interpretations in light of the author's multiple identities as a gay man, a Latino, a New Yorker, and an artist. But careful consumers of camp know the difference between false juxtaposition and brilliant accident, between art school poster food art and the pleasures of an old Linda Ronstadt LP. Mondini-Ruiz demands your serious attention, and then laughs at it. And that is High Pink's greatest accomplishment: to convey what Sontag perceived in camp more than forty years ago: "another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human--in short, another valid sensibility."