ART REVIEW : Fisher Dares Viewer to Find Order in Chaos

I am like a comedian who simply walks on-stage and reads a newspaper. You don’t have to make it funny or absurd: it already is.

--Vernon Fisher

Eyes gravitate first to the words in Vernon Fisher’s work, the bold, capital letters that literally penetrate the surfaces of his paintings. The clear and continuous blocks of text seem to offer immediate refuge from the amalgam of forms, objects, textures and images that constitute each of Fisher’s works. One grasps at the words for guidance through the chaos, just as, unwittingly, one often reads a label before perusing the object it identifies.

The text in Fisher’s work, however, rarely explains or corresponds directly to the painted, constructed, drawn and partly erased imagery around it. Whether written like a diary or pseudo-scientific, it presents simply one more layer of incomplete information--the only kind of information there is, according to Fisher. And, like the comedian whose act consists of reading the newspaper, Fisher delivers only what is already out there, floating about in the world of visual and verbal data.

His mission, as seen in the mid-career survey of his work now at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, is not to impose a false sense of continuity or coherence on this material, but to reveal it in all of its discontinuity, illogic, absurdity and mystery.

For many, this metaphor for the impenetrable meaning of the world may not be enough. It may even make the multifarious channels of information outside the gallery seem lucid in comparison. Fisher would probably welcome that interpretation, though. By working in a free-associative manner, pairing disparate approaches, structures and systems, he invites the viewer to do the same, to consider for oneself which strategies for navigating the world are best.

Fisher, who lives in Ft. Worth, Tex., was an abstract painter until the mid-1970s, when he began making books and, subsequently, adding text to his images. Although this combination of words and images groups him with Terry Allen and others in the loose category of narrative artists, Fisher still considers his work abstract. Regardless of its various forms, it consistently examines the nature of erception and what he calls “cognitive failure,” or “not adding up.”

In the maps, diagrams, grids, eye charts and gray scales that he layers into his work, Fisher proposes methods of delineating, clarifying and measuring phenomena. But these means of transmitting information fail to “add up” to either a comprehensive, rational view of the world or a coherent narrative in Fisher’s own work. Order remains ever evasive, although the process of seeking it can be intriguing, as Fisher’s art demonstrates, for the path is strewn with chance revelations, visual and verbal puns and launching pads for deeper analytical inquiry.

In “Show and Tell” (1981), for instance, visual rhymes loosely bind the incongruous parts, a painted panel with text, a chalkboard and a cut-out cartoon figure. In the text, Fisher recounts the story of a little girl’s hesitation to participate in “sharing time” at school, then her sudden presentation to the class of a handful of shredded “Kleenix” (sic), which she calls snow. The story runs from top to bottom, edge to edge, on a large photograph of two fishermen proudly displaying their catch.

On the wall to the right hangs a framed chalkboard with the word snow faintly discernable beneath a barrage of white paint splatters. Farther to the right and lower on the wall, a woodcut-out of the character Aunt Fritzi from the comic strip Nancy raises her arm and turns her head in surprise. The white dots on her black blouse mimic the white globs on the chalkboard as well as the snow referred to in the written story. This unites the parts formally, but on a more conceptual level, they are bound by a common theme, the misrepresentation of what is promised: the girl in the story promises snow and delivers only tissue; the chalkboard announces snow and bears only paint; Fisher tells a tale about snow and shows fish instead.

Throughout Fisher’s work, showing and telling are revealed to be distinct activities that don’t, as expected, reinforce one another. In the transmission of information, as in its translation, much is lost and distorted. Fisher exaggerates this erosion of meaning by presenting texts, images and objects that are incomplete in themselves and often difficult to read.

In “Basutoland” (1986), he paints a fragmented eye chart on an open umbrella and mounts it high on a wall. In “Night Watch” (1985), a chart recedes into the black, glazed and painted surface of a ceramic vase. And in his large paintings on laminated paper, the incised text and background image compromise each other’s legibility. Each intrudes upon the other and impedes its deciphering.

The cursive writing in “Pollock” (1981) is almost impossible to unloose from the painting’s interwoven skeins of color, but it is worth disentangling. The anecdote within pokes fun at sexual differences, but it also speaks of courage, the nerve to do the unexpected, the shocking, perhaps even the offensive. By merging the text with a painting in the style of Jackson Pollock, Fisher pays homage to the artist’s unorthodoxy. A urinal mounted on the wall to the right pays equal respect to the influence of Marcel Duchamp, whose “readymades”--objects taken from daily life and presented as art--shocked their audience in the early years of the century and permanently broadened the vocabulary of artists.

Fisher’s debt to Duchamp, as well as to the Pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, runs deep. Like them, Fisher begins with obvious and clear slices from popular culture or lived experience, and isolates them from their natural sources. Layered and recombined in a new context, the clarity of the parts diminishes and gives way to a new opacity. Fisher’s comic strip characters, common objects and immediately recognizable images of globes and cars are accessible, and yet remote. They communicate but their message is one of pervasive miscommunication. In this way, Fisher’s work mirrors the complexity and competing focuses of modern life, but never, unfortunately, manages to transcend it.

The exhibition, organized by museum director Hugh Davies and associate curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, continues through April 2 and is accompanied by a richly illustrated and well-written catalogue.