My work at that time was in a sense a form of ventriloquism: I could depict in my paintings what I found difficult to express in my life. And I did understand that what I was doing as a woman and as an artist at that time—going against the dominant style and philosophy of art, depicting my dreams and my own sexual and erotic experience in small gouache on paper paintings—had a political dimension. The scenario of Bear Triptych is that of La Belle et La Bête, in a way. The bear is a symbolic representation of a specific person, a short stocky man with black hair and a bushy beard who was in real life my means of finally being rescued from the burden of virginity! The works were about the wildness of sex itself and eroticism was also expressed through the landscape. I often use forms from nature in an animistic way. The big sky, the slightly scary aridity of the High Desert where the school was located, North of Los Angeles, contrasted to the extravagant forms of the in LA’s lush gardens, the palm trees, the Cypress trees, the thorny Agave plants—painting this landscape was another expression of sexuality.

Meanwhile, because CalArts was a small place a lot of people could see the relationship develop in real-time and they enjoyed the Story Paintings the way people look forward to another episode of a TV series. That acceptance on my own terms paradoxically gave me the freedom to move away from that type of work, and once the Story Paintings were done, I moved towards a completely different type of use of space and subject—shifting from narrative landscape and figuration to language itself as subject. Over my career I have in essence shifted back and forth between these approaches, sort of decade by decade. 

“Appropriated Sexuality” definitely marks a turning point in my work and career. I had a particular insight into the political meaning of Salle’s depiction of women that no one else would have, knowing the rather different work he did as a student of John Baldessari, and knowing that in an ordinary art school, without the presence of feminism as a center of interest and even power in the school—and the thing about CalArts was that because it was a small school with a lot of the work and life taking place on a small campus you didn’t have to study with someone to have a sense of their work—he might have been the school “star.” So I understood his work as a reaction formation against feminism, and I saw the critical acclaim as part of what was described as the Backlash against feminism that began at the turn of the decade. 

Writing the essay led to starting my own art magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G with another painter, Susan Bee, because I couldn’t get “Appropriated Sexuality” published elsewhere—the last straw was when a small Chicago-based art journal was going to publish it, then showed it to a local author, and published her piece instead, which did exactly what I critiqued the art world establishment of doing, that is, raising the issue of pornography, then laying it aside, and never raising the issue of misogyny which seemed to me to be expressed in the work, in its imagery and artistic approach. 

Writing that essay and starting M/E/A/N/I/N/G in 1986, when postmodern theory and “post-feminism” took central stage, led to a big shift in focus in my painting. In the 1970s I had worked in a way that I later came to think of as a dream time. Writing, the research and reading I had to do in order to write at that time, and asserting a critical position in the art world gradually changed my art work away from that dream place to a more sharply focused, more intellectual approach. When Salle was asked what his paintings of women in pornographic positions was about, his terse answer was “irony,” so the first book I read in this new phase was a small book about “irony,” which was a watchword of the time, along with theoretical language coming from authors like Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida. It was a sink or swim situation, you had to learn a new language, or fall out of an important discourse. In general I’ve always been attracted to what seems at first antithetical to me. Paradoxically that’s also the moment when I began to work for the first time in the “master medium,” oil on canvas.

That’s interesting. Apparently I never learned that lesson! I’ve always had very strong opinions and found it hard to flatter people if I didn’t actually mean what I was saying. The other side of that unfortunate characteristic is that people know that my praise is heartfelt. 

After I published “Appropriated Sexuality,” I didn’t fully realize the enemies I had made. I always say that I am extremely risk averse, so I certainly didn’t get up in the morning and think “today I’m going to attack a powerful person in the art world” or think to myself, “attacking important art historians and critics is dangerous but I’ll do it anyway.” I simply felt I had something to say that no one else was saying and I knew I had the capability and the will to take it on. So I did. Several years and many writings later had passed when I mentioned to a noted art historian that I was publishing a second book (A Decade of Negative Thinking) and he asked, “Oh, who are you attacking now?” Then there it was. So be it.

I think women are allowed anger, but only as it pertains to romantic scenarios. Women are supposed to be beautiful, mysterious, they can have a notorious sex life, they can be a “bitch.” That’s different than anger converted into action, in art or activism. But that’s how anger can be very energizing. I got through the trump years by the precise mechanism of instantly converting my outrage—and believe me there were countless days where I thought I would literally “blow my top”—into artworks, literally jumping out of bed after reading the latest Tweet and turning it into a drawing or painting. There is actually a link in many of the works I did the past four years to some of the underlying structure of my Story Paintings including Bear Triptych: a woman faced with a dangerous creature, in a battle for autonomy, turning anger into action and art.

Recently around Halloween I was channel surfing and caught a tiny moment of The Devil’s Doll, a 1935 horror movie, just in time to hear the villain (the actor Lionel Barrymore, disguised as an old woman!) say this most remarkably extreme but eloquent thing, “Without my hatred I could never have lived to exhume myself.” 

In the CalArts Feminist Program, one day we were taught to introduce ourselves to people in a professional manner, to say, “I’m Mira Schor and I’m a painter, or, I’m an artist.” Something like that. At the time it seemed silly to me but has stayed with me as an important core lesson. And once a woman takes that step, to identify as an active being operating outside her assigned role within patriarchy, it’s already likely she will be marked as angry. I’m in good company: the day that art historian asked me what I was attacking now, we were attending a public interview with Carolee Schneemann, who certainly was driven by both a great passion for life, and a considerable amount of anger at everything that had ever been placed as an obstacle in her path just because she was a woman. A number of the great artists I most admire work from a sense of anger at injustice—Ida Applebroog, Nancy Spero, Louise Bourgeois, to name a few. But there’s also a lot of humor in my work, there are many dreamlike poetic moments, and there is a relationship to the expressive uses of materials and the sheer sensual pleasure of line and surface.

Yes, I never thought I would depict a full human body again after the Story Paintings. There have been representations of an abstracted figure which stood in for the body but whose form was taken from forms in nature, and the human body has appeared, but as selected symbolic parts—ear, penis, breast. The avatar works developed out of the work I began after my mother died. She was an artist, we shared that work and that life. After she died, even my being an artist felt up for grabs. I sat down at her work table to draw, because I didn’t want the table to be lonely. I began with a blob of dense black ink. It turned into a thought balloon, which turned into a head, which then wore eyeglasses and one day developed legs and arms and started to walk off the page and there I was, working figuratively in terms of a figure occupying a space. I added whatever felt necessary in any given painting, including language. The language often came from books I was reading that had a philosophical cast. Here/Then, There/Now was suggested by a book whose title asked the question, What Is Contemporary Art? I felt that the question really should be “Where Is Contemporary Art?,” because of the impact of a much more global art world than the one I grew up in. There (the global art world) is Now but my roots are Here, in the New York art world which is associated to Then, the post-War modernist moment. But you can only work from where you are and do the best you can to be alert.

The figure in the avatar paintings wears a dress but not much else denotes femininity or womanhood though as it’s an avatar of self, it’s female. When you pass a certain age as a woman, actually amazingly early—if you’re 35 and you walk in the street next to a 16 year old girl you experience invisibility!—the world loses interest in your body, and in a way so do you, which can be liberating: you can become a person who sees without being seen and that is a form of power. 

The next series of works, the Power Figures I showed at Lyles & King Gallery in New York in 2016, returned a human face to my figuration, albeit often that of a skeleton, and there’s breasts and blood. Though they were on tracing paper which also made them delicate and vulnerable, the Power Figures were very hot and confrontational.

The weirdest thing for me is that in the most recent work I can’t seem to settle on one stable way of representing the body or the self. Sometimes the figure bears a relation to the way figures appear on ancient Greek vases, sometimes like Picasso! Many of the works I did during the pandemic focus on the spaces we have been occupying, our houses, apartments, rooms, whose only occupants are a book, a clock, sometimes a flower growing through the floor. 

I’m still working from the agenda I set myself of depicting what it is like to live inside a female body—with a mind. What that looks like may seem very different than the early work, though often it is basically the same premise—a figure in a space or a landscape, and “with a mind,” so the paintings are still personal in enacting the being of a thinking woman, poetic, political, philosophical.

Another artist once said to me, with some surprise, “Your work is about something.” I thought that was funny, I mean isn’t all work about something, but I had a sense of what he meant.

There’s a lot of pressure in the art world to have a signature style and stick with it so your work is a recognizable commodity. In my case, over many years, there are themes, there is a hand, a touch, that is characteristic throughout. Ultimately I see all the work I’ve done as one work, essentially, each painting or drawing being a single frame from a continuously unspooling reel of movie film, which occasionally loops back upon itself, recovering some key element of past work, the way one’s life moves forward toward an unknown but carries everything that happened before.