Nicole Eisenman hates talking about her work. She asked for a list of questions in advance, but has decided they’re too laden with -isms, so perhaps it would be better just to go for a chat. “When I’m in the studio painting,” she says, “I don’t think about any -isms. I have my own problems, like how to make a painting look good, how to organise the paint, how to organise shapes. It’s not about grappling with large ideas.”
We’re at Nottingham Contemporary, where Eisenman is co-curating a group show. Just opened, it’s called Ridykeulous: Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos – and it’s as much of a blast as its name suggests. But I’ve come to interview the artist about something even more monumental: her career retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, which is opening this week.
What Happened covers a momentous 30 years, going from jokey lesbian subversions of cartoons (in one, Wilma and Betty from The Flintstones get it on) to self-portraits, political paintings and public statues. So impressive is her output that, eight years ago, the French-born American was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for restoring “cultural significance to the representation of the human form”.
It’s a mighty citation, but when it comes to talking about this “significance”, Eisenman is all at sea, much like the self-portrait she made back in 2006, in which she is hunched at her sketchbook, with pictures flying all around, on an exploding houseboat chugging towards a land of insurgent women patrolled by flying burgers and packs of hunting dogs.
Crop-haired and clad in khaki cargo pants and trainers, Eisenman looks far younger than her 58 years. “You know,” she says, “it’s hard to make an interesting painting. And it never never stops being a challenge. So I’m not in the studio looking at big problems in the world. The subject matter filters through your unconscious. If you’re lucky, you get a good idea. It’s more like fishing – for ideas that sometimes come in a flash of so-called inspiration.”
Eisenman, having been followed around for decades by what she sees as misrepresentations, is today keen to set the record straight. So we agree to address the pictures in the catalogue for the London show. But this raises another problem. It organises her work into phases that she rejects: riotous early drawings, a mid-career retreat into a portraiture of self-doubt (with titles like From Success to Obscurity), then an explosion into the commanding oil paintings and sculptures of the Genius award winner.
She bristles at the suggestion that her early art was provocatively transgressive. “I feel like it’s like an accusation of hyper-sexuality and the broader idea can get lost.” The catalogue falls open at a 1996 picture titled Jesus Fucking Christ, which features one bearded Messiah doing exactly that to another. “OK, so that seems pornographic, I suppose, but it’s also not pornographic. It’s sexual but it’s not titillating. It’s the opposite of porn. I tend to make sex look awkward, dumb and abject.”
Another striking ink drawing from the same year, called Alice in Wonderland, shows Lewis Carroll’s heroine with her head inside Wonder Woman’s vagina. “Would anyone really be offended?” she asks. “I mean, there’s a lot of very offensive things going on in the world. And I don’t think that any painting, and especially that one, compares to what goes on if you read the front page of the Guardian.”
Eisenman spent much of the 1990s addicted to heroin. “You know,” she says, “I had a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that lifestyle. I was very productive. I never stopped. It got a little messy towards the end and I had to figure out how to manage it. Then eventually, of course, I had to stop. But it wasn’t like this hard break. I would say it was a slow shifting from one lifestyle to another. We’re talking years of adjusting my thinking and reassessing what I wanted out of my work, which was to put the focus more on painting and less on murals, installations and scatter-art wall drawings. I wanted to figure out how to get that energy into oil paint. And that became a project I’m still working on.”
She made her London debut in 1993 with a mural for a group show at the ICA called Paloma’s Minotaure, in which an army of naked women have strung up a minotaur and speared its groin, from which yellow blood spurts out into perfume bottles. Paloma Picasso, daughter of Pablo, had recently released a cologne for men called Minotaure. “It’s about overcoming the patriarchy,” says Eisenman with a laugh. “But it is also a personal story of a woman who’s a creative force in the world, having Picasso as a father. How do you deal with that? How do any of us deal with our fathers?”
It’s a question that echoes through the retrospective: Eisenman’s work is full of allusions to the old masters of European art. Take Sluts, her 1993 defacement of the famous nipple-tweaking sisters in Gabrielle d’Estrées et Une de Ses Soeurs, by an unknown painter. Her tweaker’s chest has “SLUT” daubed across it in red. Meanwhile, in 2009’s The Triumph of Poverty, a gaggle of Breughel peasants troop along the bottom of an otherwise modern satirical oil painting indicting capitalism. Behind these is Eisenman’s relationship with her own father, a Freudian psychoanalyst, who was so outraged when he discovered a gay love letter addressed to his student daughter that she had to escape to Rome for a year, thereby igniting a lasting love affair with Renaissance art.
She makes light of her parents’ reaction today, pointing to a painting from 2008 of people wading around a town waist-deep in mud. She made this a year after the birth of the first of her two children, “when the recession was happening and there was this feeling of the whole culture slowing down and people really having to slog through”.
At its centre, there’s a tiny tableau of an androgynous figure cradling a baby and being given directions by an old man. “It’s my father showing me the way,” she says. “I was reared in psychoanalysis and I love taking paintings apart from a psychoanalytic point of view. So I could probably find a story in here that’s very personal about where I was. I think that’s true of all of my work. But the viewer does not need to have that reading.”
Although based in Brooklyn, Eisenman has spent a lot of time in Germany, where she made her first big public sculpture six years ago in a park in Münster. Sketch for a Fountain consists of five figures, lounging around a pond. One is lying on their back holding a beer can on their belly, from which water spurts. It is tender and funny, the supine figures – two in bronze and three in perishable plaster – mocking the stuffed-shirt statuary of so many public monuments. “People who get exalted in public sculpture are the so-called heroes of a particularly white colonialist patriarchal worldview. We don’t all exalt the same people. So these are very ordinary figures but also they’re trans bodies, they’re an answer to the patriarchy.”
The choice of location – a park known for gay cruising – was carefully made after hours scouting out the city by bike. “I had some concerns about how those bodies would be treated, because whenever you put a body out in a public space, you’re exposing it to potential acts of violence. There were some small incidents.” Well, small-ish: one had a swastika daubed on it and another was decapitated. “But,” she goes on, “nothing that undid the overall positivity of the response. You know, I would never do that in New York or in London: they’d get wrecked in a second.” A crowdfunding drive enabled the statues to stay in perpetuity, with the plaster figures recast in aluminium.
“It informed me how to think about public works, how to very carefully contextualise who’s living around them, passing by them every day. How to attend to the social ergonomics of the sculpture and not just plop things down. I think a lot of municipalities have these budgets to do public works, and they’ll pick some artist and say, here’s the location, put your bauble on this plinth, and it becomes a sort of jewellery: clip-on earrings you can pop on and off.”
There is a humour in Eisenman’s work that often plays out in our relationship with technology: people are plugged into phones, laptops and PlayStations as well as into each other. “I don’t know,” she says. “I may have lost my sense of humour along the way. There’s something about the speed at which jokes happen. They’re really valuable. It’s not that everything I do is devoid of humour, but I was interested in changing speeds a little.”
As for the technology, that is another misconception. “These paintings aren’t about technology. They’re not about the screens. I’m interested in how people connect and how bodies show that connection. You know, they’re about romance. Now there’s a subject I’m interested in. Romance.”
Our time is up. Rising to her feet, Eisenman unexpectedly flips open the catalogue, whisks out a Biro and scrawls, “Thank you for the chat” – to which I can only reply that it was fun.
• Ridykeulous is at Nottingham Contemporary until 7 January. Nicole Eisenman: What Happened is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from Wednesday until 14 January.
