Merlin Carpenter
The Opening: The Studio Visit Rehearsal Dinner Party Coffee
Galerie Mitterrand + Sanz / Zurich
on Friday 30th May 2008, 7-9 pm
show runs until 12th july
“I was a big baby with big artists” – Trudie Styler.
The Studio Visit Rehearsal Dinner Party Coffee is the fourth in a series of shows where Merlin Carpenter saves time, or in the English expression “kills two birds with one stone” by making his paintings at the opening. The first was at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, the second at Overduin and Kite in LA, and the third, organised by Galerie Christian Nagel, was located in The Corner fashion store and in a gigantic Mercedes-Benz showroom in Berlin, where the paintings were side-swiped from the window of a moving car. Corporate horror, corporate guilt: this showroom show was the last in a series of works featuring Mercedes-Benz products including the badly wrecked 90s limousine currently exhibited outdoors in Zodiac 3000 at the International Project Space in Birmingham, UK.
The “Action Painting” catalogue from the Beyeler Foundation is rubbish. Pollock was still composing, arranging, conservative. Today’s view of informel is about ideological recovery. There is NOTHING behind these contemporary reproductions/recontextualisations of 50s paintings, no discourse lurks within. No opening, no position, no critique. On the contrary what seems like an opening is just money and power. Nevertheless, just bodies and power are all there are, The feminist view has pointed the way out toward the necessary mediocrity: Gutai, Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, Kubota, Gunther Brüs, Janine Antoni, Shigara, Lee Krasner.
Zürich Spiders web drawn in BLACK SIENNA, The Black Parade, working with rich EMO screamo pillocks. Student grot. The idiotic show, gossip, chat, I know what you did after your bad taste opening dinner…. Party… damien skull…. Amazing… Hot artist performance…. The canvases arrive ready made. The artist steps off the plane. The champagne is uncorked, the wine is unscrewed. Seemingly no work goes into the making of the commodity in this easy kind of exhibition. But that is only partly true. Someone has to make the blank canvases. Before The Opening in LA in February 2008, the canvases had to be re-stretched at the last minute. A whole team of semi-legal Mexican workers lost half their weekend wrestling with still-wet toxic lead white paint-covered linen. More- and less- coerced working classes are also involved in the making of the timber, the stretcher bars, the staples and of course the linen, both at source and for the weaving in Belgium. Not to mention the transport of the canvases by low-paid marginalized artist types and technicians. So just as the painting stubbornly maintains its grasp on the collector's dollar, the object also maintains its compromised relation to exploitation and ecological damage. Raw materials are also commodities, containing surplus value. So even the idea of trying to show “the making of” the readymade - in this case a readymade painting – a process enacted in The Opening series of shows - already involves readymade commodities such as linen and paint. This project is only a metaphor in that sense.
Merlin Carpenter was born in 1967 in the UK, he lives and works in London. This exhibition will be his first one since the gallery opened in March 2007 and it is the third one with Edward Mitterrand (M-Project, Paris and Galerie Edward Mitterrand, Geneva).
Solo museum exhibitions have been organized by the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway in 2005 and the Secession, Vienna in 2000. Monographs of Carpenter’s work include Relax It's Only a Bad Cosima von Bonin Show, Galerie Bleich-Rossi, Vienna, 2007; Nueva Generación, Distrito 4, Madrid,2004, Militant, Christian Nagel Gallery, Cologne, 2002; and As a Painter I Call Myself the Estate of, Secession, Vienna, 2000.
------------------------------------------
Merlin Carpenter
Sounds of War
Galerie Edward Mitterrand, 2006
May 18th – July 15th, 2006
A new fundamentalism. A period of transition. Period Bleu.
Abstract paintings, neither abstract nor good. But no other compromises either. What ideology do you do when you don't know what to do? Write your name on a painting? Three paintings here are a critique of the show "Make Your Own Life" at the ICA Philadelphia, in which MC concurrently appears. Seemingly dumb abstracts are explained by supposedly intelligent texts painted on top. But they are being shown in the wrong place. A landscape as seen by a cow (or dog) in Switzerland in wartime. Sound piece. And some primitive sexual studies, wood sculptures and a carving of Bin Laden. Paint on a wood relief becomes its own truth, not the truth of representation, however mediatized. A self-defining description, circular self-understanding. A post-psychoanalytic relation to oneself - basis for a conflictual relation to society?
Undercutting through quality. Good is bad is good. Bad is good is bad. Capital needs to fail for the next cycle of primitive accumulation to begin. Failure - albeit via protest and critique - is the only creator of value. "It's bad being misunderstood but it's worse being understood." Faced with this simple and closed system, and when she herself is the artwork, the artist becomes a successful guru of failure.