An Artist of Our Time

Christopher Wool Damien Hirst Lucian Freud Bill Viola Mat Collishaw Jitish Kallat Live from Italy, It’s Artissima The Appendix: Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul H-O

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Contested meaning
Desperation. We don’t know what we’re doing. The collectors are still buying but the prices are down 30 percent and much less work is moving than before. Who will tell us what our lives mean now? Since 2007 Merlin Carpenter has been restaging in various international galleries an event he calls "The Opening," in which all the paintings for the show are done on the evening of the private view. His website illustrates each edition of "The Opening" in the same way: a photo of blank canvases in a gallery and then a photo of the canvases defaced with scrawled, sloppy black lettering, like joke Christopher Wools. They say things like DIE COLLECTOR SCUM, I HATE YOU ART WORLD CUNTS, I LIKE CHRIS WOOL, and FUCK.

The way the routine works is that the audience starts arriving at the usual private view hour, they see a gallery full of pristine blank surfaces (expensive linen canvas expertly primed), and they mill around for a long time and start to get restless and impatient, and at that point (after he’s been milling too) Carpenter gets a bucket of paint and starts daubing. It lasts for about 10 minutes. There’s usually something disobliging about the gallerist. At Reena Spaulings in New York one canvas read: RELAX IT'S ONLY ANOTHER CRAP REENA SPAULINGS SHOW.

Is it serious? Is it puerile attention-seeking? Or is it that, but with other dimensions, other depths? Which bit is the deep part? The latest edition was at the Simon Lee Gallery in London. The paintings there were priced at $40,000 each. The advance publicity featured a photo of Die collector scum from the Spaulings show, which sold at the 2007 Miami art fair on its opening day. Many others have entered collections. Buyers resist if there’s only a splash or a squiggly mark on the canvas, but so long as the words can be read, the works tend to sell.

As I write, it’s too early to know if the Simon Lee show will beat the credit crunch, but it doesn’t really matter: the institution of the vernissage has still been made into a site of contested meaning: value, performance, spectacle, and money. How does the meaning work, though? You can only ask more questions. Is Carpenter morally better than Lucian Freud, whose prices are manipulated by auction house scams? And if we were at one of these "Openings" would we be better people now because we’ve had the experience? And are his galleries, following the pretend-flagellation he puts them through, now purified and morally better than hedge-fund people? The issues are too silly to follow up on (the answer is "no" to all of the above, of course), even though somewhere they are actually operating, and he has kept them in focus, and they’re the right issues, and he hasn’t done it in a turgid way, as many agitprop artists certainly have in the past (with different issues that were also the right ones at that time). He does so many twists on self-consciousness and moralizing (and doing the right thing and being strategic and careful and going way over the edge but somehow staying firmly within a protected circle) that it’s tempting just to dismiss him, if only in order to forget about the problem.

Cheerful bollocks
What draws me in again is the utter rightness of his sneers, which I see confirmed like crazy in the new show at Haunch of Venison, called "Mythologies." This show is basically about art market swank, but it masquerades as something important and thoughtful. There is a huge list of players. It’s on a museumlike scale. Some of the artists (from every point of the globe) are big sellers, some medium, others new arrivals. The top names ratify the unknowns. Damien Hirst renders his diamond skull on an epic scale, a photographic image on canvas, with an addition of resin and glass. The aesthetic of this painting is something like the glossy look of a page in an auction catalogue, a philistine’s idea of luxury. Some appalling videos by Bill Viola show actors writhing and grimacing in slow motion to enact Viola’s idea of what it means for olden-days paintings of saints and so on to be emotionally moving. The actors are actually moving, geddit?

Haunch of Venison’s new premises are the former spaces of the Museum of Mankind, in Burlington House, where for decades fetish sculptures from exotic lands used to stand around. This history provides the taking-off point for "Mythologies." The catalogue says the show is concerned with "the stories we tell about the world in order to understand it." This cute little book’s mixture of tones — twee, hard sell, and worthy — goes with a distinct feeling that no one involved in its production has ever thought about anyone actually reading it. Not even the collectors, who of course only require their purchases to have had some verbiage generated about them, as a tedious but necessary rigmarole in the art-speculation business.

Everywhere in the show there is narrative and imagery, and appeals to a popular sentimental sense of "art." But at the same time a laid-on atmosphere of remote, learned, profound high-mindedness: quotes in fancy script high up on the wall from philosophers and magic-realist authors, and a catalogue full of lengthy, zombie-like references to the same kind of authorities. Photos of child soldiers in Africa with superb production values are disturbing in all the wrong ways — atrocity chic. Sculptures and paintings that look like voodoo dolls and conjure up looming Spanish Catholic atmospheres and looming Indian Hindu ones are fun and shallow and eminently buyable. A right old festival of clichés — where’s an art terrorist when you need one?

Intervention in ideology
Return to Merlin Carpenter. Painting the words BANKS ARE BAD or KUNST = KAPITAL on a canvas isn’t really raising issues about anything. It’s just being idiotic. Also at the Simon Lee event, you could watch Carpenter paint the words SIMON LEE UTTER SWINE, STOP ART, KUNST, CUNTS, and BEUYS IS A BAD BOY. It is tiresome, performative attention-seeking, done according to an easy formula. But on the other hand, how easy is it? It easily could go wrong, and he could lose his market (which of course he totally hasn’t, unless everyone has). You have to make insults work, just like anything else. One successful aspect of Carpenter’s act is clarity. Contrast is a key element. Black versus white, crap versus luxury. He is strategic and clever with his silliness and laziness and narcissism. It’s the other way around to the "Mythologies" show, where vacuousness is larded with arty gloss. That show asks, in a fakely innocent way, something like, Is being spiritual the way to go in a recession? And then it simply lays on some sampled global religiosity and cooked-up mythologies, whereas Carpenter makes genuine bitterness into the material for a theatrical version of politics.

He has been exhibiting for many years: His shows have featured real cars and speedboats, hand-done paintings of fashion models and ads (a lot of which use the episcope), plenty of scrappy flotsam and jetsam, and an endless stream of sarcastic slogans and titles. He exposes the artworld’s elitism, consumerism, racism, and general cheesiness. But you have to work hard to get past the initial impression — trendy anything-goes contemporary art — and see the broad social point in each case. And even then it is as if he feels a trendy look is simply inevitable, and the only thing to do, if you’re an artist and you have any politics, is to make sure the audience simply has to register some kind of broad political issue at some point while they’re getting decadent pleasure. If this sounds like not much, it is actually sort of something. You could ask if Guy Tillim’s photo series Portraits: Mai Mai militia in training, in "Mythologies" doesn’t force you to think of politics too. But the very superbness of the series, its high production values, keeps the politics remote. Carpenter obviously is thoughtful about production values, but his are all about attitudinized roughness or obvious junk, thoughtfully positioning the idiotic and the inept. You move from a declarative journalistic politics to a politics of personal intervention. Your own complicated head comes into the frame a bit more.

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.