A Conversation with Jason Stopa

I met Cora Cohen in the summer of 2022.She sent me an email inquiring about my recent review of a John Zurier exhibition in Hyperallergic, and asked if I would attend her upcoming solo show at Morgan Presents in New York, where she was presenting a suite of paintings from the 1980s.Her email was personable and charming, and when we met later that fall she spoke in few words, with a commanding demeanor.

Indeed, although I’d been wholly unaware of her recent work, I was generally aware of Cora’s legacy. My first encounter with her work was in a graduate school slide lecture given in 2008 by Robert C. Morgan, who was interested in painters working in the shadow of Postmodernism. The works I encountered were highly physical and decidedly expressive. Her surfaces felt arrived at, rather than predetermined. Postmodernism’s emphasis on signs and semiotics required a fair amount of attention, and though I had not seen Cora’s work in person, I was aware that she was working in a modality that was neither trendy nor conceptual. Her aversion to language was evident. Rather, she possessed a desire to revisit threads of abstraction left visible from a previous generation.

Cora was part of a micro-generation of artists who helped breathe new life into gestural abstraction. She did so by posing a series of questions, as opposed to presenting a set of answers. Questions such as: Can an all-over abstraction still retain composition? What happens when you reverse figure and ground over and over again? What role, if any, does intentionality play in the meaning of a painting?

Her long-standing suspicion of language also surfaced in the interview we conducted over email, Zoom, phone, and handwritten notes in early 2023. Many of my questions to her were met with additional questions. This kind of call and response is evident in her paintings. It is part of their charm. Their dense layers are composed of floating gestures, viscous drips, addition and subtraction. Color is often dirty. The sheer accumulation of paint on the surface is impressive. The results are both mystifying and revealing, leaving audiences to parse out signification from her enigmatic process.

In February 2023, Cora told me she was feeling ill. Unfortunately, she declined rapidly. Some of my questions remain unanswered, some of her answers remain impenetrable.

This is completely fitting.
—Jason Stopa, 2025

Jason Stopa: What’s your process, Cora? Do you start with studies or drawings?

Cora Cohen: I think process is one of the most uninteresting things to talk about.

JS:We can skip it.

CC:I mean, it is crucial, yet so much else is. I think, in that sense, I am essentially advocating for an Arte Povera mentality. I know very deeply that the way something looks is completely affecting. However, a lot of the time, reading a description of it is not very interesting.

JS:Yeah, it can be tedious.

CC:I find it boring, too. I was influenced by my college painting teacher [Paul Feeley], and he liked “big.”¹ If you asked him something specific, like how to stretch a canvas—or how to do anything—he’d say, “Oh, go ask one of the other students. It’s not interesting, I’m not going there. That’s not what I want to talk about.” And then he’d pick something really interesting to talk about from Greek mythology or art history, or from everyday life.

JS:Like what?

CC:His belief, for example, that you could not tell from how people looked whether they were criminal or not. He’d say, “Let's talk about why that happened.” And he’d just go on a really interesting riff—a monologue really.

JS:You liked that?

CC:I felt I was learning something important. And it was also about encouraging students to learn from their peers. In my family, looks were crucial, so I found his notion of “looks were not a positive indicator” to be completely radical.

I didn’t really want to be taught how to make a good painting. I didn’t like somebody saying, “This could be a lot better if you put a little green in the upper-right corner.” I had plenty of that in high school, and back then I knew how to make things look okay by certain standards. But I couldn’t help but begin to question those standards.

Then, the next thing would be: “This is good, but try pushing it a little further.” Mm-hmm. I was like: “Oh, maybe I should just lean back from it. Maybe I don’t need to push anything.” The whole idea of paintings working and being pushed and all of that . . . I don’t know. It seemed kind of stupid. Like, why should a painting “work”? That’s an argument I always had with Joan Mitchell. It was her nomenclature. I would say, “Why should a painting ‘work?’” Maybe it should “play.”

JS:It’s a progress narrative, right? It’s a way of saying that you’re getting somewhere. And it can keep going and going and going. And it’s going to keep getting more interesting the further it goes. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes something can get pushed into a corner because it has a logical endpoint. And then it’s actually not so interesting.

CC:But if you’re teaching, the student can confront that corner and move on to something else. I mean it’s not such a terrible way to teach.

JS:Right. It’s about trying to understand the boundaries of your project. And maybe that’s something that you do and don’t want. It sounds like you came into art school having a general sense of what was going to be on the table.

CC:I didn’t go to art school. I went to college. I’m afraid that people do have a certain nature, and I was, by nature, rebellious. I was also arrogant.

JS:Were you always a contrarian?

CC:Some of my good and older old friends would say so.

JS:I wonder if you think of painting as an act of self-discovery. Are the act and the meaning of the act inseparable?

CC:I think they are connected. I mean, we’re talking about how people who paint the paintings think they want them to be.

JS:Your recent show at Morgan Presents was groundbreaking for many painters in New York. It presented an abstraction that seemed to stretch across art history without any concern for the postmodern threats leveled at painters with a strong relationship to Ab-Ex. Your work doesn’t flirt with other ’80s and ’90s movements like Neo-Geo or conceptual abstraction. Has your career been marked by your engagement with your moment? Or have you been swimming in your own stream? Many arguments have been made about painting being its own autonomous language; the use of drips, gestures, and lines corresponds to a historical usage that positions the artist in a given context.Identifying a painter’s vocabulary of forms grants the audience access to what is being expressed. This prompts questions about language—what is your relationship to painting as a language? Is your practice an attempt to subvert this?

CC:That is very nice of you to say about my show. Most people I know said simply, “Oh, I think I remember some of these.” I personally dislike language, except for poetry of course. I don’t think painting is, or can be, a language. When you say, “Vocabulary of forms grants the audience access to what is being expressed”—this is exactly correct. But I think “granting access” is confining and a bit prescriptive.

JS:Maybe my point is more about the past, when painters were limited to a single signature style.

CC:A long time ago, I think the market needed a signature style for its own purposes. However, that is less the case now. Stylistic fluidity is okay. Ormaybe stylistic fluidity is a style.

JS:There’s a contingent in the art world that still feels strongly that paintings aren’t things that you can deduce down to a series of positions—and that they rather best serve as a metaphor and an act of translation.

CC:I had to really work to learn about metonymy and all of that stuff. I’d memorize it and go over it with myself and then get it wrong. I don’t think painting is like one big agitated fit or one thought-out process. There are paintings that are a combination of those two things—people write about it as “zombie formalism,” where you have these rules but you then get to break them in this prescribed way. It must be very hard to teach right now?

JS:It is. We are no longer in a grand narrative moment with consensus about the stakes in painting. Not that there ever was total consensus, but there were arguments for and against certain things. A discourse. Now there are separate stakes and issues in each person’s studio. Every painter is having a distinct conversation.

People think about narrative a lot now and they want to tell their story, which is different from somebody else’s story. Great artists have always known that one’s story is only useful insofar as you can make a successful painting out of it. It’s very hard to do. Using painting as a storytelling medium has always struck me as prescriptive. It doesn’t seem like you think of your paintings as narratives.

CC:No. I dislike narratives. Like, I don’t read novels.

JS:No novels?

CC:I might one day find a novel, but I read poetry, and I also read a little critical theory.

JS:I was reading an article today by Galen Strawson about people who identify as narrative and non-narrative individuals. Some see themselves in a continuum, and Strawson calls them “endurists”; others don’t necessarily think of their subjective persona as enduring, and he calls them “transients.” But to think of your entire life as a story is rather difficult; there are things we can claim about our lives and then things we really don’t want to claim. It begs the question: Which part of one’s story is in the painting? I feel like abstraction can lend itself to meaning by association as opposed to narrative.

CC:That does make sense.

JS:Your last show had a number of paintings that spanned a real range of time. Do paintings from twenty or thirty years ago feel as fresh to you as paintings that you may have made six months ago? Do they feel like they’re all part of the same spirit? Or are they locked in different times?

CC:I don’t know. I have a friend who came to my show, and she said, “Cora, tell me about these. What were you thinking about? What are they about?” I said, “Well, I don’t know. And she said, “What were you feeling?” I told her I was feeling very free. And then she asked me, “Who were you with?” I said, “I don’t think I was with anyone.” And she said, “Well, that’s really unusual for you. You’re often with someone.”

JS:Right. We’re in an art world that very much wants to kind of glean what the work is about. And your response is that you’re not quite sure of the specifics, and that maybe the work is, in a more general sense, about freedom. That might mean different things to different people. Freedom to one person might feel like confinement to another.

CC:What you said calls to mind that the act of painting just by itself can be confining—you have all this stuff and you’re in your studio with these paintings you’re making, and you have all this equipment—this stuff you have to clean up. Right? It’s kind of a chore. I mean, I always wish that I were a writer, even though I don’t want to be one. Because you can do it without all this baggage. You can just be free.

Some painters can make it all come right out—they can even make it happen on the computer and literally print out the painting. Matthias Groebel has a painting machine. Christopher Wool has a method, and he is less hands-on. I call it alternative ways of producing. So they have their own baggage. I mean, it’s not really like writing poems. It’s a little heavier.

JS:I was wondering if youfeel any baggage with respect to art history. Your palette employs some of the same dirty, muted colors I recognize from certain periods of art history, but it’s a far cry from the buoyant palette of second-generation Ab-Ex painters like Joan Mitchell.

Louise Fishman is another painter in your circle who embraces some tenets of Ab-Ex, and she also introduces content into abstraction that was once seen as strictly off limits, like feminism. Do you share a kinship with her?

CC:I love many of Joan’s paintings and admire them very much, but I think I was formed by different art histories: Chinese painting mainly—the Yuan dynasty; and modern European art, like Joan Miró and Max Ernst; and early Spanish painting, more than I was by Italian painting; and, of course, American Modernism. With Joan’s work, I’m more inclined towards the ones she made directly after the war that seem to be influenced by Art Informel—it was a period of her work she did not like, and we used to argue about it.

Sometimes I wish I could paint a little more like Joan Snyder. I like how her paintings are not cohesive. I did one drawing that I considered to be riffing on Snyder, but I knew immediately it was too mannered, too Twombly.

The way in which one knows the content of a painting is through a combination of factors, including who and what the person who painted the painting is. There is something with many of Snyder’s paintings that makes me think, “Big mama’s gonna break that grid.” I like her attitude and how she paints. With Louise Fishman, who was a friend and whose work I admire, I feel like hers are very fine paintings in an established tradition—the ones with words do announce her identity and gender and retain an attachment to an established aesthetic.

JS:Do you think you have to contend with abstract painting’s history? Do you feel like you have to contend with anything?

CC:I don’t think that much about it. I love one painting in the show—it has the big red blob at the bottom. It didn’t really have a name, but Joan Mitchell referred to it as “can-can dancer.”² It looks like a can-can dancer’s skirt. But I think of it as a big red blob. When I saw that painting after not seeing it for a while, I thought of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas.

JS:I know that painting.

CC:It’s an amazing painting.

JS:The space of that painting—with the body hanging upside down—there’s very little negative space in it.

CC:I made that connection from Titian to that big red blob. I’d like to do more than one—to do variations. Because it keys in on an idea I’m really interested in: formlessness. I don’t mean to imply that Titian was thinking that way . . .

JS:I understand what you’re getting at. It’s not so volumetric, but a feeling conveyed by the way that you use paint. The marks are relative, nearly floating off the grid. You mentioned painters like Joan Snyder breaking the grid.

CC:I don’t think that way, but I don’t know her. So I don’t know if she thinks that way.

JS:Maybe it just organically happens through your way of working. I’m curious about your titles. As someone with a complex relationship to language, how do you come up with a title? Is it through a poetic sensibility?

CC:I have always felt that a good title could be a handle into the work. It wouldn’t be the way of understanding the work, but it would allow you to peer over the edge and see a little bit of light. So I tried very hard with titles to make them associative. But then I gave up on that. People would get too involved with the words and would want to talk about the title. Now I’m doing watercolors and works on paper, and I just number them and provide the year. There are too many to make titles.

Once in a while I can make a title for a work on paper. I want the title to be a way that anybody walking around on the street—like my physical therapist—could understand. He is embarrassed because he feels he has no culture. Like he feels he doesn’t know what art is and he doesn’t know what painting is. And he’s worried about his children, because he doesn’t know how to give them better knowledge of art. There are people like this who are highly intelligent, and there has to be a way they can understand what I’m doing.

JS:It sounds like an interest in democracy.

CC:Definitely.

JS:Being cultured gets kind of a bad rap. Some artsy conversations can be perceived as elitist or snobby. But there’s actually this interesting middle ground between being able to speak to a general audience and keeping the conversation elevated enough that it’s interesting and not pedestrian.

CC:I think it’s good to sprinkle a little pedestrian in, so it can be grasped easily.

Notes

^1. Cohen identifies Feeley in Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview,” 2022, an unpublished interview included in the Texts: Archive section of this website.

^2. See 3085-7 (Untitled 1987), (Can-Can Dancer), 1987. Reproduced on this website.