Nicole Eisenman: “Tonight We Are Going Out And We Are All Getting Hammered” @ RISD Museum
What would happen if some important contemporary artist were to choose an exhibition from our reserves? If the only organizing principle would be whether or not he liked whatever he saw? Would the result be different from having a storage show chosen by a curator? Or by anyone?
— Jean de Menil
Jean de Menil posed these questions to Daniel Robbins in 1969, the then-director of the RISD Museum of Art, after a tour of the basement in which the vast majority of the collection was stored — much of it torn, broken, and uncatalogued. [1] Soon after their discussion, the RISD Museum (located in Providence, Rhode Island) invited Andy Warhol to curate his own show using artworks from the basement. The resulting exhibition, “Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol” (April 23 - June 30, 1970), embarrassed the RISD Museum more than the hidden objects Warhol took from storage, which included miscellaneous shreds of rubber, torn umbrellas, stacks of former catalogues, rows of broken wooden chairs, and an unusably warped table. Whatever caught Warhol’s eye as he toured the basement was installed in the galleries exactly as he found it. He saw the metal screens on which multiple paintings were stored, and the sandbags that held them in place, and said: “I’ll take those, just like that.” Andy Warhol’s only organizing principle in “Raid The Icebox I” was pointing at the things he liked. He was a collector, a shopaholic, and a hoarder, but he refused to be a curator. For curators, it wasn’t enough to just like that: putting an exhibition together required the historical expertise and scholarship necessary to determine an object’s value in relation to the others surrounding it. Warhol had no such interest; indeed, the problem for Robbins was that Warhol had no curatorial interests at all: “There were exasperating moments when we felt that Andy Warhol was exhibiting ‘storage’ rather than works of art.” [2] Warhol’s “Raid” questioned the very premise of curating; he showed that any assembly of objects is a matter of individual taste, and that curators are ultimately just collectors whose tastes have been legitimated, even naturalized, by an academy that has little to do with just liking.
Warhol’s gesture reminded us that organizing an exhibition both ennobles and demeans the work of art, simultaneously presenting it while concealing its innermost qualities by subordinating them to the collector’s — the curator’s — taste. After all, “Raid the Icebox I” was mechanical, deadpan, facetious — unmistakably Warholian. Unfortunately, the RISD Museum stowed away this reminder throughout the decades it mattered. Most of us — myself included — are aware of “Raid the Icebox I” only as a result of RISD Museum’s ongoing exhibition “Raid the Icebox Now,” which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Warhol’s intervention by inviting eight contemporary artists to “invade” the museum’s collection.
Installation view of Andy Warhol’s “Raid the Icebox I,” 1969. Institute for the Arts, Rice University.
Installation view of Nicole Eisenman’s Tonight We Are Going Out And We Are All Getting Hammered, 2019. RISD Museum.
Like Warhol, Nicole Eisenman’s contribution to “Raid the Icebox Now,” Tonight We Are Going Out And We Are All Getting Hammered (2019), disregards the surviving assumption that curating an exhibition must involve some kind of value-judgement, that its mission transcends matters of taste. Just as Warhol followed the storage structure as loyally as possible because he liked it (it was like shopping; after one visit to the basement, Warhol asked Robbins if there were “any good antique shops in town”), (Bright, 243) Eisenman’s mini-exhibition employed the aesthetics of a queer nightclub in order to catalyze more robust, intimate, and ultimately enjoyable interactions with the objects she selected.
I had been meandering through the RISD Museum’s labyrinthine galleries for two hours, constantly checking the exhibition map to make sure I didn’t mistake an artist’s “invasion” for an ordinary hang. After serious attempts to contemplate the rooms and objects, museum fatigue began to set in, and my head felt condensed and weighty. My coworker and I, exhausted after a busy shift on a concrete floor, slowly trudged our way toward Nicole Eisenman, the only artist in “Raid The Icebox Now” left to see.
When I entered the room, my mood instantly lifted. The first thing I saw was a line of statues arranged in a single-file line behind red velvet stanchions. Kim Wilde played softly through the speakers. A pretend neon sign — the only object the artist made herself — reading KIKI’S BACKDOOR was mounted on a makeshift brick wall that separates the inside of the club from the queue. Surprised and refreshed, my companion and I couldn’t help but grin at each other, rocking our shoulders side-to-side. An invisible pressure to think correctly has vanished, and I immediately begin to identify with the figures in line, to read them as I would read people.
The bronze woman at the front of the line has become impatient; a hand rests staunchly on each hip and she puffs out her chest indignantly. She looks like she will have something to say to the bouncer when he returns to his post. A bronze bust behind her maintains an aloof, angular pose. Her shoulders make a diagonal line that gives one a sense that she wants to appear like she couldn’t care less. Her eyelids cast downward and to the right. She is suspicious of whatever she sees, and perhaps a bit annoyed. Despite her irritation, she continues to channel Grace Jones with a cool, steady posture that she knows will get her through the door. Next in line, a marble Eve tilts her head upward to the left as she rolls her eyes in exasperation. Behind her, a couple waits side by side. A small bronze bear postures in a graceful contrapposto, while to his right his angular partner, a wooden carving of an apostle from the late 1200s, stands straight up and leans on his toes, keeping an attentive eye on the corner around which an absent bouncer will soon emerge.
Installation view of Eisenman’s Tonight, 2019. RISD Museum
Personas and attitudes continued to emanate from the figures as my gaze made its way down the line. Eventually I consulted the guest list, sitting on a metal stool, and my sense that Bear Erect (1833) was a pun intended is confirmed. The list consists only of queer public figures from the eighties to now, including Audre Lorde, Andy Warhol, Marsha P. Johnson, Eileen Myles, John Waters, Bette Midler, Carrie Brownstein, Divine, Frank Ocean, and, of course, Adam + Steve. I walked past an actual dumpster in order to enter the space beyond the brick wall and the impatient queue. All four walls of Kiki’s Backdoor were covered in an anachronistic hodgepodge of historical portraits and allegorical paintings, interspersed by a few modern and postmodern sculptures. A disco ball spins and colored lights streak across the room. The installation completely undermines Alfred Barr’s now-conventional method of hanging artwork side-by-side, each piece with its own autonomous terrain and above-head lighting. Some paintings are explicitly in conversation with one another; for example, a young boy is pointing to a friend on the right, who looks knowingly at the viewer; she seems to be holding back a wry smile. These strategically arranged relationships signify that the exhibition is structured according to a rather arbitrary and amusing organizational logic, and therefore invite the viewer to think up her own ideas about how these objects are interacting with one another.
In his essay on “Raid the Icebox I With Andy Warhol”, Anthony Huberman asks a relevant question: “Is liking something less valuable than knowing something?” [3] Nicole Eisenman’s contribution to the RISD Museum’s “Raid The Icebox Now” exhibition asserts that when it comes to aesthetic experience, liking and knowing are often indistinguishable from one another, even though the museum, as a bourgeois pedagogical invention, seems to uphold an aura that maintains an implicit hierarchy between the two. When I encountered the queue, it didn’t occur to me to think about what it meant, for I was too involved in my own interpretation to contemplate what Eisenman was trying to do. Indeed, Tonight We Are Going Out And We Are All Getting Hammered blurs many of the distinctions that society has continued to take for granted since Andy Warhol’s exhibition in 1970: like Warhol, Eisenman’s intervention renders distinctions between good and bad, high and low, educated and uneducated, right and wrong, knowing and liking, completely irrelevant in the art-viewing process. Such an act of leveling offers the viewer an opportunity to engage and think with the objects on display more robustly than would be possible if such distinctions remained intact, as they tend to in the social vacuum, or ‘white cube,’ of a fine art museum. The club setting, with its overt references to queer life, renders moot that invisible pressure to think correctly, which is ultimately the viewer’s sense of her own inability to sufficiently maintain all these binaries at once. Tonight We Are Going Out And We Are All Getting Hammered, much like an actual dance club, offers a brief refuge from the stress and anxiety involved in constructing and maintaining the boundaries of one’s particular social identity. It didn’t matter that my coworker had never heard of Eisenman and was unfamiliar with the history of art, nor did it matter that I was fully steeped in the jargon of curatorial discourse at the time: we both liked Eisenman’s piece the most.
Eisenman’s intervention, like all those included in “Raid The Icebox Now,” questions curatorial assumptions in the same way Warhol’s exhibition did, for it ignores the conventional thematic considerations typically associated with curation, such as historical period, medium, and geological origin, opting instead for an irreverent theme that has no regard for academicism. Deborah Bright, one of the first to write critically about “Raid The Icebox I,” asserted that in Warhol’s exhibition, “the suppression of socially connotative meaning embedded in conventional art-historical taxonomies was boldly made visible…” Undoubtedly, the same can be said of Kiki’s Backdoor. Not only does it formally work to exhibit the socially connotative meanings of the objects on display, meanings that would have been overlooked in a typical museum installation, but it suggests that the encouragement of such social connotations from the viewer may be the most meaningful, productive, and equitable approach to interacting with documents of an unrelatable past.
Installation view of Nicole Eisenman’s Tonight, 2019. RISD Museum
Rev. Matthew William Peters, Lydia, c. 1776. Included in Eisenman’s Tonight. RISD Museum
This continuity, however, between Eisenman and Warhol’s irreverent interventions at the RISD Museum casts light on just how much has changed in curatorial discourse since 1970. Nicole Eisenman mimed what Deborah Bright described as “Warhol's blatant disregard for art-historical orders of classification, professional decorum and conventions of object display” While Warhol’s exhibition was initially repressed by RISD as some kind of traumatic event [4] because of this act of disrespect, Eisenman’s anachronistic juxtaposition of the objects she chose to exhibit is, by contrast, a legible gesture in contemporary art that invokes the informal open-endedness of relational aesthetics. In the last sentence of his essay on “Raid the Icebox I,” Huberman argues that even though Warhol wholly undermined the value judgements that curator Daniel Robbins took for granted, Warhol made a lasting impact on curatorial discourse, and “by occupying the role of curator himself, he ultimately contributed to enriching and expanding the conversation around what an exhibition could be.” Nicole Eisenman’s exhibition takes place in the wake of that conversation, which is now over fifty years old. Her explicit use of Warholian gestures thus blurs another distinction, one that has continued to be targeted by contemporary art since Warhol’s time: the distinction between socially critical and socially complacent art. By directly referencing Warhol in both form and content (one of the first paintings you encounter as you enter the club is Matthias Stom’s Christ at the Column [c.1635], which is pictured in one of the few installation shots of “Raid The Icebox I”), Eisenman’s intervention simultaneously usurps the chronology of art history and the conventions of object display it imposes. It also acknowledges her place as an artist whose oeuvre explicitly evokes this history, which has produced the very discourse that renders her intervention less transgressive than Warhol’s — despite the artists’ shared irreverence.
Relatedly, Eisenman’s contribution to “Raid The Icebox Now” is also remarkably consistent with the RISD Museum’s own history of innovative exhibition strategies, a fact that grounds her intervention, which on the one hand is critical in its disregard for the history of conventional modes of display, in the larger history of creative exhibition practices. Alexander Dorner was the director of the museum from 1938 to 1941, and there he continued to experiment with unusual installations of artwork that “defied standard categorizations and chronologies… The museum had the ideal collection for this kind of experimentation.” Traces of Dorner’s early experimentation have been palpable in RISD Museum exhibitions years before the “Raid The Icebox Now” exhibition. The first time I visited the RISD Museum was in June 2016; this was also the first time I encountered a hang that defied chronology; Angela Dufresne’s Man and Kid (2014) and Roger Hiorns’s Untitled (2005) were installed in the main gallery, which typically houses paintings, mostly portraits, from 18th and 19th century Europe. In December 2019, works by black contemporary artists were also inserted into the main gallery, and thus encouraged a certain kind of political perception of the works on view. Likewise, the galleries that remain untouched by the artists participating in “Raid The Icebox Now” could be easily confused with an artist-curated exhibition: Yinka Shonibare’s Dutch wax fabric costumes and a bronze head of a Benin king are installed in the gallery that houses European Renaissance paintings, porcelains, and sculptures.
Purposeful interruptions in the continuum of Western, Eurocentric history have become commonplace in the contemporary era, and Tonight We Are Going Out And We Are All Getting Hammered indexes the progression of such interruptions from unacceptable to canonical in curatorial discourse. Eisenman’s exhibition consciously employs a now-institutionalized and familiar gesture of irreverent juxtaposition — a gesture that still appeared radical in 1970 — to add to the conversation that Warhol initiated fifty years ago. What she adds is a rather refreshing reminder that although we can read artwork as we do people, engagements with works of art offer the viewer a freer, more honest, and more genuine opportunity to explore how and when identity manifests aesthetically. //
Marie-Victoire Jaquotot, Portrait of the Dead Napoleon, c. 1821. Included in Eisenman’s Tonight. RISD Museum
Left: Roger Hiorns, Untitled, 2005.RISD Museum. Right: Angela Dufresne, Man and Kid, 2014. RISD Museum
[1] Anthony Huberman. “Andy Warhol, Raid the Icebox I, with Andy Warhol, 1969.” In The Artist as Curator: An Anthology, (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2017), 89.
[2] Deborah Bright. “Shopping the Leftovers: Warhol’s Collecting Strategies in Raid the Icebox I.” Art History 24, no. 2 (April 2001): 286.
[3] Huberman, 108.
[4] Bright, 288.
