ART REVIEW : Taking Aim at Societies Past, Present : ‘Art of Attack’ at the Armand Hammer is a historical package of six exhibitions by artists devoted to social criticism.

Poetic justice is served. UCLA is taking over operation of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. Intended as one man’s homage to his own ego, the place now joins a humanistic institution.

UCLA’s art gallery director, Henry Hopkins, intends the museum to become a calm and stimulating populist oasis. This is not an impossible job. Westwood has a lot of smart foot traffic and, although the building at present feels as dreary as a dictator’s mausoleum, it has fine promise. Happy endings are rare these days.

It’s also possible to imagine a certain amount of irony was at work in planning UCLA’s first contemporary-feeling show at the Hammer. Titled “The Art of Attack,” it’s a historical package of six individual exhibitions by artists devoted to the kind of social criticism that sees guys like Hammer as bloated plutocrats in top hats freighted with bags marked $$$$. Of course, he’s sitting on the little guy. Drawn from the holdings of the Hammer, Wight and Grunwald collections, it was organized by three Bruin academics--Elizabeth Shepherd, Cynthia Burlingham and Karen Mayers.

At present, we endure a period of coercive political correctness fragmented into self-righteous groups who think anybody is fair game for calumny except themselves. It’s a terrifyingly humorless epoch awash in self-righteous artistic propaganda and badly in need of artists with the true satirist’s conviction that everybody’s human but absolutely nothing is sacred.

Honore Daumier set the standard for visual social satire. It resides in his genius for nuanced emotional expression. The famous “Rue Transnonian” is unmistakably about horror, tragedy and pathos. When he skewered the legal profession, Daumier didn’t forget to admire its shrewd intelligence. When he went after the repressive Louis Philippe, his skill as a draftsman brought off an amazing anamorphic drawing of the pear-king as a three-faced stinker. He had such affection for the bluestockings he tweaked that it’s hard to imagine even today’s thin-skinned counterparts taking offense.

Daumier’s older British contemporary, George Cruikshank, was more Rabelaisian. We recognize his subject and his scatological delight in depicting “Little Boney Gone to Pot.” The demon offering the exiled Napoleon a flintlock to blow himself away is surely Cruikshank himself. His parodies offer the satisfaction of seeing the cast of life’s Vanity Fair as a collection of gut-bags posturing in fancy dress.

Mexico’s great graphic satirist Jose Guadalupe Posada illustrated literally thousands of broadsheets decrying the flagrant injustices of the Porfirio Diaz regime. His brilliant use of the traditional calaveras (skeletons) reminds us we are all the walking dead. A grandee brandishes his sword and announcing, “Without dispute I will make dishes of your skulls.” He himself is, of course, a complete bonehead.

The contemporary work on view is more problematical. Today, problems are complex, their critics polarized to predictability.

The most graphically biting among them is German poster maker Klaus Staeck. He consciously carries on the tradition of socio-critical photomontage started by John Heartfield, whose current retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art must also be seen.

Heartfield had a clear target in Adolf Hitler. Staeck has the rather cuddly looking Helmut Kohl and amorphous evils such as environmental pollution to contend with. He does awfully well, considering, in works such as “The First Poison,” which shows an infant at his mother’s breast.

New York’s Guerrilla Girls are a feminist art collective that operates with an anonymity that may damage its credibility. Their work consists mainly of printed sheets listing the names of galleries, museums and critics who, in their view, don’t pay sufficient attention to art by women.

Such a dry diet of unseasoned polemic begins to alienate even those who agree with them. Fortunately, they’ve lightened and broadened their interests. Their best work here is a fuzzily reproduced photo of a female Desert Storm soldier above the question: “Did She Risk Her Life for Governments That Enslave Women?” That’s powerful stuff and indisputably worth doing.

Everyone with a rebellious bone must love Robbie Conal, the L.A. artist who lit into the Reagan regime by putting up posters of Ronnie and his male staff titled “Men Without Lips” and then laying into Nancy and the Reaganettes as “Women With Teeth.”

He’s gone after Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker as “False Profits,” and turned Daryl Gates into a shooting-gallery target after the former LAPD top cop said casual drug users should be shot. Conal got into trouble with the authorities for sticking these up all over town, but you had the feeling they were stifling a laugh.

Conal has the stuff. He’s funny, sly and mordant. His originals are even better. He really can’t paint, but he brings it off anyway out of sheer ecstatic bile and a determination to show the predatory side of all our false prophets.

* The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood; through Jan. 2, closed Mondays; (310) 433-7000.