NICOLEEISENMAN INCONVER

SATION WITHLYNNETILLMAN

I. Amy Sillman, "How to Look atNicole Eisenman," Mathieu Victor(ed.), Nicole Eisenman, SelectedWorks: 1994-2004, Leo Koenig Inc"New York 2006, p. 8.

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IT What were you looking for, when you decidedto be an artist?NE I recognized early on that creating other worldswas transporting and magical. I remember fingerpainting in nursery school and accidentally makinga shape that looked exactly like a mountain witha road wrapping around it, like in the Road RunnerCartoons. It's one of my oldest memories, I wasso excited to have used my hands to make somethingthat looked so real. I continue trying to recapturethat feeling, the "ah-ha moment" in painting whenyou create something that convincingly takes youinto another world. As I got older, I found I could stillescape from reality through drawing and painting.LT You went to Rhode Island School of Design. Whathelped yon most in art school? What hindered you?NE I learned how to design pictures in a formalistway, I guess that helped. I spent a year abroadin Italy and was turned on to Italian Renaissance artand Italian Gothic art, which was hugely influential,but it was also a hindrance. Eventually I had tounlearn the classical stuff to push forward with mywork. The best aspect of college was that I got intothe hardcore punk scene. I was a champion ofviolence; i~was a real male·dominated scene in the1980s and I loved it. I put my frustration, my energythere, and also started looking at and making comics.LT You're such a modern character, with a contempo-rary take on the world. It's fascinating that you decidedto be a painter, not a photographer, filmmaker, instal-lation artist.NE I recently began to think of myself as a painter.In the past I was more inclined to mix up my practicewith video or sculpture, although now none of thatseems particularly modern.LT What was it about the Italian Renaissance andGothic art that compelled you?NE The paint is crisp, and there's a theatricality thatwas appealing. It's linear and somewhat flat. Oftenthere is a tableau of characters acting out a narrative.But there is more going on than just a story beingtold. I'm thinking of Matthias Griinewald-everydetail, a leaf or a hair, has agency, and the paintingbecomes animated in surreal ways.LT In a catalogue essay, painter Amy Sillman wroteabout your relationship to earlier painting: "Maybepart of Nicole Eisenman's fascination with old paintingis exactly its collapse."! You moved into an area thatexcited you, because it had been evacuated.NE Like a ruin.LT You could, with your imagination, take that ruinand reanimate it.

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NE I'm like a developer building high·rise condoson the ruins of art history. (Laughter) I love what Amysaid there. I take painting lessons from history, but Ialso enjoy using familiar tropes to make breaks fromtradition. The techniques various artists have usedover the past BOO years are memos to self that thereare many ways to handle the material) but ultimatelyit's about making a picture, which reflects my life,my unconscious or conscious desires.LT Your work refers to kitsch, porn, comics, MarsdenHartley, German Expressionism. Your world-yourart-is an image bank.NE It's all of that stuff, art history is alive to me,it pulls me around in different directions. I feel theImpressionists tugging at my arm and Francis Picabiayanking at my ankle. There's so much compellingart. I'm won over easily, so for me, defining a singleartistic style is difficult or impossible and justplain boring. It's like branding, which is a stylisticimperative that you follow through over and over;it's a kind of trap when artists feel obliged to definethemselves, especially for a market. I appreciateartists that can move fluidly from one medium andstyle to another.LT In writing, everything you've ever read goes intowhat you write, it's part of the way you think, and whatyou've looked at becomes the way you paint and addsmore layers and levels of meaning.NE That's true. This cumulative experience becomesa memory helix with Gordian knots of art historybraided into it.LT As a novelist, I like to work in different styles.Different stories need different voices.NE That reminds me of the original fantasy game.When you're a child, you are the Barbie doll, the GIJoe, and the horse they ride off on. You can be threecharacters at once. Painting is like this game butmessier. When Winslow Homer painted Undertow(1886), he had to understand the struggle of the mansaving the women, the power of the woman clutch-ing at the other woman and the force of the waveworking against them all. He inhabited every forcein the painting.LT You give your characters an ability to be all sexesand genders, which is similar to your not limitingyourself to one style.NE There it is, you've hit the nail on the head rightthere. It's all fluid. I've come to resent definitionsand restrictions. Just the word gender makesme tired. I grew up with brothers and hung out withthem, I didn't feel especially different. I was disap-pointed in the 1990s, when, as an artist having

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shows for the first time, I was forced to talk aboutissues of gender. To have to define yourself like thatwas miserable, I felt like I was being shackled.LT You're turned into a "woman artist," "woman. "wnter.

NE It's that loss of innocence when you go from beingwho you are, Lynne Tillman the person with endlesspotential, to being the woman Lynne Tillman, whohas to deal with sexualized representations of herselfand all the ensuing stereotypes. In the 1990s I wasreacting to the world and unconsciously shootingfrom the hip. Some of the images were about gender,many were not. Sometimes my work dealt with issuessurrounding the visual similarity between bundtcakes and sphincters; however, the conversationswere never about cake. It's the writers and criticswho frame the discourse.LT In your work, I see movement from freedom toconstraint. A female figure who's bound, a male tiedup. In portraits, pathetic-looking characters seem ruledby their emotions and their circumstance. Sometimesthere's a riot of dancing forms, an explosion oferoticism.NE The power of the crowd is the offer to let indi-viduals dissolve into it. Elias Canetti talked aboutthe moment when the individual gets rid of hisdifference; that he then joins the crowd. It soundswonderful or like a nightmare. In drawings witha lot of people, the crowd becomes a block, a worldunto itself. They might be pictures of humanitycoexisting in a kind of sexualized tumult.LT 10 Swimmers in the Lap Lane (I995), a number. of figures are in sexual poses.NE It's a sexy painting.LT You painted the lanes in red. The motion of thepainting is quite vertical, it's on a diagonal.NE In formal terms, there's no real space created;there's only a signifier of deep space. Wheneveryou have a diagonal in a picture, it creates space,but actually it's very upright. The figures are almoststanding up.LT Icould see this on tbe ceiling of the Sistine Cbapel:one of the figures, lying supine, as if a dying Christ,and, at the same time, because of the colors, there'sa cartoon-like quality.NE The figures in the pool defy gravity. I like theSistine Chapel ceiling comparison, that paintingcompletely defies gravity, it's the same feeling whenyou're swimming. I used to be a lifeguard at a poolwhen I was a closeted teenager, it was a site ofmU~h fanta~izing, which is also a way to defy gravity.SWimmers In the Lap Lane was an important

painting to me, it took me a long time to figure outwhat I did right with it.LT Your colors, oranges, reds, blues, belie the anxietyin your paintings, like Tennis Ball (2006). A big orangetennis ball, thickly painted, is about to land on a face.NE According to Homeland Security, orange is thecolor of high alert, of danger.LT Tennis isn't violent or dangerous.NE The hyped up aggression of the ball is a joke ofcourse, but on the other hand, I play tennis with mybrother on occasion, it's scary to be on the receivingend of his serve. I get tense watching tennis andcompetitive playing it. When I play, I'm center courtat Wimbledon, thousands of people watching me,not to mention the TV cameras.LT Tbe orange ball coming is '.'NE Anxiety, of course.LT You mostly have figures in your work. You mentioned"characters" before. Are they characters in a movie?NE I like the Jungian idea that they are aspectsof me, I inhabit them, they inhabit me, they livecrowded together inside my head, it's a big crazypajama party in there. Part of my process is thebusiness of discovering them. Like From Successto Obscurify (2004), he's always right there, tailingme. I spent time in the country in 2002-2003,gardening and shoveling snow mostly. I was thinkingabout ageing, leaving New York, about obscurity,about death. Those ideas were with me constantly.It was the beginning of a prolonged eight-year-Iongmidlife crisis. Painting those fears as abject char-acters was a way of grappling with them, makingfun of it all. Eventually I reapproached painting withnew feelings about what I wanted to do.LT Wbat cbanged?NE I wanted the paint to become more active andnot take a back seat to the image. I wanted sensuouspaint. I was bored by being in such·tight control of it.LT Abjection hovers in some of your portraits andpaintings of small groups, like Dysfunctional Family(2000). Tbe fatber holds a pballus-like bong in bismouth, the mother is sexualized, her legs spread open.NE She's knitting, doing her lady work. The baby'sgot a meat tenderizer, he just finished poundinghimself out. It's the family romance, but all thetwisted, emotional material has bubbled to thesurface. Whenever there is repressed trauma on anylevel-basic Freudian stuff, right-it emerges some-where else. In this, itJs not bubbling up somewhereelse, it's just there. They're actually not dysfunc-tional; they are at peace with each other's neuroticbehavior.

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IT The painting mixes fantasy with a sort of naturalism.The bloody genitals obscure whether it's a boyar a girl.NE It's a boy, as I see it, who has pounded his dickwith a cleaver.LT In The Work of Labor and Care (2004), two menin gray are looking down at a mound of shit.NE They're forming it, plying it with their hands. Iwas thinking about when you don't have inspiration,all you have left is labor and care. I once was in aclass at a graduate school and heard a teacher tell astudent, "If you just keep doing it, keep insisting onit, eventually it'll be good." The notion that you don'tneed an idea, but just have to keep pounding away,working, and eventually it might become something,is suspect. So, you could have labor and care, butwithout inspiration, and all you end up with is apile of shit, like in the painting. It would be a vapidobject of pure aesthetics.LT Do you always have stories in mind when you makea painting?NE Less and less so.LT Ten years ago, you were working much more withnarrative, weren't you?NE Yes, I've loosened the reins on my approach topainting; however, there always has to be an image,a symbol of something real or imagined, otherwiseart consumes itself in a self-referential abstract orgyand becomes too obtuse and disconnected from life.LT Depicting aggressive females entails a new approachto painting the female form.NE Those images are also mostly ironic inversionsof the relationships we're used to seeing in painting;dominant men, submissive women.LT I wanted to ask you about Hanging Birth (1994),about representing the mother.NE A woman is giving birth while she's hanging.LT Presumably dying.NE I'm amazed now that I was able to make thatpainting in 1994, knowing nothing then aboutmotherhood. She's hanging, giving birth, everyoneis watching. It's a tough painting.LT Do you think everyone is complicit in a mother'ssacrifice?NE Maybe it's out with the old and in with the new.Society's complicit, which has something to dowith toddlers being so damn cute. The mother givesup almost everything for the child, at least initially.It's astounding to witness.LT Because now you are a parent.NE I have a new very sweet but needy six-week oldbaby girl named George, who demands absoluteattention all the time. She is literally sucking the

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energy from my partner, who is breast-feeding her.It's a sacrifice, we're both exhausted all the time.LT In Batcave (2000), there is a profusion of facesupside-down, with a horrifying effect. It throws theviewer off.NE Upside-down faces lose their identity. Theybecome stamps of color.LT People give so much importance to the face.NE Our primitive brain is wired to see them every-where for our own protection. The wonderful partis that we see them even where they don't exist.LT You de-familiarized them, also by hanging the facesin the dark, like a bat cave.NE They are sinister yet a bit dopey.LT In Golddiggers (2002), you applied the paint differ-ently again. It's so different from Tennis Ball.NE They are much different paintings made almostten years apart. Tennis Sal/works collage into thepainting, which relates the painting back to drawing.I'm thinking all the time about using the same strat-egies in painting that I do in drawing. Applying paintis like any language; communication in life varies,we talk in colloquialisms, we talk formally, we talkand act appropriately or inappropriately. This shouldbe true in painting as well. Not every picture is ahaiku; some paintings are big, messy tone poems,with an accompanying interpretive dance. These aretwo paintings that represent the end and beginningof a change. Around the time Imade GolddiggersI also made made Hunnenschlacht (2001), which wasa difficult painting to make. Painting had becomeextremely un-fun, I felt too constricted to continuein this vein.LT Why was it constricted?NE I was paying attention to a certain set of paintingconventions, basically using the Italian model Ilearned as a student. The paintings were fairly tight,my brushes were small and soft, my process hadbecome a bit repetitive. That was around 2002;I stopped painting for a while, but I returned to it,with a willingness to draw and sculpt with paint.LT InMountain Man (2006) the forms look freer, looser.NE The paint means something there.LT Mountain Man has a big, thick, red nose.NE It's not really a nose; it's an unruly glop of paintwhere something that should be painted to looklike a nose might be.LT What about your recent portrait, Hamlet (2007).Why him?NE Hamlet is a great role model, a superhero for2007, and a literary character who is thoughtfulnessincarnated.

LT He's not an action figure.NE He's the anti·action figure. It's part of a series ofpaintings of role models. In Ketchup Mustard War(2005) there's a referee for a battle of colors. Giventhe scale of this painting, he'd be a giant as-foot-tallreferee walking cross the earth saying "time out"to everyone. That would be helpful.LT What about painting women as heroes?NE I've done that already. In any case, Hamlet goesback to my ideal of a genderless state. He's feminizedbecause he's thoughtful.LT What you're saying makes me think about thepeculiar position we women artists and writers are in.NE It's a complicated or maybe just a crap position;since we are "burdened" with female bodies, wehave to deal with representing ourselves within thehistory of female objectification. We need to havean ironic and critical view of the body to turn main-stream traditional narratives on their heads.LT Your irony and candor shake things up, and youmake all kinds of bodies. They challenge a viewer'sperceptions and limits.NE Determining what constitutes a body in art is wideopen. Art doesn't eat and excrete and isn't restrictedby needs like a glandular system or kidneys. In art,a mattress with two melons is a perfectly acceptablebody. But unlike the human body, which is a con-tainer for an idea, a spirit, the art body is the ideaincarnate. There is no separation, form is substance.

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