In the space of two years, hip-hop star Nicki Minaj has made the leap from little known Lil Wayne protégée to object of national obsession, via a number-one album, seven singles simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100—a first for any artist—and a series of scene-stealing cameos, including an epic verse on the Jay-Z and Kanye West track “Monster.” Along the way, she’s established a zany look (all neon, all the time), introduced countless alter egos, and become the first female rapper since Missy Elliott to be cast not as a sidekick but as a bona fide swaggering leading lady.
Powerful female figures have always been a draw for the artist Francesco Vezzoli, who has produced a trailer for a mock remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula featuring Courtney Love and made a fake-fragrance commercial starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams. Through film, performance, and images often enhanced with embroidery, the 40-year-old Italian links contemporary icons to historic representations of women in art. He transformed Eva Mendes into Bernini’s masterpiece The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa for his Prada Foundation installation at this year’s Venice Biennale and, for MOCA’s 30th-anniversary gala in 2009, he reimagined Lady Gaga as a latter-day Ballets Russes star. Now Vezzoli has remade Minaj as an 18th-century courtesan. To discuss the project, he sat down for a lively tête-à-tête with Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1, who is organizing a touring retrospective of Vezzoli’s work that will land at the New York venue in 2013.
BIESENBACH: You have a history of collaborating with
celebrities. What interested you in working on a project with Nicki
Minaj?
VEZZOLI: I wanted to play with the public
image of a female hip-hop star. During my entire career, I have always
been fascinated by powerful women in history. I have spent a lot of time
researching the ways they were represented in art and how their images
were used to mold the public imagination—and to convey aesthetic and
philosophical ideas about beauty and sexual desire. My main interest has
been to link the historical artistic
approach to female representation
to contemporary icons of the media era.
In my most recent works, for example, I transformed Princess Caroline of Hanover into a Garbo-esque Queen Christina, I asked actress Eva Mendes to become three symbols of classical sculpture (Venus, Saint Teresa, and Paolina Borghese), and I framed Lady Gaga into a de Chirico–inspired robotic extravaganza. For W, I wanted to turn the lovely Nicki Minaj into a powdered 18th-century courtesan.
BIESENBACH: How have you transformed her?
VEZZOLI: In her performances, Minaj makes very explicit
and challenging use of her beauty and her body, so I thought of
comparing her to some of the most famous courtesans in history: the
Marquise de Montespan, Comtesse du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, and
Madame Rimsky-Korsakov. My idea was to reproduce four iconic portraits
of some of the most fascinating females of the past in a series starring
an American pop-culture role model. We tried to re-create those original
portraits using similar furniture, props, and clothing, à la Visconti.
Luckily enough, the result came out as surreal as it could be, just as
I wished.
