SIGHTS AROUND TOWN / THE ART SCENE : Exploring the Abstract Impulse : The Conejo Valley museum show surveys works between the 1940s and ‘60s.

The current sampling of art at the Conejo Valley Art Museum serves as a pleasantly meandering survey of abstract art, as seen through the window of one anonymous collector’s collection.

Fine as it is, though, there is something misleading about the title, “Private Collection: Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture.” How do we define “contemporary” in a fast and furiously moving world of culture?

In the art world at large, the abstract impulse has gone through some serious changes since the 1960s, the vintage of most of the paintings here. Generally, this art seems caught in a time warp--somewhere in the nether world between what looks like cutting edge “contemporary” art and what has settled into the river of history.

What is loosely covered in this exhibition is a transition period: after the heyday of the abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s, and before the navel-gazing conceptualist revolution of the late 1960s and beyond.

The centerpieces of the show are three paintings by the prominent abstract Expressionist Mark Tobey (1890-1976). His untitled works here are murky abstractions with tightly knit patterns and vague images pressing from below, striving toward the surface.

Tobey created introspective paintings, which suggest the presence of cosmic or spiritual forces, in a way similar to Mark Rothko.

Another notable figure represented here, if modestly, is Herbert Bayer, the Bauhaus figure who spent his later life in Santa Barbara. Bayer’s tiny, delightful models for sculptures to adorn ARCO structures relish bold primary colors, like his controversial “Chromatic Gates” project on the beach in Santa Barbara.

The collection also includes two small pieces by the famed assemblage sculptor Louise Nevelson. They are, definitively, small, black and intricate, with a high degree of internal logic and no inherent purpose other than the act of art-making.

Locals will remember Laddie John Dill’s elemental work of oil and concrete on plywood from his memorable show at the CVAM a year ago.

Joyce Weinstein’s “Spring Cityscape with Red” stands out from much of the other art by virtue of its garishness, with loud linear patterns splashed atop thinner washes. John McKracken’s work strongly echoes Jackson Pollack-esque existential confetti, and Paul Jenkins’ seeping color patches recall Helen Frankenthaler.

One of the most effective pieces here is Stanley Boxer’s warm- but-unsettling, notably vertical “Plumedroseofthunder.” Unruly, ascending sweeps are at once sensuous and tempestuous in this visual poem about the nature of flames.

While the CVAM has maintained a regular program of diversity in what it presents--sometimes with a diluting effect--here, at last, is a show about art, and a provocative one at that. Ultimately, it may be a penetrating, if humble, view of certain cracks in the firmament of art history. Time will tell.

Forbidden City

Let us now be thankful for the antics put forth by that left field aesthetic haven known as Art City II. Just when you thought the local art scene was getting too pretty, too scattered, too complacent for its own good, Art City brings funk to the rescue.

Last month, selected Art City-connected sculptors were on their best behavior in a group show at the Oxnard Library. But in the show now at the Art City II gallery, called “Wit, Warps and Whims,” all hell and free-ranging irony break loose.

There are a lot of fresh, unkempt ideas and doses of irreverent wit in the house, which, for all its humble corrugated-roofed rusticity remains one of the nicest gallery spaces in the county.

Paul Lindhard, Art City’s fearless leader, showed subtle, sensuous stone sculptures in Oxnard, but here breaks out large wooden junk sculptures. A nose, apples, a snake and a lovely polished hunk of wood distinguish “Original Comedy,” while the rafters-high “Sing a Song of Sixpence” resembles nothing so much as a Claes Oldenburg-ish clothespin-turned-proboscis.

Sculptor “Matt” wryly fashions primitivistic busts, merged with such TV culture icons as the Three Stooges and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

For sheer sensory impact, Art City regular M. B. Hanrahan grabs the viewer’s first impression in the show with her wall-size mural “Breakfast of Champions,” picturing marlins piercing doughnuts. It’s big. It’s wacky. It is what it is. What is it?

The most striking art in the gallery is a series of paintings by Leonardo Pieter, depicting shifting relationships of a female nude and a swarthy satyr.

Most of the works are scruffily rendered but placed in gilt frames, except for his masterpiece of back-room squalor, “The Satyr Feller at the Bad Girl’s Place.” This painting is an unframed, fraying rag of a canvas, adding to the atmosphere of leering, fleshy shame/delight. Funk attacks, again, eloquently.

While a consensus crackpot attitude hovers in the room, each painter comes from a different corner altogether, both in terms of content and materials.

Ronald Walker’s diagrammatic imagery on plywood uses pseudo- science to play footsie with smirking existential angst. Dan Layman (a pseudonym, perhaps?) works in a low mode of high art, splashing airbrushed kitsch on metal serving trays.

Gerd Koch, a Ventura College teacher by day, is by far the most seasoned and “painterly” painter of the lot, but with this group of paintings he shows a playful side. “Adam and Eve Visit the Statue of Liberty” has tongue-in-cheek and 3-D elements popping out at you.

With these paintings, Koch’s mysterious narratives are underscored by an abstractionist’s intuitive sense of form.

As the flyer says, this is “an art show featuring the struggles of mankind against the evil tenets of logic and rationality. Go to the show. Have fun!”

If there were no Art City in Ventura, we’d have to invent one in our minds. At a time when alternative art venues are scarcer than a popular government, this is one last bastion well worth supporting.

WHERE AND WHEN

* “Private Collection: Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture,” through June 12 at the Conejo Valley Art Museum, 193-A N. Moorpark Road (in the Janss Mall), Thousand Oaks. Information: 373-0054.

* “Wit, Warps and Whims,” art by Paul Lindhard, M. B. Hanrahan, Gerd Koch, Matt Harvey and Ronald Walker, through June 7 at the Art City II gallery, 31 Peking St., Ventura. Information: 648-5241.