Plinth

Among the paintings, video work, a collage wall, comic strips and an array of sculptures currently on display in a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, all the works seem to ask, what if something bad has already happened?

With over three decades of materials on show, the earlier work from the 1990s is full of bodies, piled up, tied-up, mutilated, hung-up, or put to work in cramped nightmares equally reminiscent of Carolee Schneemann and Jeff Keen as well as Hieronmyous Bosch and Bruegel the Elder – the details crowded out by fleshy, violent movement. Constructed in an irreverent style that blends elements of collage and cartoons, there’s a visceral fascination with how pain is both intolerable and comic.

This preoccupation with misery continues in the large paintings that constitute most of the show’s middle and end (and all from this century), albeit explicit violence is supplanted by melancholia, with paintings like ‘Coping’ (2008) showing a host of sullen faces wading through water, while in the background drinkers commit to a wooden pub table as floods rush past their waists. These paintings are hellish conversation pieces in which it is not clear what one might be able to say about them.

The worlds from the mid-period of Eisenman’s work are expressionistic, showing places where humans and landscape are sites of egoic transference, aggressively extra-worldly in their dream-like delirium. In ‘The Triumph of Poverty’ (2009), a backwards-march of the downtrodden includes a top-hatted Monopoly capitalist with his buttocks on his frontside, walking with a parade of freaks surrounding a beaten up car. Where the man with his trousers down grapples with his flashlight, it is a painting that contends with the horror of moving into the darkness.

In ‘Beer Garden with AK’ (2009), the detail of a foregrounded face becomes a site of absolute absorption. Cheeks and chins stand out in bustling scenes where other faces are plated in the mise-en-scène like a cornucopia of absurd fruit, both glowing fresh and rotting at the same time.

Similarly, in ‘Sloppy Bar Room Kiss’ (2011), a horizontal drunken embrace between lovers commands the foreground. Behind their table lies an alienated social scene, where a male figure glows impossibly blue alongside two shadowy friends – the red-nosed puppet now afflicted with the curse of life, he turns to beers and friendship to tolerate his new affliction. In these paintings there is a monstrous luminescence of feelings that lingers in those who merely survive. Our eyes are drawn to the fullness of the foreground, where the use of colour often suggests that life is spotlighted. But life presses on at the back.

Across the 2010s, many of Eisenman’s paintings exhibited toward the end of the show take on two clear themes: the atomisation induced by technology, with a series of works depicting cartoonish, people with circular noses and eyes glued to their phones, and the threat of right-wing violence in the USA, figured through what the artist calls ‘Dark Light’.

Eisenman is still more direct in paintings like ‘Tea Party’ (2011), where a gaunt Uncle Sam watches a figure patiently rig a dynamite stick with a timing device. We know the clock is ticking. How do we learn about the threat of fascistic violence? Often by being glued to screens. I wondered if there was a way that the work could integrate these two elements.

While there are many shifts across Eisenman’s output from the last century and into this one, there are also contiguities. Her work puts forth that to be human is to be conditioned by your historical inheritance, to feel monstrously beside yourself. Or, much like my phone's feed, many of the paintings scream out: Something Bad Has Happened.

Barry Schwabsky has described Eisenman’s paintings as harbouring “Disgust with allegory.” It is refreshingly hard to say what each work is ‘about’. In fact, the work seems to guard against this. One can take Schwabsky’s line further and argue that the paintings are somewhat disgusted with recognition whatsoever, denying the reduction of their various elements into digestible propositions.

Attempting to join together the disparate elements of the work is like undertaking a moving puzzle where each tile contains a familiar picture or emblem, but no matter how much you slide each piece around, no organisation of meaning can be grasped from the images. Instead, we are left with bad feelings in the aftermath of bad events, staring at our phones or otherwise. Onward into the darkness we go.

By Ed Luker