Sunday in the Park With CalArts Takes an Artist’s View of Old and New West

It was not a typical Sunday in the park.

While a group of musicians played Celtic folk songs, children mounted a toy horse and got soaked by a water-pistol cowpoke.

In another part of the park, a young man dressed only in newspapers handed out matchboxes inscribed with the message: “There is no good or bad art, only different levels of perception.”

So it went at the California Institute of the Arts’ “Mini Festival and Medicine Show” on Sunday in Newhall’s William S. Hart Park. With the help of a grant from the Valencia Co., about 20 CalArts students for the first time introduced park visitors to the Valencia campus’s zany brand of art and humor.

The event was the product of a semester-long interdisciplinary class combining elements of the institute’s dance, music, film video, art and theater schools. Using a variety of artistic approaches, the students explored different aspects of the West, from the cowboys of the Wild West to suburban life in the new West.

Picnic Opener

The event began with a picnic for children and concluded with a walk up a hill to the William S. Hart mansion, where visitors heard “tall tales and outright lies” in performances by a group called the “Rolling Suburban Medicine Show.” On the way up, walkers passed singers in trees, dancers wearing miners’ helmets and a band of cowboys on mopeds disguised as horses.

David Stout, a CalArts instructor who taught the class and organized the event, said the park was chosen for its Wild West heritage. Hart, the silent-film cowboy star, donated the 265-acre property to Los Angeles County in 1946. His 26-room ranch house overlooked an active film community in Newhall, once a favorite setting for cowboy movies.

Eye of the Storm

“We picked this place because, for one thing, it’s the eye in the storm of development and yet it had a connection to the past,” Stout said. “This is also a park where the Hispanic community comes together, so there were a lot of ideas” for artists to explore.

Mark Coniglio, 28, a CalArts music composition major, arranged eight portable stereos playing tapes with different Western themes. One of the tapes played a passage from a book by the Austrian-born modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. At the same time, howling wolves were heard against a backdrop of a Weedeater while another tape played the sound of a bouncing racquetball.

“We’re just taking this Western William S. Hart theme, yet trying to integrate the ideas of expansion in the Old West and expansion in the new West because this is a town that’s growing so quickly,” Coniglio said.

The nearby Antelope Valley and the city of Santa Clarita were among the fastest growing communities in Los Angeles County in 1988, the state Department of Finance reported last week.