Wry and Poignant Look at Life of La Jolla’s Luiseno Indians : Art: James Luna’s exhibition portrays the tension between traditional and contemporary customs.

SAN DIEGO —  “This is meat for us,” says a woman on a videotape in James Luna’s current exhibition, her cupped hands full of acorns. The statement is made plainly, as part of a 15-minute tape in which three generations of Native American women demonstrate the gathering, shelling, grinding and cooking of acorns to make a hot dish called “Wee-Wish.” Its declaration of respect for tradition amid competing choices reverberates strongly throughout Luna’s show at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery, where an installation by Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez is also on view.

Through photographs, installations and videotapes, Luna, a Luiseno Indian who lives on the La Jolla Reservation, takes a wry look at the porous frame that distinguishes Native American culture from the dominant white culture that surrounds it. As new habits slowly seep in, traditional ways become diffused and lost. The tension between traditional and contemporary customs, and the continual redefinition of Native American culture that results from that tension, are explored humorously, didactically and often quite poignantly in Luna’s show.

The installation titled “The History of the Luiseno People: The Process and Evolution of Wee-Wish” is the most blunt of Luna’s statements. Beside the video monitor is a display of utensils used to harvest and grind acorns. They range from the traditional matate , a grinding stone, to an electric food processor. A sign reading “The Choice is Yours” leans against the display and issues its solemn-toned challenge to the keepers of tradition.

Most of Luna’s work has more subtlety than that, and more absorbing wit. “The Artifact Piece,” for instance, stabs its point home with tremendous, rough-edged humor. Luna literally put himself on display when he presented this performance/installation at San Diego’s Museum of Man in 1987 and again last year in New York. In the current show, Luna’s presence is documented through photographs.

He lies, nearly naked, in a sand-bottomed box, like a specimen in a museum case. The label on the case reads “James Luna, February 9, 1950, Luiseno Indian.” Additional text panels give the type of information about lifestyle and customs that one expects from an anthropological display, but with an up-to-date satirical bite.

Burn marks on Luna’s arms are described as the result of an accident during a drunken bout. The callus on his ring finger is said to indicate a marriage that was bittersweet, due to the “emotional scars from alcoholic family background . . . cause for showing fears of giving, communicating and mistrust.”

“The Artifact Piece” is Luna at his best, reminding us that Native Americans are also contemporary, living Americans, and gently chastising us and our anthropological institutions for believing otherwise.

Pain is the source of much of Luna’s humor--both personal pain and the trauma of an abused, exploited and misunderstood culture. “Humor,” he states in the show’s brochure, “can be a form of knowledge, critical thought and perhaps used in a way of easing the pain.” His recent work is an excellent demonstration of humor as a tool of both instruction and insight.

The accompanying installation, Lou’s and Sanchez’s “Suspended Text: A Border Matrix,” is physically disarming, while Luna’s is intellectually. To enter the installation, one must lie, face-up, on a low, wheeled platform like a mechanic’s creeper, and push oneself along through a black curtain. Such limited, proscribed movement at once conveys a sense of vulnerability and insecurity. Inside the installation, a low roof of wire grid further confines movement.

Thus manipulated and lacking control, visitors to the installation are in the same situation, physically, that Lou and Sanchez suggest they are in intellectually when it comes to receiving information about issues of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Newspaper pages hang from the low wire roof and are also mounted on the walls of the gallery, near the floor, so all are legible from the ground. Black paint blocks out areas of each page, leaving visible articles about the border, addressing such issues as law enforcement, migrant workers, and the contributions of the maquiladora industry.

On many pages, only fragments of type are left unpainted, and these are the most potent indications of the artists’ intent. “Stepchild” and “racist” are the only two words left uncovered on one page, and in this context, both apply pointedly to the attitudes governing border issues. Another page reads only “humans,” “no more,” and faces “mob mentality” on the opposite page.

Through their excisions and juxtapositions, Lou and Sanchez, both local artists who have exhibited with the Border Art Workshop/ Taller de Arte Fronterizo , call attention to the distorted and politically slanted nature of journalistic coverage of the border in the local press, and to the dehumanizing effect it has on its subjects. Silhouetted figures standing in wait to cross the border after dark are painted on three of the gallery walls as monumental reminders of the lives those articles claim to represent.

Unfortunately, this installation never really coheres into as powerful a statement as its theme suggests. Both Lou and Sanchez are proven talents, but in this case, their collaborative effort equals less than the sum of their individual visions.

* Boehm Gallery, Palomar College, 1140 W. Mission Road, San Marcos, through April 24. Open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday.