A scripted display of debris

Trash rarely looks as good as it does in Tomoko Takahashi’s “Auditorium Piece,” a great tsunami of castoff stuff that cascades down unfinished bleachers and sprawls across the stage in the ground-floor auditorium at the UCLA Hammer Museum. The rawness of the space, with its blunt concrete surfaces, exposed ductwork and other coarse innards, merges effortlessly with the tons of tattered junk the artist has piled inside to become part of the captivating scene. Urban dystopia blends with contemporary aesthetics to create an instant ruin--a Pompeii of the present.

Takahashi built the work using salvage from dumpsters, alleys, studio back lots and other sources around town, which she and a crew of assistants gathered over several weeks. The auditorium lobby includes scores of casual snapshots of the scavengers at work, stuck up on the wall with blue masking tape, while a list of helpers is scrawled in marking pen on an old projection screen nearby. Nominal screen credits, they underscore the fundamental theatricality of the piece.

Inside the auditorium, visitors are kept at the top of the raking space. A sturdy wooden railing has been erected so you can lean on your elbows and survey the scene, with or without a helpfully provided pair of binoculars. The setup recalls nothing so much as a scenic overlook on an interstate highway; Takahashi’s installation is another roadside attraction.

Natural wonders like ocean cliffs or canyon walls have been replaced, however, by mountains of shopping carts, waves of used tires, fields of battered electronic equipment and outcroppings of clock faces. There are movie props of every description, a rusted Jacuzzi, the cab of a pickup truck, lightbulbs, buckets, tin cans, the guts of a dishwasher, a basketball hoop and thousands of other ordinary things.

All of it is dusted with a light “snow” of laundry detergent, like Half Dome at Christmas. The snow puns nicely with the fuzzy, flickering light of numerous televisions, scattered artfully throughout the wreckage, while the oscillation of standing electric fans keeps the air moving. Props wave gently in the man-made breeze, like palms on a post-apocalyptic beach.

The setup loosely recalls William Wegman’s witty scenic overlook in the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego, which turns its back on La Jolla’s stunning seaside setting to face out over the suburban sprawl growing steadily to the east.

Takahashi presents contemporary social scenery for our consideration as cultural tourists. Her piece is not a documentary harangue about a social issue -- recycle now! -- nor is it a critique of the perils of consumption or the squalor of postindustrial America.

“Auditorium Piece” is instead a carefully calibrated entertainment -- a dance of debris, a scripted display of rubbish. Her trash performs.

Assemblage, which critic Peter Plagens once described as “the first home-grown California modern art,” has always relied on the theatrical possibilities latent in broken-down material goods, which were the residue of post-World War II prosperity. Classic assemblage tends to be melancholic, meditating on qualities of loss.

Takahashi, by contrast, takes the sensibility to a pumped-up extreme, which feels appropriate to our moment. It’s assemblage on steroids.

And it’s not a studio work, assembled through solitary trial and error for later public display. International art is such today that a typical well-established motif has an artist jetting to an exhibition site, gathering materials in the neighborhood upon arrival and making a new piece on deadline.

Sometimes, as with Brazilian artist Jac Leirner, the sculptural materials consist of stuff like blankets, plastic forks and sugar packets gathered on the airplane. Takahashi takes the theme to its over-the-top conclusion, hauling whole dump sites over to the friendly art museum.

Like a “three-dimensional painting” by Jessica Stockholder, the material in the auditorium looks carefully composed. The density of the mass only allows individual items to reveal themselves slowly, while their formal logic also unfolds at a leisurely pace.

Objects are arrayed with an eye toward their relationships with one another and with the viewpoint of the audience. The truck cab, for example, abruptly looms out toward the spectator from the tangle of surrounding stuff, like a postmodern Pegasus erupting in a dramatic burst of horsepower.

And where did that airplane fuselage suddenly come from? Like opera-goers, we’re invited to examine the spectacle and luxuriate in its orchestration of visual excess and sensory overload.

Interestingly, the Tokyo-born, London-based artist -- like Wegman and Stockholder -- was first trained as a painter, and came to sculpture and installation art later.

For all its Brobdingnagian tonnage, her vast assemblage work is finally a graphic composition in which spontaneity and planned choreography intertwine.

UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through Jan. 5. Closed Monday.