ART / CATHY CURTIS : Museums, Galleries Don’t Just Hang Art; They <i> Install </i> It : Newport Harbor facility is a case in point. Its entire biennial has been turned over to installation works. Others can be found at local colleges.

Installations are the art form of our time. And no wonder--no other medium involves such an extraordinary degree of permissiveness and promises such vivid, visceral results. After all, an installation can consist of virtually any objects, images, sounds, smells or light effects an artist feels like putting in a gallery.

In recent years, artists with such different working methods and points of view as Chris Burden, Christian Boltanski, David Hammons and Ann Hamilton have devised memorable installations much remarked on in art circles.

Museums are increasingly responsive to installation work, despite the considerable leap of faith it involves. (Once an artist starts working on site, there’s no telling how different it may be from the preliminary description.) As cases in point, Newport Harbor Art Museum has turned over its entire biennial to installation work by California artists (“Mapping Histories”); in New York, Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr recently chose seven artists to create idiosyncratic “ Dis locations” throughout the museum.

But along with the unprecedented level of freedom goes a big responsibility: to give viewers the sensory and intellectual shock of an idea presented in an utterly fresh way. Needless to say, few artists possess the metaphoric resources to carry off such an ambitious program.

Two current exhibitions--one at Cal State Long Beach, the other at Golden West College in Huntington Beach--offer installations that deal with environmental issues. But only one of these works begins to offer the viewer a transformative experience, rather than simply a collection of objects baldly representing a point of view.

At the University Art Museum in Long Beach, Eugenia Vargas--a Chilean-born artist who lives in Mexico--has installed “Aguas” (Waters). The piece is about the deterioration of the Lerma River, a major water source for Mexico City.

According to a story in last Tuesday’s Times, “the Lerma is considered second only to Mexico City on a list of national ecological disasters.” The 309-mile-long river is a dumping ground for inadequately purified waste water from factories and refineries, chemical fertilizers draining off 250,000 acres of irrigated farmland and even pig manure covertly disposed of by farmers.

Given such grim facts, you might expect Vargas’ piece to be a dramatic indictment of conflicting interests and callous mismanagement, or a fanciful image of waste and neglect. Actually, it is neither.

“Aguas” consists of four long rows of photographs of life along the riverbank: children playing, animals drinking or grazing, random bumps of plastic, glass and metal debris, bubbles of foaming phosphates, lazy piles of old tires. Each photograph sits in a developing tray of water placed on the floor. A red darkroom safety light hangs directly above each image.

The gallery is very dark, and it’s hard to see these matter-of-fact photographs clearly, but they don’t seem to be of overwhelming interest, either singly or collectively. We’ve seen so many, many images of the despoiled landscapes of our time (not to mention the landscapes themselves) that these images are neither particularly surprising nor particularly upsetting.

After all, any artist working today is obliged to acknowledge that we are glutted with images every day--in newspapers and magazines, on TV, on billboards, in shop windows, in junk mail. Images chosen for an installation must be truly remarkable--or presented in a remarkable way--otherwise there’s no reason for a viewer to pay special attention to them.

To be sure, Vargas has supplied “Aguas” with a metaphoric aspect. The photographs eventually will deteriorate and the water will evaporate--a gentle fading away that stands in contrast to the increasing sludge of pollution (from such sources as untreated sewage, improper land-use and irresponsible industrial production) accumulating in the river.

Museum curator Diana C. du Pont also reminds the viewer (in the accompanying brochure) that photography itself involves the use of toxic chemicals and that Vargas invites the viewer “to consider with her our private uses of water and how they are balanced against the public uses of this resource.”

Well, OK. But there the piece is oddly uncompelling, on either a sensual or an intellectual level. Nothing in the way we actually observe the images is particularly insightful or suggestive in an allusive way. Based on descriptions in the brochure, Vargas’ earlier, ritualized, performance-oriented pieces involving her own body seem to contain precisely the kind of immediacy and power this work lacks.

At Golden West College, there are other problems in an exhibit called “Deceptive Cadences,” which includes work by four Laguna Beach artists, two of whom have made installations. (The others are Charlotte Myers, who is showing vacuous mixed-media pieces with swirls of metallic paint, and Grace Songolo, who offers several table-top sculptures of smooth stones held in various formations within pairs of clay crevices.)

Janet Mackaig’s floor piece, “minus 19 feet,” looks like a well-meaning attempt to reproduce, in a would-be “artistic” way, a chunk of polluted nature (an unnamed lake in Southern California, according to Mackaig’s typed statement).

The piece consists primarily of an oval-shaped carpet made of shredded bark, scattered branches, sawdust dyed phosphorus-green to mimic an industrial spill, and--carefully dispersed hither and thither--black-painted rocks and black-painted litter. A tidy little square patch of fake earth a short distance away contains a twig balanced on a rock painted in iridescent hues and an unidentifiable object, which may be the painted canvas fish Mackaig lists as one ingredient of her handiwork.

The ponderous artsy-craftsiness of the piece unfortunately gets in its way. An oil spill does leave an iridescent trace, but an artist needs to distinguish that type of surface effect from the glitzy decorativeness of a gift shop bauble. Painting things black doesn’t automatically make us think in a serious way about death and decay. Ultimately, the piece is so overwhelmingly literal and predictable that no imaginative work is left to the viewer. If good installations share any one quality, it’s the ability to involve the viewer in a world that’s partly the artist’s creation and partly the viewer’s.

In this context, Barbara Berk’s piece, “Rain Forest,” is especially welcome. It consists of hundreds of white nylon strings--strands of frozen “rain”--anchored to the ceiling and to small tufts of grass forming a large square on the floor. As the viewer walks around the piece, the strands create a shimmering effect, at once transparent and dense, and marvelously akin to the properties of water. Now that’s a real experience-- a sensory effect that involves translating one medium into another in a captivating way.

Of course, there are no trees in this piece, which is precisely the point. The identical vertical shafts of rain “rooted” in the ground are the forest--a forest of rain, in Berk’s fanciful image.

Berk writes in an accompanying statement that her work “addresses how . . . art has become an end in itself; how . . . nature has become romanticized, rarefied, manipulated.” It’s debatable just how new this phenomenon is--hasn’t art always romanticized nature? But in the process of raising the question, Berk invites viewers to consider image, language and a social problem as parts of a whole. What do we visualize when we talk about saving the rain forests? And how much does it matter if our romantic perceptions don’t match up to the facts?

“Centric 45: Eugenia Vargas” remains through Dec. 15 at the Cal State Long Beach Art Museum, on the fifth floor of the library. (Nearest parking is off 7th Street.) Admission is free. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. (213) 985-5761. “Deceptive Cadences” remains through Nov. 1 at Golden West College Fine Arts Gallery in Huntington Beach (parking is at the corner of Golden West and Gothard streets). Admission is free. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. (714) 895-8783.