Slow Spectacle

Los Angeles in the Art of Sayre Gomez

Abstract

Sayre Gomez’s photorealistic works reflect explicitly on the gentrification of historically low-income, non-white areas of Los Angeles, manifesting a pervasive aspect of spectacle, namely, its production of the city as a collection of images that in the last instance resolve to ciphers of property relations. Building on Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, this essay explores Gomez’s characteristic device, the use of literal or implied scrims to produce layers of spatiality distinguished by their degree of focus. My argument is that the enframement of the city in Gomez’s paintings concretizes Debord’s critique of capitalist spatiality by returning it to the built environment, while also reflecting on the entanglement of spectacle with racial capitalism (unlike most Debordian discourse). Gomez’s highly stylized painterly realism hence does not articulate spectacle as an undifferentiated miasma but rather as the minutely differentiated medium of racial and class distinction.