CRAIG FISHER
This is the first publication
of an essay written on the occasion of Craig Fisher's recent exhibitions
at Florence Lynch in October 2002 and Galerie Corinne Caminade, Paris,
in March/April 2003
By BARRY
SCHWABSKY
Craig Fisher Drop
Cloth Painting 2002
acryclic on raw canvas, 67 x 170 inches
This and all images courtesy Florence Lynch Gallery, New York, and Galerie
Corinne Caminade, Paris
The conflicts and antagonisms
that impinge on the place of painting in contemporary culture are innumerable,
and they've been with us for generations. In wake not only of Gerhard
Richter's work, but also that of Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, among
others, the relation of painting to photography remains contested, as
does the closely related issue of the dichotomy between representation
and abstraction-and also that between abstraction and the readymade.
Another related problem, most obviously articulated in Pop art and its
many subsequent derivates, is the one often signaled by the dichotomy
between high and popular art-although it would be more accurately articulated
as the problem of what becomes of an art whose roots are entirely in
high culture when the very division between high and low is becoming
an increasingly dated historical artifact.
Not only must any serious manifestation of painting implicitly take
a position on such issues-every indication is that it must also fix
on one or more of them as its very subject matter. A glance at the work
of Craig Fisher is sufficient to indicate certain positions that have
been taken: this art is entirely abstract and non-objective, and appears
to have found an effortless equanimity in being able to align itself
with the highest traditions of modern painting that go back through
Abstract Expressionism to the Impressionists-but in a way that never
asserts a complacent or toplofty denial of all those formerly despised
or ignored aspects of being that are now sometimes described as "abject"
or "formless."
That very equanimity suggests,
however, that the tension that would give Fisher's work its true subject
is not to be found in its vicinity. Instead, let's look for the irritant
that impels this art in less specifically aesthetic, more broadly metaphysical
terrain: in problems of human action, and specifically in the relation
of will or intention to everything that, determinate or indeterminate
as the case may be, seems to function independently of our will. The
more perceptive of the critics who have commented on Fisher's work have
always noticed the importance of this theme, David Cohen marking the
effect of a "courtly style in which volition is held to lack decorum,
but in which it is equally poor manners to betray angst in the denial
of volition" (Art Press, March 2000) where Lilly Wei found "chance
configurations" of which Fisher "acts more as agent than as
author" (Art in America, September 2000).
Every action, every event must have its stage. Isn't that why these
paintings take place on raw canvas? Canvas is preeminently the place
where painting takes place, and in order for this "taking place"
to be exposed, made evident as such, the stage too must be made to show
itself as a stage. So the canvas is that which, in the painting, has
not yet been assimilated or subsumed into painting. Or which will not
be so assimilated, one might say, until the last minute-that is, until
the fecund unity of the picture emerges from the sparseness and welter
of those seemingly stray bits of pictorial matter that float as if indifferent
to one another across the picture. The ambivalent nature of the canvas-its
hesitation to be seen as either already a manifestation of painting
or as a mere field, a readymade, on which that which is truly painting
will take place-is lightly mocked in some of Fisher's paintings by certain
passages that have been painted in a shade as close as possible to that
of the canvas itself. Fisher's ability to joke with the fundamentals
of his art in this way is, needless to say, quite distant from what
in the '80s used to be mislabeled irony, despite one commentator's having
mistaken his work for a "tongue-in-cheek conceptual exercise"
(Kim Levin, The Village Voice, October 26, 1993), which is just what
it is not. It's more like the matter-of-fact recognition that there
are, after all, more serious things in life than this-a simple matter
of keeping one's fascination with art in perspective.
Craig Fisher After
the Fall 2002
acryclic on raw canvas, 80 x 66 inches
Now as for the events that
take place on this canvas: To characterize them is either too easy or
too difficult. Pours, smears, dabs, rubbings, stains…and I can
use the thesaurus, if I care to, to expand the descriptive vocabulary
to encompass flows, discharges, smudges, spatters, traces, blots, mottlings….but
that will hardly give the reader a real sense of what these things look
like. They are of the order of material instances that are differentiated
but not individualized. Sometimes they seem to be the kind of things
that happen accidentally, but more often they seem rather to be the
sort of marks one might make intentionally and yet absently-the kind
of marks one might make in order simply to test a brush, or a particular
mixture of pigments, that one intends subsequently to put to some more
concerted use. And then there are marks that appear to be not on but
somehow of its surface-places where the canvas itself seems to buckle
and harden. These are caused by puddlings of paint on the verso-just
as certain other more or less faint discolorations have been made by
inundating the other side of the canvas with paint: another deconstruction,
if you will, of the canvas's status as ground for the events of the
painting.
It is this sense of absented
intentionality that leads me to believe that the underlying concern
of the paintings is the relation of the artist's intentions to the realm
of determinacy and indeterminacy (which is to say the realm in which
intentions are irrelevant). Wasn't that Buster Keaton's subject too?
Houses fall down around him, but Buster soldiers on as if everything
were going according to plan and, somehow, everything does work out
right. Of course, that's because his alter ego Keaton was there behind
the scenes directing the film. Craig seems, in these paintings, to be
rummaging around in the studio, spilling things, sopping up the mess,
procrastinating by trying out his new brushes, doing anything but having
a solid go at asserting his intention to make a painting-and somehow
or other, at the end of the day, there's a ravishing one anyway. Lucky
thing his alter ego Fisher was there patiently directing. To get a grasp
on the paradoxes of intention, it seems-the way you can fulfill them
by evading them, and presumably frustrate them by carrying them out
as well-you've got to be of two minds.
Craig Fisher Red
and Black Painting 2002
acryclic on raw canvas, 80 x 66 inches
