A plucked poppy, the state flower of California, wilts in less than a minute in Emilie Halpern's spare video, Poppy (2001). Since it's against the law to pick the flower in California, the piece documents a transgression, but it is also a metaphor for the state's decline, and more broadly, the death of a communal idealism embodied by the "flower children" of the 1960s.

The video's melancholy captures the overall tone of this group exhibition, which although framed as a "pre-election free-for-all" on the occasion of the fourtieth anniversary of the upheavals of 1968, has little of the rowdy energy that such a description suggests. To be sure, most of the works address some aspect of current events—global warming, the war in Iraq, healthcare, personal security—but they do so with oblique references and modest gestures, a far cry from the obstreperous interventions and protests of '68. On the one hand, this approach charts a general trend away from the strident exhortations of political art of the past. On the other, it reflects a curatorial vision that, while wide-ranging and adventurous, is perhaps too ambitious for this modest exhibition.

With eighteen works in one small room, the show doesn't have enough space to develop its myriad themes. For example, Joel Tauber's color photographs of custom "earrings" dangling from the branches of a tree express affection and identification with nature, but they reflect little of the larger project of which they are a part. Over the course of two years, Tauber "adopted" the pictured sycamore tree, watered it and built guardrails to protect it from cars. He made a suite of videos about the tree and even helped it reproduce, planting "tree babies" throughout Southern California. It's a shame that none of this story appears in the current exhibition, since it is arguably a better example of how the legacy of '60s activism has survived and mutated in the present.

In such tight quarters, it's works like Poppy—which use spare gestures to evoke complex issues—that are the most memorable. Few photographs are more direct than Eve Fowler and Anna Sew Hoy's image of a fist punching a hunk of clay, but it is nevertheless triply evocative, suggesting sexual penetration and political protest (à la the raised fist of the Black Power salute) as well as artistic agency. For those familiar with Sew Hoy's work, it's also a healthy rebuttal to her over-sized sculpture of a cast from a broken arm, shown earlier this year at LAXART.

Similarly pared down is Shizu Saldanado's drawing, Francisco's Graduation, which depicts a military officer, flanked by two hipsters, on a blank white ground. Excised from any surrounding context, the differences in dress, hairstyle and posture among the figures highlight the awkwardness of traversing class and professional boundaries. And, in a time of war, they also reveal the divide between soldiers and civilians, between the harsh realities of military service and the relative ease of life back home.

However, not all of the works are so rich or even topical. Although art needn't be representational to be political, the inclusion of abstract works by Peter Wu and Maya Schindler is puzzling. Wu's trippy black and neon colored paintings are vaguely apocalyptic and Schindler's droopy rectangular floor sculpture appears to be bandaged, but they venture too far a field in an exhibition already stretched thin.

In this sense, the show feels more like a random sampling of ostensibly issues-oriented art than a concerted effort to explore the social and political ramifications of our current moment. But perhaps in this increasingly complex and uncertain era, it's unrealistic to hope for cohesion. The whole world may be watching, but it's no longer clear what it should expect to find.

This review originally appeared in the December 2008/January 2009 issue of Artweek.

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