ART REVIEW : Golub Show on Violence Aims at Mind

What is most shocking about Leon Golub’s installation “WorldWide,” at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, is that it hardly shocks at all.

The show consists of 12 large photographic transparencies that hang from the gallery ceiling at various heights and angles. Each features a different fragmented image reproduced from Golub’s paintings of torturers, assassins, mercenaries and mourners. Golub provides no clues about the identities of perpetrators or victims--they are simply ordinary people in ordinary places, participating in the worldwide phenomenon of ordinary violence.

Ordinary violence.

It should be an oxymoron, but it’s not. In this, the New York artist’s first installation, and through four decades of powerful painting, Golub has drummed home the notion that violence around the globe is commonplace and continuous, an abusive adjunct of power. Violence makes it to prime-time news when it’s fresh or particularly extreme, but violence of the sort Golub scrutinizes--closeted interrogations, torture of the “disappeared”--never sears the public eye.

Golub wants us not only to know and care about it, but to feel its brutality in the gut. His paintings, with their scraped and tortured surfaces, have always left one troubled, bruised and committed to change. But this installation, with its slick, mediated imagery, is far less visceral. It needles the mind, slowly, and only gradually torments the soul.

Despite the rawness of the subjects--men with guns drawn at others’ heads, a nude woman blindfolded and bound, a man hanging by his feet--the images here lose a tremendous amount of power and immediacy in their translation from paintings to transparencies. Golub’s immense, unstretched canvases--flayed, abused and blistered--have long been analogues for the skins of the victims Golub portrays. A roomful of such paintings can make one suffocate with shame.

But here one can walk among the slick, vinyl transparencies, and still feel physically distant from them. The anonymous texture of the images only exaggerates the generic quality of the violence, removing it even further from the real physical and emotional space of the viewer. While the transparent suspended panels cause images to appear to overlap with each other, and with the bodies of gallery-goers, the installation remains far less palpable and involving than Golub’s gritty, two-dimensional paintings.

“WorldWide,” organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport for the Brooklyn Museum in New York last year, has plenty of haunting moments, with its oversized faces and menacing gunmen, but the cool, spare dispersal of the transparencies throughout the gallery tempers the potential heat of the subject. Adding an intellectual, didactic tone to the show is a pair of charts that Golub has reproduced, listing roughly 100 armed conflicts now occurring throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. Some of the battles have persisted for more than 50 years, and some have left hundreds of thousands dead.

These specific places, names and numbers help anchor Golub’s floating, generalized images. The information they impart helps channel the anguish and despair that emerges, undirected, from the images alone. With the help of these facts, Golub’s installation truly enters the real space of the world.

“WorldWide” continues at the Mandeville Gallery, UC San Diego, through June 21. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.