Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Nicole Eisenman
16
Floor 6 Terrace
Born 1965 in Verdun, France
Lives in Brooklyn, NY
The figures in Nicole Eisenman’s sculptural ensemble Procession appear downtrodden, yet they carry on and move forward. For the artist this tension poses questions about what it looks like to be disenfranchised, but also part of a community, and about how to protest when protests feel like a constant cycle. Eisenman often combines traditional materials such as bronze and plaster with foam, sneakers, clothing, fog machines, and fountains that hint at bodily realities that sculpture has traditionally worked to transcend. Ultimately Eisenman seeks to pull the viewer into her mirrored view of the world, which she has created as a means of carefully examining our own.
Procession also features a live video feed of the Museum’s eighth-floor gallery where Gamma Delta (1959–60) by Morris Louis is on view as part of the exhibition Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s. The video presents a thermal mapping of the gallery overlaid with an animation. Museums and art institutions have often been characterized as secular temples dedicated to the vision of the historically male “genius.” In the video feed Eisenman subverts the sanctity of that space and questions the cultural framework that has been built up around such places.
Procession, 2019
Installation view of the Whitney Biennial 2019 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 17-September 22, 2019). Nicole Eisenman, Procession, 2019. Courtesy of the artist, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Photograph by Object Studies
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Narrator: This sculptural installation by Nicole Eisenman was conceived for the Whitney’s sixth floor terrace.
Jane Panetta: So for this work, Eisenman was really interested in using the sixth floor terrace specifically. She looked at different spaces in the building and I think was really excited about the possibility of making a sculptural tableau that would have the city as the backdrop, that that would be a powerful place to present this strange procession of figures.
Narrator: Biennial co-curator Jane Panetta.
Jane Panetta: One thing I really like about this work is the complicated tone of it as an installation. Nicole has always been interested in humor, and how she can use humor to get at more significant messages or more significant images. And I think in this work in particular there’s a real conflation of the kind of difficulty, struggly moment that we’re in in many ways, but also inflecting that with playful elements. And I think for her that’s both how she sees life and sees the world, but is also a way to really bring viewers into the space of the work.
For Eisenman, I think it was also really important that the work contained figures both in bronze and plaster. Of course bronze sculpture is related to a long history of sculpture and classical sculpture specifically. And I think by including materials like plaster, more ephemeral materials in the tableau, she’s playing with and complicating this history of sculpture very deliberately.