THE ARTS : L.A. in Their Rear-View Mirrors : Local avant-garde performers are finding that their best act may be to pack a suitcase. Despite L.A.’s prominence as a creative crucible, even top artists say the best audiences (and best paychecks) are on the road

In “SOME GOLDEN STATES,” performance artist Tim Miller pretends to have sex with a huge plywood cutout of his beloved California. He spins yarns about gas station epiphanies, love on the beach and the hometown he and Richard Nixon shared, Whittier.

In “STRETCH MARKS,” Miller imagines a fiery plane crash on a mythical, magical Venice Beach not unlike the real Venice Beach near his home. And in “SEX/LOVE/STORIES,” he recounts a weeklong vigil held to demand that an AIDS ward be built at County-USC Medical Center.

These works were made in Los Angeles. They’re about L.A. And they’re part of a body of work that made this artist-activist a focus of national attention in 1990 as one of the NEA Four, the group that sued the National Endowment for the Arts for rescinding its grants. But if you want to see them in L.A., the chances are, well, few and far between.

Even though Miller has been living here since 1986--and co-founded Highways performance space, where he is still artistic director, in 1989--he has spent much of the time since then as an L.A. artist in absentia.

Last year, Miller spent more than 30 weeks living out of a suitcase, careening between such far-flung spots as Winnipeg, Canada, and Sydney, Australia, in the space of a few days, only to turn around and do a gig in, say, Glasgow, Scotland, or Louisville, Ky., before heading home just long enough to pat his dog, then shipping out once again. He spent more time in Britain than in L.A. last fall. And when Miller premieres a new work at Highways next month, it will mark his first local run in two years.

“There’s so much work on the road and it generally pays better,” he says. “But if it were possible, I would like to strike more of a balance. I think L.A. is losing some major resources in terms of what might be contributed to the life of the city.”

At least Miller can’t weigh in with that old saw about not being able to get arrested in his hometown. He’s been booked for arrest at ACT UP and NEA censorship demonstrations plenty of times. But the lengths to which he and other L.A. artists must go to support their careers is another matter.

First and foremost is the matter of where they can perform. On one end of the scale, dance, music, performance and interdisciplinary art are seen in Los Angeles at such venues as the Music Center, the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, the new Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and an array of university venues from Occidental to El Camino to Cal State L.A., which is completing a new complex of facilities.

For emerging artists and others, the best bets are Highways, which is the busiest, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. There are also several part-time spaces that occasionally present such work.

But that’s actually a pretty limited map for such a big city.

“We’re lacking a middle range to fill that gap between LACE and Highways and UCLA,” says Performance Exchange’s Deborah Oliver, an L.A.-based booking agent and artist, referring primarily to venues for dance, performance and interdisciplinary work. “Where’s that 400-seat hall? That’s hard in terms of career development for artists. They have to get out of town (to work), and some don’t come back.”

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The problem applies to theater as well. While many of the major performing arts venues present a limited amount of theater--and some small theaters such as the Fountain also present dance--theater is divided between a few large producers such as the Taper, South Coast Rep and the Pasadena Playhouse and the many 99-or-less houses that dot the city.

The overwhelming majority of the small theaters now function as full- or part-time rental facilities. And the larger Hollywood theaters such as the Pantages--like the Wiltern and a few other venues for dance and performance--charge rental fees that are usually too steep for all but touring companies.

Perhaps more important than the holes in the venue network, though, may be that through the 1980s many presenters held to a longstanding bias against hometown artists.

In 1989, the National Task Force on Presenting and Touring the Performing Arts put it this way in a report titled “An American Dialogue”: “Despite the bond of local artists to community, a bias often permeates the institutional attitude toward them--as if, at home, they are somehow less creative, less worthy, less professional.” But, the influential and controversial report concluded, “local artists represent a resource that our field cannot afford to squander.”

Fortunately, however, there have been at least two significant developments here in the years since “An American Dialogue”: An increasing number of L.A. artists have garnered international attention and acclaim, and some of L.A.’s key presenters have made it a point to look homeward.

Performance art in particular, which has important roots in the feminist art movement that was centered here during the late 1970s, has become a choice export.

“There’s a cachet L.A. has as a center of performance art,” says the Santa Monica-based Miller. “Internationally, there’s a feeling that the engaged, socially contexted, hard-core performance is coming out of L.A., and that’s reflected in a lot of international festivals right now.”

During a recent two-week period in London, for example, Los Angeles was represented by Miller, Michael Kearns, Denise Uyehara, Keith Antar Mason and choreographer Mehmet Sander.

“In Britain (last) fall, the majority of performers who were brought in for the National Review of Live Art were from Southern California,” Miller says. “But most sponsors in L.A. are clueless about that.”

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Not all are clueless. In fact, one of the most significant changes in the outlook in the past couple of years is that such larger venues as UCLA and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center are leading the way in the other direction. There have also been significant supportive efforts by such presenters as Highways and California Plaza and independent producers like Neil Barclay.

This season, UCLA is presenting new works from Sander and performance artist Rachel Rosenthal. The 1993-94 season also includes performances by 13 additional California groups or individual artists, as part of the center’s “Gold Rush!” series.

This marks a change in policy since Michael Blachly was appointed director of UCLA’s Center for the Performing Arts.

“Starting last year we began to make a conscious effort to have artists from all genres represented and to make sure the balance was there with the rest of our program,” he says. “It’s an important statement to try to make for the artists in California.”

The JACCC, under Director Gerald Yoshitomi, launched its “Celebrate California!” series in 1990, a programming effort specifically designed to reach out to a multicultural contingent of California artists. Under this rubric, the center has presented fare as diverse as El Teatro Campesino, the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, soloists Nobuko Miyamoto, Dan Kwong and Amy Hill and comedy groups Culture Clash and Latins Anonymous.

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Ironically, the prolonged recession may also be helping to shift presenting priorities toward home, making a virtue of necessity. The 1993 Los Angeles Festival, for example, recently found itself faced with a funding shortfall that caused it to cancel its plans to import many acts, turning instead to L.A. artists--a move that pleased those who thought that that’s what the festival should have been doing all along.

Presenters who do voice a commitment to California talent, few though they may be at this point, also see it as an investment.

“Those of us who have a lot to offer need to include California artists so that artists can work in our state, but also so that they can begin to get more regional bookings, which will benefit the other Western states as well,” Blachly says.

And the artists are understandably enthusiastic.

“The most positive thing I see in 1994 is UCLA getting involved more with local artists, supporting local companies,” says Sander, who came to Los Angeles from Istanbul, Turkey, in 1987 and has been touring extensively in Europe lately. “Local artists should be able to be presented by local venues.”

But you won’t--nor should you, say some--necessarily find all presenters beating a path toward indigenous talent. Presenting is, after all, a business. And some--particularly those who don’t have a university structure to back them up--say their task is to program what will sell, period.

“If you were to think of a spectrum of performing arts presenters, you’d find, on the most conservative end, those that don’t have the support of a host institution, such as La Mirada,” says California Presenters Inc. President Mark Cianca. “As you go more toward the fine arts end of the spectrum, (you find) those presenters who maintain a commitment to California artists because they see their work as the research-and-development end of the business.”

For most, the trick is to strike a balance that allows them to stay afloat.

“You find a balancing of a commitment to California artists with a realism that says we have to watch the bottom line,” says Cianca, who is also director of Arts & Lectures at UC Santa Cruz. “We present some engagements that will be more successful so that we can present some that are more challenging. Most of us try to present a blend. But for some, that’s just not their mission.”

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Artists have their own stay-afloat strategies. Touring, in particular, continues to be a major source of employment, and annual regional and national booking conferences can be key to setting up out-of-town gigs.

Many Southland presenters, managers and artists, for example, took part in last month’s 37th annual Assn. of Performing Arts Presenters conference, the largest marketplace of its kind, which takes place every year at the New York Hilton.

“A big reason for artists to be there is we all go to see performances,” Cianca says. “My biggest concern about California artists are the dance companies, who because of expense elect to stay home. It hurts them.”

For young artists, such gatherings can offer an unusual opportunity to make contacts.

“The question is, do L.A. artists have less access to touring or to the institutions that encourage it now?” Miller asks. “I’ve been touring internationally for 13 years, and two-thirds (of my dates) are return gigs. A lot of it was set up while I was still living in New York. Some people even now position me as a New York artist.”

The New York bias may indeed persist. But, says Performance Exchange’s Oliver, who was at December’s APAP gathering, “Artists have to go and push themselves to these presenters on a national scale. This is a sad situation that presenters aren’t exposed to enough of what’s going on in Los Angeles.”

These kinds of bookings aren’t the only kind of touring. Theater director David Schweizer, who was tapped as a boy wonder in the early ‘70s by Robert Brustein and Joe Papp, has taken a different route.

After moving to Los Angeles in the late ‘70s, he has become one of L.A.’s busiest directors--if also one who seems to work here very little. Like Miller, he’s had to spend a lot of time on the road.

“When I came here, I had already established relationships with companies and theaters around the country, so I was never beholden to the resources of L.A.,” says Schweizer, speaking by phone from New York, where he’s in previews for “Booth,” a production starring Frank Langella.

Schweizer has also spent a considerable amount of time directing in Eastern Europe under the auspices of a U.S. Information Agency program launched in the mid-1980s.

“Financially and artistically, Europe was wonderful,” says the man who was just recently tapped to direct his first main-stage show at the Taper, Lisa Loomer’s “The Waiting Room,” expected within the next year. “It kept me aware that what I was doing had consequence, so then I could come back to L.A. and create my own consequences.”

In the wake of political upheaval in Europe, however, Schweizer’s been stateside more: “In the last year or two, I have been trying to travel less, and it’s been hard.”

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Miller probably gets the prize for the most radical solution with his a-space-of-one’s-own approach. He not only helped found Highways, but earlier, New York’s PS 122 performance space as well.

“I’m very unusual in that I founded the two main performance centers in this country,” he says. “Frankly, for an artist, it’s the smartest thing you can do to nurture your work.

“Although I don’t perform at Highways more than every year and a half or two years, I teach there and it’s a place for me to articulate other concerns,” Miller continues. “I’m a homebody and I like to perform (at PS 122 and Highways), in the same way that the Wooster Group almost never performs anywhere but the Performing Garage in New York.”

And while not everyone will want to hang out his or her own shingle, more innovative companies and individuals are indeed doing a version of just that, turning away from depending solely on the major institutions. Not just Miller and the Wooster Group, but such artists and companies as the Hittite Empire, Michael Kearns and James Carroll Pickett’s Artists Confronting AIDS, Alan Pulner and Theresa Chavez’s About Productions and the Actors’ Gang, which will open a new theater in Hollywood this year, are just a few of those who have set up production companies or theaters that allow them to work independently.

Yet even such bold moves can leave artists feeling the energy drain for which Los Angeles has become known.

“The L.A. problem with keeping artists is a thing of the spirit too,” observes the veteran Schweizer. “The best thing about L.A. is the way it forces you to constantly motivate yourself. And the worst thing about L.A. is the way it forces you to constantly motivate yourself.”