MOCA Gives Artists New Voice Via Airwaves : Radio: 16-week program showcases diversity with a lineup of dancers, painters, photographers and others.

“I’ve always been plugged into the wall,” Peter Sellars declared. “I love radio. It’s where I live, where I come from.” It’s also where the Los Angeles Festival’s artistic director has been spending some of his happiest creative time recently--as a contributor to “The Territory of Art,” a 16-part weekly radio series sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art and broadcast locally on KCRW-FM (89.9). The program begins its third season today at 10 p.m.

Sellars has two pieces in the coming lineup--”Where the Exile Lives” and Jack Kerouac’s poetry cycle “Mexico City Blues,” both products of his recent work with UCLA theater students. “I find Kerouac better to listen to at a low volume, where you can’t quite make things out,” he said kiddingly of the free-from “Blues.” In “Exile,” Sellars’ adaptation of Ezra Pound’s adaptation of a Japanese Noh play, the characters are now Vietnam vets living on the street.

Sellars firmly believes listeners will get a unique and valuable workout. “You don’t lose anything,” he said of the stage-to-radio transition. “The visual loss is a relief. It detaches the slavish link of visual to auditory. It’s a very pure realm; the images are complex and evoked by sound. Sound provokes memory--and, of course, a sense of the interior experience. So it’s automatically private because each of us feels sound separately.”

During November, the half-hour programs include Armin Medosch’s “Radio Subcom--Europa Report,” artist Richard Kriesche’s “Informationsculpture”, choreographer Elizabeth Streb’s “Airworks,” Iris Rose’s voice piece “Society of Mothers” and composer Carl Stone’s Asian-themed “Thonburi.”

“The idea has always been to showcase and endorse the diversity of art,” said MOCA curator Julie Lazar, the executive producer of the series. Hence the inclusion of dancers, painters, photographers, musicians, storytellers and poets--from all over the world.

“We have new works, individual works, works converted from one form to another,” she noted. “One of the things I feel most strongly about is that all that richness coexists in this small series. People sampled other cultures, adapted and adopted them.”

For Lazar--who commissions, supervises, produces and markets the pieces on a $150,000 budget (the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation provide partial funding)--the primary goal is to have these arts voices heard. Although $10 audio cassettes of new and past programs are available at MOCA’s gift shop, the weekly programs are provided free--via satellite--to radio stations nationally and internationally. (Locally, KUSC-FM is also broadcasting the series.)

“It’s a very complicated thing for a couple of people in a museum to be doing,” Lazar said. “We have a lot of artists from the West Coast, large and small organizations, known and lesser-known people; the mix is important. We also have two hosts, Ruth Maleczech and Guillermo Gomez-Pena--who has a strong accent, the kind of voice that doesn’t regularly make it on radio. We’ve gone against a lot of traditional standards.”

In spite of her enthusiasm, Lazar concedes that the ongoing controversy over government funding for the arts has worried her.

“What was acceptable before is not acceptable now,” she said, noting the fundamentalist outcry a few years ago when a sexually explicit drama was broadcast on KPFK. “The level of censorship has definitely affected our programming. We haven’t been censored yet, but the climate has changed. (A few tapes carry “language” warnings.) What’s ironic is that some of the things the artists say are more acceptable in other countries--where freedoms are not as assured as they are here.”

Performance artist May Sun, who premiered a portion of her “LA/River/China/Town” in “Territory of Art’s” kickoff gala Oct. 13 at the Japan America Theatre, is first up in the radio series.

In the piece, Sun focuses on the history of the Chinatown community. “So much is unknown, unrecorded,” said the artist. Talking with area residents and immersing herself in historical texts, Sun’s piece focuses on the Chinese railroad workers who settled here in the 1860s--with the L.A. River as a metaphoric link between the old and new worlds.

Created as an 8,000 square-foot installation, Sun’s work (co-conceived by director Peter Brosius, with a score by Tom Recchion) was on display last winter at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. “The original piece was very visual, and it’s a shame people can’t see that,” she said. “But the text did come first--then the music, then the visual. So for radio, we made it more of a journey and described the visuals.”