MAGNUSON: A VIDEO CHAMELEON

One of Ann Magnuson’s earliest TV memories is John F. Kennedy’s funeral. “I think all the bands that played made a big impression, because all of us neighborhood kids went out and banged on pots and pans,” she recalled. “Then I made a papier-mache model of the President and we all tried to revive him. I called it our assassination game.”

Magnuson winced. “I remember my mother was appalled. She told us to knock it off.”

The unusual event may have signaled the debut of Magnuson’s career as an outrageous performance-art comedienne. Dubbed the Funny Girl of the Avant-Garde, Magnuson has emerged as one of the most celebrated figures in the wee-hours New York club scene, a guerrilla satirist who revels in the accumulated absurdity of pop culture.

Working the East Village gallery and video circuit, she’s introduced such wiggy characters as Anoushka, the dreary Iron Curtain chanteuse; Kimberley Crump, the addled anchorwoman; Fallopia, a hilariously trashy Prince protege; and Mrs. Rambo, who leads an armed mission into Bloomingdale’s to save Nancy Reagan from getting a bad makeup job at the Yves St. Laurent counter.

Magnuson will bring this arsenal of caricatures to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions at 8 tonight as part of the gallery’s “TV Generations” series, which runs through April 12. (See adjacent related story.) Her performance marks the L.A. debut of “Tammy’s Nightmare,” a combination stage and video act which features Tammy Jan, a madcap evangelist character who gets knocked senseless during aerobics class and drifts off into TV purgatory.

“I love doing all these characters, especially because it gives me the freedom to really let go,” said Magnuson, a henna-haired 28-year-old who looks like a young Shirley MacLaine. “It’s like I take a vacation from myself, like I’m reincarnated without really dying.

“These characters are sort of a cross between satire and an anthropological field trip. I guess they’re 3-D cartoons. It’s as if you get to change the channel on your psyche. That’s what’s so great about TV. I like changing channels. In fact, I can’t seem to stop.”

Born in Charleston, W.Va., Magnuson became obsessed with TV at an early age--her favorite program as a kid was “The Loretta Young Show.”

In college, she took a film class and soon found herself experimenting with oddball video projects. “I started to make a typical teen surrealist film, but ended up doing a Super-8 movie on Elvis,” she said, sipping coffee at a downtown eatery here as she “recovered” from an aerobic rehearsal for her performance. “Then I was supposed to do a task-oriented movie, so I filmed my roommate making up her boyfriend to look like David Bowie.”

Magnuson eventually moved to New York, where she helped found Club 57, a now-defunct “Dada cabaret” that became a popular watering hole for local artists, musicians and video pioneers. “We’d screen monster movies and put on shows with different themes every week. If it was ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ night, then I’d serve drinks in a halter-top and cut-offs and pour a bucket of carrot juice over my head.”

In 1983, she performed a tribute to Muzak at the Whitney Museum, using the museum elevator as a stage, serenading passengers with renditions of schlock standards.

More recently, Magnuson has appeared as Raven, a wild-eyed, dominatrix whose heavy-metal group, Vulcan Death Grip, performs such songs as “Pigs Squeal in Fear.” Another popular character is evangelist Alice Tully Hall, a backwoods preacher who is moved by spirits which often come in the form of a bottle of Wild Turkey.

Magnuson also has made brief appearances in several films, including “Desperately Seeking Susan” and “The Hunger.”

But she has earned the most accolades from “Made for TV,” a startling video which aired on PBS’ “Alive From Off Center” series last summer. Featuring a series of fragmented images, as if an unseen viewer impatiently were changing channels on a TV set, it displays Magnuson playing a kaleidoscope of female TV characters. The video showcases Magnuson’s talents as a video chameleon, as she rummages through TV’s pop-culture junk heap.

“TV has always had this amazingly powerful effect on me,” she said. “Even when I was a kid, after watching the war on TV, I had these dreams of GIs and Viet Cong invading our suburban home and killing everyone. You know, like a My Lai massacre on the linoleum.”

Sometimes you get the feeling that Magnuson sees herself as a TV character sprung to life. When she describes her small-town upbringing, she likens it to a “Father Knows Best” existence. She joked about her outfit of the day--an all-black ensemble of tights, T-shirt and spiked heels--as “my Laura Petrie look.”

Her heroes are TV wizards like Jonathan Winters and Andy Kaufman. It’s no wonder that her idea of a compliment is “when people can’t tell whether my stuff’s for real or not.” She’s a video sponge--give her 24 hours of TV and she could easily put together a whole new act.

“TV’s so great, because it lets you stretch the boundaries of your imagination. It allows you to create a whole new vocabulary. That’s the idea behind the pace of ‘Made for TV.’ We’re so deluged with information all the time that it’s almost impossible to get any perspective.

“Everything is spiraling faster and faster, like water going down a toilet. So all these old TV images are like found art--you want to exorcise yourself of all this stuff. And I think you can create new things by recycling elements of the past. You just take the images and use them as a springboard, so you can jump high enough to get a new perspective.”

However, Magnuson worries that her satirical energy, which offers such a loopy, nightmarish view of our junk culture, may never find a comfortable home in the homogenized world of today’s television. “The pursuit of fame has become pretty anachronistic,” she said. “But I’d love to have my own TV show, or at least the resources to get my ideas on the air.

“It would be great to live out a whole subversive TV myth--you know, like the Smothers Brothers did. Get my show on the air, get in trouble with the network, then get canceled and end up . . . doing the back rooms in Atlantic City.”

Magnuson laughed. “I guess the whole idea is to celebrate all the crazy stuff we’ve grown up with. I just like to take my characters over the edge and then see what happens.”

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