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Bikini, 1987. Acrylic on canvas. 11 ½’ x 18 ½’
Collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois.

“Your normal experience of a painting is you see it as a whole first and then you see it in parts. My background is in literature and as a result the interaction is part to whole, not whole to part. You have to experience it in a linear fashion. Only at the end, and through reflection, do you get to see it. With my work, you are aware of the parts before you can construct the work visually as a whole. You are aware that the parts come from different modalities of representation. The text is part of a puzzle that you have to decode before you can read it as complete. Then there are vignettes that take the form of representation, and then there are the other elements that appear such as abstraction, representation, or other. You never get the experience where everything is seen as one piece; you get more of a partnership of elements. Chaos is at times more interesting in my works than harmony. The viewer gets to choose where to enter.” — Fisher in conversation with Middendorf.

Concentrations 17: Vernon Fisher, Lost for Words was a special exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art from January 23 – April 17, 1988. The following is an essay from the brochure accompanying the exhibition, written by Sue Graze, then-Curator of Contemporary Art.

“[…] For the Dallas Museum of Art, the artist has created his most ambitious site-specific installation to date, combining traditional painting on canvas, three-dimensional sculpture, text and painting directly on the wall (12 elements all inclusive) over an architectural span of almost 200 feet. Fisher has choreographed the space to make the viewer aware of the processional nature of this architectural area, yet at the same time he subverts it- forcing the viewer to waver among text and image – a kind of balancing act that continually insists upon active audience participation.

[…] and finally ending with a large acrylic on canvas painting of the Bikini Island nuclear bomb test. Although the image has an awesome, frightful quality, it is distanced from the viewer, made to resemble a tattered disintegrating photograph. Here again Fisher employs the idea of interruption or static by placing an octopus image from a miniature golf course within the midst of this Bikini field. All seems conceptually askew, but both bomb and octopus share a similar bulbous, sensuous form, and both images are simultaneously strongly horrifying and banal.

Fisher’s Dallas installation begins with a text and ends with a painting, thus combining intellect and allusion into a complexly layered work. Questioning the notion of order, Fisher’s art insists upon a number of different experiences – visual, tactile, intellectual, emotional, and physical. Thus his strategy is truly the opposite of 20th-century precepts of a streamlined, controlled objective order. It moves from the cosmic to the mundane, the past to the present, from echoes of Duchamp to Magrittean surrealism, and Jasper Johns’ pop. Fisher has said, “There are really two stories in my paintings,” and indeed there may be more.” –excerpt of essay by Sue Graze.

Text and an interview, in 2016, with artandseek.org.

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