"The Undiscovered Country" at the UCLA Hammer Museum

by Leslie Markle

Curator Russell Ferguson's survey of Figurative painting, "The Undiscovered Country", at the Hammer Museum, offers up an exhibition that is at once quirky and slyly understated. The title is appropriated from Shakespeare's line in Hamlet, " . . . the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will. . .". Ferguson uses this quotation as an allusion to the death of painting and creates an exhibition that weaves an elliptical and indirect path through figurative work of the last fifty years. While its premise regarding the declared demise of the medium is not to be taken seriously, its seemingly casual juxtaposition of works does lead the traveler to unexpected and sometimes ironic epiphanies about the nature of painting in this era of post-conceptual art.

The exhibit is an international showcase of more than 60 works by 23 artists whose ages span several generations. Ferguson successfully sidesteps the heavy handed and improbable teleologies of a more traditional historical approach by avoiding a chronological organization and allowing his eclectic connoisseurship to leave room for unlikely revelations. A case in point would be the sleepy, suburbanesque landscapes and self-portrait of Fairfield Porter, which are hauntingly empty in their timid pallor. These works may be seen as emblematic of Ferguson's curatorial agenda for reclaiming the marginalized. The melancholic vacancy of Porter's work sets the emotional tone of the show, which, as several reviewers have acknowledged, hits a chord of slightly dark romanticism. Ferguson's other choices for the exhibit range from a sublimely eloquent landscape by Gerhard Richter to the elegiac identity politics of Kerry James Marshall's work. In contrast to the apologists of the eighties whose aggressive assertions for a rebirth of painting in Neo-expressionism offered, in the end, nothing more than hollow necrophilandering, this exhibition provides an understated and subtle approach by simply documenting that Figurative painting has continued with a quiet, and, at times, graceful persistence. Moreover, it shows that interesting painting is not exclusively rooted in the grand gesture but more often comes in the ability of individual artists to filter the world through a unique, albeit offbeat subjectivity.

The "Undiscovered Country" traces a meandering path between the two opposing poles of photography and abstraction that, as Ferguson states in his catalogue essay, defined the visual discourse of figurative painting for more than a century. In addition, however, the exhibition makes clear that the challenges to figuration have not only come from photography's usurpation of its documentary function and truth telling facticity but also from post-conceptual art movements that foregrounded the discursive nature of representation itself. The wave of continental theory, which developed simultaneously with and later justified the myriad of postmodern movements washing over the art world in its wake, problematized both the historical tropes and genres of Western painting as well as issues of representation and identity. Artists who chose to continue with figurative work devised a plethora of stratagems and techniques to mitigate their practice largely in response to this critical discourse.

While large scale works like Souvenir I by Kerry James Marshall embrace a contemporary approach to historical painting as a forum for identity politics through African-American subject matter with glitter added, other works, like Richard Hamilton's Countdown, call into question the act of representing through a combination of painting and photographic processes. His portrayal of an Irish loyalist is filtered through multiple photographic and video techniques, leaving the viewer to grapple with a highly charged if slightly ambiguous politics. Another Hamilton painting, Soft Pink Landscape, is, in fact, one of the delights of the exhibition. Its combination of seductively decorative kitsch and fantasy landscape is wryly offset by the depiction of a finely packaged roll of pink toilet paper, literally in the foreground. Hamilton is yet another artist deservedly reclaimed through Ferguson's curatorial benevolence.

Other choices, like John Baldessari's post-studio Commissioned Series made by amateur painters and Philip Guston's existentialist laden figurative abstraction, may be more familiar and predictable although still to the point. This latter work is surely one of the few painterly paintings in the show highlighting a minor conundrum of the exhibit—namely that more than a few of the works were produced by artists who are not commonly thought of as painters. Still, like Fairfield Porter's, at the time, unfashionable assessment that it hardly matters whether a painting is abstract or representational—an observation that we easily take for granted today—it hardly matters whether a work is created by an artist who defines herself by her medium. Certainly, the layered images of nurses by Richard Prince are riddled with expressionist tropes as well as allusions to previous works (Gerhard Richter's Eight Student Nurses) giving the viewer a highly mediated allegorical experience rather than one of unmediated presence with the work.

It is telling to see these works of Prince, the poster boy for postmodern appropriation, in such close proximity to younger artists' work. Two who stand out in contrast would be Laura Owens and Mari Eastman. Owens' painting of a pony is direct and visceral in the way a Dubuffet painting might be, and Eastman's ethereal rendering of a porcelain cup with spray paint and glitter is pure visual pleasure. This latter work strikes one as the unabashed projection of the artist's dreamy fantasy life, leaving one with the suspicion that perhaps it is no longer necessary to mitigate what one loves. . . or so it would seem.

However, while works by Owens and Eastman offer up the hope of a more direct and perhaps innocent projection of subjective desire they simultaneously highlight the mediating function of representation itself. Like the work of Elizabeth Peyton (who is not represented here) they demonstrate that depictions of female desire remain a relatively scarce commodity in any medium. Consequently, it seems improbable that we may return to more deeply romantic rhetorical flourishes surrounding painting, but may be satisfied with a more world-weary recognition that these semblances occasionally tell us something about ourselves. Certainly, Ferguson's poetic and inclusive approach leaves us the space to draw our own conclusions.

publication date: January 2005