By Callan stout Mar Vista
Saturday night Santa Monica hosted Glow, an all night event focused on artistic vision expressed through light. Glow took over the Santa Monica Pier, the surrounding beach and Palisades Park. Glow promised to be a great celebration of all the beauty that could be California, a huge public art event exploring and glorifying light on the beach we are so lucky to have. After I received the first e-mail describing the event I knew I could not miss this.
Judging from the massive attendance, I was not alone in this feeling. It was heart warming to see the pier crawling with all members of the Angeleno community, swarming across the beach to the luminescent art installation and otherwise enjoining the perks that living beach side affords us. I myself was almost glowing with the community spirit that was pulsing through the event.
Yet in the midst of this celebration, the ugliness of the Angelenos reached the height of its grotesque parody of itself. The beach and artistic vision soured when the glow sticks of one artist sprawling across the beach in imitation of the tide shift of the ocean was destroyed by Angelenos tearing the glow sticks from their arrangement in the sand and stealing them away into the night or perverting their natural geometry with lewd shapes.
The visionary artist was left to beg his glow sticks — his art — back from the thieves, many who simply refused. Where was the event staff to protect the project? A small band of pre-teen girls ran passed me yelling at each other, “Quick. Some guy’s collecting them. Hide them.”
They were each carrying an arm full of glowing sticks. Where were the parents to teach their children simple decency? Hours later as I left, disappointed that Frank Rozasy’s “Illumination Migration” was unable to be recreated, I still saw people carrying away these glow sticks.
They were designed just for this event, and were easily differentiated from the slender glow sticks for sale. And where were the police when this all fell apart to at least aid this artist in retrieving his scattered art? I did not see them.
Unfortunately, I did not see the art either. Not the way the creator intended. I saw the glow sticks mimick-ing the movements of the crowd instead of “mimicking both the movements of the tide and more specifically the grunions coming ashore and returning to sea.” All I saw was the ugliness of the people of Santa Monica and Los Angeles. And it made me sick.
As an artist myself, although a very different kind, I can understand the wrenching pain that tears deep into the stomach when a creative endeavor is destroyed by the very people it was meant to inspire. I know it is too much to ask every single person involved in this travesty to apologize to Frank Rozasy.
But I am asking that all pilfered glow sticks be returned to him. And I ask the entire Angeleno community to think next time before they so selfishly destroy the creativity of an individual and the opportunity for others to share in the experience of artistic expression.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 24, 2008. Read the original PDF.