The Janitor

1996, 58:13 min, color, sound

Produced in collaboration with students at the San Francisco Art Institute (where the artist is an instructor in performance and video), Labat presents a satire of the "Art Student" as social specimen, as experienced through the eyes of the school's bewildered janitor, who states, "I feel like a thermometer here, checking and marking the temperature like a cultural weatherman." Through humor and self-parody, Labat presents a world of pretentious art kids and addresses the predicament of art-making in a postmodern age. If artists suffer alienation, what about the janitors of the world, whose labor is to clean up the debris of messy performance art pieces?

Written and directed by The New Genres Pulp Video Class. Editor/Producer: Tony Labat. With Dale Hoyt as the Janitor.