Newport Harbor Observance to Feature Performer Tim Miller

The AIDS epidemic, which has resulted in “the loss of what’s increasingly looking like a whole generation of American artists,” has helped redefine the artist’s role in society and has caused a major shift in the nation’s arts community, says Los Angeles performance artist Tim Miller.

The shift has occurred in the content of artworks, said Miller, who will take part in the “A Day Without Art” nationwide observance with a free performance of “Sex/Love/AIDS: Stories From Life” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum Friday at 3 p.m.

The work, Miller’s first performance in Orange County, is drawn from three autobiographical pieces from the last six years and will focus on his life as a gay man in the era of AIDS.

“If your friends are dying, it certainly changes the theoretical underpinnings of your work,” said Miller, a Whittier-born artist who attended school in La Habra through the 12th grade.

Miller, 31, who became a leading figure on New York’s performing arts scene before returning to California 3 1/2 years ago, has since taught performance art at UC Irvine and is well aware of Orange County’s virulent anti-gay faction.

“It certainly has been interesting recently, what with the Irvine election (in which the city voted to remove protections for homosexuals under a new human rights ordinance) and the NEA’s treatment of work having to do with AIDS,” he said, referring to the National Endowment for the Arts’ new amendment that forbids funding of artworks that depict “homo-eroticism.”

“As an artist dealing with material from my life as a gay person as well as political material relating to AIDS . . . I’m sort of a real ripe target,” Miller said, describing his new work as “directly political and very sexy.”

But Miller praised the Newport Harbor Art Museum for taking an active part in “A Day Without Art.”

The Newport Harbor is “a spunky, pushy museum,” Miller said. “They take risks curatorially, and this fits right in with that.”

Maxine Gaiber, the museum’s public relations officer, programmed Miller’s performance “because (the AIDS epidemic) is an important issue and no matter where we were located, we would do it,” she said.

“AIDS has devastated the art community and we owe it to our fallen comrades to participate and to give hope to the people still struggling,” said Gaiber, a former education curator.

“A lot of contemporary art right now is being devoted to the AIDS situation. Also, we have a wonderful trustee willing to stand behind it.”

Trustee Eugene C. White, an Irvine attorney, is underwriting the museum’s participation in “A Day Without Art.”

“A museum of contemporary art has to be on the forefront, artistically and culturally,” said White, who supports the Costa Mesa-based AIDS Services Foundation. “That involves taking risks.”

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of Anaheim, a leader of the religious right who has attained national publicity for his attacks on homosexuality and other issues, “is not all that powerful,” White said.

Along with changing the content of their work, artists themselves are taking a more active role in the political or social realm by marching for AIDS research funding or donating sculpture for AIDS benefit exhibits, Miller said.

“Bianca Jagger would come to your opening and that was considered cool. Now it’s cool to do what Leonard Bernstein did” when the conductor declined a national arts award to protest the retraction of endowment funding of an AIDS-related exhibit in New York. The funding was eventually restored for the show (though not for the catalogue).

Bernstein’s action is “something that hasn’t happened since Eartha Kitt . . . (challenged Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies during a White House gala). Artists are realizing they have power, that they can use their impulses to change things or comment on things they don’t like,” Miller said.

AIDS isn’t alone in increasing artists’ activism, Miller said. “Ten years of conservative presidents,” for instance, has contributed. But the epidemic has had a profound impact.

The art world trend toward greater social awareness parallels a similar evolution in Miller’s own work--an evolution that will be evident in his performance at the Newport Harbor museum, he said.

Weaving together parts from his performance pieces “Buddy Systems,” “Some Golden States” and “Stretch Marks,” all of which mix confessional monologue with music, slide projections and abstract movement, the work will also incorporate new material to link each segment.

“It forms an interesting time line showing the different ways I’ve dealt with AIDS in my work, from the kind of late-adolescent, self-serious optimism of ‘Buddy Systems,’ to the first brush with the reality of AIDS in ‘Some Golden States,’ to a more politicized take on the subject in ‘Stretch Marks.’ It’s like a journey away from a youthful romanticism and towards activism and the world and a more practical, hopefully more adult approach.”

Miller, who studied acting at South Coast Repertory’s summer conservatory and attended college for two years in Fullerton, said that some of the new material he will create for “Sex/Love/AIDS” will help “locate” the 45-minute work in Orange County.

One segment will take place in Garden Grove where, as a teen-ager, he had a painful “introduction to gay life” in the form of gay bashing: one night, his boyfriend was stabbed four times while walking home from the city’s gay community center.