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“Sixteen Tons”

Broad Art Center,

New Wight Art Gallery

Open through Oct. 26

With its breadth of variety and experience, the “Sixteen Tons” exhibit is seemingly perfect for the newly inaugurated Broad Art Center.

The New Wight Gallery smells of fresh white paint, but exudes the rhetoric of powerful past art and punchy new aesthetics.

Exhibiting works ranging in media and time period, the show, which is on display through Oct. 26, encircles a large collection of varying styles, meanings and impact.

Curator Michael Darling’s title for the exhibit straddles two exclusive meanings and associations: 16, the number of artists represented, and “Sixteen Tons,” the famous country song about the misery of coal mining.

The lyrics to this antiquated labor chant oddly correspond to the cyclical nature of art: “Another day older and deeper in debt” is perhaps a nod to the nature of art as a definer of the present but also a borrower of the past.

And rightly so, as the show exhibits a selection from the archives of the past and the portfolios of the present.

The survey of original works by current and emeriti UCLA faculty members radiates significant range and purpose.

The consuming flurry of sight and sound overwhelms the senses, as a pole of rainbow food towers over a boxed-in video installation of a wailing widow at her deceased’s funeral.

Aesthetically harmonious and provocative, the exhibition takes patience and dedication.

With 16 artists and at least seven types of media, the small exhibit harboring 27 pieces is a tour de force, and a complicated one at that. Yet a tour of the gallery manages to showcase a significant selection of art, surveying composition, form, content and material.

Paul McCarthy’s video projection with sound from 1973 emits sloppy noises and grotesque actions, creating debauched chaos that arouses terror and lust in the onlooker.

McCarthy’s oeuvre is rooted in his vision of painting, performance and sculpture as parallel and intimately related. McCarthy has influenced a fascination for the abject and a penchant for grotesque and baroque aesthetics.

Opposing in style and vision, Lari Pittman’s 1987-1988 piece, “Where the soul intact will shed its scabs (8624 A.D.),” flutters with colorful decoration and symbolism.

Pittman’s piece is an ardent declaration of the significance of decorative traditions amidst a sea of grave contemporary paradigms.

The most recent pieces include John Baldessari’s “Prima Facie: Innocence/Sweet Naiveté,” which exposes displaced photograph fragments and juxtaposed text, and Barbara Drucker’s 2006 piece, “Bread and Death.”

“Bread” is a boxed-in video projection reiterating the privileged and fetishized position of the viewer. Both contemporary pieces suggest the separation of the visual sign and the implied signifier, forcing the observer to question the state of reality as molded by displaced signs.

With such a complex review, “Sixteen Tons” is an experience that teaches and delights.

The survey of these 16 artists bolsters the breadth of modern and contemporary art, and solidifies the UCLA art community in a substantial position for lasting fortitude.

E-mail Ashmore at aashmore@media.ucla.edu.