This exhibition of recent work showcases Tony Labat’s peripatetic output, including a wall of casually scrawled drawings complemented by coffee stains; a video of the demolition of the artist’s 1977 Lincoln Continental; a graffitied painting made collaboratively with BKF, a tagger wanted for vandalizing Labat’s studio and later recruited by the artist; and a series of crisp, small-scale monochromes with flag mounts, erect and at full attention, screwed dead center onto their surfaces. Citation of modernism is rampant here, but it’s deployed with a swagger and a dose of barbed irreverence. So Labat redoes Fontana’s slash paintings with velvet paintings of Tony Montana (of Scarface infamy) glimpsed through the ripped canvas. This is probably not what Fontana had in mind when he claimed his trademark slashes freed artists to do as they like.
The show’s most significant work is also appropriative. Day Labor: Mapping the Outside (Fat Chance Bruce Nauman), 2006, comprises footage of day laborers waiting for work in the parking lot across from Labat’s studio, shot from his window over three months with a handheld camera and four hidden surveillance cameras. The largely Hispanic group of men drink coffee, talk on cell phones, horse around, and feed pigeons. But mostly they wait. The reference is to Nauman’s recent installation documenting the near-total inactivity of his studio’s interior at night. Labat’s move—to take the camera’s (and the artist’s) gaze outside—makes concrete what many have called a paradigmatic shift in contemporary art of late, from the artist’s own subjectivity to the fragile ecology and often violently unequal conditions of globalization. The stakes of this reversal could not be clearer, particularly in a city whose seemingly left-friendly politics has a tendency to create an environment of civic lassitude and inattention to difference. Finally, and on the subject of creating environments, since October Labat has overtaken the gallery space of artist-run Queen’s Nails Annex with BULK, a social club that makes the art opening the art, with poker and domino nights, shows by local bands, and an upcoming night of oxtail stew, the artist’s signature dish. Get it while it’s hot.
