THE MAN IN THE MIRROR Sarah Morris on Merlin Carpenter at Galerie Neu, Berlin
“Merlin Carpenter: Business Women,” Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2017, installation view
As an artist, I am continuously both the subject and the object – both a subject with an ongoing narrative, creating situations, making forms and experiences out of them; and an object, in as much as I make objects which are commodified, and as such am identified and placed by myself and others in a field of activity and meaning with histories. In that field, as with most, one loses control of the object and its possible meanings after it is made. Making this further complex I can, for instance, comment on Picabia while appearing to be “a Picabia” – a female “face” who is simultaneously an agent, an author, and a producer. This latter example, suggested to me at a museum dinner – a shared “deviousness” with the image of a Picabia girl – made me laugh. But these objects of art, these productions, always go back to the condition of having an author, of having
been made with intention, a willpower; willed into the world with a deliberate provocation and contradiction. This is the Artist, this interesting movement between two states of being. It is this loop that I find endlessly, fascinatingly perverse, full of infinite play and interpretations. My twin, my reflection, is real only insofar as it is a real projection. Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” a naked Yves Saint Laurent selling his perfume in 1971, Alexander Kluge reading my script, talking back to me. What do I see when I look at my reflection? I do not see a man but perhaps I am thinking of one. The mental image of what I see and what is actually there ping-pongs back and forth. A mirror is a social equation, a thought about a future moment, a wish, a morphing self. A social space is imagined. In his summer show of six large works at Galerie Neu, Merlin
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Carpenter has returned to figurative painting to an empty space awaiting meaning – whether a collapse the idea of reflection with the idea of the room, a painting, a person, a gaze. What to make twin into the ideas of use value and contemplaof a mark, a gesture, a character made in these tion on the existence of an “outside.” spaces? A sign of acceptance? A warning? Some Reflection and twin – these are not the same acts, whether creative or political, even if they are but they do share some properties. To have a twin intended to carry certain meaning, instead effect is not about seeing the same, but about a similara concrete void or meaninglessness, which is an ity of origin and a seeming similarity of direction altogether different order of emptiness. This is or journey. Yet DNA mutates differently in each not the case when I look at Carpenter’s paintings, twin’s body and in fact systematically does so over which are collectively titled “Business Women.” a duration. We see this in Carpenter’s paintings. In these paintings, I see both consensus and afflicThe businessman and his twin in the mirror: Cap- tion depicted through the “twins.” ital configured as the theory of the young girl, its We are all involved with the “business “vision machine.” Or is it the other way around? women.” That’s obvious now. But this fact makes The jeune-fille mirrored by him? One in a skirt or Carpenter’s series no less perverse: paintings that lingerie, the other in a well-cut suit; the business- picture the female gaze looking onto “herself” man using the female form, controlling her, and, becoming a man who in turn embodies the reciprocally, she using him. It’s not clear who’s in rhetorical gaze of the viewer who is, meanwhile, control and that’s alright. It goes beyond gender, consuming both. Multiple women and one man; this slipperiness of the reflection. It goes beyond a seemingly classic power structure. How many gender with the infinite ways Capital instructs women have been the object of painting? How all of us without exception. It’s not about lipstick. many “girls” sell the work (back to the delicious There is no desire in these paintings whatsoever. Picabia)? And who is this effete, corporate-suited No coupling. No ideal. “Graham” as the busi“Graham,” seeing himself as a girl in a skirt or nessman figure with his escort – or her with her panties actively posing à la théorie de la jeune-fille? This capitalist – seems devoid of desire. In fact, the is fantasy. This is the controlled choreography of reflection never touches the real. Graham, in five Capitalism. This is not desire. This is Carpenter of the six paintings, is accompanied, appearing presenting farce feeding itself to us, presenting in private or public scenes that are set in private Carpenter as the artist. If the girl is the subject in or public (no difference to me) mirrored spaces, the act of looking at herself for others, she has possibly hotel rooms or bathrooms, and yet she been hijacked by this Tony Blair-looking busiseems utterly oblivious to her “twin.” It could nessman in the bathroom mirror; who does not be argued that his purpose is her reflection. The dominate necessarily, but does manage to underInstagram come-on. It is transactional with no mine the subject of our looking. We are complicit. sex. If this seems a bad metaphor, it is; and it falls “Merlin Carpenter: Business Women,” Galerie Neu, Berlin, flat on purpose. June 16–August 8, 2017. Desire in this equation, by absence, figures centrally in Carpenter’s show, revealing itself as the void. But the void desires; it is a vacuum,
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“Merlin Carpenter: Business Women,� Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2017, installation view
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193