They Still Need Their Space : Things are a lot less bohemian and a lot more community-oriented as facilities and artists scramble to survive changing times

Back in the days when art school was cool and bell-bottoms were a first-run fashion, downtown bohemians were setting up shop in lofts and storefronts across the country. It was the beginning of the post-Vietnam wave of so-called “alternative arts spaces.”

Because many artists were frustrated by not finding the right venues for their increasingly interdisciplinary work in the we-can-do-anything flush of the late ‘70s, they decided to invent their own artist-run havens. And, in that financially rosy time, the National Endowment for the Arts was ever willing to support them.

Well, the bohos are older now. Bell-bottoms may be back, but the national arts climate has undergone some major changes since those halcyon days, and new challenges loom.

AIDS and the long Republican winter weren’t even on the horizon back in the late 1970s, when the boom of alternative arts spaces first started. Although these nests for the avant-garde have never had it easy, ironically, they did get a boost during the recent political wars at the National Endowment for the Arts. In the midst of the Republican-sponsored Kulturkampf , the critical spotlight shined on these spaces, beefing up their box office and rallying the liberal troops.

Now, though, with the recession and changing priorities in the arts world, such places as San Diego’s Sushi, Los Angeles’ LACE and Highways, and San Francisco’s Life on the Water and New Langton Arts are changing their game plans, trying to attach themselves to a broader community beyond the small, hip world of the arts.

All of these California venues are currently in a time of transition, although the changes they’re undergoing differ in each case.

“We have grown increasingly alarmed by the rapidly deteriorating financial and operational condition of so many performing arts organizations,” wrote Nello McDaniel and George Thorn in their 1991 report “The Quiet Crisis in the Arts,” “. . . Something fundamental is wrong throughout the entire field.”

“These smaller organizations live so close to the edge,” McDaniel said in a recent interview. He and Thorn co-direct the Virginia-based firm ARTS Action Research. “The human and financial resources are so minimal. They’re the canaries in the coal mine.”

Widely regarded as one of the key venues in the field of performance art, 13-year-old Sushi was recently evicted from its downtown San Diego home because the Salvation Army bought the building and wanted to use it for storage. Sushi has found a new office and art gallery space, less than half the size of the old 4,700-square-foot space, but they are operating without a permanent performance venue for the time being.

In San Francisco, the Fort Mason-based Life on the Water--which was founded in 1986 but grew out of a group that began in 1979--is also leaving its digs, although the move is by choice. It has new offices in the Mission District, and will still have access to the old stamping grounds on a project by project basis.

New Langton Arts, founded in 1975, is one of the oldest such organizations and is probably looking at a major restructuring in the near future.

In Los Angeles, 14-year-old Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is in the process of ditching the downtown arts district that never really developed for a new Hollywood home. And Santa Monica’s Highways--which celebrated its fourth birthday last month--has said ciao to co-founder Linda Burnham, who, while she’s keeping the title of artistic co-director, has given up her administrative post at the 18th Street Arts Complex and is leaving L.A.

These changes and similar ones at other such venues across the country aren’t just about dollars and cents. Location and changing audiences are also an important part of the evolving picture.

Most of these organizations--attracted by cheap rents and ample loft space--originally sprang up in downtown urban centers or adjacent warehouse districts. Inspired by the SoHo model, city governments made half-hearted efforts to foster these nascent arts districts as a form of redevelopment planning.

In most cases though, the areas floundered in the absence of serious government attention to an already collapsing infrastructure, and perhaps because only the most adventurous developers were willing to invest in such properties, leaving the mainstream behind in more suburban settings. L.A.’s downtown, which sported something of an incipient bohemian-arts community in the late ‘70s to mid-’80s that has now faded, is just one case in point.

The end result of all these changes is that many small alternative arts organizations are in the throes of a philosophical midlife crisis.

“Alternative arts spaces were created by people who looked at themselves as outsiders, who declared themselves purposefully anti-Establishment,” says Life on the Water’s co-founder Joe Lambert. “We were generally college-educated, bohemian, leftist, white, experimental people who were critical of the status quo. We were just talking to each other. Now, we want to be closer to the grass roots, but it’s creating tremendous contradictions in our original reason for being.”

“Ten years ago, the change was (toward including) non-artists on the board,” says the NEA’s Michael Faubion. “Now it’s non-artists in the audience.”

“Everyone,” says Sushi’s Lynne Schuette, “is questioning everything.”

The sign on the doorway said “ART,” but it was easy to miss. Tucked away on a scruffy side street on the edge of downtown San Diego, Sushi’s nondescript entryway looked more like the portal of the socialist reading room that the same space was in activist Eugene Debs’ day than the nationally recognized hotbed of performance and interdisciplinary art it had been for the last dozen-plus years, until the recent eviction.

Sushi began in 1980, when Schuette moved into the second floor of this building, originally making it both her home and studio. During the first year and a half, she ran a performance and art gallery as a small business in her upstairs loft space, solely dependent on the take at the door, as she tested to see if there was sufficient audience for avant-garde work in San Diego.

There was. Sushi soon caught on with a wide variety of solo performers, many of whom have since gone on to both acclaim and controversy. Karen Finley’s “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” the solo work that was buffeted by right-wing attacks during the NEA imbroglio, premiered at Sushi in 1989. Tim Miller figures that Sushi has presented him more often than any other space in the country--except for those that he personally co-founded (New York’s P.S. 122 and Highways). And MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner Guillermo Gomez-Pena first performed at Sushi in 1983 and kept an office in the space until 1991.

“There was a change in artists’ attitudes around 1980,” recalls Schuette of how such places came about. “Artists were doing work that wasn’t appropriate to a traditional theatrical institution. Because we’re flexible, it isn’t about finding the best piece. It’s about seeing the work, talking about the issues. Most forms don’t or can’t deal with what society may be denying. Performance does.”

These small theaters and galleries operated pretty much just for their own avant-garde audiences of intellectuals, art-world types and fellow performers until about 1989, when because of their National Endowment for the Arts funding, they were thrown into the spotlight by far-right conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), in particular, attacked the NEA for its support of artists whose work dealt with sexual politics, gay issues and AIDS.

The hostile climate of the late 1980s to early 1990s both helped and hurt such places as Sushi. Audiences, in fact, increased, while grant monies dwindled. Sushi lost $22,000 (about 7% of its then annual budget of $300,000) in national and state public funding in 1990 as a result of the fallout from the NEA controversy and a diminished pool of state arts resources.

Yet now that the spotlight has pulled away again, Sushi and its counterparts face harsh economic realities that had been lingering all along. This year alone, Sushi’s budget is down $60,000 from last year--due to a combination of public funding cuts and a local private sector weakened by corporate flight and bank closures.

Alternative spaces are having to change to survive. “Artists’ organizations were established by artists and their audience was predominantly artists,” says the NEA’s Faubion.

“When they became more responsible organizations with government grants, they had to expand their bureaucratic structures. Now, they’re going through another monumental change. For reasons of survival, financially and otherwise, they have to expand their audience beyond the immediate community of artists and the known art-interested public. The majority realize that it is a necessity to broaden their audience base--and not just for money.”

The increased awareness of the art of diverse cultures has also pushed alternative arts organizations to develop broader-based audiences. This shift, in turn, is bringing alternative arts spaces in line with some non-mainstream organizations that are not only older but often more stable.

Nationally, there is a parallel, and even sometimes partially overlapping, group of artist and community arts organizations that rose up out of the civil rights movement and the 1960s’ social upheaval. These groups defined themselves primarily in terms of the ethnic, political or gender identity of its members. They include L.A.’s Inner City Cultural Center and East West Players, San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza and San Francisco’s Galeria de la Raza.

Today, these groups are the closest thing to a model that the alternative spaces have. These older arts organizations were and are rooted in pre-existing groups, as opposed to being the product of disenfranchised artists coming together.

Today, the worlds of these two different kinds of organizations may be merging. The ex-bohemians are scrambling to align themselves with others and to make an artistic truce with what has long been the aesthetically conservative bent of some community arts groups.

“In a sense, we’re competing with community centers for a relation to the grass roots,” says Lambert. “Some (alternative arts spaces) never figured out whether they’d have a community component and an avant-garde component. But now we have to be ‘alternative/community.’ ”

San Francisco’s Life on the Water, for instance, grew out of the People’s Theater Coalition, a group founded in 1979 with Lambert as artistic director. LOTW was started in 1986 by Lambert, Leonard Pitt, Ellen Sebastian and Bill Talen, who left this year. It has been housed in Fort Mason, a nonprofit government-owned foundation that leases spaces to arts and other organizations.

LOTW has new offices and rehearsal space in the predominantly Latino Mission District and will officially be out of Fort Mason by July, although they keep a preferred renter status. In part, the move to the Mission District is symbolic of the shift in priorities toward a more ethnically diverse constituency of artists and audience.

But it’s also a sign of the failure of civic-fostered arts districts. Even with a relatively cushy setup like Fort Mason, it can be hard to attract people. Sometimes it’s easier to bring the art to the audience than vice versa.

It’s especially difficult to get people to come when a location is perceived as dangerous, which has become the case for downtown Los Angeles. LACE, which has now shut down its Industrial Street site, is among the last of many arts organizations to leave a downtown that never materialized as the Soho-West many once envisioned.

Despite the burgeoning artists’ enclave that temporarily arose downtown during the late ‘70s, the area never really came together, perhaps due to lack of concerted efforts on the part of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency. That’s partly why, when Linda Burnham and Tim Miller set out to launch Highways in 1989, they were encouraged by potential patrons to locate away from downtown.

The Santa Monica-based Highways, in fact, has benefited from the experiences of the older alternatives in more ways than one. Kicked off at a time when multiculturalism was just moving into high gear, this venue has from the start made a point of presenting a diverse group of artists.

Did the alternative spaces get off track, or did times just change? Most say it was a bit of both.

“The artist-run model got distorted,” says McDaniel. “Because they’ve had to compete for funding, they’ve taken on the trappings of every other organization, but they’re having a hard time holding onto their spaces. We may find more of them operating without walls.”

That’s what Sushi will be doing for the time being anyway. “We’re looking at all sorts of options,” says Schuette. “But it’s unrealistic to think that a building would drop in our lap.”

Besides, the venue has produced off-site performances and exhibitions all along. And the temporary homelessness isn’t necessarily going to stand in the way of Sushi’s longstanding commitment to following artists’ leads.

“There’s been a complex discussion in the last couple years about community,” says Schuette. “A lot of artists are choosing to work with particular populations, doing much more community-based work. We’ll try to remain responsive.”