A Spectacle of L.A. Art in Times Square : Advertising: California artists have been decorating a billboard with “Messages to the Public,” but loss of funding threatens the project.

Bright lights, big city. Kinetic Spectacolor billboard lights in Times Square, that is, brought to you by half a dozen California artists.

The artists are the first group of Californians to participate in the 7-year-old “Messages to the Public” project of New York’s Public Art Fund.

Unfortunately, they may also be the last, since the project recently lost its $27,000 or more in National Endowment for the Arts Inter-Arts support.

“Messages to the Public” has artists program the 800-square-foot, computer-animated display that blinks down at passers-by from several stories high on the building at One Times Square, projecting a continuous program of artwork intercut with advertising.

The Californians who’ve given their regards to Broadway include Michael LeBran, Mitchell Syrop, Barbara Carrasco, Anne Bray and Linda Nishio.

Currently up in lights is Louis Hock’s “800 BUY W/ ART.” Hock also has a video installation called “Leaps of Faith (Unnamed Sources and Victims of Circumstance)” now at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, N.Y. The installation use mannequin-like figures in tableaux, viewed first on video monitors and then, surprise, in person, which is other than the viewer expected.

Susan Freedman, executive director of the Public Art Fund, and her fellows made a “concerted effort” to reach out to non-New Yorkers for the “Messages to the Public” show, in part by having LACE’s Joy Silverman on the selection panel.

Although the geographical and cultural diversity of the new blood pleased both the fund and the endowment, according to Freedman and the NEA’s Loris Bradley, there just wasn’t enough money to go around.

The Inter-Arts category was expanded this year, so that the applicant pool doubled while available funds remained the same.

The loss is especially painful in light of the success of the fund’s “California year.” Having “L.A. in Times Square,” as Freedman puts it, has convinced her that West Coasters’ like a little topicality with their art. Hock and his fellows take the idea of “Messages to the Public” literally. “Many artists who are interested in public art also have an interest in social issues, and the California artists have been especially consistent with that,” she explains.

“Especially” is the word all right. The owners of the Spectacolor board required Carrasco to alter three frames from her “Pesticides!” before it was shown in July. The three frames, thought to be too harsh, had shown children about to eat pesticide-sprayed grapes.

Like Carrasco, Hock uses the advertising context to criticize advertising. “I figured it’s an advertisement, so I made an advertisement. You have little time to convey information, enmeshed in advertising, in Times Square which is already swirling with ads.”

The challenge, as he sees it, is to co-opt the power that is already there. “You try to create public space in a solid wall of private landscape which is advertising,” he explains.

Hock, who along with David Avalos, Elizabeth Sisco and Deborah Small has also been creating a series of controversial public artworks in San Diego, is well-versed in such tactics.

Recently, the four created a billboard attacking their city for failing to make good on a promise to name the new convention center after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The billboard was subsequently the object of an attempt at ex post facto censorship by the San Diego City Council.

Hock approached the Spectacolor board with an equally subversive agenda. “You use the rules of advertising because they work. Then you capture the power by shifting it off balance.

“The Spectacolor board is a chance to be didactic in a way that gallery work won’t accommodate, to extend a political voice into the world,” he says.

He’s also extending that voice via “800 BUY W/ART’s” 800 phone number that viewers can call. According to Freeman, it’s the first time a program has included such a number.

Intrepid callers will be treated to a sardonic “Artquiz” that shows how “the connection between censorship and the commidification of art is the use of language.”

Hock completed his lightboard program before the NEA’s funding crisis broke, but it dovetails with that ongoing imbroglio as well as his own experiences with censorship.

“The censorship of (Robert) Mapplethorpe and (Andres) Serrano has to do with absolute subject matter,” he explains. “But the reason my projects with Avalos, Sisco and Small, for example, become so dangerous is that they enter the space of commerce. When the elements of public space enter private space, it becomes threatening. The idea of controversy is itself seen as problematic.”

The NEA didn’t deny the Spectacolor project funds for fear of controversy, though. In fact, the PAF’s California gambit may suggest a prototype that could enable the program to survive.

The loss of funds will “force us to reevaluate,” Freedman says. “But if we can find a new hook--like having L.A. in Times Square--that might make it easier to go to corporations (for financing).”