Artists Draw a New Kind of Party Line : Politics: The newly founded Los Angeles Arts Democratic Club is part of a growing nationwide trend that stresses activism in the arts.

The meeting at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood one recent Monday night started late and had an appropriately disorganized and distinctly Bohemian flavor.

One of the first speakers felt compelled to advise the audience of about 60 people to consolidate at the front of the auditorium so the gathering looked more like what it was intended to be--on the off chance that a television crew might show up.

There was performance art--laced liberally with AIDS protest themes--by Tim Miller and humor by Paul Krassner, who free-flowed through funny bits about such subjects as the concept pausing after the first 300 years of a 600-year orgasm for a glass of orange juice.

The whole thing was weird enough that, at one point, City Councilman Mike Woo looked out from behind a lectern that had been placed incongruously in the middle of the set for the Ivar’s current stage production and observed that the proceeding seemed very much like “an anarchists’ convention.”

That got a laugh, but also more than simply scattered nods of concurrence from the people attending the first full membership meeting of the Los Angeles Arts Democratic Club. It is the country’s fourth urban arts-driven political endorsement organization. All four clubs are parts of what appears to be a very young, tentative but potentially broad national trend toward greater structured involvement of artists in the rough and tumble world of partisan politics.

The membership meeting on this particular Monday night lasted more than two hours, produced 50 new memberships in the club--on top of about 60 already signed up--and satisfied its organizers. An indication of the remaining challenge, though, was that the turnout was the yield of distribution of 10,000 fliers handed out all over the city for two weeks before the meeting.

Woo’s remarks were indicative of the degree of naivete organizers of the club may have to overcome. Lecturing almost in the fashion of a politics primer, the councilman told the artists that “you can help transform what the Democratic Party is all about,” but that artists must first “define who you are” and “figure out what it is you want.”

The event’s main draw was former Gov. Jerry Brown, who, with Woo, was one of perhaps only a half dozen people wearing a suit. Brown had resigned earlier in the day as chairman of the California Democratic Party. Taking the platform, Brown had the familiar bearing of the proverbial all-but-announced candidate. This time, he was telegraphing a run for the U.S. Senate. Brown took advantage of his appearance before the artists to deliver what was clearly a dress rehearsal of his anticipated stump speech.

Standing in the back of the theater before he went on stage, Brown chuckled at the concept of a political club whose members are artists. But after he had had a moment to think about it, he turned serious. The moment for success of such a venture, he speculated, may actually have arrived.

“Parties themselves are weakened institutions,” Brown said, “so anything that can bring some spontaneity and freshness--wake people up--is good for us. Politics is a decaying set of mechanisms. (It) has a banality and a clashing of negative emotions that a more free spirit could definitely ameliorate and perhaps illuminate. I don’t know if one or two arts political clubs can (do that) by themselves, but it’s a very good trend.”

A California-driven trend, at that. It began two years ago, said Bruce Davis, vice president of the San Francisco Arts Democratic Club--the nation’s first partisan artists’ group--as artists in the Bay Area began to recognize with concern the beginnings of the political firestorm that was to sweep arts issues, focused on the National Endowment for the Arts. The controversy is ongoing.

“The concept of an artist who can be an artist and live on your private island (uninvolved in the political system) has been jarred in the last year,” said Tarabu Betserai, an organizer of the Los Angeles club and a writer and composer who is also a statewide organizer for the California Confederation of the Arts--a traditional apolitical nonprofit advocacy group. “This period has done a lot to politicize the arts nationally.”

The climate, Davis contended, has produced among artists “a radicalization on some levels” that has produced a recognition that they “have a natural way to get the attention of the party structure. Once you get their attention, you can steer them.”

The San Francisco club has grown since its founding, said Davis and politically neutral observers who have watched it mature, into one of the largest Democratic organizations in the Bay Area--with 200 members and enough clout to play a key role in inducing Mayor Art Agnos to hire a special liaison officer working exclusively with arts issues. Naming of the arts aide had many of the trappings of a conventional political reward--given in exchange for support. Not surprisingly, the arts liaison, Margie O’Driscoll, is a founding member of the San Francisco club.

“Many people believe that power rises in direct correlation to the amount of attention you can get,” said O’Driscoll in a telephone interview. “If you define attention as press attention , which many people do, the Arts Democratic Club has been the most successful club in San Francisco.”

The idea, said Davis and Lee Werbel, interim president of the Los Angeles Arts Democratic Club, is to get artists to recognize that they must become part of the political system in which they live and that they have some unique skills and opportunities that may facilitate--not inhibit--achievement of that goal. In that sense, said Werbel, who recently resigned as managing director of the Aman Folk Ensemble, the newly formed Los Angeles club would welcome a Republican counterpart.

“The idea here is to try to build a political power base for the arts,” she said. “This is not a nonprofit corporation that is prohibited by (federal tax) law from engaging in political activities. This is a club of the Democratic party.”

The Los Angeles group is following a path already trod by arts groups in Chicago and New York, where newly formed organizations patterned on the San Francisco model have come into existence over the last few months.

In New York, the Arts Coalition of Independent Democrats--which formally adopted its constitution last September--was the result of a process that began sometime in 1989, said Cliff Scott, one of the club’s founding members and a producing director at Manhattan’s Downtown Art Co. In Illinois, Greater Chicago Citizens for the Arts has been formed as a nominally nonpartisan group to allow latitude to make candidate endorsements in any party, said Tom Tresser, one of the group’s organizers. The nonpartisan nature of the club permits maximum maneuvering room to accommodate promising candidates without having to fret about party endorsement bylaws.

Tresser quit his job as managing director of a local theater last year to found the Center for Arts Advocacy, which he hopes will become a national clearinghouse for information on political initiatives in the arts community.

After he received a foundation grant to conduct an initial needs assessment, Tresser traveled the country talking to arts advocates. When he returned to Chicago last year, Tresser said, “I had become very concerned with the state of the nonprofit-arts world in general. We’re undercapitalized. We’re fragmented and we’re politically unsophisticated. Our inability to affect public policy has really stood out over the last two years.

“We have a lot of problems that we’re to blame for, including a self-imposed isolation that has removed us from the mainstream of society.”

To Scott, political events on the national landscape of the last two years have detracted from pressing local issues that, he said, may be common among arts communities in every large city. They range from unique manifestations in the arts of multiculturalism, housing and work-space issues to broad complaints over the progressive abandonment of arts education in public schools. The AIDS epidemic cuts across most issues of political prominence to artists, Scott contended--often in ways that are unique and exacerbated by more generic issues, beginning with the special difficulty experienced by many artists in finding affordable health insurance.

“I think many artists tend to vote, but they consider themselves above the fray, or perhaps being trampled by the fray,” Scott said. “What do we have in common other than our love of the arts or being arts workers or artists? One of the things I felt many of us had in common was that we all voted for the losing Democratic candidates over most of our lifetimes.

“The NEA foolishness and the whole thing (with current funding restrictions that loom for government support of the arts across the country) has brought the realization that we’re not above or below the fray, we’re in the middle of it.”

Ironically, two failed 1990 campaigns appear to have played a role in the formation of the club as well. One was the unsuccessful run of former Charlotte, N.C., Mayor Harvey Gantt for the U.S. Senate seat of Republican Jesse Helms. The other was an opposition role in the reelection of U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach). Both incumbents had targeted artists and arts issues for conservative attack. Artists across the country raised between $1 million and $3 million to try to beat Helms. But while Gantt lost, the race is widely seen as having established the fund-raising clout of an organized incursion of artists into a major race. The campaign, Woo told the artists at the Ivar, should be perceived as teaching a lesson about the futility of artists believing they can somehow remain politically uninvolved. “Jesse Helms helped to disprove that,” the councilman said.

In California, Long Beach area artists borrowed from the practices of big-league organized politics and founded a political action committee, or PAC, to try to dump Rohrabacher. It didn’t work in the sense that the congressman won, but Rohrabacher has said in the last few weeks that he abandoned the arts as a political issue shortly after he was reelected. The extent to which the artist-PAC’s run against him influenced the decision remains unclear. Rohrabacher has insisted it played no role. Founders of the arts Democratic club say they hope to bring the anti-Rohrabacher PAC organizers into their fold.

The Los Angeles club already has a listed telephone number (it rings at an answering service), a post-office box address and a slate of interim officers who will stand for election sometime in the next few weeks. Werbel and other club organizers hope to be in a position to make endorsements in City Council elections later this year.

But that discussion emphasized, again, that the club remains very much in a learning mode. Organizers said the club intends to interview candidates in races involving the seat of the late Councilman Gilbert Lindsay, whose district included a wide swath of downtown Los Angeles, where many artists reside and where issues concerning the homeless population and affordable loft housing and gallery space for artists commingle in a continuing state of controversy. At one point several months ago, organizers hoped to have the club in operation in time to play a role in the county supervisorial election today that pits City Councilman Gloria Molina against state Sen. Art Torres. But those plans proved overly optimistic.

Nevertheless, the club also may become active in races later this year involving incumbent City Councilmen Robert Farrell, Ruth Galanter and Joel Wachs, Werbel said.

When Wachs’ name came up, however, a couple of the half dozen club organizers who had been sitting in Gorky’s on Cahuenga Boulevard before the membership meeting looked confused. Isn’t Wachs, they asked one another, a Republican ?

This revelation was confirmed by the councilman himself, who, laughing, noted that the fact that the organizers of the Los Angeles Arts Democratic Club didn’t know that Wachs--who, with Woo, is one of the two most ardent defenders of arts issues on the City Council--was a Republican underscores the unique nonpartisan nature of Los Angeles County politics.

“Ninety percent of my support comes from Democrats,” said Wachs. “This club is a vehicle through which people can become organized. It will be an opportunity for artists to have a voice in City Hall to push the agenda of the arts community, whether it be funding, freedom of expression or multiculturalism.

“I’ve spent a lot of time over the year trying to politicize the arts community. Nobody is better able to champion the arts than the arts community. This is long, long overdue. I think it’s a fabulous idea.”

Besides, Wachs continued, “I’m sure they’d never endorse anyone who ran against me.”