PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Highways: A New Path to Hear Views of the Disenfranchised

The launching of the space shuttle Atlantis, the jury’s verdict on Oliver North and the inauguration of Highways may not seem to be related beyond sharing Thursday among their realities.

But they are--if you listen to Tim Miller and Linda Frye Burnham, co-directors of the brand-new Santa Monica gallery for performance art.

For these subculture impresarios see their functionally appointed, high-ceilinged complex as an intersection between art and society, a forum for victims of sociopolitical abuse--we’re talking Vietnam War vets, the homeless, California’s Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned during World War II, AIDS sufferers without recourse to medical care, Jewish lesbians, battered black wives.

And so eager were they to embrace the disenfranchised who dabble in various forms of low-impact, inchoate street theater that the opening became a marathon event lasting until 11:45 p.m.

The good news is that Highways exists and with it a platform for deserving performance artists. The bad news concerns the inaugural’s presenting choices.

It took Miller himself to rescue the evening, and did he ever. He gave us a one-man show that purged all shabbiness from the scene. His rhapsodic visions of Pacific myths and vigils outside County General Hospital “in beautiful East L.A.” were punctuated with poetic direness and wrought with passion and irony and literacy. His heated message, that “this is a time for art to be useful,” could not have had a more compelling spokesman. The word artist belonged to him. And to Rachel Rosenthal, the other heavyweight of the evening. Her stunning impersonation of a sensitive gorilla and a silly self-important trainer illuminated human foolishness and held up a mirror to the sham of our so-called civilized decorum.

So did Douglas Sadownick make a strong showing with his tragi-hilarious account of the Sports Connection: For two groups--the old Eastern European Jews with Nazi numbers on their arms and the young strutting gays whose fate is AIDS--”the message is death.”