CULTURAL POLITICS : Two Faces of Columbus : As the 500th anniversary of the fabled ‘discovery’ begins, artists are exploring the dark side of the story

A tall man with shoulder-length hair sports a red velvet cloak and cap, knee-high boots, a sword on his belt and a silver globe tucked under his arm. A woman tries on a Queen Isabella gown, complete with a starched ruffled collar. Men in tights tinker with props, and the spirit of “Hey kids, let’s put on a show” hangs in the air.

You could almost mistake the scene for one of those dreadful grade school plays--the ones with the heroic explorers coming to the New World to bring peace and prosperity to the heathens.

But “Mondo Novo” (performing this weekend and next at Highways), is far from the standard-issue Christopher Columbus show you may have grown up with. And the artists rehearsing on this hazy Sunday afternoon in Santa Monica are anything but the school kids of Americana pageants past.

The faces in the room are of an array of ethnicities, religions and backgrounds. They are working together--like so many other multicultural and culturally specific groups of artists at the moment--spurred by the looming Columbus Day kickoff to the celebration of a history they feel is sorely in need of reexamination.

Just when the business and government sponsors thought the Columbus Quincentennial--the marketing push designed to mark the explorer’s landing on the continent--would sail on through, artists across the country have decided to stir the waters.

On the one side are the Columbus boosters, from the U.S. and Spanish governments to sundry national and multinational corporations. On the other side, there are a pack of artistic, cultural and activist groups who are no longer willing to sit through what they see as the glorification of an invading slave trader and mass murderer.

“For the last 500 years, we’ve been told a particular version of history,” says Patricio Chavez of the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego. “This issue is one of the principal myths. Ending the denial (of these hidden histories) has a basic appeal to the humanity in all of us. Now, the histories will be told by the people who experienced them.”

The yea-sayers may have been first out of the gate, with the 1986 establishment of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission, the official U.S. body for the commemoration of the explorer’s arrival in the Americas.

But, with the official start of the ’92 anniversary next weekend, it’s the nay-sayers who are the early favorites to leave the lasting impression on the national consciousness.

Offering a slew of counter-events, the burgeoning multicultural arts community and its allies are doing more than simply calling into question a commonly accepted holiday. They are reshaping the agenda and vocabulary of the mainstream. For the word discovery they substitute invasion --or at least the more noncommittal encounter .

The upshot is not only an unprecedented amount of socially conscious creative activity. It reflects the reemergence in this country of the artist as social critic and is a milestone in the increasing politicization of the arts community.

Over the last 15 years, that community has become a voice for the newly ascendant minorities: African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, American Indians, gays and lesbians. As societal inequities increased, and the class- and union-based left wing dwindled to irrelevance, it was in these groups that political insurgency flourished.

It was these groups too--and the artists within them--that became the target of the right. With the demise of the Red menace, the cultural politics encapsulated by the controversy at the National Endowment for the Arts and the debate over political correctness have become central to American conservatism. But the artists have fought back.

Now, the celebration of Columbus is providing a new rallying point for the community as it resists not only the quincentenary, but the Eurocentric history it represents. It is, for many, what curator Chavez calls “an opportunity to look at the underpinnings of our society. There seems to be a galvanizing taking place, looking at colonialization as a system under the rubric of the quincentenary. It’s been a rough last several years for the arts community, but this is a rebound.”

For American Indians, the Columbus holiday brings up issues not just of artistic visibility, but of cultural survival. “There is a constant going back and forth between being co-opted and stating who you are,” says Brian Wescott, an Athabascan Indian from Alaska who is a scholar of Native American theater.

“There has been a slow, steady increase of Indian activity in the arts because people have realized that artistic voice is the most essential part of Indian survival. Attempts at economic and political sovereignty will fail if Indians don’t have a sense of who they are.”

American Indian works appear in a number of group shows and there will be pow-wows, rallies and marches related to the quincentenary. Within the arts community at large, the Columbus projects span all points of view, disciplines and locales--from West Coast galleries to Midwest theaters to East Coast television.

Yet this flurry of activity is just the beginning. With next weekend’s launching of the 500th year, there are many more projects in the works, innumerable grant applications waiting for the go-ahead.

On the one hand are the mainstream forces, headed by the congressionally created Jubilee Commission. Originally chaired by John N. Goudie--who stepped down in December, 1990, amid allegations of mismanagement and pork-barreling contracts--it is now headed by Frank J. Donatelli. Its premiere project is the tour of replicas of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, set to arrive in California ports next August and September.

Another high-profile mainstream event is the “Honeymoon Miralda” project, a six-year conceptual work by Spanish artist Antoni Miralda. The symbolic wedding of the Statue of Liberty with the statue of Columbus in Barcelona Harbor, “Honeymoon” installations have been seen in a variety of international cities so far and the work is set to culminate during Valentine’s Day week, Feb. 13-16, in Las Vegas.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington opens “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration” Saturday, backed by a global consortium of corporations and featuring more than 600 paintings, sculptures, drawings, decorative objects, maps and scientific instruments.

Paramount Pictures has acquired for U.S. distribution a film featuring Gerard Depardieu as Columbus, directed by Ridley Scott. Another Columbus film, starring Timothy Dalton, is being prepared by Dino De Laurentiis. The National Italian American Foundation is planning a televised celebration at Washington’s Kennedy Center on Columbus Day, 1992.

Then there are the more ambivalent appreciations. The Smithsonian Institution has collaborated with a group of Spanish investors and London-based Malone Fill Productions, Ltd. on a bilingual series entitled “The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World by Carlos Fuentes,” set to premiere on the Discovery Channel in April. And bowing tonight is PBS’ “Columbus and the Age of Discovery,” a seven-part documentary filmed in 27 countries over a three-year period.

Counter to this official and relatively non-confrontational fare, however, there’s a flood of activity. More than a simple rebuttal, it is a varied cry from many quarters, representing the new wave of arts leadership. For the increasingly powerful multicultural arts community, Columbus’ anniversary is seen as the moment to stake a claim.

In New York, performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena will present his “1991” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month, with a local outing of the piece at Highways in November. New York-based Deep Dish Television has likewise dedicated its entire 1992 programming calendar to work related to the Columbus issue.

Minneapolis’ Heart of the Beast Theater has tackled the subject, as has Aberdeen, S.D., artist Mark McGinnis. His performance-installation, “The Wonderful World of Explorers,” calls into question the ideology of manifest destiny.

In San Francisco, Artist’s Television Access will screen a bill of American Indian video artists, while San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza recently opened “Counter Colon-ialismo,” a group show co-curated with MARS Artspace in Phoenix and MEXIC- ARTE Museum in Austin that will tour the Southwest.

Nowhere more than in Los Angeles, though, is Columbus the issue of the hour. Here, the counter-attack is already in swing, with this coming weekend’s events an acceleration of what’s been afoot for some time.

One of the first Columbus sendups to gain a wide local audience was on the boards at the Los Angeles Theatre Center over the summer, as the Latino trio Culture Clash’s “Bowl of Beings” weighed in with a spoof segment entitled “Don Colon (The first Chicano opera, 1492).”

“Bowl of Beings” has been taped to air on PBS’ Great Performances this winter and the group’s Herbert Siguenza, Ric Salinas and Richard Montoya will be back with a new show at LATC in ’92. Topic: Don Colon. Playwright Velina Hasu-Houston also has a drama on the Columbus issue in the works.

Beginning Oct. 19, Venice’s Social and Public Art Resource Center Gallery (SPARC) will offer “Encuentro: Invasion of the Americas and the Making of the Mestizo,” a group show featuring 21 Chicano and American Indian artists.

Besides Highway’s “Mondo Novo,” the Columbus Day weekend events include the Fringe Festival/L.A.’s “24 Hours of Art,” a series of art party-bus tours conceived in response to the 500th anniversary. Focusing on work by American Indian, Latino and African-American artists and performances, vehicles such as the “Mondo Novo ColumBus,” hosted by local performers, will tour to a wide variety of venues.

Far from expanding a narrow tribalism, the Columbus controversy is also bringing together artists from a range of communities. “Multicultural organizations are talking to each other, saying we have to do something to survive,” says Marietta Bernstorff, curator of the SPARC show. “The dialogue of who you are and where you come from makes you stronger, gives you people to bond with.”

“Mondo Novo,” where the collaborators are African-American, American Indian, Caucasian, Latino and Asian, is a case in point. “It’s about the multicultural community having an investment in America,” says writer-performer Keith Antar Mason, who is involved in the project.

Art traditionally has the function of protest as well as celebration. Far from an isolated incident, today’s battles over censorship, artistic freedom, political correctness and multiculturalism versus Eurocentrism are actually part of a recurring pattern in U.S. political life.

In the ‘20s and ‘30s, the emerging groups were Catholics, Jews and European immigrants. Gathered in cities, they brought with them social, political and artistic sensibilities then foreign--and seen as hostile--to Protestant American culture. With the New Deal, these groups entered the governing coalition, and with the Works Progress Administration, they received funding for their art, a ways and means to integrate their world-views with American culture. The backlash soon followed.

In the last years of the New Deal, such conservatives as Rep. Martin Dies, whose congressional committee investigated “subversion” in the arts, sought to cut off government funding to these artists. After World War II, Dies’ crusades were taken up by Joseph McCarthy.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the emergent groups were women and gays, and, as the late ‘80s melded into the ‘90s, it was the newly multicultural U.S. As the WPA did for immigrants, the NEA funded these artists.

In each case, the right has attacked the symbolic politics of art and arts funding as a way to mobilize against the incursion of new groups into society. As Michael Barone put it in his recent book, “Our Country,” the battle has been and continues to be over “Who really is an American?”

During the Reagan years, religious figures and other conservatives were increasingly active in protesting the liberalization of the mass media, such as the TV programming of Norman Lear and such films as “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Many of these figures resurfaced in the NEA wars.

These pressures prompted the previously scattered creative community into action, and it was during the latter half of the ‘80s that the arts began to become more politicized--in sharp contrast to the ‘70s. Just 15 years ago, the Bicentennial offered the spectacle of a nation immersed in celebration while simultaneously trying to forget the embarrassment of Watergate. There was virtually no resistance to the boosterism from the arts community because there was virtually no community.

With the onset of AIDS and other horrors, the mid-’80s saw the transformation of the artistic community. “Amid the abrupt changes in the political cartography of the world, a mysterious convergence of performance art and politics began to occur,” writes Gomez-Pena in the current issue of High Performance magazine. “Politicians and activists borrowed performance techniques, while performance artists began to mix experimental art with direct political action.”

In California, such groups as the Border Arts Workshop, the Los Angeles Poverty Department, ACTUP, Queer Nation and San Diego collaborators David Avalos, Louis Hock, Elizabeth Sisco and Deborah Small addressed civic politics with performance and public artworks.

Locally, performance artist Tim Miller, actor Michael Kearns, theater director Reza Abdoh and many others have created stage works about the physical and psychological ravages of AIDS. Such L.A.-raised performance artists as Luis Alfaro and Dan Kwong have made works that explore the contradictions of their respective ethnic heritages. And the list of artist-activists goes on.

Ironically, throughout much of this century, Columbus Day served a function not all that different from today’s contra-Columbus cacophony. It was the preeminent Italian-American holiday: a way for one major immigrant group to rewrite American history to reflect a non-Nordic perspective. Now, the resistance to the Columbus quincentennial is emerging as the vehicle for the third wave of immigrants and other minorities to reframe U.S. history from their vantage point.

The call from artists and communities of color--as we sail into Columbus Day 1992 next week and the ensuing, no doubt turbulent, year--is a demand for access, resources and the right not to melt into the pot.

“It’s the artists that try and wake up the average person,” says Rick Davidson, an editor of Griot, a journal of “native consciousness,” and an organizer in the Columbus-resistance movement. “The artists can delineate choices.”

The key, say many in the arts, is that now individuals and groups are being allowed their own voice. “The root issue is who gets to define what an Indian person is,” says Wescott, who is currently completing his Yale dissertation on the politics of representation in American Indian drama.

“A lot of Indian communities around the country are realizing how crucial cultural and artistic life is to their long-term survival. People are trying to get away from other people’s artistic definitions, toward cultural self-determination.”

“One of the first questions I ask myself about trends is, ‘Who is doing the activities and what is being said?’ ” adds Centro Cultural de la Raza’s Chavez.

For Gomez-Pena, the formula for progress is as simple as the task is monumental: “As the ‘90s unfold, U.S. artists, cultural organizers and intellectuals must perform central roles in the making of a society beyond Columbus. We must rebuild community through our art.”