Louis Eisner

[afroken]

I think he deserves his own thread.

[rizza79]

here are a few more painting examples from Louis.

[afroken]

Love those slides.

It's worth explaining the painting I started the thread with which is in his show in London at the moment.

First of all it's huge! Probably around 8 foot tall. And it's oil on linen.

It's an exact copy of a drawing that was executed by a chimpanzee (presumably done with crayon) in some scientific experiments exploring simian intelligence in the 50's (I think).

It took Louis almost a year to paint as every detail, down to the organic imperfections of the paper, has been recreated very precisely. When I walked in to the gallery yesterday my initial reaction was that I was looking at a blown up photograph of a drawing.

It's a fascinating piece, full of contradictions and tensions. The monkey probably took 30 seconds to draw that and yet the artist has spent months reproducing it. He had to use all of his artistic intelligence and skill to faithfully recreate something created by a dumb (-ish) animal. And the result is a scribble that's been painstakingly rendered on the canvas in order that it might still look exactly like a scribble.

In effect the artist has put a huge amount of effort and commitment in to making something looks incredibly worthless, until you understand the story behind it.

It's a fantastic piece, in my opinion. I could look at it for hours, getting lost in the brush strokes which are visible up close but disappear when you stand a few feet back.



EDIT: To declare my hand and because I think they're great paintings, here is my Louis Eisner diptych:

[sail]

May 4, 2013 6:26:23 GMT -8 afroken said:

He had to use all of his artistic intelligence and skill to faithfully recreate something created by a dumb (-ish) animal. And the result is a scribble that's been painstakingly rendered on the canvas in order that it might still look exactly like a scribble.

In effect the artist has put a huge amount of effort and commitment in to making something looks incredibly worthless, until you understand the story behind it.

I suppose, ultimately, outside of the technical exercise, the question is why? and why is it in a gallery?

is it in fact art? is the original scribble art? if not, why is this? just based on craft? would a young relatively unknown artist get acclaim from the piece or laughed out?

I find the conversation that stems from the piece far more interesting than the piece itself, but I've never been a big modern art fan.

[onemandown72]

edit - I am referring to the first piece in the thread here.

This is a great example of something I had a long conversation with a friend of mine today - the value of concept Vs purely visual stimulation

When does the concept overtake the finished piece?
When does the concept become absolutely integral to the finished piece?
At what point do you look at a piece of art and want to know why it was made?

I think that this is purely scribble, and hearing the back story makes it no more valuable to me.
I must admit that I need to be visually stimulated first and foremost. Which isn't to undermine the artist's process, more to explain how I come to view a piece.

Any other thoughts?

[80]

i think i appreciate that first piece backwards. in that the concept feels thin-ish to me but i like how it looks on a purely visual level

where is it on display? would like to check it out in person

[paulypaul]

A year? To copy a monkey scrawl? He's a dick. It's a self indulgent bout of mental masturbation. It like art world David Blaine. Like some chap in India holding his hand above his head for 40 years. Here's how the conversation should have gone..

"Dude, did y'see that monkey do that drawing?"
"What drawing?"
"The one with the crayon?"
"What about it?"
"I'm going to copy it! It'll take about a year!"
"You're an idiot."
"You're right, I'll get the drinks in"

[mose]

I'll play the opposite.

is the aspect being criticized here any different from the photo-realists?

"chuck close, did you see that photo i took of Bob?"
'what photo?"
'the one against the white background?"
'what about it?'
'i'm going to copy it! it'll take about a year!'
'chuck, you're an idiot?'
'you're right? i'll go back to being an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts'

man in general, and artists in particular, has long struggled to do things for the sole purpose of proving them doable. almost die climbing a mountain for no reason = 'hell yes, let's do it again.' I see that as a virtue.

I mean, if we want to talk about utility, all artwork is basically 'useless' with highly negative feed efficiency(resource in to 'product' out). It's all purple cabbage with a handle.

But, that doesn't measure its 'value' as a catalyst, causing reactions within the mind of the viewer. As the famous, and overused by me, Duchamp quote goes, "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

So, I think rather than, "why did he spend a year?!?" with negative and dismissive angle, i think the more apt question is, "why did he spend a year?" in the framework of what did eisner look to accomplish for himself(what was the mountain) and in the minds of the viewer(what is he looking to catalyse).

This searching for depth may look to some as silly, but we all agreed to suspend various degrees of disbelief when we walked through the door marked 'art'.

[guymo]

May 4, 2013 13:04:06 GMT -8 80 said:

where is it on display? would like to check it out in person

It's at Ritter/Zamet in London.

[saL]

Im not usually going into these kind of discussions, but I must say I appreciate the piece for the story behind it.. not sure why, but I do.. before I read the story, I just saw a scribble and thought "oh man, that really looks like nothing", but after reading about it, I got complete new way of looking at it.. I told the story to my wife, and it did nothing for her.. which Im fine with..

my point (I guess), is that I dont think it matters if this should or shouldn't be seen as a great piece of art (not to mention calling someone "idiot" or "dick" for making it, being totally uncalled for).. it's how it affects people, and how it makes them feel about it.. obviously, some will just say it's useless, ugly looking waste of time, and I can totally understand that point.. other will appreciate it for a silly idea and concept and the final product, which I can relate to as well..

I like the slides too, for the same reason I liked the Lucien Smith's Seed packet painting - for it's ridiculous, bizarre concept..

now, I have no idea if Id ever go as far as wanting to own such piece of art (especially cause like onemandown, I too need to be visually stimulated first), but these kind of things remind me of how creative, imaginative, and persistent humans can be.. and before you tell me he could have invest his time into something more useful, Im gonna say that there are too many people out there that's are not contributing to the world with ANYTHING through their entire life, so spending a year to paint a chimp scribble is definitely an accomplishment that not many people thought of or achieved... at least that is how I feel/see it.. so thanks for sharing this, and exposing me to the kind of art I'd hardly pay attention to otherwise!

[rizza79]

nice to see some conversation. personally I'm not sure how I feel about this particular painting.

I'm curious as to why there is no mention of the backstory, no reference image, no little paragraph at the exhibition(that is an assumption) explaining what it is. or maybe this is part of the whole piece?

for me personally I think it may be a little combination of what both mose and paulypaul said.....some mental masturbation and the mountain thing. either way, it doesn't do so much for me on a conceptual level. He's certainly not the first artist to do either. it definitely shows he's a disciplined and talented young kid. it shows he's willing to take chances and push himself. it shows he's not concerned with what the market thinks. I like that. especially in this day of artists making work strictly that is more marketable.

combine his paintings with his other works....ie: knuckleheads, photography, slides, etc and he strikes me as a young talent that is worth watching.

[drevil]

I hope they displayed the monkey scribble and story with the canvas shown above that resulted from it. That is the more important piece of the art here. To remove that piece guts the whole.

Also I'm not sure that it is directly comparable to photorealists. The starting photos are art. The monkey scribble was not.

I wish a blurb from the artist or some other knowledgeable person accompanied artworks in most gallery and museum settings. Context. Can. Be. Important.

[mose]

going over this more-and-more, i've been thinking about the visual similarities between the eisner/monkey scribble and the early 1950's drawings of cy twombly and how context of work enhances and expands it way, way beyond its inherent physical appearance.

Also, keeps me considering Picasso's famous quote, "“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child” and how that could come into play in the current discussion.

[rizza79]

do you think that the reason he chose this sort of imagery could it have been a nod to Twombly or was it mere coincidence. I'd like to know why he chose this particular experiment.

the press release here gives some insight, but I would think there is a more to it than this for Eisner.

"In 1806, Shogun Iyenari organized a competition between {Japanese artist} Hokusai and Shazanro Buncho, a celebrated representative of the chinese school. Hokusai won general admiration and the favor of the shogun in the following manner. First he unrolled on the ground a long roll of paper and painted it with big blue loops. Then he took a cock, dipped its feet in red paint and made it walk across the paper. His audience at once recognized a river studded with red maple leaves in autumn. In his text Eloge de La Main, Henri Focillon returns to this story in order to remind the reader that the cock was, for Hokusai, nothing more than a new kind of painting tool... like a special kind of brush whose shape and way of moving (largely unpredictable) allowed him to achieve exactly the effect he was looking for."

-Desmond Morris, 1997

[guymo]

May 5, 2013 6:20:00 GMT -8 drevil said:

I hope they displayed the monkey scribble and story with the canvas shown above that resulted from it. That is the more important piece of the art here. To remove that piece guts the whole.

I want to agree with this completely, but I have some nagging doubts.

Regardless of how one ends up feeling about a work like this, if you don't know the story then you don't have the whole work to consider. So to me it seems daft not to present the painting and the story together when the original monkey-scribble is something not many people would know about and recognise. (I haven't been to Ritter/Zamet to see the show yet -- can someone who has tell us how they're presenting this?)

But I do also wonder how far that should be taken. For instance, Manet's Olympia gains almost all its power from its cultural references (and now, from its place in history). If you don't know what the imagery refers to then you won't experience what the artist intended. But I guess Olympia would not have been displayed alongside a description of Titian's Venus and detailed explanation of the cultural signifiers in the image when it was first shown. Perhaps these things were just very well known at the time.

So, right now I am thinking that it's the relative obscurity of the reference material that makes it important to explain.

Eek, did I just compare Louis Eisner to Manet?

[afroken]

I think I can throw some light on that Rizza, given the Desmond Morris quote:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_(chimpanzee)

Congo became a bit of a celebrity by all accounts, with Picasso being a fan too, and his work has even been sold at auction fairly successfully:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1492463/Art-world-goes-wild-for-chimpanzees-paintings-as-Warhol-work-flops.html

I suspect that Eisner's journey started with the cover that Congo did for Mad Magazine:



In the bottom left hand corner is an image of Congo that Eisner has previously reproduced as a painting, which is also the flyer for his current show:



And his previous show was entirely based on Mad Magazine iconography:



Maybe Congo was responsible for the image currently exhibited, I don't know. That's not what I was told but gallerists don't always get it absolutely right. That would make sense though.

So to my mind, this is Eisner exploring pop culture, and the Pop Art tradition of reproduction of the banal, from a very painterly perspective but with a good dose of humour. The fact that anyone could ever have considered Congo to be an artist probably throws some light on to wider society's attitude to Abstract Expressionism at the time which I'm sure most people considered to be utter garbage.

All in all, like it or not, I think there are many narrative layers to this painting which makes it pretty special, but then I don't start from the pure visual stimulation angle.

[carlito]

this debate made me think of this Kapoor



what you experience and then the story behind

(for the record I quite like the scribble, mainly because it pisses Pauly off!)

[knucklehead]

Anyone know if a print has been done with the knuckleheads image - thanks

[pokymoll]

I think Louis and sebastian black are the most interesting young painters in the NY scenario

[pokymoll]

Very interesting show in Rome

www.departfoundation.com/site/en/anamericana.php

[artladval]

May 6, 2013 0:31:23 GMT -8 afroken said:

I suspect that Eisner's journey started with the cover that Congo did for Mad Magazine:

J. Fred Muggs
2014
Oil on linen
99.5 x 94 inches

[afroken]

www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/louis-eisner-marshall-head-5792588-details.aspx

[sam.register]

Apr 22, 2014 18:20:38 GMT -8 afroken said:

www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/louis-eisner-marshall-head-5792588-details.aspx

$40,000 – $60,000 for real?

[queequeg]

Ridiculous. Someone totally pulled some strings to get this painting into that auction.

[sam.register]

Apr 26, 2014 6:34:40 GMT -8 queequeg said:

Ridiculous. Someone totally pulled some strings to get this painting into that auction.

Someone pulling strings in the art world?