An Ironic, Bloody Tableau: In Night/Crimes, a new photographic series at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Charles Gaines juxtaposes a portrait of a convicted murderer, an unrelated crime scene in which a body has been discovered and a view of the night sky as it would have been configured at the moment the murder was committed--an expanse of black punctuated by dozens of white-hot points of light.

These pieces are both straightforward and oblique. They counterpose the sublimity of nature and the banality of human nature. By itself, this isn't very interesting. But Gaines pushes further, taking on the bogus scientific techniques of astrology, criminology and phrenology.

Are there cosmic clues to the future? How can we fathom the unfathomable? Is there a way to ascertain evil in the bland features of the guilty?

The answers are not at all clear. What is clear, and rather glaring in light of today's demonizing headlines, is the fact that none of the faces in these photographs belongs to an African American male.

Gaines has very carefully plundered his images from police files and back issues of the Los Angeles Times, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, in order to conjure an era of white-on-white crime. He comments subtly upon questions of race, destiny and [the] romanticization of violence.

Yet, by juxtaposing three images that essentially have nothing to do with one another, Gaines creates a blood-soaked tableau whose logic is entirely contrived. Dashiell Hammett's Continental Cop once observed that the detective's role is not to determine the truth, but rather to concoct the most convincing fiction. In Night/Crimes, Gaines fulfills this prescription with no small degree of irony.

When I first saw Charles Gaines's Night/Crimes series, I took it to be standard photo/text stuff, the kind of conceptual art that was popular in the early 1980s and is still taught assiduously in art schools of repute. Such art is rarely done well, only infrequently transcending shrill political metaphor or rudimentary illustration of French theory. But, for all its screenprint-on-Plexiglas slickness, Gaines's version doesn't transcend tradition so much as perform an end-run around it, leaving its viewers unfulfilled but hopeful for change.

The eight works in Night/Crimes are similar in appearance and format: They are large, rectangular, framed pieces, with one or two black-and-white photographs placed atop a larger screenprint of stars in the night sky. The photos are of criminals and crime scenes; the constellations below are those that assumedly were visible when the crime occurred. Between the upper and lower elements of the works are printed inscriptions, which document the name of the constellation, the date and cartographical location of the crime, as well as a date exactly fifty years in the future.

From this information, the 1-2-3 metaphorical progression of standard photo-text art can be discerned: Crimes were committed, they'll happen again. Just as the sky runs in cycles, so does the cycle of violence. Big deal. Wait a minute. Look at these works again. The archival crime-scene photos, while authentic, are all overly dramatic--starkly lit, composed like movie stills, with charactersstraight out of Central Casting and storylines from pulp fiction. In Aquila, a revolver lies in the foreground; behind it are six shell casings (three spent), a man's driver's license, and a photo of two children. In other pieces, a dead woman lies on a deserted beach; a restaurant table is splattered with blood; and a mug shot of a pug-nosed man looks like every nameless gangster in every Cagney movie ever made. These photos straddle the line between reality and our concept--bred of fiction--of what reality should look like.

But how can be sure that these photos are even connected to each other, or to the date and place printed on the artwork? Well, we're not. This lack of continuity is nowhere spelled out in the work, only hinted at by the fictional cast of the photographs. Much as in the early-1980s work of LA artists Larry Johnson and John Baldessari, Gaines combines arbitrary yet superficially related elements into evocative but ultimately empty narratives. Seduced by their formal beauty and pretense to poignancy, we're let down after being drawn in.

Yet that disappointment is laced with meaning, as we're left to consider both the substance of our emotion and the source of our need for narrative, fictional or otherwise. Gaines aims neither to fool us nor to preach to us; what's left isn't much. But at least he doesn't coddle our addiction to easy answers, something most highfalutin' political art loves to do.

One other thing. In hardly any of these crime-scene photos do African-Americans appear. Most of the criminals, victims and police are white. Nothing is made of this in the work, or in the documentation provided by the museum. It's significant, I suppose, only if you know that Gaines is black, and that his art--with its morally ambiguous tone and its eschewing of art's ability tout sharp and deep into the social fabric--is not the kind stereotypically made by politically minded African-American artists.

As a tool for "empowerment", art has been popular because it provides, in theory, a level playing field upon which alternative power structures can be proposed and history rewritten, far removed from life's harsh and imperfect realities. But Gaines's political art is of a kind that can be said to actually do something, however small, in our world. His art throws everything back into our laps, where it belongs, allowing us to see our time and place in a new light or at least in a new combination, to make sense of and act on as we will.