This tongue-in-cheek installation suggests a tongue-lashing

If there’s a difference between audacious and smart-alecky I vote for the latter when it comes to the painting and sculpture of Nicole Eisenman.

“Fixed Crane,” her new work installed in New York’s Madison Square Park looks like debris from a construction site. And guess what? That’s exactly what it is - a toppled 55-year-old industrial crane with a few sculptural flourishes.

By way of explaining “Fixed Crane,” The New York Observer says it’s meant to “challenge traditional ideas about monumentality, serving as a stark reminder of human hubris ...” “Stark reminder”? I’d call it a smackdown for all of NY’s failed public artworks.

Just what the city needs, a monument to its mistakes. Talk about “human hubris,” who made Eisenman the monument police? The New York Observer, an obvious Eisenman devotee, praises her “irreverence when it comes to interacting with traditional canons.”

You may remember my less than enthusiastic take on Eisenman’s irreverence in a retrospective of her paintings last year at the White Chapel Gallery in London.

Most memorable was an image of a man in disheveled formalwear whose trousers are dropped to his knees exposing his lower anatomy – but in reverse – showing his buttocks. It looked like a cartoon.

Eisenman is considered a serious artist having won the coveted MacArthur Fellowship award in 2015 for bringing back the human figure that had been out of style during the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the last century.

You can find Eisenman’s sniggering paintings in MoMA or the Whitney Museum. Her work makes plain that she didn’t just bring the human form back, she stripped it bare to tell satiric stories.

For instance, if you’ve seen her “Tunnel of Love” at MoMA you’ll likely remember the outsized image of a boy staring down at female nudes coupling in amusement park boats heading toward the tunnel.

Given the scale of the boy, the women seem like Lilliputians in Jonathan Swift’s satire “Gulliver’s Travels.” MoMA quotes Eisenman talking about this painting saying, “I was painting against my education—against a man-made art world, the one I had learned about, with all its masters. I wanted to turn it upside down.”

But wait, Eisenman doesn’t want you to take her too seriously. In her words, “There is always a tongue firmly planted in the cheek of my paintings.” Might that also apply to “Fixed Crane”? Just how seriously should we take it?

Your guess is as good as mine. She told Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker art critic that her favorite artist is Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, whose artmaking is as serious as it gets.

Consider Mantegna’s version of the bloody Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes. He painted it without color as if to emphasize the coldness of the action. And by rendering Judith’s nurse bagging the severed head with her legs apart, as if bracing to receive the weight of it, Mantegna brings yhe action home in a visceral way.

But while Mantegna’s figure paintings have the look of carvings, the females in “Love Boat” look like worms. Even so, Eisenman has critics convinced that history is in her work.

Laura Cumming, critic for The Guardian, says: “Eisenman’s ability to absorb art history and recast it as her own is so prodigious that looking at her output over her 25-year career, you might not fathom it as the work of a single artist.”

I’m not seeing what Cumming sees. Everything in Eisenman’s work looks like a joke, and an unfriendly joke at that. Dumping a toppled crane in the name of art in a public park where it can’t be ignored, is not only a sign of hubris but also hostility.

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