Morgan Fisher / Passing Time, installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, October 25, 2018–February 16, 2019. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Like playing hard to get
Like a resting bitch face
Like mistresses who refuse to reach out
Like looking but not touching
Like flowers that implacably refuse to
surrender their scent Like mostly anything Margiela
Like the monochrome’s sweet nothings—

Reticence encourages delightful frustration, curiosity, cheap & chic thrills. Whether served up by shy boys with smutty agendas, dominatrixes, Russian Suprematists, Mona Lisa smiles, imageless artworks, sculptures pushing ahead the ineffable, chapter three of William Wordsworth’s The Recluse (1888), or West Coast conceptualists, the art of withdrawal lies in its capacity to enchant not only by what is given, but also by what is encouraged in the so-called negative space. Like all things coquettish, the more an artwork plays into withdrawal, the more it seems to gain in projective valence, and the more meaning-making becomes an elaborately informed guessing-game based on a blushed history of touches, some theory, and a continuous parlaying with time and context about the nature of nothingness. (As Robert Filliou put it in an action poem, it’s a matter of “not deciding / not choosing / not wanting / not owning / not aware of self / wide awake.” ) ¹ Contemporary art has been formed of leaps and voids, pure surface, empty space, uniform light, and undifferentiated lines, enticing artist and viewer alike into a quizzical search for an elusive something (or generative nothing?) beyond subjectivity, a species of uncanny truth beside our immediate expressions. Naturally, what we grasp the least stays with us the longest—or, as Eve Sedgwick put it in Touching Feeling (2003): “The jokes that stick in people’s minds are the ones they don’t quite get.” ²

Sedgwick was musing on the writings of Michel Foucault, calling out the elegantly economical albeit unfulfillable promises made in The History of Sexuality (1976), but her point resonates equally with the work of “elusive Los Angeles éminence grise” Morgan Fisher. ³ Just think back to an interview entitled “The Rewards of Self-Repression,” in which Christopher Williams met up with Fisher in his gin-clear world, and Williams insisted, “There is nothing that does not make perfect sense.” ⁴ From structural films to sandblasted mirrors, monochrome paintings, and performative scores, each wood panel and layer of house paint, every reel and aspect ratio is auspiciously arranged according to a predetermined system, fitted to some spatial or scalar logic, and cleared of the sticky problem of subjectivity. Fisher’s work battens on impersonalization: effacement, removal, refusal, blankness, and detachment; in other words, self-erasure and the eradication of (self-) expression. The come-hither effect of the work is attached to the promise that, as Fisher notes to Williams, “Composition is personal and subjective, which is to say arbitrary; construction is impersonal and, if not objective, then not arbitrary, that is, not expressive in the ordinary sense of being self-expression. Broadly speaking, the performative, if it’s the right kind, is consonant with construction. When a construction leaves room for the performative, the performance can reinforce what the construction already does, which is to shift attention away from the artist as the origin of the work.” ⁵ Our attention fixates on the event of the artwork; the professed grand prize for snuffing the self lies in an exalted sensitivity to the artwork’s curiously indeterminate signification, its capacity to communicate (aka construct) a kind of ephemerality through material references alone.

Or so it goes. Yet for all the fuss that West Coast artists like to make of self-expression’s arbitrariness, to what extent can we ever make the “I” disappear in our output? How long can we produce under the influence of selective dissociations before they hit their half-life and, like Xanax making a movie reel of our impressions, wear off to a sobering sense of time passed? What are these refusals and excisions but recherché avocations to occupy ourselves with while, as in Fisher’s 1980 film Passing Time, “the scratches accumulate, inscribing on the image, in principle unchanging, the changes that passing time inflicts.”⁶ Even self-abnegation, in all its ascetic sangfroid, reveals itself in time to have a feel, a surface, a temperature—“constructing,” against all our best wishes, that inevitable trap of “selfhood.”

Just think of the texture of poet James Schuyler’s timeless world, more cloudy than gin clear, within the perpetual twilight of grief that makes up his book Morning of the Poem (1980). Fisher’s twilight survey, Morgan Fisher / Passing Time, at the Gallery at REDCAT allied itself with such poetic dilatoriness in its titular line break, particularly if the mind is allowed to wander into the crucial last lines of Schuyler’s not unrelated poem Pastime: “Sitting. Staring. Thinking blankly. / TV. A desert kind of life.”⁷ (Which is strangely analogous with the last lines of Filliou’s aforementioned poem: “SITTING QUIETLY, / DOING NOTHING.”⁸ ) In Fisher’s case, this could be rephrased as a Los Angeles kind of life—you know, a whole lot of blankness fitted to the standard formats of the film industry.

Morgan Fisher / Passing Time, installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, October 25, 2018–February 16, 2019. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Curated by Bruce Hainley and Sohrab Mohebbi, the exhibition opens with the oblique glaze of the artist’s Scratched Aspect Ratio Pieces (all works, 2005), four mirrors scaled to match the proportions of motion pictures as we perceive them on a screen, each inscribed accordingly: Scratched Todd-AO, Scratched Ultra Panavision 70, and so on. Uneasy, circuitous objects, the mirrors certainly complicate the sight/site of signification by narrowing the cinematic to shape and inscription alone. The captivating image expected is replaced with a nihilistic portraiture made up of infinitely deflected glimpses. Coquettish glimpses shared with other gallery-goers; glimpses of other pieces, such as the cigarette pack stack Empty Camel Packs (1968) and the monochrome paper rubbings Photograms of the Year (2011); and, within the lines etched into these mirrors, glimpses of contact. Some may call it a signature style or sense of humor, but scratch that—what emerges in etched surfaces and stacked packs is a conceptual feedback loop that is underwritten by a propositional tactility trying to say something about our core composition. (However much personal whim ails you.) Certainly the work appeals primarily to logic, acting as a machine that feeds on interpretation and point-source references to film, form, and performances of space. Certainly, the voiding of the image rages against subjectivity’s arbitrariness. Yet as the mirrors avert gaze, a buzzing visual violence, what is reinforced is the infernal queasiness that comes from realizing that the self is made up of nothing but free-floating signifiers doomed for obsolescence. The zero degree of tactility emerges suddenly as a sentimentalism dead set on desubstantiating its subject—a desire to hold onto whatever sense of an origin can be found in an inexorably emptying image.

Morgan Fisher, Red Boxing Gloves / Orange Kitchen Gloves, 1980. Two-channel video. Polavision cassettes transferred to DVD, color, silent, 18 fps, loops 3:20 min. each. Director and camera: Morgan Fisher. Production assistant and performer: Doug Hertz. Installation view, Morgan Fisher / Passing Time, REDCAT, Los Angeles, October 25, 2018–February 16, 2019. Courtesy of Maureen Paley and the artist. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Touch is implied throughout the works in acts of stacking, smoking, scratching, sampling, snapping of latex gloves and eye caps, boxing, and painting, as well as in the analogous acts of cutting film and handling its ephemera. There are constant clues about covering the body, protecting a medium, and recuperating or preserving time, like souvenirs or the lingering clarity of gin and cigarettes on one’s breath. In the video Protective Coloration (1979), Fisher himself is seated by a table in queasy green scrubs, adding CMYK-ish colors to his surgical couture over the course of the eleven minutes: protective goggles in bright orange, a yellow swim cap, a satiny sleeping mask in black, then a cyan swim cap, yellow latex gloves, more swim caps—a silvery one— and so on. On the gallery’s concrete floor, a simple white painted rectangle bears the title: Self-Portrait (74 inches tall, 190.75 pounds; October 4, 2018) (2018). Minimalism, on Fisher’s terms, is a heady, drunken refusal that tries its best to act sober by adhering to a standard format. There is a certain sadness attached to this realization, one that disrupts or hurts, which has to do with how close we actually are to our own nonexistence. One can only feel out the contours of existence as flimsy affirmation of its being. In other words, it does not take a lot to make the self disappear through a sleight of hand. On the flip side, before my existential dread sets in, it is not hard to be softly recuperated in the things we are touched by.

Enter the monochrome. Toward the end of 1949, Yves Klein took up monochrome painting, and described it as a “means of painting that is against painting, against all the anxieties of life, against everything.”⁹ Dramatically, the monochrome demarcated the end, not of art as such, but of art’s charted territory. Klein summoned his color panels as an icon for this movement “beyond”; the monochrome was a threshold, a space, to be directed through. Fisher is perhaps less concerned with the mystic lure of color swatches transcending art, life, everything; but his Interior Color Beauty (2013) pieces summon a similarly spatial logic. Polychromatic field paintings in delightfully titled house paint, for example C1 (Oyster, Oyster, Bluet) and C4 (Cloud, Moleskin, Rose), each one is proportional to samples collected in a book produced in 1935 by a prefab housing company founded by the artist’s father. Where Klein was sucked into some void “beyond” painting, Fisher’s works instead adhere to a logic of adjacency—that touchy-feeling positioning Sedgwick would have called the “beside.” They exist beside memories, beside themselves, beside the point. On Sedgwick’s terms, Fisher’s “besideness” “comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.”¹⁰

Morgan Fisher, Interior Color Beauty, 2013. Acrylic house paint on plywood panels, 24 7/8 × 30 × 1 1/4 in. each. From left to right: C1 (Oyster, Oyster, Bluet); C2 (White, Tamorae, Aqua Marine); C3 (Cream, Bisque, Apricot); C4 (Cloud, Moleskin, Rose); C5 (White, Heather, Iris). Installation view, Morgan Fisher / Passing Time, REDCAT, Los Angeles, October 25, 2018–February 16, 2019. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Bourgeois painterly pleasures aside, the pieces are touching, or seek to touch us, which makes for a sweetly wry play on words with their roommate on view, a two-channel video titled Red Boxing Gloves / Orange Kitchen Gloves (1980). As two sets of naked hands touch the two sets of gloves on separate screens, an oblique sensuality appears as though deus ex machina, and Fisher’s project shifts slightly from the attempt to understand the mechanisms of filmic materials and their phenomenological framing of the world to something closer to the creation of material surrogates, in which the self can be felt or known through the relative strangeness of objects.

Morgan Fisher, Red Boxing Gloves / Orange Kitchen Gloves, 1980. Two-channel video. Polavision cassettes transferred to DVD, color, silent, 18 fps, loops 3:20 min. each. Director and camera: Morgan Fisher. Production assistant and performer: Doug Hertz. Installation view, <em>Morgan Fisher / Passing Time </em>, REDCAT, Los Angeles, October 25, 2018–February 16, 2019. Courtesy of Maureen Paley and the artist. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Given this project of self-portraiture, the titular poetry breaks down something like this: Fisher is cast as equal parts deflected auteur of a work entitled Passing Time (1980), an artist passing time, an artist forced to reckon with the passing of time, and also as someone for whom the passing of time has sedimented in artworks, the marks, or maybe rewards, of said time passed. Remade for the occasion, the eponymous 16mm film is a No Exit-ish loop of the phrase “Passing Time.” The video plays on a monitor that is installed beside a selection of Fisher’s film canister paintings from the late 1960s and a blueprint for a work called Register Loop from 1975. Putting aside the inexorable deterioration of the materials, the obsolescence of the selected formats, and, for the time being, the experience of watching the film, the existential iffiness imparted—its “ontological problem”—lies in the artwork’s self-seeking gaze. The film is given a self-consciousness, or at least the devilish representation of one, and so takes over what is arguably the ghost of Fisher’s averted “I.”

My mind keeps tugging toward the opening lines of Annie Ernaux’s autobiography The Years (2008), so I will yield. Speaking with the frail authority of someone who has seen her self composed of fragmented pictures, destined to dissolve with time, she writes with confidence: “All the images will disappear.”¹¹ With a poise to match Schuyler’s quiet time, she lists each one still available in memory. Fisher’s survey similarly mourns a life made of flickering images, be it film or formulaic colors. The desire to index, accumulate, and preserve underwrites the practice. It moves through a disappearing act, arguably because confronting subjectivity’s arbitrary fade posits deeper, more troubling questions about being (being in-culture?) than it does about visuality alone. Ineffable questions prodding at passing time, time’s construction of self. In such situations, touch becomes a surrogate for what we cannot say; in fact, sometimes it says it better. We reach for meaning, and are absolutely beside ourselves when it doesn’t arrive. Seducing through emptiness, contemplating the flat frame and its focusing act, is one way of circumventing the saccharine quality of self-expression. Still, what rewards are there really for being emptied or for all these vanishing acts in contemporary art, when all that enters the world is bound to be lost anyway? Enter an endless production of meaninglessness. Or, no—not meaninglessness. Just an endlessly alienating joke about existence, which might simply be existence itself. The images will disappear.

Sabrina Tarasoff is a writer currently based in Los Angeles.