Conservatively Restrained
Monday, May 02, 2016
I always look forward to the Friday NY Times. It has two
arts sections and one of them is dedicated mostly to the visual arts like
painting and sculpture. While I never had an arts education with my frequent
perusal of that arts section in the last 18 years (that we have been receiving
a daily delivered NY Times) I have to say that I have a pretty good arts
education based on my good memory and the good writing of the NY Times arts
staffers.
This particular Friday I was drawn to a an artist called
Nicole Eisenman. You can read the piece here. I was drawn to her statement in
the NY Times interview:
Ms. Eisenman, an
American who was born in Verdun, France, in 1965 and grew up in Westchester
County, is similarly ambitious in her refusal to cultivate a signature style.
Her refusal may also be more explicitly autobiographical; she is a lesbian who
said in a recent interview in The New York Times that she is “gender fluid,”
and that she uses the “she” pronoun. In neither art nor life is a single
identity desirable or even possible.
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| Nicole Eisenman’s “Morning Studio” (2016), at Anton Kern Gallery. |
I have seen her Morning Studio many times before. I find
that the painting is extremely erotic. It was most pleasant to find more info
on this woman artist.
In my own particular personal photography I have mostly been conservative. I have photographed a professional dominatrix friend of mine while telling her I understood nothing of what she did. Not too long ago I photographed another friend who posed in my studio’s psychiatric couch while wearing leather shackles. I told her that I did not understand the concept and that I felt sorry for her being in that immovable and restrained position. She laughed and told me that it the worst thing I could have told her.
