Bird Watching
Vernon Fischer at Mark Moore Gallery

by Leslie Markle

Disconsolate Pairs, 2006
Oil and acrylic on canvas
60 x 64 inches
All images courtesy of Mark Moore Gallery

A noted historian and critic once remarked that visual art apparently has no need for language. If this is so, it leaves the process of writing about it superfluous, redundant, and perhaps even slightly absurd. It presupposes that the best way to experience art is through direct visual engagement in the moment, in a vivid and unstructured communion with the presence of the work. Despite the seductiveness of such a cultural construct, there are nevertheless artists who always seem to muck it up for us, deferring our rush towards the sublime or throwing a wrench into the works of our aesthetic response mechanisms, delaying the dissolution of identity and leaving us with something to actually think about. Or, at any rate, creating such a lifelike and convincing illusion of meaning that it begs for that futile attempt to translate some tiny aspect of it into words. Such is the work of Vernon Fischer whose prolific output over the last thirty years have given us whimsical, complex, and typically, paradoxical visual puzzles that make him as close to an artistic national treasure as we may lay claim to here in the Western United States. He is one of the greats, like Reubens or Velasquez, or rather a post-modern version of them—as if the soul of Velasquez was reborn into the body of William Faulkner and transplanted with the brain of a naturalist having iconoclastic predilections and maybe even some latent mind/body dualism—or something like that. Only its out here, west of the Rockies, instead of Europe, where the closest thing we have to a literati culture is maybe a few former Disney Imagineers who play golf on Sundays with the folks who write copy for Camel cigarettes. Fischer is the perfect postmodern master in a landscape where the natural sublime is presented to us in billboards advertising SUVs and where giant fiberglass ice cream cones along the freeway ride to MOCA are among the only uncontested, public sculptures. Of course he is only great if you believe that ambiguity, delayed gratification, and flashes of poetic eloquence should be artistic goals.

Fischer's signature aesthetic strategy for more than two decades has been the juxtaposition of iconographic images from cartoons and films to paintings of sublime landscapes, along with the cartographic grid and the literary narrative. According to Dave Hickey's "little Guide Michelin to Vernon Fischer's universe"1 this is ostensibly to create a clash of information systems, which defers closure—very postmodern.2 Fischer's exhibition of paintings entitled North American Birds at Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica exercises this signature stategy, but exempts the literary narrative. No longer do we have the literal written narrative sanded through or pasted over imagery. Instead we are left only with visual images, talking to one another on a proscenium grid. This creates, if not an infinite number, certainly quite a few possible interpretations with numerous layered permutations that read like lessons in visual analogy.

The Raw and the Cooked, 2006
Oil and acrylic on canvas
60 x 64 inches

Fischer is fond of placing loosely painted cartoons or crudely pixilated pop culture images in close proximity to paintings of late romantic landscapes or freeze frames from Hollywood films rendered with the care of a nineteenth century Beaux Arts academic. The play of images in the cartographic grid is like a game of free association or a stream of consciousness narrative. The images bump up next to one another, sparking familiar and multilayered connotations. The work of Robert Rauschenberg is an apt reference here. The historian and critic Leo Steinberg noted, in respect to the work of Rauschenberg, how the picture plane had become a flatbed surface, like a cluttered desktop, where things accumulate in a seemingly random order.3 This was a new model for art, which starkly contrasted the dominant pictorial paradigm, even latent in abstract expressionism, of the picture plane as a window. Like Rauschenberg, Fischer plunders the cultural archive for potential meaning and for equally open-ended effect.

However, the range of interpretative possibilities seems more circumscribed in this new body of work... and also more politically charged. In The Raw And the Cooked there are, what appear to be, multiple portraits of Bud Abbott, from the mid-century comedy duo Abbott and Costello, decked out in his Safari helmet as the great white hunter. In close proximity to the portrait(s) of Abbott, we have what seems to be a cinematic representation of a cannibal—perhaps from Abbott and Costello's Africa Screams—replete with bone headdress and tusks. Slightly below this, there is a painted detail of Raphael's famous portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, the literary Renaissance man of Urbino, whose attempts at diplomacy as ambassador to the Holy See in 1524 failed to prevent the sack of Rome and the capture of Pope Clemente VII. In this context of images, we might assume that Fischer's reference has something to do with Castiglione's most famous work, Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Couterier), in which the characteristics of the ideal Renaissance gentleman are defined by his understanding of art and literature. Located in close proximity to another portrait—this one of Fred Astaire—it's likely that an air of sophisticated refinement is meant to be evoked. Also, paired as these images are with the ones from above, this seems to be an elliptical comment on Western imperialism and the farce of the white man's burden, hinging on what cultural studies calls "the Discourse of the West and the Rest," where the rationales for colonialism were the double sided stereotype of non-Western peoples as the noble and the ignoble savage or the search for the ruins of an ancient white civilization (like Atlantis or the legendary Christian Kingdom). Alongside an image of a man treading water, the work has an added tone of contingency and desperation.

Crying Boys, 2006
Oil and acrylic on canvas
63 x 75 inches

In Crying Boys we have images of two of the three stooges (Larry and Moe) juxtaposed with a small, pixilated portrait of Osama Bin Laden in addition to various, familiar cartoon characters. The characters hold their heads in obvious angst and dismay. Strewn, as they are, among beautiful renderings of a serene, but fragmented garden of cypress trees, they allow us to easily make out the allusions to the conflict in the Middle East. In typical fashion, however, Fischer avoids any obvious single statement as well as simplistic dogmatisms that might tempt a lesser artist. Here, rather is the work of a metaphorical ornithologist, an observer, who allows glimpses and perhaps evokes empathy, but avoids definitive commentary. Is Bin Laden depicted here as the third stooge in a tragic comedy of errors, a victim, or merely a hollow rhetorical sign? In this deft handling of ambiguity, one might be reminded of Gerhard Richter's eloquent October '77 series—his elegy to the Baader-Meinhoff group—where photographic representations of the groups' last days of imprisonment and questionable suicides in the hands of the German authorities are rendered on a monumental scale with Richter's signature, painterly diffusion. However, rather than the somber tone of European history painting, Fischer's work gives us an ironic turn towards the comic and absurd.

Disconsolate Pairs
Detail

He is the quintessential jump-cut artist whose work consistently takes on a cinematic quality. His persistent reference to, and pillaging of, the Hollywood archive performs a kind of archaeology of the iconic moment in the form of the freeze frame. By incorporating maudlin or melodramatic moments from both cartoons and dramatic narrative films, Fischer successfully targets the closest semblance to a collective unconscious we retain in a culture of amnesia and instant history. His painting Disconsolate Pairs is a prime example of this kind of excavation where Fischer finds formal repetitions in similar gestures of angst and frustration from both cartoons and dramatic films. Here he contrasts the iconic image of Marlon Brando's "Stella!" moment from the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire with identical gestures by Mickey Mouse. In a parody of this maudlin moment, he ironically deflates the naturalism of Method acting with the purely artificial nature of the cartoon sign. Fischer's irony lacks the bitter edge of cynicism, however. Rather, it has the character of beleaguered fatalism similar to what is evoked by the philosophical, downward gaze of Paul Newman from Cool Hand Luke also rendered in Disconsolate Pairs.

In creating work, which is indeed clever rather than about being clever, Vernon Fischer maintains, through it all, a humble and self-deprecating stance. In Animal we have a reprise of his self-portrait as mouseketeer, which is a double-edged reference to his own, earlier work, Annette. It is also an attempt to show us that he is still keeping it real. We are reminded that these are not the works of a pundit, but the keen and patient observations of an ornithologist with a penchant for collecting and categorization. The season for sharing his observations is all too brief and rarefied an experience to miss.

Published 12/03/2006