Cooperative of Performance Artists Enters a New Phase With Fund-Raiser

In the early 1980s, a group of Los Angeles performance artists began meeting informally to share ideas, gossip and the dream of low-cost bulk mailings.

Today, the Cactus Foundation, the result of those meetings, is one of the West Coast’s most highly organized cooperatives dedicated to the production, presentation and distribution of performance artists’ work.

Funded through grants from city, state and federal agencies, private foundations and individual donations, Cactus is about to launch into a new phase with a fund-raiser scheduled Friday. The $65-a-plate dinner at Cafe Largo will feature 10-minute servings of works by Linda Albertano, Jacki Apple, Shrimps (Pam Casey and Steven Nagler), Paul Chavez, Josie Roth, Dan Kwong, Tobi Redlich, Elisha Shapiro and Joyce Wexler-Ballard. Only one member, Anna Homler, will not perform. The goal is to raise $4,000 that can be applied toward future Cactus projects.

According to Apple, a Culver City-based artist, the concept for Cactus, which became a nonprofit corporation in 1984, evolved out of her 1982 conversations with Lin Hixson, another performance artist. Gradually, through a series of large group meetings at Apple’s house, a core of artists began holding workshops, talking about applying for grants and collaborating on each other’s projects.

They decided to call their organization Cactus, Apple said, “because we liked the idea that it was prickly, spiky and we were the kind of artists who were prickly.” Los Angeles, she added, was seen as an “art desert,” with “not only no water, but no nourishment for artists. So, as an independent artist, there you were--a cactus out in the middle of the desert.” The Cactus logo is a drawing of how the Hollywood sign would look if the word “Hollywood” were replaced with “Cactus.”

By the late 1980s, Cactus artists were winning grants from the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Cactus provides a nonprofit affiliation and serves as a fiscal receiver for individual and group grants. The individual artists involved also pay $10 per month to help cover telephone, postage and printing costs. In January, 1990, the organization hired an executive director, Michael Wade. “By the time we got Michael, we didn’t know if we could handle it anymore,” Apple remembers. “There was a kind of exhaustion. People were getting so burnt out” trying to keep the organization going, pursue their art and also somehow earn livings, she said.

The artists involved with Cactus are now mostly in their late 30s and early 40s, “old enough to know better,” according to Wade, 37. “They know that the prospect for commercial success through performance art is relatively small, but there’s an active community out there that will support them in some way.

“Cactus represents a kind of emerging artists’ organization that will be replicated in an era of declining arts resources,” Wade said. Through its own fund-raising efforts, Cactus can be an antidote to shrinking city, state and national government arts budgets, he added. Wade monitors the Cactus budgets’ grant applications and promotes the artists’ work. A board of directors helps administer the foundation.

Ray Tatar, a theater and interdisciplinary grants administrator with the California Arts Council, said Cactus is “one of very few organizations, certainly on the West Coast,” providing organized, supportive structure for performance artists. Twice funded by the CAC for two-year grants, Cactus’ work was recently reviewed by a committee of peers, who gave a “solid to excellent” rating to the artists, Tatar said.

“The concept of coalitions of different artists joining together setting up an administrative center as a service for themselves is absolutely a model that has worked for Cactus and can work for others,” he said.

In 1990, Cactus operated on a budget of just over $50,000; this year, if all the grant applications and projects pay off, Wade expects the budget to reach $80,000. Most of that money goes directly to the artists to help with expenses associated with their frequently high-tech projects.

The Cactus artists represent what Apple calls “a real eccentric cross-section of personalities.” Eight have been involved from the beginning: Apple, who is primarily interested in multilayered audio productions; Albertano, a poet whose work ranges from cabaret-style theater productions to informal readings; Homler, an intermedia artist who does performance, audio, installation, music and assemblage; Redlich, a choreographer and dancer; Casey and Nagler, who take on gender issues in comedic mixtures of dance and music; Shapiro, a “media prankster” who gained attention with his 1984 “Nihilist Olympics,” and Wexler-Ballard, who works in performance, video and installation.

Last fall, three new people--performance artist Kwong, composer Chavez and singer-songwriter Roth--were invited to join. Kwong said he joined because Wade seemed sincere and organized. “Previously I’ve always been sort of a loner as an artist and have been reluctant to affiliate myself with groups,” Kwong said. “But I’m moving away from that and becoming more involved with communities.” Wade, he said, has been very helpful with arranging bookings, but he still hasn’t figured out how to relate to the artists themselves. “The original Cactus members, they’re like a family of friends,” Kwong said. “I’m still getting at home with them as a group.”

The artists meet intermittently to discuss projects and share ideas. Casey said Cactus provides a sense of camaraderie and also helps with brass-tacks information about grants, technicians and bookings. Wexler-Ballard said the main benefit of belonging to Cactus is being “encouraged to do the work” and getting inspirations about new creative directions to explore.

However, Redlich noted that there have also been problems. “We all have a hard time working in a group, but we try to do it anyway,” she said. “We’re all strong individual people with our ideas about what we want to do. Some of us have worked together, but we’re pretty much all separate artists, not an ensemble.”

So far, Wade said, his job has been mostly reactive to the artists’ needs, but he wants to stage several future fund-raisers, including a golf tournament that would feature the artists performing on the course.

Wade, who previously worked with the Dance Theater Workshop in New York, said that in New York it’s more common than in Los Angeles for innovative artists such as Whoopi Goldberg and Spaulding Gray to make transitions from avant-garde theater to better-paying work. “I’m surprised that doesn’t happen more in Los Angeles because of the weight of the entertainment community,” he said.

He thinks that some of the Cactus artists could also make the transition, however: “For the most part, these artists are working in areas with little commercial possibility. I’d like to be the bridge from the not-for-profit world to a better financial life for them,” Wade said.

The Cactus Foundation’s fund-raiser will begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Cafe Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. Tickets: $65. Information or reservations: (213) 935-2454 or (818) 546-8856.