The Painter of Mediated Life: Judith Eisler

As a painter, I am very concerned about my chosen medium’s position in contemporary art. I often think about the effects of translation when using the internet, photographic and filmic imagery for my paintings. I’m equally interested how ideologies are constructed around an environment saturated with technologic mediation. It’s for these reasons that I find New York artist Judith Eisler’s photo-realistic paintings based on film especially meaningful. Eisler’s filmic paintings contribute to the post-modern movement of Photo-Realism and how it renegotiates the relationship between painting and the mechanical eye. Her cinematic photo-realism becomes a reconstruction of her identity, taste and desire. In doing this she’s both a product and a depicter of our zeitgeist, where the most potent visual information is experienced through simulation. Since the nineteenth century invention of photography pushed painting into Modernism, the two mediums have had a reactionary relationship. Two early Modernist painting efforts, Impressionism and Futurism, strongly relate to the work of Judith Eisler. Whether it was the artist’s attempt to capture light or the rapid movement of urban life, paramount was the desire to immortalize fleetingness into a fixed medium. Film, made up of light and movement, was also the closest approximation of life in real time. Wielding a remote control, Judith Eisler halts the progression of the film, the simulation of life, snapping a photo to take back to her studio. But as if stopping time came with consequences, the film image is fragmented from the full narrative and blurred by the television light. A further distortion is shown in Eisler’s oil painting Linda Manz (2009) where the upper forth of the composition is obscured by a horizontal streak unique to VCR pausing. (Fig. 1) This shows that when film, a medium reliant on the passage of time, is made static by Eisler also produces static from the technology.






Fig. 1 Judith Eisler, oil on canvas, 30x42 inches. Linda Manz (2009) Judith Eisler Homepage. March 26, 2010.




Photo-Realism’s beginnings were similar to the paintings shift to Modernism in that it was reactionary. Pop Art and Capitalist Realism reacted to the sudden increase of advertisement’s scale and sophistication. The Post-WWII prosperity in the US brought many new products to the market in massive quantities from large scale factory production. To sell all these new goods in America, the newly available Freudian psychology was applied to ads, where practicality was replaced by products as vessels of consumer’s selfish desires and primitive emotions. (Curtis) Capitalist Realism was unique as its inventors had personal experience with even darker forces of propaganda. Gerhardt Richter was born into Nazi Germany, who, like is younger associate Sigmar Polke, later had to escape from Soviet occupied East Germany. (Honour 880, 882) In his painting series October 18, 1977 (1988) Richter metaphors his own suspicion of both the States official story and the dogma of the Red Army Faction, in that “…just as painting and photography were making competing demands from within the same object, so ideology’s claims were unresolvable.” (Hopkins 216)

Judith Eisler’s work is heavily influenced by Richter but also has her own reactionary relationship to technological innovation in her time, at a high point of television’s influence. The movies Network (1976) and Videodrome (1983) made some direct and allegorical critiques of television’s mind control over the isolated masses while Noam Chomsky provided the theoretic framework in his influential book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Referencing this, Eisler’s painting Nikki Brand (2007) alludes to the critique where, in its own echoing simulacrum, Debbie Harry aka Blondie plays the role of Nikki Brand in Videodrome (1983). (Fig. 2) In the movie, the psychiatrist Nikki Brand criticizes TV over-stimulation and then plays muse to the hallucinations of James Woods character. (Videodrome) She encourages him in both the scene where he’s sucked into a sexualized television and the ending where, in a weird doubling of the character’s suicide, he first watches it on TV before mimicking it. (Videodrome) The video cassette, which became widely accessible in the late 70s, and television are crucial elements in the movie, just as they are in Eisler’s artistic practice.

Fig. 2 Judith Eisler, oil on canvas, 58x76 inches. Nikki Brand (2007) Judith Eisler Homepage. March 26, 2010.


Also in the late seventies, Rosalind Krauss and other contributors to the arts journal October started to apply semiotic language to photography. (Hopkins 208) It would be heralded as an indexical sign, directly using imprints of reality, as opposed to the iconic sign of “…the painterly mark”. (208, 209) Photo-Realists like Richter and Eisler contradict these distinctions, as they mimic a camera by using techniques of extreme accuracy, whether slide projection for Richter, or grid transfer for Eisler. They “…take banal photographs and transmute them into something quite different… their indexical relationship to that photograph (has) a whiff of ‘the real.’” (Godfrey 253) Here, the painter is a mediator “…whose ‘performance’ – the mastery of the narrative code – may possibly be admired by never his ‘genius’. (Barthes 97)

Another change in the perception of photography was the re-photography from Douglas Crimp’s Picture’s Generation. Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans (1981) shows how the photo could displace authorship while deceiving the viewer with the medium’s transparency. (212) Eisler’s could be a better enacting of decentralized authorship, considering the longer line of translation: from acted scene, to film to VHS video to television to photo and finally to painting. Testament to Barthes’s “…birth of the viewer” for “…the death of the author”, each mediator, although the same image, has its own context, meaning, and behavior associated with it. (Barthes 100) Furthermore, in terms of transparency, Eisler painting surfaces have no obvious qualities of paint as the texture is smooth and glossy like a photo. But visual information is blurred, in grayscale or processed colour, and cropped, showing the opaque qualities of photography. Photo-realism renegotiates the critique as painting playacts an indexical role, while the mechanical eye is malfunctioning.

The Painting of Modern Life was a 2007 London exhibition at Hayward Gallery where Judith Eisler was grouped with all major Photo-Realists over the last 40 years including Vija Celmins, Malcom Morley, and Richard Hamilton. The title of the exhibition refers to Charles Baudelaire’s essay The Painter of Modern Life”(1863) where “…the poet called for a shift in subject matter …away from the grand themes of myth and history, and towards the everyday activities of urban life.” (Foster) Baudelaire does not suggest using photography for this purpose because he “…remained suspicious of the new medium.” (Foster) Also, the text was fifteen years before the first successful use of quick shutter speed to capture movement, Eadweard Muybridge’s Galloping Horse (1878). (Honour 684) In this new exhibition the Photo-Realists centralized photography but only in the subservient role of a tool. This somewhat explains why Tony Godfrey found his photography students to hate the show, exclaiming that the paintings were "…a rip-off, theft even of the photographs!" (Godfrey 151) It’s an odd accusation from a mechanically reproducible medium, but in Eisler’s case, originality is very difficult to place. The real world events she depicts are in fact simulations: acted scenes of a movie or on stage rock star posturing. Since representational paintings usually depict life, they mistake “…signs of the real for the real itself”, a hyperreality. (Baudrillard 170)

Judith Eisler’s work in the gallery hung next to Johannes Kahrs’ two panel piece La Révolution Permanente (2000). (Fig. 3) They both work from photographs taken of a television playing movies, giving their images a special glow. Eisler and Kahrs could be seen as the next generation of Photo-Realist painters, instead using a time-based photographic subject. It complicates Photo-Realism because in the repetition the resource image skips a beat into a medium that is forever fixed. Since it was originally reliant on film to make sense, as information is revealed over time, the film still is especially inarticulate. But they’re replacing the experiential nature of film with paintings traditional aura and ritualistic consumption under the cult of beauty. (Benjamin 223, 224) If they ease into suspending their disbelief for illusionistic painting, viewers are trapped into a series of simulated lies, through many layers of mediators.

Fig. 3 Johannes Kahrs, oil on canvas, 76x106 inches La Révolution Permanente (2000) Johannes Kahrs: Contemporary Artists. March 26, 2010.


Eisler’s painting in the show Smoker (2003) was based on the second film by director Nagisa Oshima Cruel Story of Youth (1960). A kind of Japanese Rebel without a Cause (1955), it shows beautiful abject youth acting out mythic coolness. Just as another painting based on the thematically similar movie Dogs In Space (1986), the painting contains another layer of simulacra, this time in content, because “…what we view in the cinema is already a totally simulated reality where the humans conform to stereotypes …coded in the eclectic mixtures of movie genres and period styles.” (Newman 82)

Fig. 4 Judith Eisler, oil on canvas, 58x70 inches, Smoker (Cruel Story of Youth) (2003) The Painting of Modern Life, Hayward Gallery. March 26, 2010.

Smoker (2003) contains elements that relate to historic photography and advertisement, particularly in the way such mediated information affects real life behavior. The half-parted female lips, shows a sexy pose popular today which only exists because of photography. As some of the first photos were nude women, these early attempts at pornography depicted female figures standing awkwardly in utilitarian fashion. (Varma) The pornographic feminine sexuality was developed over time as real women learnt these new body gestures for the camera. (Varma) As if to further fetishize the glossy red lips, she’s smoking a cigarette. The Freudian connotations of this image are all too relevant when considering that it was Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays who deliberately popularized smoking to women. In the 1920s, his “Torches of Freedom” campaign had suffragette reminiscent women light up during a well publicized stunt. (Curtis) By connecting women smoking to women’s lib, Bernays aka The Father of Public Relations, single-handedly overturned the taboo against women smoking. (Curtis) Since then, women smoking cigarettes has been promoted extensively in film as advertising ploys to “…influence young girl’s attitudes towards the habit.” (Escamilla 412) Real identities of young impressionable viewers are replaced by manufactured roles. This shows the way Eisler’s content can displace authorship, truth and the real.
As seen with her attraction to using films that voyeur young outsiders and pop rock stars, it appears Eisler uses these images more subjectively, creating a fragmented self-portrait. The films used for the paintings are from the sixties to mid-eighties which roughly parallels Eisler’s birth in 1962 into her early twenties. Now older, it’s as if she uses the filmic archive to reconstruct identity, tastes and desires. But her voice and the content she expresses are limited to pre-existing cinematic tropes, in some ways similar to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills which began in 1977. Eisler chronicles herself as a product of a generation raised on television, where everything learnt and internalized was emitted from the tube.

Judith Eisler applied the methodology of Photo-Realism to technology she grew up with, choosing content that showed aspects of her ideological make-up. She also has evolved beyond VCR and television, two dying technologies, in a small series based on Johnny Thunders. Deriving several images from the more contemporary phenomena of the internet, she showed several colour distortions produced by converting You Tube videos. This shows the potential associations Photo-Realism can make with newer technology. Eisler takes up the discourse between photography and painting and expands it to film, making the issue of time part of the discourse. A painter of mediated life, Judith Eisler is all too relevant in the contemporary atmosphere. The desire to capture fleetingness within a fixed medium makes reference to the mood at the birth of Modernist painting. But the displacement of authorship, originality, truth, and the real are all relatively new issues to explore in painting. This pressure on the expectations and definitions of the medium gives painters some breathing room and space to move forward.

Work Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” Auteurs and Authorship. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 97-100.
Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations” Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings. 2nd Edition. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford University Press, 2001. 169-187.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217-251.
Curtis, Adam. The Century of The Self, Part One: Happiness Machines. Dir. Adam Curtis. BBC Four, United Kingdom. 2002.
Escamilla G. and A. L. Cradock. “Women and Smoking in Hollywood Movies: A Content Analysis.” American Journal of Public Health. vol. 90 No. 3. March 2000. 412-414.
Foster, Hal. "At the Hayward." London Review of Books 29.21 (2007): 16. 15 Mar. 2010 .
Godfrey, Tony. “The Painting of Modern Life”. Photography & Culture vol. 1 no. 2 November 2008: 251-253.
Honour, Hugh and John Fleming. The Visual Arts: A History. 7th edition. Ed. Sarah Touborg. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc., 2005.
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art 1945-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Newman, Michael. “Simulacra” Appropriation. Ed. David Evans. London: MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2009. 82.
Varma, Dev. “The Mechanical Eye: The Photograph.” Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization. Dir. Dev Varma. Channel Four Television, Great Britain, 2006.
Videodrome. Writ. / Dir. David Cronenberg. Prod. Claude Héroux. Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1983.