Doors Opening to Brave New Art World

First, think of boom boxes as cultural icons.

Think, too, of a truly off-the-wall, living Madonna as a cultural icon. Also graffiti, street clothes, gang colors, minicams and PCs of the computer and correctness kind.

Then realize that exciting things are happening in the zest called Los Angeles. The edges are moving toward the center. The center (read Getty, read Music) is moving toward the edge. It’s OK for uptown to get downtown.

And so the belief that art is what museums collect and all else is momentary, a fad, is beginning to turn.

How else do we explain those grand thinkers and spenders from the Getty, preservers and conservers of significant others from the past, spreading their arms toward rap musicians and the inner game of street fashion, to computer hackers and the comix of Art Spiegelman?

And from a different direction, how do we explain voyagers from Valencia bringing back variety nights to a Hollywood where variety and night long ago took on different meanings?

Exciting things.

So we find the full-time thinkers of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, a division of the Getty Trust, immersed in an ambitious, first-time, free, four-month program of talks, films, demonstrations--mass culture as a scholarly pursuit, mutually shared. The idea is to study what is popular, especially in youth culture, while looking into the thousand pockets that form Los Angeles’ neighborhoods, people and their entertainment. In this series, the Getty hopes to draw lines that connect ethnic dots and to show the give-take connection between the culture industry (films, video, fashions, music) and ourselves.

At the same time, we have a couple of limited-budget CalArts students who dare to come in from the suburbs and take over an empty building in Hollywood for five weeks of everything goes, evenings that mix music, art, dance and readings along with shared spaces for young artists of all persuasions, taking their messages to the community.

Exciting things.

The Getty program obviously is grander in budget and range.

Starting last month and running through mid-June, it has scheduled successive Monday nights--”Shifting Boundaries: Contested Spaces,” it’s called--that speak of such things as rap, videos, television news and the Columbus quincentenary.

On Wednesday nights, there are related screenings and performances: rock music, youthful street fashions, the films “Truth or Dare,” “The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez.” On a recent Monday, it was the Watts Prophets, for some, the godfathers of L.A. rap. The following week, a panel on street fashions and two days later, British writer and performance artist Dick Hebdige and his multimedia satire of contemporary advertising. Next Monday, an examination of experimental film, then on Wednesday a screening of “Paris Is Burning.” And on and on through April, May, June . . . new films, new videos, new panels until finally Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena and their “Year of the White Bear,” a very post-Columbus performance piece.

Most of these Getty-enhanced evenings take place in downtown Santa Monica, at a rented facility at 1210 4th St. and at the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex. Occasionally, the program gets out into that larger community the Getty is attempting to examine, such as Sunday’s afternoon film workshop at Kaos Network on Leimert Boulevard in southwest Los Angeles.

Regularly the Getty Center assembles 12 experts--Getty scholars--to find a mutual area for intellectual study. Last November, this year’s target was set: Los Angeles and its “cultural diversity,” its different neighborhoods, its culture industries.

This series of weekly events tries to do many other things, for example, the link between messages and messengers, how the music of rap spread into the general culture through such new electronic sources as MTV and peripatetic boom boxes, of how the fashions of Venice and Crenshaw interplay with the catalogues of mail-order merchants.

The two CalArts students, Amy Jones and Kristun Gunnars, both sculptors in their 20s, have a similar, more modest idea of breaking through the pockets of isolation that sometime separate the arts. They hope in a small way to start blending artists and the Los Angeles mainstream.

Gunnars, a native of Iceland, describes the CalArts student effort as “two girls and a telephone.” The telephone got her and Jones over the hill and in touch with the Hollywood office of the Community Redevelopment Agency, then with local real estate agents and city officials.

Their idea: a return to live variety nights, showtime back in Hollywood. They were unhappy with traditional exhibits that compartmentalize work, one painter in this room, a separate space for a sculptor, an evening for one dancer or one performance artist, exhibitions on campuses and in institutions removed from the general population.

Their project starts April 17 and will run until May 16 at the moribund Hollywood Citizen News building, featuring the work and performances of CalArts students and alumni. It’s called “The Real Post Other,” a reference to artists naming periods post-modern, post-classic, post-etc. This is their Real Post. Or Other.

CalArts trustees granted $13,500 seed money to the two students. The CRA found the newspaper building for them and is providing some financial support in banners and printing. The Los Angeles Photographic Center is allowing the project to fly under its nonprofit wings. Councilman Michael Woo also pitched in to get the program started. Food will be available at evening and weekend performances when a $5 to $10 admission fee will be charged.

Opening nights of “The Real Post Other” will have a dance performance, animation work and live band music along with on-site artworks.

If Gunnars and Jones prove their point in Hollywood--that young artists can flourish in the neighborhoods--the two artists hope to develop future shows and to find other friendly property owners.

The CRA says that other groups have come to them recently with similar ideas for empty and “historic” Hollywood buildings: local theater groups, including the Inner-City Cultural Center and a London-based organization hoping to produce an art-in-architecture program.

The Getty’s project also may have a life beyond the short term. It’s recording some of the programs for future study and a publication may follow, maybe future series.

Museum doors can swing both ways.

Cultural diversity, too, can swing both ways.

* Information: Getty, (310) 458-9811, ext. 7085; CalArts, (818) 367-5507 or (805) 253-7382.