ART REVIEWS : Charles LaBelle’s Bourgeois Revolution

In 1848, the members of the Paris Commune used stones ripped from the city’s streets to erect their ill-fated barricades. In 1993, Charles LaBelle uses the detritus of post-industrial society--old cushions and stained mattresses--to mount a revolution of everyday life.

Of course, mattresses can’t stop bullets. Indeed, at Robert Berman Gallery, LaBelle’s revolution exists on a plane that is largely theoretical. It’s patterned after the arcane programs of the Situationist International, an avant-garde group whose theses and tactics were influential in leading to yet another French Revolution--that of May, 1968.

The site of class struggle has always been the city. Like the Situationists, LaBelle fixes on the urban milieu, with its issues of territory, boundaries and control. How are shared spaces navigated and then colonized? How might they be differently navigated in order to shift the relations of power?

LaBelle’s installation, “Colonies II,” takes three different, intersecting approaches. First are the mattresses and cushions, found objects abandoned in alleys as refuse. Reclaimed by the artist, they have been transformed into the stuff of art. Arranged in tall stacks, each is mapped with an elaborate pattern of flags and tacks.

These patterns coyly refer to military campaigns, offensive strategies, defensive formations, etc. They suggest the extent to which a city is a war zone, where control over space equals power.

The second element of the installation offers a photographic record of a “psycho-geographic excavation” (another Situationist phrase). LaBelle includes three maps, annotated with red flags, and 54 laser-print photographs, which document all the discarded Christmas trees he discovered in a bounded area over a three-day period.

The choice of the Christmas tree is crucial: These middle-class luxury items reek not of good cheer, but of bad faith. Lying sideways in gutters, or wrapped up in white bags, they’re uncomfortably close to the city’s legion of other, abandoned bodies.

Finally, a 29-minute video, which records an acupuncture session undergone by the artist, comments on the ways in which the body, like space, is contested territory. His bare feet are smack in the viewer’s face, posed like Andrea Mantegna’s “Dead Christ,” and his body is pierced by sharp, silvery needles, each crowned with a map flag

LaBelle presents himself as a martyr, sacrificing all for art and revolution. On the other hand, he also emerges as quintessentially, self-indulgently middle-class, hoping for holistic relief from the urban maladies of back pain, head-ache and indigestion.

Despite the irony with which LaBelle addresses a failed ideal of artist-as-revolutionary, his work is marked by a powerful social conscience; by a hope that, if the artist can’t change everything, perhaps he can change something; and, by a belief that, if he can’t lead the struggle, perhaps he can fight, however vainly, against its collapse.

* Robert Berman Gallery, 2044 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9195, through Feb. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Successful Failures?: To an existing body of naggingly, irresistibly elliptical work, Theresa Pendlebury now adds “Failed Photographs.”

What is a failed photograph? Is it an aesthetic failure? A technical failure? A failure of nerve or of the will?

What about a failed photograph that fails precisely because it is not a photograph, but a pastel drawing of one--a drawing so unusually bland and flat that one doesn’t hesitate to call it a failure?

Not every drawing is a failure. But, in a certain sense, every photograph is. There is an inevitable gap between seeing and showing, between what was there and what is here, between what was then and what is now.

At Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Pendlebury’s five photographs redouble that sense of failure. These are copies of photographs taken in 1960, 1975, 1978, 1982 and 1984. They’re copies of copies of something we call reality, twice removed from an origin that remains forever out of reach.

A statue in a park at dusk, multicolored Christmas lights strung along the side of a building, a trio of red chairs lined up on a porch, a desert scene, an empty armchair. There is something banal and just plain wrong about each image: an off angle, a miscalculated mood, a sky that is too clear.

Yet, if these images are indeed failures, why did Pendlebury hold on to them? Was it to make sense of them at some future date, by re-enacting them--by “returning to the scene of the crime”? Can failed photographs inspire anything but failed re-enactments? Failed understanding? Failed interpretations?

Like a hall of mirrors, this work keeps multiplying in its own image, asking, with every question, more questions. In this way, it has anything but failed.

Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through Feb. 7. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.