(English)
Friday, June 22, 2012, 7 p.m.
Starting in the late 1960s Morgan Fisher made films, and in the late 1980s he became interested in making paintings, an earlier interest he had not pursued at the time.
In this lecture Fisher traces his path from making films to making the Italian Paintings, completed in 1999. These paintings were, with one exception five years earlier, his first mature work in painting. As Fisher says, he is the beginner in painting, so his lecture is in effect addressed to himself.
Fisher describes how he found that he could apply to painting the model of copy photography that many of his films enacted, a model that has affinities with a kind of technical drawing called orthographic, which he learned as a child from his father, an architect. Copy photography and the orthographic are modes of representing that exclude opportunities for personal expressivity. The characteristics that they express and imply are present in other aspects of Fisher’s films.
While translating these and related paradigms to painting, the Italian Paintings also worked with size and shape, something not possible in film.
Concluding with the Italian Paintings, the lecture does not describe the work in painting that Fisher has done in the thirteen years since, but the principles of impersonal construction as an alternative to composition that underlay the films and underlay the Italian Paintings have been the basis of the work in painting that has come since.
Fisher gave the lecture in several forms in 1998 and 1999. At the Generali Foundation he will present the lecture last given then, revised only slightly to correct some errors and to make it shorter.