AT THE GALLERIES:There’s no O.C. in O.C. art?

Take a cross-section of works of art in any given period and you’d see a much greater amount of diversity than you might have believed. What lives and what dies in art is a matter of contemporary taste. An artist we now consider “immortal” could fall out of favor — and off the museum walls — tomorrow.

So it’s a real challenge to try to see through the fog of the common into something really interesting, something that speaks beyond today.

But wait a minute. That attitude is so passé. Artists don’t seek immortality anymore. They don’t look for greatness. What the hippest, coolest among them want above all else is to be contemporary. To speak only for today.

If you’re looking to get a concentrated shot of what that might mean, do not miss “OsCene 2006: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC,” on view at the Laguna Art Museum through Jan. 21.

The artists are all based in Orange County, but let’s take these three terms (contemporary, art and culture) one at a time and see how they work in the exhibit.

What does it mean to be contemporary in art? Is it just the accident of time? I think when we say contemporary, it’s assumed we mean something that looks to the present for inspiration rather than the past.

Ever since Rene Magritte announced in his painting of a pipe that “This is not a pipe,” representational painting has been called into question. (It’s titled “The Treachery of Images,” by the way, and has a whole installation built around it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art right now.)

So if you’re going to paint representationally in contemporary art, you better be doing it ironically, like watercolorist Moria Hahn, who paints fantastically detailed renditions of Japanese classical woodcuts that feature cats and birds as the main characters. She calls these “remixes,” playing of the modern term for mixing songs together electronically.

There is a wealth of symbolic painting in this exhibit, ranging from the dark, Charles Addams-like work of Matthew Price (check out “Garden of Apathy”) to Joe Biel’s absurdist “Ground,” a marvelously executed work on paper.

You might also consider work that turns its back on “painting” altogether as “contemporary”: the installation. Installation art has been a fixture in contemporary art since the 1970s. Artists take readily available materials and occupy “space” with them, carefully arranging them to create an “experience” that attempts to aggressively question the viewer’s assumptions.

There are a surprising number of installations here — nearly schizophrenic in variety and approach.

The most complex by far is Richard Turner’s “The Poetic Geography of Saigon,” which has it all: It takes up space with sculpture, places found objects, uses a meta-reference to museum walls and involves post-structuralist references (literary critic Walter Benjamin). What’s missing, you ask? That’s right — there’s also a small video player. You could spend all of your time at the museum studying Turner’s labyrinthine comment on a labyrinthine city.

But there is also “bricolage” going on here — the use of found objects in ways out of their context, and yet another mark of the contemporary. Take Alvin Gregorio’s “Anobangproblemadito,” which features a tent made out of bricks and strips of fabric, or Delvin Hanson’s “Circles of State.” It’s a complex composition of cables and connectors and neon that produces a moving and ever-changing series of rotating circles.

This starts to raise that ultimate of philistine questions, “Is this art?” Perhaps we should think first about that word “culture” that’s in the title. If asked, could you define your own culture? Perhaps this is ultimately what makes art contemporary: it’s an attempt to express some aspect of culture back to itself.

You may love the weirdness of seeing Dave Silva’s little twisted versions of “Bob’s Big Boy” dolls or you may hate Rick Reitveld’s painting of bikini-clad male fantasy as Shiva the Destroyer surrounded by monster trucks. But this is what’s going on. You run the risk of sentimentality — or worse, romanticism — to dismiss the voices of these artists.

They have picked up materials at hand and, in Shelley’s words, made themselves unacknowledged legislators of the world. And this exhibit packs a huge punch of art, culture and the contemporary in a very small space.

I’ve left out one of the key terms of the exhibit, saving it for last. There’s almost nothing on these walls that marks this art as particularly “Orange County.” The exception is the rather gimmicky and unfortunately named “Legacy Project” (the name of numerous victims’ rights organizations) which turned a hanger on the El Toro Air Base into a giant camera. Certainly, the artists all seem to live here, but few of them are from O.C., and try as I might, I found nothing particularly recognizable as “Orange Countyesque.”

Then it occurred to me that the repression of geography might be what they all had in common — a kind of club of exclusion or a silent agreement that Orange County isn’t a place to talk about in contemporary language. This is also a familiar concept in contemporary art and culture, that something may be most present in its absence.