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HOLY TERROR
ON MERLIN
CARPENTER AT SIMON LEE GALLERY, LONDON
BY MIKE SPERLINGER
"In the rich man's house", Diogenes of Sinope is reputed
to have said, "there is no place to spit but in his face."
History's original Cynic might have found himself at home at
the opening of "The Opening" at Simon Lee Gallery,
confronted with the sight of Merlin Carpenter daubing a blank
canvas with the legend: "Simon Lee utter swine".
The exhibition is the fifth in a series of shows by Carpenter
in which the paintings are produced during the private view
although in the press release, Carpenter leaves open the hypothetical
possibility that the canvases might simply remain blank ("If
the works are painted "). Carpenter left it late on this
occasion, allowing some of the audience to drift away and the
ice-sculpted platter for finger food to melt a little, before
painting the eleven canvases in the course of a couple of minutes,
trailing a cloud of sweaty spectators. Most of the resulting
paintings took the form of slogans alongside the swinish
assessment of his host, others read "CUNTS", "Bad
BEUYS", "KUNST", "STOP ART", "BANKS
ARE BAD", "KUNST= Kapital", "Beuys BADBOI"
and "DESTROY NEO LIBERAL". The only exceptions were
a delicate Ab-Ex splash and a Beuys-like black cross. From accounts
of previous instalments in the series it appears Carpenter's
work has entered a more classical phase none of the paintings
ran onto the wall space, as was the case at Overduin and Kite
in Los Angeles last year, nor was there the coup of painting
them from a moving car, as at the Christian Nagel-organised Mercedes
Benz showroom event in Berlin in May 2008.
Carpenter's current cycle is exemplary in its reductiveness:
he is an outrider of idealistic cynicism, the lone horseman of
an adolescent apocalypse (the press release talks of the current
"depression" leading towards "starvation and Mad
Max"). Cynicism is the very real stake to which Carpenter
has tied himself and, with commendable crassness, his work marks
out the limits of self-criticism in the art world, corroding
the difference between being undeceived and being disillusioned.
Peter Sloterdijk defined distinctively modern cynicism as "enlightened
false consciousness", a kind of ironic impotence. How we
judge an art of cynicism might depend whether we stress the irony
or the impotence. Even if we wish to recuperate cynicism, however,
the irreducible risk remains: like all forms of irony it constantly
trumps critical judgment by retreating to another level of reflexivity
the commercial exploitation of these paintings, for example,
becomes a self-conscious part of their anti-heroic posture. In
the press release Carpenter writes that if capitalism is able
to repurpose all criticism to improve itself, "better to
go on art strike, wander into your own show, outraged ... ready
to vandalise and destroy". But of course, "The Opening"
is no "art strike" the putative possibility of
non-performance is a tease. And what is being destroyed? The
pristine canvases? Carpenter's practice and/or career? Or, in
full apocalyptic mode, the possibility of art per se? Is Carpenter
a Samson, bringing down the temple bathetically on all our heads?
Another way to understand "The Opening" is as an act
of withholding, like a parody of those placeholder pieces Adrian
Piper made in the 1970s which declared that "the work originally
intended for this space has been withdrawn" in the face
of general conditions of "repression, racism, hypo-crisy
and murder". [1] The show's graffiti-style slogans solicit
our embarrassment, however, rather than our solidarity. In his
recent writing, Carpenter suggests a strategic scrupulousness
verging on the paranoic in the face of possible recuperation;
if capitalists are on standby to monetise even critical insights
then like Diogenes, who famously defaced the currency
he proposes dealing in bad coin: "Instead of critiquing
market formations in advanced capitalism and feeding this data
as information to the art world, better to feed the art world
to the art world." [2] Beuys's utopian creativity is reconstituted
only for the purposes of historical gavage, on which we are invited
to gag. As if haunted by the spectre of Lee Lozano, the painter
whose intransigent withdrawal from the art world in the 1970s
only fed the speculative hunger for her work when it was recently
"rediscovered", Carpenter tries to head-off cooption
by offering, instead of protest, only a perfunctory and ironic
pantomime of protest's impossibility. In this, he perhaps goes
beyond cynicism and into a kind of literal nihilism something
akin to the late Keith Arnatt's 1970 piece "Is It Possible
for Me to Do Nothing as My Contribution to This Exhibition"
(1970). Arnatt's work was a witty, genteel text parsing the paradoxes
of proffering nothing: any "contribution", however
nugatory, is already a something. Carpenter's "Opening"
series, on the other hand, is a vicious circle in which satire
performs its own failure and (presumably) profits from it.
"The Opening" paints its audience into a corner. Its
tautologies mean response is pre-programmed and by engaging with
it at all whether as audience, critics or chattering classes
we enter a fatal complicity in which we can only (moralistically)
denounce or (cynically) applaud the gesture. Any insight comes
courtesy of the absurdity of this dilemma, which is authentic,
rather than the terms of the dilemma itself. There are, of course,
other aspects of complicity. Carpenter has written: "If
you criticised your friends you would be implicated. Self-criticism
then maybe starts with your friends."[3]_ Merlin is a friend,
and I would suggest that "The Opening" represents the
wrong cul-de-sac. There is undoubtedly a virtuoso perversity
in holding to the terms of a complex critique, as evinced in
Carpenter's writing, by exhibiting anti-market commodities in
a Mayfair gallery. But I would suggest that "bad coin"
practices ultimately rely on a kind of occult vanguard optimism,
a belief in the good coin which is withheld, coupled with an
overestimation of the importance of intention.
Carpenter remains a holy terror to an art world which prefers
the more innocent cynicism of careers based on Kunsthalle-funded
critique: a conspiracy of good faith. "The Opening",
by contrast, offers with unsettling directness the impossibility
of deciding on whom the joke is, and for this we may be grateful.
There is something preferable in bad jokes, perhaps because they
remind us how priggish all good jokes are. In this case, however,
even if it is not clear who has the last laugh, there is no doubting
that all this laughter is very late.
Merlin Carpenter, "The Opening", Simon
Lee Gallery, London, April 1 April 25, 2009.
NOTES
[1]
From Adrian Piper's work "Context No. 8": "Written
Information Voluntarily Supplied to Me During the Period of April
30 to May 30, 1970" (1970).
[2]
From Carpenter's essay "The Tail That
Wags The Dog", available on his website: merlincarpenter.com..
[3]
From "The Tail That Wags The Dog".
TEXTE
ZUR KUNST, ISSUE NR.
74 / JUNE 2009, p. 119
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