GALLERIES : Experiencing Poverty Through Art

It’s artwork that’s as physically demanding as it is thought-provoking, requiring the viewer to lie down in a morgue drawer, box a few rounds in a ring, flip burgers, turn a trick as a hooker, stand in line for food at the local church and, finally, attempt to rest on a park bench as a night train rumbles overhead.

Titled “Etiquette of the Undercaste,” this disturbing installation with a psycho-political punch is being displayed at UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery through Feb. 11. The piece has been touring the country since its creation in 1988 by two artists with the Antenna Theater in Sausalito. Stops have included the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

The installation is a natural conversation piece. Its interactive format is low-tech but effective, requiring the viewer to go through a post-modern maze of horrors alone--with only a headset and a tape recorder spinning out a hallucinogenic track of interviews with poor and homeless people. As art, “Etiquette” is hard to categorize: part theater, part visual art and part performance piece in which the viewer is the performer.

“I think it’s like being in a delirious state for 15 minutes,” said Michael Marvi, a 21-year-old psychobiology major. “I haven’t been on a drug trip, but I figure this is what it would be like.”

“Etiquette” rang true for students who have worked with the homeless or experienced poverty firsthand.

In one of the first rooms in the installation, the viewer emerges from a baby’s crib, watching the shadow of “Mommy” guzzling alcohol.

“I was born poor. My mom was an alcoholic,” said Alexandar Castaneda. A 21-year-old theater major, he credits a neighbor for helping him out of poverty by nurturing his interest in writing.

Pablo Pazmino, a 21-year-old history major, said the voices on the tape reminded him of the homeless people he used to feed at a Texas shelter.

“It echoes a lot of what they say,” Pazmino said.

For co-creator Ron Davis, 34, “Etiquette” was inspired by a brief stay in New York City in the mid-1980s. “People were sleeping in the (automated teller),” he recalled.

He and Hardman, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, wanted to debunk what they call “the American myth that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

Work on the piece began with extensive field interviews with homeless people, prostitutes and others in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. Davis constructed each room in the maze from those interviews, capturing through lighting, sculpture and performance the fear, suspicion, despair and sense of marginality that come with poverty.

In one particularly effective tableau, Davis constructs a maze of metallic “turnstile people” to re-create the experience of walking through a crowded room to collect a disability check, to wait by a clock and to get food from a local church.

The homeless people who have been through “Etiquette,” Davis said, have told him: “I don’t need to go through this. I get enough of this during the day.”

The experience is anything but routine for the UC students who have walked through it and written about it in the gallery notebook.

More than one viewer described the exhibit as “scary,” “disturbing” or as a journey “to the other side.” Others wanted to spread the word: “Clinton should have experienced it when he was in California. I want to add (that) every congressman who has refused to see the plight of the homeless should experience it,” wrote one viewer.

Sohini Ray, a 28-year-old native of Calcutta and a member of the UCLA Student Committee for the Arts, which sponsored the exhibit, said such reactions are just what the committee had hoped for. After one committee member saw the exhibit in Seattle, Ray said, the group spent many months scraping together grants to bring “Etiquette” to campus.

Ray said she hoped the exhibit would “strike the conscience” of U.S. students, who she says are mostly in denial about the poverty that surrounds them.

“When you’re in India, you have all these illusions about this country, that it is a very rich place,” said Ray, who has been in the United States for two years. “I came to New York and I saw the homeless people. The thing that struck me the most was the denial.”

In India, she said, “when you see a person on the street, you have some empathy. You open up a meal center. If there’s an auspicious occasion in the family, you might offer a meal for one day to anyone who comes in.”

Andrew Cahn, a 21-year-old music major, said he wondered if anyone who denies the existence of poverty in this country would bother to experience such an exhibit.

“It’s a different experience, to be aware of it and to become part of it. You get bogged down with the overwhelming negativity of the whole situation you encounter. You’re somber, depressed, by the end of the piece,” he said. “If you were put in a situation like this in real life, you’d probably run.”