ART : Exhibits Paint Disappointing Picture : Two new offerings at Newport Harbor Museum provide slim pickings in different ways and for different reasons.

Two exhibitions at Newport Harbor Art Museum--one by a curator recently hired by the museum, the other by a curator laid off during a round of deficit-reducing staff cuts earlier this month--offer disappointingly slim pickings for viewers, although in different ways, and for different reasons.

“Guillermo Kuitca”--a small group of recent works by an Argentine artist barely out of his 20s, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York--constitutes the first hint of the type of exhibitions chief curator Bruce Guenther has in store for Orange County viewers.

The fact that the exhibit comes from MOMA is less of a recommendation than one might think. The “gray lady” of modern art has been roundly criticized for a lackluster overview of the contemporary art scene in recent years, and Guenther himself came in for criticism during his years at the Seattle Art Museum for a tendency to bring in “transplanted” gallery exhibits of an artist’s recent output rather than going out on his own to assemble work from diverse sources.

Of course, the prepackaged nature of this particular mini-show is to be expected because Guenther is only in his second month on the job. But Kuitca’s work hints at more content than it actually delivers. He seems all too inclined to tap a cheap vein of sentimentality that no amount of special pleading on behalf of Surrealist influences can quite redeem.

The exhibit consists of one untitled installation (five child-size mattresses painted with road maps) and six paintings in which the dominant imagery is either a map of an actual place or a generic house plan.

On top of the pink or blue patterned upholstery of the children’s mattresses, Kuitca has painted maps on which viewers can locate such well-known English towns as Lincoln, Manchester and Leeds. It is possible to read the physical “depressions” caused by the mattress buttons as metaphors for the economic depressions of Northern England industrial cities. Other than that, however, the piece seems to have little to say for itself.

To be sure, beds are normally associated with the imagery of sleep (as a refuge from the world or a realm of unsettling dreams), and children’s beds presumably are meant to conjure up an even more poignant realm of nocturnal vulnerability. But the mere sight of children’s beds does not, in and of itself, conjure up the “romantic, theatrical melancholy” that MOMA curator Lynn Zelevansky ascribes to Kuitca’s work. We need more input from the artist if this piece is to resonate with genuine poignancy and conviction.

In the accompanying brochure, Zelevansky writes that beds “recall the filthy detritus found on city garbage heaps.” Since the children’s mattresses are shabby but hardly filthy, the puzzled viewer can only conclude that she must be referring to other beds the artist has made, the ones that have been described elsewhere as looking as though they carry “the discharge and waste of another’s body.”

In a similar vein, there seems to be a disjunction between Zelevansky’s description of Kuitca’s peculiarly anthropomorphic house plans (“they weep, bleed, defecate, have broken hearts and suffer from AIDS”) and the Kuitca paintings included in the exhibit.

One piece (“House Plan With Tear Drops”) does incorporate incongruous drawings of tears, superimposed on the room plan. But they look deliberately kitschy, as if the artist were mocking the attachments people have to their living spaces, or perhaps the oh-so-heavy psychic battles they wage in the privacy of their homes. The rooms in another, untitled plan are lined with stacks of bones, like diagrammatic representations of medieval crypts. Still another plan vanishes into smoke.

But this is a very basic level of imagery that does not suggest arrestingly profound or original insight. A house plan vanishing into thin air, for example, is at once too baldly literal and too unspecific to convey the sense of loss felt by Argentines forced to flee their country’s repressive regime (supposedly a central theme of Kuitca’s work).

Zelevansky notes that Kuitca was deeply influenced by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose work inspired him to use Catholic imagery. But when Kahlo used imagery of the Passion, she transformed it into part of her bizarrely original mythology. When Kuitca paints a thistle plant (presumably referring to Jesus’ crown of thorns) on one of his house plan pieces it comes across as a student’s footnote, a dry “reference” devoid of personal engagement or metaphoric nuance.

“New California Artist XX: Sarah Seager,” the final Newport Harbor project of departing assistant curator Marilu Knode, spotlights the diffident and almost willfully precious work of a Los Angeles artist in her early 30s whose concerns have to do with the history of Modernism in art and linguistic experimentation in modern literature.

Her earlier work, not in the current exhibition, includes a piece called “Record of 100,000 Sighs” (a display case that holds 100 white vinyl photograph records, divided into 10 stacks). Another piece, “Sing,” consisted of two fluorescent lights attached end to end to the wall, with the block-lettered word, Sing .

Such works recall innovative moments of modern and contemporary art, including John Cage’s completely silent musical composition (“4’33” “), Marcel Duchamp’s decision to convey instant art status on ordinary objects via his “ready-mades,” and Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent light tubes as sculpture. But Seager is also concerned, in a way that is wholly her own, with the intersection of visual data, music and language. (Hint: Fluorescent lights have a characteristic hum.)

Seager’s “Participation of Letters” works in the Newport Harbor exhibit are all-white paintings made by pouring acrylic paint mixed with turpentine onto pieces of paper lying on the floor. This process creates a series of stark “landscapes” rather like alluvial deltas, pockmarked with ridges and cracking dry pools.

On top of these uneven surfaces, Seager scoots straggling convoys of tiny commercial press-on lettering that form nonsense words (sometimes with accents used in non-English languages), or numerical sequences. The effect is somewhat like scat singing or reading a copy of James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” that someone has torn into small pieces.

Seager makes several references to map-making in these paintings, though she approaches the theme in a cool, linguistic way that is poles apart from Kuitca’s attempt at emotional resonance. Sometimes, as in “Participation of Letters: Ce la,” she places a small open circle next to one of her non-words ( Nott ), as if it were a name given to a specific geographical spot. In “Participation of Letters: finneg WOTTE,” the letters spelling out wotte are spread out, hugging a chunk of whiteness as if they represented the name of a territory.

Seager also plays variously gentle and intense little games with her made-up words. For example, while Nott (not) suggests that nothing, in fact, exists in that spot, the letters also spell out the beginning of Nottingham, a real city in England. In “Participation of Letters: Wotte parte,” a passage that reads: “here hare hare he herrangs HArenGG,” suggests the gist of some not-quite-clear story involving a place (“here”), a hare (the animal), a herring, a man (“he,” possibly also Harry or “hare”) and a harangue (the capital letters add appropriate emphasis to the word meaning tirade).

The difficulty with this sort of thing is that it creates enormous work for the viewer without offering a great deal in return for any but the most ardent devotee of experimental writing.

Seager’s three-dimensional piece in the exhibit, “Box Rail,” is a white-enameled steel frame, the kind manufactured to hold a box spring and mattress. While it’s of passing interest that both Seager and Kuitca use bed imagery in their work, the way they employ this imagery couldn’t be more different.

Seager seems completely uninterested in the intended use of the bed frame and the meanings that accumulate around the notion of sleeping. For her, the piece of furniture is simply a “ready-made,” which she can use for her own hermetic devices. And what she does with it is to bracket empty space as though it were as full of interest as art in a frame or people in a room.

She seems to be asking: What does it mean to focus attention on this thing instead of that thing? What is the nature of “aesthetic” concentration, anyway? Those questions have become commonplace in the annals of modern art, however, and Seager does not appear to be adding a distinctive twist to justify hauling out the framing apparatus one more time.

At least “Box Rail” offers a visual and mental relief from the type of effortful engagement required to deal with her concrete poetry. Granted the limited compass of the small-scale “New California Artist” series, it still seems that Seager’s recent work would have been seen (and comprehended) to better effect had it been shown with some of her earlier pieces in various media or as part of an exhibit of work by several artists who work in similar or related modes.