La Bobgah's installation not for faint of heart

'Tis the season for spooky fun. Haunted houses and hayrides, scary movies and more will be coming your way like never before.

But already Downtown, there is a place just as creepy, a room where witches and bats will have you either screaming or weeping. A place where they watch as you enter the door, those spooky spirits, especially the three masked ones hanging high above the floor.

In the center of this haunted hovel, a queen witch holds court. All around her, the spirits dance and cavort. They dance and play in the most unusual way, with the intent to provoke by all possible means, as their antics play out on four tiny video screens.

Enter the world of Bob La Bobgah.

By far one of the Pittsburgh area's most unusual and interesting artists, La Bobgah has filled the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Gallery 707 with his latest installation, "Dada Puppet & The Oracle Trilogy."

Loosely based on the story of an old witch that is part of the centuries-old oral tradition of the Northwest Coast Indians, who captures disobedient children who wander into the forest, then cooks them and eats them, La Bobgah has created an installation and three videos that anticipate Halloween yet hearken back to the myths and mythologies of yesteryear.

Halloween is just another day for this video, installation and performance artist, who lives in Friendship in an old Victorian house that has a 30-foot-tall bamboo garden in its backyard. That's where he filmed the three videos on display, the main one of which features model Ericka Dilcer slowly donning various pieces that make up the central witch marionette figure.

Dressed in little more than Japanese Buto makeup, Dilcer interacts with a variety of props and gadgets, all of which La Bobgah crafted by hand. They range from plaster phalluses to an "oracle" made out of a Vidalia onion and four red feathers. Nearly all can be seen in the videos arranged in the gallery. Three stations -- Oracle I, II and III -- each hold a small video screen inside of suitcases attached to the walls. High above each of the three suitcases is another hand-sculpted mask of the witch that La Bobgah has fashioned from wet plaster.

La Bobgah was born and raised in Montreal, moving to Eastern Pennsylvania in the 1960s to complete a degree in psychology. But after five years in professional practice, he decided to give that up to become a full-time artist. That was in the early 1970s, and ever since, La Bobgah has been pushing the boundaries of what art is, and especially what people perceive.

"I guess it comes from being a psychologist," La Bobgah says. "I'm really interested in how people react to visual images, whether they are films, sculptures or whatever."

A voracious reader who enjoys everything from poetry to plays, especially those of the Japanese Kabuki and Noh variety, he also is interested in film, particularly those of Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), which goes along way in explaining the dramatic sense of doom and ever-changing subjects in his video works.

"Bergman kept experimenting," La Bobgah says. "Every single time he made a film, he did something different ... The idea of doing something different every time is interesting to me. It has a way of carrying you from one thing to the next."

Like Bergman, whose name came to define an entire genre of stark movies about the human condition, La Bobgah mines the human psyche through the use visual imagery combined with fragmented storytelling.

Eastern religions and American Indian mythologies hold a special allure for the artist. And he is especially interested in spirituality as it relates to the profane.

"They really are two things that are almost the same when you look at them," La Bobgah says. "When you look at the Tantric (tradition) in India, it is very spiritual, and the sexuality is very sexual and spiritual. But over here, in the Western world, sexuality is separated from the spiritual world."

True enough, La Bobgah's work is not for the prudish or faint of heart. In the videos, Dilcer and another female model continually interact with plaster phalluses and other seemingly sensual objects.

"It's on the edge of being a little provocative, but nothing happens," La Bobgah insists. "(The models) are just using the props in an interesting way."

The relative lewdness of what passes for sexuality in the videos is debatable. But more important, these works tap into something far more carnal: human frailty.

Theoretically, La Bobgah's work can be seen in alignment with the work of Hermann Nitsch (born in 1938), the Austrian artist who is the mastermind behind the Orgy Mystery Theater, a Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total art," that claims the attention of all the senses through a carnal display that is, at the very base level, psychoanalytic dramaturgy.

Since the 1960s, Nitsch's work has attempted to cause a catharsis in the viewer through the staging of excessive actions that involve a whole lot of guts and gore.

La Bobgah's works are nowhere near as bloody, but his pieces are equally compelling and creepy -- qualities he readily admits to aiming for.

"There is a feeling of pending disaster or pending death," he says of his work, adding that much of it is closely allied with the Buddhist philosophy that "the more you think about death, the richer your life is."

However, as dramatic as it all might seem, La Bobgah says of this particular installation, "It's silly. The whole thing is silly. It's nonsense."

Perhaps, but even so, it's the kind of nonsense that makes this installation all the more fun, making for an accidental haunted house that is perfect for the season.

Kurt Shaw can be reached at kshaw@tribweb.com.

Additional Information:

'Bob La Bobgah: Dada Puppet & The Oracle Trilogy'