This winter, visitors to Madison Square Park’s greensward were treated to a hunk of postindustrial kink. Artist Nicole Eisenman’s Fixed Crane is fixed, mobility-wise, but broken—a superannuated antique model that, if it weren’t gracing this snow-dappled ellipse in Manhattan, would be rotting in a boneyard. The forty-foot dinosaur rests on its side, lewdly displaying its undercarriage and treads, with its engine, gears, and hook tastefully scattered around the lawn. Smaller, fabricated sculptures—a goblet, a bandage, a giant red piercing—adorn its scaffold and enhance the corporeality of this rusty red odalisque. To the Parks Department’s credit, you can touch the crane—polite signage only asks that you not climb it—and the piece provides the thrill of seeing big rigs up close, feeling the girth of the cable, the teeth of the gears, the implacable gravity of the counterweight.
Eisenman’s lauded paintings bring fin-de-siècle verve to portraits of the Trump era, but she is not above locker-room humor. A figure in a parade-like sculptural group in 2019’s Whitney Biennial emitted puffs of smoke from its butt, perhaps invoking a controversy around a museum board vice chair’s tear gas company. Here, this long piece of equipment reclines within view of the Empire State Building and a gaggle of erections, including 262 Fifth Avenue, a much-maligned pencil tower topped (as of late January) by a yellow crane. Surrounded by bronzes of generals and statesmen, you also feel the insinuation of Manhattan’s bristling skyline as a phallic monument, which this limp crane fells with a dick joke.
Have a gap in your archive?