ART REVIEW : Ordinary Can Be Extraordinary : In its inaugural show, San Francisco’s newest museum shows how artists use everyday photographs as tools to make searing artworks.

SAN FRANCISCO — Given the mundane ubiquity of camera images today, it’s hard even to imagine a time when seeing a picture was a special event. That time unraveled only about 150 years ago--my grandparents’ parents probably knew the experience--but the specialness of pictures was characteristic of life for millennia prior to Daguerre, Kodak, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Microsoft and all the other modern purveyors of pictorial imagery.

Once, pictures were special just on account of their being pictures. Now, pictures have to be made special, or they’ll simply get lost in the traffic.

“Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document” is an unusually beguiling exhibition of contemporary art that often begins with common camera pictures you wouldn’t look at twice but, through artists’ interventions, are made oddly special again. Today, the very ordinariness of pictures is what surreptitiously gets them under your skin and into your head, where they can unconsciously shape the ways you think, feel and believe. If the sneakiness of that process makes you uncomfortable--well, this show won’t offer solace, but it will open your eyes, mind and heart.

The show inaugurates the handsome and capacious new home of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It’s triply suited to that momentous event.

First, SFMOMA’s respected department of photography was joined in the 1980s by a department of media arts that, in the often hidebound world of museums, remains a curatorial rarity. Second, the show encompasses all the museum’s departments, including painting and sculpture, which underscores how so much art does not fit easily into institutional categories. Finally, works by eight of the 15 artists displayed in “Public Information” are from SFMOMA’s own collection, appropriately demonstrating a long-term institutional commitment to artistic ideas explored in the transient form of a temporary exhibition.

In addition to such permanent collection works as videotapes by Larry Clark and Martha Rosler and a James Coleman multimedia installation, SFMOMA is also hosting the premiere of an extraordinary new piece by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It’s the Paris-based artist’s first multiscreen environment designed for a museum.

This show is not the first to tackle its evanescent subject. Two shows mounted in Los Angeles about a half-dozen years ago rank as its most important American predecessors: “Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946,” organized by the L.A. County Museum of Art in 1987, which showed how the once-ghettoized medium of photography had been absorbed into the artistic mainstream during the previous 40 years; and “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,” organized two years later by the Museum of Contemporary Art, which homed in on the dizzying, sometimes amusing, sometimes sinister hall of mirrors created by modern methods of image replication.

“Public Information” builds on those precedents. Less rigorously didactic than either, and not a comprehensive survey of the past 40 years, it nonetheless carefully acknowledges pivotal historical developments. The artists can be very loosely grouped into three generations, from the late-1950s to the present, while threads of continuity and conflict among them are provocatively coaxed into view.

Sixty-eight black-and-white examples from Robert Frank’s rough-edged but magisterial photographic document, “The Americans” (1954-56), are the exhibition’s earliest works. They establish an edgy tone of loss, mixed with beleaguered perseverance, that recurs throughout the galleries.

“The Americans” originally had trouble finding a publisher but created a huge ruckus when finally it did. Frank’s grainy, intimate, restless pictures of politicos, roadside diners, urban transvestites and small-town life swept aside the ennobling, self-consciously artistic tradition that had dominated American photography for decades. They also stood in sharp relief against the supposedly bland conformity said to characterize the Eisenhower era.

In style and format, these photographs couldn’t be more different from Cady Noland’s bleak and emotionally bereft installation, newly made from Nixon-and-McGovern era imagery crudely silk-screened onto cold aluminum panels. Casually strewn about the room, the panels are interspersed with a swing made from an old tire suspended on a chain--noose-like, it’s vaguely ominous--and a set of old-fashioned, Puritan-style stocks.

Despite the huge differences, however, a distinctive tone links their work. Frank’s ambivalent take on the American Dream reverberates against the neurotic, equally scattered work of Noland, whose birth in 1956 sent her into the world Frank was then describing in his photographic odyssey.

Frank’s photographs also form a psychological foundation for the subsequent, camera-dependent paintings of Andy Warhol and Germany’s Gerhard Richter. Warhol is represented by seven of his gruesomely great, early 1960s death-and-disaster paintings, showing tabloid-style car crashes, suicides and such, and Richter by his poetic, 1988 paintings of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang.

Frank, an American immigrant, was born in Switzerland and his book was first published in France; his outsider status no doubt helped him see the United States with fresh eyes, while his perceptions were readily understandable to Europeans. In what may be the exhibition’s most hauntingly beautiful room, five other Richter paintings from 1963-66 do for European painting what Frank’s photographs did for American photography: They wipe the slate clean.

Using as sources banal snapshots of an apartment building, a jet, a family at the beach, a woman on the street and I.D. pictures of eight student nurses slain by mass murderer Richard Speck, Richter made gently blurred paintings of thoroughly mundane images. To sanctify mechanical photographs through handworked paint bluntly eradicated a deeply entrenched, formal and expressive tradition in European art.

It also posed a perplexing question: Why do we casually regard photographs to be telling factual evidence--a kind of testimony--when we just as easily withhold this assessment from painting?

The early stirrings of a crossover media-aesthetic certainly isn’t new or surprising. John Baldessari’s wittily dumb photographs--printed directly on canvas and given captions, as in a textbook--occupy a now well-traveled territory somewhere between painting and art criticism. Likewise, Edward Ruscha’s wry books--made of intentionally inartistic snapshots that tell funny, non-narrative stories about such trenchant topics as parking in L.A.--are also classics of the 1960s.

But “Public Information” is less geared toward news of art’s recent history than it is toward sowing seeds in the fertile field of inquiry these artists opened. It’s filled with provocative linkages and unexpected juxtapositions that complicate the respective artists’ works, rather than classifying and pigeonholing them.

The show also demonstrates how viewers came to be acknowledged by artists as active participants in creating meaning for works of art. Dan Graham’s video installation “Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors” (1974) uses both simple and complex technology to displace the viewer’s perception of himself in space: On the TVs, you see yourself coming and going in the gallery, both in the present and (through a kind of tape delay) in the immediate past, while the mirrors reflect these disconcerting images into infinity.

Stan Douglas’ sinister “Evening” (1994) projects recorded pictures of grim, 1960s-era television newscasters onto large screens, alternately interrupting the talking heads with the notice: “Place Ad Here.” Submerged relationships between information and commerce are pushed to the surface, raising disquieting questions about the audience’s ability to understand and interpret the flood of images that now engulf it.

Douglas’ installation also recalls the very funny precedent of a 1973 Baldessari videotape, on view in a nearby gallery. “The meaning of various news photos to Ed Henderson” focuses on a sequence of captionless newspaper photographs push-pinned to the wall; voices off-screen chat about what portentous events these innocuous pictures could possibly mean to describe.

A vernacular photo-tradition is salvaged by Nan Goldin--and in a surprising way. Her routine documentary photographs of downtown New York life are boring when framed and hung on the wall. But, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1981-1993) is mesmerizing, a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it slide show of otherwise banal snapshots of Goldin’s friends and acquaintances, set to pop music. Theatricalization makes perusal of what is essentially an open-ended family album miraculously compelling, partly because its fast pacing fits the high-tech media generation being depicted, partly because it trades in a private form for a public one.

The subtitle of the exhibition-- Desire, Disaster, Document--concisely conjures the poignant mix of longing and catastrophe so often encountered in the galleries. This characteristic tone, far from being depressing, exudes a kind of autumnal beauty that seems appropriate to our era of almost unfathomable change.

Nowhere is that sensibility more powerfully conveyed than in Chantal Akerman’s “From the East.” This unforgettable installation occupies two rooms. In one, a 110-minute film is continuously projected, showing intimate scenes of Moscow residents engaged in mundane daily tasks: writing at a desk, chopping vegetables, walking on the street.

Akerman filmed these non-events with a mostly stationary or slowly tracking camera. Her visual style is so stripped-down, so radically different from Hollywood’s conventional narrative seductions that, ironically, a viewer becomes hyper-conscious of the camera’s presence. Looking at the screen is uncannily like looking at a genre painting--at the artistic creation of an experience, rather than a transparent imitation of life.

The second darkened room contains eight staggered rows of video-monitor triptychs, with an aisle running down the center. The images on screen are excerpted from the film: slow, tracking shots of Muscovite men and women bundled against the nighttime or early morning cold, as they walk through softly lit city streets or await the arrival of a bus.

As you walk down the central aisle, these tracking shots slide away on either side, like the Red Sea parting before you. The silent, dusky world seems in continuous slippage, ungraspable, chimerical, melancholic in its soon-to-vanish loveliness.

“Public Information” unfortunately will not travel. But it’s an important show because it charts its subject’s history with first-rate art, then brings the story up to date in examples that, with one or two exceptions, are equally convincing. Conceived by the late John Caldwell, former curator at SFMOMA, and by its other curators, Gary Garrels, Sandra S. Philips and Robert R. Riley, the show sets a high standard as the museum inaugurates its new building.

* San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., (415) 357-4000, through April 30. Closed Mondays.