Artistic Equilibrium

Since unveiling its impressive, newly expanded incarnation nearly two years ago, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art has been in a settling-in mode.

The challenge of any museum trying to grow into a cosmopolitan institution is to adequately serve its constituency.

The agenda is to please members and fiscally involved patrons while articulating to the public the contemporary raison d’etre of art against a backdrop of art history.

The new SBMA doesn’t always strike the right balance, but a nice equilibrium currently exists. The diversity of its exhibits showcases the sort of pluralistic artistic vision one wants to see in a contemporary museum.

In short, as we approach the end of this millennium, SBMA is a fine place to take visiting family--whatever their individual levels of artistic sophistication--during the holidays.

For the idle-minded holiday crowd, the central McCormick Gallery is filled with old things that glitter in “Ancient Gold Jewelry From the Dallas Museum of Art.”

Elsewhere, the museum’s interest in photography is respectably represented in a fine cross-historical compendium of city-themed images. “Toujours Paris: Photographs of Paris,” presents evocative pictures of that city that run a long gamut.

There are images by the legendary French photographer Eugene Atget and Andre Kertesz’ classic still life “Chez Mondrian.”

More recent works include a mystically banal image of stuffed birds by Richard Ross and some color-drenched audacity by Kathy Barrows. All in all, it adds up to an engrossing Parisian valentine.

Two other museum exhibits are from the contemporary end of the spectrum.

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First is Gilles Barbier’s “Copywork: The Dictionary Pages and Other Diversions,” which turns out to be numerous huge panels on the gallery walls, filled with scribbling that passes for knowledge, and finely re-created drawings in ink and gouache. The result is an elaborate ruse that fills the gallery with information, fastidiously culled and sometimes fabricated.

For several years now, Barbier, whose exhibition is part of a series of contemporary French art shows presented by SBMA contemporary art curator Diana du Pont, has been meticulously copying and altering pages from a dictionary published in 1965, the year of his birth.

Barbier created a self-imposed, dense thicket of data, with multiple layers of potential meaning, including a reflection on the innate desire to assert one’s own original imprint on the data flow of human-cultural history.

There is a CD-ROM linked with all this laborious, anti-digital handiwork. It complicates the issue, but also extends the natural connection to the data lust of the Internet generation. In a way, the entire project is like an information--or disinformation--superhighway of the artist’s own paving.

Other more physical, sculptural pieces present another side of Barbier’s interests.

The long assemblage on the gallery floor called “Mega Maquette” appears like a large architectural model for a museum, containing tiny reproductions of the dictionary pieces we see full-sized.

In addition, there are talking plastic animals, a cloning room and a bloodied little man trapped in a spinning mousetrap, all part of the work’s pathway between the sublime and the grotesque.

It was inspired by the “portable museum,” “Boite en valise,” by another absurdist French artist, the iconic Marcel Duchamp. But Barbier also nods toward an American pop cultural influence through an army of plastic toy creatures lurking below the staid tables, and cheesy “classic rock” humming like aural kitsch.

From a starker but no less effective perspective, the prominent African American artist Carrie Mae Weems presents the installation “Let the Record Show.” It is a historically charged series of translucent banners that transforms a compact gallery space--with the help of James Newton’s musical score.

Weems’ installation goes in an opposite, less-is-more direction from Barbier’s.

In this collection of digital imagery imprinted on sheer fabric panels, she riffs off the basic subject matter of DNA research and its various implications.

We wend our way through a gentle maze of imagery as Weems circles the topic: the cloning of Dolly; the recent validation, through DNA testing of descendants, that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his favorite slave; questioning the morality of scientific investigations.

The through-line here is intentionally vague, though, and Weems approaches her subject more poetically than as an artist with an obvious socio-moral message. Newton’s music, which blends jazz and classical ideas gracefully, accents the loose, nonlinear nature of the visual elements in a happy, and engagingly perplexing, convergence.

DETAILS

“Copywork: The Dictionary Pages and Other Diversions by Gilles Barbier” through Jan. 30; “Let the Record Show: Audio Visual Installation by Carrie Mae Weems” through Feb. 6; “Ancient Gold Jewelry From the Dallas Museum of Art” through Jan. 31. At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. Hours: Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sunday, noon-5 p.m.; 963-4364.