Cora Cohen

“Paintings To Walk By”

Cora Cohen in conversation with Manfred Engeser – about ideas and sources of inspiration, stupid paintings, works from outer space and being an artist during a pandemic lockdown

Manfred Engeser: Cora, since spring 2020, the world is caught in the clutches of the COVID-19 pandemic. Has the lockdown affected your life and work?
Cora Cohen: I’m happy and very grateful to be alive, healthy, be in a stable economic situation. Just being able to continue working feels like a real privilege, a luxury. Having my studio in walking distance from my home is great. But on the other hand, the pandemic has affected my life in general and my work as an artist in particular.

ME: To which extent?
CC: I have become acutely aware of the privileged life I’ve led. This COVID thing hangs over everything. Although right now it feels as if the worst is over, at least in this part of the world, everything one does needs more work, more time, more money. In the beginning of the pandemic, when it was suggested that everyone who could stay home, should stay home, not going to my studio was difficult. It felt rather strange to me as I’m a studio person: I like to come to the studio, that’s how I work.

ME: How did you handle that gap?
CC: I wanted to go back to my own beginnings as a painter – my love of making things with my hands. So I started making work in our living room, going back into small unfinished paintings and drawings from various periods of my life that I had left unfinished and then abandoned. My sense that life was not infinite and that what I had not finished might never be finished unless I did so right away took over. The works I made in the spring of 2020 had that sense of urgency. Because they had been begun at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between life and death, life and the possibility of an afterlife, and between the past and a radically uncertain future. For a long time I’ve felt every moment of life was crucial in relation to my work.

ME: So all things considered the pandemic seemed to have triggered a boost of creativity and inspiration for you?
CC: Oh no, far from that. The degree of isolation I was experiencing in the beginning of the pandemic was not at all inspirational – it was just difficult. I upgraded our wine, I supported as many people as I could, I tried to make everything around me beautiful. I felt that was a reasonable way of living in the present. Making life better for myself and others became a new category of my daily routine. As the pandemic went on, I realized I was suffering from that isolation and without an end in sight. I missed closeness to people, and still do. I like being around others.

ME: Even though the boost of digitization helped to stay in touch with family and friends quite easily in these difficult times?
CC: Communicating through all these digital devices, even though it saves time, takes away energy. The lack of interaction with friends or just people, not even friends, but just people with whom one has ordinary contact was a real deprivation, and then not being able to visit museums and galleries: everything was very frustrating.

ME: Rather than frustrating one might experience such an inevitable isolation as an opportunity for higher concentration …
CC: It’s kind of true in that I moved to a new studio December 2019, before it was suggested that people limit their interactions with the outside. And I liked the slow getting-acquainted period I was having with the space. At the same time, a lot of the physical and practical stuff that was supposed to happen, like works going out and racks being built, was stalled.

ME: You described yourself as a studio person. What are the differences between the old and your new space – and what’s inspiring about the new place?
CC: It’s really quiet and serene when no one else is in the building. And I soon realized that here in my new place, the relationship of the inside space to the outside world is different. At the start of being here, in addition to seeing water and barges and trains, I could also see debilitated military veterans from the shelter for homeless veterans across the way. The inside space and the outside world are more continuous and, as such, that called to mind my thoughts about New York City in 2007, when my studio was in Chelsea and Chelsea was changing to a place for luxury and I was becoming acutely aware of the neighborhood’s income disparities.

ME: How did these thoughts affect your work?
CC: I had asked my studio helpers to stay home – I just didn’t want them to get sick because they came to work with me – I began doing the prep myself, just one step at a time. I was feeling real pressure to make something beautiful in the face of the criminally unnecessary deaths and degradation of many. What we all have realized in the recent months: life can be very complex. And, for a while now, life is asking us a lot of difficult questions.

ME: Does art help you find answers?
CC: No. I’m happy to still be able to go to the studio most of the time. I can draw at home, no problem. The way I work I hardly depend on other people. On the other hand, interacting with the world is essential. Of course, still a lot of my energy comes from within, but a lot of it is derived from without.

ME: Looking back to the early nineties, another pandemic seems to have inspired you from without: the AIDS epidemic which led you to your series of altered x-rays.
CC: I began the altered x-rays in response to the AIDS epidemic, and the x ray films themselves were all of people who had died of AIDS. When I worked on those x rays, I was furious – really angry! People I knew died – and died awful deaths because the US government refused to take AIDS seriously due to fear and prejudice. Maybe only I and a few others recall that and think about it, still. Due to medicine’s neglect of the issue, and the bullshit of the government, because those affected, were gay or trans or addicts who used needles, there were a tremendous number of unnecessary deaths.

ME: And what exactly did you do with the x-rays?
CC: l tried to burn and destroy the films. And found how indestructible they were. I tried to respond to the disease with both destruction and creation. At times I chose to mirror the ravages of the disease, at times I attempted to eradicate it. In the late nineties, I began to include the films of strangers, friends, and colleagues with a wider variety of disorders. Films from other, newer imaging techniques, like sonogram and neuromagnetic resonance, as well as exposed roentgenographs, began to supply the physical support and an elusive image. But the images of an x-ray are viewed usually in the event of disease and illness, and one doesn’t know exactly what one is looking at. Certainty is supplanted by ambivalence. The transitory becomes the mode of operation. The influence of the transitory is noticeable, at least to me, in all of my work.

ME: Like how?
CC: Usually, I work to understand things I haven’t understood. Although I retained that attitude during my isolation in the early part of Covid19, I was not exempt from the momentous and clear caste of BLM and Social Justice movement. In the face of the ugliness of our culture, I had the desire to make things as beautiful as I could. And I wanted to finish as many works as I could because I had an acute feeling that life was finite. Somewhat connected to this, I found that chance and accident, which had played a part in my work for a long time, were elements that I wanted to harness in a different way – more in service to a melodic beauty.

ME: How did that change the process and result of your work?
CC: As I began to question my reliance on chance and accident, I began to deploy it less. I had thought that by using a brush I was being more deliberate, but then I realized: There’s plenty of chance and accident with a brush stroke, particularly when using water-based paint as I was. And I turned towards working more on paper since the start of the pandemic.

ME: Why paper?
CC: Paper gives you more flexibility, you just can get rid of it quickly and easily. Looking at very early works of mine recently, from when I still was in college and immediately after, I saw that they were very interesting as paintings on paper. They would feel almost over-produced as paintings on linen. In contrast, some of the paintings I’ve been doing in the last few years could exist on paper.

ME: It was because of your paintings you’ve often been associated with Abstract Expressionism. What has changed your perception of your early paintings?
CC: Nothing. In the early eighties many people thought I was in that tradition, and in many ways the work I was doing then was I did deploy seemingly free brushwork. But before then, in the sixties, at Bennington College, my works could have been described as “soft hard edge”. That was the going mode of my school, where at that time Clement Greenberg made periodic visits. Freer and more expressive brushwork was kind of my personal discovery, I naively thought, that I began after I was out of college. I was teaching myself to paint with oil paint and with a brush, something I had not tried since high school.

ME: You quickly got a lot of attention for your paintings. Why not stick to them?
CC: Although I’ve always had a lot of positive reactions to my paintings, I’ve never seen them as the best and only thing for me to do. What I discovered in the last ten, twenty years: I don’t like a lot of materiality. I don’t want to make a huge painting. I don’t want to make a heavy painting. I certainly don’t want a painting that is going to take five art movers to handle, I don’t want to make a big, thick or aggressive painting. They don’t invite the viewer in. They seem like the visual equivalent of manspreading to me. I think they are kind of stupid, in a certain way.

ME: You find paintings stupid?
CC: Not in general, of course. But some are. Those that are intrusive and bombastic and feature materiality above all else seem so to me. I am interested in paintings easily overlooked, paintings that one might walk by without knowing they were paintings. Something almost like air, kind of like the paintings I made in the early seventies right after graduate school. They were shown in 1974, at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, my first solo exhibition. Although most of the works from that exhibition no longer exist physically, I found a catalogue messed up with paint and discovered that they are very much related to my recent work, particularly in how they resemble the cosmos.

ME: Can you try to describe them?
CC: Some of the early ones I began with a plant mister and then altered the paint while it was still wet, and then I quickly worked back into them. In some of the recent ones, parts I silkscreened onto the linen, then washed off the ink while it was wet. It’s not as if there are no traces or signs of the hand on them but they still look like they were brought in from outer space. However, the play of the forms as they are, in front and behind the main plane are more complex.

ME: How come your current reflections are of your beginnings?
CC: I guess it has to do with getting older and the world as it is today. The world is changing, and so is my body of work. When I was younger, I was always good at making big paintings. But it’s kind of a “been there, done that” issue.

ME: Why?
CC: They take up a lot of space, and energy – not mine, but of the world. So as one reflects on the impact on the world of how one lives, one’s energy consumption, how one travels, what one decides to eat, there is that component in relation to making a physical object, and even a non-physical object, like an NFT.

ME: You see NFT as art?
CC: I think NFTs can be art. Ruling out certain forms as art makes art a too honorific designation. I kind of like art to be more homey – an everyday occurrence. Yet right now NFTs are huge energy consumers – although that seems to be changing.

ME: You want art to be more homey? Why and how should those two terms go together?
CC: Wasn’t art first made by people, ordinary people? Art is just something people make – it’s not such a big deal. Art is not curing the world’s ills and it doesn’t write a script for the future – but ít’s very important to me personally, and to many. It can open up possibilities of being and thinking. It can be life affirming.

ME: So how do you see art?
CC: I love art – seeing it and making it. But, at times, it’s like going to work. My grandparents were working people, and in some ways they influenced me more than my parents. With my work, I want to do things and I do them. But sometimes it’s boring, sometimes I don’t want to make art. At the same time, I approach every workday with an anything-can-happen mentality. It’s that freedom that’s what my work is about. I’m interested in exploring what I’m thinking about as I’m doing it. That means I want to work slowly – and that’s a crucial issue. And I like being in a pretty clear and alert state.

ME: That sounds more like hard work than fun …
CC: Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s fun. Having a work ethic is very important because it’s very hard to make art. Essentially, that work ethic is what keeps it going. It supplies structure.

ME: So what gets you started with a new piece?
CC: Usually I have a rough idea ¬– a stance or an attitude that I want my work to have, or a position that I want my work to take. Sometimes a subject – sometimes a work of art, sometimes a physical object charged with personal or historical significance – provides a source. And sometimes it’s odd things I get connected with, that are debased. Recently I saw an air freshener hanging in a subway car. I thought it was odd and took a picture of it and then found it very beautiful. Its sweet colors combined with its mundane aspect intrigued me. Then a painting I’m working on at the moment had a shape reminiscent of that air freshener and I decided the painting ought to be in those colors.

ME: A sunset also provides beautiful colors …
CC: Both from my studio and my apartment I see very beautiful sunsets. I like watching them, I take pictures of them, I even send these pictures to other people – but there’s no way for me to paint them. I love nature, but I don’t find it inspiring in that sense. I have a playfulness in my nature that also comes through in my work and especially with these horrible times I think I need to play a little. I have a lot of fun doing that. During the process of working, the multiple, even contradictory ways of seeing and making come into play. Usually my source material ceases to be my reference point and the process of adding and subtracting paint takes over and becomes the subject as well as the content of a work.

ME: And how do you know when a new piece is good enough to stay?
CC: I don’t know it necessarily in the moment I’ve finished it. Some paintings are proud, some are nascent and evolving, some have authority. I think a work being finished is fairly arbitrary. Sometimes a work is okay enough to exist, However, I don’t see my job as one of adding to the number of paintings on the planet. In my book there has to be a really good reason for a painting to exist.

ME: What are these reasons?
CC: Such a reason doesn’t have to follow a rational logic. It can be something emotional. And if it doesn’t fulfil the reason to exist I’ll get rid of it – I can’t know until it’s made. I started a painting which turned out to be rather horrible – but I still look at it every day when I’m in the studio. I have confidence that one day I’ll have a really good way of handling it – that’s why I don’t throw it away.

ME: You’re rather interested in horror than in beauty?
CC: Not necessarily, but things that can manage to be interesting over time are important.

ME: Can you give an example?
CC: In the early seventies, I had become interested in Linear B Script which is almost a precursor of Greek.

ME: What triggered your interest in this niche topic – the pure beauty of the script?
CC: This script is beautiful, no doubt. But there was much more: The notion that this script had not been deciphered by professionals but by Michael Ventris, an architect and classical scholar, and John Chadwick, a linguist and classical scholar. These amateurs in the sense of “lovers of” found and developed something no one else had. They explored Linear B out of their own interest. Many years later, in around , I began paintings that were based on that script – what it looked like, what it meant, the story, the notion of the glyphs. These paintings are done on linen and paper with water-based paint, raw pigment and oil, and began as mediations on the syllabary, logograms and pictograms. During the course of making, acts of figuration and their subsequent erasures occurred. There was an oscillation of emerging form and its dissolution. Following the trail wherever it led me, I included the peripheral elements that developed during the process of making. Any sense of meaning was displaced by a shift away from tangible image. Through uncertainty, erasure, displacement, fracture a painting emerged.

ME: Why did you come back to something that had occupied you more than 40 years before?
CC: There are certain times when I’ve stopped everything to take a step back and explore questions like: What am I interested in? What do I care about? What am I here for? What’s my life about? What do I want to learn about or discover? To answer these questions, I navigate through elements of connectedness with others. That’s what I get ideas from, and that’s why yet again the Linear B thing became interesting. Not for itself – but for the idea behind it: This script doesn’t need words to transport meaning and I find that appealing as I do have some problems with expressing myself with words.

ME: Another topic that filtered into your work at around the same time had to do with Jean Prouvé, the self-taught French architect and designer. Why?
CC: I had been aware of him for a long time – a very interesting character. I found him initially through his work, its visual aspect – my husband had been interested in furniture, and I learned about Prouvé through him. Then I tried to learn more and discovered he had been a member of the French Resistance – to me a big deal, and that he produced structures and furniture for nomadic existences. He sought to foster connections between art and industry and made efforts to link art and social consciousness. I admired the combination of pragmatism and idealism, and the aesthetic of his forms.

ME: And how did Prouvé’s work influence yours?
CC: When I began cutting veneer following Prouvé’s forms, which I did, possibly to include them in a painting, I found unexpected curves and moves that I had not seen or known of in adavance–the forms seemed animated. Those discoveries caused me to discard my expectation of what the form first signaled. The resulting slippages and discrepancies prompted me to include disparate elements in the rest of the painting – like a seemingly random brush stroke. I guess I saw Prouvé’s forms eliciting in me an inclination to follow my own bent.

The Nomads would best be seen in liminal and odd spaces, at irregular intervals, on a wall of a staircase, opposite an elevator, in an elevator, on the exterior wall of an exhibition space. These spaces would be provisional way stations for the works, and I hoped that the irregular intervals and placements would allow – even encourage – the viewer’s consideration of our uncertainty in the world.

ME: How do you see the Nomads series in relation to your body of work?
CC: My work is very diverse. And free-ranging, and perhaps that maybe the improvisational plays a significant role. Not in the sense of spontaneity which could lead to anything. Like you are thinking of kittens so you put in kittens. Improvisation (I think) is rather riffing off something you know, or even have established, or have achieved and are continuing to explore. Like jazz musicians who know their intent and their material well enough to play within it.

ME: Has Jazz influenced your working philosophy?
CC: Maybe, although I don’t know jazz well. It was after my return to Bennington college in 1970 when I got to know Stephen Muller a color field painter who was younger than me and unfortunately has died. He recommended that I take a course called Black Music – and I did.

ME: For inspiration?
CC: First of all because it required neither reading nor preparation, so I would have more time for painting. In high school I would go out to jazz joints, like the Half Note and the Five Spot just to be with friends and people, and I found the music tedious, like Lenny Tristano and Lee Konitz. I think I was just too young and undeveloped – I mean, I was only 14 or 15 and I liked a different sort of basic pop sound – like Frankie Lyman, Shirley and Lee, the Platters. But that course at Bennington, which I took only because it had no requirements, became truly interesting – hearing about John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. The teacher, a good bass player named Jimmy Garrison, brought in visitors, very good jazz musicians from New York, like Elvin Jones, a great drummer. I really got into it, realized that music is one of the most important things to me and just learned a lot. So far as me and jazz, I felt funny as a white girl claiming jazz as an influence despite that being Jewish has caused me to feel not exactly white.

ME: You said you learned a lot from Jazz. What about exactly?
CC: I had grown up with classical music and a little bit of jazz, more cerebral jazz. The course at Bennington was a whole other way of music – the music and the people were hotter. And I began to distinguish between European music and African music, realizing how different they were.

ME: Apart from music and musicians: What and who else influenced you and your work?
CC: In my life a lot of what has influenced me are those with courage – first of all my parents: My family roots are Russian from my mother’s side and Polish on my father’s side. Their parents came to the United States in the early 1900 and settled in New York where my parents met. They were Jewish but not religious; they did not practice any religion and in fact my father was a confirmed atheist, my mother sort of a deist. Religion was not a part of my education. Rather than religion science was their God, instead of prayers they preached the idea of “use your privilege to improve our society”. And my parents liked being American. They believed in many of what they saw as the tenets of American democracy.

ME: Can you give an example?
CC: When I was a child, they took me on a car trip through the American South. We stopped at many of the places in which Black people had been oppressed and my mother talked about that to me. She talked about things being better for Black people but not just or fair yet. That along with her strong pro-union bias – the championing of those who worked – influenced me. But there was someone else in my family who was very different from my parents and had a lot of influence on me: my mother’s father.

ME: How come?
CC: He emigrated to the United States from Russia due to political pressure and for about one and a half years he lived with us in our apartment, in a space outside of the living room that my parents had prepared for him. As he was very rigid, demanding, sometimes even mean and authoritarian person – both to his sons and his workers – his nickname in my mother’s family was Czar Nicolai.

ME: And how did such a difficult character influence you?
CC: Although many people had their clashes with him, he was good to his daughter – my mother – in some ways, and to my father and to me. He was a designer and manufacturer of women’s and children’s clothing, and he was meticulous with his grooming and about the way he dressed. I think some of his aesthetics and his emphasis on craftmanship influenced me. He loved designing clothes for me, as he had for my mother – but there was a price: When he worked on anything new for me, I had to stand still for what seemed like hours and hours. He was a very precise person and in that he was very different from my parents.

ME: And who influenced you outside your family?
CC: In these days, generally all people who feel themselves to be a different gender from the one they were born, declare that, and go through arduous sex reassignment surgery.

ME: What about your art teachers?
CC: I especially liked Paul Feeley, my painting teacher at Bennington College when I was an undergraduate. A very charismatic person who also had been the teacher of Helen Frankenthaler. Although I did not love his work, his mentality meant everything to me.

ME: What did you learn from him?
CC: He didn’t teach you how to paint and talked very little about paintings or art at all. He had a very broad world view and talked more about life than about art. He had more like a sociological, broadly philosophical approach. He was talking about all different kind of interesting things, like “slices of life”, the place of art in life, about gender preference, about the mystery of what things really were, about anything. He taught me the art of questioning everything and not taking anything as sacred.

ME: Like what, for example?
CC: Like how you couldn’t ever tell from what people looked like who they were – like if you had shots of a group of criminals you couldn’t necessarily tell who was a notorious criminal or a good person, just from their looks. He was almost anti-visual. He was very good in taking examples outside art history, examples in life. Like the culture of Greece, ancient and contemporary, where he also went a lot. Sometimes he started talking about the idea of democracy – not in terms of a political system but in daily life. Like when you were asking someone how to get to a certain place: The person might tell you about his favourite choice but another person joining your discussion might suggest a different solution let alone if a group of people was involved. For him everything was open for examination and discussion, even clichés like „necessity is the mother of invention“ – in terms of: What to do if you want to use a certain color that is not disposable. The way that he thought could be very mundane but it always led to something more important. And he was one of the few teachers who wasn’t sexist. He just didn’t make a big thing of girls being girls – which a lot of our teachers did. He was also very interested in Alexander Graham Bell, he was interested in science. A bit like the Beuys thing „everyone could be an artist“ – like just put your heart and mind into it. All very encouraging – at least I felt very encouraged by him. His influence was incredibly lasting. It was most unfortunate that he died the year after I finished school. He was extremely encouraging and generous and fun. Same with the sculptors David Smith and Tony Smith. Tony who also was an architect became very important to me, but unfortunately, he got fired for coming in drunk and other small sins. Or Anthony Caro. They were all very accessible and encouraging.

ME: And outside your college cosmos?
CC: Philip Guston who resumed image making after years of being an established abstract painter. Although I did not know him, it was his idea of being true to oneself, no matter what.

ME: No women amongst the people who influenced your attitude and thinking?
CC: Yes, of course! When I was young, women of science – of course Marie Curie, and social reformers like Lillian Wald. As I got older, some of my female high school teachers were important and freeing, like our French teacher who insisted that we speak even if we did not have the right French word – just make up a word. And there were role models who actually made art, like May Stevens.

Or take Pat Adams during my time in graduate school at Bennington. I really admired how she articulated ideas about painting. She was not my teacher because – get this: women were not permitted to teach studio art at Bennington. Although we were only female students it was only men teaching us. In the retrospective it seems a scandal but at that time it wasn’t officially allowed for women to teach anything besides art history – neither drawing nor painting or sculpting. Pat Adams’ husband taught at Bennington – but she wasn’t allowed to. Once we were discussing the topic driving in a car and I told her she should teach at Bennington. She said they wouldn’t let her. Nothing we found very political – but simply stupid. But I learned from her and it was very nice to have some real female energy. Later on in my day-to-day life, there were women who reinforced my mission as I saw it and respected me despite differences.

ME: Like Joan Mitchell whom you interviewed in fall 1985 for the art magazine Bomb? Reading your conversation left me with a strange feeling …
CC: Although Joan was very critical of me and my work, she was very important for me. Yet she clearly let me know that she thought it was good.

And probably that – although I have always loved Western art, since even before high school, my model of painting is more over the map.

ME: Over the map?
CC: Yes. It’s said that in Eastern Art the viewer has to go into the painting. Although I’m not an Eastern person, a part of me is that way. I like things that are a little bit less noisy, not telling you how to look at them. More offering options rather than telling the viewer how to look and hopefully see.

ME: Why not?
CC: Because I’m interested in making art that offers a space in which to roam around, where the space is not pre-navigated.

ME: Given that: How do you get viewers involved in your work?
CC: It is visual questioning and reordering that brings my work to life – for me, and perhaps eventually the viewer. You know how the French philosopher Roland Barthes made a distinction between two types of texts, “readerly” and “writerly”? Readerly texts don’t disturb common sense. These kinds of texts are straightforward and demand no special effort to understand, while the meaning of writerly texts is not immediately evident and requires effort on the part of the reader. It is almost as if they need deciphering.

ME: Can you give an example?
CC: Whereas English is readerly, I think of German as writerly. I guess the question is, “Why is that of interest?” And I guess the answer is, common sense is accepted as are received notions. But the way of discovery is different. And difficult.

ME: Guess you see yourself in the writerly camp…
CC: I want to encourage viewers of my work to gather their own interpretations. I’m against art that tries to control how the viewer sees the work.

ME: As an abstract painter where is your connection to the world?
CC: That is a good question. I am currently working out the answer. I learned and taught theory at one point when I was teaching at New York University because relying on formal concerns was boring, didn’t cut it. I think there’s something not immediately decipherable or comprehensible in abstract painting. And certainly, there are no fixed correspondences. And isn’t that the way the world is?

ME: Can you give an example?
CC: Take abstract paintings I did in the seventies: I titled many of them with women’s names: Sacagawea whom I admired – a Native American who lived around 1800 and today is seen as a symbol of women’s worth and independence. Or Ruby, for the really interesting Ray Charles version of the great song by Heinz Roemheld. There was a seemingly free paint handling. They were not about women or paint or form, yet they reinforced all of that. My works don’t cohere, at least not in a formal way. They are about the same things but they don’t look alike, they’re not organized, their morphology is not consistent.

ME: Similar to the artists of Art Informel, with their purportedly unplanned approach?
CC: I am skeptical of attributing thinking to movements. Artists with ideas phase in and out of them. Thus, movements have little fixity and are not monolithic. Art Informel is many kinds of art, and much of it is of interest to me. Initially, its odd materiality drew me to some of the work designated as “Art Informel,” particularly Fautrier and Wols. Fautrier’s paintings consist of paper and plaster conjoined with color, which are then painted onto, with lines that often run free of shape and form. His motivations in making his work, particularly his hostage paintings, were complicated. Wols’ works rely on line and form that are free of each other. His line is so abstract – as is with Agnes Martin – it has nothing to do with describing the forms on which they are drawn. Taking one’s time looking at his paintings and drawings, one becomes aware of a renunciation of form as an organizing element, and a rejection of quotidian psychological space. The abstraction of Fautrier and Wols counters the striving toward logic that is inherent in people – all people, those who make art objects and those who view them. I am also grateful to the existence of Art Informel – it was one of the things that initially drew me to Germany.

ME: Is there a certain visual experience you want to achieve with your work?
CC: No. I don’t think that way. Mainly, I work to make visible what has become hidden, and I work to try to understand what I find incomprehensible. By the time I’ve finished articulating what I think I am doing, I have usually moved onto something else. I do know I have always been interested in sensory visual experience that is mutable and difficult to convert to solid fact.

ME: Why?
CC: As we convert the uncertainties of initial seeing in daily life into coherent, generalized views, our nuanced complexities of first sight are subsumed by our predilection to make sense of the world. I try to affirm the schism and disjuncture inherent in the initial act of seeing, when things are first glimpsed, before logic and rationality take over, before an image has been grasped, when points of view don’t necessarily cohere. I include peripheral elements that develop during the process. Think of the artist Milford Graves who attempted to free drums from time keeping so they could roam free. Having said that, I might describe my own body of work as disparate.

ME: Disparate in which way?
CC: My work starts with both the ideas and visuality – each is important. As a visual artist, I want to see something, and I want to have what I see be something interesting enough to explore visually. I want my work to be visually interesting and challenging. In that sense I’m a very conflicted person.

ME: Combining ideas and visuality: Is that the core of what you tell your students when teaching?
CC: When I began teaching I was trying to understand how to talk about what I was seeing without it being formalist claptrap or formulaic rhetorical dogma. That’s why I started to read about anthropology to bring in an alternative way of thinking. To put across that there were many ways of thinking about art. That there is more than one document about a topic. My approach deployed anthropological thinking and understanding, and journalism, which at the time (in the nineties) were committed to rejecting the notion of an impartial investigator or the omniscient narrator. And that, for example, disparity and conflicts can be huge catalysts for creativity. What, today, might sound like a good and given fact, as many people like disparity, that hasn’t been the case earlier. For so many times I was confronted with the same question: „Why do you have to do these other things? Why don’t you do just paintings? But we’re not little, tiny beings. We have the capacity for a tremendous amount of diversity within ourselves. And we are all influenced by the culture around us.

ME: What was the culture like around yourself that formed you?
CC: At least no one in my family taught me how to draw, not even my grandfather. What my mother did teach me was sports and maths, but no art – apart from doing water colours together with me which was fun. She was not at all instructive in that area. That’s how I learned it before I learned it in school. And I had art lessons, and I went to a special high school -- the High School of Music and Art which was a public school but provided instruction in visual art and music.

ME: Couldn’t your parents have afforded a private education for their only child?
CC: Indeed we didn’t have a lot of money, but they did provide me with a lot that cost money -- many kinds of lessons and summer camps. But the important point was that they believed in public education. My mother was a teacher and my father had become a school administrator after he decided not to stay in business. Sending me to a private school was against their principals – public school seemed to them like the right thing to do – to support democracy.

ME: And it was your wish to visit a High School for Arts?
CC: Oh no. Although I liked painting and had extra lessons in art and painting I didn’t want to go in the beginning. I loved sports – running, swimming, horseback riding – and just didn’t want to do many hours of art every day. After I got there, although the days there were very long and exhausting, and I didn’t like much of what I was taught there like drawing. But but in the end, I learned a lot.

ME: Like what?
CC: There were more people there who had come from very different areas of New York with backgrounds that were very different from the people at my former schools, or my cousins. There were students whose parents had been born in Europe and Black people. I also had great teachers there who taught me a lot: A French teacher asked us to bring in a picture no matter what it was – a real photograph or painting or something torn out of a magazine or newspaper. Then we had to talk about it without preparing in advance at home. You had to stand up with your picture in front of the whole class and talk. And if you didn’t know a certain word or how to go from one sentence to the next you had to make it up. In my eyes a good way to learn a language because it not only trained our ability to describe things but also our ability of improvisation. On the whole it wasn’t the drawing or painting lessons I enjoyed most then. Already art was more a part of my whole being.

ME: How do you mean that?
CC: When I visited the Guggenheim Museum with a friend right after the opening in 1959, and I loved it as it was not only a place to exhibit art but a building that was a piece of art itself. Referred to as a temple of the spirit, or, as I would prefer, a total life experience which for a while led me to the idea of becoming an architect. So although I don’t think it’s a good museum it was a great inspiration for me then. I hardly saw a building, especially a public building, so harmonious – very unusual at that time – also because everything seemed to be part of a plan. An aesthetic plan. To sum it up: My time in High School provided me with a good basis to develop an open mindset for moving on.

ME: Which meant moving on to Bennington College – not the most established Art College there was at the early sixties …
CC: At that time choosing your college wasn’t at all such a big deal as it’s today where parents do almost anything to get their children to a famous college. Again my parents didn’t make a big deal of it. All I knew at that time that I wanted to go somewhere outside New York, but not too far away either, – like not Ohio or even California. I simply applied at Bennington’s because a friend of mine did to because she wanted to study dance , and it seemed to her they had a good dance department. So I thought, it they had a good dance department maybe they would have a good art department. there. It was very expensive for my parents but they felt responsible for my education and paid for it. They even gave me enough money so I didn’t have to look for a job – they just asked me to pay attention at school. We slept in a dormitory, it was like going to a camp, a big adventure. I enjoyed that mixture of cool, snobby, intellectual people and atmosphere. Apart from going back to New York for a weekend from time to time I spent most of my time on the campus. I liked the isolation of Vermont, a very peaceful place. I loved it there right from the beginning.

ME: Even though it was a women-only college?
CC: I didn’t care as I didn’t go to college to meet men, and my parents didn’t expect me to get married. The teachers were my role models, I was really into being and becoming an artist. something but I was not sure of what. I liked a lot of the subjects I took –painting, sculpture American history. I was learning and discovering new things every day but it also was rather hard for me as I wasn’t a natural academic. But the art part was terrific and very different from High School: As in High School we had teachers who told us about the history of art and maybe eventually they were doing art too. In college it was rather meeting a lot of artists who also worked as teachers.

ME: About career plans after leaving college:
CC: I wasn’t very career orientated and no one else was. Looking back and comparing it with today’s situation at art colleges it was all very innocent. Bennington was rather like an ivory tower in that respect. It was absolutely no topic between students to talk about any career plans or making money through selling your art as an outspoken aim in life. It was rather like „I’m a really good artist, I’ll be found and everything will materialize automatically“. During my time at Bennington I hardly thought about what could come next after finishing college, I simply couldn’t have said what I wanted, I wasn’t really sure. It even didn’t have to be art, I was in the mode of exploring all the time.

ME: You even thought of giving up on art?
CC: I felt kind of clueless. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. My parents were pretty laissez faire. The only thing I knew was that after graduation I would go back to New York. I was just really young and sophisticated (for my age) about art and philosophy – but I didn’t know what to do. What I did after college was travel to Italy on my own with the support of a little amount of money my grandfather had left me.

ME: We are talking about 1964, you were living in New York City, in the middle of an extremely lively art scene – just to mention Andy Warhol who had just opened his famous Factory – and you didn’t burn to be part of all that?
CC: When I came back to New York I moved in with my parents again. I even considered studying law for a while. It just wasn’t as if I woke up one morning and decided deliberately to become a painter, it was more like slipping into it. I started going out with the artist Jules Olitzky, he was part of the group of Colourfield painters which Greenberg supported. I went to dinner with a whole entourage of artists and critics, but I was rather clueless in this respect, I didn’t actualize in terms of taking advantage of knowing these people let alone planning a career – all very different from today’s youth who knows all of this. Young people today. Looking back, you could call this naive, or even arrogant as I thought I would be successful anyway.

ME: How would you describe your art at that time?
CC: Not a lot of visual incident, very reduced, very clear, rather declarative. Not that much form, but colour and not expressive. It wasn’t geometric, but it also didn’t feel as if one thing things leads to the next. It felt a bit premeditative.

ME: Nothing to make a living of, probably?
CC: Oh no. I started taking on a few boring jobs just to make some money, amongst them as a waitress where I got fired as I was too dreamy. I eventually found a tiny, but cheap apartment, with an extra room probably supposed to be the bedroom – I used it as my little studio and started making sculpture there. I used wooden crates which I got for free, put them together in a variety of ways and then painted them. In that period I also found a part time job, working for an architect in his office on Madison Avenue. I started with the least sophisticated jobs like deliver things to clients, retype documents – slowly, as I couldn’t type. As I was good with colours they asked me to harmonize the colours in projects at schools and hospitals. I also have a certain precise nature I started to help organizing their projects.

ME: And what about your art at that time?
CC: At that time I sublet a friend’s apartment which was in walking distance from my workplace and only cost something like 30 dollars per month. By then I was painting and in that apartment, I had a tray as big as a bed I could dip the canvas into and then stretch it. The final trigger to really become a painter might have been sometimes in 1968 when I discovered a poky section about opportunities in the back of an art magazine I was flipping through. One of those ads offered a post graduate fellowship in Fine Arts at the University Pennsylvania which actually was more famous for its architecture department where the famous architect Louis Kahn was teaching at that time. I was talking to Clement Greenberg about it. As he knew Piero Dorazio who was teaching there, Dorazio helped me getting the grant – so I started there in 1969 as an artist in residence. The only thing I was supposed to do was to interact with – not even teaching – the undergraduate students. So I had time to read a lot about art history, play a lot of tennis, learn about electric arc welding - and paint whenever I wanted to. Which I did a lot. So although until then I had been a better and more confident sculpturer than a painter it was during that year when I realized that painting was my thing and that I really had to paint full time. So Pennsylvania was like a catalyst to my artist development.

ME: At the age of almost 30 …
CC: That’s why my parents wouldn’t support me anymore financially. So, the only possibility to paint full time was to go to a graduate school as an assistant. And with the support of a friend, I found such a job – back at Bennington.

ME: Going back to Bennington – didn’t it feel like a step back, a compromise, an emergency exit?
CC: The opposite – relief and progress, a big move forward. Bennington had changed a lot since I had left: Not It was not only girls anymore, and I had a a new role with giving job as a graduate – teaching drawing classes to undergraduates, buying wine for the faculty parties, going to dinner with visiting professors, still having a lot of time for my own painting. And meeting new interesting people – like Liz Philipps who was enrolled in my drawing class. She was only in her early 20ies but very smart with electronics and already ahead of her time, a true pioneer of interactive sound sculptures. She explored the possibilities of electronic sound and introduced me to the work of Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich. She was connected to people like Nam June Paik, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. She was really good and even those people saw her as a way of expanding their own field. She also was a good visual artist. So from the beginning I felt equal with her. But also people like John Cage felt she was equal. They were all part of Electronic Arts Intermix, an organization that foster the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of media art and the artists themselves. A small, but very intense group of people at that time in the early 70ies.

ME: Were you tempted to develop your own art in this direction?
CC: Not at all. The music department in Bennington was 12-tone based and rather dismissive towards electronic music. Liz did all these things with Joel Chadabe at the Staten State University of New York, Albany. And for me, on the one hand all this was definitely interesting, but on the other hand, I also couldn’t stand it in a way. All the constant technical malfunctions would have driven me nuts. You had to stop everything and backtrack and start the whole thing again. That’s what happened at Liz‘ concerts very often. I would never have had the patience.

ME: So how did you move on with your own art at that time?
CC: It became difficult as the atmosphere there became a burden. Teachers there sometimes were jealous of their students‘ achievements, arty and small minded at the same time. Which actually was my general impression of the academic world: They prefer people who reinforce their own situation. They don’t like people who are different. They also wanted to change me. My painting teacher whose paintings were very heavy with a lot of paint wanted me to develop my paintings in his direction. But I didn’t want to. In the end I really hit a stride and made some pretty good paintings. They gained a kind of clarity, had a reductive aesthetic. Something between the Colorfield tradition and Minimalism. Quite close to what I’m doing now, it had a related aesthetic. I definitely had grown as a painter. After my second stop at Bennington, I knew who I was and what I wanted to do with my life – be a painter.

ME: And the final starting point of your career?
CC: I still wasn’t very strategic. My parents both thought I was a good artist but also worried as it’s not the easiest profession. When I came back to New York, I found a loft in the area which is now Tribeca. Cheap, but very raw. A really nice building, originally built as a hotel, but a real mess which took me six months to clean up. But it was worth it as it was a beautiful place – a floor of 2000 square feet just for my own. It felt like a new start for me. I felt confident.

ME: And ready for your first exhibition?
CC: Oh yes. Liz had taken James Harithas to my studio, it must have been sometimes in 1972. He then was the director of the Everson, A small museum in Syracuse, in the state of New York. A really crazy and adventurous person she knew from her group of artists around Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono who already had exhibitions there. He came to see my paintings and asked me right away when I wanted to show.

ME: An opportunity you couldn’t reject …
CC: Not necessarily. Tempting maybe, but also a place no one would necessarily go. And James was a very special character, always had trouble with the board of the museum. Where ever he hired he got fired. So the real challenge was to realize the show before he was thrown out. So in the end Harithas got the show scheduled, the board didn’t change it and it was opened – indeed without Harithas who wasn’t at the museum anymore a year after his visit in my studio. And without my artist friends who didn’t show up as Syracuse just wasn’t New York City.

ME: What did you show?
CC: I focused on a group of work all from the same period after graduate school. I don’t have these works any more but if one might look at them today one wouldn’t notice much of a difference from the things I’m doing now. Maybe they were not very sellable saleable at that time, but they were good – and brought me to the next stage as through that exhibition I found my first gallerist: Max Hutchinson.

ME: How come?
CC: I knew him since the early 70ies, he was quite accessible, a man of the people. He was fun, clever, a character. He had his gallery in SoHo in walking distance to my apartment loft so I just showed up one day. It was not like he was overwhelmed right away, but I was persisting: As my favorite Italian cheese shop was in this area I tried to talk to him every time I was around and finally convinced him – also by a bottle of Scotch I used to have available in my studio when he came visiting.

ME: And after the show in the Everson Museum he gave you a contract?
CC: No one I knew then did. It was rather like if you have enough great paintings I give you a show. So I had to keep asking him to come over to my studio and see whatever paintings I had I thought were good. And finally he would show them.

ME: You started working with him in 1979 until 1984. Would you call it a success?
CC: In a way – I had three shows there in all these years – a second one in 1980 and a third one in 1984 which sounds little. But the art world was much smaller at that time and only to get your own show was a great achievement.

ME: And how about sales?
CC: I don’t think Max sold a lot of my paintings in all these years. But that wasn’t unusual at that time so my expectations weren’t very high anyway. There wasn’t much of a middle section in the art market in those days. You either got really famous or not known at all. At least, my show in 1984 got a lot of attention, with good reviews. But just then Max was in Australia for six weeks. I found that ridiculous as it would have been a great opportunity to promote my work. But there was a curator, Klaus Kertess, who liked my work He managed to sell a piece to an American collector and this collector recommended my work to other collectors – so they also bought paintings, directly from me, after the show was down. So I left the gallery and sold my paintings on my own with some help from Klaus and Phil Schrager, the collector.

ME: Could you live from those sales?
CC: It just started then – before I earned my living mostly through grants and visiting teaching jobs and lectures in Chicago, Boston and New York I got through friends. I really liked teaching at that time and couldn’t believe they were paying me for that. It still didn’t make me a rich person, probably everyone at that time had more money than me. Sometimes I would go to my parents for emergencies. It was hard sometimes, and I maybe was naive too, as I even couldn’t afford health insurance. But I really liked what I was doing. And for the most part I was lucky. And I just didn’t need much for a living at that time. My rent was very low, and selling a painting once in a while for, let’s say 7000 Dollars, covered my expenses for at least three months.

ME: Ever thought of giving up painting for economic reasons?
CC: No, never. It might not sound very introspective, but I felt that painting was my job I had to do. It felt like I was in my own element. I had the impression I was getting more knowledge and getting better in parting that knowledge. I was getting better with people. Like New York which is my home although I sometimes don’t like it I felt like the art world was my home. And making paintings is where I belong. Like my grandfather and the grand parents from my father’s side, I felt like a worker who can’t just go away from what she or he was supposed to do. An attitude my mother used to ascribe to me already when I still was a child.

ME: Stubborn?
CC: She called it persevering. And this ability still keeps me going today even when I’m miserable, maybe due to all these little obstacles of daily life which might hold you off working. But I go on instead – and looking back I probably started many of my better paintings in a rather miserable mood. I might be complicated in many ways – but not in this way. On the other hand, I usually did and do what I felt like doing – and if there’s no teaching job or an appointment I usually keep it turned out to be painting, most of the time.

ME: No time for parties?
CC: Oh, I did go to clubs and dinners given by artist friends like Stephen Mueller who was connected to the Warhol factory cosmos. But to be honest it wasn’t really my world as it usually was too noisy to talk, it got late and I simply found it boring to just stand around. And – it might sound weird – but I never did a lot of drugs. And when I drank too much I felt terrible the next day. I was never the one to go to the after after after show party. I would cost me too much energy

ME: Would you describe your mission successful?
CC: I still didn’t know exactly what I was doing with my painting at that time. But at least I made enough money to survive. And even if I wasn‘t getting famous at least I was getting somewhere. And it’s still like that today: Sometimes when I don’t know what I’m doing it’s pretty good.