Silent & Sensuous

Moving Pictures meet Bedroom Paintings

bedroom painting at the Lab at BelmarThis bedroom painting is not in the show at the Lab, but is simply for your viewing pleasure.

by Terry Talty
May 23, 2008

To see in new Window: Silent Films Bedroom Paintings

LAKEWOOD -  The Lab at Belmar specializes in juxtapositing of incongruities. Seductive, silent, scenery films from the 1910s roll simultaneous on three screens in a dark gallery while in another brightly-lit one hang paintings of seven contemporary artists. The title of the show is Silent Films and Bedroom Paintings, and just as the Lab calls itself a juxtaposition of art gallery and public forum, this offering of two seemingly unrelated topics in one exhibition mimics the Lab's Modus Operandi. The Lab's most popular attraction, Mixed Taste, is a series of tag-team lectures presented every Thursday night throughout the summer.

Mixed Taste has paired goat cheese and land art, tequila with dark energy of the universe -- the list is long, and continues this summer -- Motown and gonzo journalism, Wittgenstein and Hula Dancing. Get the concept?

Jennifer Peterson, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, curated the Silent Films' half of the juxtaposition. Screens are suspended from the ceiling so viewers can walk around them, and see the three films rolling with no relationship to one another from both sides. This is not how the first viewers sitting in a dark, mohair-seated theatre in the early 20th Century, would have seen these films, but the curator has brought them to the future, isolated them in this small, one-level gallery to focus attention on their flickering, aesthetic qualities.

The subjects of the films are obviously from before WWI, and take viewers away in time. As they did with the original viewers, the films take the viewer to uncommon places like: traveling to European spas, down wild river gorges, into conversations with primitive peoples, along the entire life cycle of flies.

History is hard to avoid while watching the silent, B&W films because the clothing, the styles and props are obviously from early 1900s, but the show's setup asks you to try. And, while you're at it, avoid art history when viewing the paintings in the next gallery.

Adam Lerner, director of the Lab and curator of this section of the show, writes in the exhibition catalogue that the prevailing view of the 20th century was that each generation of artists advanced on the problems of the previous one. These are bedroom paintings, Lerner is saying. Sensuous for sensuous’s sake.

Standing around at the opening, the concept gets flushed out. "There are no high-minded concepts these artists are trying to get across," says one guy, "They're just fun to look at."

His friend says, "They're anti-conceptual art."

"These artists don't care what you do with the painting after you buy it, put it in the bedroom, donate it to a museum when you die, it doesn't matter," says another.

"I know Frank T. Martinez (one of the four Denver artists in the show), and he doesn't want this hidden away in a bedroom. He wants to sell them," says a woman.

Another says she didn't think bedroom painting implied they were unimportant or not part of art history.  “They're bedroom paintings because they are made for pleasure.”

"It all comes down to feeling," says another man, a photographer. He looks at paintings to see if they have "a feeling that I resonate with." He says he sometimes looks longer at paintings that don't resonate, to understand why they don't.

"Are you an artist?" another woman asks me. "If you are, then maybe you know more about why you like a painting, but I just know what I like and what I don't like."

I ask a recent graduate of the Rocky Mountain School of Art and Design what she thought. “Paintings are about art history,” she says. “An artist can't, and shouldn't avoid what she knows,” and goes on to say that, maybe, the current generation has been too vague about what is art and has failed her generation by not providing anything to care about.  “Many people my age,” she says, “don't care about anything.”

Back out in the lobby, I wonder if anyone has put anything together from the two shows. An established artist whose work was the subject of the past exhibition at the Lab, says he likes the juxtaposition. "There are some amazing triptychs that come out. I saw a camel, a maggot and a squirrel, at the same time."

Terry Talty wrote this view of the exhibition for the Art Tourist. Art tourism accounts for more tax revenue in Denver than any other type of venue including sports.