The Brooklyn Rail

Playfulness and pointedness in equal measure preside in Fixed Crane, Nicole Eisenman’s largest public sculpture to date, and first in New York, another memorable project by an incisive artist in Madison Square Park.

The centerpiece is a fifty-five-year-old distressed and rusted 90-foot-long brick-red Link-Belt crane, laid on its right side, with its cab at the southern end and trestle-like boom and extended jib pointing just about due north, orienting it celestially like so many works of ceremonial architecture, from Sumerian ziggurats to Stonehenge. The crane came from either Kentucky, according to the artist, or Nashville, according to the curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport, and that detail is about as meaningless as whether the dirt in Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room was sourced in Pennsylvania or New York: the monumental material, its starkness, and its relation to its environs are about metaphor, not provenance. Disassembled parts litter the park’s oval, including the engine, gears, massive counterweight, and hook, becoming makeshift seating opportunities.

The Duchampian conceit of presenting an intact or loosely manipulated material object (a bottle rack, bicycle wheel on a stool, repositioned urinal, suspended snow shovel) is here aesthetically individuated through the inclusion of sculpture and often humorous additions in and on top of the crane’s structure. The accretions, like Eisenman’s painting, sculpture, and works on paper over her nearly four decades of artmaking, are stylistically divergent and broadly referential. A ruby red, cartoonishly large, and Koonsishly reflective ring hangs inverted on the boom. A foot-long white figure with bulging body parts like a semi-deflated Michelin Man, typical in Eisenman’s sculptural productions, hangs horizontally like a flag from the top of a metal pole that pops straight up from the crane’s tracks. This clod-composed person is suspended in the air—perhaps more like a pole vaulter at the apex of their assisted leap than a flapping flag. One joint section of the metal jib is wrapped with white plaster cast material, as if it sustained a fracture. Grafted to the hoist ropes near the base is an unopened can of Bumble Bee Solid White Albacore Tuna: on an art historical level, an accusatory link to Warhol’s “Tunafish Disaster” silkscreen series from 1963, but in a personal vein, a throwback to the same brand of can used as an ashtray on a milkcrate night table in Eisenman’s painting Morning Studio (2016). The languid eroticism of that picture, a contemporary take on Gustave Courbet’s lesbian-themed The Sleepers (1866), is seemingly absent in Fixed Crane, although it retains its status as a felled priapic obelisk. Upturned dedicatory obelisks were markers of empires exhausted, such as the Romans found across the Egyptian sands and repurposed as imperial monuments, which were then, in turn, appropriated by the Catholic church and placed at Christian power sites in Rome. And to see this archaic, enervated crane as a disembodied phallus is nothing new in Eisenman’s oeuvre—her early bacchanalian works are replete with cadres of Amazonian women separating minotaurs and men from their members. Viewing it as a marker of societal impotence is certainly the point.

At the same time, ancient ruins and tumbled monuments have long been sites of play, exploration, and scrambling ascension for adults and children alike; even modern ruins served that same role, as in John Boorman’s autobiographical film Hope and Glory (1987), with scenes of boys messing about on the rubble of the Blitz to the jazzy sound of “In the Mood.” So, Eisenman and Rapaport have ensured that Fixed Crane is not roped off, that the entrances to the park’s central oval remain open, and that kids and grown-ups can climb all over the industrial relic, an artifact as alien to this space as Dorothy’s sepia-toned Kansas farmhouse transported via twister to technicolor Munchkinland. In fact, a rubber shoe heel is nailed to the backside of the cab, like the feet and shoes of the crushed Wicked Witch of the East poking out from Dorothy’s farmhouse blended with the “convulsive beauty” of André Breton’s slipper spoon, photographed by Man Ray in 1934, and its charged sexuality. Such play and humor have long been a part of Eisenman’s aesthetic vocabulary, in saucy paintings of pop culture icons from the Flintstones to Wonder Woman.

The Duchampian connection is most engagingly made in an interior diorama visible through a small sliding panel just above the heel; a repurposed wood block forms a step from which to view its magical contents. I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say the crane has an inhabitant, in a play on both the “Woman who Lived in a Shoe” and Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946–66) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Fixed Crane is also a readymade-aided monument in the spirit of the Duchampian artworks identified in September of 1967 by Robert Smithson when he made his famed trek to Passaic, New Jersey. There, he found “The Great Pipes Monument,” “The Fountain Monument,” and other industrial detritus in a proto-brownfield site that he elevated as “ruins in reverse,” in “a kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur.” Ever art historically astute, in using a crane, the machine that later in his career became Smithson’s medium for drawing in his earthworks, Eisenman has plunked down in Manhattan’s most opulent and lovingly maintained park an entropic monument, a cautionary tale of industrial decline, urban excess, and the most architecturally alert Madison Square Arts Conservancy work since Martin Puryear’s Big Bling in 2016 (which I reviewed in these pages). But while that colossal and terrific, if unscalable, sculpture was a “visual poem of praise to Manhattan,” in Puryear’s own words, Eisenman’s all-played-out crane is an expression of titanic exhaustion—of the body politic, of raw materials, of our environmental imagination both natural and constructed, of our willingness to fight, of our desire to develop our realms of habitation in an equitable way. As Eisenman has noted, with this crane “gravity has won.”

Eisenman’s New York, and by extension America, is not the city of ruins that Bruce Springsteen sang about post-9/11, but there is something ruinous about the city’s recent evolution: the spread of the supertall residential buildings that have lifted the skyscraper ceiling some 33 percent, but added little stylistically to the skyline besides boxy tuning forks; the glossily exclusive and consequently bland design of Hudson Yards; the lack of vision in improving transportation networks, despite the marvelous new mosaics in the MTA system, with investment only going to lavish money-making airports. There is something about the twenty years of projects at Madison Square that hits harder than temporary artworks at other familiar sites (City Hall Park, Doris C. Freedman Plaza, the High Line). It has to do with the remarkable support of creative freedom consistently fought for by Rapaport, and the willingness of artists to engage deeply with the shared histories of the park and its immediate built environs. Eisenman has delivered her own scruffily poetic paean to the city she grew up near and has long called home: a fixed crane without an easy fix for our dilemmas, but through March, a template for play and pondering new paths.