Serg Riva, author of a blog chronicling his privileged yet insecure life as an haute couture swimwear designer, is a fictional persona and art project of Bay Area artist James Buckhouse. You can enjoy the project at the level of a witty send-up of the contemporary fashion world, but there is more going on here. Riva belongs to a long line of artistic noms de plume, from Marcel Duchamp's alter ego Rrose Sélavy to the 1990s Internet art persona Mouchette. Mouchette demonstrated how authorship and identity are constructed amid the endless masquerade ball of the Internet, and Buckhouse takes us further by unpacking social class and psychological elements of that pastiche. Riva is an aspirational character through which Buckhouse explores how identity is constructed in the slippery class environment of the twenty-first century, where “high” and “low” cultures continue their decades-long slow-motion collision, exemplified today by the couture fashion reality TV show. Riva's blog presents snapshots of himself, his fashions, and his high-culture cohorts-images composed in the eye of a camera but then drawn rather than photographed. He presents the expected depictions, down to drawing the lens-flare of the camera, while undermining those expectations. This dissonance creates a vacuum, as in a dream where you are watching celebrities at a crowded glamorous party when you suddenly realize that everyone else there is a life-size cardboard cutout; you are the only one in the room, and it is you who are on view. Riva invokes a mental state of unfulfilled longing, incompleteness, and allowing one's self to be shaped by the gaze of others-all while managing to be catty, romantic, and wry, and showing you how to wear your boyfriend's shirt just so.
