GLOW Festival in Santa Monica: The Trials of Creating an Art Show on the Beach

So she and her staff proposed to the city council an ordinance that would temporarily void all conflicting ordinances within the designated GLOW area for that one night. This year, when they proposed the GLOW ordinance for the third time, self-declared Santa Monica peace activist Jerry Rubin spoke in support, sounding almost choked up, talking about how important the event is, "because Santa Monica, as you all know, declared art to be a sustainable city goal." Last year, the city council added "Arts & Culture" to the official Sustainable City Plan it first drafted in 1994.

GLOW 2008 brought in a staggering 250,000 people, and the 2010 event brought in closer to 150,000, which is why Cusick opted to wait three years for the next one, to take time to focus and strategize. There will be fewer but bigger projects this year — 15 total, versus 27 the first year. The list includes artist/nanotechnologist Victoria Vesna's reprogramming of the Ferris wheel lights and Glenn Kaino's bioengineered pool of glowing plankton.

The new scale and focus could increase the event's cachet in the larger community of L.A. culture makers. "We had a hard time trying to convey the idea of serious art on the beach," Cusick says.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GLOW

Mathieu Briand's rendering of 6:43, his piece for Santa Monica's GLOW festival

Location Info

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Santa Monica Beach

Pacific Coast Highway
Santa Monica, CA 90407

Category: Community Venues

Region: Santa Monica

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• Santa Monica
• Paris (France)
• Jessica Cusick
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Visual Arts

GLOW enlisted respected artists, but the almost-too-pretty logo, the chipper KCRW ads, the clichéd setting of the Santa Monica Pier and the location's total lack of obscurity or exclusivity make its seriousness hard to accept. Among the scant coverage of the first 2010 event was an L.A. Times article that quipped, "Thinking ... may be optional, as many of the projects are geared toward fun."

"It's too populist," Pally hypothesizes about this pushback against the event's thoughtfulness.

Artist Steve Roden, who had a large sound-and-video installation on the sand in 2010, tells the Weekly via email, "Initially the fear was simply how a work that was intended to be subtle could exist in a situation where it might be drowned by the chaos. But because of that chaos, a ton of wonderful, unexpected things happened. A group of teenagers, who were clearly stoned, were standing between the projector and the screen, and they were having their pictures taken immersed in the light ... as if they were inside the images, and they were laughing their asses off and it was wonderful."

This kind of event can be frightening for artists, Briand says, as the work might become more mode of entertainment than means of communication. Still, he says, "At the end of the day, we do the work for the public."

Probably five to 10 people at a time will be able to enter his 6:43 shipping-container temple. It will be mostly dark inside, but as they move through they'll come to a projection of the moon's surface; then as they turn into the adjacent container, they'll see a record player faintly lit, on which a concrete replica of the moon spins. It's a live feed of this fictional moon that they'll have just seen.

"It's not to do something spectacular. I never think about that," Briand says of 6:43. "We have so much spectacle, 3-D movies and other things." Instead, he wants people to feel that slippage between what's real and what's fictional and to experience the familiar merging with the strange.

This sort of experience is what Pally says he wants GLOW to offer, too — something immersive but not obvious. "The public is entitled to be exposed to great art, to joy, generosity and provocation."

GLOW 2013 | Santa Monica Beach | Sat., Sept. 28, 7 p.m.–Sun., Sept. 29, 3 a.m. | glowsantamonica.org