Always expect the unexpected

What does it look like on the other side of death’s curtain? While most imagine ferrymen or cherubs, drifting clouds or reeking smoke, Russell Ferguson sees a revolver firing very slowly, a once-glamorous Czech hotel lobby that looks as if it was rendered with nail polish, or preppy painter Fairfield Porter standing quietly in a sunlit room. They’re some of the paintings he has assembled for a show about the death of painting.

“You wouldn’t conventionally, or art-historically, put these artists together,” Ferguson says as he surveys “The Undiscovered Country,” the idiosyncratic exhibition he curated at the UCLA Hammer Museum. His deeply personal show, which Times reviewer David Pagel called an “unabashed partisan” exhibition dedicated to a “damaged romanticism,” tries to use startling juxtapositions and odd groupings to look at paintings freshly.

Ferguson’s challenge is to present 60 canvases in a medium whose demise has been declared many times over, whether because of the ambush of photography, the intellectual assault of Conceptualism or an art market that reduced painting to a commodity. The title comes, with a characteristic understated humor, from a description of the afterlife in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

“The academic painter Paul Delaroche said as soon as he saw his first daguerreotype, in 1839, ‘Painting is dead,’ ” the burly, bearded Ferguson, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, says in a soft burr that’s always on the verge of disappearing into his chest. “On one hand, photography haunts the show, and abstraction haunts it on the other.”

Ferguson doesn’t want to force the concept -- he knows some find the idea of painting’s death a bit musty too -- but he sees painting as growing more interesting, in some cases more painterly, because of its embattled status.

Whether exhuming representative works, collecting pieces associated with the New York School poet Frank O’Hara or presenting the work of musician and artist Christian Marclay, who creates sculptures of melted record albums and unplayable musical instruments, Ferguson has compiled some of Los Angeles’ most unorthodox exhibitions. While extroverted director Ann Philbin is the Hammer’s public face, the reticent, self-deprecating Ferguson has helped generate the museum’s reputation for the unexpected.

Philbin, who hired Ferguson from L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art in January 2001 and appointed him chief curator, calls him “a real connoisseur, a curator with an eye for unusual and under-recognized artists” and a cosmopolitan with a “deeply poetic, eccentric sensibility.”

Ferguson’s own sense of his method is hard to describe. “I really don’t want to be bored,” he says; his earliest enthusiasms -- literature and rock music -- often glimmer from behind the shows he assembles. “And I don’t want to be the kind of curator who does the same show over and over again. So I try to be as open as I can. And I try to withhold judgment from a work as long as possible.”

The solo exhibitions he has curated have been eclectic: sculptor Liz Larner and video artist Douglas Gordon at MOCA, photographer Jeff Wall at the Hammer.

Paul Schimmel, chief curator at MOCA, brought Ferguson to Los Angeles from New York as editor of MOCA’s publications in 1991.

“He has a light, deft touch -- and there’s a humor and intelligence that informs the choices,” Schimmel says.

He adds that Ferguson has “a little bit of the poet in him,” which goes beyond his interest in literature and language. “The Undiscovered Country” and Ferguson’s 1999 MOCA show on O’Hara, “In Memory of My Feelings,” were grounded in metaphors -- he saw O’Hara’s life as creating “a lens” on his time and place -- instead of straight art-historical arguments.

“And the poet side allows him to touch on something, to make a visual association, without making it a labored or scientific approach,” Schimmel says. “It gives him a broader sweep.”

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Spotlighting the overlooked

Ferguson is staring at the Porter canvas again, one of three he has put in the show by the unfashionable, low-key artist once dismissed as a Sunday painter.

“Porter was a bit out of step; he painted in a period dominated by abstraction,” he says. “I’m drawn to figures like that, whose work is very serious but who are kind of overlooked. And I wanted to see his paintings alongside newer work -- where his pieces seem very contemporary.” He does the same thing with Richard Hamilton, a British artist who largely dropped off the map after his early Pop work, and finds unusual ways to frame Germany’s well-established Gerhard Richter.

When he looks at Porter’s “Self-Portrait,” (1968) Ferguson sees what he calls “a quiet, stubborn confidence,” a phrase he says applies to the persistence of the medium of painting. It also describes his own style.

“He has this rather easygoing quality to him,” Schimmel says. “But he’s very firm -- you could say he can be stubborn on something he feels strongly, intellectually, about.”

It may be that stubbornness and commitment to his own counsel that moved Ferguson into a position as chief curator after only three years in the field.

Ferguson’s earliest training was in literature: He wrote his thesis on Mark Twain as part of his English degree at Scotland’s Stirling University. As a student he was more interested in bringing rock bands to campus than gazing at paintings.

When he moved to New York in 1980, in part for the openness he saw in the U.S., he found a milieu around art that resembled what he’d known in the rock world. “There was a broad audience for contemporary art at the time, in New York, that I didn’t see in Britain.” He started going to galleries and museums and taking odd jobs hanging shows.

In 1986 he was hired as special projects editor and librarian at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art -- he remains what he calls a compulsive reader of topics as varied as jazz memoirs and the “romantic miserablism” of English poet Philip Larkin -- and after five years there, he came to MOCA.

His roots are unsurprising to those who know Ferguson’s prose. Even a detractor of the Hammer show, the LA Weekly’s Doug Harvey, calls Ferguson’s exhibition catalog “one of the best pieces of writing on the problems facing painters today.”

“I don’t have a problem with a highly technical vocabulary if it describes highly technical ideas,” Ferguson says. “But I’m committed to the idea that it’s possible to write about contemporary art without loading it up with a lot of jargon that closes off the audience.”

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Three M Project

Ferguson’s next project is part of an unusual collaboration with the New Museum and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that will allow the Hammer to commission and exhibit new work by young artists. The first fruit of what’s called the Three M Project will be a summer exhibition by New York video artist Patty Chang.

His thematic shows, Ferguson says, tend to come together as he juggles three or four ideas in his head, taking notes on pieces he likes and wondering if he can combine them in illuminating ways. With his range of interests, it’s hard to figure out what he’ll come up with next.

He’s cagey when asked if he has another thematic show up his sleeve. “There are things,” he says, “that need to marinate for a while.”

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‘The Undiscovered Country’

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

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: Jan. 16

Price: Adults $5, seniors $3; students and children free

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

Also

Russell Ferguson will moderate a panel, free with museum admission, with four artists from “The Undiscovered Country” at 3 p.m. Sunday.