ANTHONY LEPORE
EVER SINCE CLAUDE MONET recorded gray smokestacks on the riverbanks at Argenteuil, France, industrial modernity has stood at the heart of artistic production. Think Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry Murals,” 1932–33, Charles Sheeler’s crisscrossing conveyor belts, or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s taxonomic grids. Yet few if any of these artists can claim to have experienced these spaces as has Anthony Lepore, whose modest studio—a roughly five-hundred-square-foot open-top box—is positioned squarely in the center of a working factory floor. To visit the artist, you must enter a nondescript warehouse at the edge of LA’s Lincoln Heights, before wending your way past rows of workbenches where seamsters hand-sew garments with meticulous attention. The sounds of conversation, laughter, norteño music, women singing in unison, and the general din of machine-assisted labor echo off the walls.
Curiously, this industrial racket continues even after hours, when the lights are out and the factory floor is mostly empty. The source of the noise—call it Lewis Hine by way of Vicente Fernández—is Lepore’s assemblage Untitled (work table with music),2015, a squat, stubby wooden worktable fitted with a pair of white speakers. Strewn across the table’s surfaces is a magpie’s bounty made collage: thick pages dismembered from a bikini promotional calendar featuring Cuban American model Vida Guerra, who poses in skimpy bathing suits against backdrops of crashing waves and pristine beaches; a punch card; a Continental Airlines ticket; an AT&T bill; a sewing-machine label; a Virgin de Guadalupe card; wads of chewing gum; and the name OMAR scratched into the varnish. The work’s sole vertical element, a foreboding, épée-like metal rod, reaches skyward. The ephemera taped to Untitled were adhered to it ten years earlier by seamstress Nelly Felix, to whom the workstation belonged, in an attempt to protect her fingers from splinters that would emerge from the aging wood surface. The calendar and various heavy papers were the most readily available protective material within the ecosystem of the factory. Lepore’s only visible intervention was to embed the speakers into the table’s surface. A hidden iPod contains a twenty-two-minute edit of ambient recordings collected during busy workdays at the factory, captured with Felix’s permission and knowledge that it would become part of an artwork.
The building housing the studio was commissioned in 1971 by Anthony’s grandfather Joseph Lepore and has since been passed down to the artist’s father. It was built during the late nineteenth century on an empty lot on one of the first industrial and commercial corridors in Los Angeles, now considered one of the most environmentally burdened in the city. The area has played host to Chinese, Irish, French, and Latin American entrepreneurs and, although rapidly gentrifying, is now home to a mostly Latino and more specifically Chicano community. Anthony’s grandfather was an East Coast tailor who made his way out west to start a business manufacturing bikinis, garments that require little fabric, if not necessarily little labor, to produce. The senior Lepore himself built all the necessary pieces of furniture—several dozen rudimentary, rugged pine worktables—which are still in use today.
Lepore’s layering of authorship produces a complex, multifaceted portrait of the personal histories, gender politics, and cultural dynamics that intersect at the factory, and in turn looks outward toward those that define the east side of Los Angeles.
In 2010, Felix and her mother, Raquela, opened their own bikini-manufacturing business, and they continue to produce the swimsuits and other garments as Setroc Inc. As domestic clothing production moved overseas and the business shrank, space within the factory opened up and other kinds of garment-manufacturing businesses moved in. Today, about a third of the factory is occupied by artisans fabricating leather, latex, and polyester BDSM wear for fetish outfitter Rough Trade Gear. Several of the workers are saddlemakers from northern Mexico who have adapted their specialized expertise in leather manipulation to produce these goods. Save for the four slabs of drywall that delineate Lepore’s studio, the factory floor is an open space. Leather thongs, studded collars, harnesses, and bikini bottoms hang next to each other, all handmade objects requiring similar skill sets, if not equal aesthetic dispositions, to produce.
Untitled falls somewhat outside of the norm for Lepore’s practice. Typically, the artist works in photography. His ongoing “Bikini Factory” series, which he began in 2013, documents the factory from a similarly ethnographic vantage point, but centers a disorienting layering yielding complex still lifes that merely hint at their connection to human touch. For Spill, 2015, a pool of liquid splashed on the concrete factory floor serves as a mirror, reflecting a hazy Technicolor swatch of fabric. Nelly’s Locker and Jesus/Hilda, both 2013, capture the ad hoc collagist arrangements produced by the workers and found throughout the factory: Calendars, personal photos, devotional items, and punch cards hang together in loose grids that recall the surface of Untitled.
Although Lepore is no stranger to collaborative making, most notably as part of a shared sculptural practice with his partner, community activist Michael Henry Hayden, the immediacy and complex dynamics of hierarchy, pedigree, and personal relations of the source material for Untitled do away with the distance provided by the camera. The layering of authorship here—the crafting of the table by the grandfather, the functional embellishment applied to it by Felix, and the junior Lepore’s sonic intervention—produces a complex, multifaceted portrait of the personal histories, gender politics, and cultural dynamics that intersect at the factory, and in turn looks outward toward those that define the east side of Los Angeles.
Indeed, Lepore’s literal and metaphoric indexing of labor ties the making of this work to dialogues regarding power, privilege, race, authorship, and appropriation within the context of the economy of the art world. What kind of labor qualifies as art? What value does the stamp of authorship bring? And for whom? Untitled—and Lepore’s practice as a whole—brings these questions uncomfortably to the fore. By situating his rarefied white box amid a working factory, Lepore places two kinds of work—industrial labor and artistic labor—in precarious proximity, highlighting their differences and underscoring their strange affinities. Yet while one contemplates the sculpture within the idiosyncratic environment of the bikini factory, Lepore’s voice becomes hard to distinguish from the voices in the recording, just as the tempo of the music starts to match the rhythm of the sewing machines.
