Activism Becoming a Popular Canvas for the Arts : Lecture: From AIDS to First Amendment rights, artists are casting themselves in high-stakes roles, performer Tim Miller tells a Rancho Santiago audience.

In 1989, performance artist Tim Miller and several of his fellow AIDS activists camped for a week outside Los Angeles’ County-USC Medical Center to protest what they felt was woefully inadequate care for AIDS patients there.

At the end of the week, during which he slept on the cold concrete sidewalk, Miller staged a performance to dramatize the demonstrators’ charge. About three months later, the public facility opened its first AIDS ward, Miller told a lecture audience of about 60 Monday at Rancho Santiago College.

“If artists take their social role responsibly, they can do two things,” he said. “They can create important, dynamic, charged art and in some small ways, and maybe in some not-so-small ways, they can change the world.”

That aim--to change the world--wasn’t always embraced by artists, many of whom functioned in a “protected landscape” largely segregated from real-life concerns, said Miller, a 33-year-old Los Angeles resident whose work often deals with experiences he had growing up in Orange Los Angeles counties.

But in recent years, that’s changed radically, he said. Artists have thrust themselves into the forefront of social and political issues--ranging from gay rights to racism and sexism--through social activism, not just by addressing such concerns with paint, song or performance.

“Suddenly, we as artists have been dealt a whole other deck,” he said, citing Vaclav Havel, the playwright-turned-president of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. “The stakes are extremely high.”

The AIDS crisis is the high-stakes issue that has for seven years dominated Miller’s artistic and personal life. Touring the country, he has performed works that confront homophobia and governmental funding for AIDS research, and he’s been arrested repeatedly while demonstrating with such AIDS activist groups as ACT/UP, the AIDS Coalitions to Unleash Power.

Miller has also fought for First Amendment rights. He is one of four artists, known as the “NEA Four,” who are suing the National Endowment for the Arts over grants the agency rescinded in 1990. That was the year charges of artistic censorship erupted, in part over NEA funding of an exhibit that included homoerotic images by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

“This is not just about me or the Mapplethorpe stuff,” he said, “it’s a pervasive attack on all of us.” Miller said the threat goes far beyond artistic censorship to an effort, put forth by “the Administration of the last 12 years,” to “silence and control people.”

“This (battle) is not just about words, this is about lives and bodies,” he said, predicting that within a year abortion will be made illegal, which he considers a more profound “act of censorship” than any grant rejection.

Despite the overriding political slant of Miller’s work, it also is intimately personal and humorous, reflecting another recent trend especially popular among Los Angeles performance artists, he said. Various communities and cultures, from Latinos to lesbians, are drawing on the details of their own lives for performance fodder to make a more direct, personal connection with audiences, rather than “pushing them away.”

“This is a real major shift from before when artists were almost trying to confuse their intent or communication,” he said.

Climbing atop a large desk, he staged an excerpt from his latest piece, “My Queer Body,” which he’s now performing at Highways Performance Space, a Santa Monica venue he co-founded in 1989.

The solo work deals with his high-school days in La Habra and his awakening as a homosexual. In the piece, a date with a punk rocker who lived “in the shadow of the Matterhorn” at Disneyland ends at his parents’ home, with the two teens sharing the bed in which Miller was conceived.

“We slept together on that bed, in The Bed, and I was conceived once again,” Miller said.

Only one person in Monday’s appreciative audience had ever seen Miller perform before. But he’s been criticized for preaching to the converted, particularly at Highways, where he attracts a loyal following.

Miller rejected the idea, asserting that even audiences who may share his political views need to be spurred to action.

“Every one of us is beaten down on a daily basis to a malaise and depression by the economic reality and political reality. I think people are in deep need of re-juicing and recharging. Sixty percent of the people I perform for don’t vote.”

* “My Queer Body,” by Tim Miller, will be presented Friday and Saturday, and April 10 and 11 at 8:30 p.m., at Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. $10. (310) 453-1755.