PERFORMANCE REVIEW : A Safe Look at Aborigines in Captivity : 2 ‘Specimens’ Are Displayed Behind Bars for Crowd Attending ‘Year of White Bear’ at UCI

The arty crowd that shuffled into the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery Tuesday night to see a performance piece called “The Year of the White Bear: Take One” had plenty of time to greet old friends, read various materials hung on the walls, watch a “native girls” song-and-dance clip from an old movie and peruse a handout on appropriate ways to deal with aborigines.

During the first languorous 40 minutes, the crowd also was permitted to observe two “genuine” aborigines from an undiscovered Caribbean island somehow overlooked by European conquerors.

These strange creatures--El Aztec High Tech (Guillermo Gomez-Pena), powerful in his gold-and-feather regalia, and Miss Discovery 1492 (Coco Fusco), lovely in a two-piece animal-print playsuit and beauty pageant sash--were safely ensconced in a large cage.

There was ample opportunity for the crowd to watch El Aztec exercise methodically with a hand grip, play with a plastic snake and have a contemplative smoke, and for Miss Discovery to sew her doll, dust the cage, read Vogue magazine and perform a quiet ritual with a coconut. Visored “zoo guards” kept the crowd moving around the cage to permit maximum viewing opportunities for all.

Anyone who cared to drop $1 into a collection box could pose for a Polaroid with the obliging couple who, in sunglasses, gazed out patiently from behind the bars. The two appeared quite content within their cluttered habitat, which included electronic gadgets (TV, portable computers, boombox) as well as a sizable collection of art objects (neon Budweiser “Cerveza” sign, painting of sleepy Indian on horseback), ethnographic materials (Mexican bandit doll, Tiki statuette, Ninja Turtle pinata), books (the Bible, “Occupied America,” “Mex Americana: Two Countries, One Future”) and other objects and foodstuffs essential to their exotic way of life.

Both aborigines lived in the cage full time for three days--this was Day Two--leaving only for trips to the restroom, to which they were led by leash. They were simply the latest in a long line of curious specimens from outlandish places to be displayed for the edification and curiosity of Westerners. A wall chart outlined a number of these public showings, from an Arawak Indian left on display for two years in the Spanish Court in 1493 (he died of “sadness”) to the 13 Ubangis (including “the nine largest-lipped women in the Congo”) proudly presented to the paying public in 1931 by the Ringling Brothers.

At last it was time for the ritual. Robert Hickok, Dean of UCI’s School of Fine Arts, read a short, dignified speech in which he remarked that the safe presentation of the aborigines was in the “finest tradition of multicultural education.” Whereupon, the aborigines put on their coats and were led outside in back of the gallery, where a fire burned in an industrial-sized trash can.

They read some rather long documents aloud (in Spanish and English), and while it was wonderful to see that they could read, it would have seemed more fitting if they had declaimed their material, as members of storytelling cultures do. The main document, which they had worked up while in captivity, was a list of abuses against members of indigenous American cultures perpetrated by European colonists and others.

Miss Discovery--who seemed to have kept up with the news on her TV--noted that a 1614 decision taken by the town council in Lima, Peru, to censor comedies in the local theater was remarkably like the National Endowment for the Arts’ attempts at censoring obscenity.

Similarly, the archbishop of Lima, who banned the Indians’ dancing and singing invocations to the sun as “heretical,” struck Miss Discovery as strangely resembling Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Republican presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan.

It was gratifying that the aborigines, who have so much to learn about our culture, already know who their enemies are. And yet the inadequacy of their attempts to draw analogies was sadly obvious.

The final portion of the speechifying had to do with some possible ways the 20th Century might end--with Panama invading Washington in search of Oliver North, “Multicultural” becoming a TV series, President Bush developing Downs Syndrome, Buchanan getting his maid pregnant and changing his mind about abortion, the art world discovering a new “ism,” the Eastern Block going West for shopping.

These aborigines might not be terribly witty or original, but they have learned how to preach to the already converted.

They were very good about being led back into their cage--well, the worst was over now--and the management provided free refreshments for the public, which uncomplainingly squeezed back inside the building to consume them.