ART REVIEW : Revealing Some Untold Tales : Centro Displays Views From Outside the Mainstream

Call it what you will--revisionist, parallel or remedial history--the telling of untold tales has become a prominent current in contemporary culture. Long-suppressed voices--from outside of the white, male Eurocentric experience--are finally beginning to be heard in American literature, art and history. Though this cultural pluralism is still young and is far from penetrating the sensibilities of the cultural Establishment, it has already brought to light some of the most provocative, enriching and necessary art being made today.

“Historias Portatiles/Portable Stories,” at the Centro Cultural de la Raza, is a show of living history, a compendium of voices purportedly outside the mainstream of America. One of the many myths shattered in this powerful show is that of the mainstream itself: We all come from someplace else, the show’s storytellers make clear. We all have our stories to tell.

“Portable Stories” is the work of the ever-fluid collaborative Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) and nearly 100 other participants, including several dozen students from San Diego High School. Current BAW/TAF members Narciso Arguelles, Carmela Castrejon, Edgardo Reynoso, Carlos Toth, Michael Schnorr and Susan Yamagata have followed the form of past BAW/TAF projects in making this year’s “Border Realities” exhibition a network of separate, not attributed installations around a common theme.

One unsettling, re-created living room borrows as much from a slick Benetton-like ad (with a large wall montage urging viewers to “put some color in your cheeks”) as from the musty, melancholic environments of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. A fire burns in the fireplace, but it is only a video loop. Cigarette butts, shell casings and an empty tequila bottle sit on the table. Portraits hang on the walls.

The room is ripe for long, confessional conversations, and that is exactly what one hears from the earphones on the hearth--descriptions of what it is like to be black and gay in a white, straight world. From the pictures on the wall--both still photographs, captioned with text, and videos accompanied by sound--one learns more about the outsider’s experience from Czech, Romanian and Japanese immigrants to the U.S.

In another room, a dry cleaner’s carousel sends a dozen shirts around in a continuous loop. Each bears a bilingual message on its back, a one-sentence evocation of its owner’s life story.

Yet another installation makes the analogy between human and animal migration, particularly that of birds. A trail of bird seed winds around the floor in a swirling pattern. Blocks of seed hang from a dead tree in one corner, but streams of cautionary yellow police tape hang on the walls behind it, and an ax rests nearby. The tree, like the United States, has a decaying infrastructure but holds out the promise of material satisfaction. Those lured by the tasty seed, however, are promptly punished.

A pseudo-border crossing presents two extreme alternatives for entering the U.S.: illegally, through a treacherous, domed tunnel pierced with sticks and scarred with fallen bodies, or legally, through a nearby door painted like a dollar bill, representing the newly introduced option of automatic entrance to those bringing $1 million into the country.

Cumulative impact is all in these shows. There are parts here, as in past efforts, that are sloppy, crude, illegible and uninteresting, but, as the title suggests, the “Border Realities” show is a reflection of life. It may be unrefined at times, but this rawness lends an immediacy to much of the imagery. Unlike much contemporary art that aspires to political activism, this work is not mediated to death by theory or conceptual strategies. It is real, messy, juicy and bittersweet.

Not only does “Portable Stories” contribute to a redefinition of the U.S. border with Mexico, it also adds to the continuing expansion of art that embraces political and social issues. Like the border itself, this show is less about a static aesthetic product than an evolving social process. The show, in fact, continues to change with the participation of viewers.

One section, looking much like an oversized book with wooden pages hinged to the wall, invites viewers to write in their own responses to such questions as, “Where are you from?” and “How did you cross into the United States?” In another area, visitors are provided with a tape recorder and blank tapes with which to record their own stories.

Video and audio interviews play continuously in nearly every section of the show, transforming the Centro into a bazaar of diverse faces and voices. As one listens to the different stories of lives pinched and isolated between two cultures, another myth, the myth of community, gradually erodes.

Our geographical region attracts such a kaleidoscopic range of individuals, without truly welcoming them, that we may be bound only by the obvious outcome of our separate migratory missions: We are all here, now. By its very nature as a collaborative act, however, “Portable Stories” acts as a prescription to heal those rifts, to respect the distinctions between people, and from them to build a richer, more committed community.

* “ Historias Portatiles/Portable Stories” continues at the Centro Cultural de la Raza, Balboa Park, through July 19. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.