The films by Los Angeles artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher (US, 1942) are largely about film itself, whether in its material form and technical procedures or as an institution, such as the tropes of films made in the commercial film industry. Fisher started making film in the late 1960s, when the dominant schools of visual art were minimalism and conceptualism. Some of his films were included in “Information,” the landmark exhibition of conceptual art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and received further recognition at the Independent Avant-Garde Film Festival, London, in 1973. In 2005-2006 a retrospective was presented at Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. From the beginning Fisher made his films as a filmmaker, but the range of his films, touching visual art on one side and on the other the commercial film industry, above all Hollywood, has complicated the reception of his work within avant-garde film criticism. Since the late 1990s Fisher has been active mainly as a visual artist, producing paintings and other works, many of which, like his films, bring into view unexamined assumptions about their medium.
