Artforum

Critics Picks

by Tara McDowell

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.

San Francisco Chronicle

Jim Dine, Tony Labat and Ruth Eckland: wrecks, lies and videotape

Kenneth Baker

Saturday, December 15, 2022

Labat seeks the heart of American darkness: San Franciscan Tony Labat has made some desperate moves in his art career, including staging a boxing match in which he was a contestant, to perform the idea that art occurs at the convergence of preparation and opportunity. Among American conceptual artists, perhaps only Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim and Chris Burden have also put their bodies on the line to this extent.

Labat's recent work at Paule Anglim implies no personally life-threatening commitments, but it references various extreme states: paranoia, war, poverty, religious hallucination and caffeine rush. The work strikes notes of desperation more social than personal. Labat's fascination with impact comes sublimated here in the form of the video "Mata Crush" (2006), which dotes in slow motion on the destruction of an old Lincoln Continental by a crane-borne drop hammer. The Lincoln may symbolize the arrogance of American empire in its oil baron phase, and possibly even a phase in Labat's own life.

The video "Blur" (2007) records a long freight train crossing a traffic intersection, apparently shot through an auto windshield: Car after flatbed car speeds by, all bearing military equipment - spotless tanks, trucks, armored vehicles - possibly bound for one of the foreign wars that we manage to keep out of mind much of the time.

The train passes over and over again on the looped video, evoking "endless war for endless peace," as Gore Vidal calls it, and the ever-receding horizon of public debt that it entails. The very passivity of the camera reads as an expression of helplessness.

As counterpart to this depressing piece, Labat offers "Peace Roll" (2006), a video of performer Chelsea America Torres rolling across San Francisco a wheel-like sculpture in the form of a giant peace symbol. The pointless performance reads as an incantatory exercise, perhaps futile, but morally necessary in circumstances of political frustration and deadlock.

"TIR (After Niki) AK47" (2007) stands for the release of that frustration, in terms just as futile. It presents a photo-collage made from a bullet-riddled shooting range target bearing the image of an imaginary armed hijacker with a flight attendant hostage.

The adjacent "Target Painting (To be shot at)" (2007) refers to Jasper Johns' famous "Target" paintings and the economic and cultural realities that make them definitively not to be shot at.

The reference to Johns' "Flag" paintings in Labat's "Designated Area" paintings - small, square monochromes, each with a phallic flagpole holder attached - does not lift them above facile political statement.

The "Day Labor" series - videos and stills in which Labat captured the boring suspense experienced by day laborers waiting for pick-up jobs on a corner nearby his studio - makes for a disheartening study in the difficulty of waiting for fate to play itself out. It also forms an ambivalent exercise in the aesthetics of surveillance, for which Labat knows he has to answer. In a sense, without knowing it, the spied-upon laborers were working gratis for him.