MADE IN THE U.S.A.

Remember when UC Berkeley was a brazier of social radicalism? Women burned brassieres and men immolated draft cards. There were glorious demands for civil rights and the sizzle of brains fried by LSD. Love was declared against war.

It was giddy but it’s gone. Well, almost. The gloaming of memory has produced an exhibition that pokes through the ashes of the whole post-World War II American social revolution. On view at the University Art Museum until June 21, “Made in U.S.A.” is a remarkable show.

Pop. It is about Pop art in all its permutations. You remember the style. Jasper Johns painted an American flag green, orange and flat. Claes Oldenburg inflated an ice cream cone to the size of a canoe, then let the air out. Roy Lichtenstein made a comic-strip panel as big as a Rembrandt and Andy Warhol elevated a Campbell’s soup can to the status of Christ Pantocrator. Establishment critics fumed. Unwashed viewers sneered at the put-on, but one way or another everybody got a good laugh out of Pop. Some laughed en route to the bank, as art became big business and artists stars of near-cinematic magnitude.

“Made in U.S.A.” was organized by UAM curator Sidra Stitch in a rare venture by a museum that scarcely ever originates exhibitions of major proportion, much less one with so handsome and thoughtfully written a catalogue. Stitch’s essay attempts bravely to track elusive relationships between art and society suggested by its subtitle, “An Americanization in Modern Art, The ‘50s and ‘60s.” A humanistic tone is struck and furthered by the inclusion of chapters on poetry and the novel by James E. B. Breslin and Thomas Schaub.

Ever since Thorstein Veblen, sociological writing has inclined to smugness. This text does not escape, but it overcomes. And the exhibition far outstrips its own questionable assumption that somehow the American and socio-critical character of Pop was missed at the time of its making. It wasn’t. Everybody was in on the joke.

“Made in U.S.A.” is the framework idea for an epic exhibition. It would hold together as a Museum of Modern Art blockbuster including every major trademark of the period. In a way, it does even better as a thoughtful collegial essay with a modest 100 works. There is a nice touch of the recherche here with offbeat linchpin works like Larry Rivers’ “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and a gaggle of outland artists like Wally Berman and Jim Nutt.

The thesis here is that Pop was the ultimate Americanization of ideas fostered by the European avant-garde. On evidence it was also a style that allowed significant art to be made outside New York, by Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles, Wayne Thiebaud in San Francisco and the Hairy Who in Chicago, for instance.

But the best thing about this show is the way it brings back the spirit of that tumultuous era with its zany commitments to laconic hyperbole and cool radical-chic, devastating put-downs delivered from deep well-springs of affection, tolerance and aggravation. Wandering around the gallery is like walking in a time-capsule sitting in the middle of a present that is a completely logical extension of everything that was going on then but so stunningly different that it is almost impossible to figure out how we got here from there.

“American Icons” shows artists trumpeting and cross-examining patriotic cliches like the flag and George Washington. In an era of billowing dreams for the American Everyman, Tom Wesselmann put Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of the father of our country in a bright Cezanne-Sears breakfast room with a real TV set. The scene’s cozy grandiosity absorbs all past cultures into the populism of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.

Pop artists have been accused of waffling too much on social issues but there is political irony here that seems inescapable in today’s malaise, bracketed by uneasy neo-patriotism on one hand and an artistic disillusionment so profound it will not even bother to satirize a dollar bill. Our burgeoning self-esteem somehow transferred itself from a thing for all Americans to a thing for rich Americans only.

Yankee Pop acted as a kind of trade barrier against foreign art. The French make great wine and bad Coke. But Pop was generous about all of America symbolized by roads that whisk everyman to his dream. For Robert Bechtel, it was a ’60 T-Bird and a California suburb where a man can be king in glorious anonymity, for George Segal a guy getting off a bus somewhere to start over. Ruscha and Allan D’Archangelo saw the romance of On the Road at Night with the radio playing Janis Joplin singing about she and Bobby McGee.

That was before the Energy Crisis. Before Detroit was mauled by Japanese robotics.

You get the feeling that much of what the Pop-eyes painted is still going on out there somewhere, but it seems transformed. The road image is now that of well-heeled retirees in plump RVs or uphill kids going to and fro from ski resorts. The shade of Jack Kerouac lurks nowhere.

Nowhere is this show more cheerfully brainless and celebratory than in the section “American Food and American Marketing.” Junk food was a vernacular metaphor for an America where everything was cheap, yummy and available 24 hours a day. Nobody had more fun with it than Wayne Thiebaud painting cake frosting its true thickness, or Rivers flipping out on the romance of cigarette packs, and everybody from Robert Arneson to H.C. Westermann making Cokes, hot dogs and Oreo cookies stand for casual recreational sex.

Today the health police remind us that sex is lethal unless consumed with the wrapper on, cigarettes more dangerous than nuclear fall-out and hot-dogs are cholesterol torpedoes. And you can’t always find Twinkies on the shelf.

It is an omen of the times that indulgence is still OK if it is as expensive as Godiva, foreign as Haagen-Dazs and if you work out afterward at Jane Fonda’s, who used to be a liberal.

There is something extremely tiresome about most observers droning on about the Mass Media. No matter where they are coming from, you get the feeling they want control . The nice thing about the artists’ section on the media is that they deal in paradox and flat facts. There is not much question that experiencing things at second hand makes them seem different, distant and dreamy, as in Vija Celmins’ “TV,” but at the same time oddly oversize and mythical, as in Walhol’s “Elvis.”

The media is still the crucible in which we create and destroy our secular royalty and household gods, but it seems to have changed over time because our perceptions of it have changed. When Warhol depicted Liz Taylor, or when Ray Johnson collaged James Dean, their media carried a message of tragedy and artificiality that most Americans were just beginning to learn. Today, when Ronald Reagan speaks to the camera some ordinary folks feel he is acting, and when Gary Hart takes the fall there is recognition that a tragedy might not have catalyzed without the intervention of the media.

Pop helped teach us that the media is only the message until we know it.

You can also sort between artists who deal in paradox as mumbo-jumbo and paradox as truth. Mel Ramos never painted better than in his mordantly mystical “Superman,” nor Warhol more upsettingly than in his Race Riot series.

Oops, we’ve strolled into “The American Dream, The American Dilemma” where all the rococo Pop fun begins to come unglued and the art turns ominous and oracular. This is where Robert Indiana identifies Selma, Ala., as the nation’s anal sphincter and Ed Kienholz sees America as a charred tangle of incinerated pride, electrical wires and dead dolls.

There is propaganda by May Steves and a sermon by Duane Hanson, but mostly this is art that properly asks felt questions without dictating cheap answers.

A theme of national and personal heroics runs through the show, settling sometimes on the national love of the outsider and outlaw. Finally, Ed Paschke just quietly points out that that our beloved misfit was also Lee Harvey Oswald.

Who is he today, Rambo or Ivan Boesky?

Never mind.

Among other things, “Made in U.S.A.” makes us realize that Pop played an important role in what is passing today for Post-Modernism, with all its recycled not-so-common imagery and ironic posturing.

Pop was a reaction against worn-out convention and snobbery. It was a breath of breezy American skeptical optimism, but it left a bad legacy of flat, dumb graphic art cliches that repollinated commercial design and impoverished fine art.

Pop gave us our own brash selves and a single moment in time and cost us juice, profundity and the long view. The last picture here that has a sense of anything beyond the moment is Robert Rauschenberg’s 1963 “Tracer.” It combines dragon-fly helicopters with a Titian nude that projects something forward about the icy narcissism and fanatic fundamentalism of the ‘80s.