Contradiction but not necessarily terminal
His website reveals how protected and precious his existence is. A short review of a show at American Fine Art in 2003 ("Children of the Projects," in The New York Times) unhiply wonders who he’s supposed to be mocking, while an immensely long one of the same show by one of Carpenter’s friends, in Texte Zur Kunst, mocks the New York Times review and relates Carpenter’s great mind to the author and political activist Jean Genet. A fawning review in Artforum of another show at a gallery in Austria (written by Isabel Graw, editor of Texte zur Kunst and Carpenter’s onetime girlfriend) says that Carpenter always "goes against conventional practices and value judgments." I think this is true, but only in a complicated way. He’s made himself the scourge of the art system, but he’s also its entertainer, and he’s a hustler with something to sell in an established competitive market. The political effect is far from the factory workers in France in 1968 making the bosses tremble. On the website you don’t see very many of Carpenter’s sub-Liz Peyton portraits of desirable-looking young people, but nevertheless he seems to do a lot of them, sloppy paint and minimal effort countered by an artful sense of painterly freshness. (An example illustrated in a catalogue on the reception desk at Simon Lee is titled Gareth, which is the Christian first name of one of his worshipful reviewers, Gareth James.) He’s a funny distortion of 1789 as well as 1968; he lacerates collector scum but gives them plenty of cake.

Matthew Collings is Modern Painters’ London-based contributing editor.

"An Artist of Our Time" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' Summer 2009 Table of Contents.