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It's Beyond My Control Merlin Carpenter Look What You Made Me Do by Josephine Pryde |
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George W. Bush, he's the President
Evil Nathan Barley, Channel 4, 2005
There were a lot of different things to look at in this show, including a performance at the opening. Look What You Made Me Do - the title functions as an immediate disclaimer. You could call it expropriation of agency or you could call it whining - whichever, it displaces responsibility from the artist's shoulders. In this sense, it could be said to draw attention to a set of contemporary conditions in art production, where it's noticeably hard to hold anyone responsible for their actions, in an enduring atmosphere of 'they're just doing their job', 'it's all dirty money' etc. But in the case of this title, the artist goes on the offensive and states a lack of responsibility from the outset. It doesn't entirely remove intention from proceedings, but it does disrupt the assumption that this is exactly what the artist meant to do. There are things in this show that connect such a disruption to other determining factors, but not in a causal relationship, exactly. It's more as if a set of statements that risk a close to dysfunctional relationship to each other are used to disrupt any too easy coupling of - just to take an example - art and politics.
I am going to mention the performance first, because it is actually a little difficult to get around it when thinking about the show. I went as a friend to the opening, the performance came as a surprise, and since Bergen is (still) a relatively remote outpost of the international art circuit, I have been given the task of reporting back to those who couldn't make it to experience the live event. There is probably going to be a photograph of it accompanying this article, so you can see from that what it looked like. In case you need me to spell it out, this was a performance that took as a template one of the internationally syndicated images of a hooded prisoner being tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It's the image that had always already seemed to me to most resemble a document of a piece of performance art from the early 1970s. It has been run, amongst other places, on the cover of the Economist magazine. It is also probably the least sexual of all the images of the often sexualised torture perpetrated during the control of Abu Ghraib by the occupying American military force in late 2003, images that were made public in early 2004. Whichever way you look at it, it remains a document of the extreme violence continuing within the state of exception that is the current so-called 'war on terror'.
There is a risk of corniness in such reference within an art exhibition to an image that is already so extremely iconic, like making a painstaking effort to demonstrate a relationship between something called art and something called reality by using such an obvious image. How did this performance reject such an interpretation and how did it combine with the rest of the show? With the kind of ambivalence that is part of the package when you also make Pop paintings or install ready-mades? What stops this work from being evaluated as no more than a backlash against the grip of political correctness, perhaps similar to the one that turned some liberals into neo-conservatives during the 1970s and 80s and still does on into the present day? And why doesn't Merlin Carpenter just hang up the paintings and be done with it?
The performance had not been formally announced. Carpenter asked six students from the art school in Bergen to execute it. They entered the main room of the exhibition after the opening had been going on for about an hour and stood on the three jet skis and three snowmobiles that were a permanent part of the show. A set of ready-mades ready-made for Norway. The 12 paintings in this room, as well as the huge inverted pentagram on the back wall, constructed out of one side of the exhibition poster, played their part too. The paintings lining the side walls had been hung very high, effectively leaving a gap for the performers to fit into between the jet skis and snowmobiles. The two grey landscape paintings on either side of the door were hung low, though, like brooding gatekeepers. A painting of Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath gazed out over the scene from the back of the room, and there was a blunt comment 'Not Very Interesting' outlined in white on one black painting. The paintings looked good, interesting or otherwise, steeped in an insouciance that may have been deceptive.
The performers wore hoods and blankets that had been dyed lovely shades of yellow, blue, red and green by the artist, all in different combinations. The range of colour on display reminded you of the didactic optimism perhaps associated with the fruit fresh colours of e.g. the panels of a Liam Gillick discussion platform for the British Home Office or an installation of lamps by Jorge Pardo. The well-trained crowd cleared its throat and fell silent, not knowing quite what to expect. The six figures assumed their positions on the skis and snowmobiles, facing the front, and held out their arms. The wires attached to their index fingers dangled towards the floor. After about five minutes, the spectators, who until then had remained largely silent, were encouraged by the curator, at the prompting of the artist, to mingle between the performers, which they obediently did. The decibel level began to rise again, children resumed their playing about, people took photos with their mobile phones, wine was quaffed, opinions and news exchanged. I was filming the event - which in retrospect gave me a supporting role as a torturer too (1). The performance ended after about 20 minutes and the students took off their hoods and got down from the vehicles.
On one level, in a direct way, this performance realised a picture in four dimensions that might once have been a task fulfilled by a type of painting - to provide a clear picture of these people - me, us, the enlightened producers, purveyors and consumers of art culture - chattering away at an art opening, while at the same time as this social event, torture is being committed against another group, one whose identity has been conveniently obliterated. Invoking the fantasy of a political theatre within the art context, this picture is able to imply that the actors within in it are linked to each other via a power relation. That the performers here were standing on a selection of real-life toys produced by the civilian leisure industry further makes a tangible link between the 'war on terror' and the nature of the freedom that it claims to be protecting, freedom as a kind of ownership of the means of consumption, perhaps. Or perhaps rather, to put it another way, the lie is given to the idea that what is happening in this picture could have anything to do with freedom at all.
There are also very clear references here to other performance art - Vanessa Beecroft most directly, because of the standing around of the performers. But the therapeutic basis that she uses to explain the endurance and high end image value of her work is swapped here for an apparently unambiguous comment along the lines of 'if it looks like torture, it probably is'. That the piece was performed by students connects not only to Beecroft, whose very first piece was realised with fellow art students in Milan, but also to an old friend and Cologne based associate of Carpenter's (and mine), Cosima von Bonin, who has worked with students of hers on performances and film. Bonin has said in the past that if she can be accused of using the students, then it doesn't mean that she doesn't want to be used herself, too. Maybe that is the invitation that Carpenter is responding to here.
But what about the paintings, and what does the heightened theatricality of the mise-en-scène that Carpenter used in this show do with them, or both against them and despite them? They have to enter into a kind of competition with both the fetishistic perfection of the ready-mades, and with the conceptual origami of the text and information in the poster and pentagram, as well as with the performance. They look likely to lose that competition on the level of immediate interest or impact or content-soaked importance for the eager reviewer. So they bring with them a sense of 'too little', and because they are painted in a way that might seem incomplete or perhaps a bit fast, perhaps with one touch only, both sloppy and sensitive, they also look like real art is supposed to. Incisive, intuitive. They don't look like commodities in the same way as the jet ski, does for example, and they aren't actually covered in stickers that say 'devour the competition' like the jet ski is. They exist as commodities that attempt to disguise that they exist as commodities by making themselves look like art. That's deconstruction in action for you. That's their special art status acknowledged. The 'not enough-ness' of a painting becomes legible next to the other things, and you realise just how little is needed for it to be art, in a way. So that should be enough for you, after all.
Well, I guess this may all have been said before by other writers, and probably better than I can do it. The next question is whether, if you are satisfied with that explanation, how and when does it become a problem? Can you mine the next level of the bottomless deposits of conceit that are required to make art at all and suggest something as a solution, even whilst knowing as much as you already do about the uses of failure? I ask the question, because I have the feeling that Merlin Carpenter is starting to really crank up in his work something that you could call a middlebrow aspect and that this may be something to do with attacking this problem. There is an office scene in this show of mind numbing genericism. A painting with Picabia's name and a big bulgy eye looks like a blow-up from a silk scarf. Plath-Paltrow brings with her a whiff of a real woman of achievement, of fresh sea air from across the Atlantic hitting the stale and fusty atmosphere of an ink stained Virginia Woolf cardigan. Plath's struggles with work and life are legendary. I'm about to be a bit hard on her, and I would also like to put on record before I am that it makes me baulk a bit when I suspect Merlin Carpenter might be having a go at feminism's promotional mechanisms. But the Plath-Paltrow portrait is also bolted onto the perpetuation of the image of the artist as irretrievably different, even while she is also part of a class that is most the same, limited, reduced, privileged. An artist, however sympathetic she remains to the work of other artists, can still ask the question - in whose interests is that image perpetuated? By whom? Who conforms to it, and why?
About three quarters of this exhibition comprised new work. The older work included in the first, smaller room was from the Children of the Projects exhibition that Carpenter made at American Fine Arts in 2002 and appeared clearly selected to re-situate some of the central problematics of the current show. In a review of that earlier exhibition for Texte zur Kunst (2), Gareth James made some very clear points on how he saw Carpenter dealing with the terms 'artist' and 'racist' in that work. Well, here, as a result of the performance he orchestrated, we also have him dealing with the terms 'artist', 'institution' and 'proto-fascist state torturer', compelled in some kind of hideous limping progress from generalised racism to the specifics of an act of torture in a state of war. (And, as James noted in his review, he's still dragging his friends into it - an image of mine from a catalogue and poster, for example, was cropped and stuck on the invitation card without my knowing it would appear. I was quite proud of that picture, and I can see why Merlin Carpenter might want to take it over - briefly, it seems to me, since I still think of it as mine too. What seems to happen through such appropriations is that he forces an establishment of an intellectual commons that must be artificial, because he has forced it. But maybe that is the trap that he is suggesting exists in the all too willing transparency of a concept like 'intellectual commons' anyway. Another name for intellectual commons could just be stealing from one another. His surreptitious appropriation of my image could simply legitimate itself as his revenge for something I had stolen from him, or it could also de-stabilise the terms 'criticism' and 'homage' by rendering them indistinguishable from one another through the aggression of the appropriation.)
On the poster for the show, in white on black, he reproduced an email he wrote turning down a show at Cabinet Gallery in London. At first, I found this reproduction a bit annoying, to be honest. I know from my own decisions about participation in exhibitions that a refusal can be more resistant to public inscription than an acceptance, and is likely to remain obscure. How do you make a point of refusing? It's like the other side of the coin to criticising through acceptance - also a tricky one. If I thought Carpenter risked making himself a bit self-important through insisting on publicising this friendly but declining email, well, I think this is probably a reflection of a crucial dynamic in his work anyway - that he might be working within such systems of recognition by asking for recognition of the systems' own impotence/paralysis/tendency to self-inflation at the same time. And then we also have to come back to the suggestion of dispossession of intent mentioned at the beginning of this review and his relinquishing of an over-loaded artistic agency. And also recall that the email was printed on the poster above the title Look What You Made Me Do - suggesting that we consider 'when is an option not an option', and why. The cutting of several of the posters into the form of the huge inverted pentagram could provide a clue here. The pentagram became a full-on realisation of the key provided on the other side of the poster, a key to a field of contemporary paralysing dread - corporate, artistic, governmental - the lot.
So, to finish off. I think Merlin Carpenter inserts his work into articulations - aiming at the gap opening up between, let's say, a pictorial and a conceptual definition of art. But he knows that he will not be accepting success as constituent to either of those definitions, because that would be to close down the gap again. On the one hand, using Pop avoids a moralising tendency and asserts ambivalency. The pictures depict the friendly face of capitalistic production - the products we love. The freedom they represent. On the other hand, as has been proved before, making such pictures risks relinquishing any critical possibility altogether. Add to this the contemporary retarding middlebrow influence of, for example, Luc Tuymans, and the perpetual need for art to be discussed as serious, and never degraded. A problem then develops, for those who are still interested, of an over-load of critical expectation being invested in the more elaborate but for all that subtle developments within what remains outside the pictorial, within what is defined as 'conceptual art'. On top of this, during the 90s, it seemed like the term conceptual art was splintering off and being applied to all sorts of different areas of art production. You could say, to 'relational aesthetics', for example. The over-load of critical expectation thus gained a larger, and more diverse, surface area across which to operate. With the pentagram he made from the poster and the colourful performance outfits, Carpenter takes on two examples of the developing fractions in conceptual art and juxtaposes them with his paintings and ready-mades, taking some of the weight off critical expectation in a gesture aided by such tough devices as the performance.
Thanks for help whilst writing this review to Stephan Dillemuth, Simon Ford, Isabelle Graw.
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Footnotes: (1): In his book Chain of Command, Seymour Hersh cites a New York Times interview with a man claiming to be one of the captives saying 'that his ordeal had been almost constantly recorded by cameras, which added to his humiliation.' (p. 38) In the same book, Hersh records testimony from a former Marine that at Guantánamo Bay, 'One pastime was to put hoods on the prisoners and "drive them around the camp in a Humvee, making turns so they didn't know where they were."'(p. 12). (2): Please Kill Me, Texte zur Kunst, September 2003 |
The show was at Bergen Kunsthall in March 2005
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| First published in German in Texte zur Kunst, No. 58, June 2005 |