TV REVIEW : KCET’s ‘Take Five’ Starts With Avant-Garde Art

Got five minutes? That’s all you’ll need to take in “Take Five,” the five-minute programs that KCET will begin airing four nights a week at 7:30, starting Tuesday. Beginning July 10, each of the four nights will be devoted to a different subject, but this week KCET is focusing on only one--arts and culture, including a half-hour collection of short pieces at 7:30 tonight.

The focus of tonight’s “Take Five: Arts” is on the West Coast avant-garde, with a vengeance--so much so that a better title might be “Take Five: Is It Art?”

The centerpiece of the five segments is, fittingly enough, a quick, sly look at an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. If you, as I, find MOCA an aggravating, depressing home for no-point, no-fun modern art, don’t miss this. Even the artists here seem confused about their work. We hear one of them saying, “It’s hard to tell, in looking at the piece, exactly what its point is. . . .” Another, who has put together something resembling a bunch of bulletin boards, says, “(The boards) become works of art of a very high order only because they’re, basically, in a museum of high art.”

The other four segments take their artistes considerably more seriously, even the first one on choreographer Bella Lewitzky--despite the fact that Lewitzky seems to specialize in what might be called MOCA dance. Try to keep a straight face as she explains how she “always tries to have something in my dances that is a walk” and then see her dancers do exactly that, walk.

But Joe Frank will knock that smile off your face in the second segment--as you know if you’ve caught his unique, dark, public-radio monologues. “Take Five” offers Frank at his best and most mercifully short, in a nightmarish tale of a man caught in a malfunctioning phone booth in the wrong part of town. The best way to appreciate Frank is simply to listen to him, but if you must have illustrations, producer Cynthia Crompton’s Skid-Row images are appropriate and haunting.

It’s hard to know what to make of the five minutes on “Bocon!,” a Mark Taper Forum children’s production about Central America. The play seems colorful, scary and strident, but that may be simply because we’re seeing the most colorful, scary and strident moments--plus comments from the actors.

The final piece is a beautifully edited (in fact, masterful editing marks every segment) look at composer and Cal Arts music professor Mel Powell. Powell writes the sort of horribly dissonant music that should be confined to bad horror films, but he seems a nice enough man here. His attempts to make us believe that those atonal screeches are worth our time are somewhat undermined by the fact that producer David Hamilton never allows the music to be heard without being blanketed over by words.

“Take Five: Arts and Culture” will be worth five minutes and maybe even more when it devotes equal time--or any time--to art that doesn’t make you want to slit your wrists.