REVIEW: The Lab at Belmar
The Lab at Belmar in suburban Denver takes as its recipe: one part humor, one part serendipity, one part seriousness and one part everything else (imagery, discourse, discussion, party-time). And the results are delightfully hard to pin down, being neither museum nor academy; but often the source of something stimulating, even exhilarating (traditional institutions: take note). The most recent 'exhibit' is a case in point. I should say two 'exhibits' because they are separately defined, although located side by side in exhibit spaces. The artists involved probably had never heard of each other before this event and in many ways could not be more different. The Plains of Sweet Regret is a visual poem by master cinematographer, Mary Lucier. Phil Bender's Last Place presents serially and generically arranged found objects from everyday life - pots and pans, pitch forks, yardsticks from long ago lumberyards, etc., etc... Despite this, there is between them a common thread: the sense of abandonment and loss, of an unwritten history barely remembered and even less cared about in this unusual dual reliquary.
The Plains of Sweet Regret
Something like a century-old patchwork quilt, Ms. Mercier's The Plains of Sweet Regret is a series of pictorial anecdotes (in motion) of life as it once was and as it is now in that vast swathe of the USA: The Great Plains. Specifically set in northeast North Dakota, the footage stands in for everywhere else as well as that stretch of land, once the familiar backdrop to homesteaders and settlers whose small one-family residences and farms formed a palimpsest of 19th century American hopes and desires, combining a sense of freedom with a pride in ownership of the land, however meager its alluring bounty. And of course the tale is not yet told. So we see country roads stretching for miles with hardly any sense of life about them, perhaps one distant slowly moving car at best. And these scenes show, in close-up: abandoned 'soddies', weather beaten frame houses, a left-behind car from the 1930s, a white clapboard church whose doors flap open into eternity, a now empty town hall; and even closer-up: an old fashioned school desk with a hole on top where an inkwell once dwelt, a large tea kettle on a coal stove where the hastily-departing left it, some small iconic statues that might have reminded those departed of what was lost. In their place, the cattle "operation" (no longer just a ranch) symbolized by a birthing cow, a giant steam-belching mill (undoubtedly receiving raw material from vast industrially farmed, or perhaps mined acreage). The piece ends with dissolving split-screen imagery of a contemporary country rodeo (this one in Devil's Lake, ND) with a typical assemblage of ropes, horses, cowboys, Brahma bulls and clowns all set to George Strait's song, I Can Still Make Cheyenne, a tune that seems both very old and very modern, all at once about the quiet desperation of desire. Much is compressed into the mere 18 minutes this film takes from beginning to end, yet I was somehow struck with the thought of how the cycle of life, never complete, passes on amid the enormous wonderment of being which these lonely outposts strewn across The Great Plains somehow symbolize.
Last Place
Phil Bender's presence in Denver is as ubiquitous as it is pervasive - he is of course well and widely known here for his presentation of everyday objects in ordered tableaus depicting anything but always the same thing: at once, i.e.; all forks or all knives or all spoons, or all place settings, but never admixed as in: all forks except for one knife. And that is, of course, a point well taken. And as usual we see in his show here at the Lab's generically selected objets trouves - kitchen utensils, pitchfork, flip-open match holders, etc. - arranged serially in columns and rows. But there is more here than meets the eye, as the artist, no doubt, would insist. I especially remember row upon row of 18-wheeler mud guards lined-up at a Bender-exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, each one of them possessing the dreary similarity of used, but still almost identical industrial products, now worn out and discarded; each made different by that same road-wear that consumed them and little else, bearing silent witness to a seemingly endless history of industrial productivity and ingenuity and the rubbish that remains.
The objects in this show are different only in that they all seem as if and probably are discards from another era, from the 1930s through the 1970s - the pre-computer chip era. Most still look serviceable enough but the culture that made them necessary has been replaced as well. A wall of wooden tennis racquets recalls a past when long whites were worn and Technicolor movies were the latest rage. Beaded Indian belts for boy and girl cowpokes, used pinochle boards all speak to the past enthusiasms of a me-too culture. Pitchforks and used stepladders, not to mention used kitchen implements, recall lost hours of labor, all somehow glistening in their worn out trashiness - drifting together into a timeless patina of lost immediacy. In a sense, this exhibit is the perfect corollary to The Plains of Sweet Regret bringing with it those many objects that were part of everyday in the lonely farmhouses and small towns that once swarmed over the plains from Texas to the Canadian border.
But something else is going on here as well. The beaded belts, fabricated doilies, the colorful pinochle boards are hung at each end of the hall. One of the long walls has metallic implements mainly, the other mostly wood, cardboard and glass. The center panel adorned with tennis racquets on one side and replicated - somehow desperately unimaginative - artwork on the other. Each matrix seems somehow to be in order as if obeying a higher simplicity of design and architecture - a meta-order perhaps, not of categories but of shapes and purposes amid endless banality.
Failure
The space that houses Failure is usually reserved for lectures, talks and parties. To me the space has never seemed terribly prepossessing in itself. Perhaps it was originally designed with the thought that energy company sales executives could hold regional meetings there. At any rate, the invitational group-show here of about 50 smallish pieces seems more like an attempt to add aesthetic interest to the otherwise somewhat dull wall space. In this it only partially succeeds, as each individual piece is too small to see except in close proximity. But the participating artists are all arguably successful career-wise, so the upshot, if we are to think of failure as the flipside of success, is that perhaps this was a successful dead end.
By Marina Graves