This piece initially appeared in Reframed, the Artwork in America publication about artwork that surprises us and works that get us labored up. Join right here to obtain it each Thursday.
Nicole Eisenman’s portray Seder (2010) options objects acquainted to anybody has celebrated Passover: a shank bone, lettuce leaf, and boiled egg, all assembled on a Seder plate; an open horseradish container, its contents expectantly awaiting consumption on Hillel sandwiches; and open Haggadahs, their pages wilted from years of use. Within the foreground, bulbous pink palms break a chunk of matzah in two, a reference to the second when one half is put aside for the afikoman. We’re invited to view this Seder by the matzah breaker’s eyes, with Eisenman channeling a particularly Jewish perspective on the scene.
What wouldn’t it imply to see not simply this one portray however Eisenman’s complete oeuvre by the lens of her Jewishness? That’s a wealthy query posed by curator Mark Godfrey within the catalog for Eisenman’s retrospective on the Museum of Modern Artwork Chicago, which has arrived stateside after a run in Europe.
Prior surveys much like this one have proven that Eisenman’s queerness and gender are inseparable from her artwork—one thing that may be seen in Seder, the place, on the Seder plate, one can spot an orange, an untraditional image for ladies and members of the queer group who’ve traditionally been sidelined throughout the Jewish group. However her Judaism has largely been unconsidered, and that makes this present vital. I got here out of it considering that Eisenman is without doubt one of the nice Jewish artists working as we speak.
Eisenman’s Jewish perspective is most blatant in her work of the ’90s, which approaches spiritual materials in a method that may solely be referred to as sacrilegious. Take her 1999 drawing Jesus Will You Shut Up, which depicts a man on the wheel of a automotive being hounded by one other driver attempting to hurry by. The titular phrase, generally uttered within the face of an individual who received’t cease honking, is right here made literal, with a mopey-looking, crucified Jesus close by. “OH SORRY,” Christ says within the drawing, to which the motive force responds, “NOT YOU, YA IDIOT”—a dismissive comment that hardly acknowledges Jesus’s presence. (Sadly not included within the MCA exhibition is Eisenman’s 1996 drawing Jesus Fucking Christ, which depicts precisely what its title implies.)
Work of Jesus Christ over the centuries are usually meant to encourage deference and piousness, whereas Eisenman sees the topic in decidedly profane methods. In Lemonade Stand(1994), clusters of figures come collectively to piss into jugs and promote their urine to unsuspecting passersby. Mannerist painters like Tintoretto painted comparable plenty assembled to witness crucifixions and baptisms. Had been he alive to face earlier than Eisenman’s Lemonade Stand, Tintoretto would most likely be scandalized.
In subverting the Christian-centric Western canon, Eisenman affords a Jewish standpoint that might by no means have made it into the creative document of, say, Tintoretto’s Sixteenth-century Italy. And although the canon has been opened to individuals who could have as soon as been seen as outsiders, Eisenman stays intently attuned to artwork historical past as an exclusionary drive.
The Chicago present marks the debut of The Guests (2024), a portray wherein a bunch of gallery-goers admires artwork that vaguely remembers Eisenman’s, together with a canvas displaying a girl masturbating. Everybody appears oblivious to the trench-coated males on the gallery’s door, who had been lifted by Eisenman from {a photograph} of “Degenerate Artwork,” the Nazi-organized 1937 exhibition that sought to strike down modernist artwork that evinced a “perverse Jewish spirit.” Eisenman’s ancestors departed Vienna through the ’30s because the Nazis rose to energy, and the artist has stated, in an interview quoted within the catalog, that she considers it her “job” to “course of the disappointment of my household.”
In The Guests Eisenman reveals that oppression nonetheless exists and that there are folks on the market who search to disclaim queer and Jewish views like her personal. However the portray is hardly meant to encourage terror. On the backside of the canvas, a determine in a maroon sweater—somebody who appears like Eisenman herself—reaches a hand into the pocket of a person who seems to be a patron and pulls out his pockets, on the brink of take the cash and run. As standard, she will get the final giggle.