O.C. ART : You Need a Good Map for This Land of ‘Milk and Honey’ : Susan Joseph installation at Laguna Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite requires a better and more detailed explanation.

It’s happening again in the Laguna Art Museum’s unpredictable space at South Coast Plaza: An oddball installation turns out to mean much more than you initially want to give it credit for. But, as Professor Harold Hill (a. k. a. the Music Man) said, “You gotta know the territory.”

The piece is Susan Joseph’s “Milk and Honey.” Tiny milking stools have been placed next to Supergraphic-type images of cows painted on the walls; an immense carved wooden spoon and bowl (containing a giant’s portion of honey) sit on a large black wooden platform; and from two tall wooden structures, rows of honey buckets hang above honey-filled troughs.

Each bucket is stoppered with a long wooden plug and labeled with a word or phrase: “Savagery,” “Insensitivity,” “Matter and,” “Maenadic Dances,” “Silence,” “Lying,” “Diabolic Beauty,” “the Kitchen,” “Impulsion,” “Hysteria,” “Ornamentation” (written in gold beads and colored glass), “Lasciviousness” (in red), “Witchcraft” and “Weak.”

A small clue to what this all may mean can be found in the brief and disappointingly vague wall text with which the museum introduces the piece.

“Joseph’s own thinking on the work involves ‘women’s identification with material plenitude’ and other feminist and theoretical issues,” according to the wall text, which further notes the “text” of the piece (the labels on the honey buckets) was taken from an essay by French literary critic Jean-Francois Lyotard.

As someone unfamiliar with Lyotard’s theories, I figured that it would be wise to read the essay. So I called Joseph, who sent me a copy. The essay is called “One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles.”

In it, Lyotard uses a story from a 6th-Century Chinese military memoir to illustrate the fallacy of the “male way of thinking,” which, he says, involves the need to establish order and maintain an attitude of high seriousness in the face of the inevitability of death.

Lyotard writes that men “want to conquer, not love. They have nothing but disdain and irony for the sensual, for odors, sensations, secretions, laissez-faire , music . . .”

On the other hand, he writes, women have a “compulsion” to undermine order and to laugh in the face of death. Relegated to the margins of life, they commonly are believed to embody or participate in such worthless or dangerous traits and activities as “impulsion (impulsiveness), hysteria, silence, maenadic dances (the maenads took part in the orgiastic worship of Dionysus, Greek god of wine and revelry), lying, diabolical beauty, ornamentation, lasciviousness, witchcraft and weakness.”

Where have we seen these words before?

It seems to me that Joseph’s piece offers two central themes on which to chew. One is a meditation about how women’s roles as nurturers vie with other, less savory, traditional perceptions of their talents and drives. The other is Lyotard’s notion of a Utopian “unisexism,” a commingling of “male” and “female” attributes in which neither is perceived as either inferior or superior.

The words milk and honey (in the title of Joseph’s piece) have stood for a vision of fecundity ever since God told Moses about the land of the Canaanites, and, for obvious reasons, the female sex always has been particularly associated with nurturing. Cows and nursing mothers produce milk; female honeybees (“worker” bees) make honey.

But while women passively are suckled by babies (and cows are milked by humans), bees that make honey must actively seek out flowers and obtain the nectar. Worker bees not only provide food and shelter for the male “drones” (whose only function is to mate with the queen), they also fight (sting) and die when necessary to protect the bee colony. So the normal life span of a female honeybee combines many “male” and “female” activities.

The giant serving of honey in the piece also suggests a curious sexual duality: On the one hand, the big bowl serves almost as a parody of “female” nurturing; on the other hand, its outsize proportions are “masculine” (the original sense of giant denoted “a man of great size and strength”). At the same time, the aggressive carving that produced the two rough-hewn wooden implements contrasts with their incongruously dainty floral designs.

Even the honey buckets--”female” receptacles filled with a “female” product--are stoppered with phallic-looking plugs of black-painted wood. (Should we read anything “lascivious” into the fact that the paint on some of these stoppers has worn off?)

Somewhat confusingly, the press release for the installation quotes Joseph, who teaches in the art department at Claremont Graduate School, as saying the work deals with “emotional hunger.” It’s hard to comprehend the piece as a whole in that light, however. If Joseph really intended to yoke quotes from an essay about one subject to a work about a different subject, it was an ill-advised attempt. Disjunctive art that reflects a disparate society is one thing, but making a piece that just doesn’t hang together is something else entirely.

Of course, over and above what a piece like “Milk and Honey” may mean , it needs to have a physical presence to succeed as an installation, rather than simply a didactic illustration of an idea. The best things going for Joseph in this department are the organic and decorative qualities (the foamy amber honey with its almost beer-like smell, the carved surfaces and silhouettes of the wood, the playfully beaded bucket) that flaunt Joseph’s “feminine” taste for “ornamentation” as well as “the sensual . . . odors, sensations (and) secretions.”

At the same time, she orders the installation with a firm (“masculine”?) hand, configuring the gallery space itself into a channel that directs the viewer from one portion of the piece to another. The identical cow images--applied by hand to the wall, yet imitative of mechanical reproduction--also embody a duality, even if it isn’t specifically sexually oriented.

It’s true that the installation has its own life and meaning apart from Lyotard’s article, as Joseph herself was quick to point out to me. It’s entirely possible that my own reading of her piece has been overly influenced by the essay.

But an exhibit of this nature--installed in a public space, where it attracts casual visitors who don’t necessarily follow the annals of contemporary art--just begs to be augmented by a cogent explanation of the way art can reflect contemporary theories about social issues.

It really isn’t sufficient for the museum to put such an idea-laden, non-traditional work “out there” without making a more concerted effort to enlighten viewers about the kind of thinking that lies behind the piece. To present the work so minimally in this venue is to do it an injustice--turning it into little more than a cute curiosity or a baffling conversation piece.