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TIMES STAFF WRITER

A chat with John White can be like a piece of his performance art--eccentric and elliptical, not spelling things out, yet somehow making its meaning clear. A fast, freewheeling outburst.

White, now semiretired, began doing performance art in the ‘60s and recently talked about the new work he’ll present tonight in a Santa Ana gallery.

“I’m going to come down there,” he said, gathering speed, “look things over and make a piece on the spot and do it that night.”

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White, performing with two other artists at the new Marie Elias Center for the Arts (MECA), plans to play off the landscapes on exhibit there. But without a lot of preparation or rehearsal. Why?

“One, it’s convenient,” he said, “because I live way up here [in Brentwood], and two--and it’s really No. 1--because it’s the way I like to work. The piece is only 15 minutes anyway, and I want to be able to get some fast information.”

The 60-year-old painter and longtime UC Irvine art instructor added that what he does now is part performance, part lecture-demo.

“It’s hard to separate them now for me; I like to do a lot of chalkboard drawing while I’m doing the performance.

“Al [Preciado, co-owner of MECA] said he has some big windows. I said, ‘Fine, give me the windows, and I’ll use them; we’ll light them from behind. . . . And give me a felt-tip pen and I’ll draw on them.’ ”

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On the bill with White are Squelch, a student at CalArts in Santa Clarita who lives in Santa Ana, and Matt Driggs, a Cal State Fullerton student living in that city. They too plan to relate in some way to MECA’s group exhibition, “Groundsight: Landscapes from the Earth.”

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MECA occupies an old Santa Ana home where Preciado lives with gallery co-owner Kelly Griffin. They also present poetry readings. Seats are set up in the intimate galleries or on a back porch, where Preciado’s sociable, domestic shorthair dogs roam.

White did prepare a little something for today, he said. It’s a vignette alluding to the environment and his maternal grandmother’s family. Every girl in the family was given a plant-like name, he said: Pansy, Rose, Gladdis (for gladiolus), Lily and Flora (his mother, nicknamed Betty, “which no one understands why”).

“It’s a very intimate little piece with some props,” White said, “and I’ll bounce that off of some [art] that’s there. I work that way now--so I’ll do free association from the work that’s there--and then it’ll all be diagramed and make sense--ha, ha--on the window, and that’s it.”

White’s performance art, influenced by experimentalist Steve Paxton, is rooted in earthy things. His first piece, in the late-’60s, was an anti-Vietnam War “dirt event,” for which he tilled soil and sloshed through a muddy pond.

In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, he taught performance art at UCI, which had been a hotbed for the form around the early ‘70s, when then-student Chris Burden famously shot himself in the arm for a piece called “Shoot.”

White now teaches only painting, which he attributes to students’ lack of interest in performance art.

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The hybrid aesthetic has not found substantial support in Orange County as a whole in recent years but always has managed to attract some acolytes.

The MECA event “reminds me of the ‘60s,” White said. “You start doing [performance art] in a little doorway or a little opening somewhere, and whoever [the artists] get a hold of [to watch them], coupled with their own will to get out and do something,” keeps the art alive.

* John White, Squelch and Matt Driggs perform tonight at the Marie Elias Center for the Arts, 120 W. 20th St., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. Free. (714) 568-9901.

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