Nicole Eisenman’s painting “Tail End” (2021) is set within an arid land of melting time. Under hazy iron yellow skies a lanky figure trudges against viscous air. Their stony gray head is bowed low and their bulbous arms are captured mid swing. The walker is haloed by the outline of their shirt and pants, a shade of white similar to that of printer paper illuminated by fluorescent lighting. They hold a small black cat in front of them like a shield or totem. The cat reaches out, gaze steely, with claws extended. Two other figures flank the cat’s carrier, though all three exist seemingly in isolation. There is no contact between an ochre sleeper lying motionless in a tilted chair, a brassy smoker blowing cigarette smoke like strands of gray snot, or our cat person. The “tail” of the painting’s title might refer to the cat’s animated appendage, or it might be a play on the idea of coming to the “tail end” of something: a project, a person, a book, a city. Eisenman nudges the viewer into this post-apocalyptic landscape—think of the scene’s sparse desolation, the vaguely ill color palate, and the disconnection between the three human characters—and I begin to hear the 1987 R.E.M. song in which Michael Stipe’s nasally freewheeling voice sings “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”
It is fitting that “Tail End” is the cover image for Eileen Myles’ 2022 collection “Pathetic Literature.” “Pathetic” centers the idea, or better put, the possibility that something “pathetic” can be uncomfortably recognizable, something even valuable, rather than a source of contempt or pity. The idea of such shared vulnerability, in all its stupid, small, albeit powerful manifestations, finds a home in Eisenman’s colorful vigor, her righteous anger, her tenderness, and goofy cock-eyed humor. Eisenman is a painter for whom the world is both very large and very small. Her New York is one formed by globalization, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter, but simultaneously populated with lovers and friends; those chosen few with whom you share secrets, meals and forgotten sloppy kisses. In a 2016 Frieze profile of the artist, Myles wrote that when Eisenman paints, she has a way of seeing a person as “not just gender, but color (like blue or green), texture (maybe they’re snake skin haha) and like cartoon v. human. If she paints you, you don’t know if you’re gonna be a beautiful boy or a lumpy boulder.”
Eisenman’s predilection for the expansive, the possibility of a person possessing alien texture, supernatural color, engorged cartoon limbs, or dripping eyes and outsized features, lends itself to the immensity of the MCA’s “Nicole Eisenman: What Happened,” the first major survey of the artist’s career. With over one-hundred pieces of the artist’s work included in the show, from paintings to murals, sculptural installations to drawings, and a short film of collage and stop-motion animation, the exhibition is satisfyingly overstuffed with work in a way that befits the artist’s own eye for the cacophony of modern life.
I won’t be much of a critic by way of my assessment of “What Happened” because, simply, I like Eisenman’s work. I think she’s funny and I’m a sucker, crudely put, for BIG art. I say big not just to comment on scale and size, though her monumental paintings and immense installations scratch that itch, but rather to appreciate art that yells what it needs, what it wants, what it asks of you. I find…
This article was originally published by a art.newcity.com . Read the Original article here. .