ART : There’s a Lot More Than Meets Eye at Offbeat Laguna Museum Exhibit : Untitled installation at South Coast Plaza facility acknowledges a host of strategies in the history of modern and contemporary art.

“This isn’t an exhibit,” snorted the elderly man. “They’re pulling your leg.”

“I’m waiting for some tribal music to come on,” joked a young woman.

Another woman looked around briefly and smiled helplessly in the manner of someone who wants to make clear that she remains of good judgment and sound mind even when the world clearly makes no sense.

The focus of attention was Sono Osato’s untitled installation at the South Coast Plaza site of the Laguna Art Museum (through Nov. 17). The piece consists of bumpy black canvases of various sizes lying on the floor, leaning against the wall or reclining on one another, and a jury-rigged wooden platform leading nowhere in particular.

Yes, it may look as though the show hasn’t opened yet. But more is going on here than immediately meets the eye. Osato’s installation coolly acknowledges a host of strategies in the history of modern and contemporary art and museum exhibition design without making a case for any of them.

The “scatter” effect is a legacy of such ‘60s artists as Barry Le Va. The seemingly identical all-black paintings (several contain hints of red, light blue or shiny, shoe polish-brown; some look matte and inert while others sparkle with glints of light) refer to the meditative tradition of Ad Reinhardt and other artists. The encrusted surfaces of the paintings (some look “curdled”; others are composed of horizontal skeins of paint) replay the exaggerated effects of some of the “pattern” painters of the ‘70s.

Even the platform and the vague suggestion of a roof over it have certain associations--with museum exhibition design, with real-world architecture, and with the attempts of fellow installation artists to create a sense of place within the neutral space of a contemporary gallery.

Osato herself refuses to “transform” the space she works in, however, or paper over the genuine peculiarity of walking into a space and finding something labeled “art” in it.

The viewer’s first encounter with the show is fragmentary. The eye takes in a scattering of things: a painting lying on the floor, casually propped up by a 2-by-4; a small thingamabob made of scrap wood; a small painting lying on top of a larger painting; a large, standing painting blocking the gallery’s sole window.

The next logical thing to do is walk across the ramp, which is bordered by a “landscape” of big, jostling paintings. But on the other side, the show ends abruptly, dumping the viewer into the awkward bleakness of a dark, empty gallery.

A couple of years ago, Osato wrote a brief “statement of philosophy.” In it, she remarked, “We are not separate from nature. I want to celebrate the way that things find themselves: the porous, simultaneous, interconnected truths.”

Similarly, the Laguna museum piece acknowledges no separation between aesthetic vision and ordinary vision, between carefully stage-managed exhibit space and unused space, or between everyday space and the space within an area designated as art exhibit.

Osato, who was born in 1960 in Baden Baden, West Germany, and moved to California in 1983, is part of a generation of young artists who essentially see the world as a place with all kinds of objects of pretty much equal value. The important thing is how we look at them, how we make sense of them for our own purposes. For these artists, connections exist where you find them, not necessarily where people tell you they are.

Looking at this installation, I thought of Jessica Stockholder, a New York artist born in 1959 whose work was included in the Whitney Biennial this year. Stockholder’s installations--which consist of all manner of miscellaneous objects, mostly castoffs, clumped together with a deliberate ungainliness--look very different from Osato’s. But both artists are making work that could only exist in this moment, when the whole notion of artistic convention is no longer “What style should I work in?” but “What meaning can I find in the conventions that define the world of art?”

It’s a pity that museum director Charles Desmarais’ notes on the exhibit, displayed at the entryway, show no awareness of Osato’s approach. When he writes, for example, about the “beauty and variety . . . found in the interstices of an apparently black canvas,” he confuses the aesthetic of an earlier era with a new way of observing the status of objects in the world.

Speaking of the real world, “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis” (Art is long, life is short)--an exhibit at BC Space in Laguna Beach of texts and photographs by amateur artists who are (or were) ill with the complications of AIDS--has been extended through Sept. 7. The works, at once poignant and cliched, are the fruits of a four-year program called “Open Portraits,” led by artist Mary-Linn Hughes at Laguna Shanti, a support organization.

The photographs--some of which are organized into homemade books--are mostly clowning or wistful self-portraits, portraits of nurturing members of the medical profession, and snapshots of favorite people and places; the accompanying writings range from famous quotations to personal memories, hopes and confessions.

“Sometimes, even in the company of friends, I have a false sense of isolation, like I don’t deserve the closeness of intimacy anymore,” writes Wade Phillip Wenthur, who illustrates this feeling with a double photo-portrait of himself, standing alone and looking warily over his shoulder, and smilingly embracing a friend.

It is not productive or fair to hold art made for therapeutic reasons accountable to art-world standards. (Needless to say, the AIDS crisis also has produced numerous incisive works that combine personal experience with sophisticated formal, political and philosophical outlooks.) But in this case, the therapy actually turns out to be a two-way phenomenon. It reaffirms the large and small delights of a life lived apart from the mainstream--not only for the person numbly observing the terrible pace of his own mortality, but also for outsiders burdened by ignorance, embarrassment or prurient curiosity.