Cora Cohen's Meaning

Among the things one learns by pursuing the vocation of art criticism is that, on the whole, artists are better (or at least more interesting) writers than most writers. I think this has to do with the discipline of noticing that they cultivate. So it’s been sobering, as I’ve been preparing to write this essay, to read through the words that Cora Cohen devoted to her work as a painter over the years. Fragmented and casually structured as her mostly unpublished writings might be, they contain observations with a precision and accuracy and poetic flair that I can only envy—as in some lecture notes from 2012, in which she sums up her process in this way: “Meaning is arrived at through contradiction and subsequent re-grouping.”¹

Anyone who knew Cohen knows that contradiction was essential to her being. To converse with her was, quite simply, to open oneself to being contradicted. I’ll say more about that later, but I want to start where her sentence starts: “Meaning is arrived at.” That’s already an important and surprising statement. I’ve written before that she was one of the few painters whose works are truly abstract in what I consider the strictest sense, namely that they evade language. These deeply abstract works are, as the painter-critic Sherman Sam once put it, “‘pictures’ that question their own premise.”² (Sam was referring to the London- and Madrid-based Argentine artist Varda Caivano, but might well have been describing his own paintings, or Cohen’s, but not those of too many of their fellow painters.) This rigorous self-questioning, and the concomitant indifference to whatever can be nailed down linguistically, might lead one to imagine that, if the idea of meaning is relevant to such paintings at all, that imagined or hoped-for meaning can only be one that must be endlessly deferred, endlessly opening to difference—or différance, as the Derrideans used to say. Such a meaning would never be a point of arrival but only ever of movement, of wandering, of perpetual setting out (or perhaps even that paradoxical “mooring of starting out” of which she might have read in the poetry of John Ashbery, with which she was quite familiar—again, more of that later).³

But Cohen, evidently, saw things otherwise: She considered that in her art, meaning is or can be an achieved point of arrival. This is important to keep in mind. Elsewhere, I’ve written about Cohen in terms of what John Keats called “negative capability,” that is, that capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”⁴ I still think that is right, and I have since writing that discovered that Cohen cited Keats’s words in her own notes toward a way of working that she wanted to remain “provisional, non-finite, ambiguous, but at the same time rather serious, straightforward, and non-ironic” as “a method of turning failure into a compelling act.”⁵ But even so, I now realize that what should have been more strongly emphasized was that this state of doubt and uncertainty was not, for her, an end, but a means: through the deferral of meaning to arrive at meaning—and a meaning that can only be incarnated thus, in painting, and not in language—and then “re-grouping,” rearranging one’s thoughts or one’s materials, or both, on the basis of that illation.

Such a conclusion, of course, leaves the would-be critic or commentator in a perplexity. How to communicate a meaning that is by definition tacit and nonverbal? In fact, there are some likely gambits. One would be to forego altogether any attempt to indicate a work’s meaning in favor of focusing, instead, on the means the artist used to attain it—simply to unpack the work’s formal and material elements, investigate the process by which it was made, and so on, leaving the “why” of it all out of the picture; this method might be ultimately unsatisfying, but could still be very informative. Another way to proceed might be to attempt to evoke the work’s meaning indirectly, to try and conjure it in the reader’s mind without pretending to state it. Meaning as a ghostly presence, sensed but unseen. This would be the—let’s say—poetic way of working. Not scientific, not claiming objective truth. More specifically, borrowing from the language of theology, this might be called an apophatic approach to meaning—a meaning indicated by negation, as opposed to a cataphatic or affirmative approach. This, too, could be considered unsatisfying, since readers can never be sure that the meaning they take away (if any) is the one the writer intends, nor that the one the writer intends is the one that artist intended. “You have it but you don’t have it.” But that quandary is just the flip side of the freedom of mind involved in the very act of meaning. To arrive at a meaning, in this view, is a kind of wager, unguaranteed.

And that idea of unsecured meaning—that poetic sense of what meaning might be—is, I believe, the one that Cohen had in mind. In 1993 she gave one of her paintings the title Paradoxes and Oxymorons, which was borrowed from a poem by Ashbery. (I told you I’d be coming back to him.) It’s the poem from which I borrowed the sentence, “You have it but you don’t have it.”⁶ It’s a poem about living in this way: “Without proof. Open-ended.” But how is that? Even if you arrive at meaning, you may not recognize it. “You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.” But it’s there, and you’re there, and something has happened. “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” is also a love poem.

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Whatever has happened has been the outcome of contradiction. Remember, that’s how meaning is arrived at, according to Cohen—“through contradiction.” Disagreement was food and drink to her. (I told you I’d be getting back to this too.) I wish I could remember every time she contradicted me. Luckily, I don’t have to, because one example will do and I don’t even have to recall it myself. It’s been written into the record. Back in 1994, according to painter Mary Jones, I “described [Cohen’s] work as alchemical and in her inimitable way, she interrupted [me] and said, ‘No, it’s chemical.’”⁷ I honestly don’t remember that moment, but who cares? Se non è vero, è ben trovato. First of all it’s beautiful in its verbal economy: using just three words, Cohen contradicts me by echoing my own word, enjoining me to make the word shorter, to cut a syllable. And she reminds me, in doing so, to steer clear of the impulse to mystify what is already mysterious enough—for what happens when pigments and other materials meet and interact on canvas is not a magical process, or a spiritual one; to call it chemical is to refute any implication of an esoteric side to it.

And yet the purely worldly and material and exoteric nature of this process does not mean it is ever completely knowable, even by the person who shepherds that process along, the painter herself. Jones recalls Cohen “always” claiming not to know what she was doing. That wasn’t exactly my experience, but that may just mean that Jones and I needed to be contradicted in different ways, and I believe Jones when she writes, “I remember hearing this at her studio table, when I would pick up the mysterious vials from Kremer and ask her how she used them. She said, ‘I don’t know.’” That makes sense: Paintings happen chemically rather than alchemically, but that doesn’t make the painter a chemist any more than it makes her an alchemist. She might be more like a kid with a chemistry set. Maybe something will accidentally blow up? How cool would that be! The great thing is to be amazed. In any case, at least in the time that I followed Cohen’s work, which is to say starting in the late 1980s, it has always been the case that—excuse me if I insist on something I’ve already written—a “dialectic of control and loss of control, of will and randomness, of structure and the dissipation of structure, [has been] the key to the entire development of her art.”⁸ And at the time she made Paradoxes and Oxymorons, she seems to have been intent on tamping down the urge to determine, to compose, to order, to observe hierarchy, even to know; she was willing to work as deeply as possible in that state of negative capability that I spoke of before: Here, it might seem as if she had simply scattered onto her near-square canvas some quanta of fluid matter—does it even count as paint? Jones is right to speak vaguely of “pours, powders, and indefinable stuff that looked like residue scraped from the bottom of a turpentine jar”—and then stood back to see how they would interact, maybe giving a little push with a stick or something here and there to make sure things were staying active.

I should explain that I have lived with Paradoxes and Oxymorons for thirty years now. I look at it every day. So when I talk about it staying active, trust me, I am speaking from experience. What’s peculiar about this strangely formless painting in mostly grays and earth tones and the occasional hint of pinkish white with lots of bare canvas is that, for most of these thirty years, each morning when I glanced at the painting for the first time that day, I found myself puzzled, uneasy: Hadn’t the painting changed a bit overnight? Hadn’t that bit of stuff shifted a little bit, or maybe that one there? I could never put my finger on exactly what the change might have been, but neither could I shake the feeling that the painting was somehow not quite as it was when I’d last seen it the night before. It seemed to me that, just as Sigmar Polke (who unlike Cohen really did embrace an interest in alchemy) had made paintings with hues that change based on ambient atmospheric conditions (humidity and temperature), in this painting and others Cohen might have been working with unstable combinations of materials whose interactions would continue morphing long after being placed on the canvas.⁹ But is that really true? Maybe not. Lately I’ve come to a different conclusion, that it’s simply the painting’s avoidance of closed or nameable forms or even of gestural traces with determinate directionality or intention—that radical abstractness I spoke of before—that makes it next to impossible to entirely fix it in memory. You can’t keep a consistent mental image of it. Every encounter with it is a little bit different than the last—"and then you aren’t there / Or have adopted a different attitude,” as the Ashbery poem after which the painting is titled says. Even if it is physically as stable as almost any other painting, it always appears different, a little unfamiliar. To experience a painting in this way is to know both the excitement of seeing something new and the melancholy of feeling the loss of what one had previously seen. It’s an extreme embodiment of Cohen’s declaration that she is “against art that tries to control how the viewer sees the work.”¹⁰

Not all of Cohen’s paintings are quite as mercurial—as uncontrolling and uncontrolled—as this. At other moments in her exploration of the medium’s possibilities she was much more willing to put down declarative gestures that seem closer in feeling to those one might find in the work of her Abstract Expressionist precursors—whom she admired, but about whose relevance to her own work she was, I think, ambivalent. The willful gesture in her paintings always seems to be in contradiction, not necessarily to another gesture, but to the context, the space in which it had to occur—the pictorial weather, if you will, that always admits so much chaos. Because the painting always makes space for what continually changes and evolves, the sense of what seems or seeks to stand firm is itself in constant transformation. Should we even speak of “gesture”? Recalcitrant as ever, Cohen once told me flat out, “I hate the word gesture.”¹¹ At least in that moment, she preferred to speak simply of strokes. Elsewhere, she mentioned “intensely purposeful lines and shapes.”¹² Whatever it’s called, the assertive mark is an assertion of intentionality, of meaningfulness, but it does not reveal the meaning of which it is full. Purposive action does not conquer chaos but becomes one of its elements. And when that action leads to change, to what Cohen called “re-grouping,” the observer knows that it has meaning. As a reader of Ashbery might suspect, the meaning is you.

Notes

^1. Cora Cohen, “2012 Lecture Notes,” 2012. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-8.html.

^2. Sherman Sam, “Letter from London: Vaida Caivano,” The Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2007, https://brooklynrail.org/2007/07/artseen/london-july-august.

^3. John Ashbery, “Soonest Mended,” in John Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956-1987 (New York: Library of America, 2008), 698. I give here the poem’s conclusion: “For this is action, this not being sure, this careless / Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, / Making ready to forget, and always coming back / To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.”

^4. Barry Schwabsky, in “A Tribute to Cora Cohen,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Cora-Cohen/.

^5. Cora Cohen, “Keats had an idea he called negative capability”, 2018, On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-2.html.

^6. John Ashbery, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” in Shadow Train (New York: Penguin Books, 1981): 3.

^7. Mary Jones, in “A Tribute to Cora Cohen,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Cora-Cohen/.

^8. Schwabsky, in “A Tribute to Cora Cohen,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Cora-Cohen/.

^9. Kathleen Howe, “Alchemical Researches: The Photoworks of Sigmar Polke,” On Paper 1, no. 2 (November–December 1996): 13.

^10. Cora Cohen, “2012 Lecture Notes,” 2012. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-8.html.

^11. Barry Schwabsky and Cora Cohen, “A Conversation,” 1996. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-15.html.

^12. Cora Cohen, “Artist’s Statement, George” 2002. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-14.html.

Image included in the article
Paradoxes and Oxymorons, 1993
Acrylic paint, oil enamel, copper, graphite, and pigment on linen, 27 x 29 in.