From Our Archives: Eric Fischl
Art Fair: Her, 2016 © Eric Fischl
This interview was originally featured in Issue No. 15 — Place.
STEVE MILLER: So this is you, prowling with your camera?
ERIC FISCHL: This is me prowling...
STEVE: Do people know you’re doing it when you’re doing it?
ERIC: By now they do.
STEVE: Cause nobody seems like they’re noticing you.
ERIC: No, and I’m pretty quick with the camera.
Untitled (Man Leaning on Desk) © Eric Fischl
STEVE: Are you just snapping as quickly as you can snap, as much as possible, or are you composing?
ERIC: No, I’m just snapping. I’ve got no interest in the photograph whatsoever. All I’m looking at in this photo is this purply-pink banquette with her sitting on it.
STEVE: Looking at her cell phone.
ERIC: Yeah, looking at her cell phone. And I don’t even see the rest of it. In this one, I’m looking at these two people, and his hand on her shoulder, and I’m not seeing anything else around it. It’s ironic.
STEVE: Yeah well irony abounds in these works for sure. So your approach is pretty much...
ERIC: Pretty straightforward.
STEVE: Grab what you can.
ERIC: It’s got nothing to do with photography other than the simplicity of it capturing a moment. But I’m interested in the body language of people. I’m interested in their outfits, I’m interested in the black....
Left: Untitled. (collage), 2015 © Eric Fischl
STEVE: Obviously you were just thinking, like, nothing’s changed, right? The world conditions are the same. Are you thinking about political statements when you’re doing this?
ERIC: I’m thinking more about conditions, I guess. I don’t think it’s as judgmental as people at first think it is. What I’m thinking is that these are two realities that are present at the same time. They are profoundly conflicting emotionally. Neither one is a place you can tolerate living in for any length of time, yet both are present at this moment in time. The panel on the left reflects the ennui and inertia brought about by the privilege of disengagement. Choosing not to care. The objects that surround the people in this picture reflect the emptying out of what should have great meaning for us.
STEVE: So I guess the question is the art fair. It’s like the new phenomenon, right? It’s just changed everything, and it’s changed the way people do business. I don’t want to answer your question, so tell me – why did you go this way? What drew you to it?
ERIC: Well I think what drew me to it was first coming to terms with the transformation in the art world over the time that I’ve been in it. And from the 70s to now where it did move from an “art world” to an “art market.” And it is something I hate, and tried to reject, fight against, and ignore. But while I was writing my memoir, the publisher insisted that I focus as much on what happened in the art world from the 90s forward as I had focused on my life and career up to the 90’s.
STEVE: Do you collect photography?
ERIC: I have some, yeah.
STEVE: Did you acquire it because it’s friends’ work, trades, or you saw stuff that you said “I’ve gotta have that photograph”?
ERIC: It’s a combination. I have some photographs, like I have a Diane Arbus photograph because she’s somebody I greatly admire, and represents feelings that I share with her and her worldview. So it’s an example of that kind of thing. I have photographs like...a Bill Brandt photo that I used a figure from in a few of my paintings. I have many friends who are photographers and have bought or traded with them. I have a lot of Ralph Gibson photographs, Sally Gall, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Peter Paul Rubens, Erica Lennard, Jock Sturges, to name some. And I have some of Pierre Bonnard’s photographs, which I was thrilled to get. I didn’t even know he did photography.
Art Fair: The Cat’s Meow, 2015 © Eric Fischl
STEVE: Are they like the paintings, compositional?
ERIC: Well they’re more like snapshots of figures that show up later in his paintings. The revelation for me was that when you strip the color away from Bonnard, you get to a deeply anxious, maybe misanthropic vision of the world. His characters are so awkward and in some cases sort of sinister. And it’s like all these things that I never thought about with Bonnard when you just look at his paintings, ‘cause his color, his light, is just so celebratory and beautiful you don’t notice how uncomfortable he is in his flesh, and how angry he is in the world. I did a program about Bonnard for the BBC. They took me to his house in southern France, to a big show in Lausanne, and to Paris to meet his nephew. In the course of our conversation he offered me some of Bonnard’s photographs.
STEVE: Wow, so you’ve got a strong connection to photography.
ERIC: What photography does is capture life in such thin slices that everybody is off balance and everybody is in motion. In snapshot photography everybody is slumping, turning, twitching, closing an eye – doing something animated. And it is that animation which triggers narrative. You put somebody in a scene where they’re beginning to turn and you immediately wonder about why. Are they turning towards something, or away from something? If they’re turning towards, what is it that they’re turning towards? If they’re turning away, why are they turning away? You can just sort of take it from there. Is somebody turning to somebody who’s turning away? Are they both turning towards each other? Is one turning because somebody just left the room? Can you see the evidence of that? Is somebody turning because their dog just walked in? What is going on here? And so all of these are results of that kind of questioning. I start with a figure or two and then just begin to build a narrative. So my process is allowing myself to wander and to associate and to try to understand the feeling these images of people, these characters, are causing me to feel. Art is about trying to make sense of it all.
Art Fair: The Disconnect, 2015.© Eric Fischl
To view the full interview, visit Issue No. 15 — Place.
