ART / CATHY CURTIS : Bringing Sense of Disorder to Irvine : One of America’s best-known planned communities plays host to a first-rate exhibit on the futility of planning.

To file under Strange but True: The current exhibit at the community arts center in Orange County’s model planned community is about the futility of trying to make the world an orderly place.

Actually, as guest curator Tim Jahns remarks in his catalogue essay, the Irvine Fine Arts Center is a “fitting” venue for the show because, “in many ways this community serves as the embodiment of all that is beneficial in the ordering process, and also . . . what is flawed and stifling in the order we make, even at our best.”

But “Imperfect Order” (through Nov. 3) has bigger things on its mind than the pluses and minuses of living in a cookie-cutter city. The seven conceptual artists represented in the show deal in varied ways with the tension between structure and chaos in life and art.

Too often, “theme” shows try to cram works of art into tight little boxes that reveal little more than the poverty of the curator’s imagination and lack of understanding about the real meanings of the works. But when a theme makes sense--as it does here--it allows viewers to view the art from a new perspective without denying the individual quirks that make one artist’s ideas vastly different from another’s.

Most of the work in the exhibit--mostly by up-and-coming younger artists--is really first-rate. Ironically, large-scale installations made by Martin Gantman and Barbara McCarren especially for the show are its weakest components, offering more posturing and pretense than insight.

Tim Hawkinson, one of the most original minds to surface in recent Southern California art, is represented in the show by 10 works in various media from the past few years.

Balanced on one slim stalk, “Key” looks somewhat like a mutant plant. The punning sculpture, which strips a door down to its working parts--key, lock, hinge, peephole--is actually a “key” (diagram) to the structure of a door. Hawkinson dissects the man-made object as if the organization of its parts were a result of organic necessity rather than human invention.

The nutty charm of Hawkinson’s “Dew Drops” conceals a sly commentary about the nature of illusion and reality. Two, three or four dewdrops shimmer convincingly on each leaf of an artificial plant. But as you keep looking, the drops begin to look awfully schematic--just white dots with white semicircles underneath them. How much artifice does it take to create the illusion of reality? How structured do we expect nature to be?

An untitled vertical black-on-white stripe painting by Hawkinson seems to be struggling to get itself in focus. The misty edges of the stripes sharpen briefly halfway down the painting, only to lapse into fuzziness again. Even the structure of the painting seems to be under stress, with in-curving sides that narrow at the center of the canvas. It’s as if the work of art has taken over--or is trying to subvert--the workings of the viewer’s own eyes and brain.

Nicolas Rule’s painting, “Fly So Free,” consists entirely of a bloodline diagram of a particular thoroughbred racehorse--a sort of family tree in which the ancestry of Fly So Free is traced back to steeds named Bold Ruler, Broadway, Swaps and Misty Morn. The chart represents the product of careful planning by numerous breeders, yet the outcome is never certain: A fine lineage does not guarantee a winner.

Despite its airtight underlying structure--almost a parody of the idea of “structure” in art--the painting is executed in loose, drippy strokes of diluted red and blue paint (suggestive both of actual blood and the “blue” blood of equestrian royalty, as well as the dilution of genetic characteristics by breeding).

In a way, the loose, painterly treatment of the chart is an equivalent of the imaginative names of some of the horses. (For example, the offspring of Bold Ruler and Broadway is Reviewer.) The catalogue of names also has a poetic quality of its own--a blend of aural rhythms and natural and cultural references, akin to lists of river names or the names of small towns.

Erwin Wurm’s untitled sculptures are all made of articles of clothing arranged to look like minimal sculptures. One piece consists of a red sweater with its sleeves joined together, hung on the wall to form a drooping semicircle. Another piece is a heavy dark wool coat folded as tightly as wrapping paper over a rectangular block. In yet another work, pants legs stretched tautly over a metal tube hanging on the wall perform a rigid “split.”

There is something unnatural and depressing about these pieces, as if the bodies that once inhabited the clothing have vanished, leaving the clothing with no useful function to perform. Instead, it contorts itself in artificial ways, as if submitting to the torture of unseen powers. The pieces seem to suggest that--coming after the long and vital tradition of sculpture based directly on the human body--the dry intellectualism of minimal and conceptual sculpture may have reached a dead end.

Buzz Spector’s works based on postcard reproductions are probably the most cerebral of all the pieces in the show. These pieces deal with the way we’ve come to know the world in the 20th Century: second-hand, through mass-produced images, rather than via first-hand experience.

In “Mondrian Scape No. 3,” on top of a postcard view of a landscape, tiny bits of paper stuck on edge form a tree-like shape. It resembles Piet Mondrian’s painted tree abstractions, made during a transitional period between his early, traditional landscapes and the strict grid system of his famous works. Mondrian devised his synthetic version of landscape out of a belief that “pure reality” could be shown only by stripping away realistic details.

Spector seems to be comparing two different kinds of distance from the real world--Mondrian’s abstracted version of nature and the fake quality of a postcard view. While Mondrian’s art was the product of a metaphysical yearning for purity, the view on a photo-postcard represents a sentimentalized form of purity--an attempt to sum up the beauty of a particular place without revealing any of its imperfections.

Carrie Ungerman makes quiet little pieces with odd, ephemeral materials (insects, soap) that deal with definitions of structure and waste materials. Her splashiest piece is an untitled mesh cape trimmed with rows of dead wasps painstakingly arranged to form a wide, “supergraphics” style arrow shape.

In fact, wasps--which are known either as “solitary” or “social,” depending on their nesting habits--have their own well-developed organizational systems. The absurdity of arbitrarily arranging dead wasps into a symbol denoting movement (an arrow) calls into question the presumed superiority of man-made systems. At the same time, a transparent garment trimmed with wasps also subverts one of the basic purposes of clothing--to shield the body.

Other Ungerman pieces are investigations into the way wasps structure their dwelling places (for example, a piece of old wood holds a tiny wasp nest, its delicate, paper-like cellular structure made of regurgitated wood fibers). Another piece--a brown panel on which wasp wings are mounted in an allover pattern, like wrapping paper--seems to be a tongue-in-cheek view of the human urge to turn natural materials into arbitrary forms of decoration.

The weaker pieces in the exhibit tend to seem boringly obvious--or just plain boring. Viewers unsure how deeply to ponder Barbara McCarren’s “Fireplace” will not be encouraged by the inept surrealist poem written on a black window shade hanging on the wall. As a meditation on the different contexts of fire, the installation seems to go to great lengths to state the obvious.

A mock-up of a fireplace with a rag rug and gleaming sconces on the wall offers a cozy notion of domestic warmth. On the other hand, a grid of photographs of famous recent fires--the burning Kuwaiti oil fields and the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots--offer fragmentary views of anguish and devastation. The magnifying glasses mounted on each photograph perversely make the imagery harder to see clearly. Does McCarren mean us to doubt the worth of close-up scrutinies of disaster? Is she saying details can be deceiving without the whole picture? It’s hard to say for sure.

Martin Gantman’s three painfully earnest installations look as though they lost something vital in translation from idea to three-dimensional form. His most ambitious piece, made in collaboration with physicist Lothar Schmitz, incorporates a TV monitor screening a potpourri of individually unattributed quotes from American and European writers (“A shell hole in its water held the whole sky”), a stack of TV monitors showing images of foaming water and what appears to be a block of ice; and a fussy tableau composed of piles of slate, a water pan and a rock.

A text on the wall mentions the “unpredictable” and “dynamic” quality of the environment, and how these qualities make us “uncomfortable.” But the piece itself mirrors none of these qualities. It has little impact, other than to test viewers’ tolerance of boredom and pretentiousness.

Similarly, Gantman’s “Dehabitation” (an arrangement of blue-painted lobby furnishings viewed through a gigantic frame) and “Appropriate Location (To See What)” (a calligraphic black-and-white painting hung above the stark black furnishings of an art gallery) embalm chic ideas about the shifting relationships between viewers and artworks in an unsubtle, pedantic approach.

“Imperfect Order” remains through Nov. 3 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave., Irvine. Hours: noon to 9 p.m. Monday, 9 a.m to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. (714) 552-1018.