“Cut,” a performance piece that Yoko Ono first did in 1965 and re-enacted in 2003, is seen in both versions (via video) in “Off the Beaten Path.” Film still courtesy of Yoko Ono

Can art help to diminish human cruelty and better people’s lives? This is the implication of “Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art.”

The Oakland-based curator of this touring exhibition, Randy Jayne Rosenberg, almost certainly holds this view. Otherwise, you’d have to doubt she would have even done a show like this.

Now on view in the University Art Gallery at the University of California San Diego, “Off the Beaten Path” features 21 artists from various parts of the globe whose selected work focuses on a spectrum of violence toward women — from domestic abuse to wartime practices of widespread rape and killing. The revulsion against cruel, callous treatment of women is collective, but media vary greatly: There are painting, installation, photography, video and a videotaped performance piece complemented by sculptures.

The show’s big issue is both timely and timeless. Violence directed toward women is never far from the news. There is the seemingly ceaseless procession of war zones in recent decades, coupled with chilling reports of systematic use of rape by military and paramilitary groups. And then there is the greater societal awareness of and intolerance for domestic abuse. But it would be naive not to realize that these varieties of violence are as old as human history.

A majority of the artists in the show are women, and multiple generations are represented. On the elder stateswoman end of things is Yoko Ono. She is best known, of course, as John Lennon’s wife and widow. But Ono had already established herself before meeting John as an artist in the conceptual vein. She was part of the Fluxus circle, and a well-known early work is “Cut,” a performance piece from 1965 in which people from the audience walked up to the seated artist and cut away part of her clothing. This version is on one screen, and a 2003 re-enactment is on another.

It’s a quietly powerful piece, which anticipates a more radical 1974 performance work by Marina Abramovic, “Rhythm 0,” in which that artist lay passively for hours in a gallery space, surrounded by props like a gun with one bullet, scissors and a whip that visitors could use as they wished.

“Cut” is clearly a theatrical metaphor for violence against women. And like most metaphors, in art or poetry, it is open to interpretation. But as with all the works in “Off the Beaten Path,” the art becomes a springboard for the show’s theme.

On the wall near “Cut,” Rosenberg’s text reads: “In Europe, domestic violence is the major cause of death or disability for women ages 16 to 44. The United Nations Development Fund for Women estimates that at least one of every three woman globally will be beaten, raped or other abused during her lifetime.”

This curatorial approach has its built-in problems. On the one hand, if this is a way of opening some viewer’s minds to an ugly reality, then why not? This is a statistic that should horrify any feeling person. But if someone were to conclude that the art is only concerned with what Rosenberg is conveying, that would be unfortunate. “Cut” is first and foremost a visceral and symbolic experience, not a tract.

Rosenberg isn’t oblivious to this sometimes strained relationship between art and issues. She offers some wall text about the works themselves, before segueing into an issue. And some selections are overt social commentary, while others are not.

Mona Hatoum’s selection is among the overt examples, the sort of agitprop image that wants to make a direct point. The Lebanese-born British artist with a Palestinian family history evokes exile and political themes in her work as a whole, but the simpler “Over My Dead Body” (2006) is a response to increased violence against women in the Palestinian territories. A woman’s face looms large in the montage style photograph, and a tiny soldier balances on her nose. It’s a witty reversal of expectations, with the representative woman holding the fate of the military in her sights.

In the category of less topical works, Hung Liu’s “Demeter” (2008) stands out. The Bay Area painter invokes the name of the Greek goddess for fertility and agricultural fecundity with some irony, given the rendering of a young woman weighted down by the agricultural load on her shoulders. But the figure seems heroic, too, in the way she carries herself — a presence reinforced by the lovely rendering of figure and surroundings.

The woman is Chinese, and the choice of figure resonates with Liu’s own experience, coming of age, as she did, during the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution in China. There is nothing explicitly political about this painting, though it resonates with the history of a dark time in modern Chinese history. It becomes an act of resurrecting the past, giving it a kind of mythic (though not idealized) glow.

Because it is issue driven, Hatoum’s image is closer to the core spirit of the show than Liu’s. So, too, is a trio of visceral images, “Rose Petals” (2009). It was assembled by Volontaire, a nonprofit agency in Stockholm devoted to social causes, for a Stop Violence Against Women Campaign led by Amnesty International in Sweden. Each of three images pictures a rose with its petals sewn together.

The curator says these pictures “poetically tell a story of female genital mutilation.” And while Rosenberg doesn’t say whether that is precisely what Volontaire and the images’ designers (Malin Akersten Triumpf and Yasin Lekorshi) intended, the design does symbolically convey the brutality of that practice.

By contrast, Yoko Inoue, a Japanese artist, has less success with conveying a chosen issue though her untitled 2007 photograph of a woman holding a pan in front of her naked torso and a portion of her face. It needs the attached explanation about the resistance to domestic violence, presumably in smaller Japanese communities; a group of women will assemble outside the home of the male perpetrator and bang pots and pans.

Still, what Inoue’s photograph means to convey is in keeping with a major purpose of the show: to stir visitors to act. Just inside the gallery door, there is wall text that says just that: “Take Action.” Then, there is an array of materials nearby, from a brochure for the Sex Trafficking Outreach Project (STOP) to a bookmark for notorture.org, the Web site for Survivors of Torture, International, a local nonprofit organization that cares for survivors of torture and their families.

With “Off the Beaten Path,” having materials like this on hand isn’t out of place. But the connection between art and activism doesn’t seem easier to see after seeing the exhibition. To return to the question that Rosenberg asks in her initial curatorial statement — “Can art foment social change?” — each viewer is likely to offer a different answer.