ART : Out of Ordinary Comes Fresh Perspective on Familiar Objects : Guggenheim Gallery offers works by artists who have hitched rides on the conceptual bandwagon but managed to lend their own touch to the pieces.

You know a gallery has its work cut out for it when a visitor wanders around trying to figure out whether the exhibit on view has been fully installed yet.

Under the title “Ironic Objects, Subversive Associations,” the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman College in Orange has assembled an assortment of projects by four Southern California artists who have hitched rides on the conceptual bandwagon. These rides can be bumpy--no mental shocks and struts here--but credit is due for willingness to tackle prickly new work.

What the artists have in common--according to the accompanying essay by gallery director Richard Turner and his assistant, Maggi Owens--”is the deliberate invalidation of conventionally understood meanings of their source material.” In other words, the artists are deliberately wrenching familiar objects from their normal contexts in order to reconsider them in fresh ways.

The knottiest and potentially most far-reaching body of work is by Ellen T. Birrell.

One of her pieces, “Inventory,” consists of an array of framed Polaroid photographs, hung in grid fashion on the wall. The photographs include such apparently unrelated images as: scientists examining a space photo; hands positioning a pool shot; artist Robert Smithson’s “earth art” piece, “Spiral Jetty”; the spiraling smoke of the Trident 2 missile going out of control; the whorl of a fingerprint; a rose boutonniere; a violin; wrought iron designs; a plate fired in a curling wave pattern; and the oddly similar silhouettes of an animal pelt, a wooden plaque and a leather tag that reads “genuine leather.” But there is a method to this madness. Birrell seems to be interested in the way we look at patterns. She mixes and matches organic forms that repeat themselves in different guises throughout nature (and which are frequently imitated in man-made objects), and she ruminates on the recurrence of events in life that we also call “patterns.”

The essay quotes her posing such questions as, “What does it mean to value the same natural phenomenon differently, as in the case of fingerprint patterns and the patterning of animal pelts?” and “What is the relationship of art to decoration, and of decoration to nature?”

Meandering through Birrell’s art are such themes as the role of luck and chance, life’s potential for disaster or revelation, and the way objects in nature are related through function and pattern. A viewer might wonder if Birrell was making a case for the teleological origins of the universe--the notion that the world was created according to an orderly plan, for a specific purpose. The essay instead proposes that her imagery “veil(s) subtle social commentaries,” but the exact nature of those commentaries remains unclear.

Andrew Short’s “Art Pit Museum” is as easy to “get” as Birrell’s work is ruminative and open-ended. Paintings in the shape of floor plans of the Los Angeles County Museum are covered in tar and accompanied by more goopy black paintings of various sizes--all leaning casually against the wall--that are intended to represent various works in that museum’s collection.

This is one-shot art that takes a blackly humorous long view: What if our art temples were victims of the same natural disaster that caused animals to fall into the La Brea Tar Pits? Or, to extrapolate a bit, what if the current pall that hangs over the art world thanks to Jesse Helms and his ilk are in fact the equivalent of death-by-nat

ural-disaster for art institutions?

Peter Seidler is haunted by the conviction that virtually all our information today comes prepackaged by the media and cuts us off from experiencing life at firsthand. His wall piece, “Somni Flumen” (Latin for “dream of the river”) consists of birch branches--each one encased in plastic--that spell out the words of the title. The plastic shields (remember the weirdness of households where the sofas were covered in plastic slipcases?) dutifully and uselessly keep nature at a distance.

There is also a family resemblance between these birchbark constructions and the trinkets sold at tourist shops that aim to keep alive a simple-minded fantasy of Indian lore and unspoiled nature--thereby tacitly denying depressing facts of American Indian poverty and disenfranchisement, and the greed and indifference that have trashed the West’s fabled great open spaces.

After you’ve pondered works by these artists, it’s probably time to go home. Lak Prasasvinitchai’s pieces are so doggedly hermetic and studiously heavy-handed that you want to tell him to stop spending so many hours with his eyes glued to Flash Art magazine and consider taking up dirt bike racing or pit bull breeding.

Prasasvinitchai’s work involves making “parasite” objects that feed on the “host” works of certain critically lauded artists, like Barbara Kruger, Peter Halley and Haim Steinbach. Kits filled with objects of pop culture (like Day-Glo suspenders, a Magic 8 Nerf ball, cans of dog food) that are meant to interfere in some way with the viewer’s ability to read the “host” work, or even to physically destroy it.

Of course, you have to be familiar with these other artists’ works to make any sense of this project, and even if you are , the labor involved in trying to understand Prasasvinitchai’s convoluted pieces doesn’t seem worth the effort.

He means to create a parallel to the incredibly rarefied dialogue that continues between artists and critics in the pages of small-circulation art journals. But life is short, and frankly, I’d rather glean what I can from the “hosts” and disperse the hopeless parasites with a shot of (critical) bug spray.

In fact, all artists are to some degree reliant on other art, but the best ones nevertheless find new ways of surprising us with truths about ourselves.

Incidentally, it is worth underlining that the accompanying essay--available as a free handout--adds significant value to the show. After all, a university art gallery is supposed to be in the education business. At Cal State Fullerton, on the other hand, “Deep in the Art of Texas”--a group of mini-exhibits of work by James Surls, Melissa Miller, Burt Long, David Bates and Bob Wade, on view through Oct. 3--comes with no curatorial statement at all.

Budget constraints account for the lack of a catalogue, according to a gallery spokeswoman, but surely money could have been found for a photocopied essay offering the reasons why these particular artists were selected, and perhaps some idea of how their work compares with other strains of Texas art.

Instead, the show is accompanied by videotapes on two of the artists; one was so awful, I fled before the other one came on. Produced by the Pan-African Journal in Houston, the tape about Long (who makes mixed-media pieces with a homespun look) is dominated by an unseen interviewer who hasn’t the foggiest idea how to interview an artist. He inquires at one point, “Do you love your wife?” and informs us that Long’s talent is “boundless, like the ocean.” Silence would have been better than importing this inept and gushing “educational” effort.

“Ironic Objects, Subversive Associations” remains through Oct. 16 at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman College in Orange. The gallery is open from 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday only. Admission is free. (714) 997-6729.