United by humor, a love of drawing, and the recent loss of both their mothers, artists Bryan Zanisnik and Eric Winkler meet in a cafe to catch up and make comics. Zanisnik, who creates photographic tableaus, performance art pieces, and sculptures, tells Winkler about being sued by Philip Roth, his latest installations, and how he is dealing with the recent loss of his mother. Winkler turns his stories into comics.
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These conversations, as well as some of both artists’ work, are documented in a new video from Art21's New York Close Up series, which aims to document life and art in NYC. Zanisnik, who is playing with iconic images of New York, considers his current project, photographed outside the Queens Museum, to be a kind of “goodbye to New York.” In this project, he creates photographic sets and then makes holes in them so that New York monuments can be seen through them. The idea behind this, Zanisnik explains, is that “these places that are so much tied to the city or identified with the city are…almost becoming outside of our reach.”
In 2012, Zanisnik posed in one of his installations, reading a Philip Roth book. Roth then attempted to sue Zanisnik, which is the inspiration for his latest piece. He has purchased 550 Roth novels to create the “Philip Roth Presidential Library”. He also has a 3D printed bust of Roth. “Do you think he’s going to sue you again?” Winkler asks. “I’m hoping” says Zanisnik “don’t tell the gallery in Miami.”In the past seven years Zanisnik estimates that he has done around thirty performances with his parents. Additionally, Winkler has catalogued Zanisnik’s mother extensively in their comics. Last year, Zanisnik’s mother passed away from cancer. He feels that experiencing this loss has brought him closer to Winkler, who lost his mother to the same disease two years earlier. In their most recent cafe-chat-inspired comic, Winkler depicts Zanisnik entering another world in which he finds his mother standing on a doorstep and embraces her. Zanisnik says he thinks she would like being included in Winkler’s comics again.
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