Hyperallergic
by Hrag Vartanian
May, 2012
Painter, author and critic Mira Schor’s current show at Marvelli Gallery delves into the world of language. The works on linen and paper chart a world where the individual appears in a form of stasis, holding a book or laptop, looking at things — windows, paintings, screens — and generating rectangles (and the occasional oval) which seem to speak, label, think and even dream.
All the works are rather small — the drawings are often larger than the paintings — and they appear to meditate on the state of the artist and intellectual, both labels that fittingly describe Schor.
The show is titled Voice and Speech, but there’s an erie silence to these works. The artist’s hand is alway present and the paint is often treated like ink, flowing with a dark contrast across washes of paint, defining space and and giving each rectangle it’s own character.
What fascinated me about the show was her drive to collide language with imagery to create something new. Her cursive text tells a story but so do her characters. It’s a word of solitary contemplation, with words, with pictures, all coming together and making something new.
The New York Times
by Roberta Smith
April, 2012
Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now. Sparely cartoonish in style, at least partly feminist in intent and always linguistically inclined, they can evoke the elliptical eyeglass paintings of Michael Hurson and the prankish, word-punning early paintings of Neil Jenney that were grouped, in the long-ago 1970s, in a short-lived trend called New Image Painting.
Ms. Schor’s latest efforts are among her best yet. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.
Their main character is a seemingly female stick figure whose rectilinear head could symbolize a blank canvas, page, screen or thought balloon. She appears against robustly worked monochromes of white, yellow or green that are equipped with occasional doors and windows, and imply rooms, studios or gardens of one’s own, available for private cultivation. The single red painting, a lightly hallucinatory work titled “The Song of the Cardinal,” suggests nature as a source of inspiration.
Artforum
by Britany Salsbury
April, 2012
Since the late 1970s, Mira Schor has integrated text into works that interrogate the formal and theoretical concerns of artistic production. Her current show could be a summation of this long-term project, as the paintings and drawings on view metaphorically depict transitions from thought to action, and from process to product. In many of the works, figures are seen reclining in space as if caught in reverie. Often the figure holds a book, which underscores the scholarly, meditative nature of the moment captured. Rendered in loosely drawn layers of lines, these barely-there surrogates for the artist are situated between words—such as VOICE and SPEECH, as well as THE SELF, THE WORK, and THE WORLD—in interconnected shapes suggesting the thought process.
The feminist concerns that so critically inform Schor’s output manifest most clearly in a small group of paintings that transfer the exhibition’s overarching theme of interiority to a broader social space and reinforce a connection between the personal and the political. The Dreams of All of Us (all works cited, 2012) shows a sleeping figure surrounded by the words of the title. In this instance, a fusion of individual and community implies the possibility of enacting social transformation, and this bond reinforces the importance of collectivity and empowerment within Schor’s practice. The work is hung alongside three others of identical size and similar composition; these four pieces, taken together, can be seen as a sequential progression into and out of darkness that culminates with the final yellow work, This Is the Future. In this work, the shapes that held words in the first painting have become incandescent and illuminate the awakened figure who now reads a book while assuming the reclining position featured in other paintings. The sequence resembles a summation of the political concerns in Schor’s oeuvre, namely the individual as an ideal site for the germination of resistance.
Artinfo
by Chloe Wyma
April, 2012
Name: Mira Schor
Age: 61
Occupation: Artist and writer
City/Neighborhood: New York — recently returned to childhood home on Upper West Side.
What project are you working on now?
I want to follow up on some ideas that came up in the last series of paintings I finished this winter for my current show at Marvelli Gallery, “The Dreams of All of Us” series. The last one is an intense cadmium yellow light and I called it “This Is the Future.” I was thinking of the Occupy movement and chose to give the series (which follows a collective dreaming sleeper through the darkest night) an optimistic outcome, but the title also refers to the immediate future of my work: I want to use more intense color. I have a show planned for CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles next year and I think it would be great to have vibrant, intense hues for that show, but I also may end up following the path of darkness, so I can’t be sure where the work will go. Mainly I just want to re-immerse myself in the rhythm of working. I also hope to get back to writing for my blog, “A Year of Positive Thinking,” which I had to put on hold while I prepared for the show while also teaching.
This is your first solo show in New York in some time. How has your work developed since your “Book/s of Pages” in 2010?
“Book/s of Pages” included big digital prints made from very hi-res scans of the small notebook drawings that are an important part of my process. It’s all part of my quest for one of the holy grails of painting, how to bring the freedom, spontaneity, and investigative spirit of drawing into the sculptural materiality of paint.
Many of the paintings feature a little stick figure reading or sleeping. Who is this figure and what does she or he represent?
The figure is a sketchily drawn avatar of myself, wearing glasses because at this point my reading glasses are so much an organic part of my head that I sometimes forget to take them off when I turn out the light at night. Interesting that you ask “he or she” because the figure is indeed barely gendered, even barely embodied: when I formulated an agenda for my work when I was in my early twenties, it was to bring the experience of living inside a female body — with a mind — into high art in as intact a form as possible. I’m so glad I was so prescient in adding “with a mind,” because once woman moves past nubile youthfulness, her body is of no interest to representation and maybe even to herself, so I assured myself a lifetime of possibilities. My avatar is a thinking person walking around, sleeping, reading, looking. She is a scholar, an ancient philosopher, and an eight-year old girl vividly perceiving the world’s beauties and its terrors.
Two Coats of Paint
by Sharon Butler
April, 2012
Inspired by Raphael Rubenstein’s approach to the Artseen section of The Brooklyn Rail, EMAIL is a new section featuring short posts based on notes written to other artists.
Hi Mira,
I stopped by your show on Saturday and particularly love the white painting on the wall near the office: esp. the relative chalkiness of the paint, the visible decision-making around the feet, and the whoosh of..whatever that is (!) going through the windows. The tension between text and image as well as the small scale successfully address the urge to make work that’s personal, political and conceptual (all at once) that you talked about during your lecture at American University. Sometimes words, especially for writer-artists, are so important to the process, they can’t be eliminated—even in a medium as visual as painting. But, interestingly, I find the pieces with faint or no text the most compelling…and yet, they need to be seen alongside the text-ier ones for the lightness (and absence) to be as powerful. That thin, yellow-y tracing paper is a perfect choice for the ink studies in the backroom—the flimsiness is intriguing…and lovely. Congratulations on a fine show. But perhaps I should be posting this to the blog…?
Anyway, please tell your students I enjoyed visiting their studios on Friday—thanks for the invitation. I will print and sign the PDF and put it in the mail today or tomorrow.
All best,
Sharon
The Huffington Post
by Roger Denson
April, 2012
There seems to be something structurally incongruent if not absurdly wrong with an analogy between painting and the human voice, even more so between painting and speech. Comparing an instrument of sound and the collective faculty for shared, spoken language with a manipulation of visual, formal components built up into graphic signs is apt to be riddled with unbridgeable voids of difference. And yet Mira Schor, a prominent New York critic-painter for the past three decades, has made an alleged correspondence of voice, speech and painting the thematic center and motivating ethos for her latest series of paintings, all of which she has compiled under the coyly taunting title, Voice and Speech.
Culture Catch
by Bradley Rubenstein
April, 2012
Mira Schor: Voice and Speech
Marvelli Gallery
Through April 28, 2012
From the Muses of Helicon, let us begin our singing, that haunt Helicon’s great and lofty mountain, and dance on soft feet around the altar of the mighty son of Kronos. This from Hesiod’s Theogony. “Night bore hateful Doom and dark Fate and Death, She bore Sleep, and she bore the Tribe of Dreams….”
“We live as we dream,” wrote Joseph Conrad, “alone.” Mira Schor’s recent exhibition at Marvelli, Voice and Speech, makes a compelling argument against Conrad’s existentialist notions with paintings that are interrogations of thinking, speaking, writing and, of course, the act of painting.
In this exhibition of recent paintings, Schor explores the concepts of “voice” and “speech” in contemporary politics and art theory, inspired by an idea put forward in Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau’s theme is that there exists a knowledge that precedes theory and which retains “voice” even when “speech” attempts to subsume it. It is the knowledge that causes the city dweller to inscribe living patterns of usage onto the fixed grid of the planned city; it’s the knowledge of the folkloric, of craft. He writes, “In turn, ‘the voice’ will also insinuate itself into the text as a mark or a trace, an effect of a metonymy of the body…a transitory figure, an indiscreet ghost, a ‘pagan’ or ‘wild’ reminiscence in the scriptural economy, a disturbing sound from a different tradition, and a pre-text for interminable interpretive productions.”
Mira Schor is a painter and writer living in New York City. Her honors include awards in painting from the Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, and the 1999 College Art Associations Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism. She teaches in the MFA Program of the Fine Arts Department at Parsons The New School for Design.
Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists Writings, Theory, and Criticism (both from Duke University Press) and of M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Plus her new book, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life.
