TV Reviews : ‘1492 Revisited’ Loses Its Focus, Impact

In the manner of most television shows about art exhibitions, “1492 Revisited” can’t decide whether it is about art, artsy filming or information. It tries to be all of these, and in doing so, loses its potential impact.

The alleged subject of this half-hour documentary airing tonight at 10:30 on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15 is “Counter Colon-Ialismo,” a show of numerous artists’ revisionist views of Columbus’ “discovery” of America that premiered last fall at San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza. But too often, the program--produced for KBPS by Paul Espinosa--relegates the art to illustration of its very pointed view of history.

The exhibition’s strength lay in its variety--sculpture, paintings, video and installations all attacked the same subject from what seemed like every possible angle, sometimes with intensity, sometimes with scholarly, analytic voices. In “1492 Revisited,” the art and commentators seem to blur, and as a result too often seem to be speaking with a single, one-note voice.

At the Centro, each work had its own integrity: Deborah Small’s huge “New World Women” showed cutouts of enormous red-headed Amazon women that mock the mythic accounts of the explorers’ exploits, and her inclusion of diary quotations of their conquests of native women point out that these were no more than rapes. By contrast, David Avalos’s small toy-like “La Nina and the Little Boy” juxtaposed a bomb carrying the name of one of those dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 with a replica of one of Columbus’ famous vessels. The title of the work--the little girl and little boy--implies that these two historic objects are symbols of the same kind of imperialist mentality.

In “1492 Revisited,” these works and many more are shown mostly only in partial detail, as illustrations for the artists’, scholars’ and curators’ running commentary about Columbus’ evil deeds. The works’ visual impact is secondary.

At a time when such revisionist views of the explorer’s accomplishments are becoming common, even commonplace, it would be have been more interesting and fresh to see this program do more to highlight the art and its complex tactics of storytelling, instead of giving another almost cliched splicing of running commentary.