Is TMA's New Show A Sign Of The Times? By Margaret Regan NEW FIGURATION IS the name of the current show at the Tucson Museum of Art but the images in it first catapulted onto the art scene a decade ago. Most of the 22 paintings in the exhibition were painted in the early to mid-'80s, the tumultuous days of the freewheeling high-stakes art market. Nouveau art superstars barely out of grad school rebelliously began painting the human body, often deliberately badly, turning against their professors' cool lessons of abstract expressionism, minimalism and conceptualism. They took exuberant inspiration from previously verboten comic books and graffiti, and from the artier innovations of the new figurative painters from Europe. Unusual for sleepy Tucson, the show lets locals get a gander at the work of ex-star David Salle, whose reputation flashed and burned like a comet, and East Village icons Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, whose lives were famously extinguished by AIDS. There's a serious, major work on Latin American terrorism by Leon Golub, a politically engaged artist from an older generation, and a couple of intricate monochromes by Mark Tansey, the intellectual of the new work. Other big names are Susan Rothenberg, Mike Kelley and Kenny Scharf. In fact, the exhibition, drawn from the Eli Broad Family Foundation collection in Santa Monica, "makes a good cross-section of what was happening in the '80s," says curator Joanne Stuhr. Cautioning that the work "was so different from artist to artist," she nevertheless points to several common themes. "There was a re-devotion to the figure in art. Artists were responding against the cerebral qualities of the '70s and early '80s. Haring and Scharf represent a reaction against the elitism of museums. They started out as graffiti artists. But they all had a very different take on the figure: It was an expression of emotion. There was neo-expressionism and 'bad painting'." A good example of the bad painting is "The Harvest" by Richard Bosman. Huge--8 feet by 8 feet--like so many of these audacious works, this 1981 oil on canvas is deliberately constructed to look like the work of a schoolkid. There's a big golden wheat field, a conventional blue sky and fluffy clouds. But there's something sinister going on. One man lies bleeding and dead on the road by the field, and another man, dressed in the classic gray flannel suit of the '50s, has emerged anxiously from his '50s-style auto. Everything is badly drawn on purpose: The shapes are awkward and neither man is truly tethered to the ground. Bosman here challenges the sacred craftsmanship and fine painting prized by the abstract expressionist of the previous generation. In defiance of the cerebral minimalists he puts content, even kitschy content, into his art. Everything and nothing is art. The bulk of these artists were small children in the '50s, when television and electronic advertising were first making their frontal assault on human consciousness. Fifties imagery shows up frequently, sometimes as talismans of memory and the past, sometimes as deadpan appropriations from the all-pervasive commercial soup in which we live our lives. Scharf's ugly "Inside Out" from 1984 has everything to do with old-style comic books, and so do Haring's more elegantly simplified figures, even though they aspire to a kind of spirituality that Scharf's work lacks. In Salle's "Savagery and Misrepresentation," a 1981 acrylic on canvas, two female figures are dressed in '50s fashions, complete with the pointy rocket breasts de rigueur in that epoch. There's also a camel-faced guy in a suit--an advertising reference--and a couple of art-school nudes, making for a clunky symphony of image appropriations. The intellectual Tansey goes even further with his appropriations, using them not only as thumbnail references to trends and ideas, but as symbols. "A Short History of Modernist Painting," an oil on canvas done in 1979 and 1980, at first glance appears to be a work of pure irony. It's a series of snapshot-size pictures painted in monochromatic blue-gray or brown, each in the clunky advertising style of several decades ago, a style worlds away from modernist painting. A boy anxiously scans his chin for pimples (think of Clearasil ads), a woman runs the washing machine and makes the bed (does she have tired blood ready for a cure by Geritol?) On one level, these images from popular culture point out that modernist painting has long been divorced from common life and from common understanding. On another, as Artnews critic Nancy Stapen has pointed out, this piece is a symbolic rendering of the battles in contemporary art: A brick wall is about the high status of the flat canvas in the '50s, a pothole is a reference to earth art, a linoleum grid is a parody of minimalism. These were the battles that the '80s artists were waging, with greater and lesser success, in their East Village storefront galleries and in cushy Soho venues. If their free use of everything seems sometimes to betray a belief in nothing, this collection of their works at the very least is an accurate portrait of their times. New Figuration: Selections from the Eli Broad Family Foundation continues through June 2 at the Tucson Museum of Art, 140 N. Main Ave. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Closed Mondays from Memorial Day through Labor Day. For more information call 624-2333.

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