O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Addressing the Idea of Home : Six artists take advantage of the repair work at the Muckenthaler to install inventive projects.

Every once in a while, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center embraces the world of contemporary art with a project that can hold its own with the world of art beyond the Orange Curtain.

Actually, home-grown necessity was the mother of “Suitably Appointed,” an inventive project (on view through Nov. 26) dreamed up by a loose confederacy of Los Angeles artists that calls itself Project X.

The six artists took advantage of repairs to the center’s alarm system that involved ripping down false gallery walls that covered portions of the building. The center started out as an Italian Renaissance house built in 1924 by Walter and Adella Muckenthaler, and as Ellen Birrell and Stephen Berens explain in their preface to the exhibition catalogue, the artists were “looking for traces of (the house’s) history, looking for the beauties of the place, for its humor, resonances, quirks and provocations. . . .

“Some of the artists have responded to the architecture, some to its condition as a house, an empty house, or a house that might be furnished in certain ways, a home in which small private dramas are played out, a home of a particular family at a particular time in history, or simply a place from the past that has been made over for use in the present.”

Although some of these pieces have much less visceral impact than others, all rely to some extent on the viewer’s experience of walking through a building that is at once a home and a historical artifact, an exhibition site and a place of stored memories.

Renee Petropoulos sketched pale chalk lines on the walls throughout the house, marking archways, doorways and ornamental wall treatments. As she wrote in the newsprint catalogue, “the entire house becomes sculpture.” Whether her piece has anything to do with the history of the house (it’s unclear whether any of those archways ever existed, in reality or even in a plan), it stimulates the viewer’s openness to the spatial possibilities inherent in any structure.

Buildings are so long-lasting that it’s hard for the lay person to remember that each one represents only a single solution to a client’s needs and the demands of a particular site. By treating the Muckenthaler as a work-in-progress--tracing potential changes on the walls in the manner of a surgeon drawing the path of an incision on the patient’s skin--Petropoulos recalls the organic quality of architecture.

Her drawings also suggest a late-20th-Century conceptual twist on ancient Roman wall paintings, which frequently incorporated delicate, linear architectural forms in a trompe l’oeil (fool-the-eye) style. In contrast, Petropoulos delineates only a skeletal outline, requiring viewers to perform the burden of the imaginative work.

Although Eric Magnuson’s work looks entirely different, it also is concerned with the relationships between architecture and sculpture, between “useful” arts and “useless” ones.

In the Muckenthaler’s former living room, he looped filmy curtains at a window and positioned a speckled gray ashtray made from cigarette ashes embedded in epoxy resin. In the former open-air atrium (now an enclosed patio), a rectangular white slab leans against one wall, near an airy free-standing wood construction resembling an indoor gazebo.

The curtain, which combines decorating and sculptural functions, suggests a contemporary shorthand for the concept of beauty embodied in ancient Greek statues of women, distinguished by the rhythm of the folds in their long, draped garments. In a different mode, the ashtray embodies a fancifully open-ended notion of recycling waste products into receptacles to hold more waste, which in turn would be recycled again. The piece is also a linguistic pun: a tray made of ashes.

The leaning white slab (“Wall,” which looks rather like a thick, dull-surfaced variation on a John McCracken sculpture) seems to be about the juncture at which a necessary component of architecture literally slides into the status of a piece of minimalist sculpture. Similarly, the gazebo-like wood piece (“Allusive Construction”) exists at the intersection of architecture, landscape architecture and sculpture. Such a piece is normally placed outdoors, as an enclosure and vantage point from which long vistas can be appreciated; in its current position, the piece serves as a memento of the original open-air character of the space.

In a lighter vein, Elizabeth Pulsinelli fills Muckenthaler’s former library with mutant vinyl “bean bag” chairs she teasingly calls “That sweet, that soft, that funky stuff.” A pear-shaped tomato-red piece with a black velvet stem lies on its side, near a black puff-ball adorned with purple and red velvet rosettes and a demure white tussock with an aureole of pink satin sprouting a red satin stem. These blissfully silly things mingle references to fruit, vegetables, animals, human anatomy and kitsch decor--and perhaps also to Walter Muckenthaler’s study and cultivation of rare plants.

For “Chapter of Forecasts,” Elizabeth Bryant stocked the hutch in the former small family dining room with old painted china plates. Inscribed on each is a quotation written in 1893 by one of various poets, journalists, politicians, scientists and others asked by the American Press Assn. to speculate on the evolution of society in the next 100 years.

Bryant links the quotes to the china plates in a roundabout way by explaining in the catalogue that the predictions lured readers of a syndicated column to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where the Woman’s Building displayed fine art, handicrafts and inventions made by women--including china painting. Fanciful and practical, prescient and misbegotten, these quotes give a sense of the boundless optimism typical of the era.

“By 1993, doctors will prescribe no more than one-third the drugs they now think are necessary,” wrote Edwin Checkley, a “physical culturalist.” Thomas Morgan, commissioner of Indian affairs, prophesied that “an Indian will command the U.S. Army.”

John Habberton, an editor, opined that “all the forests will be gone” by 1993. Populist orator William Jennings Bryan (best known today for his prosecution of the Scopes Trial in 1925) wrote, “The government will grow more complex in details . . , but it will grow more simple in purpose.”

A geologist imagined that “precious stones will be utilized for impressive religious ceremonies.” (Too bad he wasn’t thinking about crystals.) Then-popular poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox proposed that “woman will be financially independent of man.” Theosophist Annie Besant bet that people might routinely live to be 150 years old and that both sexes “would cooperate for mutual service.” Someone else suggested that “excursions to the mountains of the moon” might be a Sunday pastime.

Christian Mounger ironically titled his complex multipart installation “The Peaceable Kingdom,” after the early 19th-Century American painter William Hicks’ “naive”-style painting illustrating the Biblical verse about the lion lying down with the lamb. Mounger’s piece seems to be concerned with various intersections between art and life in the Muckenthaler family (and by extension, in American culture in general), particularly the point at which seemingly innocuous cliches reflect ingrained prejudices, fears of the “exotic” and feelings of cultural superiority.

In addition to his love of exotic birds and dogs, Muckenthaler fancied art and shipped home various objects from a grand tour of Europe. An Italian statue, “Boy with Dolphin,” once stood in the solarium, and a mural (covered over years ago) was commissioned for a wall facing the former atrium. According to an oral history of the Muckenthaler family by Keith Terry in 1974 (excerpted in a wall text and in the catalogue), the subject of the mural was “a beautiful senorita” gazing over a Spanish landscape.

Pointing up the persistence of artistic and cultural cliches into the 20th Century, Mounger juxtaposes a reproduction of an obscure painting of Napoleon looking out to sea in the moonlight with an ad for a 1957 sunken treasure movie, “Boy on a Dolphin,” showing Sophia Loren (as “a wild island girl” in Greece) posing on a small boat with a dolphin statue.

On a wall in the former atrium, Mounger juxtaposes a reproduction of a view--by a Japanese-American artist--of the internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, with a portion of the oral history that deals with the Muckenthalers’ Japanese gardener.

The gardener did “careful, expert work” and “never bothered anyone,” according to the history, yet he was arrested as a spy after Pearl Harbor, “much to the dismay” of the Muckenthalers, who were shown unspecified “message(s), newspapers, supplies and cameras” he kept in his rooms, as proof of his crimes.

The Muckenthalers and the historian--who wrote with no apparent sense of irony--seemed to have found these items adequate proof of the gardener’s supposed treachery, rather than possible plants by the U.S. government or objects that actually posed no national security risks. (In the catalogue, Mounger reproduces a Daily News Tribune news story from 1942 about the “serious” discovery in Anaheim of a “mysterious” paper lantern and a small Japanese-made paper parachute.)

The third portion of Mounger’s densely allusive piece seems to tackle the opposite side of the issue by stressing points of similarity between Walter Muckenthaler’s own love of exotic birds and animals and their depiction by artists living in different periods and places.

A cluster of small black-and-white reproductions of images of dogs and birds includes artists ranging from Albrecht Durer to Catalina Pottery and Tile, from Norman Rockwell to 19th-Century Japanese woodblock master Hiroshige.

Perhaps the oddest piece in the show is Anne Walsh’s “Men’s Restroom”--a woman’s blond wig that can be tried on by visitors to the original main floor bathroom, now officially the men’s room.

This highly personal and provocatively open-ended piece invites questions about cultural definitions of appropriate gender behavior, a subject that informs Walsh’s other recent pieces (seen in Chapman University’s “Different Strokes” and in the Newport Biennial at Newport Harbor Art Museum) involving lesbian stereotypes.

Walsh suggests in the catalogue that men who use the room might ask themselves about the way their encounter with the wig is affected by the privacy of a restroom. (Would a guy feel free to try out “very mild drag”?)

Women might ponder their feelings about entering a “male” space, having been given permission, so to speak, by the art inside. And how peculiar would a woman unaccustomed to having “big hair”--or wearing a wig of any sort--look to herself if she tried on the wig?

Granted, some of the works in this show require the viewers to perform feats of mental gymnastics. But the thoughtfulness and depth of the projects create a most unusual realm, a house filled with thoughts about art and life, modern culture and human foibles. Such exhibitions are rare indeed.

* “Suitably Appointed” continues through Nov. 14 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave. in Fullerton. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: free. (714) 738-6595.