ART REVIEW : Violence Made Ordinary : Installation: Vinyl transparencies by Leon Golub remain less palpable and involving than his gritty, two-dimensional paintings.

SAN DIEGO —  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 either 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 about it and to 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, 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 their 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, blistered--have long been analogues for the skins of the victims he portrays. A roomful of such paintings can make one suffocate with shame.

But here, one can walk among the slick, vinyl transparencies, yet still feel physically remote 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. Although the transparent suspended panels cause images to appear to overlap each other and 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 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 heat of the subject. Adding an intellectual, didactic tone to the show are 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.