Festival turns entire city into a museum

The welcome signs posted at entrances to Santa Monica State Beach host a list of rules that must be observed while enjoying Los Angeles’ most beloved sandy stretch: No temporary enclosures, no percussion instruments, no audio devices after 10 p.m., no loitering under the pier. These are just a few of the many laws the famously strict city allowed to be broken for its inaugural run of Glow, a biennial dusk-till-dawn art festival that returns to Santa Monica this weekend.

The 2008 event, inspired by Paris’ popular Nuit Blanche, featured commissioned artworks that took over Santa Monica State Beach, the Santa Monica Pier and Palisades Park for a full night of interactivity meant to transform the by-day tourist hotspot into a free-for-all, pop-up playground-meets-museum.

In its first year, Glow featured site-specific works, such as pirate lullabies on the sand, moving trash mobiles hanging under the pier, audio-stimulated projections on a water-mist wall and an orchestral work performed from the baskets of the iconic ferris wheel.

Still, Glow’s well-meaning first attempt was not without its faults.

For nearly 12 hours — the event ran until 7 a.m. — the estimated 200,000 Angelenos that showed up expecting a large-scale city-organized event were instead met with overcrowded access points, inefficient signage, cancelled performances, botched electronics and overall mass confusion.

After battling Santa Monica’s already brutal parking situation to get into the event (the city said it only expected 25,000 visitors), many attendees complained that they did not know where to actually go to find the art, and when they did it was either experiencing technical difficulties or not mind-blowing enough to be worth the trek.

For these reasons, Glow’ first run could be considered a failure — a city’s botched attempt to create a signature cultural event — but that wouldn’t be entirely fair. Though the overload of attendees in 2008 created unexpected chaos at what was supposed to be a low-key, interactive experience, it also proved that L.A. residents are ready to accept large-scale public interactive art as part of the city’s ever-shifting identity.

So this year, Glow is up to the task and is ready to give Los Angeles the all-night culture fest it craves. Glow has employed a brand-new marketing campaign that aims to train visitors for what to expect before they arrive.

This includes interactive Google maps, public transit information, tips on how to plan one’s visit and an hourlong audio guide/downloadable soundscape created by KCRW’s Jason Bentley. And to curb the amount of impromptu drum circles and drunken hangers-around, the hours have been scaled back to end at 3 a.m. — still an impressive time to be traipsing around on a crowded Southern California beach.

The idea behind the art, however, remains the same. Taking its name from the glow of the local grunion fish as it gets tossed through the waves during mating season — a quintessential Southern California sight — all of the commissioned pieces are asked to respond to the coastal landscape and utilize, in one way or another, the symbolism of light.

Words such as “glittering,” “illuminated” and “glowing” are all over the descriptions of works that will be presented Saturday night. Pieces include a moon-themed karaoke room, an evolving lifeguard tower that responds to audio and visual input, a light-filled reinterpretation of the original muscle beach and a real-time screening of a day on the sand.

Machine Project — an Echo Park-based art collective currently in residence at the Hammer Museum — is returning with three musical performance concepts scattered throughout the area, including the return of authentic sea shanties sung by local freak-folk band Featherbeard and a cache of wandering musicians playing instruments for festivalgoers.

Glow also stepped outside of its previous artistic boundaries by making interesting connections with local businesses and organizations whose projects are expanding the boundaries of what can be done with public art.

The 18th Street Art Center and L.A. Commons will lead a procession down the Third Street Promenade to mark the official start of Glow (and spend the evening trying to balance the earth and the sun, per the local Native American legend The Sun and the Coyote). The Border Grill restaurant will take over a living locomotive steam engine parked just north of the pier, turning food preparation into a living, interactive sculpture. And the Los Angeles Nomadic Division — a non-profit public art curatorial group — will present Yoshua Okón’s projections of pitbulls and their owners against the outside wall of Hot Dog on a Stick on Ocean Front.

Unlike Paris’ Nuit Blanche or Berlin’s Lange Nacht der Museen, however, Glow is a uniquely L.A. creation. Forgoing the museums-open-all-night draw — which is already satisfied by late-night events such as the Natural History Museum’s First Fridays — Glow reappropriated the city-as-de-facto-museum idea and gave it an interactive twist.

“It’s not just about looking at art,” Jessica Cusick, cultural affairs manager for the City of Santa Monica, said to Defamer before Glow’s inaugural run in 2008. “It’s about changing the paradigm. Instead of just looking at it, you are in some way contributing to the experience.”

Sarah Bennett is a senior majoring in communication. Her column, “Fake Bad Taste,” runs Wednesdays.