Video artist Charles LaBelle’s retrospective at Lawrimore Project, entitled Polis/Persona, dramatizes a long-running dialogue between the artist and an indifferent physical environment he attempts to engage. Casting himself in the role of an enchanted wanderer, LaBelle transforms the blighted urban sprawl or filthy city park into his social context, stage backdrop, and artistic medium. Using video and projections of his own actions and interventions, he pieces together a detached and dystopian “Song of Myself” that Whitman would have much trouble recognizing. The forward thrust of America’s engine of progress and hope seems to have run out of steam and crashed somewhere on the outskirts of town, stranding its sole survivor - a post-medium Ishmael and sober comic straight-man.

In 2001: Space Odyssey, LaBelle documents our arrested state of manifest destiny with recurring images and circuitous movement. Affixing two cameras to the dashboard of his car for an entire year, he produced 1,600 3-hour VHS tapes. One feed recorded him driving during all hours of the day and night; the other captured the bleak Los Angeles he passed through. The colorless footage of his bald, bespectacled head is projected on the wall while 12 vintage iMacs show the unremarkable terrain he glided through each day, with one monitor designated for each month of the year. The monotony of wide roads lined with ugly storefronts, skinny palm trees, and blinding street lights is as endless and unvarying as the view of the artist’s head, which turns occasionally left or right in the driver’s seat. LaBelle’s subject is the ennui of the contemporary artist whose culture and society keep dealing him the same losing hand. Horace Greeley’s exhortation “Go west, young man!” must be reconciled with Jerry Brown’s “era of limits.”

In Blind Trajectory, an earlier, East Coast work, LaBelle is filmed wandering blindfolded in a Chroma Key Blue suit around New York City’s Thompkins Square Park, his arms outstretched. Like 2001: Space Odyssey, the artist’s wanderings are both explorative and directionless. While he can’t see, his magic video-invisibility suit does not work in this, the real world, and he stands out sharply against the gritty urban setting. Even so, no one pays him any mind as he fondles the parking meters in his attempt to circumvent the garbage-strewn block.  

The piece asks us to consider the artist’s role and audience in this broken, disconnected environment, as does LaBelle’s lonely and provocative Stars at Noon. It is a series of five performances and attempted social encounters that would have gone unnoticed save the blurry-edged photographic documentation we witness in the gallery. For five consecutive weeks, LaBelle ran a classified ad in the LA Weekly, announcing each time that he would be at a particular street corner over a period of several hours on a Sunday afternoon. The points themselves were determined by a star he superimposed on the map of Hollywood, giving the piece an ironic subtext of artistic ambition and probable failure. There was no explanation of his identity or purpose, just an announcement of the time and place.

We see LaBelle in a horrifying blonde wig and mustache, enormous glasses and series of suits, jackets, turtlenecks, and bell bottoms that make him look like an extra from Kojak. In some shots he wears a tuxedo and a blood-stained cast over his hand and forearm. He waits alone as the sun sets, holding his cigarette with the flair of a failed, forgotten actor as the traffic passes him by. There is humor in this contemporary artist allegory, but there is also a bitter poignancy to the cheap, theatrical poses LaBelle employs as he holds his own against the city’s shrug of indifference.

A more flamed-out sense of isolation and despair emerges in Cracker Actor, a series of 36 photographs that document LaBelle’s three week effort to paint the lyric’s to David Bowie’s song of the same name onto abandoned mattresses he found on the sidewalks of Hollywood. The song’s wild audacity is conveyed by its punchy declarative phrases, but the words lay dead and hopeless upon the soiled floral patterns left alongside the street. Each photo is an elegy of the Dionysian urges it proclaims and functions as a warning of its likely outcome.

LaBelle captures the melancholy of the contemporary artist and individual without the usual romanticism that often accompanies it. In Interior Song, we see a slide show of empty rooms inside a decaying and abandoned motel near the SeaTac Airport. Here broken furniture and shattered mirrors lay scattered on the floor along with refuse left behind by violent and long-departed guests. The audio is of a song taken from a cassette found among the detritus: “The Song of Repentance.” The voice, presumably that of a murderer on the lam, is as haunting as it is sadly off-key. There is something at once spot-on and wholly inadequate about the singer’s capacity to express his troubled state of mind. His artistic predicament, while of a different scale and urgency than our own, may feel strangely familiar.

Polis/Persona closed on April 12^th. Susan Robb’s The Challenge Nature Provides will be opening at Lawrimore Project Thursday, April 24^th from 6 to 10. That show will run through May 31^st.