Questions, few answers

Reality isn’t what it used to be. Neither is Realism, a style of art that once promised to tell the truth about modern life, often by confronting viewers with point-blank views of its ugly underbelly.

At UC Santa Barbara’s Art Museum, “Social Strategies: Redefining Social Realism” asks interesting questions about art’s relationship to reality. Unfortunately, the sketchy survey falls short of answering them in a satisfying fashion.

Part of the problem is that guest curators Klaus Ottmann and Pamela Auchincloss have tried to do too much (redefine a 100-year-old style) with too little (two dozen works, the majority of which were made during the last three years).

But the quantity and newness of the photographs, videos and objects displayed are less problematic than the narrow range of ideas and media they represent. To look at Social Realism through the lens of this exhibition is to see not a corpse but a skeleton: the bare bones of a once-vital movement.

The show begins with great promise. On a free-standing wall across from the entrance hang mismatched letters that spell “Anytown USA.” Made of discarded signs scavenged from neighborhood bars, bowling alleys and other mom-and-pop businesses that have gone bust, Jack Pierson’s 3-D collage is a communal tombstone for failed dreams. It gives poignant form to fantasies that have been abandoned but linger in the memory.

Glorious images of fame and fortune collide with the cold knowledge of their unattainablility in this bittersweet piece, which recalls both illuminated marquees and ransom notes. The only two letters in the same typeface are the N and Y of “Anytown.” This suggests that New York is just a bigger version of any other town and that the fantasy of making it big in the big city involves the same risks, labor and luck as just getting by anywhere else.

To the right hangs a billboard-size photograph of British artists Gilbert and George. The middle-aged gay couple stand against a sea of bright yellow, in which cross-shaped microorganisms float among tiny bubbles. Naked except for their eyeglasses and wristwatches, the men clasp hands and stare straight ahead. At once sober and hopeful, Gilbert’s and George’s expressions say, “Neither of us may be much, but together we’re ready for anything.”

The portrait comments on a controversial Andreas Serrano image of a crucifix submerged in a beaker of urine. Unlike Serrano’s work, which mocked the hypocrisies of televangelism, Gilbert and George’s Pop picture is both more personal and wider ranging in its appeal.

It updates Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Softening the prim determination etched on the faces of that painting’s farmers, Gilbert and George’s endearing self-portrait abandons the trappings of Puritan humorlessness for the sweet charm of basic human integrity and the moral seriousness of lasting commitments.

After starting strong, the exhibition wears thin.

In the old days, posters played a major role in Social Realism, whose artists sought to convey such urgent messages that they saw their art as a form of propaganda. Today, many artists see their work similarly. But rather than printing posters, they manufacture signs.

Electronically operated examples include Tracy Emin’s “I Can Never Leave You,” written in blue neon, and Jenny Holzer’s scrolling LED messages, liberally peppered with first-person pronouns. Barbara Kruger’s photo-silk-screened image printed on vinyl mimics the format of billboards to state, with the bluntness of a bumper sticker, “Your body is a battleground.” And Ken Lum’s 6-foot C-print resembles a personal ad blown out of proportion.

All are savvy about the mass media and the way messages move through the world. But none says much more than the obvious.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Rainer Ganahl set their sights on newspapers and cable news networks. Gonzalez-Torres invites each viewer to take a 5-by-3-foot sheet of paper from a stack on the gallery floor. Printed in the center of each is a short news story about an Atlanta woman who saw Christ’s face in a plate of spaghetti.

In contrast, there isn’t a whiff of playfulness in Ganahl’s mock newscast, which plays on a monitor. He simply articulates his opposition to U.S. military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq. His looped videotape might have some punch if it made it onto the airwaves. But in a museum, it preaches to the choir. As art, it’s uninteresting. As politics, it’s ineffective. Ganahl’s piece has the presence of let’s pretend Social Realism.

The same can be said of Edgar Arceneaux’s studious drawings based on TV programs; Mary Kelly’s fragment of a news story, rewritten in carefully arranged bits of lint picked from her dryer; and Paul Shambroom’s documentary photograph of a small town meeting, dolled up to look like a painting.

These pieces, like the majority of the works in “Social Strategies,” lack the breadth, depth and complexity to hold their own in the social world. They’re also too coy, generic and disembodied to pull viewers into new worlds by clarifying aspects of the one we’re familiar with. In other words, they fail to engage us artistically.

Three videos stand out because they work on both levels.

Paul Pfeiffer’s ghostly rendition of a boxing match from which the fighters have been excised is a haunting metaphor of social invisibility -- and of art’s uncanny capacity to conjure meaning out of thin air. Kim Sooja and Beat Streuli use close-ups, slow motion and silence with surgical precision, transforming a winding journey through the countryside and a few minutes on a Manhattan street corner into dreamy stories filled with sorrow and hope.

But in general, the exhibition puts undue emphasis on photo-based works, most of which favor clearly articulated ideas over the messy unpredictability of embodied experience. Painting, both traditional and contemporary, supplies such sensory experiences in abundance. But this medium is almost entirely absent from “Social Strategies.”

Sue Williams’ stylized abstraction is passed off as a painting, but it’s really a drawing in oil on canvas. It pales in comparison to the cartoons it mimics, not to mention Willem de Kooning’s late paintings, which blow it off the wall. Jeremy Blake’s perfectly pleasant sequence of abstract images on a plasma screen monitor also tries to pass as a painting. But “Angel Dust” is little more than a glorified screen-saver, an abstraction for people with abbreviated attention spans.

The only painting in the show, by German artist Neo Rauch, looks more like a printed poster advertising a low-budget carnival than a hand-painted picture of the real world. But the longer you look at this old-fashioned view of the future, the more it says about the profoundly strange times in which we live.

Filtered through the discredited lens of Eastern bloc Socialist Realism, Rauch’s piece of Neo-Realism gives queasy form to the twin currents of violence and entertainment currently coursing through modern life. Fusing fantasy and reality, leisure and alienation, his pointed painting captures the tenor of times.

This conflicted, emotionally ambiguous weirdness is in surprisingly short supply in “Social Strategies.” Its definition of Social Realism is too tidy and academic to resonate in the real world. That’s where all art is tested and shown to be social, no matter what name it goes by.

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‘Social Strategies: Redefining Social Realism’

Where: University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara

When: Tuesdays, 12-8 p.m., Wednesdays-Sundays, 12-5 p.m.

Ends: May 11

Price: Free

Contact: (805) 893-2951