The Art Tourist goes to the Lab

Artist experiments with ideas at Lab at Belmar

DENVER – You know how it feels when you can't shut up the movie that's playing in your head? The same sounds or images keeps playing over and over and you just want to be quiet in your own body. Good conceptual art turns off the movie, for me, and I get something that floats in and lands on my pile of knowledge.

On Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2007, I went to hear an artist, Liam Gillick, talk about what he was going to be doing at the Lab at Belmar and I was optomistic that I would see good conceptual art. He said he was thankful to the lab for being a place where something good might turn up and no one had a preconceived idea about what that should be. The Lab had rustled up some student and young artists to work with Gillick, had put large, black, sans-serif letters high on six walls of the gallery space and had built eight or so edgeless, stage-like, unfinished wood platforms. The space smelled a little of fresh plywood.

During this lecture by the artist, he admitted that the space may look very similar on Saturday when the piece was "finished." Behind him was playing a movie made by the Medvedkin Group in 1974 at a Peugeot factory in provincial France. The film is not in general circulation and is one of the later products of the group of anti-industrial activists who lived through the high times of 1968 France and the student protests against oppression of workers. The artist had seen the earlier films and chose this one because it was six-years past the heyday.

He found it interesting that the workers, today, are not who they were in these films, rural Frenchmen and women, but immigrants from the French colonies. And today, the workers are Mexicans in the U.S., or Chinese in China and we, liberal, leftist, activist types, are not arm-in-arm with them as the leftist filmakers were with the workers in this film.

The artist looked like a 2007 actor in the film as he moved and talked in front of a screen that played the muted movie, explaining that he didn't want his work to be political or transparently political. He said it was probably because of his Irish background, but he didn't want to directly tell what he was going to do or what he thought because he didn't want "them" to know what that was.

He did say he wanted to give people the opportunity to put themselves into the place of the big bearded guy in the activist movie, making a speech asking workers to come build cars at Peugeot and enjoy a good life including plenty of leisure. I know this speech, not becasue there was any sound displayed with the film, but because the sales pitch of his speech was the root of the words on the walls which the artist had translated from French into English and then to large Helvetica letters. Having read them, I knew that if you put yourself on the platform and played the role of the bearded guy who looked like an activisit you were actually the spokesman for Industry, or the spoof of a spokesman, making unrealistic promises.

On Saturday evening, at the opening, no movie danced behind the artist or anyone who happened to stand on the biggest of the platforms. The visuals of the movie played in a smaller room entered by narrow double doorways. There, multiple LG monitors were oriented in different directions which detered a viewer from watching the movie, and encouraged just getting a sense of it as the monitors each played the film a few moments before or behind the others. It was a constantly rotating gallery of images from this film, and in the largest room, on the stage where the artist had spoken the previous night's lecture, a sketchbook was nailed on the stage and a speaker beneath it said, "read the book." The voice stopped when the book was opened, and the contents were English-ified words that when said aloud would be the French text of the film.

A student in the collective group who made this work had said on the night of the lecture that she expected the piece would be about knowledge production, and apparently the students and the artists talked about these ideas, which lead to more ideas, and, voila, knowledge production. I suggested to Gillick that he tie a string around each of their ankles and find out where they go from this spot in time to see if any actual knowledge was produced. (Against some labor (volunteer labor) laws?)

For me, I still didn't know if this piece was giving enough so that any art tourist, any man from the street, could buy this production. I went back the next day to give myself another opportunity to be open to this "So Show," an Americanization of the name of the French town, Sochaux, the seeting of the movie. I still didn't know if the space quieted me like a good yoga lessson or nirvana-progressing meditation, so I went to the discussion with the artist and the curator on Sunday.

The artist said he had been told by a mentor some twenty years ago that, "we (he, the mentor and all of us liberal, artist types) are all on the same side of the barrier in the class struggle. The barrier is the word for what the French used when they blocked the streets in the French revolution (1778) and the May student protests (1968). Thinking about this, the artist said, he was not sure where or what the barrier was, and actually how many of them there were in the struggle between workers and the other side. I'm not sure I could have walked into this space as arranged by the artist, Liam Gillick, and absorbed all this. I've given the whole idea a lot of time, and I am ready to say, it was worth doing, so I turned to my companion, and he summed it up beautifully: "It is always good for your mind to have different things juxtaposed against one another."

Terry Talty, the Art Tourist, is living and playing tourist in the country of Colorado, a place half the size of France and with the same human population as New Zealand.