Slutty Hipsters Make A Comeback: Merlin Bronques for Wild Dragon

Let’s take a trip down memory lane, all the way back to the heady days of 2004. Jessica Coen became the third editor of Gawker.com, and, as Carla Blumenkranz put it in an N+1 story recently, the site bgan to “treat every subject, known or unknown, in public or private situations, with the fascinated ill will that tabloid magazines have for their subjects.” Julia Allison was years away from becoming one of those subjects through her sub-McLuhanian self-promotion-as-product –– although she did already have at least one media scandal behind her.

Back then, girls with a desperate desire to see pictures of themselves on the Internet didn’t launch their own curiously content-less media empires. They went out at night dressed (or undressed) with the hopes of attracting the attention of a brand-name hipster papparazzo like Merlin Bronques, who launched Last Night’s Party that year as a repository for his endless photo streams documenting the mascara-caked, PBR-soaked underbelly of the Lower East Side — a sort of Weegee for slutty hipsters.

Bronques had a good run as a New York web celebrity, one which probably hit its peak in late 2005 when he was profiled by the New York Times. But his web site suggests that he’s not spending too much time in the city these days –– he’s apparently traveling the world, shooting his usual types for various ad campaigns and promotions. Bronques’ latest gig is a web video promoting an energy drink called Wild Dragon. It’s a two-minute, psychedelic short film featuring various party people cavorting with the drink in hand. According to some marketing copy on Wild Dragon’s web site, the clip documents “downtown New York’s hip, cool and ‘wild’ nightlife with its real and restless people, pushing the limits of their barefaced enthusiasm.” Here is perhaps where it should be noted that Wild Dragon is a product of Austria, and there’s something about the whole Bronques gambit that, like the above passage, seems to have been lost in translation.

The video is both hypnotically beautiful and so logic-defying as a work of commercialism that it borders on self-parody. From the kaleidoscope effects, which seem to almost mock the notion of associating a pretty face with a product for sale, to the sluggish slow motion suggesting that the actual effect of this “energy drink” is something like a heavy dose of Quaaludes, it kind of feels like Bronques is pulling a fast one on his patron. It would be easy to criticize Wild Dragon for co-opting “the scene”…if this were a scene based on a specific strand of music or art or one which amounted to anything more than Girls Gone Wild with a patina of druggy glamour. It would be easy to criticize Bronques for allowing his “art” to be co-opted…if the idea of documenting the attention-crazed sordidly gorgeous didn’t feel so dated.

Maybe it’s because the downtown scene has become notably more monied and less genuinely dirty in just a few short years, or because enthusiastic self-branders have wrestled local web infamy away from anonymous exhibitionists, but it’s hard not to look at something like this with “fascinated ill will.” That Bronques is still managing to fascinate at all by taking his tired schtick corporate is something of a pleasant surprise. There’s more artistry in that feat than in anything he’s ever done.