IN CONTRAST TO THE SPIRIT of celebratory commemoration and even boosterism that underlies so many “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions thus far, Paul Schimmel’s latest curatorial effort, “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981,” has a critical and historical argument to make. His premise is that a “plethora of individual art practices”—what he dubs “California pluralism”—“flourished within [the era’s] dystopian atmosphere.” To put it more bluntly: “Bad times” make for “good art,” or at least the kind of art Schimmel favors, which tends toward a negativity bordering on the apocalyptic.

“Under the Big Black Sun” is named after an album by the Los Angeles punk band X that was released in 1982 with a very noir cover by Alfred Harris. “Helter Skelter,” Schimmel’s groundbreaking 1992 survey of contemporary LA art (at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), likewise took its title from popular music—not coincidentally, Charles Manson’s favorite Beatles song—and came to be known internationally as an exploration of the sick psyche of “Bad America.” In many ways, this latest show can be seen as a kind of prequel to that previous one, and accordingly it seeks to provide its audience with a story of origins, explaining just how those “bad times” got started and why they are not likely to end anytime soon. Highlighting the proximity of Schimmel’s present thesis to that of the earlier survey, a number of artists reappear, among them Llyn Foulkes, Richard Jackson, Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Nancy Rubins, and Mike Kelley, albeit with works from different periods in their careers.

Immediately on entering the museum, standing in the middle of the Geffen Contemporary’s raised landing, viewers are caught between South America Triangle, 1981, a hanging sculpture by Bruce Nauman dealing with political torture, and a selection from Chauncey Hare’s series “This Was Corporate America,” 1976–77, black-and-white photographs of slack-faced, lower-management drones working for the likes of Standard Oil. One lesson that could be derived from this arrangement is that when society is run by corporate decree, government is reduced to the role of a bullying ally in order to ensure this agenda’s enforcement. The point is clinched in a vitrine bearing President Nixon’s 1974 resignation speech, centrally placed just before the steps leading down to the main galleries. And from there, one can already see its rejoinder, another vitrine bearing President Ford’s pardon of his predecessor. Over and above any innovation in art, these two events mark the start time of “Under the Big Black Sun”: the revelation of cover-up followed by further cover-up.

The end time is marked in a no less “newsworthy” manner by Robert Heinecken’s Inaugural Excerpt Videograms, 1981. Stills derived from the moving image of Ronald Reagan during his inauguration speech, these prints were made by placing photographic paper directly on a television screen. They emerge blurred, ghostly, haunted—a suitably sinister premonition of what was on the political horizon. That the time under review is bracketed by the presidencies of two Californians is salient because, Schimmel argues in his catalogue essay, this region was throughout the nation’s troubled epicenter. Of particular note in this regard is Proposition 13, the 1978 decision to cap property taxes, which sounded a victory for the state’s growing libertarian constituency and presaged the full-on conservatism of the so-called Reagan Revolution. According to Schimmel, it is in California that the dismantling of our postwar civil society began, only to reverberate across the nation in an ever-accelerating succession of disasters, from covert military campaigns gone wrong to retaliatory terrorist strikes. Slide-show presentations of archival news images documenting these and other crises are distributed among the artworks, suggesting direct causal relations between them. For instance, Eleanor Antin’s video narrative of cardboard cutout airplane passengers, The Nurse and the Hijackers, 1977, is a rapid-response satire of an insurrectionary practice that would reach its preliminary extreme in the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. Elsewhere, artists attend to military expansion (Judy Fiskin), technocratic hubris (Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan), economic decline (Anthony Hernandez), social unrest (Asco, Suzanne Lacy, Fred Lonidier), urban blight (Bonnie Ora Sherk), “white flight” (Joe Deal), and so on.

The accounting of the worst “signs of the times” is so diligent that some of the most perplexing curatorial inclusions are swept up in its logic. Although it is central to Schimmel’s story line, Chris Burden’s The Reason for the Neutron Bomb, 1979, is possibly one of the artist’s least engaging works. Its sprawling enumeration of Cold War arsenals in fifty thousand coins and matches takes up a great deal of space, whereas two stunning drawing-paintings by William T. Wiley (Slightly Hysterical Perspective, 1979, and Acid Rain, 1981) amount to barely a footnote.

To have some reservations about an endeavor of such scale and ambition is almost inevitable, and in a more general sense, one could take issue with the exhibition’s deterministic bent. Nevertheless, the show is timely and troubling in its unstated implications: that the individualist aesthetics celebrated elsewhere in “PST” are intimately linked to the collapse of “the good society,” and hence to such things as economic deregulation, a monopolistic-oligarchic concentration of wealth, and the emergence of the model of disaster capitalism that we are presently blessed with. For better or worse, this show suggests, it was all made in California.

“Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981” is on view through February 13.

Jan Tumlir is a frequent contributor to Artforum.