ART REVIEW : APOCALYPTIC VISIONS ON VIEW

The summer is unlikely to deliver a more shattering art show than “Disarming Images: Art for Nuclear Disarmament” (at UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum through Aug. 4). A bombed-out cavern of holocaust images echoes with such apocalyptic visions as Alex Grey’s “Nuclear Crucifixion,” a painting of Christ nailed to a mushroom cloud and Hans Haacke’s photograph, “The Lord’s Prayer,” depicting President Reagan gazing heavenward and desperately asking, “Lord, the Pershings are launched! What now?”

Artist Claes Oldenburg sets forth a plastic foam model for a sculpture of an extinguished match, painter Peter Saul portrays Three Mile Island as a high-tech can of worms, and photographer Dona Ann McAdams pictures three women juggling their genes in front of a power plant.

“Your manias become science,” declares a cutout strip of words running across Barbara Kruger’s terrifyingly beautiful photograph of a nuclear blast. “Disarm,” screams a banner in Mike Glier’s graphic painting of a demonstrating crowd. “You are trapped on the earth so you will explode,” reads a sentence painted in white block letters across Jenny Holzer’s depiction of irradiated people on a city street.

Reverberating sounds of such written warnings are no more insistent than insidious smells of molten flesh at this exhibition. Sickening odors of a civilization simmering dry or going up in smoke seep through artworks that vary widely in medium and style, but agree on the nuclear threat. The scents would putrefy into an unbearable stench if the art were less interesting as art and if the exhibition were not fired by the force of strong individuals, temporarily united.

There’s no denying the repetitiousness of the message in “Disarming Images,” but if you can’t bear to look at Ilona Granet’s enamel-on-aluminum lineup of dehumanized men as bombs, or at Joan Brown’s painting of a skeleton stalking a charred metropolis, you can find comic relief in Red Grooms’ and William Wegman’s work. Grooms’ “Nuclear Nuts” pull toy has cartoonish wooden sculptures of Reagan and Andropov standing on a missile while locked in a perpetual handshake. Wegman’s collage-and-ink “Tardy Start” is a ludicrous inquiry about contributing art to a missile program.

While the predominant mode is figurative and harsh, Rudolf Baranik parodies Minimalist painting to good effect. His “Dictionary and Manifesto II” juxtaposes a black square, painted on half a diptych, with a mock definition of disarmament (from the “Dictionary of the 24th Century”) spelled out on the other half. Another distinctively quiet piece is Robert Rauschenberg’s “Cot. 1980.” This veiled collage of flowers, mice, machinery and a fist (among other images) may be the most poignant work exhibited.

The show of about 45 artworks by as many prominent artists was curated by Nina Felshin for Bread and Roses (the cultural project of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees), the AFL-CIO and Physicians for Social Responsibility in New York City. “Disarming Images” has been crisscrossing the country for nearly a year (including a stop last fall at San Diego State University) and will continue traveling for another year. The exposure is well deserved, for the hard-hitting show brings all the issues of political art to the fore.

The art amounts to more than sloganeering and, while it contains no masterpieces, the exhibition reminds us that the most enduring political art is the product of extraordinarily gifted artists. It took a Picasso to create “Guernica,” a Gericault to paint “The Raft of the Medusa,” a Daumier to satirize the French monarchy, a Goya to produce “The Disasters of War” and “3rd May 1808.”

The exhibition also brings up contradictory truisms: Important art must reflect its time; yet, even at its best, art is not the most effective reformative tool. To put a finer point on it, artists know that military decisions are not made in galleries. This dilemma leads some practitioners to abandon elite showcases, others to separate their art from their political action. In “Disarming Images” we have a group of artists who have chosen to air their convictions in a comfortably rarefied forum. They preach to the converted, but their delivery is convincingly impassioned.