LA Alive! 2-Day Arts Festival With a Local Flavor : 2 Unusual Works Expected to Light Up Music Center Plaza

As a “light artist” working on a grand scale with sophisticated technical equipment, Michael Hayden has learned to be patient while explaining what the big words mean. But he views the feats of engineering simply as a means to an end.

“I don’t do science-fair art,” he said in a recent phone conversation en route from installing one of his works at the Edmonton (Alberta) Advanced Technology Center . When the piece he created for the Mark Taper Forum colonnade at the Music Center starts creating rainbow images on the plaza this weekend, “I just want people to be blown away by how beautiful this is.”

Hayden’s “Lumetric Presentation” is one of two works commissioned from local visual artists by LA Alive!, a free multi-arts festival at the Music Center Plaza Saturday and Sunday.

The other offering, “The Annotated Lipchitz,” is the brainchild of John White, a painter and sculptor best known for his major contribution to Los Angeles performance art. Starring the extra-beefy guys and small-boned women collectively known as the Shrimps, a truckload of Salvation Army furniture and a “sound sculpture” by Michael Brewster, the 30-minute performance piece will interact in unexpected ways with Jacques Lipchitz’s “Peace on Earth” sculpture and the fountain in the plaza.

Vancouver-born Hayden, who said he was thrown out of art college in Canada “because I wanted to make art using (technology) accessible to guys living now,” has spent the last two decades making public sculptures in the U.S., Canada and Europe that involve light, sound, video imagery and viewer-interactive mechanisms.

“If Michelangelo had access to the great (technological discoveries) we have, he’d have been just as likely to use them as I am.”

Two of Hayden’s pieces are permanently installed in downtown Los Angeles: “Generations of the Cylinder,” a 270-foot-long piece in the International Jewelry Center arcade that responds to the body heat of pedestrians, and “Inverted Stele,” a 100-foot-tall steel frame in a helix design that incorporates light tubes, a work commissioned by Security Pacific Bank for the interior atrium of the Beaudry Center Building.

Hayden doesn’t even make drawings of his sculptures until they’re finished, because he likes to feel free to rejigger details as he works. “The conditional attitude is a very healthy one,” he feels. “You end up with something alive and kinetic and right for that environment.”

After winning the invitational competition for the LA Alive! project, he went down to look at the site with the thought that he’d create a light-emitting work. But he immediately realized it would be washed out by the sunlight.

OK, in that case he’d make a piece dependent on light, using technology he had never tapped before. It would be a holographic deposit etched in the billions of “hills and valleys” that make up the iridescent surface of a defraction grating--on mirrorized 2-by-4-foot plates.

Hung on the exteriors of six columns of the Taper arcade, the 24 plates will break up sunlight (as well as light from other sources) into a dazzling spectral array.

Hayden uses so-called non-imaging holograms in his work. (“I’m not interested in having a girl wink,” he said, referring to a well-known holographic image.) So the rainbows that will be thrown on the plaza below are pure prismatic effects.

“I’m accused of using spectral arrays so I don’t have to make a color choice,” he joked. “But light, colored light, is what I’m pursuing. . . . Rainbows are traditionally available only after a rain or during a rainstorm. I want to make a rainbow available when there’s no rain.”

Believing that “the responsibility of any artist is to make pieces that speak to everybody,” Hayden likes the idea that the people who appreciate his work “can be anyone who happens to see it, not (only) the people who’ve been following my career.”

White, on the other hand, spent nearly 20 years in the rarefied world of performance art, making affable chalk-talk pieces heavily dependent on humorous word games, before he “retired” to his Venice studio in 1986 to concentrate on his painting.

“I said to myself about a year ago that performance has gone so uptown and become such a large form involving a large budget and theater people and production people,” White recalled recently. “I felt that a lot of artists were losing control of the medium.”

So what induced him to create “The Annotated Lipchitz”?

Well, there’s nothing like a spot of cash. The award for the winner of the LA Alive! art competition was $8,000, eight times the amount of money White usually had to spend on a piece. With a full wallet, he could afford to hire the Shrimps, with whom he’d worked before, commission a work from Brewster (whose acoustic sculptures have been shown at major museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), buy decent props, sign on some good sound technicians and even take everybody out to dinner after rehearsals.

To determine exactly what he would do with the site, he hung out at midday, watching the behavior of tour groups and office workers on their lunch hour. He saw that they all ignored the black sculpture of a dove holding in its beak the upswept skirts of a squat female figure held aloft by human and animal figures.

Then the fountain went shooting up and everybody paid attention.

Aha, thought White. “Why don’t I have a piece that focuses on the Lipchitz and the water and keeps the audience’s attention for about 30 minutes.”

He decided to have the Shrimps walk out from behind the audience, “moving quickly at a high, upbeat pace” as they tote ladders, tires, baseball gloves, couches and other ordinary items--all painted black like the sculpture--to the accompaniment of a heavy, pounding sound. The women do the heavy-duty moving, and the heavy-set guys come off as weaklings.

Then, when the forest of variously sized objects is spread out on the plaza, the fountain leaps upward and is immediately shut off. (“It goes pwwww and just stops.”) In the resulting silence, Brewster’s piece starts.

“He’ll be sitting in a little box, making sounds with the things he brings,” White said. “A feeling like a wave will come over the audience but it’ll be abstract, not wave sounds.”

At the end, after activities that are mostly plotted in advance but with a generous leeway for improvisation (a hallmark of White’s performance pieces), the Shrimps remove all the objects, “so you see the beginning, middle and end of how a piece is put together.”

And what does all of this have to do with Lipchitz’s “Peace on Earth”? Is the piece some kind of homage to the late French sculptor?

Not exactly. And no, it’s not intended as a butt of humor, either. For White, whose drawings often contain a central mountain shape and who drew from Lipchitz’s models during his student days, the sculpture is essentially “a large shape that was familiar to me.”

White has thrown himself into creating a piece with broad appeal, so much so that he has discouraged artist friends from attending the two performances (3 p.m. Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday).

And yet, he says, “I’ve shown it to some people and they’ve said, ‘Don’t worry, John, it’s not a watered-down piece. It still says art .’ ”