Is This How it Ends or What?: Vernon Fisher, Image/Text, and the Postmodern Narrative Under Erasure

Abstract

narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances-as though any material were fit to receive man's stories.' --Roland Barthes (1) Vernon Fisher admits it: I feel like I'm making abstract paintings with the materials of a novelist. (2) And it could be argued, similarly, that Fisher makes short stories with the materials of a multimedia artist, because even his abstract paintings are not strictly paint on canvas. In Fisher's work, photographs function as settings, sculpture as punctuation, color as tone, text as voice, and his paintings as open books. But Fisher is more than a painter; he is a storyteller. His work is widely accepted and routinely described as stylistically narrative, and one cannot deny that his cast polyurethane punctuation on the wall creates clauses out of the imagery it joins, as in Cat, Mouse (2003); or turns a sublime landscape painting into a parenthetical, as in The Death of Marat (2002)--using multiple images and sequential picture planes to create the idea that one is not just a viewer of the work, but a reader of stories nesting within stories. Can one then label him literary? Postmodern? Where does a postmodern literary style or sensibility find its place in the work of a predominantly visual artist? Like postmodern writers Richard Brautigan or John Barth, for example, who explore the visuality of narrative while concurrently examining the narrativity of the visual, Fisher uses text within his multimedia works to nudge, if not to dare, the viewer to become a reader. And then there are the compulsory elements: mockery, sarcasm, pastiche, irony, wit, refusal, reversal, and ultimately, erasure. But postmodernism cannot be condensed into eight words, especially when it comes to the complexities of an and literature with a past, with a powerful ism looming like an apparition in its family portrait. One must allow postmodernism to be defined as more than that which followed, expanded, responded to, or reacted against modernism. Appealing to a wider, more mass-market audience than the art of modernism, the presumably art of postmodernism is simultaneously accessible and challenging. It is both high and low (or a collapsing of the two), humorous and serious, and, as theorist Brian McHale purports, dominated by ontological questions rather than epistemological ones. (3) A close examination of Fisher's seminal works 84 Sparrows (1979) and Heart of Darkness (Revised) (2007) will address these notions. To complete the discussion, Fisher's work will be framed within the context of WJ.T. Mitchell's problem of the image/text, which stresses both the positive and negative relationships between the two representational forms. But does Fisher's reckoning with the problem of image/text contribute to a postmodern aesthetic? What is the postmodern aesthetic? In postmodern literary fictions like Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), one notable characteristic is an emphasis on the physicality of the book; similarly, Fisher emphasizes the physicality of the gallery wall while at the same time converting it into a larger-than-life page, as in his 1994 text installation Vacuum. Other postmodern works, like Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America (1967), admit to and playfully examine the existence of the reader as well as the author/narrator and his creative process; Fisher, too, playfully nods at viewers in self-portraits like Annette (1977) or Baseball Cap (1978) while also confessing personal shortcomings or revelations--seemingly face to face. There is laughter at Fisher's (and our own) expense, as well as a sense of shared cultural pathos that viewers must both accept and deny. Remnants and relics from American history (Mickey Mouse, Hiroshima, colonial expansion, awkward love triangles) appear repeatedly and in various contexts in Fisher's work in much the same way that Brautigan's lamentation over a waning American countryside takes the form of a used trout stream for sale at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard for $6. …