SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : By the Book : Volumes are folded, spindled, mutilated and metamorphosed at a Thousand Oaks sculpture exhibit.

In the current traveling exhibition at the Conejo Valley Art Museum, books and things bookish have been artfully, shamelessly altered. Which is not to say that the work here only celebrates bookishness.

“Books and Bookends: Sculptural Approaches” is more about sculpture than literature, and about the will of artists to explore and unravel conventions. For purists who believe that a pipe is a pipe, an artwork is an artwork and a book is a book, the point of the exercise might be lost. What we have here is a mixed marriage of media.

Curated by Carol Barton and Henry Barrow, the show began its travels in Maryland in December of 1989 and has worked its way around the country. Included are a wide assortment of three-dimensional works--books that have been folded, spindled, mutilated and metamorphosed. There also are transformed maps, strange bookends and errata by artists hailing from all corners of the United States.

One dialectical branch of 20th-Century art, which includes collage, assemblage, Dada and conceptual art, has been intent on dissecting commonplace objects and the ideas we have about them. But as conceptual art goes, this display of book art is easily digestible, fun and often reliant on the quick prick of a pun. While it has the makings of Art Lite, it still rises above trivia.

Far from being academic or aloof, the show deals mostly in kitsch and nostalgia--a perfect choice for holiday viewing. Pop-up books help to lure children into the world of literature by rendering more vivid the contents of a book. These three-dimensional artworks similarly create new ways of making books.

Edin Velez’s enigmatic “Transition Event” is, in fact, a xerographic pop-up book, plain and simple, but with turn-of-the-century graphic imagery, melded surreally. The pages of “A Peep Show Alice,” by Maryline Poole, fans out accordion-like to reveal 3-D images inside the peepholes. Curator Barton’s own “Everyday Road Signs” follows a similar notion, extending a folded map to create a view of a road with depth.

The pieces range from the sublime to the audacious, from the immediate to the circumspect. With “The Cruel Book,” James Bailey translated the bed-of-nails idea to book form, using a cover festooned with dangerous spikes. On the other hand, David Horton’s “Luminous Perceptions” is, true to the title, an elegant display of mystical abstractions.

Puns, those lowbrow literary emanations we all know and love/hate, might well be an innate foible of the bookish artist. There are plenty of shameless puns around the gallery. Carl A. Potter’s “Bookworms” are coiled, wormlike metal bookends. Jane Freeman’s “Flat Beer” is a double whammy--a volume of smashed beer cans that have been bound together, book-like.

Some artists have dealt with the specific physical aspects of books. The simplest piece, and yet one of the craftiest, is Scott McCarney’s “Book Rate,” a bound book consisting of the thick cardboard you’d find in a book box. Completing the process, he actually sent it through the mail to the curator.

Three Santa Barbarans are represented in the sampling. Elena Siff, the masterful miniaturist, created “The Fortune Book” from Chinese cookie fortunes embellished with decorative frills. At the bottom is a touch of self-deprecating wit in the form of a micro-book called “How to Distrust Novelties” (good advice as you walk through the gallery).

Pamela Zwehl-Burke’s “RSHR PRZNR” (“rush hour prisoner”) addresses the mayhem of traffic via distorted maps and traffic jam snapshots. “The Bridge,” by Kristin Otte, illustrates a poem about traffic and sexuality with a literal bridge cut and folded from the midst of two pages in a book.

Notable by his exclusion is Steven Cortright, the accomplished collagist and book artist who taught at UC Santa Barbara for 20 years and died last year of cancer. Cortright’s witty and wise book works were featured in a one-man show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art a few years ago.

“The Music Box,” by JoAnna Poehlmann, is one of the more endearing miniatures on display. Its long accordion-folded text, on which music-related postage stamps are matched to relevant quotes, fits neatly into a small music box that plays “As Time Goes By.”

Her quotes sample the high and the low of culture--like the show, come to think of it. Quoth Martin Luther: “Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners; she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.” Sez George Gershwin: “I feel a song coming on.”

At its best, “Books and Bookends” dislodges preconceptions we have about books and transports us to another mind state where traditional books--containers with bound pages--are not allowed. But you can’t get there by glancing casually. Stocked as it is with small, cleverly encoded pieces, the gallery requires a close-up view.

The works demand to be “read,” in terms of both literary and aesthetic content. While many of the themes and “punch lines” lean toward the artsy-craftsy or the gonzo greeting card mentality, a more serious motivation underlies the project.

NATIVE TREASURES:

Last year, South African Chris Van Der Heeven--a farmer, sportsman, safari leader and collector of tribal art from Eastern Africa--brought over a sampling of sculptures and found here a generous market, quickly selling out his collection. He returned this year with a more sizable boatload of sculptures and other artifacts, and has been taking his wares throughout Southern California.

For public view, Van Der Heeven has set up shop at the Hampton Canyon Ranch in Santa Paula, where he is staying. The stocky, amiable South African--who has in his resume a Guinness Book world record for plowing in a 24-hour period--is going the grass-roots route as an art entrepreneur. He is showing his stuff at the ranch and dealing out of the trunk of his car.

Last week, he showed a visitor around the yard and a large room-cum-gallery, where animalia, fanciful heads and other subjects in soapstone and black ebony are displayed. To view these intuitively rendered and often wonderful pieces in humble quarters--and in our regional back yard--provides a quick trip to another time and place.

Van Der Heeven expressed his admiration for the artists. “Time is of no essence to them. Some of the pieces take a year to finish. They’ve had no training. They’re just natural artists.”

African art has long been cited as a seedbed of Modernism. Of keen interest are the examples of Shona art from Zimbabwe, with distorted faces that recall--to an art historical sensibility--Cubism. From the Matabeli tribe comes sensuous abstract sculptures that relate to the forms common in sculptures by Henry Moore.

High-backed ebony chairs made by the Mawali tribe, decorated with scenes of everyday life carved into the wood, boast an ingenious, minimalistic, two-piece design. There’s still a lot to be learned from primitive examples, and a lot of pleasure in the beholding.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Books and Bookends: Sculptural Approaches,” at the Conejo Valley Art Museum, 193-A N. Moorpark Road in Thousand Oaks, through Dec. 29.

African sculpture, shown at Hampton Canyon Ranch, 3739 Wheeler Canyon Road in Santa Paula. Info: Chris Van Der Heeven, 933-3781.