THE ARTS : COMMENTARY : The Fate of the M-Word : The hope that multiculturalism offered is in ashes, but society remains desperate for understanding. Art that is ethnic, political and moral may help lead the city out of its confusion.

The War, as children in the inner city call the recent riots, is never far from mind. Coupled with the rank injustice of the verdict in the Rodney G. King beating trial, the violent uprising has interrupted the process of normalization. Los Angeles cannot return to what it was or what some of us wanted it to be.

The city’s veneer of racial and ethnic harmony is gone. Nowhere is this felt more deeply than in the arts community, because it was L.A.’s arts world that was to be the city’s glowing light of multicultural success. If it couldn’t work here, the line was, it couldn’t work anywhere.

We were terribly naive. Whatever multiculturalism meant, and it had so many meanings, it offered the promise of hope. The riots dashed all that and exposed the raw truth simmering beneath the hype. Sifting through the ashes we can see that the arts never really delivered the cultural goods.

One artist who seems to exemplify this new stance is Keith Antar Mason, artistic director of the Hittite Empire, an all-black male performance art collective based at the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica. For him, “Multiculturalism is an empty term now. It should have been ‘cultural democracy.’ I’m not going to let the hip art linguists write grants that use me anymore. That’s all multiculturalism ever was anyway. I won’t have that.”

Reaching for a means to express his rage, Mason instinctively uses one of the riots’ most powerful images as a stinging metaphor to force the white art world to address inequities. “The art world hasn’t had its Reginald Denny yet,” Mason said, “but they’ve got to have one. I insist on it.”

His immediate concern is with “the black avant-garde, the artists who are going to have to create the work that speaks to what’s happened. I want to become an art hoodlum who speaks the truth because I’ve got to do something with my rage. I’m not an animal. I’m not a savage.

“When I heard the verdict I was physically sickened. I felt like the lights went out at MOCA. At LACMA. Those organizations never really saw multiculturalism, they just saw ways to get money from it.”

Another organization that’s been criticized for expropriating multiculturalism is the Los Angeles Festival. But even its director, Peter Sellars, admits that “up to now the arts have failed us. People haven’t gotten their money’s worth with work that’s been obedient and decorative. It’s up to the arts to stand up to what’s happening. This country cannot be run like an Islamic theocracy or a Latin American dictatorship. Americans will not tolerate it.

“That’s where the arts can play a real role. At their best, the arts are about looking deeply into the dark places. This generation of artists has a charge. It must give people some options. If society holds everything in and denies the truth, it will destroy itself. The result is what we saw on the streets: The only chance to speak turns violent. These events have raised the stakes for all artists. We now need art that is essential and committed. A big part of that means that we can no longer give lip service to cultural diversity. We have to mean it.”

Under the circumstances, serious commitments are inevitable. To do otherwise is to ignore the world around us. What’s more, our badly frayed social fabric is desperate for the kind of sense-making that only art can provide. That means we can expect new expressions of ethnic and racial-based art to come out of the energy released on the streets of Los Angeles.

And there is ample precedent for it to happen. The political and civil rights strife of a quarter-century ago produced art and artists unlike any America had ever seen before. The major difference between now and then, however, is one of faith. For all their frustration and anger, most people believed in the system back in the 1970s. There was a guarded optimism that things would change. It seemed that racial coexistence might be possible. In the current climate of hard-core cynicism--and at a time when racist demagogues are running loose in the land--that consensus now rings false.

Tomas Benitez, an administrator at Self-Help Graphics in East Los Angeles and former consultant to the city’s Arts Master Plan, sees the post-riots challenge for artists and arts organizations as a complex mix of several factors.

“What we should really be talking about,” he says, “is the system. About not having ownership. Not having a voice. I don’t see what happened, or its aftermath, in racial terms. It’s a class issue. Let us find a way to enjoin a more inclusive social community. By that I mean participation and access. Multiculturalism is out. The next buzzword will be multiple cultures or cultural pluralism .”

For many, it is still difficult to absorb the fact that the world we thought we knew so well has collapsed. Not too long ago, a social breakdown of the magnitude that struck Los Angeles would have been a scenario for a screenplay, not real life. But it did happen here and the gravity of the situation is slowly sinking in with still uncertain consequences on the horizon.

Benitez believes that art documents society and that it will help lead us out of the current crisis. “You had to have been brain-dead to have not known that this town was under great pressure. The only person who wasn’t ready for the social earthquake that shook this city was Daryl Gates. We now need to think about the next step and that’s where the arts come into play.

“Art can be a leading force,” he explains, “a leading translator of culture. Take a look at the Chicano movement. The most effective and the most powerful way in which Chicano culture has been presented has been through art. For me, there is no such thing as art for art’s sake. We’re now talking about art with a purpose.”

If he’s right, then certainly there will be a resurgence of ethnic and racially informed art packaged as an outcry of protest and anger. But, this time the art will be produced against an entirely altered backdrop. Unlike 25 years ago, we may well see cynicism and censorship combine to stymie the production and dissemination of art dealing with the crisis.

With free speech under attack from all sides, artists will have a tougher time getting their vision to an audience. The National Endowment for the Arts itself has been under siege for years with the situation worsening from month to month. It’s quite conceivable that under the guise of protecting social tranquillity, much socially oriented art will be censored.

One of those who sees the danger in creating politically oriented art is Chungmi Kim, a poet and playwright who has lived in Los Angeles for 25 years. As she says, “America used to be known as a free country. I’m not so sure now.”

She says the riots made her realize “that we can no longer pretend, regardless of our culture, that we’ll be able to live in a melting pot. Although I have hope that we’ll be able to live together, we have to be honest with ourselves. The future is not multiculturalism but pluralism. From now on, my work will be more politically oriented. It has to be.”

Still, many people will not care to examine the meaning of recent events. They prefer denial and suppression. That means we can either create a society that deals with its harsh realities or end up in a situation comparable to Prague in 1956 or China right after Tian An Men Square. In either case, artists will have to be very clever.

The artists who come out of this great convulsion and upheaval must be like moral mutants. Every now and then, people come along whose perspective has evolved to a higher level. It helps the human race move forward. We need that moral mutation now. If it does come, it will emerge out of the arts.

Rather than have the amoral edge of most work we now see, the new work must be about moral truth. Although there is a significant segment of the L.A. art world that thinks amorality is the truth, they are wrong. There is good and evil, not just a shifting ground of relative values. The truth about our situation lies in the perception of what is good and what is evil. Without a moral compass, the social fabric disintegrates just as the physical world would be thrown asunder without gravity. Truth is art’s gravity.

For these reasons, the new art will sometimes be a clandestine and forbidden

art, the type made famous in the ‘70s by underground groups like ASCO. The group of Chicano artists would often hold impromptu performances or conceptual happenings at the spur of the moment and document their work on the run. In fact, art collectives will be back in vogue for the next few years. Like the ‘60s and ‘70s, a cultural renaissance will come but it will be more knowing, grittier and angrier.

When asked what he was going to do with his rage, Mason indignantly said, “I’m an artist. What do people think I’m going to do? I’m going to make art!”

As we sort our way through the debris of a post-multicultural Los Angeles, Mason’s angry pledge and Chungmi’s determination are signs of hope. It’s too soon to know what new aesthetic “isms” will grow out of the current crisis. But, whatever does emerge must be created and built on the hope that it will help us move beyond the moral confusion of our times.