Pity there is no picture. It sounds pretty
interesting.
>>> [log in to unmask] 10/31/02
01:36am >>>
This article from NYTimes.com, published in last
Sunday's New York Times
Magazine section
Post-9/11
Modernism
Questions for Eric Fischl
October 27, 2002
Interview
by DAVID RAKOFF
Q Your sculpture commemorating Sept.
11, ''Tumbling
Woman,'' was recently removed from Rockefeller Center.
Is
that the largest controversy you've been through? Certainly
the Arthur
Ashe statue at Flushing Meadows freaked out some
people.
I guess it
would be the highest profile. With the Ashe
statue, the criticism seemed to
come from very
literal-minded people who would say things like,
''We've
never seen a nude tennis player'' or ''Where's the
tennis
racket?'' I think I'm most hurt by this one.
Q But isn't a
certain amount of controversy what an artist
hopes for?
I just feel
like it would be cynical of me to appreciate
the controversy, because it
wasn't controversy I was
looking for.
Q You're not a provocateur in
that way?
No. I actually have done paintings in the past, back in
the
early 80's, that came out of profound anger and confusion.
The
sensational aspect was intentional. But that was a long
time ago by a young
artist.
Q Where did that guy go?
He went into an adult world more
complicated and subtle and
more fascinating, and whatever. I wasn't trying to
make a
universal monument to sum up the entire experience of 9/11.
The
kind of response that I was wanting to get was one in
which people would
allow me to share in the experience, the
holding up, the sitting with -- so
of course the response
of ''Get this out of here, you can't feel this'' or
''You
can't make us feel this way'' was incredibly hurtful.
Q Maybe
the problem is that some have interpreted this body
twisting in freefall as a
piece of grim, plastic
photojournalism.
One might see a moment of
impact in a kind of way that
implies brains splattering, a graphic moment
there. The
thing is that if you look at the piece itself, it feels
like a
dream in which somebody is floating. There's no
weight there that is sending
this crushing, rippling
current back through the body as it hits a solid
mass. It
feels more like a tumbleweed, even though it's a
massive
sculpture. So somebody else looking at it might say, ''God,
it
reminds me of falling in a dream right before I wake
up.'' Both of those are
probably correct.
Q Has your art now turned to other current
events?
No. It's
actually gone back to sort of smaller, more
confined
spaces. I've been working on the relationship between men
and
women, intimacy, privacy, boundaries, all of those
issues.
Q Given the
outcry, would you have done things differently?
I wouldn't have made
the sculpture differently at all. I
even regret caving in to Rockefeller
Center so fast and
saying:
''Yeah, take it away. I don't want to hurt
anybody.'' I'm
sorry I didn't raise a stink over it. I hate this idea
that
there are some people who have a right to express their
suffering and
others who don't, that there are those in
this hierarchy of pain who own it
more than you do. It's
not about necessarily witnessing firsthand that makes
the
experience. Picasso wasn't at Guernica when it happened;
Goya wasn't
there on the firing line. This is what a
culture looks to art for, to put
image, or voice, or
context to a way of rethinking, reseeing,
re-experiencing.
Q When ''Guernica'' was first exhibited, I don't
think
people felt Picasso wasn't entitled to paint it.
Yeah, I think
this is a new turn, for the worse. Right now
we're shrinking away from truth.
No one can criticize the
president because we're in a very vulnerable time,
even
though he's doing some things that are terrifying. You
can't express
your personal horror and trauma at something
that we all experienced. I think
what happened is that
since the 60's there's been an ambition that art
merge
itself with pop culture. At first it was an ironic stance,
and then
it became actually a real thing; people wanted to
have art as a playground
and as entertainment. And that's
fine in good times, but when something
terrible or powerful
or meaningful happens, you want an art that speaks to
that,
that embraces the language that would carry us forward,
bring us
together, all of that stuff. I think that 9/11
showed us that as an art world
we weren't quite qualified
to deal with this. Not trained enough to handle
it.
Q That's some fairly grim training we're facing,
then.
It's
a terrible way to have to be trained, it's true, but
the
way the art world has been training younger and younger
artists is in
ideological gamesmanship, and there's been a
lack of training in history and
in techniques that one
could apply in rendering the human form, for example.
A lot
of the young kids are sort of fabulous at drawing cartoons.
But a
cartoon's going to be pretty hard to express a lot of
the experience of the
last year. People have told me I
should stop talking about this, just let it
die down. But I
can't stand idly by.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/magazine/27QUESTIONS.html?ex=1036746186&ei=1&en=0c5bf0de842de730
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