Art Clubbing--Puttin' on the Paint

By DOUGLAS SADOWNICK

March 20, 1988 12 AM PT

It’s Saturday night at Flaming Colossus, the downtown trend-oid dinner, drink and dance club for the Hollywood elite, Euro-trash fleet and punked-out kids from the streets. The beer’s five bucks, as usual. But the paint is free.

The paint? Yes, the paint. Welcome to the first--and perhaps the last--appearance of MayZone’s Art Club Party, just now revving into first gear inside the club’s main room. And the usual dancing, posing and snubbing is taking a back seat to art. People are here to paint themselves blue.

Mark Miller of Santa Monica had just “pumped” up at the gym and boasts that his “buff pecs” make a boss canvas. He and his girl Monica Silverman have designs on each other.

Visual artists Siu Ming and Keith Greco do, too. Greco adorns her cleavage with sky blue and fire-engine red for an hour so that the Cleopatra-like painted necklace she now sports over her bare chest is admired by arriving Art Clubbers as design work extraordinaire .

It’s 11 p.m. now and the club’s lurching into second gear, transforming itself from glamorous hangout to gratifying spectacle.

A throng of eager neophytes cluster around the Art Bar where “art muse” Monica Riley helps them pump globs of paint from over-sized ketchup bottles onto paper plates. Easels dot the circumference of the dance floor.

Waiters wrapped-up in protective paper smocks look like Mediterranean astronauts with their slicked-back, dyed black hair styles. They orbit around their patrons, trying to shake these “artistes” out of their creative trances in order to hand them their just-ordered rum and Cokes. Fat chance.

Artists Andre Miripolsky, Bob (Hope) Zoell, Tequila Mockingbird and Mike Doud are giving new dimension to Abject Expressionism and that’s enough transcendence. At least for now.

A huge yellow rocking chair acts as the center piece. An anorexic appearing naked model stands on this high pedestal, dolled up in orange body paint. She’s known as the “fire girl” and has the effect of “wowing” unsuspecting club habitues out of assumptions about how one acts when surrounded by “beautiful” people.

But MayZone admits she’s still nervous in the service. There’s still too much club snobbery for her taste.

She spots more folks in the club’s “I’m here to be seen” real bar than at her Art Bar. Nicolas Cage is sipping Pina Coladas and Harry Dean Stanton is singing Frank Sinatra hits. Dyan Cannon, Jaime Gertz and Robert Downey Jr. are there too. Performance artists Deborah Oliver and Peter Schroff are watching them. This poseur routine is definitely not what she had in mind.

“Check out the self-service Art Bar,” she shouts, pointing to an idea box for those without them. Suggestions include “paint your mother naked” or “paint with your heart.”

Two tall Bruce Weber model-types are taken aback. Until now, the two were too cool. They lightly caressed each other’s hands, noticing no one, being noticed by all. MayZone knows they’re just “dying to paint.”

“Come along, kids, “ she purrs. They reluctantly go along for the joy ride, and leave their spot. To MayZone, this threshold represents the bridge between two worlds: One where the boys and girls are the scenery, and another where they make it.

“I had to pick silk tonight,” pouts one unsuspecting Flaming Colossus regular with Vogue-model cheekbones. “I’ll simply sue if they drip any acrylic on me.”

By midnight, MayZone has her way. Almost everyone is painting.

Run by four French expatriates, Flaming Colossus is something of a notorious, local glamour scene that does fill a vacuum now that Power Tools, another theme-oriented dance club, is defunct.

Located at 850 S. Bonnie Brae St., a hop skip and a jump from the taquerias on Alvarado, Flaming Colossus offers enough stimuli to its “regulars” so that they don’t bother bar hopping to the nearby Stock Exchange. The more seriously art-conscious Lhasa Club and Limbo Lounge won’t do either. The glitterati at Flaming Colossus on March 12 got more celebrities for their price of admission ($15) here.

But the ins and outs of “club politics” are the last things on MayZone’s mind these days as she struggles to use “live art” as a weapon against the conventions of traditional art and non-traditional pretentiousness.

Her dream of making a “revolutionary” Art Club began two years ago when she had invited friends to a small gathering at her Crestline home near Lake Arrowhead. Their energy, she recalls, “was so low and depressing” that she had no recourse but to ask her friends “to get creative.” She provided the materials and the direction and they painted till dawn.

When the party was over, each partygoer had a canvas to take home. Soon after, MayZone, 37, became a renegade in pop art circles as the curator of “good bad art.” She opened her own Art Garage, dedicated to what she called “neo-folk, anti-intellectual and L.A. Dadaism.”

The art was so bad, she admits, “that it was genuine, human and of the world.” Ordinary people such as truck drivers and waitresses interested her more than “some genius in a garret.” Her point was to “smash this idea of art as conceptual, exclusionary and elitist.”

But what more elite setting exists than the one at Flaming Colossus?

“Hah! Here we are a Trojan Horse and I hope everyone sees through the disguise,” she exclaims. “I can assure you I’ll never work here again. It’s far too hoity-toity for me, although everyone seems to be having a good time and look at the art that’s being done!”

All around the room, people are migrating from easel to easel like kids at a junk-filled flee market. There’s George DeCabrio’s light show on the wall, which he describes as “overhead Alka-Seltzer.”

Curator/director Kristina Van Kirk from the B-1 Gallery in Santa Monica is talking up artists Jack Zoltak and Neal Taylor who are painting here, clearly proving that the Art Club can serve a promotional purpose for professionals that MayZone may not have bargained for.

Il Culto, an Italian rock band, blasts guitar chords. Artist N. Brittian Ehringer and famed Latino painter Magu are encouraging neophytes to collaborate on their canvases, which are part-figural, part-abstract cartoons of animals and people.

Chicago sculptor Marc Siemer builds a 10-foot high tepee sculpture of bamboo and red, intestinal-styled exhaust pipe, which he calls “a deconstructionist’s dream.” At 3 a.m. a timer goes off and, true to Warholian, post-punk form, the entire work implodes to wild jeering.

Dancers jiving to deejay Ahmed Taraft’s contempo mix of Talking Heads and Sounds of Soweto step over a leather clad man and woman who are kneeling on the floor, mixing paints. The canvases are all taken, so these renegade painters finesse fine art on the floor: portraits of each other, simple slashes of color, geometric figurines, safe-sex advertisements and swastika obsessions.

The club, which has been in full motion, now dies down. MayZone may not have brought art to the people, but she has certainly given a human dimension to this attitude-saturated club.

It’s the day after Art Club and Linda Burnham has heard from the grapevine about the Art Club. Actually, her 25-year-old daughter Jill was there. Burnham wishes she had been there too, “just to see the club people squirm with all this art.” Burnham has dedicated her life to believing that “art can make a difference in the world,” whether that expression included the women’s movement or any kind of social activism or awareness.

It worries Burnham just a little that Southlanders forget so easily their own local art history. Burnham is known as the “big mama” of performance art in Los Angeles, as well as its best, if only, historian. She’s made the city a bastion of experimental work by publishing a nationally recognized journal here during the past decade called High Performance, now edited by her colleague and lifemate, Steve Durland.

MayZone’s Art Club reminds Burnham of work she’s supported her whole life, but it’s pioneer performance artists “Bob & Bob who first come to mind” for her.

Burnham, who also teaches performance art at UC Irvine with Durland, recounts how, in 1979, “1,000 patrons of the avant-garde spent the midnight hours in a downtown warehouse making art. In a dizzying atmosphere of strobe lights and synthesized music, the crowd went to work on a 100-foot-long canvas, doing its best to express itself in paint.” Bob & Bob, who were painted yellow and silver, for six hours recited a Post-Modern mantra, which asked the crowd to forget everything they knew about everything, including sex, art, rock ‘n’ roll and Bob & Bob.

“Unfortunately, they were so successful that everyone forgot about (the achievements of) Bob & Bob,” Burnham says with a laugh.

No doubt MayZone’s approach differs from Burnham’s devotional one even though Burnham feels that the Art Club can be a “bridge between the performance-art world, the visual-art world and the club scene.”

But as Burnham negotiates to “build a performance space where the likes of Bob & Bob can perform,” MayZone searches for “less elitist venues for the Art Club than Flaming Colossus.” Still, their goals are similar: to avoid safety, to break rules, to make people--a lot of people--think.

“I think of the futurists in Milan and St. Petersburg, the Dadaists in Zurich as my heroes,” MayZone rhapsodizes, hoping for more Art Clubs to come, but realistic about how difficult such projects are to mount.

“I once heard someone refer to a Happening as ‘the brutal grandeur and ephemeral charm of things you won’t see twice.’ ”