Beverly Fishman Deceptive Pleasures By Donald Kuspit

Beverly Fishman Deceptive Pleasures By Donald Kuspit

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Stunningly beautiful, Beverly Fishmans bands of iridescent colors cannot help but arouse ones emotions, all the more so because one is mirrored by the paintings, suggesting that the squiggly lines embedded in the colors register ones own nervous emotions. They in fact do: their patterns are transcriptions of EKG, EEG, and neuron spike readouts, with some bar codes thrown in to add a social measure to the disembodied bodily data. And, for good measure, some of the patterns are derived from the modular shapes of the pills and capsules that are supposed to cure us of our ailments, mental as well as physical. The pattern registers time, giving it spatial form, a geometrical objectification that suggests that all our problems are subjective and thus of no great consequence, however fraught with understated consequence the diagnostic patterns are.
It is in fact the insistent physicality of Fishmans surfaces, with their dense layers of enamel paint, their colors adding a certain psychedelic flourish to the patterns, that suggests that Fishmans paintings are an ironical advance on feminist-motivated art. Unlike the fabric painting of Miriam Schapiro, with their touchy-feely warmth, or the expressionist vaginas of Judy Chicago, or Carolee Schneemans visceral actings-out of her strong feelings, or Hannah Wilkes mock sexual self-representations -- all engaging the feminist idea of our bodies, ourselves, and all painterly (down to the detail of Wilkes marking her body with chewing gum) -- Fishmans paintings are coolly detached, not to say ironically sober and smooth. Theres no sign of the raucous, painterly hand anywhere in the works, however hand-painted they are, and, more crucially, the patterns are all digitalized representations of bodily functions common to men and women.
Theyre truly universal abstractions, indifferent to gender distinctions, yet not transcendental abstractions, for theres nothing sublime about them: theyre all about the vulnerability of the flesh, the vicissitudes of the body impersonally measured by machines, suggesting the depersonalization of the body that the old-time feminists took very personally. Even more crucially, their edgy lines suggest that were all on the edge of having a breakdown. Thus our need for those reassuring mind-altering pills -- psychopharmacological treatment. Religion is the opium of the masses, Marx famously said, and pills are the idols in the temple of the new religion of the masses, promising even more than the old gods ever did to cure us of all our ills and solve all our problems, always inescapable whether made by ourselves or by nature.
What is presented as a medical panacea is treated as a pleasurable placebo by Fishman. For her paintings are hedonistic, whatever the pain implicit in them. They use medical monitoring systems to suggest that art can cure us of our suffering, when it can do no such thing, affording, at best, a certain intoxicating relief from it, as Freud suggested, like a good drink. Art is a cover-up, a form of self-deception and social deception, but it works its magical relief, and for more than a split second. Fishmans graphs -- graphs of the heart and mind, as it were -- are composed of split seconds, subtly different if often repeating themselves, and always systematically aligned. The monitoring systems never pause -- Fishman in effect gives us a slice of their artificial intelligence -- nor do Fishmans paintings.

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Please continue reading here: Henry Varnum Poor POOR'S NO PAUPER and DECEPTIVE PLEASURES also Decorative Art online



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