RSVP : Style Is Spreading Just Like an Infestation

The Scene: The Friday night fete at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (LACE) for its 15th anniversary celebration and benefit. The cocktail party and dance also served to inaugurate LACE’s new Hollywood Boulevard home at the former Newberry School of Beauty. LACE Executive Director Gwen Darien promises that moving this multidisciplinary mecca for alternative art from Downtown’s industrial badlands to Hollywood will mean “a lot more interaction with the street and a lot more interaction with the neighborhood.”

Who Was There: About 100 artists, patrons, collectors, city and county officials, and others who were important enough to warrant an invite or could swing the $150 or more donation, mixed it up at the cocktail party; 300 more of the same, plus a looser, grungier contingent, swarmed in for the less pricey dance party.

Multimedia/Multidisciplinary Delights: In addition to the usual “LACE would like to thank . . . “ speeches, performance artists-comedians Karen Kilgariff and Kathy Griffin told stories and deconstructed jokes, while video artists Kathy Chenoweth and Lynne Berman cruised the party with a Super-8 projector, throwing images of palm trees, bare feet and other L.A. banalities onto the walls, guests and food. In the next room, “California Classics,” containing video works by Jim Shaw, Bill Viola and others, was screened.

Chow: Duet Restaurant’s grilled swordfish and 17th Street Cafe’s tortilla cups with ceviche, vegetables and chicken--not to mention the open bar--gave the art (both fixed and roving) a serious challenge in capturing the cocktail party crowd’s attention.

The Evening’s Highlight: Although upstaged by a spectacular arrest by cops with drawn guns on Hollywood Boulevard, LACE kicked off the dance party with a series of high-camp “Day of the Locust” drive-up entrances by performance artists John Fleck, Bob Flanagan, Kitty Lukemia and others. Greeting the “stars” were that slick-as-Brylcreem man-about-town Les Stevens and sidekick Teddy Towne.

Quoted: “It’s the Newberry House of Beauty, so you got to have style,” gushed the mega-glamorous Stevens. “As you can see, wherever we look in this entire room, there’s style just bursting out like an infestation, really.”

Money Matters: Cocktail party tickets were $150 per person or $250 for a pair. For a $500 sponsor donation, guests received a pair of tickets, a limited edition copy of the “California Classics” videotape and their name on a 15th anniversary wall plaque. Dance party tickets were $20 per person for non-members, $15 for members. More than $11,000 was collected.