Pair of Exhibits Fail to Muster Emotion : Art: Museum’s ‘Desert Work’ and ‘The Artist’s Hand’ suffer from uniformity of tone.

The star of a new trio of shows at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art is “On the Road: Selections from the Permanent Collection.”

And rightly so, for neither of the two supporting acts can match the collection show’s verve and vision, its breadth, integrity and daring. Both “Desert Work” and “The Artist’s Hand” suffer from a uniformity of tone and an emotional remoteness that cause the museum’s own collection to shine even brighter by contrast.

The gallery housing “Desert Work” has, itself, the desert’s quality of bleached light. Though a small space, its walls seem to extend forever, their glaring surfaces bearing only regularly spaced photographs to interrupt the stark sameness.

Walter Cotten and Steven De Pinto are both local photographers who have been journeying together to abandoned testing sites, landing strips and gunnery ranges in the Southern California desert for six years. Their work feels cautionary but extremely cool. They photograph, in black and white and color, the detritus of these abandoned sites against the desert’s serene horizon, endowing the assorted tools and structures they find with a vaguely threatening, dramatic presence. But they also treat these mechanical remains as the stuff of abstract sculpture, arranging them in mysterious, slightly alluring patterns on the desert floor.

The artists’ ambivalence to their subject matter is evident even in the entry to the show. There, they have erected a wall, about 6 feet wide, that stretches from a patchwork of metal tiles on the floor to the gallery’s ceiling, and bears a surface resembling concrete. They have installed a metal-framed viewing window at eye level, through which visitors can see a color photographic diptych of a dry lake bed, scarred with tire tracks and strewn with such odd contraptions as a metal table strapped to the ground and a cluster of oblong black canisters, one left suggestively uncapped.

The wall imposes a distinction between safety and danger. It suggests that we are viewing something threatening, but from a protected vantage point. But De Pinto and Cotten don’t carry the illusion to a convincing end. We see a disconcerting view through the slit in the wall, but we also see the edges of the image and the space around it--we see that the view is only a representation, a formal conceit rather than an immediate threat.

Throughout, De Pinto and Cotten understate the sense of threat, though it is the most compelling aspect of their work. A pungent anti-military line could easily be woven through these images of a mute, benign desert invaded by engineers of an unknown, but seemingly malevolent culture. The aluminum sheds, wheeled and fuel-propelled carts, wires, cords and rows of empty chairs all feel like fresh fossils of a still-living clan whose intentions cannot be good, but De Pinto and Cotten keep their critique (if it exists at all) to themselves. In the end, their work feels noncommittal, intriguing but numb to all emotion.

“The Artist’s Hand: Drawings from the BankAmerica Corporation Art Collection,” in the adjacent museum galleries, doesn’t fare much better at inflaming passions in the viewer. There is a bland predictability to this selection, just as there was to the same corporation’s collection of prints exhibited last year at the San Diego Museum of Art. The 56 works here, dating from 1965-1990 and selected by Bonnie Earls-Solari, director of the Bank of America’s art program, form a respectable collection, but by no means an enlightening one.

Jennifer Bartlett is here, with an ink study of a garden, Donald Sultan with one of his monumental black charcoal tulips and Claes Oldenburg, with his “Study for a Hanging Soft 3-Way Plug,” a typical example of his Pop art wit. Jonathan Borofsky, Robert Longo, Elizabeth Murray, Edward Ruscha, Joel Shapiro, David Salle and David Hockney all make an appearance here too, to no one’s surprise, and their work carries no surprises either.

Only a few works in this show do merit a pause with their strong testimony to the power, immediacy and freshness of works on paper. Nicholas Africano’s delicate ink drawings of two distraught men invoke genuine pathos, and Joseph Nechvatal’s quirky, quivering drawing lives up to its poetic title, “Fresh Grass Grows on the Graves of Lost Loves.”

William Wegman’s chuckle of a sketch, “Hightide/Lowtide,” showing a fish swimming in water and then hovering impossibly above it as the tide lowers, is evidence enough that even a dozen lines can widen the viewer’s eyes. But unfortunately, most of the drawings here merely make those eyes glaze over.

Both shows continue at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., through Aug. 4. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, Wednesday evenings until 9.

CRITIC’S CHOICE: THE PERMANENT COLLECTION

The permanent collection of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art is instructive and often inviting. Witness Carl Andre’s landmark “Magnesium-Zinc Plain,” a grid of metal floor tiles, and Vito Acconci’s participatory “Instant House.” Three dozen works from the collection are on view at the museum, through Aug. 4, in the show, “On the Road: Selections from the Permanent Collection.” A well-documented, well-illustrated catalogue accompanies the show, which, indeed, is the highlight of the museum’s current offerings.