BAD BOY IN TOWN
Fischl on art and timing
Eric Fischl wrote in his biography, Bad Boy, that as a young artist in the 1970s he realized that “only through painting could I unlock my feelings and show me to myself.” Many years later he tried to help Americans with their own introspection by creating a 9/11-themed sculpture, Tumbling Woman. “I had a clear feeling that if ever the country needed its artists, now was the time,” he wrote in the 2013 biography.
The country, he discovered, felt otherwise.
“All hell broke loose” when the bronze sculpture was installed in Rockefeller Center in 2002. Some pedestrians were horrified by the work, which was modelled after victims who had so terribly, indelibly fallen from the burning towers. The New York Post accused Fischl of exploiting the pain of others. There was a bomb threat. The sculpture was removed from public view.
Thirteen years later, over the phone from his studio in Sag Harbor, Long Island, Fischl cites the lessons he learned.
“One is that timing is everything,” he says. “I should have warned people that they were going to see this in some way, so they didn’t just come on to it unexpectedly. It was apparently too painful, too shocking.”
But “more importantly,” he says, the experience reaffirmed his belief that “we’ve gotten so far away from the body, and our ability to understand life though our physicality, which includes pain and torment, aging and illness and death and all those other things that terrify us so much, that we’re in a profound state of denial.”
That denial was reflected in Tumbling Woman, he says. Though 3,000 people died on 9/11 “there were no bodies because they were pulverized,” so the public grieving focused on the “loss of architecture, rather than the loss of 3,000 lives, and became very abstract very quickly. It was all about architecture, it was about saving the footprint of the building as sacred ground. It didn’t help us to understand how we were dealing with the feelings of vulnerability that we were having as humans, as physical beings.”
Fischl has since made versions of Tumbling Woman in other sizes and media. A casting in acrylic resin is at the National Gallery of Canada to Sept. 14, then at the United States embassy to Oct. 23. Fischl will be at the gallery Sept. 10 as part of the Contemporary Conversations series, organized with the U.S. State Department and Vicki Heyman, wife of U. S. ambassador Bruce Heyman.
Seats at the free event were snapped up by those eager to hear and see Fischl, who rose to prominence, firstly as a painter, in New York’s burgeoning art scene in the 1980s. Now, at age 67 and a critical and commercial success, he still laments how “art is so disconnected from our daily lives.”
His revelation about unlocking his own feelings through art came in the mid-’70s, when he moved to Canada to teach at the Nova Scotia Collage of Art and Design. They were “crucial” years that “moved me into figuration and storytelling, and that became my ultimate métier.”
In Halifax he dug into his own “complicated, emotionally difficult past,” having grown up in a home that “was frightening and tumultuous and violent.” He wrote in his book, “My mother’s alcoholism was my first experience with the unspeakable. Her suicide was the second.”
Soon he was creating discomfiting paintings like 1981’s Bad Boy, with an adolescent rifling a purse while standing over an adult woman who lies spread-eagled, and oblivious, on a bed. In 1982 he made The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog, which seems to be a modern, perhaps sardonic take on Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, with inspiration from David Hockney, Winslow Homer and Canada’s Alex Colville.
The works are powered by a psycho-sexual tension or frisson, and by the dark undercurrents of suburbia’s putative paradise — “the messy, ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions, and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of a prim suburban lives.”
Director Marc Mayer recently noted in the National Gallery’s online magazine how Fischl’s paintings can make him “uncomfortable” and are “deliberately awkward,” and suggested Fischl seeks meaning before beauty, which is “not the typical approach for painters.”
Fischl, arguably, is also atypical in striving for accessibility in a contemporary art world that’s too often fond of impenetrability.
“My whole career I’ve been trying to make paintings that people can relate to, respond to emotionally — not stand in front of scratching their heads,” he wrote. Contemporary art “failed” the public when it “stopped addressing the ordinary lives of people, the rites and passages of birth, puberty, marriage and death. And when it did try to explore those themes, its iconography was often so subtle, so convoluted or individual and eccentric, that no one besides the artist and maybe a few acolytes had any idea what they were looking at.”