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Nicole Eisenman is arguably one of the most respected American artists today. With her always-evolving practice, she has been able to deconstruct and reinvent her own style, opening up her process to its endless possibilities beyond any rule of market recognition and trends. Eisenman is known to be crude, uncanny, critical, sometimes inappropriate and deeply insightful, depending on how you want to contextualize her practice within the art historical canon—or just within an ever-evolving societal landscape similarly full of paradoxes.
Her recently unveiled installation Fixed Crane, commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, is the latest significant statement of her irreverence when it comes to interacting with traditional canons and genre and destabilizing, in this case, the canonic celebratory notion of sculpture in public spaces being akin to monuments. What the artist brought to Madison Square Park is, in fact, an actual decommissioned 1969 Link-Belt industrial crane, merely embellished with handmade sculptural elements. If a monument, this installation refers to human development and ambition for dominance on this planet through the continuous accumulation of new construction and can be seen as a critical element in addressing the inherent hubris and the consequences of this on the planet. As already explored in some of her previous monumental sculptures, the artist conceived this public commission in the context of interaction; people can walk around its 90-foot length or sit atop its counterweight, which Eisenman turned into a bench. The interactive element further challenges the traditional notion of monumentality, getting public sculptures closer to the ordinary lives of those who will encounter them in public spaces.
Although Eisenman was primarily recognized for her paintings for many years, it has now been almost a decade since she ventured into sculpture, and her three-dimensional works and installations have since become some of the most discussed in the art world. Her practice started to expand into tridimensionality during a 2012 residency at Studio Voltaire in London, which resulted in human-scaled plasterworks that then became the undisputed stars of the 2013 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh before evolving into Procession, which landed on the terrace at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In recent years, Eisenman has worked on several public installations, like her bronze bathers, Sketch for a Fountain, which found a home in Boston’s 401 Park complex in the Fenway neighborhood after being presented at Skulptur Projekte Münster. Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas acquired another version of the sculptural ensemble.
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This is also not the first time Eisenman has engaged with industrial cranes: a yellow, more sizable one was part of her recent survey at the MCA in Chicago, where her idea of “monumental sculpture” was a crane with a bronze cat head substituted for the wrecking ball. Notably, these works represent a further expansion and personal revisitation of her exploration of the notion of Readymades, reflected in the continuous process of appropriation of styles, themes and motifs that animate her practice as she freely predates from the entirety of art history.
In New York, Eisenman added a series of sculptural elements to the crane, including a flag-waving figure at the apex of the crane’s overturned cab, a bronze Birkenstock–wearing foot caught under the crane’s treads and bandages appended to the crane—all elements that emphasize how obsolete the apparatus is and how decadent a symbol of modern civilization it is now that the consequences of the uncontrolled urban development it allowed have been unveiled. At the same time, it still seems to suggest a desire to preserve this tool as a relic, or cultural memory, to which we are still attached.
“Our public art commissions often inspire new and sometimes provocative perspectives on the world around us,” Madison Square Park Conservancy executive director Holly Leicht said in a statement.“With this work, Eisenman creates a pointed dialogue and visual contrast with the skyscrapers rising near the park. It is a fitting conclusion to our public art program’s anniversary season, setting the tone for ambitious commissions in the years to come.”
Fixed Crane (which was realized with VIA Art Fund’s support, as noted in a recent Observer interview with art advisor Molly Epstein) marks the fourth and final artist commission in the twentieth anniversary year of the Conservancy’s art program, following a vibrant tulle-based installation by Ana María Hernando that opened in the park in January, the towering sculptural sentinels across two New York City parks by Rose B. Simpson unveiled in April and the two-part processional performance by María Magdalena Campos-Pons held last month.
Nicole Eisenman’s Fixed Crane will be on view at Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn through March 9.
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Elisa Carollo
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