{"id":3527,"date":"2013-04-29T19:39:59","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T19:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=3527"},"modified":"2019-11-21T15:07:51","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T15:07:51","slug":"zero-at-the-bone-louise-fishman-speaks-with-carrie-moyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=3527","title":{"rendered":"Zero at the Bone: Louise Fishman Speaks with Carrie Moyer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From <\/span>Art Journal<\/span><\/em> 71, no. 4 (Winter 2012)<\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n
\"\"
Louise Fishman, Zero at the Bone, 2010, oil on linen, 70 x 60 in. (177.8 x 152.4 cm). Private collection (artwork \u00a9 Louise Fishman; photograph provided by Cheim and Read, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Carrie Moyer: Can you give me a little background on your new paintings?<\/p>\n

Louise Fishman: This all came to me in the last couple of weeks. In the late 1980s, early 1990s, my partner and I had gone to Madrid to see the big Vel\u00e1zquez retrospective. I\u2019d never been to the Prado. I spent a lot of time looking at the Vel\u00e1zquez and wandering around the museum. Eventually I found Goya\u2019s Black Paintings. I\u2019d only seen poor reproductions. They had recently been cleaned and were in their splendor. They knocked me out. I spent a lot time studying them and wandering around Madrid. It wasn\u2019t a long trip, but it was very dense. When we came back, I started working on a number of things\u2014I was about to have a show. I was living in the country then, and my studio was in a firehouse. I worked on a painting that was 90 by 110 inches, the same size as Kaddish, which had been painted several years before, after a trip to Auschwitz. <\/p>\n

I went up to the country and began painting. I\u2019d finished a lot of work for this show and I\u2019d moved it upstairs in the firehouse, which was where the storage area was. I was working primarily on the second 90-by-110-inch painting for about three months, over and over again. When I finished it, I realized that it was the way I\u2019d been digesting the Black Paintings. I remember it having an odd surface; I felt it was one of my best paintings. I had to go up to Vermont to teach for ten days right after that. While I was up there, I got a phone call from Betsy [Crowell] saying, \u201cThere\u2019s been a small fire in your studio, and I think you should come home.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought, a small fire? Why is she calling me if it\u2019s a small fire? So I went back and, to make a long story short, the studio was destroyed. I arrived and went right to the firehouse. Outside were my friends: Amy Snider was there, maybe Jenny Snider, Betsy, people from New York and local friends. They didn\u2019t know where the fire started, and it wasn\u2019t reported in time. The locals had taken the paintings I\u2019d stored upstairs and laid them out on the lawn across the street from the firehouse. So those paintings were smoke-damaged but safe.                   <\/p>\n

Everyone was waiting for me to walk into the studio. I\u2019d never seen anything like it. Black and smoky. Everything had exploded. The paint cans had shot across the space, so there were paths of paint in all sorts of color. In the middle of the studio the large painting had exploded too. It hadn\u2019t even been photographed yet. The braces from the back of the painting had flown into the room, and in the middle of the studio was a charred, black cross. All the things you keep in your studio were destroyed too\u2014my brushes, my knives. I just couldn\u2019t believe what had happened. I was angry, devastated. I got very sick with chronic fatigue syndrome, which I had for several years. I was a basket case for a long time. I never thought about that painting again, and I never thought about Goya\u2019s Black Paintings. <\/p>\n

Moyer: The whole event is so laden with symbolism\u2014it\u2019s almost unbearable. Between the cross, the smoke, the fire, the ashes . . .<\/p>\n

Fishman: It was horrible. I lost everything; I\u2019d lost my life. All my slides melted. A lot of blank paper was damaged, and the smoke had curled up the side of the paper. I used it later for drawing and painting, once I\u2019d had a little distance. One of the things I hadn\u2019t used was a little canvas-covered sketchbook. Smoke on
\nthe cover and inside. And I sat down with a few objects that survived: a rock
\nfrom Auschwitz, a whittled rabbit that a local guy had made. . . . Everything was
\ncovered with a lot of green paint. Two little figures that Betsy made for me out of clay and one piece of sculpture that my friend Brandt Junceau had made. I was hardly functioning. All I could do was open the book and trace each object. Very slowly I started doing some drawings, rubbings and transfers. The drawings were not direct. A lot of pages at the end were empty. It was a book about the fire by a person who had been through it.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Also it was a kind of archaeology. Because the stuff that was left was not painting. It was little fetish objects.<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, things that I treasured. Each one of them had been transformed. They had paint on them, or the clay was darkened as if it had been in a kiln again. Then we went out to New Mexico. I couldn\u2019t drive; I had to sleep all the time. So we went in a van, and we had somebody build a bed in the back of the van. We rented Harmony [Hammond]\u2019s place in Galisteo. Then I met Agnes [Martin], which started a very important series of events. <\/p>\n

Moyer: I spent the last couple of days reading a lot of your press, and there are many citations of \u201ca return to the grid\u201d in the early 1990s. The grid meets gesture to create structure. Does this meeting with Agnes have any bearing on this?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, it had a lot to do with it. She showed me paintings in her studio after we got to know each other, and then she started showing me drawings. I\u2019d always loved her work and was fascinated by her. I was really beside myself just being around her. When I first saw her, she was sitting in her rocking chair, not saying much. And I thought, It\u2019s like sitting with the Buddha. So I\u2019ll just meditate. That\u2019s what she seems to be doing. [Laughter.] As I was looking at her drawings,
\nI suddenly realized her work process was a meditation. And I thought, Oh I know that. I\u2019d had a history of meditation and I still do. So two or three months later when I returned home to the country, I got these little Japanese foldout books and started working with these little grids. I would just make things out of a meditative state instead of wherever else my work comes from. So that\u2019s where the grid started.<\/p>\n

Moyer: But you were using the grid a lot in the unstretched works? <\/p>\n

Fishman: And I was using it in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Moyer: What did your work look like in the late 1960s? <\/p>\n

Fishman: Before the women\u2019s movement? I was doing hard-edged grid paintings. What had interested me the most were Sol LeWitt\u2019s three-dimensional grids. First I was doing big, hard-edged shapes.<\/p>\n

Moyer: So you were taping? <\/p>\n

Fishman: Oh yeah. And then I did the grids where there was an intersection between a vertical and a horizontal. And there was a little square and the color change. They were arbitrary colors. And I did a bunch of those.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Were you using oil paint or industrial paint?<\/p>\n

Fishman: No, I was using acrylic. Then I started doing stain paintings.<\/p>\n

Moyer: You were so in the moment!<\/p>\n

Fishman: They were grids but there was a little more flexibility in them because I didn\u2019t control the paint the way I had. They were still taped but the paint would go under the tape. I may have been pouring more\u2014but they were still grids. That\u2019s what I was doing when I got involved with the movement. I was in my women artists group. That\u2019s when I made the decision not to do any of that work anymore. I decided I wouldn\u2019t do anything that I didn\u2019t want to do. In other words, to try to figure out what part of me came from all the male stuff in my history and to eliminate it\u2014just to see who I was without all that. Impossible,
\nof course.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Yeah, how could you even do that? How did it work at the time?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Well you can\u2019t. But you know what it is. It\u2019s kind of a structure that you build, something that you set up, almost like an armature.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Oh you mean modernism? [Laughter.] That\u2019s one of the armatures . . .<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, but it was more like I wanted to have every choice open to me. And if I never painted again, fine. <\/p>\n

Moyer: Whoa, really? <\/p>\n

Fishman: I thought a lot and started making things out of canvas. Cutting up the grids and stitching them together. Dying canvas in the sink. I didn\u2019t work in a studio anymore; I worked in my living room and was living with Esther [Newton]. I decided to stitch\u2014which I hated. [Laughter.] I spent my life avoiding sewing and anything else that had to do with \u201cwomen\u2019s tasks.\u201d I thought, Okay I\u2019m going to embrace this shit. I hate it, but I\u2019m going to figure out what it is. I\u2019m going to figure out what it is in me that has such trouble with this.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Did you make the connection to the fact that most of the women in your consciousness-raising group were straight? These were the activities that lesbians were trying to escape in the 1950s, by playing basketball, etc. Suddenly they become this kind of relevant art-making model with the advent of feminist art movement. Was it falsely relevant? It feels like something that got laid over your studio practice. Something you were trying on, perhaps . . .<\/p>\n

Fishman: When I was in grade school my friends all decided they wanted to learn how to knit and crochet. And I went with them, even though I didn\u2019t want to do it. Knit one, purl two. I thought, I hate this, but I tried. I made an apron for my mother, in Home Ec, a yellow apron.<\/p>\n

Moyer: When were you were working on unstretched canvas? You went back to stretchers in 1977?<\/p>\n

Fishman: No, 1978\u201379. Right before that I had been doing paper pieces. I did cutout plywood paintings for my first solo show in New York. They got very good press, and all these artists were coming up to me, famous artists like Ron Gorchov. <\/p>\n

Moyer: Was this before you were in the Whitney Biennial? Before 1973?<\/p>\n

Fishman: No. In 1973 I was doing calligraphic paintings, writing on unstretched canvas. I was trying to mimic my friends, who were all writers. I was trying to make a language. Some of them tended to be like cartoon blocks but with just drawing inside. And I had a little system about how I would construct them; each one was divided into segments. I\u2019m not nuts about that group. Except for the one that was in the Whitney Biennial that I like a lot. <\/p>\n

Moyer: I was recently looking at Pat Steir\u2019s drawings from that period, and I\u2019m interested in this relationship between language and abstraction. <\/p>\n

Fishman: Pat used literal words, like Joan Snyder did.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Can you just talk a little about that? I mean using words in painting has been a massive taboo for a long, long time. If the painting is good enough, why does it need text? They would seem to negate each other. It\u2019s interesting to me at that moment (late 1960s) there are all these women artists thinking about text, language, and the language of painting.<\/p>\n

Fishman: I don\u2019t think I was in that group actually. My interest came solely from the fact that all my friends were writers, anthropologists, and other kinds of academics. They formed writing groups. And I couldn\u2019t be in that writing group. My work had no connection to any of the politics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s
\nI did my painting; nobody knew about it but my friends. I had gotten involved with Redstockings when I met Esther, and she was very radical. Eventually the strict consciousness-raising groups morphed into new groups based on specific interests that people had such as writing, especially journal writing. Jill Johnston, Bertha Harris, Esther, and others who were getting published and rethinking how they were putting their work together. This was really interesting to me. And yet
\nI felt so excluded that I started making marks\u2014as if I were drawing fake writing.          In retrospect, I\u2019ve always had an interest in calligraphy starting with Hebrew, a language that I didn\u2019t understand. Something always upset me about it. In fact, when I was in art school, we used to sit in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia and sketch people all the time. Once there was a Yiddish newspaper lying next
\nto me, and I picked it up and pretended to read it. I was eighteen. I desperately wanted to know what it was. It was supposed to be my language, but I\u2019d never been taught it. I knew a little Yiddish, but hardly any. My parents used it as their secret language: \u201cWhat\u2019s for dessert?\u201d In Yiddish, \u201cNothing.\u201d [Laughter.]<\/p>\n

Moyer: Your parents were secular? <\/p>\n

Fishman: My father grew up as a very orthodox Jew. His father was a Talmudic scholar. My father taught yeshiva boys how to read, do their work, and say their mofters. His father died when he was about fifteen. I found out that he stopped believing in God when his father was taken from him. He said, \u201cWhat kind of a God would do that to a child?\u201d I said, \u201cYou don\u2019t believe in God, Daddy?\u201d We had gone to shul regularly all through my childhood. But then he stopped after we were grown. And he said, \u201cYeah, I don\u2019t believe in God, but I talk to him sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moyer: It seems like your generation in particular is in this position where you constantly had to parse out different bits of identity. Do they ever get integrated?
\nI was looking over your CV, and when you were sixty, you were still being put in shows for emerging women artists. When is it that you will stop \u201cbecoming\u201d these three different kinds of artist\u2014abstract, feminist, Jewish? <\/p>\n

Fishman: It\u2019s awful, I hate it. They are all kinds of links, and they need to be made. Before I made the calligraphic paintings, I was doing these stitched grids. They were more like drawing and became a kind of language. With the exception of the first two years in art school, I have never done anything but abstract work. It never interested me.
\nMoyer: You went to graduate school\u2014something that was fairly unusual for the mid-1960s. <\/p>\n

Fishman: I went from 1963 to 1965. I was a senior at Tyler. And my teacher suggested during our final review that I go to grad school. I said, \u201cGraduate school in painting? What are you talking about?\u201d I thought it was bad enough that I had to go to art school because I didn\u2019t feel like I learned dick. I didn\u2019t learn very much, actually. I went to the University of Illinois. <\/p>\n

Moyer: Were you exposed to what was going on in New York at the time?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Oh yes. We looked at all the magazines. And then there was Chicago. I went to a show that Al Held had the Art Institute of Chicago\u2014the first paintings I\u2019d seen that were hard-edged. We were looking at Noland, Judd, and a lot of sculptors. It made me think about what I was doing, which was freely drawn, very organic, and very odd. <\/p>\n

Moyer: Were you aware that you wanted to paint abstractly? <\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, I\u2019ve known it from the first time I studied art. The [Philadelphia] Museum School was very advanced. Franz Kline had taught there. People there were involved in an \u201cabstractionist\u201d style. I was very involved with Kline and Guston, whose work I\u2019d seen in magazines. I was already on a tear and very committed to that way of working and learning. Although that\u2019s not what I was actually doing at that time, it\u2019s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be on that path.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Your relationship to abstraction takes a lot from that period. There\u2019s no metatext going on. Everything in your work is coming from the experiential. It\u2019s not painting about painting.<\/p>\n

Fishman: No, no. Not at all. <\/p>\n

Moyer: One could think of Abstract Expressionism as being a kind of postwar, Jewish identity art. A lot of the practitioners were Jewish. And it has a specific kind of secular, transcendental spirituality, even as it is claimed as a quintessential American art form. Do you think there\u2019s a relationship between abstraction and your own background?<\/p>\n

Fishman: The reason I got involved with it had nothing to do with anything but the freedom and athleticism of it, the power of it\u2014like building bridges. Kline. Architecture has always come in and out of my work. It has to do with the grid and the sense of the window, interiors. Something that showed up a lot in abstraction during that time. <\/p>\n

Moyer: De Kooning? Door to the River?<\/p>\n

Fishman: De Kooning was my big hero. As well as Joan Mitchell. There were a lot of different strains that interested me. And Guston, who was just working with the mark. I didn\u2019t really think about any connections other than the physical one. I\u2019m sure I read stuff. But people didn\u2019t talk about being Jewish then. I think that by osmosis there\u2019s clearly a connection. For example, the idea of not painting
\nthe human form, it being against Jewish law. I\u2019m not even sure I knew that at the time. There\u2019s a lot that enters your body without having direct knowledge. I\u2019m very intuitive, and I\u2019m absorbing stuff all the time.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Were your mother and aunt reading publications like Art News during
\nthe 1950s? <\/p>\n

Fishman: My aunt was a big member of the art world in Philadelphia. She had a lot of shows and was very well known for a long time. My mother wasn\u2019t showing. My aunt and Jackson Pollock had studied with Siqueiros during the legendary summer that he was in New York. She had a lot to say about Pollock. She didn\u2019t believe in abstraction. I kept my mouth shut because she lectured to me and I didn\u2019t want to get in trouble. She\u2019d say, \u201cSiqueiros was the first one to use enamel paint, and Pollock gets all the credit. His paintings are terrible.\u201d She was terrifically well educated on her own. She never even went to high school and was completely self-taught.<\/p>\n

Moyer: What kind of paintings did she make? Representational? <\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, but they had an abstract quality to them. A lot of Jewish-themed paintings. One beautiful painting shown in the Jewish Museum was of a shabbos meal. She was broadly knowledgeable about art, literature, and music. She and her husband were intellectuals. My mother had a subscription to Art News. She and my father got a membership to MoMA, and they used to send you free books with a membership. So she had a big library, and I was always in there looking. I would leaf through her books, but I didn\u2019t really think of being an artist. <\/p>\n

Moyer: This was in the early 1950s?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Once I got to art school in 1956, I really started to look. That whole series The Artist Paints a Picture was so interesting to me because you could see the artist\u2019s studio and what the artist looked like. And to me Joan Mitchell looked like a tough broad, like a dyke. I had just come out myself. And I thought, Oh look at her! I\u2019d go to New York by myself and go to the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street. And I made a lot of decisions doing that. I remember thinking about how some of those painters copped out. They\u2019d get to a certain point, and they\u2019d start imitating themselves.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Who are you thinking of in particular?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Motherwell, for one. But there were plenty of others. I was set on being able to reinvent myself and to not fall into that trap. Because it seemed like death for an artist. I was way too high and mighty. I was like my father\u2019s family: very rigid, very moral to a disastrous degree. No room for \u201chuman-ness,\u201d mistakes, and any of the rest.<\/p>\n

Moyer: And you applied some of that judgment to your development as an artist?<\/p>\n

Fishman: I think so. I really have been consistent about not repeating myself. Lots of artists make a group of paintings that belong to a theme, and the paintings don\u2019t vary that much. I never could do that. Because it didn\u2019t interest me, and because I had a self-imposed restriction on never doing that. I\u2019ve wondered about it. On the one hand, you could expand by going more deeply into something. But there are different kinds of expansiveness.<\/p>\n

Moyer: I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about women artists from the 1980s such as Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger. I just wrote a review of the recent show at the Neuberger Museum, The Deconstructive Impulse, which focused on women artists and postmodernism.1 For women artists in the second half of the twentieth century, if your work didn\u2019t undergo these radical transformations, then you might as well have been dead. By virtue of who you were, you acted as a nexus of social change. Women were gaining entr\u00e9e into the art world, something that hadn\u2019t been possible before\u2014however few were let in. It was almost mandatory that you constantly redefine yourself as culture moved forward. How could you not change?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes. In the late 1960 and early 1970s, there were a lot of departures for me, especially in terms of the materials I used. When I finally went back to the stretched canvases, I had made a complete commitment to painting. I arrived at
\na completely original thing after having gone through all these permutations. When I was in Chicago, I\u2019d made paintings on paper because they didn\u2019t provide me with a studio. I had a living room. So I couldn\u2019t do the cut-wood pieces that
\nI planned to do. Initially I thought of them as drawings for cut-wood pieces, and that I would go the next step and make them more sculptural. That\u2019s not what happened. Instead, the work became more painterly. I got to a point where the paper was too thin, too flat against the wall. I wanted something that projected outwards. And I thought: a canvas. [Laughter.]<\/p>\n

Moyer: Voil\u00e0!<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yeah. I thought, Oh this is exactly what I need. And I went back with
\na vengeance. <\/p>\n

Moyer: Thinking about your return to formalist abstraction, what kind of
\nreaction were you getting to it in the 1980s, the heyday of postmodernism? Everything that\u2019s valued in the rubric of your work is being questioned in that moment. Especially with regard to whether the gesture can have a kind of authenticity. <\/p>\n

Fishman: When I went to graduate school, it occurred to me that the gesture
\nis no longer relevant. I\u2019m going to have to figure out how to do without it. That had been my entire connection to painting. So I started doing the hard-edged pieces. I also have a very strong connection to sculpture. And Minimalist work was very exciting to me. The more I educated myself about it, the more interesting it became. So I actually moved into a way of working that I never would have.
\nWho\u2019s that guy that showed at Paula Cooper who numbered every piece he made? <\/p>\n

Moyer: Jonathan Borofsky.<\/p>\n

Fishman: I met him at a party in 1969, which was downstairs from where I lived on Cooper Square. He came up to my studio to look at my work and said, \u201cThis is the only kind of painting that can be made now.\u201d <\/p>\n

Moyer: Really? Jonathan Borosky said that?<\/p>\n

Fishman: He said, \u201cPainting is dead but what you\u2019re doing is relevant.\u201d They were the flat grid paintings. But in the 1980s, I was just trying to figure out how to paint again after having gone through a long period of questioning everything. I had attention from some quarters for a brief period. During the heyday of Baskerville-Watson Gallery, I was getting reviewed, and they sold all my paintings.
\nI was in the Whitney Biennial again and the Corcoran Biennial. In the 1987 Whitney Biennial, I had a room of paintings next to de Kooning\u2019s room of paintings. <\/p>\n

Moyer: You thought you\u2019d died and gone to heaven!<\/p>\n

Fishman: I want to go back to the beginning of the conversation and talk about the current work. Now you have all this background, including the information about the fire. <\/p>\n

Recently my paintings haven\u2019t had much black in them. A very important painting went down to the Basel Art Fair; there was a lot of interest in it. My dealer said it could have sold ten times over. And of course they want me to keep doing the same painting\u2014something I can never do. And I came back to the studio, and the first thing I made was a black painting. It had nothing to do with anything I\u2019d been thinking about, and I had no idea where it came from. It was a small vertical. <\/p>\n

A friend e-mailed me from Madrid and said, I\u2019m on my way to the Prado.\u201d And I wrote jokingly, \u201cBring me back a couple of Black Paintings.\u201d She said, \u201cI\u2019ll bring you the Dog,\u201d and I said, \u201cGreat that\u2019s my favorite painting.\u201c And I was walking over to meet Simon Watson, who knows the history of my work. I got to the studio and said to him, \u201cI think the theme of my next show is going to be the Black Paintings. He said, \u201cGreat.\u201d I thought, what does that mean? While we were talking I suddenly remembered the history of the studio fire. It all came back to me. And I thought, this is a natural thing for me to be doing at this moment. The fire is really behind me and this black painting emerged. It\u2019s time to look at those paintings again and think about them. So that\u2019s what I\u2019ve been doing. <\/p>\n

Moyer: It\u2019s not a kind of elegiac gesture? Black paintings as a kind of summation of the things you\u2019ve done in the studio? <\/p>\n

Fishman: It\u2019s something that popped up in the studio, but it wasn\u2019t a theme per se. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an appropriate move. When I brought the Goya book out, it was covered with smoke. The whole event just came rushing back.<\/p>\n

Moyer: Now when you say \u201cblack painting,\u201d are you using the term in an open-ended way? Is Yes a \u201cblack painting\u201d?<\/p>\n

Fishman: It\u2019s really not about all of them being black, although black is involved. It\u2019s really about some connection to those paintings of Goya\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Moyer: And that time in your life?<\/p>\n

Fishman: That moment, and maybe even the painting that burned and was forgotten. In a way, I almost feel like honoring that painting.<\/p>\n

Moyer: A kaddish for the death of a painting.<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yeah, right. [Laughter.] I\u2019m not sure where it\u2019s taking me, but I see that it\u2019s loaded. [Pointing to a new painting:] I\u2019m looking at that and wondering where the color comes from. It really is a charred gray. <\/p>\n

Moyer: Since we\u2019re talking about black and the idea of black, maybe we could talk some more about your sense of color. On the one hand, some of them feel like an abstract version of a Social Realist painting. Gritty spaces where the light feels almost dirty. Very urban.<\/p>\n

Fishman: Its funny that you should say that because my aunt, Razel Kapustin, studied with Siqueiros and did Social Realism. That\u2019s what I grew up looking
\nat. My mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, was doing post-Matisse and C\u00e9zanne-type paintings. <\/p>\n

Moyer: So she was a more chromatic painter?<\/p>\n

Fishman: She was studying at the Barnes Foundation, and looking at C\u00e9zannes,
\na lot of Renoirs, too, and Matisse. <\/p>\n

Moyer: Is your palette a kind of reaction then? Unconscious? Looking at the
\ncatalogue you produced of your mother\u2019s work, her colors are very vibrant and luscious.2 Filled with light.<\/p>\n

Fishman: She was a real colorist. For me, one of my main interests has been using the paint as a part of the earth. Using it as a substance that\u2019s raw. Where the whole marking system and color is a material. Which is why sometimes I can\u2019t use much color. Color appears here and there, but it doesn\u2019t feel like it\u2019s an actual substance. It doesn\u2019t have the kind of physicality that I need in a particular painting. At other times color comes up, and I associate it with a physical, natural resource rather than all the attributes (hue, value, etc.). I pay attention to them
\nof course. But I choose them for their material presence. <\/p>\n

Moyer: When did you go back to painting with oils? <\/p>\n

Fishman: About 1977, maybe a little later.<\/p>\n

Moyer: I wonder about that because acrylics were made to be eye-popping. They were all about a demonstration of modern chemistry. It\u2019s interesting to return
\nto a kind of elemental color that is made of minerals and earth. How do you include cadmiums? <\/p>\n

Fishman: Cadmium would often be muted by something else. It gets really
\ninteresting when mixed with black, for instance. When I went back to painting again, even before I went back to stretched linen, I wanted to use the materials
\nI had learned to use in art school. I learned how to grind my own paint. I had a real passion for making paint, noticing the difference between one pigment and another because of the way it absorbs oil, the different textures as you grind it. It was very physical, and that\u2019s what appealed to me. I thought of it as the tradition of painting, but actually it was the physicality that I liked. <\/p>\n

Moyer: I\u2019m thinking about different paint technologies and how they mark time. One thinks of the earth colors and the umbers belonging to a particular period of painting. Oil paint is only used to make paintings, nothing else. Unlike acrylic, which bridges fine art and industry. Even though all of these paint technologies coexist now, they each bring with them a slice of history.<\/p>\n

Back to the notion of how identity plays out in abstraction. It\u2019s one of the ideas I\u2019m endlessly mulling over right now. Is there or could there be such a thing as lesbian formalism? [Silence, then much laughter.]<\/p>\n

Moyer: I can\u2019t answer that question either. But I\u2019m interested in thinking about it. Or do we just want to get away from ideas like that? Right now it seems like there\u2019s a renewed interest in the connections between abstraction and identity.
\nA few months ago I was at an event sponsored by Feminist Art Project during this year\u2019s College Art Association conference, and there was a whole discussion of it. As someone who\u2019s made abstract art for a long time, is that something that you think about? Does it seem possible? Do you think it\u2019s just in the work?<\/p>\n

Fishman: I don\u2019t think about it. But I think my identity is so intense that I\u2019m
\nnot making the paintings that a man makes. And I\u2019m not making paintings that
\na woman makes. <\/p>\n

Moyer: You\u2019re Monique Wittig?3 <\/p>\n

Fishman: Being of my generation, there wasn\u2019t that kind of political framework around mark-making. So everything I did was mediated by my own experience rather than a broad discussion of gender. <\/p>\n

Moyer: At the same time you viewed Abstract Expressionism as a gendered
\nform of painting. Because you weren\u2019t allowed in? You weren\u2019t allowed to play in the club.<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, absolutely. Joan Mitchell was the only one who was allowed to play. She really had an independent stance\u2014even though she was sleeping with
\na bunch of them and she got screwed around. She was unusual. The norm was
\nthe woman who came along with the guy artist. I had a friendship with her that started when we went on a trip to Paris. A friend of mine said, \u201cLook up my friend while you\u2019re there,\u201d and gave me a piece of paper that had Joan Mitchell\u2019s number on it. And I said, \u201cYou\u2019re kidding me.\u201d I was really intimidated, but she was very nice to me. She invited Betsy and me to her place in V\u00e9theuil. When she came to New York, she\u2019d invite me over. She told me much later that she thought I\u2019d come to Paris to save her. <\/p>\n

Moyer: What did she mean? From Jean-Michel Riopelle? From herself?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Save her from whatever was going on that was so miserable for her. I was going to be her savior, and she put a lot on me. <\/p>\n

Moyer: I\u2019m sitting here looking at your new paintings and thinking about how you\u2019re relating to the edge of the canvas, how much of the canvas gets left open.<\/p>\n

Fishman: That\u2019s a whole separate story. That\u2019s something I\u2019m very deliberately engaged in. <\/p>\n

Moyer: I\u2019m not even talking about influence. I\u2019m talking about reference. Do these reference Mitchell? <\/p>\n

Fishman: No, not at all. <\/p>\n

Moyer: So you\u2019re thinking about the structure of the painting?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, I\u2019m looking to maintain more of the original drawing in a painting. There are times when I\u2019m very troubled by heaviness or lack of breathing space in the canvas. Which happens periodically in my work because it\u2019s very architectural, sculptural. It can be heavier than I want it to be. It\u2019s not exactly who I am. It\u2019s something I identified with for a long time. Almost like an armature to make architecture with.<\/p>\n

Moyer: In your studio there are all these paintings with open, bare canvas in them. But if I were going to picture your work in my mind, I always think if it as being incredibly dense, almost impenetrable. There\u2019s a lot of stuff under there if you look for it, but it has this I\u2019m-not-going-to-let-you-in demeanor. <\/p>\n

Fishman: That\u2019s really been true. I wasn\u2019t letting people into it. I\u2019ve protected myself a whole lot, and I\u2019m moving into an area where I\u2019m wide open. My mother\u2019s ninety-five and, if I hadn\u2019t done this catalogue, her work would be in storage forever. I was looking at it and thinking, I have to open up my work. I have to put myself out there in a bigger way. I can\u2019t act the way my mother and aunt did, and the way I learned to behave in the 1950s. A hider.<\/p>\n

Moyer: A \u201chider\u201d\u2014what a great word. There\u2019s a paradox embedded in these new paintings. The work has a kind of lightness but they are ostensibly about the Black Paintings. There\u2019s an interesting seesaw between openness and kind of portentous drama. Do you know what I mean?<\/p>\n

Fishman: Except that Goya\u2019s Black Paintings have sky in them. And that\u2019s what I\u2019m looking to have. <\/p>\n

Moyer: You mean this little corner? [Points to a painting.]<\/p>\n

Fishman: Yes, it has an opening. And certain washes of paint allow you to move into it. <\/p>\n

Moyer: You can stick your hand into the space. It\u2019s loose and watery back there. <\/p>\n

Fishman: It\u2019s about looking at different things than what I\u2019ve allowed myself.
\nIt\u2019s really an explosive thing. What I\u2019m permitting myself is really amazing. Just
\nin time!<\/p>\n

Moyer: That\u2019s really pretty great. Just keep moving. <\/p>\n

\nLouise Fishman has exhibited her work widely since the 1960s, most recently in solo exhibitions at John Davis Gallery (2012, Hudson, NY), and the Jack Tilton and Cheim and Read galleries (both 2012, New York City). Her exhibition It\u2019s Here\u2014Elsewhere is on view at Goya Contemporary (Baltimore) through April 5. The Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY) is currently organizing a retrospective of her work. Fishman is the recipient of a painting grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, and grants from the MacDowell Colony and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others; her work is in an invitational exhibition at the Academy on view through April 14. She is represented by Cheim and Read Gallery.

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Carrie Moyer is a painter and writer who has shown her work in the United States and Europe since the mid-1990s. The exhibition Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny is on view through May 19 at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York, and will travel to the Columbus College Art and Design in spring 2014. Grants and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and awards from Anonymous Was a Woman and Creative Capital, among others. She was one half of Dyke Action Machine!, an agitprop collaboration active in New York City between 1991 and 2008. Moyer\u2019s writing has appeared in Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Modern Painters, and many other publications. She is an associate professor in the art department at Hunter College. Moyer is represented by Canada Gallery in New York City.<\/p>\n

\n

This conversation originally appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Art Journal<\/em>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Louise Fishman and Carrie Moyer<\/p>\n

This all came to me in the last couple of weeks. In the late 1980s, early 1990s, my partner and I had gone to Madrid to see the big Vel\u00e1zquez retrospective. I\u2019d never been to the Prado. I spent a lot of time looking at the Vel\u00e1zquez and wandering around the museum. Eventually I found Goya\u2019s Black Paintings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3661,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conversations","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}