ART REVIEWS : ‘Novel Ideas’ Bound by Literal Works : Show of art supposedly based on books finds a common theme--protest against censorship. But the pieces generally lack imagination.

How cute ‘n’ clever can you get? Well, it depends on how good the follow-through is, as well as the initial brainstorm. On Saturday, the museum that brought you Bagged Art, Boxed Art, Tubular Art, Yard Art, Rags to Riches and other fanciful art auction themes will open bids on “Novel Ideas”--artworks that are supposed to be based on books sent to a selected list of well-known and local artists.

On the whole, the latest idea of the Laguna Art Museum’s Junior Council looks like a washout since many of the artists chose not to incorporate their books in the finished piece and most of the pieces offer only pedestrian attempts at literary-based wit or wisdom.

Still, it’s noteworthy that, in this year of censorship threats from the National Endowment for the Arts and other sources, several examples of protest art have infiltrated the generally benign ranks of paintings, sculptures and mixed-media what-have-yous intended to charm a potential bidder’s eye.

In Lili Muller’s “The American Dream”--the zingiest piece of its kind--three red-and-white striped dummy heads wearing crosses have dollar bills plastered over their major orifices: See No/Hear No/Speak No Evil. Muller adds sweet little plaster sculptures of a vagina and a penis for good measure, as well as the mocking title of Edward Albee’s play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Valerie Bechtol’s “The Scarlet Artist by Jesse Helms” is a red-painted book with burned edges, encircled by barbed wire. The artist’s habitual motif--a relief of a sexless human face with eyes obscured--protrudes from the cover, perhaps a reference to the North Carolina senator’s benighted notion of the posture an artist ought to take. Gene Maslow links censorship with superpatriotism and religion in “Censorship Is Novel Cruci-fiction,” another burned book, this one attached to a red-white-and-blue Plexiglas cross.

Jorg R. Dubin offers a numbingly obvious piece with a peculiar title. “Mr. Jesse Does Donuts” is a black canvas on which are affixed a tiny padlock and a printed “warning” that the piece has been “self-censored,” along with a brief, self-righteous sermon about First Amendment rights.

Jim Morphesis has contributed a small, slapdash painting called “Paintings Should Not Be Read.” It features a bulbous female nude, a spray of red, blue and green paint and a drawing of a book.

Morphesis’ “Icarus” painting--the nude male torso rejected by the John Wayne Airport Arts Commission for a poster that was to tout the refurbished airport--was donated by trustee Joan B. Rehnborg to the museum’s permanent collection, where it has become the center of a cult of censorship martyrdom that primarily appears to serve the museum’s public relations effort.

Picking their way among the dross, viewers may spot a few more promising works, among them: George Herms’ “Airline Stewardess,” a gangly four-armed monster of rusted metal; Max T. von Bromwell’s campy collaged images, “Das Buch”; Bridget Hoff Sabaroff’s timely anti-war assemblage, “Food for Thought”; Janice DeLoof’s flatly melancholy suburban scene, “Misalliance”; Suvan Geer’s wry little “Fertile Metaphors”; and Betye Saar’s “Color Scheme,” a delicate medley of toy watches and feathers and stuff, mounted on a book cover.

Everything remains on view until the auction, which benefits the museum’s education programs.

At the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA) in Santa Ana, Mary-Linn Hughes has constructed a quietly beguiling installation. It’s a dimly lit walk-in “house” with “walls” borrowed from nature: A free-form “screen” made of charred tree branches, stacks of chopped wood, rows and rows of variously sized glass jars filled with pond and salt water, and a giant bird cage with real chattering birds. The floor crunches underfoot with eucalyptus leaves, which yield a pungent fragrance.

A small black-and-white photograph of a human ear, hung low to the ground, is the only self-consciously “arty” (read: unnecessary) aspect of the piece. Otherwise, the eye is free to find pleasure in shapes and smells and sounds. Hughes was alert to the enchantment of sensory stimulation in previous work, but now she has let go of the urge to be overtly didactic about ecological issues.

This engagingly transparent installation has no overt agenda other than allowing the viewer to consider the symbiotic connections between human actions and the inexorable processes of nature.

If home is our inviolate “castle,” where we expect not to be disturbed, nature also makes similar demands of us. All of the natural objects in the installation have been transformed--cut, bottled, caged, gathered--by a human hand. If we find ourselves lulled by this manipulated version of the natural world, it is symptomatic of how far removed we are from the original and how much it embodies a romantic dream.

Also on view are Joan Popovich-Kutscher’s small prints and collages made with handmade paper--very private work that tends to look all-of-a-piece and, for this viewer at least, resists deeper scrutiny--and Nat Dean’s large, linear images of hands painted on wood panels. Dean’s work promises more than it offers.

The gesturing hands, which sometimes touch one another, suggest an alternative, private language--and in fact they were apparently influenced by the sign-language classes Dean has attended with Popovich-Kutscher, who is deaf.

But too much attention seems to have been paid to the decorative aspects of these pieces, which are done up in black, silver and gold, and too little to expressing significant meaning. The rock-paper-scissors sequence (the childhood hand game) is embarrassingly trite. “(Trust/ Chance),” a sequence with hands and a blank sheet of paper, offers a little more imaginative leeway, but the viewer still needs more particulars.

Laguna Art Museum hours, when the work can be previewed through Saturday, are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. The auction is Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Regular museum admission is $2 general, $1 for students and seniors, free for children under 12. Auction tickets cost $60 per person ($40 is tax deductible), and include buffet dinner and a complimentary wine bar, beginning at 6 p.m. Proceeds benefit the museum’s education programs for Orange County schoolchildren.

The OCCCA exhibit remains on view through Nov. 30. The gallery, at Harbor Business Park, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd. (Space 111) in Santa Ana, is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 549-4989.