Margaret Fisher (artist)

Margaret Fisher (born 1948) is an American performance and media artist best known for interdisciplinary works that pair gestural choreography to experimental visual theater characterized by a cartoon aesthetic with wide-ranging cultural references.

[1][2][3] She emerged amid a 1970s Bay Area experimental performance scene that included artists such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Coates, Bill Irwin and Winston Tong, and co-founded the intermedia production group MA FISH CO and the alternative theater Cat's Paw Palace in Berkeley.

[4][5][6][7] Fisher's work has been featured at the Venice Biennale,[8] Dance Theatre Workshop, PS1 and The Kitchen in New York,[9][10][11] SFMOMA,[3][12] Image Forum (Tokyo), and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal Mue-danse Festival.

[26] In the 1970s, she studied dance and choreography with Margaret Jenkins and contact improvisation with Steve Paxton, co-founded Cat's Paw Palace (1973), and began performing in experimental works of her own and others, such as Alison Knowles, Jim Nollman and George Coates.

[1][26][31] Critics note as unique to her choreography: chiseled, repetitive gestural isolations that create tension and a sense of pent-up energy;[37][39][9] a focus on smaller body parts (hands, fingers, toes, face, neck) rather than the torso for kinetic expression;[37][7] rhythmic patterns akin to language, poetry or jazz;[40][41][42] and movement on a horizontal, pictorial-like plane.

[44][45][9][3] Critic Charles Shere noted Fisher's approach to using the stage as an area to develop parallel messages (rather than a space to move through), which typically assigned equal weight to elements such as object, light, gesture, rhythm, body, image, sound and word.

[48][49][50] Fisher's solo suite, Splitting (1977–82), featured an evolving, increasingly complex movement language[1][51][41] that combined immediacy[29] and improvisation,[37] with "moments of bizarre, dadaist lunacy" (involving plucked chickens and a harmonica, among other elements);[52][53] critic Robert Palmer described it as a fascinating, non-linear work whose flow and rhythmic drive suggested contemporary jazz.

Fuji, text poured from a teapot, calligraphy exercises for disembodied hands, and swimming through water (by means of a mylar pool);[45][9][31][43] Dance critic Jennifer Dunning compared its "bizarre but magical world" to the "interior of a Joseph Cornell box in its simplicity, playfulness and inviting privacy.

"[1] Fisher also worked independently with composers Charles Amirkhanian, Beth Anderson, Robert Ashley, Roger Reynolds, Don Buchla, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Ron Pellegrino's Real Electric Symphony.

[35][61] In City of Dis (1989–90)—based on a two-sentence Cocteau story about a pet chameleon placed on a piece of plaid to keep warm that dies of exhaustion—Fisher created flat, two-dimensional choreography (focused on the torso and upper body with minimal foot movement) performed close to the audience.

[21][27][32] She has written several books published through her and Hughes's imprimatur, Second Evening Art, including: Tempo as an Organizing Principle in the 1924 Film Ballet mécanique (2016) and The Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third Opera, Settings of Poems by Catullus and Sappho (2005).

She received an Ezra Pound Society Lifetime Achievement Award with Robert Hughes (2013), an American Academy in Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies (2009), and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation visiting scholar residency for her research and writing.