ART REVIEW : ‘Satellite’ Misguided by Gravitational Pull : Exhibition: Works from San Diego and Boston artists fail to cover much ground in the quest for geographic destiny.

“Satellite Intelligence: New Art from San Diego and Boston” is an exhibition that employs a new twist on an old conceit. The two cities are within striking distance of the two most important artistic centers in the nation. They’re “satellites” of Los Angeles and New York, respectively, and as such find themselves within the gravitational pull of those important centers. The show means to find out whether or not a center’s pull affects the art that is made nearby.

Like every ZIP-code show, which is the basic genre that’s been adapted, “Satellite Intelligence” asks: Is geography destiny?

The answer, of course, is yes. The reason I say “of course” is simple: Virtually every city that is home to artists, but that is not itself influential, functions as the satellite of a cultural center. Its artistic tides are profoundly affected by the center’s pull, whether the satellite is 100 miles down the road or clear across the continent. (The sun burns up Venus, but eventually it gets to Pluto too.) The exhibition offers clear evidence--for example, in the general weakness of the painting on view and in the abundance of installation art. Both traits are common to the moment, in New York and L.A. and internationally.

Of course, the answer is also no. The reason I say “of course” this time is also simple: Virtually every artist who works does so independently. A border town that claims the military as a principal industry will provide a different milieu within which to make art than a state capital whose colonial heritage is likewise big business. But that can mean everything, or nothing, depending on the artist who is working there.

The show is on view to Aug. 5 at the newly renamed San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (formerly the La Jolla Museum) and was jointly organized by MIT’s List Visual Arts Gallery, where it travels next. If it does not present an either/or solution to the question of geographical destiny, must it be counted a failure?

“Satellite Intelligence” most certainly disappoints, but not because it doesn’t tie things up in an easily digestible package. It’s a failure because you’re always stunningly aware, while perusing the galleries, of the clever curatorial conceit that has guided the selection. Almost never does the art itself possess the wherewithal to wrestle your attention away.

The principal exception is right inside the museum’s front door. Deborah Small’s “Empire-Elan-Ecstacy,” a multipaneled wall installation that serves as backdrop to a gardenlike reading room, looks at colonialism as integral to the very idea of the modern world. Divided into two segments--the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus in San Salvador and the 18th Century establishment of a chain of California missions--it forms a coast-to-coast meditation.

Each of about 400 wall panels carries a posterlike fragment of an image: decorative jungle wall paper, book jackets, department store ads for Columbus Day sales, period paintings and engravings, baseball cards (the San Diego Padres), mementos of nearly vanished Indian tribes and so on. Park benches and a patio table and chairs mingle out front with live and artificial plants, to constitute a contemplative public/private garden. Small’s self-published notebooks are scattered about, and they contain such quietly devastating entries as a Chumash Indian woman’s fateful description of Father Junipero Serra’s mission at Carmel: “This is Auschwitz, with roses.”

Arranged in a strict grid, which is the classic modernist device for structuring visual information, these panels throw into high relief some illuminating perceptions: The “discovery” of a “new” world, steady “progress” into “the unknown,” and commitment to a “spiritual” dimension describe both the founding myth of America and our collective idea of what constitutes appropriate values for modern works of art. Small’s gift is not in asserting this familiar observation, but in coaxing it forth from our most common experience. What remains to be “dis-covered” in the modern world, the artist implies, is a history that does not simply mouth the standard cliches, complete with their supposed objectivity.

Small’s work, like most installation art, benefits from the appearance of having been assembled specifically for the present venue. In a show based on a conceit, the exhibition site is correctly perceived to be an arena for a kind of temporal performance before the public, one that invites audience participation. Devising an appropriate format is part of the trick.

Elizabeth Sisco’s otherwise provocative installation on the subject of Tijuana as a souvenir culture for the United States suffers from the grinding tediousness of its display. By contrast, Jean Lowe’s raucously rococo bedroom--in which the furniture, walls and floor are covered with paintings--suffers from being all format, while Mags Harries’ “Border Garden” has the depth of tourist-eye insight into a city.

Given the competitiveness of this performance mode, it takes a heck of a painting or sculpture just to be noticed. The painters--Gerry Bergstein, John Devaney, Timothy Hawkesworth and Steve Ilott--aren’t up to it, although Ilott’s eccentric abstract markings on wood possess an oddly ethereal appeal. (Ironically, they’re the quietest paintings in the show.) Nor are the sculptors--Abram Ross Faber, Anne E. Mudge and Cameron Shaw--all of whom work in an assemblage vein. Putting together found objects and fabricated elements is itself an ancestor of the installation motif.

The lone conceptualist, Richard A. Lou, compiles documentary interviews and photographs of socially marginalized people. The greatest interest in the 21 documents assembled here lies in just how bland and old fashioned this once-rigorous technique has become.

Because most of the art in “Satellite Intelligence” is minor at best, you strain for compensatory observations elsewhere. Here are two: The chosen Bostonians, as a rule, are significantly older than the chosen San Diegans, but the San Diegans, as a rule, make art that is more engaged. What this has to do with geography is anybody’s guess. Like a “cute meet” in the movies, you can forgive a phony set-up if the thing eventually takes off. “Satellite Intelligence” doesn’t.