Spotlight Conversation: Getting Ridykeulous with Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner (Part 2 of 2)

A look-back conversation about lesbian art and art-making from the 90s to now, including crazy parties, girls in bathtubs, and why skewering the male-centric art world remains so much fun. (Part 2)

Dec 03, 2022

Having some serious fun: Ridykeulous agit prop pals A.L. Steiner and Nicole Eisenman. Photo: Ridykeulous archives.

Readers, please note: Part One of this conversation and portrait of the creative art provocateurs Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner, a.k.a. Ridykeulous, can be found on the Substack page for Tell Me Everything.

Part Two: What happened next….

In the 90s, several of our friends working in film had breakthrough success, including Lisa Cholodenko for High Art, Jennie Livingston for Paris is Burning, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner with Go Fish, and Kim Pierce with Boys Don’t Cry -- among others. Sadie Benning was on the scene, a cute younger then-lesbian, now-transgender, artist making experimental PixelVision video diaries—a precursor to Iphone movies. (In 1998, Benning also joined the pioneering lezzie electro punk band Le Tigre, teaming up for two years with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Joanne Fatemen; Benning was replaced by JD Samson in 2000.) Director Su Friedrich, who was already making intimate, avant-garde lezzie films in the late 70s, released First Comes Love (1991), Rules of the Road (1993) and others in the 90s, including a feature doc about our protest fun, Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire , Too (1992), with Janet Baus.

Others were making television, including a roster of young filmmakers who cut their teeth at Dyke TV and are Hollywood and indie TV directors today. Deneuve magazine launched in 1992, later retitled as Curve, finally presenting lesbian life and culture with more diversity, including sexy bodies of all shapes. It picked up where On Out Backs, edited by Susie Bright, had left off, openly presenting girl-on-girl desire.

Portrait of the artist as a sassy dyke…Nicole Eisenman in her studio, 2017; credit: Cultured magazine; A.L. Seiner; credit A.L. Steiner archives.

Lesbian activism also took off, in ACT UP and Queer Nation (1990) and the Lesbian Avengers (1993). The fierce pussy collective, founded as an AIDS artivist response by Zoe Leonard, Nancy Brooks-Brody, Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka in 1991, covered the walls of downtown New York with political posters celebrating happy dykedom. fierce pussy later included other members and continues to produce trenchant visual agit prop, while its core founders have successful individual careers; Zoe Leonard is another major museum art star. Her 1992 rant, I Want A President, wheatpasted on walls in the East Village, is a classic of AIDS activism, and displayed in shows of her work. In 1991, Dyke Action Machine also took off, formed by photographer Sue Schaffner and artist Carrie Moyer; DAM made iconic campaign images for the Lesbian Avengers, too. I’m only naming the artists in my close social/activist circle, but many other lesbian artivist collectives took off in the decade too, one in which dyke zines and videos were everywhere.

By the mid-90s, trans life and activism also swung into the public eye. Drag King contests became popular in lesbian bars. By the time our tenure at OUT ended, the letter Q -- queers – had joined the mainstream lexicon of LGBTQ. When The L Word made its Hollywood lipstick lesbian debut a few years later, it reflected a watermark moment of mainstream visibility, one that celebrated the six-degrees-of-separation dyke drama subculture of lesbians everywhere.

I want a president (1992). Artist: Zoe Leonard. Photo: Zoe Leonard archives.

Looking back, I ask Nicole and Steiner, do they feel like the media captured the emergence of so many talented lesbian artists in the 90s ? The influence of that generation on our lives and popular culture now?

Both are quick to shoot down that idea. That bit of history has not been paid attention to yet, opines Nicole. Steiner totally agrees. We were invisible then; we still are. I think younger people just don’t know about the community, how it functioned, and the work. It’s almost fortuitous that nobody in some ways paid any mind…there was a more intimate way of fostering art-making.

Nicole agrees: People didn’t get support, but that’s what protected the community. It’s a double bubble: you end up inside a bubble inside a bubble. We didn’t get any commercial viability for anything any of us were doing. Nodding, Steiner adds, I think it’s about being erased and just a continuation of that story. Historic erasure…neglect. Because lesbianism has nothing to do with the patriarchy and patriarchy doesn’t get anything from us, so it gets ignored.

Lesbians are not women, Steiner adds drily.

Nicole laughs.

We have literally zero value, Steiner adds, laughing too.

Negative value, Nicole offers.

I didn’t have feminism at the time, Steiner says. We have talked about this –she gestures to Nicole – we came looking for community and our friends.

But then you get to exist in this very wonderful, capitalistic-free state, Nicole adds.

We call it poverty, I note.

Steiner laughs. Right.

Ridykelous eyes the lezzie future. From Ridykeulouse

More seriously, she says, there is something about being defined by a hetero-patriarchal system, by a home patriarchy, and having the motivation, or the excuse, to be reactionary. But also identifying yourself by that. Because when you go through rejection, you have to build yourself up. A moment later, she adds, some people can’t, and they don’t survive that. We talk about how lesbians and other women artists were making work that was frankly sexual and how little of this work is celebrated, compared to gay men of the 90s like Robert Mapplethorpe and others who made homoerotic images. It was only two years ago that Laura Aguilar’s photographs really gained international attention, notes Steiner. Aguilar, a proud Latina lesbian, often used her naked body and the vagina as a subject of discovery and social commentary.

Has it changed much? I ask them.

No! they insist. I mean, there can only be one very, very well-known lesbian artist at a time, Steiner adds, only half joking. Like there can only be Cathy Opie, and she is very celebrated, for good cause. But there can’t be…two. I remember when a gallery said to me in the late 90s, ‘we really like your work, but we already have one woman on the roster.’

So…we’re done, Nicole adds sarcastically, completing the thought.

Underneath the jokes, the two artists who formed Ridykeulous remain angry about the sexism and disregard that faces the majority of lesbian artists. Nicole is the big mainstream exception, of course: she’s gained global fame in spite of making brilliant, uncompromising in-your-face lesbian-themed paintings and sculptures. She’s that one household-name artist Steiner jokes about; Julie Mehretu, who makes abstract work, is another. Despite so many talented lesbian artists working today, the vast majority still struggle to be seen and championed. Major museums and collectors are slow to catch up.

Enter Ridykeulous, whose mission from the start has been to call attention to the misogynist eye of the greater art world and its predominantly white, male critics. As Steiner puts it drily, we parlayed our disdain into a collaboration that has lasted almost twenty years now. One of their first actions as Ridykeulous was a hack, or text correction, of the famous Guerilla Girls poster about women’s invisibility in the art world (see below). Ridykeulous crossed out the word womenfor lesbian. We had a response to the Guerilla Girls accounting of museum projects, explained Steiner. Their revised text asked, why are there no lesbian women artists? The Guerrila Girls reached out to us after that and loved it, Steiner says.

From the start, humor has been their weapon, especially satire. Says Nicole: It’s about me and Steiner hanging out and having fun. I mean, we laugh. We crack each other up. Their next step was a zine, followed by a number of curatorial projects where they invited lesbian and other favorite artists to collaborate on shows. Over the years, the list of collaborators has grown, some a Who’s Who of cutting-edge art world talent. In 2011, Readykulous: The Hurtful Healer presented a show of letters, correspondence and text-based pieces, some from the duo’s PATRIArchives™. Ridykeulous describes itself as an effort to ‘subvert, sabotage, and overturn the language commonly used to define feminist and lesbian art, wrote a critic about the 2011 show: “Steiner and Eisenman forcefully insert themselves and their collaborators into the spaces, both literally and figuratively, of the art establishment.” Their fruitful collaboration has produced traveling shows that have taken them around the world, and garnered art-world attention.

Ridykeulous exhibit, 2006. Credit: Ridykeulous archives.

Fast forward to 2021, when we caught up at Nicole’s loft, and now, 2022, when Trump (that horrible guy, Steiner calls him), is eyeing the presidency again. Both artists remain busy, productive and have flourishing careers. Nicole’s big shows at major museums are a giant draw. Steiner now teaches, as well as presents her work in galleries and shows. Both remain feisty and committed in their attitude and determination to prod the art world as Ridykeulous, to remind institutions that, as Nicole puts it, lesbians are making so much great work… there is so much to see. Steiner chimes in: The fact is, we’re all going to keep making our work. The rest of the world has yet to catch up to us. Whether they do or not, we’re doing to do and say what we want.. That’s not gonna stop.

And you’re still having fun, I note.

Absolutely, Nicole says, as Steiner nods in happy agreement. We never stop laughing when we’re together. We just have so much fun.

A still from Prologue: Disaster Paradise show by A.L. Steiner, 2022. Deborah Schamoni gallery. Photo: A.L. Steiner archive.

Ridykeulous with artist Kara Walker. Photo: A.L. Steiner archives.

[END]

Some upcoming fun to catch:

Tell Me Everything

Spotlight Conversation: Getting Ridykeulous with Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner (Part 2 of 2)

A look-back conversation about lesbian art and art-making from the 90s to now, including crazy parties, girls in bathtubs, and why skewering the male-centric art world remains so much fun. (Part 2)

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