Experimental art takes to the streets

Six women police officers -- at least they looked like police officers, except for the bad wigs and a pair of leather pants -- formed a phalanx in Chinatown’s Central Plaza, pointing bullhorns and nightsticks. Gray balloons tricked up to look like a police helicopter hovered above them.

“I’d like to see some I.D. please,” one of them demanded of an unassuming man in a heavy coat, crowding him with enormous flashlights while another pointed a video camera.

Turns out it was all in the service of art. The group was part of a sprawling evening devoted to the opening Friday night of “TV or Not TV,” the eighth biannual “celebration of experimental media arts” organized by LA Freewaves.

Introducing herself as an officer of the LATT -- the full name of which involves slang words for female body parts -- Heather Cassils shot out curt sentences as she discussed her collaborative group. “Tonight we’re an alternative police force. We’re the Big Sister that’s watching Big Brother. We’ll be stopping people and interrogating them. We’ll be stopping people and asking them on dates.”

Were they an art collective? “That’s confidential!” Cassils barked.

With about 60 artists represented, the festival opening took over a stretch of the city roughly bordered by Broadway and Chung King Road, near Bernard Street, an area that has recently become rich turf for galleries. Projections lit up the sides of buildings; TV sets played tape loops in cafes, in galleries; performances used the sidewalks for stages.

On one TV set, a surly Charlton Heston, armed and dangerous, ripped through the city in a car while electronic music played and a voice intoned “The entire Los Angeles area” and “All civilian traffic is barred from streets and highways.” On another, a Central European animated short followed a family of intelligent potatoes. At the New China Town Barber Shop, six works spooled out under the heading “Involuntary Narratives,” and outside the Acuna-Hansen Gallery, a performance called “Plasticos: Non-Surgical Plastic Surgery Clinic” unfolded.

Many of the works, like one that told the empowering tale of a female hard-rock band or the verite chronicle of the life of a young Asian woman, were concerned with gender issues and ethnic representation. Most were fairly cryptic; a few were too lengthy to command attention in the street-party atmosphere.

Sitting in Central Plaza, Anne Bray, LA Freewaves’ executive director, took a look at the action and pronounced herself pleased.

“We took the theme of ‘the wounded city and the worried suburbs’ and put it in the middle of the city,” she said. “We turned the square into a living room and put a TV in the middle.”

Happy to see a blend of generations and ethnic groups on the plaza, she dubbed the crowd of a few hundred “not just the isolated art world -- it’s a regular urban audience. There’s all this cultural mixing in the work, and I see it in the crowd too.”

Making distinctions among Web-based artworks, performance art and video didn’t seem to interest her much: “I just like experimental thought; I don’t care what medium it’s in.”

That sort of eclecticism will mark the rest of the festival as well; it continues through Nov. 30 and features videos, installations, discussions and other programming at some 40 venues -- from the Iturralde Gallery to the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena to three video billboards. According to Bray, more than 1,000 submissions of media art from all over the world were culled to come up with works by 350 artists for this year’s festival.

As Friday night wore on, a few favorites emerged among the Chinatown attendees. One was at the Happy Lion Gallery: a thin man, shot in black and white, standing before a mirror, smoking, shaving, putting on flesh-toned makeup as if preparing for a performance. But this was the performance.

“It’s an hour and 57 minutes long,” explained the artist, Skip Arnold, standing outside the gallery in a battered leather jacket and trademark scarf. His piece was made with security cameras at L.A.’s Palace Theatre this year: The cameras showed an assembled audience a closed-circuit image of him getting ready in the dressing room.

“No one saw me arrive onstage, but they had the anticipation of me arriving,” said Arnold, who teaches at CalArts and lists Charlie Chaplin and the last scene in “Raging Bull” as his inspirations. “I never come onto -- quote, unquote -- the stage,” he said. At the show’s end, the audience sees him, on camera, walk out of the theater, mission accomplished.

A piece with an entirely different tone, one of many that came into the festival about last year’s terrorist attacks, showed the last hour of daylight in New York on Sept. 11. Filmed from the roof of William Basinski’s Brooklyn apartment, with a soundtrack made from what was called a CD-burning accident, “Disintegration” was screened in a parking lot off Hill Street.

Past a couple of dumpsters and surrounded by fire escapes and the back of the Full House Restaurant, stairs lead down to a noisy, dark basement space run by a collective of CalArts graduates who call themselves c-level.

“L.A. has a real dearth of spaces for video and electronic work,” says co-founder Eddo Stern, who collects images of Osama bin Laden from the Internet. “We can’t wait around for the museums; they’re 10 years behind.” Added Jeff Hermann: “Without this festival, there’s no public forum for this kind of thing. It doesn’t get off the Internet.”

By late evening, LA Freewaves had filled the Central Plaza’s stairways, alleys and sidewalks with mostly young people dressed in black, smoking.

“I’ve decided that this is the coherent side, and that’s the incoherent side,” said Karen Schenkmeyer, a Silver Lake photographer, standing in the middle of the plaza. “I like this side,” she said, gesturing toward the screens and projections near Hill Street. “I’m a narrative person.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

‘TV or Not TV’

What: LA Freewaves: eighth Celebration of Experimental Media Arts

Where: Venues throughout Los Angeles County and beyond

Ends: Nov. 30

Contact: www.freewaves.org