Paul's Post 1: Cora Cohen

http://guidedbyinvoices.us/artists/Cora_Cohen/Cora_Cohen_work.html



http://www.coracohen.com/



I wanted to insert an image of the painting you will see if you follow the link to Cora's exhibition invitation, or the link to her website above. The painting is called Curtain 7.
But Google must have seen me trying to copy it here- I'll have to figure out how to get permission, or to make portals. 

So, take a look- follow the link.

I was struck by the layering of experiences in this painting, and I'm just responding for now to the image on my screen, sadly- although of course what I remember from many experiences of her work, and conversations also inform these thoughts.  I find it full of evening light, just prior to dusk. Cora talks about the difference between the depicted light which can infuse a painting (Turner comes to mind), and the literal light by which we see the painting, and how the painting can play with that. There already are two simultaneously and consciously deployed layers.

By creating a surface with its own texture, and painting over that, Cora isn't trying to short circuit a process of the coming about of a surface. 

In the past, I remember Cora telling me that in her work, things that happen of their own accord would be as important- maybe more important- than things that happened by her intervention. (It sounded to me then as though she almost wanted to get intervention as close to zero as possible.) Chemical reactions were a very good example of processes that happen autonomously. At that time, she was using some in her process. I believe the oxidation of copper was one- and that gorgeous pale green, almost celadon hue that results from it.

I think of her prepared surface of texture in a sense as an eminently useful distraction- a sort of stand-in for a found object- in fact, it becomes a found object. Its independence from what happens later is as important as its collaboration in that. Nothing in Cora's painting involves subterfuge. Everything invites the viewer's projections; dreaming- everything is suggestive- everything also is just what it is.

This will make a fine start for our blog- because for me there are two centers of gravity, or three, say, that are often on my mind, and they apply to what's on my mind now, thinking about my experiences of Cora's work, and listening to her talk. One would be Leonardo da Vinci's advice to painters, that if they find themselves stuck; lacking subject matter- the thing to do is to find an old crumbling plaster wall, and gaze into that- you can find any number of subjects there, he said. 

Another would be the painter Francis Bacon's assertion about Rembrandt. He said that if you study the surface of a Rembrandt painting closely, you won't find "a single illustrational mark", but a concatenation of accidental events appreciated by the profound sensibility of the artist. Bacon made a distinction between an experience that "comes off directly onto the nervous system"; and a less useful one that first is diverted "through the cataract of the brain". Bill Jensen made it very efficient simply saying "the painting is the experience." 

What happens here is something that only happens here- it can only happen between the viewer and the painting- not between the viewer and the pictures, or the viewer and someone's words, as wonderful as they might be. 


So, its good that the show just opened yesterday. 


The third thing I alluded to is the music of Bach. 

Bach is considered all around the epitome of achievement as far as polyphony is concerned.

Bach maximizes the possibilities in the idea of having many things happen at once that are all equally worthy of attention. Each voice has its own trajectory and integrity, its own "narrative" (I use this word to describe a particular type of attention). There is a process the listener goes through. The listener is highly active- choosing what to take for foreground, and what as background- choosing how to take the forms of structures that emerge as larger patterns within the overall texture. The options are many, and the choices vary from performance to performance, and from listening to listening. There is an overall structure and a final resolution. But what's  remarkable is the extent of the extendability of diversion- an elasticity; a stretching out of anticipation- that rupture is where Bach wants to take us. 

(To my mind, Bach's music is and will always be quite radical. 
I have heard people say that Bach should be thought of as the producer of mechanical contraptions that depict a Newtonian, deterministic world. To me, nothing could be further from the truth.) 

The aspect that applies here is the aspect of polyphony- a multi-valent experience. An "irreducible plural", (which could only actually relate to an indeterminate realm). 

Cora 's paintings invite a similar experience. In Bach, its the stretching of anticipation in the adventures of modulations, and the delaying of resolution. In Cora's work its the slowing of attention; the possibility that, for one example out of many offered- materials have a soul,say, (which is how Jim Clark describes this). 

Something allowed to be what  it is can  take on a special corporeality under these circumstances (Guston)- and then, the materials are endowed with the same (ontological) status as the flesh of our bodies- maybe more to the point- the flesh of our loved ones. However surreal, or geological, or astronomical, the "language" at hand may be, the material has a life. 

Irreducible- unreconcilable; unresolvable- a flowering of questions; provocations-  a vital, and ever-blooming process of interactions between what the artist left and the viewer.

In Bach, this can be, for me anyway, uncomfortable at times, in a way that I cherish, but is beside the point here- in Cora's work its generally more inviting than confrontational, although some of the works that  involve collage have plenty of jarring transitions and discontinuities to them.

The paintings lately have become  slow burning balms, as supple as the breath of the happiest monk in Tibet (say, a hundred years ago to be safe). Gently sturdy, unaccountably patient. And as different from one another as the kids in a kindergarten class at any Manhattan grade school. Each painting finds itself within terms that are particular to that painting. 

I haven't seen the show that opened yesterday as yet, I'm in bed with the latest virus for now, but I expect that there is nothing here that seeing the show would prompt me to reconsider much. 

We'll see.

2/16/13
Paul