by Gareth James

"Children of the Projects"

Merlin Carpenter at American Fine Arts, Co., New York

Young children, apparently from the housing projects of the South Bronx, and apparently underprivileged, populate the paintings in Merlin Carpenter's latest exhibition, Children of the Projects. Some are posed against a drab brick wall in the manner familiar from social documentarian photography. Others are portrayed immersed in some event of their own making, candidly snap-shot, perhaps kneeling at the side of a muddy puddle hoping in vain for the smallest narcissistic reflection while discarded needles and bottles lie in wait for a misplaced hand. Others still, strike an absurdist note; three children congregate to respectfully consider a clownishly over-sized pair of sneakers sported by one of them; a gangsta-styled snowman intimidates a night-time scene; sheep begin to appear; a young boy is viciously beaten by other kids, a kick about to descend upon his neck resplendent in an Elizabethan ruff.

Perhaps with a little knowledge about Carpenter's previous work, as well as about the conventions of picturing mediated through a century of photography's voracious tourism and art's capacity for self reflexive practice, Ken Johnson's review for the New York Times declared with certainty that the exhibition was an elaborate joke, while admitting (honestly enough) that it was unclear exactly what or who was the object of the joke (1). A strange kind of certainty. To détourn a familiar phrase; I don't know much about art but I know what I don't know. This is art criticism as fox hunting: a bunch of complacent over privileged fat bastards (there's always more than one or it doesn't work) hanging around on high horses waiting for the cry: Tally Ho! The game's afoot etc! The ruse has been spotted, now for the chase. The point of the fox hunt, adherents complain when their pastime comes under attack, is not the kill, but the sport of the chase. So too for cultural relativism: the point is not that art should finally mean anything, especially not if it should make any unreasonable claims, but that it is a beautiful shimmering endless cascade of meaning. I could illustrate this by ooh-ing and ahh-ing about how etymologically, Soho in London derives from a French hunting call, and since in New York there's also a SoHo and how THAT WAS the center of the art world and so on, but you'd probably stop reading.

Children of the Projects, far from being a pleasant country estate of semiotically rich copses and gullies, is a vicious snare designed to bite the Fox hunters right in their own idle pleasures. If the exhibition is a joke, and given that Carpenter is a relatively privileged white artist, and the majority of his 'subjects' are little poor black, brown, yellow and off-white kids, it would not be unreasonable to, at the very least speculate if not conclude, that it is a racist joke. That this possibility is not made available for consideration in the review despite its supposed ludic repleteness (eliminated entirely from the review, if not even eliminated prior to walking into the gallery) is the first success of the exhibition, the moment that a clay foot should feel the snare's trigger begin to give under it. The omission is only dramatized by the fact that an exhibition of Kara Walker coincided with Carpenter's exhibition in the gallery immediately next door (creating a good deal of confusion for some gallery-goers who thought they were seeing a new Walker exhibition). The point is, is that the idea of art as a realm of freedom that finds its crowning moment in the endless possibilities of the ludic, is carefully protected from contagion by its founding disciplinary impossibilities.

Besides the paintings, to which I will return, there is another major element in the exhibition. Two monstrous sculptures occupy the majority of the gallery's available floor space. Each is composed of four 8x4 foot Masonite boards, arranged like a cube, but in a ramshackle design, two parallel sides raised by partially intersecting the others. Though covered in splatters of paint that indicate they originate from a painter's studio, they form a kind of make-shift display mechanism for expensive articles of haute couture: Yohji Yammamoto "Gothic" 3/4 length lightweight black wool coat; Romeo Gigli 3/4 length black cotton raincoat; Comme des Garçons grey-speckled waist-length wool jacket and matching skirt . "This is supposed to represent the world of high art from which most of Mr. Carpenter's underprivileged subjects are likely to remain distant." Or so Johnson would have it. Confronted by his own confusion, and by now already committed to a ludic interpretation censorious of racism, our reviewer defaults to the worst kind of condescension. Blind to the possibility that it might be the poverty of the choices of privilege that are being mocked, blind to the very real-and sustainable-sense of superiority that the poor are capable of feeling in relation to their masters, the review puts out on display (on a different kind of ramshackle construction) its poor understanding of master-slave dialectics.

Readers of Texte zur Kunst might be amused to note that the clothes were donated by Isabelle Graw (her retired late 80s wardrobe), or by the fact that the Masonite boards had, only days before the exhibition, graced the studio floor of Charline von Heyl, in whose Chelsea studio Carpenter painted a number of the paintings in the exhibition (the big ones). While this anecdotal evidence was not necessarily available to much of his New York audience, it is not unreasonable to introduce it here. For those who do not know Carpenter's history, as a young artist in Köln, he was a storied assistant of Kippenberger's, and has written about the permissibility, not to say centrality of this kind of ex-centric information in regards to the work of Kippenberger as well as his friend Michael Krebber, another central character in the genealogy of the "Kippenberger Assistant"(2). When I was at art school, biographical information was regarded with horror and disdain ­ as a channel through which abusive power leveraged an uneven playing field against the slaves in favor of the masters. But the 90s changed something about this: as power was understood to have partially outsourced itself, from hierarchical structures to dispersed network structures, many of us returned to the words of Raymond Williams: in understanding culture as modes of lived and organized meaning, the social production or better the production of the social became an urgent task. Thus the presence of friends in the epistemological structure of the exhibition is not to be ignored, not least because of the bad treatment they receive. And here I should mention that I too am involved, in the production of the exhibition poster which was pasted onto one of the sculptures, along with the other proper nouns, Jackie McAllister, Diana Balton and Roe Ethridge(3).

If indeed, Carpenter can be said to postulate the possibility that he could be both an artist and a racist (in protest at the manner in which an acceptance of identification with the former is to be excluded a priori from the possibility of the latter) his decision to embroil his friends into this messy state of affairs requires some attention. Since, I've never had reason to suspect Carpenter of being intolerant to anyone but bigots (and even then fonder of bigots than conservatives) one could make the first observation that the excluded possibility of racism is a rhetorical placeholder for all the more numerous, quotidian exclusions of potentiality which are suffered before the fact merely by taking on the name of artist. This much is indicated by the title of his Secession exhibition, As a Painter I Call Myself The Estate of which squarely places Carpenter's self-understanding under the sign of the institutional prehistory of any individual artistic career. But I would argue, despite his protestations that the sculptures were a kind of flip passing remark that barely cohered into an idea, that his investment in this process far exceeds any simply semiotic critique, either anarchic or conceptual: they are a part of a dangerous game he's playing with the art world, with himself and his friends as pieces.

In a few of the paintings the scene is staged as though Carpenter himself was a small child amongst those depicted, just out of frame, his collusion invited in some-as yet undecided-dangerous game with a gun stolen from home or found in an alley. Pulling back from absorption in the pictorial diagesis, the dangerous game just might be the wayward manner in which the paintings are turned. Caught between the possibilities that Expressionism-and it's Neo-incarnations emanating in particular from Germany-is either a boring and familiar game of culture (as Godard might describe it) and the possibility that in its very obsolescence might be found a little running room (as Foster might say), Carpenter turns to his own social milieu for the evaluative criteria-missing from the artworld but essential to establishing the real stakes of living and representing-without which choices are merely voluntary. Before this exhibition, I had told Carpenter that it was Jean Genet's model of the thief whom he most resembled as an artist. He rejected my claim at the time. But it is to Genet that I ultimately return in considering this new exhibition: not the thief this time, but to Genet's disconcertingly amoral sympathy for acts of betrayal. For Carpenter, too many people have just given up trying: too many artists, critics, politicians, probably even friends have abdicated in all but name the complexity, responsibilities and joy of their positions. Undoubtedly there are jokes present in this exhibition, but in a state of generalized disenchantment, it is with a deadly seriousness that Carpenter considers the intensity of care we find focused at the multiple nodes of betrayal.

(1) Ken Johnson, "Merlin Carpenter: 'Children of the Projects'", The New York Times, June 12, 2003. "You get the impression that something is being mocked here, but it's not clear exactly what. [] It is perhaps a pre-emptive strike intended to acknowledge the artist's own privileged status. Still, you are left to wonder-irritably-whether the exhibition as a whole is making fun of liberal good intentions, clichés of Social Realism or something more obscure."

(2) see "Back Seat Driver" and "The Sound of Bamboo".

(3) see Children of the Projects poster.

Children of the Projects