Art is communication--of feelings, ideas, history, lessons...

Art is communication--of feelings, ideas, history, lessons of morality and immorality, of social commentary and of much else, most fundamentally the pleasure of sight.

In her exhibition “Admits Two” at Installation (447 5th Ave.), Karen Atkinson gives us many kinds of visual information in a variety of forms, but the bits and pieces do not add up to a total picture. The result is frustration rather than pleasure. But that may be the artist’s intent.

Atkinson’s didactic purpose is to bring to viewers’ consciousness the way that we view men and women in our society. (That we typically say “men” then “women” is itself a giveaway.) Because the camera creates definitive male and female images, Atkinson has used slides, photographs and texts in an installation suggesting motion picture film and the experience of watching film to show how our perceptions of gender roles are influenced by the movies. Numbered red dots on occasional images and texts refer viewers to additional images and texts in an adjacent gallery. A conscientious visitor going to and fro assembling information fears losing part of the conceptual whole.

Men and women in a row of informal black-and-white photographs seemingly gaze at an immense silhouette of an embracing archetypal romantic couple on the opposite wall. Each one of an additional three couples, about life-size, on that wall presents a male-female relationship, either of equality or female superiority. The artist’s use of gray, lavender and white suggest that traditional arrangements are cloying and flaccid rather than vigorous and dramatic.

The purpose of an installation is to engage visitors actively in the interpretive experience. The use of an announcement in the form of a ticket marked “Admits Two,” recognizable materials and provocative texts engages us. But the demands on the viewer physically as well as intellectually seem incommensurate with the insights gained into the human condition. Some images and texts are arcane. There are more efficient ways of learning that the film media invariably portray the world from the point of view of men.

Atkinson’s installation has much of interest, including a quotation from Jean-Luc Godard: “Art is not the reflection of reality, it is the reality of that reflection.” But it is not a success. Any artist who enjoys only successes, however, is not trying hard enough to surpass what she has already achieved. The observation is equally true for institutions like Installation.

“Admits Two” continues through April 27, the last day of Artwalk.

Installation, by the way, has published 10,000 maps for Artwalk, now available many places, for self-guided tours of more than 100 downtown galleries, artists’ studios and other participants over the weekend of April 26-27.

And God made Adams. Then Adams made photographs. But he did more. Ansel Adams created the way that we, especially in the American West, view, or want to view, nature. Like any artist, he manipulated his medium to realize his vision. Light and chemicals are potentially as artful as oil pigments in the hands of a master. We see nature no more “pure” in Adams’ photographs than we do in the paintings of our great 19th-Century landscapists.

The 75 photographs at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, the “Museum Set,” are the images Adams himself selected to epitomize his career.

The exhibition, which from a curatorial point of view is redundant, following as it does a larger, more scholarly exhibition at the nearby Museum of Photographic Arts only 20 months ago, has doubtless given pleasure to many. Adams’ images remain ever-fresh. Nevertheless, the SDMA should heed Time magazine critic Robert Hughes’ warnings about blockbusters necessitating ever greater blockbusters. They become an end in themselves, a phenomenon of public relations, not of art.

“Ansel Adams: Classic Images” continues through April 27.