The Crazed Cataclysms of Nicole Eisenman

“STY” at David Zwirner, 52 Walker Street, through January 10.

Nicole Eisenman’s work is a combination of social realism, twisted art history, guided-missile observations about the art world, and comic-book illustration. Her triumph at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, Self-Portrait With Exploded Whitney, was a huge wall mural of the museum swamped by wreckage. Eisenman saw the future. Indeed, 20 years later, she won a MacArthur “genius” grant.

I was an adviser for that Biennial, assisting the late aesthete Klaus Kertess, who was hired to create an apolitical reply to the previous edition in 1993. I hated this show. I got only two artists included: Rirkrit Tiravanija and Eisenman. I still remember our visit to Eisenman’s studio far out on East 8th Street. The place was a cluttered mess of rags, clothes, cigarette butts, and paint cans. 

Eisenman has said she started out in a “degenerate and proto-queer” environment, asserting that, when she arrived in New York in the late 1980s, there “was no such thing as queer yet.” The artist wasn’t interested in modernism’s pieties. She was after drama. Her influences include Caravaggio, Giotto, Michelangelo, Grant Wood, Georg Baselitz, and WPA murals, all mixed into clusterfucks of seriousness and stupidity, tenderness and the grotesquerie. Her Alice in Wonderland depicts a tiny Alice whose head is jammed into the vagina of Wonder Woman. She’s created scenes of castration and Betty Rubble and Wilma Flintstone in flagrante ecstasy. Artist Amy Sillman wrote that Eisenman renders figures “with riotous unpredictability, anti-Puritanically taking delight in misbehavior on every level.” Eisenman takes the sacred and drags it across the barroom floor.

Her paintings at 52 Walker are delirious indictments of politics, art, and money. The show is brilliantly installed on tinted Homasote walls that exude warmth and knit together the entire space. Drawings and collages are pushpinned to the walls. Videos play on three giant flat-screens, each held up by a largerthan-life-size figurative sculpture. They’re modern golems. The overall effect makes one feel like an alien on another planet bearing witness to the strange behaviors of its inhabitants. 

Archangel (The Visitors) gives us a room of familiar art-world types lounging, conversing, staring. Maybe it’s a party or an auction. In the lower left corner, two friends commune. On the right, Eisenman, in a sly self-portrait as a thief, plucks a wallet from a collector lost in thought. There are abstract sculptures installed around the space. Over the scene hovers the “Prussian Archangel,” a reference to the pig in military uniform that was featured at the 1920 International Dada Fair in Berlin. A Nazi-like figure slinks in the back. The result is a striking, absurd fresco about complicity and the borders between radical art and repression.

In The Auction, Eisenman stages a tribunal. A magistrate in black robes presides as a tote board flashes auction bids in the millions. Onlookers stare; an artist lugs a painting into the spectacle; an assistant unveils another. It’s a real “J’accuse!” — part carnival cruise, part corporate horror show. Eisenman sneers and mourns at once.

Then there’s Fiddle V. Burns, a searing quasi-self-portrait. A lone figure paints a single unseen red stroke while a tank rumbles overhead. The studio becomes bunker, sanctuary, and dream palace — painting as survival.

I need to turn back the clock here. In 1993, I first saw Eisenman’s work at Trial Balloon, a raw Soho loft-gallery on Broadway. It was operated by two women, artists Nicola Tyson and Angela Lyras. At the time, the art world was without funds. The 1980s money machine was up in smoke, and megagalleries were in the distant future. Everything was up in the air, out of sorts, homemade; it felt like everyone was starting over, looking for ways to exhibit and maybe sell work. Eisenman showed Minotaur Hunt and Penelope in the Pit. She portrayed a world of naked women killing men and an all-female pit crew servicing a pink race car. It was spectacular — and feels particularly resonant in this moment.

“There are no rules,” Eisenman has said. Whether this statement is meant to be celebratory or cautionary is unclear. Her most recent work feels like a cataclysmic staging of an artist alone in her studio while systems collapse and the country cracks up. Her art is both a private vision and an evocation of a public disaster. 

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