Louise Fishman
By Donald Kuspit
The offerings on view in “always stand ajar,” an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Louise Fishman (1939–2021), were inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Naturally, the combination of the artist’s bold abstractions with the comparatively controlled—and even wittily mannered—language of the poets’ verses set up a kind of paragone between the two art forms. But Fishman also seemed to be establishing a distinctly American lineage of vanguard creative thought.
Of the ten paintings on view, three (Paragraphs of Wind, 2008; Loose the Flood, 2009; and My Final Inch, 2009) borrowed their titles from poems by Dickinson. The second of the three is based on a phrase in a stanza from “Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music” (1865):
Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—
Gush after Gush, reserved for you—
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?
Fishman’s sixty-six-by-thirty-nine-inch canvas depicts an almost biblical torrent of blues, which ride over an earthy assortment of murky, rust-colored shapes. At the top half of the composition is a vertical ovoid form—like the blank surface of a handheld mirror—overpainted with a series of long and obliquely angled strokes in pale azure and white. Perhaps this structure is meant to represent a portal into heaven, or a tear in the celestial firmament, whose veracity can only be proven through physical touch, like that of the apostle Thomas of Dickinson’s text, who palpated the Savior’s wounds.
The seven other paintings here paid homage to Stevens—among these were
The Crust of Shape, 2003; Green in the Body, 2004; Glitter of a Being, 2005; and Hymn of the Rock, 2013. The words in some of the titles seemed to allude to sundry elements in the works, as though they co-implied each other. Consider the ninety-by-sixty-inch Crust of Shape, which features a dense mesh of muscular, viridian lines over a field of variegated emerald, which has been gently adumbrated by patches of yellow. The Stevens poem that inspired this work, “The Man with the Blue Guitar XXXII” (1937) begins with the canto:
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
This work appears to have a curious vantage point—it is as though we have climbed high up in a tree and are looking through denuded branches at the verdant ground below. But attempting to narrativize such a picture seems foolish. “Throw away . . . the definitions”—this could be the rallying cry of modernist art and literature, where inchoate sensation obliterates the objective image and feeling perturbs fact. Indeed, the art of the early to mid-twentieth century said much about what was seen in the dark. And it was often gruesome.
But the differences between painting and poetry—and the artist’s ambitious attempt to correlate them in her work, in whatever eccentrically expressive way—are characterized in Freud’s distinction between primary and secondary processes. The former is considered more developmental, or “primitive,” than the latter. Primary process, governed by the pleasure/unpleasure theory, seeks an instantaneous release of tension—as Fishman’s art seems to. Secondary process, which is subordinate to the rules of reality, often follows Aristotelian logic. Dickinson’s and Stevens’s poems, much quoted by Fishman, tend to be an ingenious mixture of what might be called primary-process metaphor and secondary-process description. To reconcile the irreconcilable, as Fishman attempts to do, is a Sisyphean enterprise—one that the artist’s recklessly raw paintings thoroughly take on.