Personalities of Sculpture: Artist Nicole Eisenman

I love a rowdy crowd all right hello everyone and welcome to the Nasher 360 speaker series I'm curator of Education Anna Smith and today I'm pleased to introduce artist Nicole Eisenman before we begin take a quick look at the back of your program for information on our upcoming events the next of which on October 26th will feature exhibition artists and late' return for the past several months we've had the pleasure to live with a group of five figures that imbue our garden with the spirit of a language summer Idol the bathers and Nicole Eisenman's sketch for a fountain provide a welcome counterpoint to the brutal Texas heat while challenging our expectations of genre gender and figuration the Nasher is grateful to the colita a duelin acquisition fund for women artists and the green family collection for the means to acquire these sculptures nicole Eisenman emerged in the 1990s with raucous satirical works that made no secret of her strongly feminist sensibility as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design Eisenman made sculptures returning to the practice several years ago most recently in the works for the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the current Venice Biennale Eisenman has received numerous awards and honors including the 2013 carnegie prize for her contribution to the carnegie international and in 2015 a John D and Catherine T MacArthur Fellowship in 2014 at the Contemporary Art Museum st. Louis organized a two-decade survey that traveled to San Diego in Philadelphia and in 2016 she had an exhibition at the new Museum her work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum Ludvig cologne MOCA Los Angeles MoMA the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Walker Art Center the Whitney Museum of American Art gusta la Zurich and many others following today's talk I hope you'll all join us for beer and brats as an a reception in the garden I encourage you to enjoy some time in the company of Eisenman's figures without fully following their example I know it's hot but keep your clothes on all right please join me now in welcoming Nicole Eisenman thank you thank you for that warm introduction and it's an honor to be here and it's an honor to have my fountain installed at the Nasher and have this be its home it's a really big deal for me and I'm couldn't be couldn't be happier I just went out just now to see it for the first time and I'm really it's big heart feelings to have it here in Dallas so thank you everyone who made that happen you guys are just amazing so thank you so I'll tell you a little bit about the history of the fountain and the hit my life is a sculptor I think a lot of people know me as a painter so I'm gonna introduce myself to you today as a sculptor I found a couple of images recently I'm gonna keep this talked to about 40 35 40 minutes just don't warn y'all what what you're getting and there we can do some questions after if you want so I found some slides some photographs that I had transferred into digital to show you they're a couple of images I found through my best friend in college mount Molly Bradford had pictures of a project that we did together and in fact Molly really began this project and I joined her in it and this is from my sophomore my freshman year at Rhode Island School of Design it was Christmas break we had a month off for winter break I guess we call it and the first week everybody left and Molly and I stayed in school and it was it just everybody was gone there was empty space everybody's like a lot of the project rooms had been cleared out so Molly and I found a project room and started dragging junk into a like an old bed spring and broken furniture and this and that and building these armatures and then we went to the store and bought hundreds of pounds of plaster and we actually stole a lot of plaster that's how we were back then we were little thieves we would buy one bag of plaster and roll out of the store with three of them on the trolley but we were students and we were on a limited budget so that's how we did it and and we built these sculptures we built about seven or eight of them and that week and then we left we both went home for the holidays and a couple of weeks later they were discovered by somebody at school and we almost got suspended and our parents ended up cleaning up our mess for us like they had to pay the school to have them demolished and thrown away and we made a big mess making them but you can see and then we were painting the sculptures and they're probably they're pretty malformed but it was really like amazing for me to rediscover that she had these images from 30-something years ago I hadn't forgotten about it but I forgot what they looked like and I forgot how good they were they were really felt and it was a project born out of friendship and that was a really important aspect of it is like learning at that point in life at the age of like eighteen seventeen eighteen that art didn't just happen on a piece of paper in my bedroom or in art class in school that it was a social activity and that you could think bigger and make bigger and that's I don't know so then I went through RISD as a painter and I graduated and I came to New York and I dabbled in sculpture in the 90s I never fully committing but then in 2011 I was offered to do a project space in London at Studio Voltaire and they said I said I can't do a painting show I you know I have like three dealers and between the three of them there's no room to do institutional pay like give you a new show of paintings or you know so they said come do something outside of your regular practice and like remember this sculpture thing from way back when and I asked them to get you know a thousand pounds of plaster and $700 worth of two-by-fours and and I went there and I built these I spent three weeks there and I was building like maybe one every two days or so so I ended up with about fifteen or sixteen sculptures and they this was the space after it was cleaned up it's an old church in the south of London and this is a little bit about the process at that point I went to London without too much of an idea of what I was going to do on the airplane over I made some thumbnail sketches of different gestures maybe I was interested in building but so when I got there we had to a couple of assistants and we were pulling tarot cards and we would like talk about the tarot cards and we would decide on the gesture that day based on the card we pulled this is what I wasn't so this is jack and he's posing as the the knight of cups and then we take this gesture inside and that's Flo was posing you know we the the gesture evolved and then it ends up this sculpture so that's kind of how it went every day at studio Voltaire and then this one there's some similarities to some of those sculptures from RISD from 1982 or not in 1981 maybe yeah no not that old nineteen what we were that would have been 1985 I guess back at RISD and Jack's working in the space and doing some of those same things like pulling old desks and mattresses off the street and integrating them into the installation and working that way it was the space had really had this feeling of being a workshop and then all of it ends up at the end in the dumpster although I did save a couple of pieces and there you know they weren't very well they weren't you know I built the the armatures and a half a day so they're they're delicate pieces they're big heavy delicate pieces which is not really what you want in a sculpture but then came Munster so Casper Koenig had seen this work at studio Voltaire and was really interested in this idea of like this kind of presenting a workshop of sculpture like building these things in situ them there and we he asked me back in all the way back I you know in 2012 I think for a proposal for sculpture monster and this is a show that he has curated over the course of 50 years he started doing it when he was in this 20s and he does it every 10 years and the last one he did when he was 75 and that was the one where I presented this piece that's now in the sculpture garden or a version of it so this process was to me it was really interesting thinking about public art for the first time in context and and thinking about how the pieces used who is in Kaunas in relationship to depending on the neighborhood I mean Muenster the demographic of Muenster is pretty like you know wealthy liberal white bourgeoisie kind of looking place but within that there are students and there's a Turkish community and there are a lot of senior citizens and so there's like other you know micro communities obviously there's a range within that but so we I thought a lot about context and how you want to approach the work - is it something you want to get on a bicycle and ride half a mile to see and discover in the woods somewhere or is it going to be more in a urban place in the city and you drive by it in your car and you can see it that way or how do you want to see it so looking at the history of sculpture Muenster then looking at some of the projects I had remembered seeing a Kippenberger sculpture when I was a student from one of the earlier iterations for that show and I really was down with this Kippenberger he built a the entrance of a subway a metro station and put it on this lawn and I remember these photographs and from Art Forum and then when I got to win ster I recognized the lawn and I was and I was like that's it I got to do my piece where where he did his piece but this is this is Caspar and I and one of the assistant curators spending a couple of days a few days maybe even a week touring around on bicycles looking at all these different sites and discussing the meaning of each site and the and the context so it was all that to say it was a very long slow thoughtful process there was no I mean this this is a show that started for me in 2000 and at the end of 2011 and when he first asked for the proposal or I guess the beginning of 2012 right after studio Voltaire and ended in the summer of 2016 when we did the show so like five and a half years he asked for a proposal and it was a big rush to get him some of these is just give me something doesn't matter we can always change it but just have it some idea so I thought of this very kind of the first thing that popped into my head is this idea of organizing figures around a body of water and it's really like you know the fountain the water becomes a kind of an excuse a gathering place for the figures and anything could happen around it it doesn't really matter what the figures are doing but it's just that they're gathered there so but a lot of the original gestures I didn't really deviate that much from the original thumbnail sketch sketches in the end there was a the original sketch of the standing guy and then I think this was 2016 during the election campaign and there was some connection to Trump's hair and this and the slug which I forgot about actually I completely forgot about that it doesn't really matter so much anymore I don't think but this is their birthplace in Dusseldorf and I built them in a foundry they're also they're made out of plaster with a foam inside them and then they're cut up there's a close-up of the line down figure and you can see there's some mushrooms stuck into the eye and there were mushrooms on the base of the standing guy some of them are homemade some of them were real mushrooms that were cast and some of the garbage pulled out of the river now I have a little video to show you and I can kind of skip right in how do I do that I just press play all right so I hope this doesn't make you too dizzy I'm not gonna play the whole thing I mean I think this is just to give you a sense of place the lawn was really elegant to me it was like the equivalent of a white cube gallery like as close as you could get to a perfect Arcadian space outdoors and muenster it had a backdrop of a hill which at some point in Munster in the 70s and 80s it was a gay cruising area and so that was a nice a kind of connection also for me for these pieces but it's on this ring if you remember that map I showed you of Muenster you could see this big ring [Music] it's a big grassy park that goes around the center of the old city and it used to be a wall back in the Middle Ages when Muenster was a walled city and then the wall disappeared and now it's a park but you can get a sense of just yeah what it looked like it was so I mean these this video must have been shot very early in the morning before a lot of people were out using the space all right I'm gonna [Music] so the the show opened and this park this this lawn is in a residential neighborhood and a lot of the there's a school nearby and a lot of the kids would come after school and hang out and people would come hang out in this park and make little barbecue say bring little hibachis and make little barbecues and it was a really a social space for this neighborhood and I there was some concern I had about interrupting that social space by putting this there but then maybe it balanced out because it's also kids could get in the fountain and splash around and indeed they did which made me really happy and then the show opened and there were a lot of visitors so it looked like this with people not quite how I envisioned the piece being that I didn't I wasn't taking into account the volume of traffic for this show in Munster they had like a million visitors over the course of the show so it was really heavily trafficked and the lawn got decimated really quickly and the dirt from the ground would go into the water and then into the pipes of the sculpture and clog it up so we were constantly draining the pool and cleaning out the plumbing and reconfiguring it and trying to keep the thing going so you could see it's like a slide on the left here like there's very little grass around it and the sculpture it was called sketch for a fountain this pieces the fountain this is the finished piece out back this was the idea here was I mean there were a few different things going on one was financing a fountain but I think more importantly than that was the feeling that we didn't want to leave plaster behind in this show that we wanted to see what it would be like to have these plaster figures outdoors for four months and see what how people lived with it and you know the the plaster the plaster fell apart and it was really like watching a body decay the sculpture is made out of porous materials and the porous materials age like humans do so there was a kind of thing happening in not very much time with these things falling apart and then of course there was what people did to them which is there's some music here I want to turn the music off okay so this is a video I found on YouTube the other day when I was putting this talk together and I hadn't seen it before but it really shows you what it looked like after four months out in a very busy show and this was on a good day I mean the mud on a rainy busy day would get so deep it was like Woodstock at like on the final day it was like you know up to your ankles and you couldn't sit down by the fountain anymore you know you couldn't even really approach it standing up without getting really muddy so the sculpture in a way like drew people to it and then also kind of pushed them all at the same time in a funny way do you want me to use this is this not working hi oh okay let me see maybe I just raised this up though yeah should I start at the beginning I'm gonna try to hold all right anyhow so but here you see some really wonderful things happen to like the way this line down figure is in this on this raft of grass and it looks like a dr. Seuss kind of scenario and then you can see the this standing or the city and figure over there on the right the head somebody took the head off it and now we have like one of the sculpture Munster aids-like had to maintain this sculpture I don't know what that is somebody left their blanket there but anyhow so that's that oh and then there was this kind of [Music] sixth piece which was this funny little box which got decimated pretty quickly but uh yeah it's a scratch it ended up being pretty scrappy looking but but at the same time the citizens of Munster really responded to it and there is now like a campaign to raise money from small donations from the citizens of Muenster to get this fountain back there and they're doing a pretty good job like getting the money together with really small donations and antonkarin and myself have sort of donated our part of it and they're really just raising money to keep the fountain to produce the fountain to build the pool and to keep it in perpetuity for to have a nest egg to maintain the piece and they're there getting there slowly I hope they do it'd be nice for me to have it there so I came back from that experience and continued the exploration and to bronze and there's some examples of some of the smaller works just playing around with the material and my feeling about bronze is that it's such a kind of stayed material and it's so steeped in history that you have to really push the material to make it do something that feels contemporary otherwise your piece just feels like choch like a big chachki so some of that some of this stuff and at the same time that I've been doing sculpture when I got back from Monster I was painting at the same time this is one of the paintings I came up with in 2017 in the beginning of 2017 it's called dark enlightenment and it has this kind of black sun dripping and I made so I've been flip-flopping between the sculpture and painting you know and as I have been for a while so then this piece I did it the Secession was a kind of sculptural realization of this black dripping Sun it's a disco ball that goes up through the roof of the Secession and then these guys my friends and gelatin poured the paint down the pole and poured the paint all over me who was sitting on the sofa reading poetry while this was happening [Music] Bernadette Myers poetry up there I am so then I've been working on these busts in the last couple years and this is from last year in baden-baden in Germany in the south of Germany I did the show I painted the Flint's these kind of candy colors because the space felt very anemic when I got there and there it just felt like everything was getting kind of washed out with this intense brightness of this space but some of these sculptures have popped up again recently in other works and other venues so here's a piece titled the general and a piece titled chirps in' in their natural environments so I would these are photoshop I was like a lot of this stuff is like that make the sculpture and then I Photoshop it into its what feels like it should be its natural environment to sort of flush out its personality for you so the idea like the general seems like like a like a Vietnam vet with PTSD and he's like out on the bench and then chirps ins in his bedroom his very messy bedroom and the here's the these guys on the right are I think they're titled goth kids they're in a cemetery the eagle is that at the 9/11 memorial this fountain is collage and to the president the vice presidential home in Washington and to his into the living room there so when I was making these sculptures I tend to do this with my sculpture more I mean I don't do this at all with my painting but with a sculpture I very much anthropomorphic eyes these things and they kind of I think starting with those works back at RISD and really realizing this was happening at studio Voltaire when I was working on these bodies is that there's a warmth to the plaster like it literally heats up and when you're smoothing a you're almost like massaging a body into shape and there's a really a feeling of like bodily connection and you know it's sensuous I mean it's not without it has a kind of sensuous quality building sculptures in this manner and it's a really it's really lovely I mean I don't know what to say but uh all of that to say is that they do have a kind of personality and I think when I went to make a catalog about this piece and I was thinking about how I wanted to frame them and talk about them I thought about like who they who are they what are their personalities so Hanna black who is a very good friend of mine and a brilliant writer in New York City wrote the essays for this catalogue and together she's an astrologer so we came up with their times their birth times based on when the metal was poured into the mold and then made an astrological chart for each sculpture and it was just a way to frame them to to flush out the personality and then she wrote essays kind of fleshing out there who these what these things are in the world what they mean in the world this is the king and a sculpture called econ prof and it's the same it's the same piece of material after it was cast as the King I took the head off and flipped it upside down and cut the nose off and it turned into that guy so they're reusable you know they're kind of like can have more than one life there is a kind of reincarnation here's some quick sculptures made out of styrofoam very simply cast into aluminium and collage tin to a Eastern European landscape to give them a kind of feeling of Monument and relationship to Eastern European monumental sculpture I threw this one in for Arthur who Arthur where are you you're out there so there he is Arthur Pina curated show last year in Dallas in a one-room cabin I don't know what what's the space called shotgun shotgun house yeah okay so we did it I did a show shotgun house and I just showed this one sculpture the egg eater and it's aluminum with paper pulp I've been working with paper this last year and so I'm gonna go through I want to tell you about this last project at the Whitney and I'll try to go through it really quick so y'all can ask some questions if you want I was thinking about the roots of this project and I was thinking about how I have been making drawings and paintings of kind of dejected people walking for a long time this is a tiny little two by two inch edging I made at some point in the 90s called relationship another drawing from the 90s some like unhappy looking person a painting called European painting this is called the triumph of poverty and [Music] this is called the conscious mind of the artist so I've had this vein if you will of these kind of processions already going back for as long as I can remember this is from last year a painting I made last year called the way world wayward trail [Music] everybody's moving in the same direction it's a pretty simple you know it's like that it's there was the fountain and the procession what they have in common is just a very simple device to organize the figures so with the fountain it's this pool so anything could happen around the pool and with the procession anything could happen within the procession this is all the figures are facing in the same direction that's it it's really simple and within that you can build it could be an endless sculpture so much can be held in a so much can fit in it it's a sculpture that theoretically in my mind I could keep building for the rest of my life and it could just be an ongoing thing anyhow here's an early sketch for the procession so I was approached by the curators of the Whitney to do my piece we had already been in conversation before the Whitney before they were even tapped for the Whitney I was they were talking one of the curators was talking to me about doing a project on one of the balconies so when she got tapped to do the biennial she asked me if she wanted me to fold me into that show and we had a lot of long conversations about whether I would fit in to that show given the demographic of that show being so young I was like really me and I guess me : Nicolina Thomas I think we're like an Barbara hammer who passed away we're like the old Dame's of the show everybody else is like pretty young so I was like concerned about that and it was also my third biennial as I'd be sure you want to give somebody else like this platform but we did it and so I knew this I knew I picked out the balcony I wanted it has really good proportions that the space I chose and kind of worked out this was a preliminary sketch and then here's what it looked like in my studio work this is what it looks like in my studio the piece was pretty big and so it's kind of working on all of them all of the pieces that are in that at the same time you know working on many of them at the same time at different scales different materials and then they would and this is one some of them the last one was built out of plaster this one was built out was a foam armature based on the body of my daughter then blown up and covered with clay I kind of mess around with the armature a bit and then cover it with clay and then bring it up to the foundry where they cut it up and cast it and at the same time kind of here's a picture trying to lay it out to actually see what the scale would feel like so this is just to give you some idea of the process and then here the shots of it and the guy in the front his arm is articulated and moves up and down and it's there's a pole which is his hand is tied to and in the back there are these tuna cans weigh about 250 pounds that balance his arm very perfectly so it's a it's not a very strong motor but it's a small motor that just helps the tilt go back and forth but it's pretty so they're the tuna cans and then here's you can see the guy in front is tethered to this pulling this cart with square wheels and there's a guy who's releasing gas now it is backside and that goes off every 5 minutes or so and some of the other sculptures this one in the front is called man at the center of men and it has this garbage can lids with mirrors inside it so when the Sun twice a day will hit the garbage cans at certain angles and reflect off the mirrors that lights his face up which is Silverleaf so his head becomes like this ball of fire at like for a few seconds every day and then in the back that pole bearer this is one I showed another picture of so that's bronze and he's holding it's holding a fiberglass flagpole and there's a little eagle at the end of the flagpole and a puddle and some of the some of the works take bringing up the rear of the piece yeah I mean I just finished this you know a few months ago so it's still pretty fresh and maybe I'm still processing what that piece meant and I think it was born out of an idea of togetherness and community and walking together and what that metaphorically means to me to walk together and it's not something that just popped up it's something like I showed you guys has some deeper roots in my practice this it's a funny piece I think the farting guy was making people laugh but it's also has a heavy feeling I think when you're in front of the piece and with it it has you know the the big figures really kind of come over you like a wave that's going to crash they almost feel off balance this front guy and it's disconcertingly large and for me that's how it feels to me but it's it's sculpture is interesting and it's different from painting in that when you're when you do something to change somebody's feeling in painting it's really in your head it's really you're kind of processing it mentally it all comes through your eyes whereas I think with sculpture since your body is in proximity to the piece there is a more of a physical sensation feelings that you can convey through the physicality of the pieces if that makes any sense I think Arthur interviewed me for the Nasher newsletter magazine recently and I think I was talking to you about like this feeling I have of I think people asked me about painting and sculpture and how I flip back and forth and my feelings about these two different practices and I always think of painting as being like from the neck up and sculpture from the neck down like that there's something you know there's this tool in between you and the work when you're painting and the painting is it's like the leap of faith you're looking at a picture you're having to use a little bit of your imagination when you're looking at a painting where's sculpture there's none of that kind of trickery it just is what it is and so there's no sense of removal of like looking at an processing image you're not processing an image or you can actually touch and sit on and be in a spacial relationship with the thing so then yeah I don't know where I'm going with that but that but that so there's that and here is a materialist so you know I mean for me to get out of oil you know oil paint and [Music] this practice that is very solitary and very difficult and I you know I like hold my head and I'm like racked I don't have to like wrack my brain for ideas and research and read and write and draw and more racking my brain for ideas like that's always how at some point painting always feels like that for me and I love it and it's challenging and I well you know it's really a primary part of my practice but for me sculpture it's just like you go in there and you blop blop blop and it's done it's so it's kind of dumb it's kind of like there's a kind of stupidity to it like like the way our bodies are kind of dumb so that's what I got for you I could pass the mic around and I could answer questions if you want I also told you a lot so I said it I have one more slide this is a painting I made when I was moving back into painting after a year off of painting after doing the Carnegie I did a show at the Carnegie which I kind of skipped over in this talk but moving back into painting and taking up sculpture as the subject matter is painting I'll wait for the fair or I'll leave it at this [Applause] alright so thanks very much for your for your presentation it was great I wonder about I really appreciated your story too beginning about stealing about stealing plaster made me think a little bit of the artist men will marry and some of his early experience and also your your figures also reminded me of Manuel nari and that with the with the processions and also with Mary I was thinking about relief sculpture so I wonder with respect to relief or just more broadly with respect to processions if you have any comments about things like Angkor Wat or the Parthenon yeah fantastic love it great sculpture yeah ya know it's interesting I think about reliefs a lot I haven't really done it I think there's something slightly confusing for me coming as a painter and approaching a form that's like halfway between 2d and 3d like I don't quite get it I mean Menai I've looked at some what if I looked at Giacometti reliefs and Matisse reliefs and the Parthenon freezes yeah I don't know why I'm not I mean I think about it I think about it I and it's you know I'm not sure I don't know I haven't I don't I really don't know what to say I haven't tried it I'm not sure what I you know it feels so slightly confusing and maybe I I don't know I want to say like the ones I've seen tend to be Deckard it like used in as decoration not that that means anything but I don't know yeah okay stumped I don't know I wish I had something more to say about the Parthenon I'm sorry next question [Laughter] just a Sarah Mike or do you want to just okay go ahead hi Nicole I want to first say it's been such a joy to see all the fountain installed in the back here at the Nasher just watching people interact has been so much fun and my question is related to the installation at the Whitney and the procession facing the decision to have the procession facing backs terior stairwell as opposed to facing into kind of the south south into the city yeah I think it had to do with how you approach the work like coming at the work like I don't know having your first sight of it from like being able to see it when you approach it not looking at the back of everything when you approach it because there's really one only one way onto that balcony and it's from the north side of the space so that really informed that decision it felt pretty pretty straightforward they gave me the mic so I guess I'll go ahead so listening to you today you talked a lot about your processes and you really didn't have like a heavy duty kind of theoretical basis that you talked about so do you see yourself as more of an expressionist of sorts that kind of reacting to your feelings and places and moments and how you respond to kind of the times you're in more than being or words where do you see the core of your work just kind of a reaction to things it's not there's no core I could tell you that there's no fixed place I could tell you it comes from I mean I think you know our identities are fluid and I don't just mean in the way we talk about it in 2019 I mean we were born infants and then we became toddlers and children and young adults and young adults and then responsible adults and then we start aging into mature adults and old people and I think there's never a point where you know it's one thing and I think it has I think a lot of my feeling about moving around in different materials is really connected to this idea that it doesn't have to be fixed like it's not expressionist it's not reactionary but then it is also that I mean I think there you know there's so many ways to read a work I mean it could be you can look at it from a socio-economic vantage point you can look at it from a psychological Freudian vantage point you can look at it in terms of it's like monetary Wirt and market you can look at it in terms of its like spiritual connected connections to spirituality all the Iona there's so many ways to read a piece and I think that's because all of that stuff is in there it's not reducible and I'm not saying that my work is so infinitely deep and interesting I mean not anymore than all of our works are you know everything we do so I mean I'm looking at I mean I I do have maybe I have a rich inner life as much as a lot of us do I also read the paper every day and I know what's going on and I have feelings about the world and I think that stuff goes into the work to say it's expressionistic I mean I think my work maybe if I was gonna make this dichotomy I would say my work back in the 90s was a little bit more reactionary like I would was reacting to how I saw the world and how I felt about it and what but I needed to see in it I'd like to think that this work goes beyond that into the idea of create you know what's the opposite of reactionary like to create something new like to make a proposal for another way like the proposal involves touch and feel and the handling material having my imprint my fingerprints in it having that be a way of communicating to whoever looks at it that there's a kind of connection that gets made through touch and in the idea of community I don't know these are all ideas that are sort of packed into the work but that's a hard question somebody asked me an easy question you got an easy this guy you keep putting this kind of the yellow shirts had his hand up Thanks well I'm going to ask you about a word that was in your bio you didn't mention it at all but I'm trying to understand the emerging queer aesthetic that I see in the arts today now I'm approaching it through Taylor Mac the performance artist who did the 24 hour history of American pop song there's a book that shows Taylor Mack standing on the shoulders of Charles Ludlum when I look at your piece the procession and I see the phrase queer in your program notes I'm wondering to what extent am I seeing this emerging queer aesthetic if at all and is your work somehow standing on the shoulders of performance artists like Charles Ludlum Taylor Mack Laurie Anderson the list goes on I never I wouldn't have thought of myself as standing on the shoulders of Taylor American Laurie Anderson but that sounds great those are good shoulders I love that good shoulders to stand on I don't think of myself in relationship to them because they're not practices I mean I like her music but they're not practices that particularly I don't know I mean influence is also really subtle how it seeps in so it's again hard to answer that question but the idea of a queer aesthetic is a complicated kind of I you know if you'd asked me this question maybe four years ago I would have maybe had a different answer that there is a kind of like I was thinking a lot about the idea of queer formalism like artists who are queer that I know who are making work that folds queerness into it and very formalist works like an artist like math bass for instance or Gordon Hall there are a lot of artists I can name but now I'm starting to think that the label is too heavy-handed in that it's too forced that again it's not necessary for one thing and it's really hard to say formalism you know something that is you know formalism to me what is formalism it's like design balance color though all the formal qualities of a work of art how could you make that queer those are things that don't have identity I think there's a sensibility a queer sensibility or a sensibility that queers have claimed and it's a kind of like the idea to me it's like undermining a given form complicating a given form I don't really that's a given [Music] yeah I don't describe myself I don't know I don't know how to describe myself I mean I won't use that word to describe myself but not my work because I don't know how you can put a label like that on a work of art it's I'm not sure again these questions are too hard you guys but yeah I mean those are you just named a bunch of incredible trailblazers and you know our world would look really different without them you know so and I always aware that I'm able to do what I do because there were feminists in the 60s doing what they did and people of color doing what they did before me and queer people and just trailblazers radical thinkers and not even radical thinkers just thinkers who weren't thinking in the way a lot of us are taught to think it's just all any anybody who thinks outside of like this this prescribed box were given and culture yeah could you talk a little bit about the importance of humor in your work I was particularly struck by the piece here and the piece at the Whitney that there's this remarkable kind of juxtaposition between humor strength struggle and by adding the dimension of humor it underscores the deep humanity of the sculpture well thank you that's a really lovely thing to say and I really appreciate that I don't really feel like a funny person I I don't know I think I used to be funny like in the 90s and then I lost my sense of humor somewhere along the way it's like stop being funny or something but I think oh I don't know I you know the piece this piece out back I really wanted to give when I was thinking about public art when I was making this piece I was thinking about the people using it I was thinking about different communities I was thinking about like my community of queer and black and disabled friends and everyone else I was thinking about my friend great like what I wanted to get like what how to honor my community and then I was thinking about this community and muenster like the people are actually gonna live with this for 3 5 months you know and the children who are gonna be using this park and what they like what what do they want what would I want if I was 8 years old in my backyard I'd want a fountain I could play in and just trying to be respectful of like the people in that community I mean what's kind of interesting about this piece is that it's is there was a way it's kind of snuck in these that I mean the bodies are kind of transy you know but it's not the first thing you notice about them so I like that I like the way that operates is like introducing differently bodied people into a very straight white heteronormative culture and have it be a not a thing like that seemed like a Marvel like you know to not talk about that and just have it let it be so I can we just stop for a second and relax and just all be humans for one second and it was like you know that is also not reality and there was a lot of the pieces got really you know what do you call it they got you know I'm having a little like now in this reverie of remembrance that the pieces were graffiti'd and cut up and somebody came and like painted swastikas on them and penises all over them so it's like they weren't it didn't end so pretty but it's a kind of experiment I don't know I don't want to say it was like a kind of an experiment and trust with the citizenry to see how people would react to these queer ish bodies by a Jewish person in this city in Germany and I don't know you know it's like it kind of worked and then it didn't which is like life we kind of work and then we don't and as a society and culture we work and then not really depending on who you are so that's yeah it was interesting I don't know you know I didn't if people asked me if I was upset when the pieces got demolished and graffiti'd and all that stuff and I was like not know no not upset I mean if that had happened to a person that's would be bad and that's a that's upsetting these are sculptures like nobody got hurt here and I know symbolic language is strong and powerful and meaningful but somehow I just felt like all right they went after my sculpture maybe that means that night they didn't go after the you know Middle Eastern immigrants who were living in a house across the street from the sculpture so they you know yeah complicated complicated did you have one another yeah you were one of a handful of artists who threatened to withdraw their art from the Whitney over a vice-chair who had profited from like tear gas and other things still a lot of museums have wings devoted to like the Sackler and the Koch family what responsibilities do these institutions have to like event their donors and their members and should more art be publicly funded across the board yeah I would say they have a responsibility to vet who's on their board and I think you know I mean I think the class of people that support the Arts have a responsibility to the public you know I think on a lot of different levels I I think about other models of philanthropy where it's not pay to play like maybe you give the money because you're doing a good thing you're not giving the money to have your name in lights over the museum you know it's like in New York now you go to Lincoln Center to hear a concert and you walk underneath the coke brother you know one of the Koch brothers I'm sure whatever but like really just give the damn money you don't need your name on it you know that's my feeling that's my feeling I think if I don't know I I I don't have any answers I do wonder if candor's had just taken his name off the museum and stepped off the board I would still be really happy to take his money you know so I'm not against like philanthropic giving it's just how it's done yeah and I do think museums should probably start looking a little bit more carefully and I don't have any answers I just know where my line is like what I can take I can't answer for everyone else everyone has to decide where they draw their line because you know who supports the project is part of the project it's it becomes the plinth on which the sculpture stands it's folded into it so it's like if you're making political work it's very it is hypocritical to then you know it feels maybe not hypocritical too strong a word but somehow dirty were just not quite right to be then letting yourself be supported by this so that in that case it felt very clear to me but it's again it's like there's no prescription and it's something as a culture we all have to figure out what we can what we want how we want to do it and I think there's a lot of I don't know I think there's been a lot of fear in art institutions that the whole thing is going to you know that people are going to get scared of giving money and being part of this project together and they're gonna you know not give the money and not be part of it and the arts will dry up and it's it's like the French Revolution is starting but it's not you know that's not going to happen I don't think that's going to happen I think it's just a matter of like converse to me it's an opening salvo of a conversation that it's time to happen but you know that was such a mess and it was very upsetting for everyone involved nobody was happy with it yeah yeah yeah I'm that delightful note [Applause]

Channel: Nasher Sculpture Center

Views: 3,247

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: nicole eisenman, eisenman, sketch for a fountain, sculpture, skulptur projekte munster, munster, germany, figures, figurative art, public sculpture, nasher sculpture center, nasher, plaster, bronze, painting, risd, rhode island school of design, lgbt, gender, artist, contemporary art, modern art, female

Id: nEL_g1WeFX4

Length: 66min 18sec (3978 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 30 2019