Neke Carson
Neke Carson,
Atomic Bicycle
Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring the works of irreverent artist Neke Carson. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (March 1994).
Exhibit at the Helander Gallery, New York
The name of Marcel Duchamp drops out of the mouths of so many unimaginative artists as an excuse for their pseudo-Dada neo-readymade objets d'art that it's hard to even like Duchamp anymore. As T.S. Eliot said, every new work of art changes every prior work by making us perceive it differently, and so Duchamp seems weakened when you're forced to see him through the veil of dull disciples who've trivialized and exhausted and humiliated what were once great ideas. But then there's an artist like Neke Carson, who doesn't appear to have any particular thing for Duchamp, yet picks up his baton and runs another hundred yards with it. Rather than produce work that's academically Duchampian, Carson makes the grand master himself seem academic: his heterogeneous output makes Duchamp look narrow, his fervor makes him look sedate, his humor makes him look horribly dry.
Carson has had a variegated career — in 1966, he opened for Janis Joplin in a rock band he had formed with comedian and actor Martin Mull; in 1977, he founded LaRocka, a New Wave modeling agency; in 1993, he became a regular contributing photographer to the trendoid "Styles" section of the New York Times — and this 25 year survey of his art manifests an equally heterogeneous array of work. There are relatively straight paintings, such as his 1986 Portrait of Suzy Krupinksy; there are paintings which are relatively straight from the point of view of form but not of content, like Ordinary Cat, Extraordinary Woman, 1968, which depicts an exotic woman apparently lapping up a pool of vomit puked up by a gray cat; there are paintings which are not straight at all, such as the portrait of Andy Warhol executed in Carson's "Rectal Realism" style (displayed alongside a photograph that's as dizzyingly circular as an M.C. Escher print: Andy's photographing Carson, who, with paint brush lodged firmly in his asshole, is painting Andy's portrait). In addition to the paintings, the survey includes sculptures, photographs, drawings, performance documents, and memorabilia from LaRocka.
Though Carson's work is so all over the place that it's hard to leave this survey talking about his "evolution" or somesuch — you can't conceive his work in terms of "progress" anymore than you can a shotgun blast — you do get the sense that Carson's brilliance lies somewhere in the prankishness that motivates his best works. Baby Lee Dies Prematurely, a 1969 drawing that's perfectly cute, depicts "the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald when he was about three and Jack Ruby was five," as the work's subtitle puts it. The 1970 Atomic Bicycle — a photograph which shows Carson furiously peddling the gangly machine through Central Park — was "modeled after the old-style idea of the atom for people who like to ride around in an obsolete concept of the universe." A 1973 poster for Art Therapy for Conceptual Artists, a six week course presented by the "United Painters and Sculptors of America," proclaims "Learn to work with your hands, not on them." A "before" picture shows someone burning his hands in a conceptual art gesture, while an "after" picture shows the same artist sculpting some sort of neoclassical head. Who's the butt of this prank? Traditionalists who hold that Art is necessarily an object? Conceptual artists who couldn't model the Blob from a lump of clay? Perhaps this is Carson's prescription for avoiding the bastardization Duchamp suffers at the hands of his disciples: offer to teach other artists your principles, but only in order to make fun of them.
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