American Indians: Dream, Reality

SAN DIEGO —  Like its title, the installation “Kish Tetayawet Dream House Wampkish” compresses elements from a familiar vocabulary with others from a language beyond daily experience. Mundane, middle-class creature comforts mingle with organic reminders of a higher, spiritual reality.

The contrasts are apparent immediately upon entering the installation, made by James Luna and Lewis de Soto for the San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery: On the wooden headboard of a conventional bed hangs a small cluster of feathers and dried leaves; at the foot of a generic shelving unit is a carpet of sand, rocks and twigs; and embracing this domestic scene are walls lined with a trellis of fragrant willow branches.

As mild and appealing as these interventions into the typical domestic setting seem, they are, for the artists, dramatic assertions of cultural identity. They signal a spiritual presence within the realm of pure physical accommodation. Most importantly, they proclaim the survival of American Indian traditions despite the homogenizing forces of contemporary American culture.

Luna, familiar to local audiences through several exhibitions and performances in recent years, is a Luiseno Indian living on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in north San Diego County. De Soto, who lives in San Francisco, is from the Cahuilla tribe. This is their first collaborative work. Though the installation can be absorbed visually in a matter of minutes, its full meaning--especially its message regarding ethnic assimilation and cultural integrity--sinks in more slowly, yielding a substantive, troubling weight in the mind.

Much of the content to be gleaned here comes from a sequence of videos playing continuously in the “Dream House.” A comfortable couch faces the monitor, as does a coffee table full of catalogues and supplementary information about the artists. The videos document prior installations and performances by both artists, which help flesh out the notion of hybrid cultural experience suggested only skeletally by the present gallery environment.

In de Soto’s filmed installations, oral traditions mesh with more conceptual contemporary art practices. American Indian creation myths whisper through the air, or ancient Cahuilla Bird Songs are chanted in spare settings punctuated by electronic imagery, photographic slide projections, books and maps.

One of Luna’s installation/performances documented here, “The Creation and Destruction of an American Indian Reservation: An American Dilemma” (1990), cuts to the heart of the American Indian situation. In the video, Luna appears in a gallery (Washington Project for the Arts) first wearing only a breechcloth and holding a rod with feathers. He runs several times around a long narrow channel of dirt and a few isolated twigs, sanctifying the space or perhaps giving thanks for it. Next, he appears in pants and shirt, wrapping barbed wire around the posts in the dirt, marking the space as property in a different way.

The site continues to be urbanized, as a white construction worker enters to install rusted mailboxes, a strip of paved road and traffic signs. As the outsider defining the terms of American Indian life, he adds the finishing touch by planting a sign reading, “Entering La Jolla Indian Reservation.” The ritual chanting has given way to rock music.

Luna reappears in a leather jacket and sunglasses, hitchhiking and drinking beer, plagued by the dual scourges of unemployment and alcoholism so rampant on today’s reservations. When he finishes his beer, he tosses the can into the once-sacred dirt. Finally, Luna returns wearing only a pelt, feathers in hand, slipping through the barbed wire to reclaim the land, to restore its sacred function.

In this compact performance, Luna has exposed not only the dilemma of conscience faced by non-Native Americans, but the dilemma of identity facing all American Indians. Luna argues for positive self-determination in the final scene, as in the present installation, by interjecting traditional, spiritual ways into a contemporary, urbanized, material world.

On the dining table here rests a broad-rimmed basket holding a shallow layer of acorns and several packages of Cornnuts and “Pemmican” brand smoked turkey breast. The challenge, both Luna and de Soto assert, is to retain the vestiges of the sacred and traditional in a society of prepackaged commodities.

As strong and as necessary as this message is for the survival of American Indian cultures, Luna and de Soto have couched it in the form of gentle subversion. The installation’s simplicity and wry humor, the way it encourages us to laugh away stereotypes rather than becoming defensive about our use of them, has much in common with Luna’s other works, in which his focus on the dysfunctional family, for instance, becomes a casual but apt metaphor for the dysfunctional culture we live in, with its sneering regard for strangers and violent abuse of kin.

In their weaving of Luiseno, Cahuilla and English in the installation’s title, Luna and de Soto hint at the rich flavor attainable through overlapping, mutually reinforcing cultures. In the installation itself, this message bears the traces of a warning against the powerful, homogenizing forces of the American mainstream--a warning that applies as well to American Indians as to the countless other cultures now being absorbed, diffused and denied as they pursue the American dream.

* San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery, 7250 Mesa College Drive, through Sept. 16. Open weekdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Thursdays until 8:30.

ART NOTES

James Luna will give two performances this weekend at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park. Both Friday and Saturday performances begin at 8 p.m. Admission is $7. Call 235-6135 for more information. . . .

Public art is the focus of the next three events sponsored by The Contemporaries, a support group of the San Diego Museum of Art. Thursday at 6 p.m., Stuart Collection director Mary Beebe will give a tour of the outdoor sculpture collection on the campus of UC San Diego. On Sept. 22, Centro Cultural de la Raza director Larry Baza will discuss public art as “Ethnic Expression and Educational Tool.” The final event will be held Oct. 22, when Gail Goldman, public art coordinator for the city of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, will deliver a slide presentation titled “Public Art: Past, Present and Future.” There is a charge for all events and reservations are recommended. Call 232-7931, Ext. 9152 for more information. . . .

Two recent productions by Brighton Press will be featured in an exhibit next month at the Iturralde Gallery, formerly of San Diego and now located in Los Angeles. The show, called “Prints & Poems--Livres d’artistes,” opens Sept. 11 and will include four books combining prints and poems. In conjunction with the show, Bill Kelly and Michele Burgess of Brighton Press will speak on their collaborative work with artists and writers on Sept. 23 at 7 p.m. Call (213) 937-4267 for more information.