Chicken Shack (That’s Where It’s At) : A nightmarish salon for artists and musicians offers television art, junkyard litter and cinematic illusions

The exact location of the Chicken Shack is a guarded secret. To get there, you have to know somebody who knows somebody.

But once you’ve been inside, you become part of the family.

So when you walk in, stop by the costume room to dress in colorful jackets and a fireman’s hat. Next, scurry through the fluorescent tunnel. Step into the main room, the dark one, and pick up a musical instrument. Play, even if you can’t. Create some art. Read a book. Lounge on the patio, in the shadow of Greek columns.

Know that you are probably being watched. Much of what happens at the Shack is videotaped.

Simply stated, this place is a huge chicken coop in the back yard of a San Fernando Valley home. The structure has been gutted and rebuilt as a nightmarish salon where artists and musicians hang out.

But that doesn’t adequately explain the Shack. Try . . . an over-sized children’s clubhouse filled with props from B horror films . . . a maze of rooms where static plays on broken televisions . . . a cross between Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” and the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”

With its careful attention to television art, junkyard litter and cinematic illusions, this is a quintessential Los Angeles invention. The Shack also is most likely illegal by building-code standards. If city inspectors discovered the place, they would probably shut it down. Thus, secrecy about the address.

“It’s like Shangri-La, hidden away in the Tibetan mountains,” said Lynn Coleman, a Woodland Hills painter. “You walk in and you’re immediately transported into a different frame of mind.”

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The Shack was built, and is still being built, by Kilgore Bohorquez.

Bohorquez, who also goes by the names Steve and Dirt, has been a plumber, fisherman and itinerant surfer. About 15 years ago, he decided that he was an artist and set out to construct an artwork big enough to inhabit.

“The whole idea for building this was to have a place for people to congregate,” said the boyish 39-year-old. “I invited some people I knew. After a while, they started inviting their friends.”

On Sunday afternoons, 20 or 30 guests will drift in for a barbecue. Some are well-known--a successful Los Angeles artist, or a musician who used to play with REO Speedwagon. Poets, sculptors, cartoonists and amateur film makers round out the gatherings.

Nighttime parties at the Shack draw larger crowds. Most of these parties have themes--perhaps everyone will play music, or the guests might make a group film.

And people drop by on their own. On one day, a UCLA film student arrives to shoot in the patio. On another, artist Craig Stecyk stops by to take photographs for his upcoming exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum.

You might expect to find this beatnik scene in New York or San Francisco. Steven Lavine, president of CalArts, said it sounds like the coffeehouses of Budapest and the cafes of Vienna, places where artists gathered in years past.

“That kind of thing is really significant; it’s one of the most exciting things that can happen in the arts,” said Joy Silverman, executive director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. “That’s where real creativity takes place. The things that happen are more spontaneous.”

The Shack’s surroundings belie such promise. The neighborhood is old. You can’t see the Shack from the street, only the house in front with its neglected lawn. Around back is a quarter-acre yard marked by piles of beer bottles, weathered lumber and rusted plumbing.

“These are my art supplies,” Bohorquez said. “Basically it’s stuff that you can find walking down any alley.”

The Shack--a simple wood building--fills half the back yard. Often visitors are greeted at the front door by a man wearing a fez, a high school band jacket and red leather pants. Fake blood drips from his ears, eyes and mouth.

“I am Dr. Fez,” he says. “Welcome to the Chicken Shack.”

Dr. Fez leads you through a tunnel-like entryway where everything is painted fluorescent. Radio static blares from hidden speakers. Wires and tubes dangle from above.

To one side, through a hidden passage-way, lies the dressing room. Straight ahead, at the end of the tunnel, is a door to the main room, a sort of underworld cocktail lounge.

Television monitors fill this room with gray, flickering light. Three small stages, equipped with conga drums, guitars and amplifiers, await the musically inclined.

Much of the action takes place here.

Jam sessions run all afternoon and into the evening as professional musicians play next to the tone-deaf. Several musicians play for an hour, take a break and are replaced by others. Much of the videotaping takes place in the main room as well. At one party, Bohorquez filmed while Dr. Fez walked around as Mexican Baby Man, an infant in diapers and a sombrero.

“The more flamboyant people were trying hard to be artsy and get in the video. The rest of us were in the background,” recalled Lonnie Lloyd, who draws story boards for Disney cartoons. “We had all these instruments made of old, rusty car parts and we would bang them in unison. We just kept playing, banging, making our own music.”

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Adjoining the main room is a video-editing room (where party footage is being spliced into a film) and a well-stocked library. Finally, out the back door is a patio bordered by oil drums on one side and a dilapidated, 1949 “Woody” station wagon on the other. At the center of the area, Bohorquez is working on a sculpture that can be climbed like a tree.

The patio is a favorite spot for discussing art, drinking beer and listening to music. A few people stopped by on a recent afternoon. When a visitor began taking photographs, everyone donned Mexican wrestling masks.

Throughout the grounds, nothing is as it seems. The jagged sheet glass on the floor of the tunnel is a piece of clear plastic. The boulders on the patio, like the Greek columns, are movie props that Bohorquez brought home from film sets.

“I think it’s a great tool for breaking down your inhibitions, kind of like drugs used to be,” said Coleman, the painter. “The people are just as bizarre as the surroundings.”

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Creating this environment costs little: The stuff is junk or is donated. A salesman friend brings tile samples, which form odd patterns in the floor. Someone always has a spare broken television. Another person finds a great deal on 10 truckloads of crushed blacktop, which Bohorquez uses to cover the dirt in the back yard.

“People get hooked on the Shack and they start to contribute,” Bohorquez said. “They say, ‘I have something that is worthless to me, but it would be perfect here.’ ”

The Chicken Shack is Bohorquez’s third attempt at creating a full-scale, art-environment hangout. The first time, property owners kicked him out. The second time--in his mother’s garage--building inspectors stumbled onto the place and made him dismantle it.

Purely by luck, Bohorquez and his girlfriend, Karen Reynolds, landed at the Shack. This version of Bohorquez’s dream is six years old.

It turns out that Dr. Fez owns the property and lives in the front house. Dr. Fez speaks in single-sentence, semi-sensical outbursts, so it is unclear exactly who he is, what he does or why he invited Bohorquez and Reynolds to live with him. They stay in a fixed-up garage.

“It’s unusual,” Reynolds said of the couple’s life style. “It’s just our circumstance.”

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Bohorquez and Reynolds work occasionally, designing sets for low-budget movies. The majority of their time is spent on the Shack. Bohorquez will pick something from a junk pile and make something of it. “I try to keep my work subconscious, spontaneous,” he said. He’ll get halfway through a piece, put it aside and pick it up months later when suddenly there is a need for it.

Bohorquez is working on a film with Dr. Fez. They have accumulated 140 hours of tape, but the plot remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, the Shack continues to expand.

“When you pass an old painting in a trash dump and you can’t decide if it’s ugly or beautiful or just strange, that’s the kind of thing you drag out to the Shack and contribute it,” said Slim Evans, drummer for the now-defunct band Rank and File. “There are Valley-surf-tropical-Hollywood-Mexican influences with a Tiki consciousness in there too.”

Perhaps it’s fitting that this place found a home in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Bohorquez said the extravagance of his artistic experiment plays well against the Valley’s suburban backdrop.

“If any place needs it, the Valley does,” Bohorquez said. “The Valley has such a bad rap as being a cultural wasteland . . . and deservedly so.”

One day, if Bohorquez can manage it, art will fill the entire back yard of this property, along with a guest cottage for visitors and water-filled canals. The Shack will become a Watts Towers of the Valley.

“Right now, everything here is evolving,” Bohorquez said. “I’m just not sure where it’s evolving to.”