Artists Shapiro, Apple Close Out SMARTS Festival

The Santa Monica Arts Council’s 1989 performance art festival concludes with two more events next Saturday and Aug. 12, with performances by local artists Elisha Shapiro and Jacki Apple. Admission is free.

SMARTS’ program, which consists of six site-specific performance pieces, will continue to be held at the Ocean Park performance platforms, designed by sculptor Joyce Kohl. The platforms are adjacent to the Santa Monica Promenade, just north of where Ocean Park Boulevard meets the beach.

On Aug. 5, Shapiro, who presented himself as a 1988 presidential candidate under his own Nihilist Party, will be giving an art performance of unspecified content. Before the performance, he will hold a press conference announcing the first Nihilism Expo that he is planning for the Los Angeles area in August, 1990.

Shapiro will also identify several local artists who plan to perform at or build pavilions for the Expo. Pavilions, he said, will include the Hall of Traffic, the Hall of Crime and Nihilists from Many Lands.

The Expo is not without precedent. Shapiro held a Nihilist Olympics concurrently with Los Angeles’ 1984 Summer Olympics, with contestants battling for medals in traffic maneuvering and smashing sculpture with sledgehammers.

“I don’t think L.A.’s seen anything like this Expo, and it’s a shame,” Shapiro said. “There’s Disneyland, Universal Studios and that Arts Festival thing, but nothing for people outside of the mainstream.”

Apple’s piece, “fluctuations of the field,” is a follow-up to “Palisade,” another site-specific performance in the 1987 SMARTS Festival. It will be presented Aug. 12.

“Fluctuations” will feature more than 30 artists, performers and musicians, including members of the Death Valley Croquet Club. Also included will be roller skaters, dancers, drummers from around the world, yo-yo artists and a tuba player refereeing the croquet match.

The Shapiro and Apple events close out the 1989 SMARTS Festival, which also receives financial support from the National State County Partnership and the Cactus Foundation. It opened July 8 with a performance by “avant-garde lounge singer” Weba Garretson. Successive Saturdays saw performances by Linda Albertano and the Chicago performance art group X meets Y, as well as Joyce Wexler-Ballard’s “Line Down the Middle” and Tobi Redlich’s “Rocky Shore.”

Admission to the Shapiro and Apple performances is free, and all events begin at 3 p.m. Parking is available nearby, just south of where Barnard Way meets Ocean Park Boulevard. For further information call (213) 936-1447.

MONTAGE & COLLAGE: A major exhibition of 20th-Century photomontages and photocollages opens at the Jan Turner Gallery this Friday, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m.

Photocollage, the physical juxtaposition of photos, and photomontage, the manipulation of multiple images in the darkroom, was a major form of expression for Dadaists and Surrealists of the 1920s.

“The Changing Picture 1920-1989” is a survey examining the development of these art forms from the heyday of the Dadaists and Surrealists, through the mass media influenced Pop Art movement of the 1960s, to the eclectic, video-influenced artists of the present.

More than 40 artists are represented, including the Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield and Hannah Houch; avant-garde Eastern Europeans such as Gustav Klutsis and Mieczyslaw Berman; Deconstructivists the Starn Twins; Pop Art trailblazer Roy Lichtenstein, and other modern artists, including John Baldessari and David Hockney. The exhibit, curated by Craig Krull, continues through Sept. 2.

Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles (213) 658-6080. Open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.