Spotlight Conversation: Getting Ridykeulous with Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner (Pt. 1 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 One)
Having too much fun…Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner. Credit: Ridykeulous archives.
Last summer, as part of my lemme-go-find-my-old-90s-pals visits to NY, I headed over to Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn loft studio, which is warm and cozy and double functions as her working residence. She has a wall of oversized art books. On a prior visit, she’d shown me a new piece de resistance: a giant moveable wall panel that can drop a floor down to her basement level and allows her to work more easily on huge canvases; she no longer has to stand on scaffolding or ladders to paint them. She uses a remote to move the massive panel and is delighted by this addition to her studio.
We were soon joined by her curatorial partner, A.L. Steiner, for a sit-down, catch-up, art and friends gab fest. We’re all old pals. The subject was now vs. then. Looking back to 1992, when we met and were early in our careers, what stood out for them, as lesbian artists and cultural/ political activists? What concerns did they have then and what preoccupies them now? I wanted to learn more about Ridykeulous, their long-running curatorial art project about lesbian visibility and sexuality that has involved many other artists, too. What prompted the collaboration? How has it been received? And in this protest era of #Me Too, and #Decolonize the Museum, and the Nan Goldin-led art activist attacks on the Sackler family and major art museums for their profiteering on the US opioid epidemic, where does dyke artivism fit in?
I can’t remember when I first met Nicole, but I’m sure it was around the wild house she lived in at 337 East 8th street, by Tompkins Square Park, which I just called the 8th street dyke house. It used to be 8BC, an East Village punk and performance art space that became a nightly carnival for a hot 80s minute. I’d moved from Avenue C and 7th to live diagonally across the park, in a big loft on Avenue B and 6th street with my then-girlfriend Cindra Feuer and a shifting gaggle of lesbians and an all-but-lesbian gay male pal, Kelly McKaig. By 1994, Steiner lived on Avenue D between 8th and 9th streets. In those years, our houses regularly hosted parties that would go all night and start up again in the late afternoon, with bucolic, hangover rooftop picnics at Nicole’s loft. She lived there with a creative bunch, including Alesia Exum ( known today as Cash Levi), Robin Vachal, Felipa (now Feli Kutu), Alison Kelly, and Pam Brandt. Crash-pad friends would cruise through. Everybody began hooking up with everybody in those years. People had jobs but somehow, they were also partying hard. It was that kind of time.
Ridykeulous tweak of Guerilla Girls’ famous art poster. Credit: Ridykeulous.
In the late 80s, Alphabet City – Avenues A, B, C and D -- was still rough. It was nicknamed Little Dresden, given its warlike appearance, dotted with burnt-out, abandoned buildings that doubled as squats and shooting galleries. Heroin was a big thing and a few of our close friends got very caught up in it. In the mid-90s, cocaine became the fun party drug. Stick-up crime was common. The rats were the huge kind that would freak us out, unafraid of humans. There were a lot of homeless folks camping out in and around the park. After Rudy Guiliani became mayor, he unleashed a “quality of life” war on the homeless and the squats; a big police station got built and Tompkins Square Park became an eviction battleground. It’s also where Wigstock and other queer events took place. At any point on any given day, if you wanted to find a friend, you took a stroll into the park.
Nicole’s building had once been a farmhouse. Dennis Gattra, who was a road manager for the performance-like traveling circus The Flying Karamazov Brothers, teamed up with Cornelius Conboy to turn it into a big, raw 80s basement space for fun and art where hundred of musicians, performers and artists went a little wild. It opened on Halloween 1983 and closed in 1985. A lot of creative people in my 90s social circle had performed there regularly, including Dancenoise (Lucy Sexton and Annie Iobst), Jo Andres and her Liquid TV team, Alien Comic (the late Tom Murrin), Holly Hughes, the late Ethyl Eichelberger, and Karen Finley. Jo was dating Steve Buscemi then; he was one half of the comedy act Steve and Mark. (Jo and Steve later married and had kids; Jo tragically died of ovarian cancer in 2019 - see NYT obit below). John Flansburgh was half of They Might Be Giants and a Columbia U pal of Laura Flanders, who I dated in my Barnard-Columbia J school days. Before it closed, 8BC snagged a coveted Bessie Award for its contribution to downtown NYC art and culture.
Now vs. then: 8BC performance space in its 80s heyday vs. the gentrified oughts.
Nicole hung out at 8BC before her household secured the lease. The walls were still covered with amazing art. I recall it being all red, but maybe that’s just my rogue memory. Maybe the vibe just felt like red and graffiti everywhere. A lot of artists had their say on the walls in and outside 8BC (see outside picture, below). In 1992, OUT Magazine launched, and I joined the staff as a Senior Editor. James Conrad became the Art Director; Sarah Pettit was my pal and boss, working with Michael Goff. That’s how I met both Steiner, as she prefers to be called; James hired her to scout hot art photographers and artists. One day she spotted cute Alesia Exum, who ended up shooting great features, including pioneering dyke fashion spreads, for OUT. Back then, we were all fighting to give lesbian voices and talents and bodies and sexuality more visibility.
Already in 1992, Nicole was a rising American star painter, an out lesbian whose canvases and depictions of lesbians mixed what I call high art and low art, blending cartoon and funny, snide commentary with gorgeously oil-painted images of creamy, fleshy bodies, often women, tangled up with each other. Think Felix the Cat or JR Crumb humor mixed with a sexy Venus de Milo painting. She’s a talented sculptor, and works in multiple multiple media. Today, she’s considered one of the world’s leading artists, including lesbian artists, alongside Julie Mehretu and a handful of others. Along the way, Nicole became a parent, a journey that she continues to describe as amazing. They are so much fun, she says of her kids, as we bond about the joys of queer parenting. It’s just the best.
In 1992, Steiner was just discovering photography, partly by chance, but soon, with passion. Her practice later evolved to include multimedia installations with video, film and music. Her photographs were featured in MoMA PS1’s 2010 quinquennial exhibit, Greater New York, and a video piece, More real than reality itself, was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among career highlights. She teaches at Yale and serves as a critic and creative force in collaboration with other projects and artists. She’s a cultural activist, with several projects that have focused on challenging gender inequities in the art world and broader society. She collaborated with A.K. Burns from 2007 to 2010 and did a 10-state tour of their 69-minute sociosexual video, Community Action Center, that ‘utilizes erotics to express the personal, sexual and political lives of people in their community, with a largely queer focus.’ In 2008, Steiner co-founded W.A.G.E., Working Artists and the Greater Economy, to advocate for institutional compensation for artists, performers and independent curators.
RiDYKE Flinstones. Photos: Ridykeulous; A.L. Steiner archives.
Along the way, and in collaboration with Nicole in Ridykeulous, they’ve examined lesbian imagery, desire and sexuality. As a duo, Ridykeulous often presents frank, funny, graphic, sexy, and in-your-face erotic images of women, often in a satirical commentary on the male gaze, or sexism, or the ongoing invisibility of lesbian and women’s desire in the mainstream art world.
I’m including all this career backgrounder stuff to frame our look-back conversation, which touched upon how public and art world awareness of lesbians and lesbian imager has changed since the 90s. (see links below.) What were they making in 1992 and what were they saying? What’s different now? Are lesbians still automatically viewed as dirty girls, as porn, as we are historically, by the male gaze? And how has the lesbian eye on the art world changed since the rad, bad days when they partied late, slept late and made art that mostly other lesbians cared a lot about?
We were all partying a lot, Nicole agrees, looking back at her early art years in New York. In 1992, she was down on Canal Street and Allen, in a building of art studios opened up by artist and feminist Eve Sussman, whose career has also flourished. (The UK-born Sussman makes work that incorporates painting, film, video and architecture and is known for large-scale digital translations of art masterworks). Nicole was making art and working a paid job for Coach leather, painting big murals. I got that job through a lesbian called Jill the Hat – do you guys remember Jill the Hat? she asks us. We do, but none of us can remember Jill’s last name. She was of those downtown fixture people who always popped up. There was a lot of lesbian-coded imagery, like women sitting next to each other --- she mimes discreetly putting her hand next to Steiner’s – like with their hands almost touching with handbags behind them…and with vaginal forms in the design. Some of her paintings hung in a Coach leather store in Trump Tower for years. .
I tell her I remember her doing a lot of doodles back then, and she laughs. So does Steiner. A career built on doodles, Steiner jokes. Yeah, I was mindlessly doodling, Nicole says, amused. She was actually getting serious about her art. I was starting to draw a lot in 1992. She moved into the 8th street loft and fell into a routine of sleeping, partying and drawing, with some serious drugs thrown in. We had a lot of parties, yeah. And we dated each other; we were all having romantic relationships, she said. I mean, I remember nights when we would take baths together. That, plus ketamine and reading Rimbaud, she adds, detailing the ingredients of one memorable girl bath.
It sounds pretty idyllic, I say—maybe without the Special K. (I didn’t even know ketamine was big back then; junk was the drug that had hit the East Village hard. Heroin chic.) It was pretty fun, she says, smiling. Her room was on the top floor and had a latch with a ladder and a hatch leading up to the roof. A rooster lived next door. There was a big willow tree that grew into the hatch and the branches spilled down into her room. I kept it open all summer, she says. It would just rain down. All the weather came down on my drawing desk. I didn’t care.
Nicole showed some of her work to her pal Laurie Weeks, who showed it to her artist pal Nicola Tyson, a talented British painter who opened an art space exclusively for women called Trial Balloon. Tons of people had first shows there, Nicole says. I remember seeing Lutz Bacher’s work for the first time there. (Bacher, who died in 2013 after a 40-year career, was a cult-status conceptual artist who won an Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2002; her work is collected in major museums. Bacher was a pseudonym; she did not publicly disclose her former name.) Nicole’s own work, she recalls, was very out and very lesbian—declaratively that. I was working from an intuitive emotional space. I was still working through trauma from being closeted for so many years and being angry about that—pissed about feeling like I was shoved into this way of being….
Nicole came out to herself young but, she came out, came out, as she stresses, in college. I had a lot of pushback from my family. So, I think a lot of that work in the early 90s was really a response, not just to the culture at-large, and how we were sort of ignored and not seen, but also to more immediate family – my personal patriarchy.
Self-Portrait. Credit : Nicole Eisenman.
Around that time, Steiner was just landing in New York, having left Washington, D.C I had been there for Reagan and Bush, she recalls. Clinton had gotten elected. By the time I got here in June of ’93 it was Gay Pride or something like that, so my life instantaneously improved, she adds, laughing. A friend had invited her to live with him in a flat between Avenues B and C. He said, ‘don’t worry — just come.’ I had one bag and I moved into a tiny room. We were sharing a two-bedroom that was, like, 400 square feet. It was a city-subsidized apartment. The man they sublet from took their rent and didn’t pay the city and by 1994, they got evicted. No matter, Steiner says, because she’d already moved into Avenue D. There were like four of us in there, and then downstairs, there were probably, like, six or something people….
A gaggle of lesbians? I suggest.
The two laugh. There was a murder of lesbians, quips Nicole. A gaggle of crows of lesbians, Steiner jokes. It was also a creative gaggle. Their Avenue D house became Dyke Central, like so many households in the East Village did in that time, a pit stop on the way to more fun.
From there, Steiner says, I kept falling into things. I begged OUT for an internship, which then turned into a full-time job. Luckily, I had some work and was trying to make art.
Steiner-as-cultural provocateur in the 90s. Photo: A.L. Steiner archives.
In the early years at OUT, the vexing under-representation of lesbians on the cover and inside the magazine and in other LGBT (there was no Q until a year or two later) titles was a constant battle for us lesbians. OUT aimed to become a mainstream glossy, and largely succeeded. Thead money and the gay men who’d invested in the magazine were less interested in looking at women than super buff half-naked gay men. So we were told. They claimed lesbians didn’t drink. In those days, a lot of the ad money came from liquor, HIV pharma, and viaticals, the latter reflecting the dark days of the epidemic, when AIDS was killing so many young gay men. They were cashing out their life insurance policies, not sure they’d live long.
When I ask Steiner how it was for her as the photo editor, she exhales. In those four years, it was this struggle to create a world of mainstream lesbian visibility. I was 24 years old, working with James Conrad, who was incredible to work with. He was really supportive. I was still trying to figure out what representation actually meant and what it did. I learned a lot. Back then, she wanted to do Stonewall coming out portraits that heavily represented trans and female-identified bodies. She was trying to do photo essays. I was trying to think about ways that could break the systems of representation that we were kind of mired in, she explains. It was a battle.
Memo from God by Ridykeulous. Credit: Ridykeulous archives.
(END OF PART ONE — For PART TWO and the rest of the Ridykulous tale, links and more pictures, to the main Tell Me Everything substack. And please share! - AC
Nicole and AC, circa 1994, in the Bywater, New Orleans — a gaggle ‘o girls trip.
To learn more:
Nicole Eisenman – Hauser & Wirth (hauserwirth.com)
Nicole Eisenman Hides Nothing at the New Museum (culturedmag.com)
A.L. Steiner (hellomynameissteiner.com)
Thank God It's Not Abstract: A Ridykeulous Interview (hyperallergic.com)
Ridykeulous on the New World Disorder - Artforum International
Some upcoming fun to catch:
Ridykyeulous:
UK: Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos, Nottingham Contemporary, Sept 23, 2023-January 7, 2024
https://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/
Nicole Eisenman show:
Munich: Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, Museum Brandhorst, March 24-September 10, 2023 https://www.museum-brandhorst.de/en/exhibitions/nicole-eisenman/
A.L. Steiner:
Miami A.L. Steiner: Welcome To The Misanthropocene (Origins of Ecofeminism), on view in Miami Design District now through Spring 2023 https://waterproofmia.com/A-L-Steiner-Resources
Munich A.L. Steiner: Disaster Paradise, Deborah Schamoni Gallery, Dec 2, 2022-Jan 21, 2023 https://deborahschamoni.eu/exhibitions/a-l-steiner-2/ (I'll fwd you the announcement with PR statement - it's work from 2001)
Munich: Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, Museum Brandhorst, March 24-September 10, 2023 https://www.museum-brandhorst.de/en/exhibitions/nicole-eisenman/
Jo Andres obituary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/obituaries/jo-andres-dead.amp.html
Lutz Bacher obituary:
Lutz Bacher, Conceptual Artist Who Hid Much About Herself, Dies at 75 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)