Spotlight on the ‘Big Lie’ : Art: New show at the Centro Cultural de la Raza challenges the quincentenary celebration of Columbus’ so-called discovery of America.

America’s blood pressure soared to a violent high upon Iraq’s recent seizure of Kuwait. And Americans continue a volatile debate over Israel’s settlement of territories won in wars.

But strangely, perversely, perhaps even tragically, it fails to make headlines that the Americans writing and reading such news also reside on land originally occupied by force. The legitimacy of our settlement on this continent is questioned only quietly--by essayists, historians and descendants of the affected native population.

But as the country begins massive plans to celebrate the quincentenary of Columbus’ so-called discovery of America, those challenging voices are becoming louder, their arguments more persistent, their facts harder and harder to suppress.

What exactly are we celebrating?

A simple handbill at the entrance to a provocative new show at the Centro Cultural de la Raza spells it out quite bluntly. “Wanted: Christopher Columbus,” for the crimes of “grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a culture, rape, torture and maiming of indigenous people and instigator of the big lie.”

Fear that the anniversary events of 1992 will be just another mega-media-hype to bolster that big lie was one of the primary motivations for the Centro show. As the punning title, “Counter Colon-ialismo,” the show protests both Columbus’ (or Colon’s, in Spanish) actions of 500 years ago, as well as colonialism in general and the oppressive acts it engenders.

Patricio Chavez, curator of visual arts and acting director of the Centro, organized the show with Liz Lerma of the Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado (MARS Artspace) in Phoenix, and Sylvia Orozco of Austin’s MEXIC-ARTE Museum. Together, they have selected 20 painters, sculptors, performance artists and writers from California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to participate in this multimedia exhibition.

After it closes at the Centro on Nov. 10, the show will travel throughout the Southwest. An exhibition catalogue is being prepared and is expected to be available toward the end of the local run of the show.

There was nothing new about the “New World” Columbus landed upon in 1492. Its shores were already well ‘civilized’ by

the native population, but Columbus and his gang of explorers worked swiftly to replace native languages with Spanish and native religions with Christianity, while extracting one resource of enduring value to both cultures--gold.

Alfred Quiroz’s deliciously vicious oil pastel, “Christopher Columbus Discovers America and Introduces the Spanish Language,” caricatures the tragic occasion with barbed humor. Among the new arrivals, one conquistador admires the gold chain he has just acquired by beheading its native wearer, while another, grotesquely diseased, rapes a native woman at knifepoint. Columbus himself proudly holds a flag aloft, so that its emblem of a gleaming bar of gold shines above his head like a cartoon bubble revealing his thoughts. His foot is planted firmly on the head of a native man.

Other works adopt a more sober tone, and not all deliver as strong a punch as Quiroz’s, but the collective impact of the show is formidable. Among the most jarring and disarming works are those that create a tense marriage between conflicting readings of history.

In Vicky Meek’s installation, “Little Known Facts,” for instance, two sides of the story of the early presence of blacks in North America appear on the two opposing surfaces of white mini-blinds. The text on one panel of blinds proclaims: “You were/are nothing. You give/gave the world nothing. You are in Amerika (sic) because we brought you here.” On the reverse appears this challenge: “Why did the Olmec speak of us in legends long before Columbus sailed?”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s sketches for “Paper Dolls for a Post Columbian World” seem works of simple satire, but they conjure up an important, fundamental image of one culture aiming to transform another through the forced imposition of costume changes, and worse. Ken, Barbie and Bruce Plenty Horses have several outfits to choose from here, all of them undesirable and demeaning: the maid’s uniform for cleaning white people’s houses, for instance, or the “suit for receiving government rations when not allowed to hunt and gather own food.” The rations? “Wormy beef and mouldy flour.”

Other works are far more blunt. Steven Bernard Jones mounts a pointed gun in the direction of the reader of a Spanish-language Bible. An acute metaphor for the forced conversion of native Americans to Christianity, his sculpture “Holy Annihilation” evokes both terror and submission.

History does repeat itself, as the saying goes, but often in subtle, mutated fashion. Karen Atkinson’s photo-text installation called “Postcards from Paradise: The Language of Discovery” reveals the underlying colonialistic attitudes lurking within common tourist-speak. Juxtaposing glorious photographs of tropical sunsets with brief texts from tourist brochures and early explorers’ journals, Atkinson equates today’s cruise ships with the conquerors’ sailing ships of yesteryear. Inhabitants of such lands as Haiti and Jamaica remain servants to the visiting Westerner’s pleasure. Their countries are still described as virgin paradises, simply waiting for our arrival.

David Avalos brings the show up to date, too, with his wood and hammered lead sculpture, “January 16, 1991: The Quincentennial Celebration Begins.” Here, a miniature, lead-sheathed jet fighter rests atop a round saw blade, which in turn is mounted on a small wooden house sitting on a lead-patched table. The quincentennial celebration, with its built-in messages of subjugation and force, began, in Avalos’ eyes, with the launching of the Persian Gulf War. The rhetoric of justification ran thick as American troops killed thousands of Iraqis in the name of defending amorphous “western values.”

Will the quincentenary be an occasion to shake out the lies and inject our history lessons with long-suppressed truths? Or will it be simply another occasion for unabashed American boosterism and the sale of souvenirs? This show--as well as similar-minded activities to be staged throughout the country next year--plants the right questions in the mind and heart so that next year’s unchecked hype will be recognized as such, and the “big lie” won’t have such an easy sell.

Centro Cultural de la Raza, 2130-1 Pan American Plaza No. 1, Balboa Park, through Nov . 10. Gallery hours are Wednesday - Sunday noon-5 p.m.

A symposium, titled “Contemporary Manifestations of Colonization,” will be held in conjunction with the show Nov. 10 at 3 p.m., followed at 6 p.m. by a performance/discussion by the collaborative group Las Comadres. Both events will be held at the Centro, and are free and open to the public.

CRITIC’S CHOICE: ROOM FOR DISCUSSION

David Hammons’ show at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art leaves plenty of room for discussion about the pungent work itself and the receptivity of the white-dominated art world to African-American artists. The museum has lined up four members of the local art community to offer their points of view on these and other issues during the run of the Hammons show.

The series kicks off next Wednesday night at 6:30 with a discussion led by Felicia Shaw, a fellow with the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. Others to share their perspectives over the next four Wednesday nights will be Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson, Cindy Zimmerman and Johnny Coleman. On Wednesday evenings there is no admission charge to the museum between 5 and 9 p.m.