“Faktura (For A Nervous Spirit)” at kim? Contemporary Art Centre

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Gotta admit, it's a pretty funny image. In Carpenter's own words "I never thought people would actually paint on the canvases [...] we couldn't in the end very easily stop them." Which now, a cage against a painting.

See too: Merlin Carpenter "Paint it Yourself" at Reena Spaulings

Merlin Carpenter at Reena Spaulings

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Irony was fun about a decade ago, seemed to have its peak in about 2010 before the political discourse shifted abruptly and boots on the ground politics seemed pressing. But now, recoil, irony is back with people wearing clown makeup and being disingenuous online. Irony is a scapegoat for so much. A means for someone to deflect and quagmire conversation by being deeply unclear. Carpenter feels like a game of "well I know that he knows that I know that he knows..." en abyme. 

Carpenter knows this is dumb, and knows that we know he knows this is dumb. But us all gripping chins wondering on which floor precisely the middle finger is resting. Our cerebral assessments of navel's swirl that 5 years ago couldn't have been less interesting now return in way that feels apt to the political moment. Because we're exhausted. And perhaps what Carpenter is actually trading in is the feeling of exhaustion. Can you imagine being forced to explain these to someone? Explain politics now to someone?

Because people often don't think this is dumb:

"Interactive art, of which this is, like Web 2.0's [...] the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user themselves to self produce, the turnkey-op entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, [...] because like Scanlan on Sehgal, even mediocrity is acceptable to a public so long as it has a hand in it."Read full Urs Fischer at JTT

Read all posts tagged Merlin Carpenter

Merlin Carpenter at Reena Spaulings

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"Self-Consciousness" in painting mainly excused noodly paintings in rhetoric as sales adage's humble aggrandizing: a painter so conscious they cannot paint! Oh how romantic. Carpenter amped this to the level of broadcast, enacting the paralysis on the viewer. Attempts to unpack exhibitions as even description overflow, stacking sub-clauses and tangentials and questions of where to even begin with a vantage that can be continually shifted in attempts to circumscribe what is exactly at stake. So, a list: what is going on is that formally the paintings might actually not suck, this is big, because if they do, contain the possibility of formally not sucking, this means that the "conceptually orientated" Carpenter may be invested formally as a painter (and which he may never have not been to begin with) and if he is a formally invested painter, which he might be, means we would have to go back, reassess, though he may just be turning "on" for this exhibition a formal investment and never will be again which would make this a "conceptual gesture," Carpenter may not have even made these paintings, and would that matter, but what would that mean if someone can suddenly "switch on" a formal investment, and can formal investment be a joke if it is taken so far as to actually formally invest oneself so far as to make paintings which contain the possibility of not formally sucking, or is irony always overpowered by its sign, and is that even possible that Carpenter is not formally invested but is making paintings that don't entirely suck - and I brought a second party in to confirm the possibility of these not entirely formally sucking, which second party did affirm the possibility - and are these categories more useless than thought, but then what does that mean for so many formally invested painters who may or not be emotionally wounded by Carpenter's, or hired lackey's, ability to just pull 40 out of a hat, assuming they were so easy as to pull out of a hat, and what would that mean for "painting today," for then Carpenter to happily ironize 40 paintings with a ledger accounting the 40x40k= 1.6 million dollars of paintings underlining painting as cultural object of conspicuous consumption, and the whole art trope of symbolic cred to $ cash-in that many of the conceptual sort must resort, and Carpenter's obvious awareness of this, and again subclauses of whether awareness of an artistic scapegoating preclude that wiener from being eaten, and I would have thought Carpeneter's paintings were selling for more than that at this point, and what does it mean that Carpenter is making paintings that have the possibility of standing at a level with so much championed painting today on formal level even as a self-aware ironic "conceptual" conceptual cash-in if this exhibition in fact is and if they do sell and if Carpenter is aware of all this, though the mirrored floor's reflection's points all point towards..., at all and if the painting do in fact not suck of course which we can not be sure, so switch those on and off at leisure, and one hasn't mentioned a Marxist or Bourdiean take on this en abyme.


See too:  Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

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In the mist of Berlin's fashion for press released in Ashbery poetics, Carpenter plops a desiccant earnestness, to clear the fog and expose the mildew of this all growing old. Carpenter has always been master of framing houses of cards, where any breath of thought topples, the whole thing must be moved with care, but here instead contextualizes with a single vantage's solemnity so dry it may lack compassion for us (what Carpenter ex doesn't), but posits an agreeable proposition: we've read Marx wrong, a disservice to the auratic objects of capital arranged so commonly speculated upon as "anonymous." And so, "By combining the single works into non-allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph" a description of most artworks today, asserting that we need a new language for it, and assembling arrangements of luxurious object as a mockery of it, art's attempting to totemize the objects of capital as an occult other, a mistake if there ever was one, and Carpenter has an essay forthcoming for that, and we'll all look forward to that.

Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Projects, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Vincent Meessen, Thela Tendu at Kunsthalle Basel

Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.



Has a more vacuous flaccid and dead show ever been done? An exhibition so empty it's like looking at ocean’s abyss. Carpenter has always been capable of the self-flagellating gesture, but this, this is like selling your flesh to pay the guy who owns your soul for its postage to hell, and you’re walking around bleeding without a shirt. This show makes Zobernig look like an academic painter. Codax like he paints Sundays. Makes Anton Chigurh look like he’s only out for a walk. If I could afford one of these I would buy Cobain’s face to hang in my bedroom, to wake up everyday and be reminded of the limitless capacity for emptiness of the human soul. Carpenter you old dog. Even though there’s nothing to look at I find myself scrolling through the images again and again, looking at the void. There’s almost a sort of pathos. Is this what it felt like to originally look at a Warhol in the 60’s? Maybe some sort of adrenalized version for post-Sturtevant times.  This show is chilling.