‘Good Stories, Well Told’ at Long Beach Art Museum

Faye Ray, one of the Weimaraners made famous by artist William Wegman, heads a doggy baseball team, clown great Bill Irwin turns into a discomaniac, New York performance artist Alien Comic celebrates lunar lunacy and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang uses doing laundry as a metaphor for the difficulties of racial assimilation in the United States.

This is child’s play? Don’t think MTV, think art . There are some music videos among the offerings in “Good Stories, Well Told: Video Art for Young Audiences,” currently on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art; there are also documentaries, animation, narratives, video poems and memoirs, as well as hybrids of traditional television formats.

Most of the almost 40 tapes, produced by professional media artists over a span of 18 years, were not originally created with children in mind--although some were a collaboration with children and teens. This unusual traveling exhibition, however, created by New York independent curator Robin White, was carefully put together with ages 5 to 18 in mind.

Grouped according to age appropriateness, the videos express a wide variety of themes, from sheer fantasy and comedy to gang violence and AIDS.

In Program 1, “Dreams and Dances,” for ages 5 to 10, for example, animated finger paintings by Kamal Kozah, an artist born in Beirut, tell the story of “Ole and the Tree,” about the dreams of a big brown car named Charlotte.

Six 30-second video portraits by artist Joan Logue are included here, among them performance artist Laurie Anderson, who does some serious head-knocking. On another tape, special-effects wizard Teddy Dribble blows up a balloon with mind-expanding results.

The Wegman piece can be found in Program 2, “Just Another Day,” for the same age group. The broad appeal of Wegman’s “Dog Baseball” can be attested to by the fact that it has been seen on both “Sesame Street” and “Saturday Night Live,” according to the museum’s Carole Ann Klonarides.

Ages 11 to 14 are steered to the third and fourth programs, “Modern Life” and “Time Travel, Space Travel.”

“Modern Life” includes “Street Art,” by Benjamin Gutierrez, a Southern California high school student who “makes the case for graffiti as an art form,” said Klonarides, rather than vandalism. Gutierrez was killed in 1990, the victim of a drive-by shooting.

A fifth program for older teen viewers, called “Media Messages and Personal Notes,” shows how television can “reinforce harmful images of the viewers themselves.”

For example, in the satiric “Media Hype Stereotype,” artist Gina Lamb and 12th-graders from the Humanitas program at Thomas Jefferson High School create a South-Central Los Angeles classroom, using only media stereotypes.

Among the many other videos are Ayoka Cenzira’s African folk tale “Zajota and the Boogie Spirit”; Victor Masayesva’s American Indian piece “Hopiit,” a “textural montage” of people and life on a Hopi reservation, and “Sushi Baby,” Bianca Miller’s sendup of black-and-white Japanese horror movies.

Two of the films--”Street Art” and “Mr. Big and Bad,” a poetry piece written by Ricky Cruz about a friend who died of gang-related violence--came out of the museum’s own video workshop for youth, Vidkidco, headed by artist Martha Chono-Helsley.

A sixth program in the exhibit, “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” dealing with AIDS, teen romance and dysfunctional families, will be seen during a free, outdoor (at sunset) screening Aug. 14 of tapes made by this summer’s Vidkidco participants.

“This year’s projects range from pieces on pro-choice and Ross Perot, to a piece on young African-Americans and patriotism,” Chono-Helsley said. Vidkidco now offers “a $250 scholarship to one of the advanced students to continue to make videos,” she said. “We named it the Benjamin Gutierrez Scholarship.”

“Good Stories, Well Told: Video Art for Young Audiences,” Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Wednesday-Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., through Aug. 16. Admission: Adults, $2; under age 12, free. Vidkidco screening, Aug. 14, 8 p.m., free. Information: (310) 439-2119.