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Monday, 6/30/97 Her Own Backyard ART: With a little help from the community, Liza Lou transforms over a million beads into a life-sized yard - and a beautiful work of art.

By Jammie Salagubang Daily Bruin Contributor A soft breeze ruffles your hair. The happy, lilting voices of people talking and laughing drift by your ears. The sparkling grass looks so lovely, so shiny. But wait a minute. That "breeze" is really coming from an air conditioner. The people aren't standing on the grass but constructing it. The lawn is actually made of a mind-numbing number of glass beads strung on wires by hand. Everything, EVERYTHING, in this 600-square-foot mock plot of suburbia, from the clothes on the line to the barbeque grill, is covered with beads. Welcome to artist Liza Lou's "Backyard," which just happens to be growing inside the Santa Monica Place mall. The work in progress, commissioned by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is a stylized piece of Americana. "The backyard really does symbolize the American dream - to have a plot of land of one's own," Lou says. "I'm always trying to tap into that collective unconsciousness that we have, that collective dream, the fantasy of an ultimate life. For me, to see the beaded backyard, it's kind of like the backyard I always wanted to have, always dreamed to be able to live in." But beading a life-size project can be more like a nightmare. The lawn itself will consist of 1 million individually-beaded blades of grass. With the aid of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where "Backyard" will first appear after its completion, the idea of a "Lawn Party" has sprung to life. "We're asking the public to help, because if she did this by herself, it would take 10 years or more to do, so we needed assistants," explains Scott Boberg, the Director of Education for the Santa Monica Museum of Art. "It's symbolic too, because the backyard is where people gather and have fun and have parties and so on. It's symbolic in terms of having the community involved, creating this work." On certain Saturdays of the month, from 1 to 4 p.m., the public can help bead blades of grass for Lou's project in the community room at the Santa Monica Place mall. All volunteers will have their names placed on a wall in the museum. "The museum is very much interested in doing community outreach and helping people understand contemporary art and how contemporary art is made," Boberg says. Lou also appreciates the impact the public has made on her art. "The grass that we have made so far would have taken me four years if I had done it alone," Lou observes. "So many people have made this project really successful." Lou also views the help as more than just volunteer work, or something to do when shopping at the mall gets old. "A lot of people say this is mindless. You're making all this grass, it's just mindless repetitive activity. I take issue with that. I think it's mind-full to be able to sit down and apply yourself to something very simple," Lou declares. "There's dignity in the doing." The message is not lost in the making, but rather, enhanced by it. "The labor itself is part of the message of ('Backyard') ... Our lives have become linked," Lou continues. "I mean, these people are coming together from all walks of life to apply themselves to this task. That is really meaningful to me." Another very important aspect of the work is, of course, the many, many, many beads themselves. Besides being shiny and attractive, beads literally shed new light on Lou's work. "She's taking an ordinary bit of life that everybody takes for granted and she's taken this ordinary object and has made it beautiful by (applying) these shining, opulent things," Boberg says. "('Backyard') really goes beyond reality. It's obviously a backyard, but it has this beauty to it that you would never expect." Lou began working with beads while she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute and remains transfixed by them. "They're the ultimate paint times 100 because you get this incredible light," Lou says. "With beads you have the most amazing opportunity to work with color and light." However, Lou didn't think the institute provided her with enough opportunities with the glistening glass baubles since, as an undergrad, she couldn't really focus on one material. So she decided to leave and "bead the world." "The impetus to really take the beads to that extreme was based on the idea that to really elevate it, to (have it) considered a fine art material, is to take it all the way. So that's exactly what I did," Lou says. Lou's first major project was "Kitchen," and as the name suggests, the work was a life-size replica of the central household room. Every square inch was covered in the sparkly stuff. It was Lou's way of paying tribute to all the "mundane labor" that goes unrecognized and must be repeated over and over again. "If women have scrubbed the floor for centuries, I wanted a floor that was permanently sparkling. I wanted to make those dishes clean forever," Lou says. "We don't have monuments for the simple labors of life and I think that there should be." Her work on "Kitchen" caught the attention of the Santa Monica Museum of Art which commissioned her to do an artwork. Fortunately, she already had an idea in mind. While working on the kitchen's window and looking out, she imagined what she would see - a beaded backyard. Unfortunately, the five years' work on "Kitchen" had taken their toll and Lou had developed tendonitis. While still committed to making "Backyard," Lou knew she needed help and set out to find creative ways of solving her dilemma. Enter the Lawn Party. "People have taken an interest which is so incredible and inspiring and wonderful. It's been the most incredible gift to have people so involved," Lou says. It is a gift not just for Lou, but for the grass makers as well. "It may be a few blades of grass out of several hundred thousands, but they will participate in it," Boberg says. "They'll be able to come and see the piece and say, 'Hey I worked on that. My blades of grass are in that lawn somewhere.'" ART: Lawn Parties take place from 1 to 4 p.m. on Saturdays, July 5, 12 and Aug. 2, 9, 23 and 30 in the Community Room at Santa Monica Place. For more information, call (310) 586-6488. Santa Monica Museum of Art A picnic table and barbeque are part of Liza Lou's "Backyard." Santa Monica Museum of Art Even the food in "Backyard," an exhibit sponsored by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is coated with beads. Santa Monica Museum of Art Liza Lou and volunteers string beads together into blades of grass at a Lawn Party. Previous Daily Bruin Story Anything goes, March 31, 1997