Objects collected, images understood.

TONY LABAT: TRUST ME

NEW LANGTON ARTS

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 

SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 22, 2005

In 1978 Langton Arts (as it was then named) announced a call for proposals. The young Tony Labat sent only a bouquet of roses with a note that read, "Trust Me." This gesture is a perfect example of Labat's aesthetic: an elegant social intervention, at once agressive yet vulnerable to social misunderstanding. Langton Arts went for it, awarding him his first art commission as an undergraduate student. Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2005, New Langton Arts presented a survey of Labat's performance, video, and installation work. The pieces in the show span virtually all media, and (whether overtly "conceptual" or more "narrative" in feel) their meaning pivots on the recontextualization of ideas.

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Labat presents specific social phenomenon (such as boxing, game shows, and room service) and makes the viewer able, regardless of experience, to identify. In his video work especially, his talent lies in communicating these moments through formal devices that resist categorization: often using rhythm, contrast, friction, and humor toward a beauty felt in the body and experienced quasi-unconsciously. Aptly, fashion and politics, and how they make for the cultural objectification of the self, are his most common themes. He depicts people, both heroes and villains, in their mythological or objectified roles. Likewise, Labat's infectious weakness for things provides him with props to create his shifting facsimile landscape.

Labat's intellect is clearly absorbed by American culture's trash and treasure, its detritus and trophies alike. In his videos, on wonderful little sets, objects are hyperbolically thrown, worshipped, and devoured. His figures navigate this world, dispelling and absorbing cultural reflections and objectifications. This is not the cool intellectual work some identify with "conceptual art," but art that seems influenced by 1980's art rock, Laurie Anderson, MTV, Joseph Beuys, avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren, and even painters like Eric Fischl.

Labat's work from the 1980s, starting with Babalu (1980), focuses on the largely alienating experiences of immigrants coming to America--an experience familiar to Labat, as he himself emigrated as a teenager from Cuba to Miami in 1966. In video pieces such as Room Service (1980), N (enn-yay) (1982), Khikiriki (1983), and Lost in the Translation (1984) he uses stylistic earmarks of the time: pedestrian dance movement a la Yvonne Rainer, narratives edited along parallel lines yet containing overlapping symbolic myths, and the use of repetitious audio to tell tales so far removed from the pretentions of the artworld that they transcend genre.

Of these, Khikiriki is the harshest, with a cacophonous soundtrack and "talking heads" of weathered and tired people contrasted with unhappy animals and an image of longing: a paper boat on water, and the words "Louie, Louie, me got to go." The singularly beautiful Mayami: Between Cut and Action (1986) is in a different tempo altogether. It features an agelessly beautiful man in pancake makeup who slowly manipulates two dolls in gestures of mourning and reconcilliation.

Labat's interventions captured on video caricature a mythologized culture. Gong Show (1978) and POV (1981) anticipate both reality television shows and the artworld's Relational Aesthetics trend. The video from the 1990s is less compelling, more casual, less personal. Talk Show (1992), Achromatic (1992), and The Janitor (1996) feature student actors who at times seem tense and humiliated. The videos also hit a sexist, backlash note on occasion. His turn toward farce in these works may have been a foil for the artworld's hypocrisy (as he became more and more a fixture of it), but we find he cannot have it both ways.

Male identity underlies much of Labat's work, even in the very early "performance" which attracted Langton Art's attention and ultimately spawned this exhibition. The breadth afforded the male psyche is touching in Labat's work; the doppelganger puppeteer in Mayami and the ballroom dancer in The Janitor, for example. His men and boys expose their competitiveness, playfulness, receptivity, and desire for procreation in equal measure.

While New Langton's video screening represented Labat's many video works well, the large gallery upstairs held twenty-seven pieces, a representative survey of his work. While several objects labeled "Relics" are elegant residues of performances or videos (such as the paper boat from Khikiriki) others are works in and of themselves, such as Skyscraper (1978-2000), a sculpture made of videotape cases, or "Body Drawings" (1977). I felt neither type constitutes a large enough group to see any single object in the context it deserves. In contrast, the accompanying catalog (a book in its own right) is full of quality reproductions of about two hundred items. Perhaps the exhibition designers felt that it would crowd the space to include more, but the dearth of connective objects felt anemic. I imagined an exhibit constructed around Labat's personality, the larger-than-life character we see in so many of his works. I felt that the space left so minimal was a missed opportunity to cast in relief his obvious obsession with finding treasure among the everyday.

New Langton Arts has smartly reviewed Labat's successful career, hopefully sharing a little of the limelight. This reciprocity felt alive in the gallery and I trust the artist and the organization will benefit and flourish in virtue of the risks they have taken.

EMILY KUENSTLER, MFA, is a 2004 graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute.