Merlin Carpenter	Reviews of When Traktors Drain the Pool...

Merlin Carpenter at Magnani

A series of unusual deviations marked this intelligent show, Merlin Carpenter's first in London. As an introduction, two text paintings confronted you at the door. Carpenter's green canvas silhouetted "BECKS" in sans-serif type (an allusion to the beer company that sponsors a British art prize?). A somewhat more obscure black painting contributed to the show by another artist, Sarah Staton, spelled "Harvest" in florid script. Rounding the corner, you entered an oppressively over-hung installation of small gestural abstract paintings and still smaller image-filled drawings. Flimsy partitions divided up the gallery into claustrophobic rooms. The impression of a student show was completed by the sight of Carpenter's name on a grubby cardboard wall label toward the back of the space.

The paintings looked implausibly inept and derivative. Many works were congested with garish smears, splashes and congealed puddles of discordantly colored acrylic. Contrarily, the remainder resembled fumbling variations on monochrome painting. The densely linear black-and-white drawings were dogged accumulations of such imagery as fashion models, tractors, yachts and battling cyborgs - exercises in an adolescent, cyberpunk mode.

There was the momentary feeling that this graceless show was all a terrible mistake: the artist needed to go to grad school, the dealer should get out more. Yet clearly the inconsistencies and awkwardnesses were intentional. The paintings were by turns gorgeously sensual, slapdash, thoughtful and unresponsive. Made on transparent Lycra®, they were in a kind of pig-Polke style, exercising the master's idiom but making it obviously wrong. Too small to be heroic impostors, too earnest to be effectively ironic, they triggered a process of questioning long before one realized this might be their objective.

Carpenter's project seems the more exceptional for sustaining a painting discourse largely absent from London. Twenty years ago, or more, this discourse was redirected by the confident inventiveness of artists like Polke, David Salle and Martin Kippenberger, who indicated that an obligation to indeterminacy might loosen the grip of an overdetermined practice. Disenchanted by the preoccupation of most current painting, Carpenter returns to those examples and roots around for unpredictable ways out.

This show suggests that Carpenter practices painting as if it were a second language. He falters, stammers, falls back on grand anachronisms and speaks with a thick accent. It's a strangely compelling painting strategy for these times.

Mark Harris

Art in America, July 2001

Merlin Carpenter at Magnani

November 15 to December 23

Sigmar Polke at Anthony d'Offay Gallery

December 15 to February 24

The concluding paragraph of the press release for Merlin Carpenter's portentously titled exhibition 'When Traktors Drain the Pool, They Don't Consult the Frogs First' begins 'Things like cyberfarming and paint fetishism are plucked from the 2000 strobelight to displace the current consensus about art's role (eg in London)'. The parochial defensiveness revealed by that bracketed qualification, along with the Pseud's Corner absurdity of the choice (or invention) of subject matter, combines with a raft of grammatical oddities to tell us perhaps more than was ever intended about these works' genesis and function. The rickety maze of fibreboard on which they are mounted and the grubby cardboard name tag which identifies their creator both parody a second-year college exhibition. While this has the whiff of a nostalgic in-joke, it is at least appropriate in reflecting the work's mood of irresolution and, within the acutely self-regarding world it calls home, its fetishisation of risk.

All the paintings in the show are executed in acrylic and pastel on Lycra®. Due to the translucent quality of this support, the marks made on it sometimes appear to be suspended or floating, and the gallery wall behind it is often clearly discernible. Presumably this is intended as a metaphor for a practice stripped bare, as the bones of context and construction are allowed to show through the delicate skin of mere appearance. Most of the panels, none of which have titles, are thrift-store gestural abstractions. Green and purple, black and orange, they are modestly scaled and uniformly ugly. The weave of the Lycra® lends the paint a pixilated look when thinly-applied, and the childlike clarity of Carpenter's signature (judiciously, he elects to use his picturesque first name - hippy parents? - in preference to his workmanlike second) will appeal to logomaniacs, but ultimately it is futile to discuss these paintings in retinal terms, or even as differentiated statements of any kind. Rather, they constitute a homogeneously forgettable (albeit, as the artist would rather sweetly have it, 'truly meant') collection of gentle nudges towards the void.

In a discussion with Anthony Davies published in the catalogue to his exhibition at Secession, Vienna in March 2000, Carpenter elucidates the quasi-political role he believes such contrivance might play. Suspicious of readily marketable 'art ideas', he argues that the empty space to which his neo-formalist excursions lead implies a model of criticism in which the most plainly visible aspects of any given culture, or subculture, are precisely those we should look beyond. Even the trumpeted strategy of 'institutional critique', however adapted to resist co-option by that which it pushes against, is unlikely to form the umbrella under which genuinely oppositional activity occurs. For Carpenter, the power of painting is in the paradoxical combination of utter familiarity and continual doubt which it embodies. The disappointment of his own particular variant is that it seems condemned to chase its own tail, aiming for acid wit but managing only a bitter sarcasm. A selection of drawings collectively titled A Colloquium of Traktors, 2000, illuminates the press release's reference to'cyberfarming'. Marshalling all the graphic trickery of a comic strip illustrator, Carpenter forcibly introduces mechanised agriculture into the landscape of dystopian science fantasy. The mismatch within the work is mildly surreal and momentarily amusing, but the contrast between this series and the paintings only weakens the potential of each to destabilise meaning in a productive manner, bringing them within the relatively safe haven of opportunistic eclecticism.

While there are obvious visual similarities between some of Carpenter's work and much of Sigmar Polke's, what really links the two is an attitude (or should that be simply Attitude, containing as it does more than a dash of Punk?). Both have been concerned to adopt a confrontational posture and to attack the dominant culture through a sardonic reworking of established techniques. Polke has, of course, been around somewhat longer, having first exhibited in Dusseldorf in 1963 as part of the ironically-named 'Capitalist Realism' movement which he established with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (later Konrad Fischer), but he retains a likably irreverent persona. Unfortunately, the display of new, large-scale works on paper in this exhibition (incredibly, his first in London for more than 15 years) looks formulaic. Images of Robbie the Robot, mediaeval knights and the Power Rangers are rendered in enlarged Ben Day dots over broad but controlled abstractions, in which poured metallic and sprayed fluorescent inks are combined with areas of more subdued colour to form simple geometric patterns. The overall effect is what was once called post-modern: signifiers of mass culture are forced to share the same surface with others more suggestive of a supposedly hermetic (but in fact just arbitrary) avant-garde aesthetic. Neither are subjected to any analysis as such, the assignment of quality and value suspended indefinitely in an endless and amnesiac present. All well and good, except that by now it all feels (and certainly looks) rather late 20th Century. The tasteful framing does little to dispel an atmosphere of ossification.

More engaging by far than Polke's new works are an extensive selection of his sketchbooks and (shown in the form of projected slides) watercolours. The earliest of these date from 1963 and the most recent from 1984. Here ideas come and go at an astonishing rate, some pursued through variation after variation, others jotted down then apparently abandoned. In one series, a savage mythological carnival is conjured up with nothing more than ballpoint pen and gold paint. In another, an array of fantastic wheeled and flying vehicles thunder across Iand and hurtle through space (or actually over the page of an exercise book), while in a third, our man appears to reveal a twin weakness for both figure skaters and wrestlers. Of course the law of averages does suggest that something of interest is bound to crop up every so often in a selection this exhaustive and that it is thus not quite fair to compare them with a mere ten new works, but all the virtues stereotypically assigned to rapid or preparatory drawing - unselfconsciousness, energy, accessibility, and even purity of a kind - really do adhere to these particular examples. Like Carpenter's paintings, they may contain in-jokes and even communicate cynicism or despair. The difference is that what they point to is never a dead end, but rather a turn of the page.

Michael Wilson

Art Monthly, February 2001

Merlin Carpenter at Magnani

The moves deemed necessary to enjoy career success in the British art world are becoming increasingly restricted to badges of triumph within an overwhelmingly competitive system. Beck's, the beer company that, as an ubiquitous sponsor, entered into a symbiotic relationship with British art some years ago, recently inaugurated the Beck's Futures prize. Aimed at artists with growing reputations, it has provided a useful staging post between the up-and-comer status conferred by an appearance in the annual New Contemporaries exhibition and the reputation-confirming imprimatur of a Turner Prize nomination.

Those who manage not to be seduced by the system's largely empty promise of riches often choose to leave the country as soon as they have graduated from art school, returning only after they have regained a little sanity and breadth of purpose. Merlin Carpenter was one such, taking himself off to Cologne at the beginning of the '90s to work in Martin Kippenberger's studio. Since then he has moved back and forth, periodically provoking the London art world with a variety of prods and gibes and always refusing to display the qualities that go down best in the city. Where sensible, ironic, and professional are called for, Carpenter prefers serious, critical, and committed. Also funny.

This time he took us back to art school , site of the earliest skirmishes in the battle for artistic recognition. Carpenter made his intentions clear from the outset, the first painting inside the door being a large version of the Beck's logo (all works untitled, 2000). Dividing the rooms up with makeshift chipboard walls, he turned the gallery into a warren of spaces reminiscent of college art studios tarted up for the degree show. There was even a Letraset name tag on the wall, peeling away as they do in those situations because they're only stuck on with double-sided tape. Somehow you just knew this was the very one Carpenter perversely saved from his own degree show all those years ago. All but one of the spaces were filled with paintings done on Lycra, the translucent material letting the stretcher ghost through from behind the surface. Ludicrously and preciously contemporary, these works nonetheless offered the consolation of a traditional debate between painting-as-object and painting-as-illusion. More or less abstract, the paintings were executed in a range of styles, allowing the viewer, should he or she so wish, to conjure up a list of references to the must-have influences of the day. Along with all these canvases, the central space was devoted to a series of obsessively nerdy cyberpunk drawings. Hosts of trucks, tanks, tractors, 4x4s, and other motorized vehicles, customized according to a kind of RoboCop-inflected trash aesthetic, moved through a sketchily suggested future world. The reference Carpenter offered in the accompanying handout was "Neuromancer"- not the William Gibson novel but the Billy Idol song of the same name.

Everyone is excitedly telling us that painting is back. It's the fashion thing: Wait long enough and it all comes round again. Carpenter's paintings and drawings set up a wry counterpoint both to the persistent authority these disciplines enjoy, and to the wide-eyed enthusiasm with which they are being reinvigorated and earnestly discussed.

Michael Archer

Artforum, February 2001

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