ART : Provocative Installation at Laguna Art Museum : George Stone’s symbol-laden work, though, prompts circular thinking instead of insight.

On the face of it, plunking an art museum down in a shopping mall sounds like a way of compounding an already bad situation. Art has never seemed more like a commodity than in our era of mind-boggling auction prices and blithely art-ignorant collectors chasing flash and dazzle.

There have been times during the six years that the Laguna Art Museum has had an outpost at South Coast Plaza that the art on view began to look like just another display of consumer goods to acquire in hopes of amusing or impressing one’s friends.

One way of refusing to collude with the shopping-mall mentality, however, is to focus on large-scale installation art outside the collectors’ cult of the object.

Beginning in early 1989 with a show of San Diego artist Mathieu Gregoire’s peculiar interior-design constructions, museum personnel seem to have begun rethinking their approach to survival as an art institution in a world of retail stores. The most memorable installation so far was Paul Kos’ terse and timely “Ber-lin” last winter; the low point was surely Stephen Glassman’s vapid trio of enormous make-believe beasts last fall.

The gallery’s current exhibit--through Sept. 2--is George Stone’s “DOUBLE CROSS: 1 (picture) 1,000 (words).” In the first room, a cruciform plexiglass case holds rows of blank books, their pages blown by a phalanx of small, whirring fans. There is also a large color photograph of a flame.

The second room, invisibly partitioned into a cross shape, is dark except for a set of prowling spotlights. Each one pauses briefly on one or more of the words inscribed on the walls in neat floor-to-ceiling rows.

A reader normally expects that the words of a text will cohere into sentences yielding discernable meaning. Similarly, a viewer is likely to assume that the words in “DOUBLE CROSS” were chosen according to some rational scheme, and that there is a method to the way they are revealed by the movement of the light.

In fact, the words were plucked from the dictionary according to a mechanical system the artist devised, and the spotlighting appears to be utterly arbitrary. So viewers are “double-crossed” by these words, as surely as by the empty, fluttering pages of books bereft of information.

That’s not to say that the installation as a whole isn’t intended to carry a message of one sort or another, however. Stone has supplied himself with some heavyweight devices--the cross shape, the flame, the light in the darkness and the books--and clearly he expects a lot of them.

In religious terms, the Word is understood as being the word of God and the Book is the Bible. In old-fashioned history texts, the Middle Ages were portrayed as the Dark Ages, during which the church kept alight the “flame” of knowledge in monasteries where manuscripts were patiently inscribed, read and stored in libraries.

As applied to books, the image of the flame also conjures up the image of book-burning, the mass torching of books by an official censor during periods of conservative backlash, as in Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction novel “Fahrenheit 451.” In the United States today, the impetus for censorship comes largely from the religious right.

Viewed in this manner, the actions of preserving and destroying the written word--whether God’s word or not--are both related to aspects of Christianity. That’s one way to make sense of the double cross shapes in the installation.

But what does it mean that the word and the book have parted company in this installation? Is Stone saying that words now have a life of their own? That we’ve come to value words too much? After all, his title for the piece affirms that “one picture is greater than 1,000 words.”

Stone really seems to be addressing the status of contemporary art with this phrase. Texts frequently are central to significant works of art today; sometimes, there are no images at all. Reams of critical commentary also have been printed to explain this frequently hermetic and austere-looking art.

Meanwhile, the notion of an image with “pure” sensual power and the idea of simply moving paint around on a canvas in pleasing ways have fallen from favor. Maybe Stone views this state of affairs as a “double-crossing” of the viewer.

But if this is so, why does his own art rely so heavily on the role of interpretation? It’s ironic that Stone himself has made more vividly sensory, look-at-me work in the past, including a white chair that turned out to be made of ice and a wall of thrusting and creaking glass panels in a piece called “Fault Line.”

It seems more likely that Stone means the title of his new piece to be taken ironically. But it is filled with so many symbols--each dragging its own highly charged load of meaning--and freighted with such a multivalent title that, ultimately, his meaning becomes very difficult to puzzle out.

Ambiguity can be an excellent and provocative feature of art. But there is a point of meaning-overload that leads to circular thinking instead of insight. Still, “DOUBLE CROSS” is nothing if not teasingly provocative. And it certainly is refreshing to accuse an artist of packing his work with too many ideas. Too often, the problem is precisely the opposite.

George Stone’s installation “DOUBLE CROSS: 1 (picture) 1,000 (words)” remains through Sept. 2 at the Laguna Art Museum satellite at South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bristol St., Suite 1000 (near the Carousel Court), Costa Mesa. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 662-3366.