Nicole Eisenman
Nicole Eisenman's work is like cowboys and indians. Good guys, bad guys and worse guys. It's a frontal assault, and you can clearly see the toed lines in the sand. Eisenman plays the cock-chopping psycho dyke incarnate, a caricature born of a homophobic nightmare. There are no subtle efforts to conjoin with the 'other side' in her drawings. She has no desire to pass, to please, to be polite.
In her first one-person show, she sifts through the heroic and the mythic as they are attributed to the artist as persona. One wall is taken up with a split mural. Half features the race-car-driving cartoon character Penelope in her pit stop, the other, a Grecian landscape of women hunting Minotaurs. The two together suggest a timeless Artemis. Eisenman's women, like the celibate huntress, move through her world unpent, sometimes violent and completely unimpressed with dick. She is intent on devising a newer kind of lesbian camp and collapsing it into classical painting. Unlike G.B. Jones, who takes Tom of Finland men and gives them breasts and muff bulges, Eisenman's camp is feminine and sensual, more curve and less thrust, her mural lusher and more romantic.
The remaining three walls are part of an assemblage subtitled 'the artist's studio'. Here, doodles, sketches, clippings and fragments sprawl lackadaisically. Similar to Jack Pierson's studio recreation at the Whitney Biennial, her haphazard collage builds on the aura of the artist's secret making place. While Pierson's was tighter, a corner of after-effects (i.e. cigarettes, books, paint etc.), Eisenman's is a bombardment of images. Within this structure, finished and unfinished works sneak out. The editing process - often a collaboration with dealers and collectors - is foregone... It can be a perfect moment where everything is good, or interesting or valid.
By giving viewers access to her 'studio', as well as an accompanying videotape of the 'artist at work', she makes a study of the art world's fascination with the Crowned Princes it so quickly manufactures. References are made throughout the show to two power groups - the big male painter and the feminist clique which achieved some influence in the 80s. Mural-making in itself bespeaks a meaty Rivera-type arm. Towering and often larger than life, it links a certain athleticism to the prissy notion of 'artist'. Eisenman's Minotaur, a sketch of livestock entitled Bull Market (also read Lesbian) and a signature piece coupling her own with Picasso's, address the concept of genius as the attribute of male artists. At the other end of the power spectrum lies a women's art movement whose major voices have been heterosexual and whose works focused less on dialogues between women than on issues concerning their relationships to men. Here, a photo of Freud is laid out underneath a Barbara Kruger 'I Hate Myself' text. A sketch of a woman squirting breast milk onto a canvas reads 'The advantage of being a woman artist' and borrows the Guerrilla Girls' logo. This world too could be impermeable, so Eisenman draws herself into 'their' pictures.
Like Roseanne Arnold, it's a thin line between the character and the real person, the act and the actress. It's hard to tell how much of Eisenman's hand is included in what could be construed as a portrait of an artist's ego, and how much is her own desire to function within the paradigm she seeks to redress. There is a sense that she is caught up in the idea of her own celebrity, an 'Übermensch' posture she assumes while standing on only one leg.
