Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / “I vehemently reject the claim that mark making by itself harbors any potential.” This was Isabelle Graw in conversation in 2010 with Achim Hochdörfer. The previous year, the latter had published his essay, “A Hidden Reserve”, chronicling a persistent but transformed and inquisitive use of the gesture by artists such as Joan Snyder and Simon Hantaï, after the myth of its unrestricted access to the inner self had been thoroughly critiqued by virtue of the encaustic and enamel regimentations of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. It is not certain, however, whether mark-making can ever be “by itself,” as Graw puts it. Certainly, it carries with it endless associations and ever-shifting positions. Upon her first encounter with Abstract Expressionism, a young Louise Fishman saw in it a queer language suitable to her own alienation, in contradiction to its macho orthodoxy, while Amy Sillman similarly emphasizes painting’s potential to transgress categories. Hochdörfer’s corollary thesis, relevant to this day, is the dialectic between “literalism and transcendence,” or the acknowledgement of art’s concrete materiality versus the expectation and oft-reported experience of transformation, metaphor, or perceptual intensification.