Content provided in partnership with
Tides and tidings: long known for large-scale wall drawings in which raucous crowds enact allegorical tales, Nicole Eisenman recently turned her muralist bent to canvas, devising a two-part epic in which art and lesbian motherhood are cast onto a remote yet populous island
Art in America, Oct, 2006 by Faye Hirsch
Progress: Real and Imagined, a new painting by Nicole Eisenman, was the centerpiece of her show at the Leo Koenig gallery in New York in late spring. Measuring 8 by 30 feet--her largest work to date on canvas--the vividly colored diptych spanned a long wall in a windowed front room parallel to 23rd Street. As she often does, Eisenman gave her painting an allegorical title, one that might have accompanied a WPA mural. The association is not incidental; Eisenman's brand of satirical realism, her narrative ambition and her skill as a muralist--she has completed monumental wall drawings every other year or so since her emergence on the art scene in 1993--1ink her to the American scene painters of the Depression era. Here, however, she turns to a subject that has directly affected her life: lesbian motherhood. Eisenman embeds her theme in visual culture past and present, exploiting to great effect the dissonance that has become her particular stock in trade. Whether to skewer art-world politics and intellectual trends (as she does in Pen & Ink, this issue, where she uses elements of Hogarth's 1750 print Gin Lane to poke fun at "the abject"), or to pay back-handed compliments to the past, Eisenman takes aim at the masters--Picasso, Tiepolo, Hogarth, et al.--from her redoubt in a dyke punk milieu.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
The two panels of Progress: Real and Imagined present two different kinds of spaces--on the left, a close-up view of a boat, with the looming protagonist, a life-size male artist resembling Eisenman, dominating a studio located in its main cabin; and on the right, a panorama teeming with small figures. In the left panel, the artist has just begun drawing a landscape. He is bent over his work in the boat, which is headed for trouble; hints of impending disaster include, at the left, a castaway in a skiff and a submerged figure hoisting a life preserver. In the cabin, artworks, many of them actual miniature canvases painted and collaged to the surface, fly every which way. A lightbulb, emblem of ideas and inspiration in comics and Guston alike, lies shattered on the deck, and a forgotten, half-eaten burger signals the hero's creative absorption. Various knickknacks tumble around the cabin; landing on the artist's shoulder, for example, is a curious clock statuette of Michael Jackson (the presence of a clock again recalls Guston, who often placed one in his studio scenes). Eisenman's imagery can be grotesque and hallucinatory, as in the mess of paint on the table, which becomes legible as an Arcimboldo-style head made of gore.
Time has run out in the right panel, where the artist reappears, Dismembered--giant head, giant foot--having washed up, Gulliver-like, on an uncharted isle whose mainly female inhabitants are disinclined to simply tie a guy up. It seems that the population harbors, along with a posse of foxhunters and spotted hounds, women with their own, biological, ticking clocks. One of the artist's testicles is being harvested for sperm by a trio of rifle-toting Amazons, while the other is slung along in a trapper's net. Within the rocky, pitched landscape are groups of figures enacting a continuous narrative about the birth of a child. At the top right, the genius loci is a boulder-spirit spouting a cascade from between her legs, which empties into a lake with some beer-swilling fishermen at its banks. The lake feeds a stream in a grotto, where a woman has been shot in the head by a huntress who, it seems, has loaded her rifle with the harvested sperm. The apparently lifeless victim is supported by figures in poses reminiscent of St. John and Mary Magdalene attending the dead Christ. She posthumously gives birth to a sweet-faced baby, who winds up downstream, flipping the bird at a hungry piranha; the baby is barely snatched from the fish's maw by a zombie with melting skin and a hook in her hand. A tiny hooded skeleton just beyond looks peeved, death having been cheated, and a throng of women grabs at the rescued infant, held up like wares in an auction. The stream spills into the sea.
The diptych's narrative is informed by the real-life fact that Eisenman and her partner have been trying for some time to have a baby. The mother giving birth in the stream is a portrait of Eisenman's girlfriend, and the gunshot is meant to refer to the inseminations she has undergone over the past year.1 The challenge of procuring sperm on this all-female isle with no viable man in sight (and none wanted) is solved by the sacrificed artist, and herein lies the tale. While she did not set out to portray herself as male, as time passed, the dictates of the narrative seemed to demand it. Not only does she become the father of the island's (and her girlfriend's) baby, but, playing the heroic (male) artist in the tradition of the great muralists, she invents a fantastical realm where such things are possible.
The anecdotal facts, however, are not vital to an appreciation of the work. Among other issues, Progress: Real or Imagined treats the old conflict between an artist's work and the burden of his or her domestic life. Violence accompanies each step to maternity, with the artist torn asunder after his creative time expires. A smaller painting that was in the Koenig show, OK Birth (2006), displays a similar ambivalence: a splayed nude gives birth, with the head of her emerging infant framed in the circle of an "A-OK" gesture made by a figure in the foreground. This character is a bumptious grotesque, part giant hand and part cat, with a jumbled green face and dangling duck feet--hardly a reassuring presence, but no doubt a reference to Eisenman, who will one day play the role of birthing assistant. To one side an abstraction in red resembles a dead bug, belly up, legs in the air. In Progress: Real and Imagined, on the other hand, events take a more optimistic turn than in OK Birth. In the background, two women seem to be enjoying the fruit of their efforts, one standing, baby in arms, and the other seated and reading. It is a portrait of Eisenman and her (resurrected?) girlfriend, happy in motherhood, and as a family.
