Pushing Boundaries Beyond the Pink

The Beyond the Pink Performance Festival, a celebration of events and artists that in recent decades have challenged traditional notions of music, visual art and performance, owes a few things to pure chance. For example, the festival--which begins Monday and continues through Feb. 21 at various Los Angeles locations (including Barnsdall Art Park, Bergamot Center and Art Center College of Design)--got its name because of an errant fax machine.

“I was faxing the program to someone . . . and the friend I was faxing it to said: ‘Oh, no, don’t fax it, because our fax paper is beyond the pink,’ ” explained Gary Todd, founder of the Cortical Foundation (more on that later), who is producing the festival with Denise Spampinato. The fax was so close to running out of paper that even the sheets with the telltale pink stripes indicating the approaching end were almost gone.

“Right away, that seemed like a fitting title,” Todd said in a conversation over cold soba noodles in a Little Tokyo restaurant near the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary facility. “So I typed in the title, and then I faxed it” (to a restocked machine, one assumes).

It also has something to do with the pink sunset visible from Todd’s window in Malibu and, according to Spampinato, with trying to capture the bright, candy-colored spirit of the 1960s--the defining decade for many of the artists of the festival--while at the same time naming it so that “people would not know what it could possibly be.”

Both Todd and Spampinato agree that Beyond the Pink would never have occurred without the exhibition “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979,” opening Sunday at the Geffen. The show is an in-depth look at art that evolved internationally from performance events and actions, including Fluxus and action painting, for example. Spampinato, an associate researcher for the MOCA show (her main responsibility was the exhibition’s Reading Room, collecting and organizing the many writings of the artists) met Todd by chance last December. Along with Allan Kaprow, who coined the term “happening” and whose “Untitled Occurrences” is on the festival program, they decided to put together an adjunct to the museum show.

The hastily concocted festival features some of the artists involved in the MOCA event, including Carolee Schneemann, whose 1963 studio installation/action “Eye Body” has been re-created at the Geffen. But unlike the MOCA show, Beyond the Pink focuses on performance itself, rather than the resulting objects and documentation that form the bulk of MOCA’s presentation.

Beyond the Pink is probably best defined by mentioning the names of a few of the participants and describing their offerings. A much anticipated highlight will be the all-night pipe-organ concert and collaboration of composer Charlemagne Palestine and choreographer-dancer Simone Forti, beginning at 11:30 p.m. at Hollywood Methodist Church. Other notables include Miriam Patchen, elderly widow of poet Kenneth Patchen, reading her late husband’s writings; a performance of Dick Higgins’ piano compositions by Delores Stevens; appearances by famed performance artist Mike Kelley (who is also represented in the MOCA show), the ear-splitting “wall-of-sound” of Joe Potts’ AIRWAY, and the electric music of The Red Krayola.

Artists are participating in the festival--which is not sponsored by MOCA but is, says Spampinato, heartily endorsed by MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel--free of charge. Some travel expenses, venue rentals and other costs are being absorbed by a variety of supporters and Todd’s Cortical Foundation, a privately funded entity dedicated to restoring the sound archives of the founders of Minimalism, including Terry Riley and La Monte Young, whose works will be performed during the festival. (“Cortical,” according to Webster’s: “involving, or in some way caused by, the brain cortex.”)

Todd, who refuses to tell his age or where he’s from, and admits to not turning on his TV since 1984, says that area art schools are already booking blocks of tickets, and he predicts a large and enthusiastic audience for this one-of-a-kind event. “It’s not just an entertainment city; people love culture here,” he says. “And having all of these artists, together, here in Los Angeles, will never happen again. Never.”

* Beyond the Pink Performance Festival information: (310) 317-4261. Ticket information $10-$25, students half-price with ID. Showtixx: (818) 789-TIXX. https://www.cortical.org