ART : Kinetic Sculpture Show Lacks a Point : The works are diverse yet quirkily provocative. At Saddleback College, meanwhile, a German art exhibit leaves viewers asking why.

How do you know that a community has “arrived,” culturally speaking? One indicator is that you generally can depend on seeing good, thought-provoking shows not only at the A-list locations (the big-shot museums, the major galleries) but also at the B-list places (colleges, alternative art spaces, community art centers and smaller, specialized museums).

Ignoring for the moment Orange County’s lack of major commercial art galleries, the B-list is where our tiny art world still lets us down. Tromping around in search of an unreviewed exhibit to which to devote this column, I had a hard time finding anything to get excited about, one way or the other.

Lackluster curating is often the major culprit. Too many exhibits function simply as a way of plonking down various works side by side rather than as illuminations of a particular way of making art or embodiments of a curatorial point of view.

At the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, artist Jim Jenkins, an associate professor of art at Cal State Fullerton, is the guest curator for “System/Situation: The Narrative in Kinetic Sculpture.”

The problem with the show is that, while all the pieces are kinetic--incorporating moving parts--they are nonetheless wildly diverse in approach, theme and mood. Some pieces do convey recognizable “narratives” of one sort or another, but others do not. The lack of any real point to the exhibit means the curatorial job is incomplete. Why do these pieces belong together? Why should we bother with them?

The works themselves are a mixed lot. Some reflect superficial or insufficiently worked out approaches, but as a group they are quirkily provocative.

Catherine MacLean’s piece is an upside-down boat hull elevated above a platform. If you step on the platform, a group of hammers begins to hit the hull in sequence to simulate the jagged rhythm of waves splashing against the boat. The idea is promising, but the piece begs to be developed more fully, perhaps in a more extensive installation.

George Stone’s contribution, “Not God,” is an oval patch of light that slowly moves across the walls of a small gallery. A label informs the viewer that the light moves at the same speed and at the same angle as the sun shining on the museum building. You can go away and come back a few moments later to discover that, yes, the light has shifted its position.

Is this a commentary on the apparent slowness of astral time? On our belief that human technology can mimic monumental natural forces? It’s hard to say.

David Quick is represented by a bunch of his rather simple-minded game-like pieces. “Museum of the Yosemite,” for example, is a spoof of interactive educational exhibits in science museums.

A roll of toilet paper represents a cross-section of a redwood tree, little red lights light up on command to mark important events and the touch of a finger activates a miniature upheaval--complete with seismographic recording--to re-enact the Great Sierra Earthquake of 1872. The piece incorporates a couple of gentle pokes at less-than-sunny areas of park management--commercialization, environmental neglect--but Quick’s cute-’n’-harmless approach prevails.

Lewis Alquist’s pieces work best as deadpan conceptual gags. “Cow Zen” consists of a butcher’s slicing machine poised over a big pan of milk activated by an unseen churning device. The mind conjures up a goofy universe in which the animal products regenerate one another without need of a living cow.

Some of Alquist’s pieces, like “Gift: Guided Missile Liquor Decanter with Shot Glasses,” blandly draw attention to the way the style and materials of consumer objects are shaped by current events of the era. The ‘50s-style decanter, encircled by the glasses, lowers itself into a vat of liquid and then shoots upward suddenly, imitating a missile.

David Wilson’s “Museum of Jurassic Technology” (seen in an abbreviated version) is a cumbersome thing, wrapped in layers of technology--which it appears to be lampooning--and communicating in a feeble and ponderous manner.

In one portion of the piece, a text discusses “the extreme ultraviolet”--wavelengths described as capable of breathing life into the inanimate remains of once-living things. A video camera said to be outfitted with a special ultraviolet filter presents three-dimensional, animated versions of photographs of human finger bones and a dry twig. The viewer is sorely tempted to cry, “So what!” Maybe if more of the project were on view, its meaning would be clearer.

Kim Abeles’ “Mountain Wedge” series has to do with her attempts to photograph and visit the small “wedge” of the San Gabriel Mountains that would be visible from her studio if the smog weren’t so dense. (Another portion of this series happens to be at Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza site.)

On view at the Muckenthaler are “Pilgrimage to the Wedge” (a book of texts and photographs) and several individual works. One is “New Kind of Clock,” a drawing of a timepiece in which the hours are replaced by notations of the time and date of each of Abeles’ mountain photographs, organized by the hour rather than the date.

Like many of Abeles’ little fancies, the clock is a sort of mental doodle--an attempt to capture the germ of an idea about--who knows?--the way we personalize time, perhaps, or the curious patterns of art activity. But it doesn’t follow through; it remains a private preliminary sketch.

At Saddleback College Art Gallery, painting and sculpture by two German artists virtually unknown in this country are offered for view with scarcely a by-your-leave.

A one-page handout provides only a sketchy introduction to Bernd Damke and Franz Rudolf Knubel, who are in their early 50s and have exhibited mostly in Germany.

We don’t learn why they were chosen in the first place, why they are showing together, or how their work fits into our picture of contemporary German art. (A couple of catalogues provide essays in German, but viewers hardly can be expected to wade through them.)

Damke’s paintings from 1989 are sparing, asymmetric arrangements of flat colored shapes on spongy single-color backgrounds. A gentle humor skitters through these works, for all their abstraction.

“Pilot’s Error,” for example, looks like a fanciful interpretation of a radar screen. One member of a squad of falling black squares is imprisoned in a white oval, and “wishbone” and “lightning” signs fly at a tilt across the other background.

Stimulants for Damke’s work are not hard to find in American hard-edge painting of the 1960s, but it is likely that Bauhaus design also has something to do with the look of these canvases. The surprise is that a German artist is doing such politically neutral, almost decorative, work today. One wonders how he is regarded by the cynical young Turks who dominate the art world in his homeland.

Knubel’s simple wood sculptures deal, above all, with the notion of proportion. The sources for his work are ancient monuments as well as the reductive, modular sculpture of American artists of the ‘60s like Donald Judd. Knubel opts for a gentle approach, warmed by human scale, organic materials and the evidence of the artist’s hand.

The major pitfalls in this manner of working are that it can become sentimental or overly wrapped up with craft concerns. In “Der Tanz” (“Dance”), two vaguely human silhouettes intersect at right angles. The hoary conceit apparently operating here is that two people become one when they dance. Made in 1986-87, the piece seems trite and old-fashioned.

The most satisfying of Knubel’s sculptures are both called “Ubersetzung von Emotion in Proportion” (shame on the gallery for not translating this; ubersetzung means translation). Each sculpture consists simply of graduated rectangular units of wood, organized so that each unit is proportionally taller and wider than the next. In the catalogue, these pieces are shown next to fragments of a musical score, suggesting that the progression of musical intervals was the operative idea. How the piece might relate to emotion , however, is quite unclear.