Causes and Effects

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re looking at when you first walk into “Uncommon Sense.” This three-ring circus of an exhibition, opening today at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, includes a rodeo arena replete with prancing horse, 600 tons of ground glass, a replica of a set from the television series “Melrose Place,” an MTA bus, a shotgun-style house and a live nude model. Needless to say, some time and attention are demanded to grasp the deeper meanings of all this.

The show--organized by curator Julie Lazar of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Tom Finkelpearl, director of programming at the Skowhegen School--comprises six newly commissioned projects by artists who explore social issues in work designed to engage individuals and groups that don’t normally frequent the art world.

“Several years ago Tom and I were talking about artists who were committed to social interaction,” Lazar says of the show’s genesis. “It was a very open-ended discussion, and without having anything specific in mind, we invited several of these artists to L.A. in 1994 for a four-day conference and the whole thing took off from there.”

The Times recently talked with the artists of “Uncommon Sense” about the ideas they brought to the show and how they have translated them into art.

KAREN FINLEY

Finley--one of the “NEA Four,” artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were rescinded in 1990 on the grounds that their art was obscene--is primarily known for performance work exploring feminist issues. For “Uncommon Sense” she created a four-part installation.

Finley says that one of her installations, “The Secret Museum,” was inspired by the 19th century museum practice of removing phalluses from ancient statues, storing them in closets and covering the altered area with a fig leaf.

“I wanted to make an elegant piece about this ridiculous story, and ‘The Secret Museum’ presents two similarly altered statues in a dark room painted midnight blue. Onto the offending areas of the statues I project imagery designed to illustrate that anything can be phallic, because pornography is ultimately created in the mind. So much has been said about me in terms of things I’ve allegedly done, so the piece also refers to things that have been projected onto my body.”

In this same dark room are two trellises decorated with silk roses, park benches and a fountain, so the environment has the feeling of a park at night. A few yards away is a computer terminal where people are invited to type in what offends them onto the World Wide Web (https://www.moca-la.org/fear); the typewritten words are then projected so they appear to float on the surface of the pool of water in the fountain.

“Fountains are associated with town squares, and I included one in ‘The Art of Offending’ because freedom has become an important idea for me,” Finley says. “A communications decency act will be argued before the Supreme Court [on Thursday] that essentially uses minors to restrict free speech on the Internet. I object to the fact that we’re not allowed to decide for ourselves what is or is not offensive.”

Finley’s third installation, “Go Figure,” is a life drawing class. “It’s an open studio, I’ll provide nude models, and anyone can come here and draw,” she says. “The piece is designed to show that nudity in the context of art is desexualized, because the nude human form is simply one of many tools in the artists’ vocabulary.

“I’m also showing a series of drawings that parody ‘Winnie-the-Pooh.’ I have a 4-year-old daughter, so I’ve become familiar with children’s books and television shows, and I’ve noticed a major shortage of female characters. It’s incredible how early the denial of female experience begins.”

MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES

The Colorado native moved to New York in 1958, where she earned a degree in international relations before beginning her work as an artist. Ukeles, now an artist in residence with New York’s Department of Sanitation, has done several works pivoting on ecological restoration; for MOCA, she created “Unburning Freedom Hall.”

“Freedom Hall was built in Philadelphia in 1838 with contributions made by 2,000 women, abolitionists and African Americans,” Ukeles says. “The hall was built to be a gathering place for discussion of the rights of women and Native Americans and the abolition of slavery, but it was destroyed by arson four days after it opened. This story of fire has been in my heart for a long time, and when I was invited to make a work in L.A., the first thing I thought of was fire. Then when I saw the Geffen Contemporary, which is so open and filled with light, I knew this was the place to unburn Freedom Hall.

“I began the piece by gaining access to two L.A. sanitation yards, two street maintenance yards and two firehouses. I didn’t pick these people out of a hat, by the way. These are the people who maintain the city, and one of the tragedies of L.A.’s civil disturbance of 1992 was the rupture in the contract between city workers and the public; firefighters were attacked, the streets were trashed, and sanitation workers couldn’t pick up the garbage. I then told the workers the story of Freedom Hall and invited them to make unburnings, which are small assemblages created inside glass jars. I also visited two schools in South-Central and invited the students to make unburnings. Kids are the future, and I wanted to raise the issue of what we’re passing on to them--will we leave them nothing but ash?”

Along with 600 unburnings, the piece includes those 600 tons of crushed glass (which represent the shattered halls of Freedom Hall, waiting to be rebuilt), a video of people talking about their unburnings and a circular glass table where eight gatherings of representatives of various local communities will take place. Jars and supplies will be provided and people are encouraged to sit at the table, talk and make unburnings. It is Ukeles’ intention that the unburnings become part of a permanent public work after the show closes.

“Freedom Hall represented a crossroads for this country, and the right path wasn’t taken,” she says. “Since I proposed this piece in 1995, 40 churches in the South have been burned, so we’re at the same crossroads again, and we have to decide: Are we going to burn it down, or are we going to build?”

MEL CHIN

The artist, born and raised in Houston, moved to New York in 1983 and has been based in Athens, Ga., since 1994 for a three-year teaching residency. In collaboration with the GALA Committee (which refers to Georgia/L.A.), he has created “In the Name of the Place,” a project consisting of the creation of original artworks for use on the sets of “Melrose Place.”

“The world knows L.A. primarily through movies and television,” Chin says. “Everyone criticizes television, but nobody tries to intervene with it to give it the meaning it lacks--and that’s what I decided to attempt. I picked ‘Melrose Place’ as the site for such an intervention because you don’t have to watch ‘Melrose Place’ to know about it--it completely permeates the culture.

“Instead of just getting my work on the show, I wanted to take the idea further and create art that is visually unobtrusive but is rich in content if you care to go deeper,” he says of the GALA artworks, which were created by artists and students in L.A., Athens, Houston, Kansas City and New York, who decided by committee what works would be produced. The works are largely drawings, paintings and sculpture that refer to things in the public domain--news events, parodies of works by famous artists, pop culture and language.

“My initial contact was Deborah Siegel, who’s the set decorator for the show, and she sold our idea to the executives,” Chin says. “The only constraint they put on us was that we had to abide by the visual rules of television--things with too much white don’t pick up well, for instance. We’ve submitted 200 artworks, 70% of which were accepted, and our things have been turning up on the show since Feb. 12, 1996.”

“The first phase of the project was getting the art on the air,” Chin says. “Now it’s on exhibit at MOCA, which served as a location for an episode of ‘Melrose Place’ that was shot on Feb. 28 and airs sometime in June. The final phase will be an auction of the works when ‘Uncommon Sense’ closes, with the proceeds going to charity. The people at ‘Melrose Place’ understood we weren’t artists for hire, and because we trusted each other, we succeeded in creating artworks that are more than just props, despite their context.”

ANN CARLSON AND MARY ELLEN STROM

For 15 years, New York-based artists Carlson and Strom have worked in collaboration and individually on performance-based pieces exploring gender, identity and the empowerment of women. Their piece for MOCA, “West,” combines video, a live rodeo performance and installation and music by Pierce Turner.

“We’ve been going to rodeos for years and wanted to do a piece dealing with them because they’re loaded with symbolism,” Carlson says. “Rodeos are closed systems where everyone has a role they never question--it’s white, masculine, and horses and women are dominated in this world. In ‘West,’ I become the colonizer when I’m on the horse, but that position can be friendly and invite you in--which is what happens in our culture.”

Positioned around the arena are 25 pairs of binoculars; 13 of them are regular binoculars, but when you look in the 12 others you see videos made by women in Chiapas, Mexico; Belfast, Northern Ireland; Belgrade, Yugoslavia; and South-Central Los Angeles. Carlson and Strom worked with intermediaries to place cameras in locations around the world, and the cameras were given to the participants as a method of payment.

“The tape from Chiapas was made by a collective of indigenous women struggling to preserve their native culture,” Strom explains. “They do this through various crafts, mainly weaving, and the tape shows them weaving, taking care of their children and talking about their culture. A 19-year-old girl from L.A. named Faviola Ridgway made a piece about the CIA and crack in the inner city, and Belfast resident Mary Fitzpatrick compiled footage from Derry and Belfast dealing with censorship, surveillance and the 25th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

“The woman from Belgrade, Dubravka Knesevik, is a leader in the opposition movement against [Serbian] President Slobodan Milosevic, and she tells a story about objects that have been in her family for a long time. She describes a pot and a spoon that have served many different functions and recalls that in the first days of protest against Milosevic, she joined her neighbors in the streets and banged this pot and spoon together in protest. This is a beautiful illustration of how the personal is political. The world is a single arena where we’re all present; do we dismiss what we know about what’s going on around the world? If not, how do we respond to these faraway events and balance them with our lives here?”

CORNERSTONE THEATER

Bill Rauch, director of Cornerstone Theater, a nomadic collective formed in L.A. in 1986, describes Cornerstone’s contribution, “bUS pLAy,” as “a three-part work focusing on a city bus as a communal public space.”

“Because this exhibition runs four months we couldn’t do a full-length play, so we’re premiering a new 25-minute play by Christopher Liam Moore called ‘Token Alien’ that’s Cornerstone’s response to Proposition 187.”

Cornerstone is also producing eight 20-minute plays conceived and directed by individuals and community organizations they invited to participate. All the plays will be performed for audiences of 39 people who will be seated on an actual bus on loan from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“The actors in the plays are an interesting mix,” Rauch says. “We put out a call to all the communities we’ve worked with, so people from all over L.A. are sprinkled throughout the casts. We also had a casting call for MTA bus drivers and cast 15 drivers in parts in various plays.”

The third part of “bUS pLAy” is a sound installation by Cornerstone member Benajah Cobb; in between the plays, people can listen to sounds of various bus routes. Flanking the bus on both sides are photomurals; on the left are Andy Bush’s images of people driving in cars, and on the right are Claudio Cambon’s pictures of people waiting at bus stops.

“Putting a bus in MOCA raises class issues particular to L.A.,” Rauch says. “Why doesn’t public transit work here as effectively as it does in New York or San Francisco? Who rides the bus in L.A. and who doesn’t? Have the people who attend exhibitions at MOCA ever been on an MTA bus? If not, why not?”

RICK LOWE

Alabama native Lowe moved in 1985 to Houston, where he created “Project Row Houses”--an ambitious “artwork” begun in 1993 that transformed a section of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods into a community cultural center. He is attempting something similar through MOCA with “Watts House Project,” which seeks to establish an artist-in-residence program in Watts.

“I was trained as a painter, and in 1988 I did a piece for Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum about a klan lynching that occurred in Alabama in 1984. I intended that the piece be empowering to the black community, then realized that the people at risk of being lynched don’t go to museums. I was so put off by that experience I stopped making work for a year and a half, and when I began working again it was with the intention of connecting my work to the African American community. That shift in how I approach art led to ‘Project Row Houses.’

“When MOCA invited me to L.A. in 1994, I visited the Watts Towers Art Center, and the director, Mark Greenfield, brought my attention to the shotgun houses across the street from the towers. He also told me about the Watts Towers Cultural Crescent Task Force, a community redevelopment plan that included an artist-in-residence program. He said the shotguns had been considered as the site for that program but nobody had gotten it off the ground.”

Lowe knew he had found the place to direct his energies, and he selected four lots out of the 23 that border the Cultural Crescent district and developed proposals for transforming them into artist-in-residence spaces. At the conclusion of the MOCA show, Lowe will live part time in Watts, working to establish the artist-in-residence program and make it self-sustaining.

“This is a closed community reluctant to let outsiders in, and a key part of this project was gaining the trust of people in the neighborhood,” Lowe says. “[German artist] Joseph Beuys coined the term ‘social sculpture,’ which refers to the developing of our environment as sculpture, and this is the kind of work that seems important to me now. Manipulating paint has no allure for me whatsoever anymore, because I’ve come to see myself as an artist who uses the community as a medium. Interaction with people is what feels creative to me now.”

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* “Uncommon Sense,” Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N. Central Ave. Tuesdays to Wednesdays and Fridays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends July 6. (888) FOR-MOCA.