The Most Oft-Requested Conceptual Goulash

Revered North Texas artist and educator Vernon Fisher remembered.

BY BRANDON KENNEDY

Ihad been told of a nearby yet distant art wizard while still in high school. A local artist known for his arid landscapes taught private classes to a small group of us who had won awards at a hospitalsponsored competition. I had entered a large sculptural shirt with a garbage tie and won “Best of Show.” The desert painter pulled me away from working on my still life one evening and told me, “Go study with my friend Vernon Fisher at [the University of] North Texas.” Pocketing a $500 purchase prize and stealing my artwork back after a paying doctor refused to pick it up, I eventually followed the advice of Fort Worth fellow artist Dennis Blagg and never looked back.

Soon afterwards, in a weekly paper, I saw mention of an exhibition of Vernon Fisher’s work at Barry Whistler Gallery, and I made my way to Deep Ellum from the suburbs one Saturday. I was floored yet confounded and went from one room to another looking intently, going back and forth several times. I had no idea what determined resolution lay within each object, or the tally of the images that informed its contextual, conceptual, and political allegories. I found room for some quiet contemplation within the chalkboard’s blankness and paint patches too. And a slow, rising smile between the potential meanings or obvious misinterpretations by the viewer, lovingly placed by a jester.

Vernon Fisher had no pretense, did not suffer fools, and told it like it was in a timely, direct manner. If a conceptually leaning artist seeking a college degree was to be serious about studying art in North Texas in the eighties through the aughts, they should’ve been seeking out this guru of serious nonsense. Otherwise, head to the coasts.

He opened up his vaunted Hybrid Forms class with a monologue outlining that his teaching philosophy was based on the character of Dr. Nick from The Simpsons. That is, a quack physician who pops out of nowhere to do his surgical task at lightning speed and then leaves just as quickly. Dubious credentials, questionable ethics, loud, and playing to the public when present. Fisher viably demonstrated the art of teaching as a Zen kōan misprinted in the funny papers.

UNT professors are still complaining about the teaching deal he was given, even in the documentary. True to the story’s arc, the world premiere of Breaking the Code at the Dallas International Film Festival was attended by artists, collectors, gallerists, art enthusiasts, former students, fellow educators, and many admirers just a handful of days after the 80-year-old Fisher shuffled off this mortal coil in late April. Documentary f ilmmaker Michael Flanagan discovered the work of the longtime Fort Worth resident at Words and Pictures: Vernon Fisher at the UNT Art Gallery in the College of Visual Arts and Design building in Denton. I attended the opening celebration almost four years ago, and it would be the last time I would see Fisher, an artist of vast influence here, a man and thinker who helped others chart the turbulent waters of art practice and contemporary theory.

After the screening at DIFF, Flanagan said that he had initially mistaken the latter part of the exhibition’s subtitle for the artist’s untimely passing earlier that same year; his rising curiosity would therefore, he thought, not be rewarded with a living subject. The subtle ironies were most definitely not lost on him as his master’s thesis blossomed into a full-length documentary and a working friendship with the confounding conceptualist. At festival’s end, the film about Fisher’s life and art was awarded the 2023 DIFF Historical Film award. At the close of Breaking the Code— a poignant ending to a life of both masterful artmaking and genuine intellectual inquiry and discovery the wry artist looks calmly into the camera and then starts to crack an ever-widening grin while asking, “How did I do, did I draw outside the lines too much?”

Not at all Vernon, but if you had, we would’ve followed. P