Object Lessons on Being Female : Art: At a lecture on the Vienna scene, sculptor Ilse Haider compares Austrian artists’ sometimes blatant and sometimes oblique comments on women’s roles.

Obliging a photographer’s suggestion, Ilse Haider lay down on the floor of a gallery at Newport Harbor Art Museum next to “Always Honeymoon,” her suggestively pulsing bath-mat sculpture, concocted from myriad Q-Tips and a motor.

The willowy Austrian artist realized the photographer still wasn’t quite satisfied. “Shall I take my clothes off?” she asked impishly, with a toss of blond hair.

Back in the lecture room, Haider, who turns 30 next year, offered an engaging slide talk about members of the younger generation of Austrian female artists whose work she admires. (Her Monday noon talk, complementing the exhibition of U.S. and Austrian female artists, “The Seventh Wave,” was presented in cooperation with the art department at UC Irvine.)

After World War II, Haider explained, the cultural mecca of Vienna became a cultural vacuum. It wasn’t until the 1950s that a new form of expression developed: the Aktionismus (action) group, whose anarchic, nihilistic work had parallels with “happenings” in the United States and elsewhere.

Maria Lassnig, who incorporated the female body in her paintings, and Valie Export, whose performance art incorporated sexually provocative actions, were the key women in Viennese art of the ‘60s, Haider said.

Today, despite a relatively small number of commercial galleries and collectors, the Viennese art scene benefits from state support and the city’s new prominence as a hub linking Western Europe with the former Eastern Bloc countries. But in place of a homogeneous art movement, Haider said, artists take “particularized positions.”

Several of the women whose work Haider showed are dealing--sometimes blatantly, sometimes obliquely--with issues pertaining to the objectification of women by contemporary society. Some also share an interest in combining disparate or new media and in using imagery from popular culture. But their styles and approaches differ radically.

Sexual imagery, covert or blatant, appears in this work. By isolating and framing such cliches of femininity as the satin linings used for perfume bottles, Maria Hahnenkamp “reappropriates the erotic” to her own ends, Haider said. Elke Krystufek photographs herself in pornographic poses to address the “structure of patriarchal power.”

Other women artists allude more indirectly to feminist issues. Dorothee Golz (the only artist Haider discussed--other than herself--whose work is included in “The Seventh Wave”) makes minimalist sculptures that incorporate household objects--with their implicit relationship to women’s work--in unsettling ways. She told Haider that she is engaged with “the thin line that divides the art object from the everyday object, the functional from the non-functional.”

Other artists Haider discussed are primarily concerned with perception, language and the reproduction of images.

Brigitte Kowanz makes sculptures from glass, nuts and bolts, and light--allowing the viewer to see both the mechanics of the pieces and their transformation into dematerialized, meditative images. Eva Schlegel’s new series (at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica) consists of large glass panels printed with deliberately out-of-focus texts that create “a tension between regarding them as a text or an image,” Haider said.

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In Christine Meierhofer’s “Little Big Difference,” the flat, comic strip-style paintings turn out to be photographs of real people wearing makeup that imitates the sketchy shorthand of cartoonists.

Haider saved her work for last. After graduating from the Akademie der bildenen Kunste in Vienna, she spent two years at the Royal College of Art in London, studying with sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi.

Working with a blend of photography and sculpture, she initially made humorous pieces incorporating a three-dimensional background (such as “Suzy and the Last Supper,” in which the image of a violin-playing friend of hers is incorporated into a kitschy plaque of the Leonardo painting). Then she started making works that involve the disjunction between the “one-eyed” vision of the camera and normal vision, as well as between glamorized and mundane images of women.

By using film emulsion to transfer the image of a nude woman to a field of clothespins, Haider obtained a broken, almost pointillist effect. Like a hologram, the image plays hide-and-seek with the viewer-voyeur, who has to find just the right vantage point for the image to be readable. Clothespins, of course, are the unglamorous implements of the hausfrau.

In her current work, Haider employs Q-Tips and media images of women, often from the ‘50s, which represent “the myth of modern life in the second half of the 20th Century,” she said. The flip side of the work is the “household-oriented” nature of the process Haider uses. “I iron the photo on the Q-Tips,” she said. “It’s hard work.”

Two “towels” made of the cotton swabs hang over a plastic rack in Haider’s “Such Lovely Beachwear,” her other piece at Newport Harbor. The images of women on the reverse sides of the towels are partially obscured--another voyeuristic effect.

Haider said the work has to do with “the atmosphere of the bathroom, where women improve themselves with beauty products” and the notion of the bathroom as a place devoted to cleansing and relaxation.

She said she finds it difficult to talk about more recent works, like “Always Honeymoon.” In these pieces, she said, “I am starting to introduce something a little more enigmatic--the breathing of the motors--but I cannot fully articulate what it is.”

* “The Seventh Wave” continues through Sunday at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. $4 general, $2 seniors and students, free for everyone on Tuesdays. (714) 759-1122.