Cora Cohen Artist’s Statement
Terrains Vagues: Uncharted Space and Wasted Time
Painting in the 21st Century
Introduction
In the age of postmodernism and its aftermath, I remain committed to the tradition and medium of painting. Through marks on canvas, I convey my experience of the world in all its nuanced complexity. Painting, from the Renaissance on, however varied in style and content, has remained the most rigorous, durable, and prestigious form of visual expression in Western culture. Other than music, what medium has such immediacy yet requires attentiveness over time? Other than poetry, what set of formal conventions enables us to convey the perturbations of the human spirit beset by circumstances, social and political, against which it must always contend? Painting can change the world. It demands a meditative calm and deliberate slowness of apprehension that runs counter to the speed and logic of contemporary electronic media. It has the capability of engaging us fully, not just our minds, but our bodies and hearts. It solicits and nourishes our psychological and spiritual well-being.
My early paintings were informed by an American and European modernist aesthetic. I counted Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove as my influences for their naturalistic and landscape elements, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, for his brooding expressionism achieved through his dense application of paint. (Figure 1. Untitled, 1968). I learned from Juan Miro and from the Color Field painters, particularly Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski, how to make paintings that were large, manifestly ambitious, yet also appeared physically light. (Figure 2. Untitled, c. 1975). I continue to use a number of the technical processes inspired by my study of these artists.
By the early eighties, I had become more interested in expressing force and aggression by foregrounding the physical, material qualities of paint. I resumed working in oils. The paint became heavier and thicker. Technical aspects of Willem de Kooning's work from the 1940's and '50's served as a model for me. I became increasingly involved in the phenomenology of figuration in painting. My canvases enacted the drama of nascent, almost recognizable forms struggling to come into being, only to recede once again into abstraction. Philip Guston's transitional work of the late 1950's and early '60's provided a source of inspiration during this period, as did Alberto Giacometti's painting and sculpture. Under the influence of the Mayan ruins of the Yucatán, my palette heated up, and I produced such paintings as Not This Quetzel, (1984) (Figure 3).
In the late eighties, monumental structures that position the human subject in relation to the cosmos became an important source of inspiration for my work. The Acropolis, El Alcazar de los Reyes Christianos de Cordoba, Moissac, and St. Severin, all gave me the sense of art as something vast that yet remained in touch with the fundamental human impulse to navigate the world in order to find a place of physical, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment. (Figure 4. The Fountain at Moissac, 1988)
Originally, painting appealed to me as the most challenging and complex form of visual expression. I took it on as a worthy challenge with mastery as my goal. As I continued to paint, I was bolstered by the recognition that painting was, indeed, a realm in which I could excel. Currently, however, I paint because it has become, for me, at once the most direct extension of my immediate experience and my most direct means of communicating that experience to another person.
During the 1980's, painting came under attack from postmodern critics for being conservative and outmoded. In the 1990's, abstraction in painting was largely discredited in feminist circles as a bastion of male privilege. Given these developments, I became committed to articulating an alternative position that worked toward the rehabilitation of this powerful tradition as a viable form of expression for myself and others.
Unlike photography, painting does not derive from modern, utilitarian practices but grows out of older forms of visual expression connected to the realm of the spirit. The act of painting connotes a belief in the value of individual, personal, subjective experience. It honors and perpetuates the most basic of humanist values. The assertion of a transcendent sublime by American modernist painting has long been in retreat. Yet painting, as a medium and as a history, remains linked to a belief in the redemptive possibilities of the human imagination and a faith in freedom.
In our time, painting has become a contradiction to and form of resistance against an information age based on digital technology. Painting fosters a way of seeing that rewards stillness and slowness. A prolonged, meditative engagement is required. Although the compelling immediacies and contingencies communicated by the electronic media are ever present and may thus become the subject for painting, the act of experiencing a painting offers the self, maker and viewer alike, a form of intersubjective connectedness to the world that remains an indispensable pleasure and value.
By the mid 1990's, I had become proficient in the full range of techniques I had been using for thirty years (Figure 5. In The Sound of the Wind, 1995). Also, I had begun working on developing new marking systems applied to found objects, mostly exposed x ray films. In addition, I began to make new kinds of drawings and to photograph my immediate surroundings as a form of visual notetaking. These records of the surface of things may offer insights, other than those of first sight.
Using the exposed x-ray films taken of those who had died of AIDS, I intervened with chemicals and color, at times to transform the image of the diseased parts, at times as an intuitive response to them. The altered x rays are elegies for the dead that lament the loss of the human touch. My transformations of the exposed x ray film seek to restore that touch in full knowledge that this is not possible. (Figure 6. R13 , 1994)
My drawings record directly and spontaneously my responses to lived experience. By 1996, I had begun to divide my time between New York and Köln. 10-98 New York/Köln (1998) is a mapping of my daily bicycle commute in Köln from my home to my studio. (Figure 7.) It delineates my route in keeping with the ring configuration of this old Roman city, laid over an earlier, erased drawing based on New York City’s grid configuration. This drawing and others like them began as an attempt to ground myself in another place and culture.
Hansaring, (2000) (Figure 8) records my complex responses as an American Jew of immigrant Russian heritage to that sector of the city, now inhabited largely by Germany’s migrant-worker population, that still bears traces of the devastation suffered in World War II. My photographs form records of the human, very current condition of flux and itinerancy. They present the residue of difficult events of Germany’s past. Sectors rebuilt cheaply in haste, as those shown in Hansaring, and memorials to those tortured and killed, are shown along with the visual, hedonistic Rhineland culture. They serve as my form of resistance into a dominant culture, despite its attractiveness.
My altered x-rays, drawings, and photographs annotate and comment upon places and events in my life in such a way as to affirm my quotidian existence -- those aspects of my daily life that I would otherwise forget or neglect. They reflect directly and improvisationally my social and personal engagements with contemporary life.
By the late nineties, this ancillary body of work had begun to contribute to my paintings in that they allowed for elements of contingency, flux and indeterminacy to inform my practice. I began to remove the virtuosic from my painting. I painted on Sphinx (1999) relentlessly, working and reworking the surface with brush and palette knife (Figure 9). It became, for me, the embodiment of destructive violence, harnessed and transformed by the act of painting. Terrains Vagues (1991) was an earlier painting that I subsequently reworked (Figure 10). In its first incarnation, I had relied on pours and chemical processes, such as the oxidation of copper, to produce a series of contrasts between areas of luminous color and bleak dullness. I then intervened with some of the pours to make them less continuous and graceful. I initiated new chemical processes that affected portions of the canvas at different rates and in starts and stops. Currently this work has a certain gritty beauty. Yet it is also a decidedly unpretty painting.
I title my paintings to suggest possible references and domains of interpretation. For example, "Terrains vagues" is an actual term used to refer to those uncharted spaces one finds between airports and cities. These spaces are neither industrial, urban, nor suburban, but rather constitute the dead zones of European topography. In titling my painting "Terrains Vagues," I acknowledged the painting's visual reference to that sort of space, a terrain that continues to interest me. It is an oasis of neglect, with no purpose, and may be linked with useless, "wasted" time. Uncharted space and "wasted" time are vital. They permit us more human and perhaps then more humane ways of feeling and being.
In my present work, I initiate intensely purposeful lines and shapes on a background of very beautiful, lush skeins and pours of paint. I then deliberately and messily erase them. The resulting palimpsest becomes the final work. Many of the drawn and painted lines and shapes are derived from projecting earlier paintings of my own, and those by others I admire, onto the pours I have previously made. I then trace their outlines with charcoal and paint. Frequently, the charcoal meets resistance from a painted line, or the paint is prevented from a smooth flow by the dryness of the charcoal. The resulting lines and shapes occur in starts and stops. My intent is to foreground an oscillation between uncertainty and surety, fastness and slowness, to make them the form and substance of the finished work. A history of my discards and overrides remains visible. An image results not unlike a multiple exposure on a single plate of film wherein a series of corollary, overlapping and competing gestures and movements coexist upon a single plane, as in Inside An Unstable Substance (2000) (Figure 11) and Man In A Chair (2000) (Figure 12).
In these paintings I explore an uncharted terrain made up of the conjunctions and conflicts resulting from the simultaneous presence of many different, even antithetical, operations within a single work. Spontaneous brushwork, a surrogate for my touch, embodies personal contingency. It contrasts with elegant pours which refer to natural forces, the alluvial and cosmic, and are distanced from the body. The recycled, projected, traced, and reworked shapes are derived from a pool of other paintings. They contrast sharply with the more naturalistic looking pours. The contested line that comes about through struggle, erasure, and interference remains in temperamental and philosophical opposition to the projected shapes produced by more positivist and mechanistic methods.
My work continues to develop and expand in response to the ongoing complexities and contestations of contemporary culture. I remain convinced of painting’s continuing efficacy and resiliency as a medium with which to express some of the most profound, complex and elusive aspects of lived experience in the twenty-first century.