Liat Yossifor

LIAT YOSSIFOR

LIAT YOSSIFOR

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

EMBODIMENT AND ABSTRACTION

By Christopher Michno

Since 2011, when Liat Yossifor definitively turned her painting practice toward abstraction, she has been making paintings that adhere to a specific formal approach. The process of making her gray paintings, as she calls them, is delimited to a three-day interval that corresponds to the length of time she can work the paint until it begins to dry. Arriving at this parameter out of necessity, she found the experience of generating a new body of work in a compressed time frame compelling and adopted the practice of working in a kind of alla prima manner—that is, in the first attempt (or from start to finish, all in one shot).

Working in this way, particularly as Yossifor has structured it, places certain demands on the painter as she performs or enacts a painting. Not insignificantly, she works from sunrise to sunset to take advantage of the available natural light that filters into her studio. This affects how she perceives the work as she makes it. Accepting the time limitation dictated by her medium, and choosing not to allow herself to work beyond that time, requires a certain kind of presence on her part as she engages the painting. Her work isn’t just visual; it becomes a self-conscious performance. The visual presence of the painting is itself a critical aspect of her work.

With her gray paintings, she developed a practice of evaluating each canvas at the end of the three-day period. If she was not satisfied, she scraped the paint from the canvas and started over.

The evidence of her hand is clearly seen. These are thick, textured, scored paintings. Knife marks drift and slash through pigment; the butt of a brush digs a trough. The surface, far from pristine, bears these marks as a kind of relief painting.

The process is physically grueling. As she trowels, scrapes, drags, and slashes, each attack adds to a cumulative depletion of her energy.

The time pressure of three days turns into a kind of psychological pressure.

Yossifor is chasing an elusive composition around the canvas—though she is not seeking to achieve a composition that is thoroughly “resolved.” She is struggling to locate something with contradictory forces that simultaneously push and pull the viewer,

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something that can confound and aggravate. And though she technically gives herself three days to finish one of her gray paintings, she could just as well pull short and stop in two days, or even one. In this process of pushing against the paint as she figuratively pushes against her own eye and her judgments of the painting, Yossifor orchestrates the configuration and subsequent entombment of innumerable compositions on the canvas. It is a cycle of excavation and burial. And when one considers the embodied aspect of her performance, one of the questions to ask is whether Yossifor is concealing something in those layers of paint.

The possibility of entering a trance-like state during these cycles of painting is a compelling aspect of her process. The hunt itself, for an evasive pictorial apotheosis, puts her in a physically and mentally heightened state, which she is acutely aware of pursuing.

It is possible to think of these paintings as creating an abstract figure embedded within the paint. This can be related to the Gutai movement in Japan, in which artists used their bodies to activate a variety of materials. Kazuo Shiraga’s 1955 performance, Challenging Mud, offers an analog. Ana Mendieta’s works in which she is photographed on the ground camouflaged with mud or plant material, or the ones in which an imprint of her body has been left in the ground as a trace, also provide a referent.

And yet, stepping back from that heightened state of awareness and focus, Yossifor began to consider shortening her performances at the canvas. A period of three days began to seem too long—giving her too much time to reconsider. If the gray paintings, in addition to being a bodily performance in relation to a medium, are also about setting up multiple possibilities of painting outcomes—most of them ephemeral—then her new series of black paintings are the result of choosing even more stringent restrictions on her process in a gambit to raise the stakes of the game.

The choice of black pigment is one aspect of upping the ante. The idea of making a profound commitment is coupled with her admiration for Ad Reinhardt’s subtle black paintings, which exert a perceptual tension between indeterminate spaces. Yossifor spent more than a year formulating the black paint she now uses, refining the medium to a state of hyper-saturation. In response to the paint’s capacity to absorb light, Yossifor has described her sensation of working with it as akin to “painting blind.” Whatever else this might do to her painting process, it must certainly have the effect of centering her movement more deeply in her body and requiring from her a greater responsiveness to the sensations within her body as she acts in relation to the canvas.

Yossifor’s black canvases heighten the sense of her painting as a performance. The shortened time frame—one day—forces immediate choices; the performance in the studio—the part that none of us sees—is even more intensely draining, more deeply trance-like. And as with her gray paintings, when she deems a black canvas unsatisfactory, she scrapes the paint off and begins again.

In contradistinction to Reinhardt’s black paintings, which are all five-by-five feet and within the arm span of a man—in his own words, “not large, not small, sizeless,” Yossifor’s canvases are scaled to her own body. (She is a woman of modest height.) Reinhardt’s assertion of absolute abstraction, witnessed by his dimensionless man, rejects the idea that abstract painting can refer to anything beyond itself. Yossifor’s paintings are open. They are an effort in which mind and body act in concert to impart an idea, encoded in the formal structures of paint. The resultant object elicits a response in the viewer in which visual, emotive, and cognitive modes, each activated simultaneously and in concert, are subsumed. It is within this awareness of painting’s embodied and sublime possibilities that Yossifor’s painting practice exists as performance within the specificity of her own person. Her work becomes an index of embodied thought as much as it is an imprint of the artist’s body. While the thought itself cannot be ascertained, much less recalled by Yossifor at a later date, the record of its pulse is present in the object itself. This quality infuses her black paintings with ambiguity, setting them in a space that defies easy classification n as a consumable object.

Christopher Michno is an arts writer and cultural journalist. He is a regular contributor to and an editor of Artillery, a contemporary art magazine, and an editor at DoppelHouse Press, a Los Angeles publisher of memoirs, fiction, and books on art and architecture.

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LIAT YOSSIFOR: PAINTING AT THE CROSSROADS

By Glenn Harcourt

Liat Yossifor is a master of erasure and burial, a painter whose practice is as much conceptual as it is painterly. Indeed, her recent not-quite monochromatic gray abstractions, with their thick impasto and bravura knife work can seem almost “beyond painterly,” struggling for realization as abstract low relief sculpture1. The work is easily flagged as “expressive” (a word of dubious value, to which we will return); but the painter explicitly refuses even an ironic, post-modern connection to the style of (male-identified) abstract expressionism.2 The works are seductively beautiful; their surface topography might be seen to map both a physical landscape (in the endlessly rich folds and valleys of which a viewer can easily become lost, wandering forever through an extraordinary world) and a landscape of desire (those same folds and valleys now defining a lover’s body, demanding the caress of the flesh as well as that of the eye). Yet they are also rigorously constructed, controlled, restrained, purely material objects empty of external meaning and resonance. In short, they embody a paradox. Perhaps they conceal a secret (or the promise of a secret never revealed).3 At the very least, they record a working process of enormously self-conscious sophistication. And it is to an elucidation of that process that we first turn.

THE PAINTING AND THE PAINTER’S BODY Needless to say, every painter on canvas has a relationship to that canvas: its size, its proportions, its orientation, whether it is approached stretched or unstretched, primed or unprimed, etc. And these relationships can be either arbitrary (as with pre-stretched canvas that is sold in standardized sizes) or quite significant: as, for example, in the case of Jackson Pollock, who often tacked unstretched swaths of canvas to the floor of his studio in order to facilitate a process by means of which 1. Liat Yossifor, conversation with author: February 24, 2016.

2. On the other hand, she has expressed solidarity with women working in that male-dominated abstract world, singling out especially Lee Krasner’s monumental The Seasons (1957) in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ibid.

3. Such a secret might have been “buried,” hidden deep within the painting, waiting to be uncovered. Or it might have been “erased,” scraped down so that only a few fragmentary bits remain for a reconstruction.

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he might work while (literally) within the unfinished painting.4 For Liat Yossifor, the general similarity here is with Pollock, since her relationship with her canvas is anything but arbitrary. However, the particularities of that relationship are utterly dissimilar, since in her case they are determined by the artist’s body in a way that makes the canvas an indexical field of action for that body in all its physical specificity: they “belong” to Yossifor’s body in a way that is true for her alone, whereas Pollock is essentially cut loose from his canvas, which becomes a field for action more-or-less untrammeled even by gravity.

The paintings in this series come in two sizes ( [80 x 70 in.] and [16 x 14 in.] ).

These sizes provide the artist with working surfaces that constitute modules mirroring her own size and convenient reach. They are, in effect, examples of an “organic geometry” that both binds the painted surface to the size of the artist’s body and establishes a boundary within which the painting unfolds as a direct index of the movement of that specific body. The paintings are thus carefully circumscribed traces of a “self” (more on this, below) which is importantly conceived not simply as a thing that thinks, conceives, or intends; but rather as a thing whose thoughts, intentions, and conceptions are fully embodied.5 This may seem to be a profoundly obvious strategy; yet it should be clear from even a superficial survey of abstract art that it has not been a common one.

Indeed, monumental size regularly seems to be invoked by abstract painters as a way of consciously lifting their work out of the immediate bodily realm. On a rather ungenerous, although (I think) not entirely unjustified reading, this penchant for monumentality may be seen simply as a way of impressing upon the viewer, by dint of sheer presence, the “tragic and timeless” nature of the subject matter allegedly appropriated by the painters, to quote the seminal 1943 statement on Abstraction’s aims composed by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko.6 4. From Pollock’s famous statement “My Painting” (1947) in Possibilities I, as excerpted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) 546-547. He also points out that this approach leaves him free to move around the pictorial field in a way that radically de-prioritizes the up – down/left – right orientation that had been as definitive as rectangular shape for non-architectural easel painting since the Renaissance.

5. This model stands in obvious opposition to the idea of a radical separation between mind and body formalized by Descartes in the seventeenth century. In practice, Renaissance painting has tended to be theorized (for example, already in the sixteenth century by Giorgio Vasari) in terms of a similar split between intention and execution. For a powerful poetic argument that this Cartesian dualism has been disrupted by modernity, see T.S. Eliot’s 1925 “The Hollow Men,” especially the section that begins “Between the idea/And the Reality … Falls the Shadow[.]”

6. See Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko’s 1959 “Statement,” quoted in Chipp 544-545. Gottlieb and Rothko also opine that “[they] are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal.” We might term this [almost inevitable] linking of the tragic and the huge a kind of “Moby Dick effect.” In contemporary popular culture, the complex tragedy adumbrated by the vast abstract expanse of the white whale has been replaced by the mindless, almost [in fact, literally] mechanical terror associated with the Great White Shark; thus Capt. Ahab becomes the relentless shark-killer Quint in Steven Speilberg’s 1975 Jaws, the classic Hollywood recasting of Melville’s iconic 1851 novel.

But Gottlieb and Rothko are not merely being self-serving. Both their own work and that (for example) of the iconic “action painter,” Jackson Pollock, are intended to be “timeless” in a much more profoundly philosophical sense. Take Pollock as our example once again, since his work expresses that timelessness in a way that is especially trenchant as it seems manifestly paradoxical. On the one hand, a careful (even a cursory) visual examination of any of Pollock’s classic drip paintings makes plain the fact of their physical unfolding over time.7 We can trace the slow build-up of the intricate formal skein of color traces passing back and forth over the canvas like the work of a demented spider weaving a crazy web. Indeed, it is almost possible to project oneself into the physical coming-and-going of that flow, to re-enact in some sense Pollock’s own pattern of working movement; but it remains easier by far to follow that flow with the eye alone, as though looking down on some vast woven pattern from a great height.

Nor is this an accidental effect. In fact, when finished, a work like this is explicitly intended to deny its own mode of coming-into-being. It is not meant to be seen close up, like a map whose endlessly complicated routes we can only follow from that in-tight vantage. Rather, the painting addresses itself to an imaginary and dis-embodied “high modernist eye” hanging in the space of the middle distance and capable of perceiving and processing the painting’s “meaning” in an instantaneous moment of visual registration and mental integration.8 Yossifor’s strategy, however, is almost precisely the reverse. The painting is intended to draw one in, to suggest a vantage point that corresponds to the point at which the artist herself stood during the painting’s actual construction. This vantage point is “privileged,” or, perhaps better, has been privileged by the presence of the artist’s own body in action; and, although a viewer will almost certainly not realize this consciously, this privilege can give a viewer physical access to the sense of embodiedness that the picture itself encodes. Still, since our viewers’ bodies (which necessarily differ in height and weight; in ability to move in space, reaching up or crouching down at need, etc.) can never duplicate the artist’s body, particular and specific to herself, our experience (again, unconscious) of the painting will always be a bit “out of registration,” a bit defamiliar; but embodied in its own (viewer’s) way. In short, the experience of viewing the painting will itself be an embodied experience, similar to, but not identical with, that of the artist: a concrete or phenomenological, 7. Likewise the equally classic photographs of Hans Namuth and the documentary film Jackson Pollock by Namuth and Paul Falkenberg.

8. The colossal late series of Water Lilies by Monet (quintessentially “optical” works, to invoke a coinage of Marcel Duchamp) work in rather the same way. Their subject matter may indeed be of this world, but they have achieved their own apotheosis by abstraction (whether or not they carry a meaning either “timeless” or “tragic”) precisely by the artist’s monumentalization of them.

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rather than a purely conceptual experience; a physical, rather than a simply optical exercise; an instance of being in relation to a thing (the painting) rather than a simple seeing of it.

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There is one fundamental difficulty with most paintings that have been or can be characterized as “monochromatic:” they aren’t.9 This is certainly true of Liat Yossifor’s monochromatic gray abstractions. And it is so for two different and equally significant reasons. First of all, the pictures are built up from a colored ground (lately most often a rich lemony yellow) that is often apparent as a narrow frame along or around the edge of the canvas. Thus the gray impasto stands out against a flat but vibrantly colored ground, which it seems to enshroud, but can never quite conceal. In addition, in working up the impasto, the artist occasionally exposes small traces of color (either that of the ground itself or another entirely, which is indicative of further non-gray marks made after the ground has been laid down, but before the enshrouding impasto has been built up). This description may be a bit cumbersome; but the visual impression that this strategy provokes is anything but. Despite the mass and weight of the impasto, these small flashes of color (or deep velvety black) can mark the topographical surface with the appearance of flickering light or random, almost slashing penetration. Clearly, these flashes of color or slashes of black played off against the encircling yet enshrouded ground go a long way toward establishing the sense of entombment or erasure that the paintings convey. A viewer can easily get the feeling that the gray impasto represents either (or both) the significant substance of the picture and/or a neutral yet substantial impediment to the recognition and interpretation of precisely that significance. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, the “clues” that escape from behind the impasto carapace are never sufficient to facilitate an actual “reading” of the hidden work. They suggest the possibility of a hermeneutics of almost scriptural obscurity or the archaeology of some other arcane and forgotten knowledge. Might the kabbalah be a potentially useful metaphor here? Or the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing within which the self is lost in its search for God? In any case, what remains visible yet remains inscrutable, the possibility of a hermeneutics virtually 9. Malevich’s 1918 White on White comes immediately to mind, although Yves Klein’s IKB works provide an obvious counter-example. For a brilliant analysis of the ontological problems presented by a series of “identical” monochromatic pictures, see the opening gambit in the section “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” in Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) 1-6.

unrealizable in practice.10 And in that sense, the pictures are essentially images of the difficulty of meaning, of its almost impossibly fragmentary nature, and of the extraordinary effort necessary for even its potential excavation.11 Second, even simply to call the pictures “gray” as a group to a certain extent shortchanges them. The artist, far from falling back on a commercially available pigment, mixes her own gray for each canvas directly on the palette. Thus each particular picture instantiates its own particular shade of gray, which can function almost as an identifying mark, an indication of the specificity of the artist’s practice (taking that term in the sense of personal engagement rather than that of a sequence of actions repeated with minor variations) in every case. Taken all together, then, the pictures provide a wonderful little “taxonomy” of the infinite shades of gray, providing a sense that something even as ostensibly banal as that vaguely innocuous “non-color” halfway between black and white (or sunlight and shadow) is in actuality infinitely mutable and infinitely expressive.

TIME PRESSURE How does a painter know when a canvas is finished? For naturalistic work, the answer would seem to be obvious: when the picture’s illusion of the natural world, its existence at the intersection of self-conscious art and the appearance of simple nature12 has been embodied to the best of the painter’s ability as an artist.13 For a non-objective or abstract work, the answer is perhaps not so clear-cut; although, in theory, a painter working in the high modernist mode described above should become aware of the completion of a work in a moment of instantaneous visual and mental registration as if a circuit has closed between disembodied eye and abstractly perceptive brain. In practice, however, I suspect that the ending of a work, whatever its mode of production or the style of its visual vocabulary, comes about most often through a procedure that we can refer to as “tweaking” or “fiddling,” a gradual approach to completion through a series of ever more specific 10. Compare the discussion of a rather different kind of quasi-scriptural inscrutability in Glenn Harcourt, “Wallace Berman: Desolation Angel,” XTRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly 15.1 (Fall 2012) 56-60.

11. For the background to this argument, see the discussion of Miles Coolidge’s photo inkjet print “Backstop” (2011) in Glenn Harcourt, “Some Notes on the Archive,” X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly 14.3 (Spring 2012) 15-16.

12. This argument is developed with succinct brilliance by the late eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant in ¶45 of the “Analytic of the Sublime” in his 1790 Critique of Judgment. Whether or not this is literally the case, Kant’s argument might well have been cribbed from the “Introduction” to Part 3 of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1 ed. 1550).

13. Onto the frame of an anonymous 1433 portrait (often taken as a likeness of the artist, the Netherlandish master Jan van Eyck “inscribed” in paint a curious signature: “Joh. De Eyck me fecit” (“Jan van Eyck made me”) as well as the presumptive motto “Als ich kan” (literally “As I can”). Although the motto’s phrasing is rather elliptical, and hence its meaning somewhat ambiguous, at the very least it implies the claim: This is the best that I can do.

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and focused changes that eventually resolve themselves in a feeling for the work as (finally) “being done.”14 This is not, however, the only way to proceed. Yossifor’s process, for example, is worked out only within a specified and rigorously enforced time frame: three days for the larger canvases, one day for the smaller. At the end of the allotted time, each canvas is evaluated and then either retained or scraped down and re-used. This kind of procedure seems rather more conceptual than painterly. In addition to which, the process of “evaluation” can hardly involve the instantaneous registration of meaning associated with the operation of the “high modernist eye,” since that registration stands in a reciprocal relationship to the artist’s own previous perception of the painting as “finished:” both the painter and the viewer must experience that instantaneous “snapping into focus” that signifies that the work is both “finished” and “meaningful.” In Yossifor’s case, each canvas is arbitrarily “finished” and must then be scrutinized both by the painter and (later) any other observer in an attempt to excavate meaning from its embodied form. Clearly, this scrutiny must be carried out over time; the painting unfolds its meaning even as that meaning has previously been enfolded by the building up of pigment on the surface of the canvas, but with this difference: that the operation of interpretive scrutiny is open-ended, unbounded, without any set temporal limit, an on-going dialogic relationship to which one can return, and return again.

The imposition of arbitrary rules on artistic production is a strategy arguably as old as artistic production itself; and, until relatively recently, might even have been seen as constitutive or definitive of those productions that we identify as “art.”

There is no reason for a sonnet to BE a sonnet in order to convey the content that it carries (a meditation on the fragility and transience of love, for example); but in order to be meaningful in its own precise way, its meditation on fragility and transience must be submitted to expression under certain rules related to rhyme and meter: the rules that define its being as a sonnet.

There is, however, an enormous difference between a sonnet’s arbitrariness and the arbitrariness of Yossifor’s process. A sonnet does not have to be written in one sitting, or in precisely three hours. It is, rather, arbitrary in a strictly formal way.15 The arbitrariness of Yossifor’s time frame, on the other hand, seems to me more intimately related to the arbitrariness at work, for example, in Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (19131914). This is a kind of arbitrariness that is external to the particular form of the work, even 14. This is certainly the way that I approach the composition of a manuscript.

15. In that sense, the sonnet’s rules are more comparable to Yossifor’s choice of working in gray. While she might in theory employ any color while still working under the same constraints of shape and time, and still attempt to embody a similar meaning, I might write a sestina rather than a sonnet while sticking to my theme of love’s transient fragility.

as it works to define that form. It provides a particular example of an arbitrariness that is simply a condition of being in the world. It has almost the force of a physical law: it just is what it is, although we can easily imagine some other situation (some parallel universe) in which a different set of (equally arbitrary) laws apply.16 This may seem a complicated explanation; but the basic point, I think, is quite simple. The decision to impose an arbitrary time frame on the painting process is not the same as the decision to execute a series of works in (more-or-less) monochromatic gray. The latter exemplifies the kind of decision that artists have had to make since time immemorial. The former is something radically new, a reconceptualization of what it means to make a painting, even (perhaps) of what it means to be a painting.17 THE PERFORMANCE OF THE SELF A bit earlier on in this essay, I suggested that a work that seems to proffer to the viewer an open-ended dialogic relationship with an essentially inscrutable Other might be viewed as in some way equivalent to a scriptural text requiring the mobilization of a mystical hermeneutic, even as an occasion to invoke the self-abnegation required of a desire to be absorbed into the absolute Otherness of divinity. It might also be seen in a quite different, much more mundane, but equally profound way.

It is not, after all, necessary to approach divinity or scripture in order to encounter an inscrutable Other; it is only necessary to confront a fellow human being. Indeed, this inscrutability is made the more urgent precisely because we have a tendency to see such human encounters as inherently transparent, regardless of the (obvious) “signs” of otherness they might display. In this particular instance, gender difference is an obvious example. My attempt to understand Yossifor’s work is already constrained by the fact that I am “incorrectly” gendered.18 But the issue is more fundamental than that. Even were I gendered differently (that is, in some sense or another “correctly”), the fact remains that Yossifor and I are radically different individuals, inhabiting different bodies, 16. The stoppages are essentially alternative units of measure comprising three replacement meter sticks cut along contours obtained by dropping a one-meter length of string onto the ground from a height of one meter. Although “meaningless” within the physical parameters of our own world, they might well be used to define “real” distances or topographical relations in some fictive world of the artist’s imagination, as is exactly the case for the “routes” mapped out across the fictive “terrain” that underlies the 1914 Network of Stoppages.

17. Ironically, it also recalls a beginner’s exercise. How well I can remember one-minute sketches and contour drawings with my eyes closed from high school art class.

18. The notion of gender (and its inevitable relation to sexuality) is almost impossibly vexed, and beyond my competence to deal with adequately here. The classic theoretical introduction remains Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990/2006). Although this assertion is immediately disputed within Butler’s analysis, my own purposes here can hardly be better served than by her quotation (177) from Michel Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History:” “Nothing in man [sic] – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men [sic].”

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reacting in different ways to the fact of that embodiment; our experiences are likewise radically different: personally, intellectually, sexually, politically, spiritually. In short, we are different people absolutely and irrevocably: an irreducible I-and-Thou (to borrow a formulation from the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber) whose essential separateness will always be keyed to that oh-so-simple disjunction of adverbs.

In addition, post-structuralist philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism have firmly established the leitmotif of the recalcitrant opacity of language in general: its rejection of any anchoring presence, its constitution in a free play of difference, its tendency to self-deconstruct — inverting hierarchies and disrupting logic.

So, even if all those other impediments could be surmounted, interpretive language itself would be waiting to play us false.

In light of what I have said previously, I can hardly argue that one of Yossifor’s paintings can replace this opacity and complexity with a perfectly transparent window.

Yet it can provide a different (and at least initially non-verbal perhaps better: “pre-verbal” or “proto-verbal”) avenue of approach. That this is true depends on my earlier analysis of the painter’s relationship to her canvas, which was described in such a way that the artist’s process appeared constructed so as to make each painting a rigorously (but not rigidly) circumscribed set of traces of the artist’s embodied self.

In that sense, at least, any one of these works can be described not just as a painting on canvas, but as a kind of “performance of the self.”19 The operation of building up the impasto, the working and re-working of the surface with brush and knife, comprises simultaneously the laying down of those traces, something the artist has described as “my struggle with [my own] identity.”20 Hence, we can read the paintings as a kind of “coming-into-being” of the artist herself, keeping in mind that that being is itself mutable, and that its mutability is played out in struggle. Both struggle and mutability are embedded at once in every stroke, the result of an artistic “choice,” whether conscious or unconscious, and in the sum total of all the strokes: the finished painting.

My job as a viewer might thus be framed as an entering into dialogue with the work through an attempt to “re-experience” the artist’s coming-into-being. Of course, this attempt is doomed by a double impossibility. I cannot describe my attempt linguistically; at least I cannot provide an appropriate description, one that will 19. I have previously made this argument with respect to a quite different work: Carolee Schneemann’s Up To And Including Her Limits (1973-1976). See “Some Notes on the Archive” 23-24. Also helpful in regard to the argument here is Kristine Stiles, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and her Circle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) liv-lix; 219 (the dialogic nature of the Up To And Including … performance); 228 (the coming into visibility of the invisible); 260 (the “enemy-man,” the “individual man,” the “old wall of man,” and the difficulty of experiencing the work across a gender divide).

20. See Ciara Ennis, interview with Liat Yossifor in this volume.

not sooner or later be betrayed by the opacity and slipperiness of language. Nor can I claim any special authority or authenticity for my own experience. The inscription of the artist’s traces is irreversible. The canvas can function neither as a window, through which to see the artist (even “as if through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12) and not face-to-face), still less as a mirror in which to see myself reflected.

But perhaps the situation is not as hopeless as it seems. Even an out-of-registration image can still be quite usefully, even if not perfectly legible. The notion of a 1:1 mapping, like that of congruence in geometry, belongs to the abstract worlds of logic and mathematics. It simply cannot describe the superimposition of experience, or the re-inscription of the artist’s coming-into-being on my own. However, this very being out-of-registration, not quite legible, slightly incongruent; this inability to sustain exact superimposition or re-inscription: all these are necessary pre-conditions for the operation of interpretation. They are points of entry into the work. They both allow and sustain the open-ended dialogic relationships between artist and work, viewer and work, artist and viewer that comprise the nexus within which the work may reveal the parameters and the (partial) substance of its meaning.

Ideally, that revelation of meaning will never, indeed can never be complete.

Unlike the work of making, the work of interpretation is by definition never-ending.

It moves past (worst case scenario) like the (potentially) endless crawl across the bottom of a TV screen.

Liat Yossifor’s paintings, on the other hand, remain, not just as passive objects of interpretation, embedded in swirls and eddies of explanatory text or glossed by an on-going stream of interpretive “updates,” but rather as active invitations to dialogue. They not only prompt the work of interpretation; they take an active part in that work. They don’t so much belong “up there” on the wall as they do down here, at the crossroads.21 They sit entangled in the midst of a landscape traversed by overlapping, convergent, divergent, and opposing texts. They are sites for the making of meanings, and anchors for those complex operations of construction, inscription, destruction, re-inscription, de-construction, invention, citation, quotation, birth, and n re-birth that we identify with the coming-into-being of culture.

21. I am speaking here of the spiritual crossroads in Haitian Vodou, the place of intersection presided over by Papa Legba, the facilitator of speech and communication. This is the site of interpretation; but it is also a site of danger, where Papa Legba can grant the duplicitous power of art, as (in the guise of the devil) he did to Robert Johnson.

This essay was originally printed in the catalogue, which accompanied the exhibition, “Liat Yossifor: Time Turning Paint,” curated by Ciara Ennis, at Pitzer College Art Galleries, 12 September – 11 December, 2015.

Glenn Harcourt writes critically on cultural and artistic issues. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is based in Los Angeles.

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Wall I

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Wall II

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Wall III

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Wall IV

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Eyes I

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Eyes II

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Eyes III

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Eyes IV

PLATES

page 17 Wall I, 2017 Oil on linen 80 x 78 inches 203.2 x 198.1 cm

page 25 Eyes I, 2017 Oil on linen 80 x 70 inches 203.2 x 177.8 cm

page 19 Wall II, 2017 Oil on linen 80 x 78 inches 203.2 x 198.1 cm

page 27 Eyes II, 2017 Oil on linen 82 x 60 inches 208.3 x 152.4 cm

page 21 Wall III, 2017 Oil on linen 80 x 78 inches 203.2 x 198.1 cm

page 29 Eyes III, 2017 Oil on linen 82 x 58 inches 208.3 x 147.3 cm

page 23 Wall IV, 2017 Oil on linen 80 x 78 inches 203.2 x 198.1 cm

page 31 Eyes IV, 2017 Oil on linen 75 x 60 inches 190.5 x 152.4 cm

33

LIAT YOSSIFOR EDUCATION 2002 MFA, University of California, Irvine, CA 1996 BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA

2010 “Falling into Ends,” Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany 2007 “The Dawning of an Aspect,” Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, CA “Project Series 32: Liat Yossifor: The Tender Among Us,” Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2016 “A Body of Water,” PATRON, Chicago, IL “The Stand,” Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 34

2015 “Time Turning Paint,” Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA “Pre-Verbal Painting,” The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO “Eight Movements,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “Expanding on an Expansive Subject, Part 4: Liat Yossifor, Gesture (as) Consequence,” Pasadena Art Alliance Gallery, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA 2013 “Hidden,” Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany 2012 “Thought Patterns,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2011 “Liat Yossifor: Works on Paper,” Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA “Performers from a Future Past,” Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2006 “The Black Paintings,” Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel 2005 “New Paintings,” Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2017 “Modulaciones,” Museo de Arte de Sinaloa y Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico “Why Art Matters!,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2015 “New Works,” The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, FL “BLACK / WHITE,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2014 “Transition,” Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany “ArtWatch 2014: Young Careers—SB to Greater LA,” Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA. 2013 “Stolen Gestures,” Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany

2012 “Fall Collection,” Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA “Iva Gueorguieva and Liat Yossifor,” Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Prince at the Forum,” Beacon Arts Building, Inglewood, CA “80 Days—Logistics in the Declaration of Customs,” traveling show organized by and culminating at the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2011 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “Costra Nostra—This Thing of Ours,” Rheeway Gallerie, Los Angeles, CA “Summer Show,” Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “About Paint,” Carl Berg Projects, West Hollywood, CA 2010 “A Reflected Gaze,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2009 “To Here Knows When,” with Daina Higgins, University of La Verne, La Verne, CA “Lovable like Orphan Kitties and Bastard Children,” The Green Gallery East, Milwaukee, WI “Mighty Daggers Do Small Paintings Throw,” Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Project/Protect,” curated by Manon Slome and Anita Beckers, Pulse New York, NY 2008 “A Deadly Serious Show,” Sister Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “The War Is Over,” with Aaron Sandnes, Seeline Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2007 “It Figures,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2006 “Subject,” Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT “From America,” Museum of Modern Fine Arts, Minsk, Belarus “One Shot,” LAXART, Los Angeles, CA

2005 “H.J. Tsinhnahjinnie and Friends,” Memorial Union Art Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA “Summer Show,” Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2003 “LA Painting,” The Standard Gallery, Raid in Chicago, Chicago, IL “The Real Me,” Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 2002 “Portraits of Yfat,” with Ori Gersht, Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “The End,” Deep River Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2001 “The Third Wight Biennial,” New Wight Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA RESIDENCIES 2011 Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA 2010 Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany 2008 The Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

LIAT YOSSIFOR 17 March – 14 April 2018

Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2018 Christopher Michno 36

Essay © 2015 Glenn Harcourt Photography by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles, CA Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9994871-4-3 Cover: Wall II (detail), 2017

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY