Event/not Event
Merlin Carpenter at the Dépendance Gallery
Catherine Chevalier
Going with the press release, in a spirit of glam-chic, a black-and-white photo of a guy in a suit snorting a line of coke seems straight out of a fashion mag. The whole interest of the picture lies in the model’s blasé attitude, and in the underhand record of a slightly decadent moment during an elegant party. The photo could have been taken at any old posh party, in any old city, any time in the past couple of decades. Actually, it’s a rehash of a photo published in Hustler in the 1970s, for a party that was held where the New Museum now stands, according to the press release, whose title provides the show’s. The brand new New Museum, in New York, is the symbol of a novel trend in contemporary art museums, whereby the exhibition and the artwork are devised and presented merely as events. It is no coincidence that, for its opening in 2007, a New Museum campaign consisted in spattering paintings of Calvin Klein posters, showing the logo and the outline of its architecture. The museum literally does its advertising on the surface of the fashion image by simulating the subversive graffito gesture. It is also by way of the vague notion of event—read: news, waves—that the art press derives a new form of seduction and, in so doing, imitates the celebrity press.. The Artforum Diary in the Artforum magazine website refers to each and every exhibition simply through the prism of the event represented by the opening, performance or concert (discreetly mentioned on the invitation), or the lecture, round table, or “artist’s talk”, all of which, to a still greater degree, help to focus the readership’s attention on the invited artists and art world personalities –starting with gallery owners and collectors. Artworks themselves are rarely shown, photographs are almost invariably portraits of a person or group of people posing for the occasion (i.e. getting themselves into the Artforum Diary). At this juncture, we won’t go into the rhetoric that swaddles the New Museum’s programming: museum as Hub, the rhizome-like commission, rhetoric that borrows as much from the vocabularies of communications theory as from the neo-uses of Deleuzian concepts. This incorporation of the museum within the rhetoric of communications goes hand in hand with a reference to a frozen present, with no historicity. So the New Museum is based first and foremost on the idea of the “new”, used as a marketing strategy based on repetition (new York, new Museum) and on the notion of generation, repeated at will for the show “Younger than Jesus” held in 2008. Plenty of art centres are also laying claim to this quest for novelty, but the New Museum is developing it on a greater scale and on different levels, ranging from communications to programming, like some tautological theme.
The title “The Opening” is stamped on the invitation for the latest Merlin Carpenter exhibition at the Dépendance Gallery, based on a model of upstroke, cursive writing, coloured with a Sharpie, the way kids and teenagers might have done. On the back, Carpenter offers us an unexpected reference to Mathieu: a black-and-white photograph shows the entrance to the Charpentier Gallery. On a light on the left we see a poster of a Mathieu show in Paris, probably taken in September 1965, or thereabouts. At that time, Mathieu was a much-renowned painter both in France and abroad, where he had had lots of exhibitions, as well as kinds of European tours with stage performances, preceded by warm-ups, like a pop star 15 years ahead of his time. Mathieu is a painter who especially amused the Viennese Actionists when they were sitting at the first row during his spectacle in a Viennese theater. He had been one of the first to have anticipated, in the 1950s, the mediatization and personalization strategies of the figure of the artist, well before Dali and Warhol; and he had turned the act of painting into a spectacle. His idea was to paint monumental canvases in public, as fast as possible, with the greatest possible effect. In a posture of heroic conqueror, all irony apart, he painted a huge canvas for the Charpentier Gallery, Paris, Capitale Des Arts, to champion lyrical abstraction. It is worth noting that Sotheby’s auction house is currently installed in the premises of the erstwhile Charpentier Gallery, Sotheby’s being the contemporary symbol of art speculation, along with its rival, Christie’s.
By sending us these few messages in advance by way of the invitation, Carpenter intentionally sets down references in the promotional ebb and flow, with the intention of beginning to bring about an unusual situation therein. Usually, in each of the shows in the series titled “The Opening”, he arrives at the actual opening and paints quickly on stretchers prerpared with a white ground, already hung in the gallery. Each and every time, he also painstakingly prepares the surroundings to create a special atmosphere where the action of painting itself is presented as an event, but an event that is altogether unusual and off-the-cuff. It is on the media fringe of this specific social event that he temporally focuses the act of production and sociability. This is only possible if he distills precise clues on the invitation, in the spatial organization, and in the press release. The critic must henceforth sidestep two pitfalls. The first involves seeing therein just a direct form of resistance to the social determinism of the art world, i.e. the pressure wielded over the artist at the moment of the opening by the gallery owner/director, by collectors, but also, and more and more, by a system of mediatization which, previously, was more the prerogative of movie stars, and music and fashion celebrities, rather than artists. The second involves regarding one’s approach as a spectacular provocation addressed to the art world, whose hallmark would still be the insult painted in large lettering across a large white stretcher, like “Die collector scum” or “I hate you the art world you cunt”, or head-on criticisms of capitalism like “Banks are bad” and “Kunst = (art) Kapital”.
Let’s get back to what happened in the Dépendance Gallery, that June Saturday, at nightfall. The tension of the imminent event was produced, as we have gathered, by specific conditions: Stefan Tcherepnin, more or less impassive, was playing at the back of the gallery, focusing on a cello hooked up to an amplifier; on the walls, white stretchers all ready, perfectly stretched, waiting. During the opening, one of the gallery owners served the best Sekt instead of the worst champagne. On the table covered with a paper cloth, a rustic bunch of flowers and plastic champagne glasses. At a certain moment, when the sound level of the base notes was so loud that people were leaving, Carpenter loomed into view and painted on the large canvases with a big brush and colour pigments. Three self-referential things appeared, symbolic signs of the opening: martini glass, music, and the words: “The Opening”. On the first canvas he started by depicting a Martini glass with its olive, using a broad red stroke calling to mind all the party pictograms taken from image banks (and this has to be one of the most used images, with the champagne flute), and on the second, a musical note in blue. On the third, the words: “The Opening”, in a grubby green, were spread on the wall and spilled over it. The few canvases remaining untouched and virgin may be interpreted as a gesture of elegance in response to the polite fullness of galleries; it is also proof of the absence of premeditation in cahoots with the gallery owner. First thought: we are faced with the reality of an art show opening and its (almost) direct representation by the artist. Second thought: we experience this opening as an event because it encompasses the moment of its distance by representation. Third thought: the origin of the French word vernissage¸(for ‘opening’) refers to a pictorial gesture: applying paint to canvases. Reverting to this first accepted sense, Carpenter adds, by way of his own intervention, a third tautological level to both language and image—the level of action. Furthermore, he doesn’t give two hoots about the complete omission of the original sense with the self-advertising slogan that occurs in his website: “An opening where the paintings are painted during the opening.”
In a lengthy essay published in the catalogue for his show at Bleich Rossi in 2007, Carpenter revealed in a very personal way the moment of crisis that he was then going through. How is art still to be made? How is one to “carry on, after thwarting all the appropriation strategies”? This crisis calls to mind the challenge of the artistic posture of Kippenberger’s assistant. This excess came through once again—at his first show with Reena Spaulings when he turned the gallery owners into assistants. In the exhibition at the Bleich Rossi Gallery, Carpenter had raised the issue of the painter’s posture by depicting him through his work tool, the easel, reintroduced as an ultimate readymade. The painting deals with two major strategies: that of the “production machine” with the system of assistants and exponential production pace, and that of the gesture used, which suspends production in a paradoxical situation. Carpenter puts himself determinedly in this latter category in his quest for the ultimate conditions of art production. On one of the canvases in the Simon Lee Gallery, we even find the words “STOP ART”. But the position is definitely dialectic and we should not forget that Carpenter defines himself as a Marxist painter. How come his position is Marxist in the series The Opening? First and foremost fighting against the fetishism of the art object, but this is at work above all with paintings and it is hard to think that provocations prevent collectors from acquiring them—quite to the contrary. Either through a spirit of classical perversion, or through a meta-level (“It is the collector in general who is insulted and I am above [it]”). Next, by shifting work conditions from studio to gallery, Carpenter does, it is true, manage to demythologize the share of the artist’s hidden and mysterious work, with all these tricks, fantasies and excesses. Then, lastly, this recurrent concentration on the conditions for producing painting, a classic Marxist issue, which permeates his work, and is clearly at work here, too. In her last piece, Der grosse Preis, Isabelle Graw compares Merlin Carpenter to Andrea Fraser, both of whose strategies involve the artist’s body and image in an advanced and risky confrontation with the institution. Both also use words to develop their critical arguments, like an art critic. Here, with the sudden use of “I”, Carpenter finds his way into the press release text, whose first part referred to the artist in the third person singular by recounting what came to pass at his last exhibition in the Simon Lee Gallery. In the wake of the anti-G20 demonstrations in London, three young anarchists tried to cover these newly painted canvases with graffiti and the gallery owner called the cops. All of a sudden, the reality of an art opening became involved like a narrative in the framework of the press release and Carpenter interpreted therein what had come about, as well as the often aggressive reactions aroused by these exhibitions. He also makes fun of himself—and of the reader too, in passing—by reinserting himself at the end of the press release, because “it is starting to make me look like Adorno in ’68 so it’s a good thing that no one will find out about it as no one reads this far in press releases”. The purpose of this text is also to index the festive moment, to make it possible, just as it is an attempt to become the “organizer of a party” in everyone, already doomed to failure in spite of everything. In Brussels, this moment was probably a warmer and more joyous one than previous occasions, with effective and elegant literary and historical keys. To say that the exhibition was successful, in the case in point, only really has any sense if you were at the opening, one of the most social moments of the media machine. Otherwise you might just as well say that the show was a flop, and wavering between flop and success is not something cynical with Carpenter, far from it. Rather, it involves really appreciating what happens in that present moment by not dissociating it from the production of a pictorial object. This, sadly, becomes overlooked, because media memory is the memory of events that are thoroughly “under control” and circulating images which represent their formatted documentation (press pictures, snapshots in blogs, etc.), not intense phenomena of these specific social moments. The pictorial quality of Carpenter’s paintings can only be appreciated in the memory of the moment and the conditions of their making. Here, as in each of the exhibitions of The Opening, Carpenter creates the conditions of a more acute perception of the material conditions of pictorial production: quite simply, that of stretcher, canvas, and paint. For, in this brief suspended moment, the onlooker finds himself in a specific state awaiting an interruption, and his perception of everything going on turns out to be radically transformed thereby.
At the Dépendance Gallery, the tone suddenly seemed merrier and freer, less aggressive than in other events (especially the one in London)—because it also totally abandoned the chord of insult—with signs originating from the tautology about parties. The empty stretchers and the overspill on the wall also marked the impossible shift of this ensemble. Each one of these series is irremediably linked to the context peculiar to the gallery and its movement into other spaces would only make sense to demonstrate the impossibility of describing this moment. Perhaps, with these virgin canvases, it is a matter of leaving the mark of an impotent production, and impotent critique, and just its attempt? This would give us an even better understanding of the final evocation of those large galleries which are deemed to have refused this intervention in the press release. Unlike the grand traditions of in situ work, Carpenter modifies the preexisting spatial context and time-frame and thus clearly reminds us that the production of art depends more than ever on its relation to current methods of communicational logic. It was thought that these positions in production relations were presented principally on the surface of language, words, and pictures; with this series, Carpenter forces us to rethink a real temporal relation between the artist and the social, namely the community and, in a disillusioned way, parties. Because the material no longer represents the sole resource of the dialectic problematization of the work for the viewer, its relevance comes through in a tense and dialectic linkage with its context.
Whereas the swift transformation of art institutions due to market pressures tends to wind up the debate ushered in by institutional criticism, from Brian O’Doherty to Daniel Buren, by admitting as an accepted fact the circulation of exhibitions and works, Carpenter, quite to the contrary, re-sets the terms of a criticism of context and formats which determine the ways we perceive art, while at the same time suspending information flows. In this exhibition he precedes to a dilating and refragmenting of each of the moments of the opening and he gets us to understand that it may be possible for the artist to find a more perilous position, by wagering his own physical presence. All that thus remains to be done is to articulate the moments differently, and invent another syntax within a space which is just that of words and images, versus the factual, to make event, in the sense of an interruption.
Image Top : Exhibition invitation, 2009.
Image Bottom : The Opening : New Museum : 1, 2, 3, 4, 2009.
