SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Diversity : After a six-year hiatus, the Assembly of Arts exhibition is back with a Ventura show featuring 23 works culled from 300 entries.

General purpose group art shows can be exercises in sorting out apples and oranges. Without a common curatorial theme to connect the artwork, pell-mell is a real danger. But in the case of the 10th Annual Assembly of Arts exhibition at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, the show makes for a nice window on the diversity of art in the area.

Although the competition was launched in 1977, there was a six-year hiatus until this year--but the hiatus didn’t extend to the artists. The current show is composed of 23 works picked from 300 entries.

Some of the pieces have been seen in local art spaces and deserve another, longer look. Awarding first place to Richard Peterson is more than a politically correct gesture. His work, “It is Finished--John 19:30,” is a chilling, but also compassionate, depiction of a recently deceased AIDS patient. The patient’s limp body is handled impersonally by hospital workers, but it resembles the body of Christ being taken down from the crucifix in a painting above the hospital bed.

The intensity of Peterson’s image makes it hard to focus on the more frivolous--if pleasant--floral subjects.

The Ojai-based Russian visitor Slava Sukhorukov has, thankfully, shown his densely allegorical paintings around town frequently (including a current show at the Ventura County Government Center). His cryptic “Game,” here given third place, finds a card-playing dandy in a surreal jail cell.

Other pieces of note: Jane McKinney’s neo-constructivist sculpture has a certain brute charm; Alberta Fins’ mixed media/mixed message inner landscape is appealingly enigmatic; Hiroko Yoshimoto presents one of her 3-D mutant butterflies, and Jacqueline Cavish’s cityscape pivots on the duality of urban and historical themes.

Of course, aesthetics and awards are in the eye of the beholder/jurist. In second place is Elisse Pogofsky Harris’ “Theatre of the Night I,” a neatly painted lark with a glib, slick mysticism-for-its-own-sake theme.

We hereby grant the “Most Strangely Compelling Award” to Suzanne Schechter’s “Sweetheart.” With warm, loose brush strokes, the artist depicts a chunky, homely gal literally sinking into a book and fading into her overstuffed chair. Moreover, she--the figure in the painting, that is--sinks into a whirling pool of unfettered brush strokes. You get that sinking feeling, in the best sense.

Swan song: In her 28 years at the UCSB Art Museum, curator Phyllis Plous has closely charted the rather erratic evolution of conceptual art, and has often presented her findings in the public forum of the museum. It is perhaps fitting, then, that her swan song exhibition (she retired at the end of the last school year) should be an overview of conceptual art.

Despite the somewhat limited space of the museum, Plous and co-curator Frances Colpitt have offered a rewarding sampler in conceptual art, that elusive, powerfully influential and barely marketable niche of the art world.

The esoteric nature of conceptual art has kept it both in the closet and commercially marginal, while postmodern art of the last decade--more immediately gratifying and more garish--has commanded attention and hefty price tags.

Yet it can be argued that the intellectual revolution quietly waged by the conceptualists beginning in the ‘60s set the stage for much of what has come since.

The conceptualists felt the need to go even further than the minimalists in paring art down to its essence. They posed implicit questions, such as: Is art a product-oriented craft or an investigative practice whose goal is the distillation of ideas?

Ideas, of course, are godly in the ranks of conceptualists, whose actual works are often less physically impressive, inherently attractive or readily symbolic than they are vehicles of hidden and/or personal meaning. This, by and large, is art that you can’t easily put your finger on.

This cult of ideas within the movement--thinking about art, and thinking about thinking--can tend to fold in on itself. The results can be quite funny.

John Baldessari, one of conceptualism’s gurus, shows a painting from 1967 consisting simply of the declaration: “EVERYTHING IS PURGED FROM THIS PAINTING BUT ART; NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK.” Another prominent early conceptualist, Joseph Kosuth, dealt with the relationship of language and meaning in the world. His “Art as Idea as Idea: Nothing” is a white-on-black blowup of a dictionary definition of the word “nothing.”

Kosuth’s “One and Three Hammers” presents three views of the subject in question--an actual hammer, a photograph of said hammer and a dictionary definition. Thus, we get to know the hammer through its concrete reality, a 2-D facsimile thereof, and a purely intellectual accounting of the object.

The show entails sound as well as sight and space. Through speakers in different rooms, a man and a woman take turns uttering words courtesy of Robert Barry’s sound piece. The effect changes from puzzling to hypnotic the longer you linger in the gallery.

Of more recent, and regional, post-conceptual art, artists freely glance backward and refer to art history. Steven Prina’s project is based on an ironically mathematical analysis of Manet’s oeuvre .

Los Angeles-based Buzz Spector provides the show’s visual dazzler: “Malevich: Eight Red Rectangles” finds red “books” of varying sizes on the floor, corresponding to rectangular cavities in the wall. It’s as if the gallery wall itself--the omniscient artistic plane--has given birth to volumes on the Russian art revolution, on the proto-conceptualist Kasmir Malevich and on Spector himself.

It’s no real surprise that the books’ pages are blank, such as those gag books, i.e. “The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew.” Conceptualists are nothing if not gadflies, probing conventional wisdoms and making up rules as they go.

Riddles accost the viewer an all fronts in this show. At best, the work questions the authority and the materiality of art--not to mention the galleries that house art.

But some of the gambits in this house of games seem merely clever or, at this stage, not worth the trouble of deciphering.

Doing more with less can become a badge of honor with conceptualists. Some ideas fit on the head of a pin, or, in the case of Barry’s “Telepathic Piece” of 1969, the page of a small art announcement. We read: “During the exhibition, I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image.”

Twenty-three years later, that wee paragraph--an artwork with no budget for materials and virtually no collector’s appeal, now tucked away in the back gallery--somehow sticks in the memory and pricks thought. That it does so is testament to the power of the idea, even in this show-me age.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* 10th Annual Assembly of Arts exhibition, at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St. in Ventura, through Feb. 16.

* “Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art” at the UCSB Art Museum, through Feb. 23.