They booked a warehouse for a night in June and spread the word to artists and musicians that they were looking for participants. The next day their phones started ringing. “Every freak in L.A. was calling,” says Bourque. They heard bizarre propositions by the hundreds. “I’ll sit in a giant bowl of Apple Jacks and staple raw beef to my body,” threatened one man. A woman volunteered, “I’ll build an archway and walk back and forth naked passing things to the people below.” Their response was the same to all: “You’re in.” The two fined up mud-caked primitives, a rock opera whose cast throws fruit and wears only paint, a woman who walks her boyfriend like a dog; they booked rappers, poets, clowns, bands. But a month before the event, both organizers realized that something was missing. “Jell-O!” cried Bourque. “We’ll fill a pool with it, and people can slither around!” Hays nodded and added “Jell-O Frolic Pit” to the list.
Similar events, massive onetime affairs involving thousands of partygoers and dozens of artists from diferent disciplines, are starting to pop up around the country, usually where there’s an art scene that isn’t getting recognition. Call it the sequel to the rave, those marathon parties where people younger than most of us stay up later than most of us dancing to incessant electronic “techno” music. Or call it by its stillemerging names: “web jam” or “omnisensorial sweepout.” The idea is simple: to gather the tribes surrounding underground movements in art, sculpture, music, mixed media and performance art, and throw them together until they add up to a mass audience and esthetic chaos.
For artists, these events are a natural way to get exposure to a large public and have some fun. “Why wait around for a concert hall to book you or an art gallery to shove you in their stable when you can organize your own far more meaningful conglomeration?” asks one of the organizers of Organism, a web jam held last month in Brooklyn. (The organizers are wary of hogging the credit for a collective effort, and so insisted that NEWSWEEK not use their names.) For 12 hours, more than 2,000 people pushed into an abandoned mustard factory to see the work of 120 artists, featuring everything from exploding watermelons to performers rappelling down silos. “The fine arts are dead,” he explains, “and we’re taking advantage of decentralized media to create a new cultural forum.”
The parties are taking place in empty swimming pools, in backyards, in lofts and foundries-everywhere but in traditional galleries. Last summer a group of Seattle artists set up a “nuclear party” by a ship canal, where sirens buzzed, fluorescent fluids spilled and steam poured forth from a mock reactor, while attendees donned toxic suits. “These types of events occur when there’s not much access for artists,” says University of Illinois art historian Jonathan Fineberg. And they seem to be spreading, to maybe a dozen cities across the country. “It’s happening all over,” says Bourque. “People are having the same feeling, a feeling of loss, and that you can’t do anything about what’s happening in the world. Our solution is to try to expand your own world.” Bourque and Hays are already planning their next party. It’ll feature huge vats in which partygoers can dye themselves like Easter eggs. Be there or be a raver.
