A Conversation
with Barry Schwabsky & Cora Cohen
Barry Schwabsky: Mumtaz Mahal [Plate 1] has a Ryder aspect to it which is probably what intrigued me about it when I saw it or one like it in Arts Magazine, at the time.
Cora Cohen: I was interested in all that. Part of what I grew up on was American Modernism — Hartley and Ryder and Dove. The idea of forces.
S: Forces?
C: Forces. You know, forces of wind and forces of regression and forces of civilization.
S: I mean I don't know if this is exactly the same thing, but with “forces” I thought you were referring to something more supernatural, because there's a kind of haunted quality to all of that art.
C: 1 understand how you could say “supernatural” but what's close to it that I've almost always been connected to, especially as a young person, is the idea of pantheism, forces of nature but not merely nature; nature as it embodies God.
S: That all sounds very socially structured, though, whereas with these early American artists I think of their loneliness, their failed relation with social structures.
C: That's what turned me away from them. It wasn't that they had failed relations with social structure. Americans, almost as a matter of course, have failed relations with social structure. It was the romanticization of those failed relations that gave me a pain.
S: That was what Clement Greenberg couldn't stand about American art, actually.
C: Well, he had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of the American Gothic, and that is part of what we're talking about.
S: That's what made or makes, to me, his championing of Pollock seem very honest — that he acknowledged the Gothic in Pollock and recognized him anyway.
C: Absolutely. He was really baffled by Pollock's achievement. But I think not all of Pollock is the embodiment of the Gothic. 1 think in the end Greenberg was looking for a major hero and that’s the way that the Gothic does function. And that's the part I have problems with — the heroic genius pitted against an un-understanding society — the isolated, usually male, genius.
S: The paintings from the mid 80's seem a little dour in comparison with your later work. The sense in them seems very confined and almost repressed or a desperate gambit against repression.
C: When I got a Visiting Artist job at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983,1 took only red, yellow and blue in oil paint. I started to work small and with a brush; I started to move the paint around with a brush. When I returned to my own studio, I began to work larger. I think that part of what happened in these paintings was me teaching myself to paint in a way I never had. It took me a while to realize I needed a bigger brush. I mean, I think Joan Mitchell said I should get a bigger brush. There's a worked quality to them — the unit of the stroke is small in relation to the whole.
And I think I was really repressed. So, when I did do something out there and overt it would be overly so, and I think that the paintings sort of have that and thrive on that and suffer from that.
S: So what happened when you got the bigger brush?
C: A lot: The Three Graces, Molloy at Tournus and Fountain at Moissac [Plate 8], which is connected to my present work, where I rely on flow.
S: Still, your hand, let's say the evidence of your effort or deliberation, is much more obvious than it will be later on.
C: You can see the mark of the person and it is deliberate. But they're strokes I've seen before. Reliance on brushwork that's like brushwork you've seen before is not an indication of intentionality.
I was looking at Romanesque architecture and sculpture. I was thinking about Appia's lighting designs. I wanted to make paintings that were — that sort of threw off the confines of painting. It could be a balanced art but I didn't want to make a painting whose rules had been decided by painting. I was interested in constant movement in contrast to, or in relation to, an idea of austerity or structure.
S: You were after something anti-structural?
C: No, not anti-structure, but things constantly changing and evolving. One kind of being or one kind of form can evolve or permutate into another creature. The idea of creature, not just the idea of line and space. Creature is image. One of the interesting things about the Romanesque is that you don't really see the stuff when you first look at it, you see an overwhelming architecture. As you become familiar with it, experiencing it over time, what seemed at first like structure slowly begins to become movement and then the pictorial emerges. That was really exciting to me.
S: I was thinking about the way Gothic architecture tends to be structural almost in the way that the art of the sixties and early seventies tends to be structural, with the kind of one-to-one correspondences where let's say, a figure equals a column, just as with an early Brice Marden painting a color area equals a canvas. Whereas in the Romanesque the relation of the sculpture to the architecture seems much more variable and sometimes by Gothic standards, slack or naive.
C: You mean it tries to control the person less? How do you mean?
S: Well, I think the Romanesque carving seems to want to fill a certain space in the best way that it can without having a rigorous relationship between image and — the structure just tries out different possibilities.
C: In Deaf Music (For John Chamberlain) [Plate 7] some of the white is paint that's been stripped away. With excavation you get to reveal the bones of what was the initial impetus. It's something I'm doing now with some of the same intent. You reveal the thing you covered up, the so-called mistake, or unsureness or unease. I am interested in the idea of unsureness or unease.
S: What are the mistakes?
C: The mistakes are mistakes of living. Something was sacrificed to something else or wasn't valued enough at the moment it was achieved so that it was eradicated. Those kinds of mistakes are ones of life. The density that I came to miss in The Three Graces or Moissac has to do with that I wanted, and I think achieved, a kind of floating. I went through a period of wanting to make paintings that somehow functioned as line and color in space.
Paintings that did not function as if they were attached to a rectilinear format even though they were, paintings where color and line were just hung in air.
S: Which goes back to what we were saying before about the Romanesque. The Gothic idea — speaking still of the Middle Ages and not about the American Gothic that came up in relation to Pollock — seems to be that the sculpture is attached to structural function whereas the Romanesque idea is that it's just hanging there.
C: With The Story of Theophilus, Fountain at Moissac and other work from that period I got slightly theatrical and self-conscious with the actual brushwork and I was interested in being so. There was a kind of isolation to the stroke.
S: A kind of spotlight on each stroke as a gesture.
C: I hate the word gesture.
S: In the theatrical sense.
C: Oh, OK. Doing the black ground was definitely a theatrical thing and that was part of my idea. Because who needs to pay attention to painting, to making yet another? My thinking was: I'll make another painting but it doesn't have to be hinged on a continuum of painting.
S: There was a kind of emptying out of the paintings compared to what you'd been doing before which to me reads as a kind of bravado.
C: I don't really know. People I had been close to had died. The world in which I lived was thereby diminished and I think that is reflected in these paintings.
S: What I get more is a kind of risk-taking, and a certain disdain for the appearance of labor which takes it very far away from the earlier ones.
C: The question of things looking like they took a lot of labor and things looking nonlabor intensive is an issue for me now, but it wasn't then. With the earlier paintings, there was more activity that wasn't primal to the painting but just had to be done. It was work but it was really enjoyable.
I love having process lead me rather than my controlling it, the sort of partnership with process I experienced in both of these periods. I really enjoyed the pouring and I worked well with it. My pours were water-based, and I got involved in work which had a liquid quality. I wasn't afraid that these paintings looked as if they hadn't taken much work. Yet after I showed them at Wolff in 1988,I started to miss a kind of richness.
S: There seems to be more of a radical break here...
C: I'm just giving you the background. The rich oil pours were the next period. I was thinking a lot about how different forces operate differently but end up with some motions and pictorial elements that are related, or that resemble each other, or have to do with showing each other or mirroring each other. When I looked at those paintings... I wanted a change.
S: This was when?
C: 1990 is when they changed. There were aspects of life and living that I was experiencing — street life, how New York was becoming like the Third World. The paintings seemed a little bit too pure. I wanted meaning and connectedness; for my work to refer to the world at large. I wanted more materiality in my work.
S: It's more than just having materiality in the work. There's a fundamental difference between paintings that are very self-contained, very virtuosic on certain levels, and ones that seem very decentered and whose borders seem arbitrary or radically porous, which I think for me is also a distinction in art-historical terms between Mannerist and Baroque. This kind of painting seems to demand not that you stand apart from it so much as that you immerse yourself in it and work your way through it in a fairly unguided way from point to point. It doesn't give you that many clues about how to do that.
C: There are fewer rules and prescribed ways to go through our lives now, and I wanted the paintings to be as life is. It's not that I thought, "I want this to be a-compositional" exactly. It just felt like there was an armature somewhere that I could hang things on, and sometimes it would be outside of the painting. There are certainly parts to the paintings that could continue indefinitely but not all parts. Some borders are acknowledged and some are not. It got more interesting that way because, then, what makes it be a painting? That's really a challenge.
S: This next painting, Terrains Vagues [Plate 17] — is in line with what you've been saying — a determinedly unpretty painting, very rough in its surface and subdued in its color, but after this it seems your paintings began to get much more intense and even voluptuous in the sensations they could contain, which takes them away from the rather earnest or almost naturalistic sentiments that you've been talking about. With that the temporal structure of the paintings underwent a change. With Terrains Vagues I have a sense that one moves around and across from event to event, and that these events are separated spatially and also in time, whereas in a painting like this one, An Unknown Listener [Plate 23], there is more the sense of experiencing a near-simultaneity of events, of a quick succession, one beginning while the previous one is fading out and that these occur across the entire painting rather than from spot to spot.
C: I think An Unknown Listener does have the simultaneity you just described. I don't think I paid attention to a sequencing of events. I wanted it to be buoyant, light and at the same time have an underside of life within itself. The underside or the underpinnings must be excavated by going back into the painting. Starting with what's closest to you and moving back into it shows earlier moments. There are deeply absorbed characteristics you have to delve for. Whereas in Terrains Vagues it's more that you're moving through it.
S: Here, it's more like it's moving through you — something that's happening to you.
C: I like that idea. I want to make art that has a lot of force. I want it to have a lot of force and really move through you. To show my hand more — and I don't mean that just literally. I want it to be more overt, to meet the viewer more than half way.
S: I'm curious what the rectangle means to you at this point.
C: The rectangle of the painting?
S: Right.
C: Not much.
S: Then why retain it?
C: There is too much rectilinear event in the world. Buildings here are built that way, streets run that way, a lot works that way. I continue making the screen paintings and other non-rectilinear pieces — in their materiality, they move outside of those confines, shifting energy to the dimensional. They are a way out and they refer to the idea of a painting going on indefinitely.
In the paintings which retain the rectangle, materiality — debris and other elements — grounds the paintings in the world of real experience. I contrast other kinds of making against this. The yellow-orange on the right in Auroras of Autumn [Plate 22] continues, by implication, way beyond the edge of the rectangle, to the right. As much of that shape that's within the painting is outside of it — by implication. What isn't visible within the painting but is implied, plays a role in one’s conscious apprehension. I want the challenge of extending making beyond the edge. By implication, or metaphor, or...
S: Illusion?
C: As different from illusionism?
S: As different from trompe 1'oeil.
C: Well, I want more of that. I want more illusion, more virtual space. At the same time, I want the materiality to be very available, as well. I think the space which lies between artifact and illusion in a painting may be an uncharted, unfinished space of making.