The next big ‘Thing’ in L.A.

As exhibition titles go, “Thing” is perfect. At once a blunt statement and an implied question that doesn’t quite know what to make of the art gathered together under its banner, it neatly encapsulates the energy and provocation that makes this show so refreshing.

“Thing: New Sculpture From Los Angeles” is the best museum survey of new art that I’ve seen in a very long time. It opened Sunday at the UCLA Hammer Museum for a four-month run and will not travel. The show surveys 51 examples of recent sculpture by 20 younger L.A. artists, 11 men and nine women, few of whom have had wide exposure. They range in age from 25 to 40, with most around 30.

“Thing” chronicles a return to prominence of object-sculpture, a category that has taken a back seat to installation-oriented sculpture, video, photography and painting for -- well, for decades. Artists never stopped making representational and referential objects by hand, of course, just as they didn’t stop painting when painting’s demise was asserted 30 years ago. It’s just that sculpture since the 1970s has tended to have more environmental concerns.

Sculpture spread out into the room -- sometimes even becoming the room, as it approached the condition of architecture and landscape art. Three-dimensional form became an agent for exploring the physical, social and psychological space in which contemporary art gets made.

Objects were built by hand, gathered from the industrial shop or bought at the thrift store. They got scattered across the floor, lined up on shelves, displayed in cases, moved outdoors, presented as tableaux, attached to walls, blown up to monumental proportions and more. Sculpture moved far away from its standard dictionary definition -- figures or designs in the round or in relief, made by chiseling stone, modeling clay or casting in metal.

The last time a museum surveyed new L.A. sculpture -- the Santa Monica Museum’s modest yet ingratiating 2000 show “Mise en Scene” -- its title announced the established distinction. A mise en scene is an arrangement of scenery and props, which means to represent the place where a play or movie is enacted.

“Thing” is not about artists constructing sets for experiences shaped by mass-media saturation. Instead, as conceived by Hammer curators James Elaine and Aimee Chang and independent curator Christopher Miles, it’s about pulling those far-flung objects back into more self-contained dimensions.

Take the sculptures by Joel Morrison and Jedediah Caesar, which do the job quite literally. If we’re used to artists taking stuff from their studios and spreading it liberally around the gallery, these artists start by sweeping up studio trash into piles and embalming it in discrete blobs.

Morrison’s sculptures are made from bundles of garbage that are carefully cast in shiny aluminum or slick fiberglass. The swelling, lumpy, irregular forms that result are raised on pedestals. His work echoes Modern precedents like Brancusi and Henry Moore, but without the idealization that characterizes their very different work. Morrison glorifies the ordinary, turning sow’s ears into strange silk purses.

Caesar cast his big bundle of junk, “1,000,000 A.D.,” in heavy resin. Then he carefully sawed the giant boulder into thick slices, which lean against the wall. The result resembles a cross between a geode and a time capsule, with nature subsumed by cultural waste. The slick, flat, highly polished surfaces embedded with stuff -- magazines, wood scraps, old cans, etc. -- look almost photographic. But the bulky materiality of the chunk of sculpture makes a disconcerting contrast.

That contrast -- between spectral image and blunt object, between picture and thing -- may be a larger motivating factor for the return of object-sculpture celebrated here. Hannah Greely recalls an earlier example of this polarity in “Molly and Johnny,” a sculpture composed from two painted polyester-resin casts of Budweiser beer bottles.

Jasper Johns’ famous 1960 bronze sculpture of a pair of Ballantine ale cans, one sealed (and presumably full) and the other opened (and visibly empty) made an intoxicating conundrum out of the industrial notion of mass-produced copies. His two cans are identical copies of an actual beer can, but they also copy each other -- except, of course, for that little problem of whether the copy is empty or full. Greely’s sculpture knowingly recalls Johns’ precedent, but she recognizes that we’ve moved on.

Today we’re in the midst of a postindustrial dilemma. One of Greely’s beer bottles is full, but the other is smashed to pieces, strewn in a puddle of brew. In our new digital universe, virtual realities demolish the very idea of difference between original and copy. A pixel is a pixel is a pixel.

Empty imagery provokes a strong desire for frank physical substance -- for art you can scrape your shin on. The phenomenon claims a profound legacy in progressive American culture.

“No ideas but in things,” as the poet William Carlos Williams put it, with characteristic economy, in 1946. Then the world was staggering to regain its bearings after the shattering experience of global war. Today, with progressive and pragmatist values under withering assault by reactionary, conservative and establishment forces, and with war a continual fixture of our lives, it is heartening to bump into “Thing.”

A cynic might suggest that a revival of object-sculpture is also a market-driven phenomenon, since discrete objects move through the economic apparatus of the gallery, private collection, museum show and auction house with greater ease than shaggier, more ephemeral art. There is truth to that. But discrete objects are no more (or less) consumable than any other kind of art.

If we’ve learned anything since the flood of private money began to flow into the art world in the 1980s, it’s that living in a market economy means that standing outside the marketplace is a utopian fiction. “Thing” grapples with fact.

Rodney McMillian blends appropriation art into old-fashioned found-object sculpture in a work composed solely from sheets of decorative wood paneling salvaged from a room in an ordinary suburban tract house. Leaning against a gallery wall, it subsumes the Minimalist power of a Richard Serra sculpture and the Conceptual blankness of an Imi Knoebel painting ensemble into something weirdly moving and poignant.

McMillian’s sculpture also recalls the work of Robert Gober; a lot of “Thing” is keenly aware of prominent recent art. Perhaps the most commonly encountered sculptural precedents are the abject work of Mike Kelley, the perceptual conundrums of Charles Ray and the robust accumulations of Nancy Rubins. Their influence is not surprising, since they teach in Los Angeles and 16 of these 20 artists went to school here.

But “Thing” roams far and wide. Chuck Moffit’s customized car morphs into a fantastic fetus. Kate Costello’s powerful bulbous shape made from crumbling cement supported on spindly legs looks like a cross between a sheep and a ship. Krysten Cunningham makes forms that pointedly suggest scientific information -- a DNA strand, a satellite -- from colorful yarn and sticks, their pattern wryly derived from the type of Huichol Indian weaving known as a God’s eye.

Putting homemade terra-cotta sculptures derived from pre-Columbian Moche civilization atop pedestals that copy Minimalist sculpture by Tony Smith, Nathan Mabry simultaneously draws on and deflates the power of cultural myth. A broken-down 1950s hot rod and a tattered baby grand piano, both built from dry and brittle slabs of clay by Kristin Morgin, look like rotting animal carcasses. And Olga Koumoundouros wraps the timbers of her log construction in white plaster, turning allusions to the humble honesty of an Abe Lincoln-style cabin into a rickety prison built from broken limbs.

A powerful group of tall, gangly works by Lara Schnitger is made from fabric and old clothing stretched over spindly wooden sticks. The towering forms allude to human figures, but the “bodies” glimpsed inside this “clothing” are alternately distended and emaciated -- at once disturbing and playful, resilient and mutant.

Less convincing is the pair of sleek black monoliths -- part John McCracken Minimalist planks, part studio prop from “2001: A Space Odyssey” -- by Lauren Bon, each printed with a giant photo-enlargement of a Chinese ancestor sculpture. Similarly coy and academic are Kaz Oshiro’s formulaic sculptures built from paintings, which like Bon’s also merge Pop art subject matter with forms from Minimalist art.

Perhaps the slyest piece here is Matt Johnson’s unforgettable “Breadface,” a little souvenir cast in plastic from the heel of a not especially appetizing loaf of commercially baked bread and painted with illusionistic precision. Johnson poked holes into the slice for eyes and a mouth, like a kid who’s been playing with his food. In the process, the staff of life became a haunting mask -- at once primeval and crummy.

If a dominant sensibility runs through this show, “Breadface” crystallizes it. “Thing” is a chronicle of the re-materialization of art, in an era when decay and degradation are everywhere encountered. The best of this sculpture signals an anxious reinvestment of faith in the potential power of a creative object, when it strains against the prevailing dissolution.

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‘Thing’

Where: Hammer Museum, UCLA, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays

Ends: June 5

Price: $5 for adults, $3 for seniors

Contact: (310) 443-7000, www.hammer.ucla.edu