AMERICAN MADE : What Happens When a Dominant Culture Constructs Its Own Historical Facts? Timely ‘Virgin Territories’ Exhibit Explores the Consequences

Ambitious, passionate and iconoclastic, even when they are less than first-rate, the works by 52 artists in “Virgin Territories” deal in some way with the timely quincentennial theme of what happens when one culture dominates another and manipulates the facts of history into a convenient fiction.

Organized by the Long Beach Museum of Art, where it is on view through Nov. 22, the show includes 16 installations, paintings, sculpture and photo-and-text pieces, mostly by California artists, and three roughly hourlong video programs, each composed of several works.

(The fourth video program, “Trans-Voices”--a project of the American Center in Paris in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Public Art Fund Inc. in New York--consists of 20 “spot”-commercial-length tapes about cross-cultural topics made by famous and lesser-known French and American artists. Another portion of the exhibit, “The Demon in the Garden,” a song cycle by Angelo Funicelli based on historical narratives and poetry, was performed last weekend.)

Most of the visual art addresses cultural tensions in metaphoric ways, while the more memorable videotapes tend to be opinionated documentaries. Some of the pieces are a lot more accessible than others, and the artists’ ideas roam freely into areas that may not immediately seem to have much to do with the theme of the exhibit.

But the beauty of the show lies in the way its many parts reinforce each other, revealing different (and sometimes contradictory) viewpoints on racial histories, stereotypes, hatreds, passions and sufferings in North and South America. Any number of connections can be found between these works, links that amplify and deepen the individual perspectives. Here’s one pathway through the maze:

* “Early Man,” a large, lushly detailed and indescribably tender painting of cultural trespass by Peter Zokosky, portrays the encounter between a remorseful-looking exiled Indian nobleman, the monkey god he has slain and a small group of weeping animals.

* In “Headhunters,” a heavily satirical video by Terese Svoboda, an American woman takes her young son on a “head-hunting” river trip in New Guinea. “There’s a quaint saying in this country: To eat means to exploit,” she says.

She wonders aloud why the native people are “so obsessed with eating” when their diet consists of only fish and yams, and she assumes their lives are “a perpetual vacation” because they “work” only two hours a day. Interspersed with the narrative are such telling statistics as the percentage of natural resources extracted from the Third World (74%) and the percentage of these resources used by people who live there (3%).

* Richard Kamler’s scrappy-looking lead plaques--he calls them book covers, as if they contained unseen narratives of destroyed lives--starkly chronicle a long series of European persecutions of the Jews: their expulsion from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Spain and Portugal in the 15th Century, from Germany in the 1930s. The final panel reproduces an article from the 1949 Geneva Convention that outlaws “individual or mass forcible transfers.”

* “Natives,” a video by Jesse Lerner and Scott Sterling, neutrally but devastatingly documents the efforts of residents of San Diego County to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants. “If they vote and make the laws, God help the government of this country,” says one man. Invasion, a woman explains, is what happens in California when an “advanced” population is “overtaken by a less advanced population group.”

Immigrants are blamed for swelling the jail population, dealing drugs, importing disease, destroying property, not keeping their yards clean and not staying in school. “We’re not like East Germany,” one man says with evident regret. “We can’t have machine gun towers and minefields.”

* Ruth Wallen’s photo-and-text piece, “Legends--The Gentle Beauty of Helen of Troy,” contrasts a San Diego housing development--absurdly linked in advertisements with the legendary beauty of the wife of the king of Sparta--with the hardscrabble conditions of Mexican immigrants.

One ironic juxtaposition compares the famous Greek myth in which Paris must award a golden apple to one of three goddesses (he picks Aphrodite, who promises him the world’s most beautiful woman, thereby allowing him to cart off Helen, starting the Trojan War) to desperate emigrants lined up in a field, each hoping to be chosen for day work by the occupants of a passing car.

* Ardele Lister’s video, “Behold The Promised Land,” contains Fourth of July interviews with a cross-section of citizens expressing mostly misinformed, narrow-minded, vague and flippant views about what it means to be an American (“freedom, justice and things like that”). These are coupled with vintage film clips pressing absurd claims for the superiority of American people and touting a mixture of myth, fact and wishful thinking about life in the U.S.A.

* David Stock’s photographs and texts in “A Truly Authentic Tableau” revisit the sculptural tableaux at Knott’s Berry Farm and Calico Ghost Town, home of such lingering, unattractive stereotypes as the cigar store Indian, the cartoonish toothy Mexican soldier and the droopy-faced Chinese person of indeterminate sex working at Wing Lee Laundry. “Consciously re-imagining the frontier as a patriotic morality play,” Stock writes, “Knott (has) given physical form to every settler cliche. . . . “

* Valerie Soe’s video, “Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re)Educational Videotape,” collages clips of “exotic,” humbly subservient lovers and raging “dragon ladies” from such films as “Flower Drum Song,” “The World of Suzy Wong” and “You Only Live Twice” to drive home the insidious quality of mass media stereotypes of Asian women.

* Hung Liu combines photographs of 19th- and early 20th-Century Chinese women with three-dimensional artifacts to focus on the historical oppression of the “second sex.” In an untitled work, the portrait of a sad-looking girl, a bonsai-like arrangement of porcelain flowers and a pair of the impossibly tiny shoes worn by women with bound feet evoke the painfully constricted quality of women’s lives in Imperial China.

* In a leisurely video called “Sometimes a Cigar is Only a Cigar (Freud),” Laguna Beach resident Victoria Vesna offers a spunky new look at cigars--their history, their manufacture by women in a dingy, fluorescent-lit New York loft, their enjoyment by both men and women and their ritualistic uses (in santeria , a religion of the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria that took root in Latin America). Included in the video program, the tape also plays in the gallery on monitors inserted in three geometric sculptural forms covered with aromatic tobacco leaves.

* Ilona Sturm’s untitled sculpture--two large, dark, mummy-like forms lying on the floor--is made of grounds from coffee beans, a crop associated with colonial dominance in Latin America. The accompanying wall text explains that the piece was conceived as a memorial. These minimal forms suggest a pair of inert bodies--presumably, of native laborers whose lives were totally dependent on harvesting a luxury product for a foreign market.

What: “Virgin Territories.”

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday; through Nov. 22.

Where: Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Seventh Street exit; turn left on Cherry Avenue and left again on Ocean Boulevard.

Wherewithal: General admission $2, free for children under age 12.

Where to call: (310) 439-2119.