Extravagant, Graceful or Gross, It’s ‘Happening’

It was a 20th birthday party Thursday night, and a nude couple in a Hollywood swimming pool were celebrating. But it was not what you think. These were hardly young rich kids in the hills living the good life.

The pool had no water and was in a part of town that has seen better days. The couple were thin, as sleek as whippets, their bodies completely shaved. They looked practically alike and moved absolutely alike, as they leaned back on haunches, limber as rubber chickens, bobbing their heads. They were beautiful moving sculptures, slightly unreal. They seemed not quite human, more like living mannequins, the framework over which each of us puts our humanity.

The couple were performance artists who call themselves osseus labyrint, and they were one of 19 acts on hand at the Hollywood Athletic Club, a once-elegant gymnasium for the stars on Sunset that is now a concert venue for rock bands. The evening, “XX: The Happening,” was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Hollywood-based arts center that has done much over the two decades to foster performance art.

Performance art is just about anything you want it to be. Dance, music, video, stand-up comedy are popular elements these days, but they are used in unconventional ways that may reveal something meaningful about who we are, but more likely about who the artist wants to be. The one thing all performance art has in common is a sense of extravagance--the artist as an exhibition come to life. Otherwise it can be as exquisite and graceful as osseus labyrint or it can be as elaborately gross as the short performance “The Island of I Don’t Care” that Johanna Went mounted.

In Went’s grotesque landscape, fabulously ugly, deformed monsters--a two-headed nun, a happy-face demon and some sexual mutants--carried on to the accompaniment of horrible booming music. A very bad dream this, but also a fascinating one of Wagnerian dimensions. Some very brave opera impresario who doesn’t care about the National Endowment for the Arts should take a chance with her.

In the 20 years of LACE’s history, a few performance artists, like Laurie Anderson or Karen Finley, have become celebrities. And the more traditional art world has recognized others. Last season the Museum of Contemporary Art had an important exhibition, “Out of Actions,” that reviewed the history of avant-garde performance. Meanwhile, Robert Wilson was brought in to reopen Royce Hall with “Monsters of Grace.”

But LACE, which opened downtown in the midst of a flourishing arts scene but moved to Hollywood when that scene dissipated, has always been more on the edge. And cutting-edge performance art, these days, has become a very small niche that fights for its existence. More than one artist Thursday begged LACE from the stage to continue its support.

Perhaps that is why performance art today has become less avant-garde and more pop. The audience was mostly young and comfortable in a pop club environment. And when one performer, Sandra Tsing Loh, spent her allotted seven minutes reminding the audience of the time when avant-garde music, absent from the program, was once a part of the LACE downtown scene, she seemed to be recounting ancient history. Nor was there much sense of funky old happenings, not when the sound system was so high-powered or the stage crew phenomenally efficient, sweeping performers and their residue off in seconds.

Still, the evening was hardly polished, and each performer did seem to go his or her own way. Some were simply bad, as one over-amplified singer, Josie Roth, did her “Choir Girl” routine. But two female singers known as Guitar Boy were able to turn loud, bad singing into effective comedy in a skit that wickedly lambasted the Getty Center and its pretensions, to the sheer delight of the audience.

Carol Cetrone performed a languid, sexy, contortionist dance while reading a book. In a creepy exhibition in the rear of the theater, Claudia Bucher imprisoned herself in a glassed-in leafy bower suspended above a reflecting pool. Paul McCarthy acted in a disturbing, sadistic video that also featured Mike Kelley as his abused son. Actor John Fleck was like a character from Hollywood’s noir period in a vividly over-the-top performance that recalled the history of LACE.

Hollywood of old was also evoked by Eastside Sinfonietta, which updates Brecht songs by Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, some written just blocks away from the party. With Weba Garretson as an arresting, latter-day Lotte Lenya, the songs--sour and sensuous--seemed just about perfect for our own times, for the strange world of performance art and also for updating with loud winds, electric keyboard, drums and bass. The volume was somewhat defeating, spoiling words, and that was too bad, because Garretson is a decent singer who puts across a lyric strongly (which could also have been said of Lenya).

But then it seems performance does have to make a lot of noise to get noticed these days, and credit LACE, inconsistent and annoying as it can be, with keeping up the fight.