Mastery: Toward An Art That Is Opulent and Gritty

The 1990s are the decade in which Cohen's practice expands decisively. She moves toward inclusiveness—in visuality and materials—explicitly connecting this to lived experience and the "messiness of the human environment." Drop cloths become paintings. Studio debris, crushed graphite, copper, marble dust, and found urban materials enter the work, developing a chemically driven process. The boundaries between painting and what painting had excluded—material, process, contingency—become materially unstable. This period, marked by solo exhibitions at Jason McCoy Inc. and mid-career retrospectives in the U.S. and Germany, also saw the emergence of two ancillary practices, the Altered X-Rays and her photography, that would feed directly back into her painting.

From “A Personal History”
by Cora Cohen

“In the ’90s, my approach became more resolutely one of inclusiveness—in visuality, and in my use of materials. I felt that the standard painting studio materials—pristine tubes of oil paint, appropriate mediums, and solvents—were not enough to re-create in my work the sensual experience of living. Seeing women and men becoming sick and dying on the streets of New York and other American cities, I felt that I was witnessing the decay of our society—of any idea of a society. I wanted to make paintings that would study and grapple with uncontrollable forces and the messiness of the human environment, rather than remain within the safety of the minimal or the limitations of the pure. Disorder, irresolution, unfinished space— these aspects of nature and the uncontrolled side effects of our culture's material abundance are horrible and fascinating. There is a raw truth in these things that has led me toward an art that is opulent and gritty, inviting conflict.”

“Between 1991 and 1992, I was working out of two studios—one in Chicago, one in New York—and the deal in Chicago was that the studio floor had to be kept clean. At the end of my time there, I had a show coming up in New York, so in order to have as much as possible to work with, I packed up the drop cloths I’d used in Chicago and sent them to New York, where I began painting on them. Working on such base and trampled surfaces was a challenge, but the process opened up possibilities. Eventually, the drop cloths became paintings.”

“I also began to incorporate other materials: elements from the earth, crushed graphite, copper, marble dust, aluminum, iron oxide, and mundane urban elements including scraps, trash, and studio debris. My interest in heterogeneity—rather than formal unity—expanded. I 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. At times I initiated new chemical processes that affected portions of the canvas at different rates and in starts and stops. Some of these works possess a certain gritty beauty; many are decidedly unpretty.”

“In the mid ’90s, I began working on developing new marking systems that I applied to found objects—mostly my Altered X-Rays. I also began to draw and photograph my immediate surroundings as a form of visual note-taking, attempting to ground myself in places and cultures. These, like the X-rays, directly and spontaneously record responses to my lived experience. By the end of the ’90s, these ancillary bodies of work fed back into my paintings, allowing elements of contingency, flux, and indeterminacy to inform all of my practice. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make the sort of paintings in which touch was more evident, an art with a greater emotive and psychological resonance. Reintroducing brushwork as surrogate for my touch made my work more reliant on emotive and psychological force. I also started removing the virtuosic from my painting, relentlessly working and reworking the surfaces of my small paintings with brush and palette knife. Some of those small paintings became, for me, the embodiment of destructive violence, harnessed and transformed by the act of painting. The larger, more open paintings referred frequently to uncharted spaces such as those one finds between airports and cities—neither industrial nor urban or suburban, only dead zones of topography. I link this with the concept of useless, “wasted” time. Both allow for more human and perhaps more humane ways of feeling and being.”

RELATED DOCUMENTS

Stephen Maine, “Keeping it Real,” Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey, September 2007

Barbara MacAdam, “The New Abstraction,” ArtNews, April 2007

Barry Schwabsky, “Cora Cohen: One Art”, Jason McCoy, New York, New York, September 2004

Sidra Stich, “Paintings and Altered X Rays (1983-1996),” catalog essay (Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, 1996)

Linda Nochlin, “Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings,” catalog essay (Jason McCoy Inc. , 1994)