Living for the Weekend: Calvin Ross Carl’s Purple Mountain Majesty
By Victor Maldonado
Equal parts hip minimalism and sardonic pop, Portland-based artist Calvin Ross Carl’s solo show at Half/Dozen Gallery (625 NW Everett #111), Purple Mountain Majesty, at first glance seems to be the work of many hands…which turns out to be the point. The limited edition print, six wall and floor works, all 2010, share a common care in design and craft and are infused with divergent strategies ruminating on the anxiety of the inherent catastrophes of the workplace within and outside the art market.
That’s a lot to say in one breath and also a lot to try to get across for his first solo exhibition (Carl received his BFA in Intermedia from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2008). But it really seems to synthesize what he’s been working with even when it hasn’t been so easy to get across.
Carl has been obsessing about the workplace since his thesis work at PNCA which centered on the flexibility of artistic labor and of mixing office space with the fallen mythic artist’s studio, the best and worst of both worlds at the same time. He continues with this camouflaged, performative iconoclasm (benign as it is in appearance), one-liner monochromes, chair throwing, and all.
The danger may become that everything is a lead-up to another art history joke or pop-cultural reference. The title for the exhibition, Purple Mountain Majesty, denotes a pseudo-heroic ideology marquee of drunkenness and fake class, while continuing Carl’s formal self-effacement through High Modernism. It also serves as the subtext connecting the pieces in the exhibit.
Looking around Half/Dozen’s handsome single-gallery space, it’s clear that Carl is willingly taking it all on one piece at a time by building on the success of his past exhibitions at Tractor Gallery and galleryHOMELAND as well as his keen eye as installation artist and curator, creating works with a site receptivity worth equal contemplation.
Carl’s ability both as a craftsman and designer gives Purple Mountain Majesty the feeling of being a tightly curated but slightly crowded group show and gets away with it because attempting to eliminate any of the seven works sheds light on their relevance within Carl’s formal and conceptual event-driven dialectic. It is also what provides Purple Mountain Majesty with a rich vocabulary and the keys to unlocking the development of a complex and conceptually-driven vision.
Peter Halley. Shonen Knife, 1991.
Robert Morris. Untitled, 1969.
Work is one of those words, like art, that everyone can grasp, if vaguely, but that without specific context can become meaningless. Carl evades that problem effectively by evoking both the beautifully brooding grand-chromatic painting “Shonen Knife” (1991) by Peter Halley and the performative elegance of Robert Morris’ hanging felt pieces from the late 60’s to create a critical context to understand and engage his varied propositions.
In “Home Depot Logo with Limp Mountain,” Carl makes clear signs blurry and in the process transfigures the landscape from symbiotic ecosystem into a kind of brutally sterile marketplace where artificial resources abound, and we are oblivious to the means and processes of their production. Where more traditional Pacific Northwest landscape painters would skirt or obfuscate the politics of geography, Carl makes use of it to produce more critical impressions where logos outlast mountains and ideology trumps nature.
It isn’t that Carl doesn’t make use of the romantic nature for which landscape painting in the Pacific Northwest has come to be known and well collected. With “Tap the Rockies,” Carl’s less-is-more aesthetic humorously makes use of mocking mountain icons from beer commercials. Alongside the title for the exhibition, “Tap the Rockies” also makes the barrel-chested certainty of beer advertising and a pioneering spirit seem suspect and campy. Where once men and women toiled to conquer the land, now if we’re lucky to have a job (or jobs), we still find ourselves working for the weekend, drunk in the leisure of our fantastical tourist landscape.
In an economic recession it’s no surprise to find anxiety in the workplace in the art market and beyond. Today’s economic climate has taken this modern fact of life and raised it to a fever pitch. By making a fetish object of the workplace, and by extension work itself, Carl’s Purple Mountain Majesty unpacks the work of art and the work of contemporary artists as they struggle to be present, to adapt, to respond to holy terror, to massive system-wide failures of governments and virtual realities, let alone good old natural catastrophes, and to somehow have the ability to access and understand ideas at all those different levels. More importantly Carl’s Purple Mountain Majesty sheds light, in knowing and biting ways, on the confluence of cultures that have come to define the aesthetics of his native Pacific Northwest.
Take for example the Joseph Kosuth-like wall work “Subsidized Chair,” smooth enamel on wood Ikea-like silhouette in monochrome black, so violently installed off the ground and half swallowed by the gallery wall. Unlike Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” Carl gives us 2010’s two-thirds of a chair that loses all of its designed function. “Subsidized Chair” is a well-crafted object that also makes use of and pokes fun at what are by now painful clichés: the subtractive process of abstract painting and the conceptualist’s love of ready-made commercial objects and cultural constructs. Recalling history is hit or miss and in Purple Mountain Majesty, it’s uncertain how well “Subsidized Chair” can hold its own over time as a mock monument of America’s recent economic fall. Maybe its boondoggle allusions will evolve into the rich transgressive gestures of contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei who is quite comfortable playing the role of a destructive and joyful god (inevitably to his own peril) by exposing abuse of power and economic domination. Why and to whom is a recontextualized chair dangerous?
“Jackhammer,” also enamel on wood, is most reminiscent of Carl’s earlier work with its white, yellow and black color palette. By returning to his most paired down language Carl has attempted to create a symbolic, industrial-strength tool for getting back to his foundation that for now seems symbolically put away for the weekend’s do-it-yourself project that will inevitably wreck someone’s hands. Its dry humor hints at the self-inflected pain and beauty of being the heavy that Martin Kersels has garnered so much acclaim for with fatally reflective and truly painful works like “Fat Man” (2002).
With “Spire Through Flood Plain,” Carl creates an interesting physical corollary to another heartbreaking piece about the dark history behind the majesty of it all in the Pacific Northwest: “The Floating Homes of Vanport” humbly displayed on a desk and the only multiple in the exhibit. In “Floating,” a small archival inkjet print on paper, we again find Carl creating visual combinations of what he terms “austere formalism” in the form of flat yellow/black parallelograms mimicking the rooftops of homes subsumed by a flood as viewed at a safe distance at a picturesquely cropped aerial view.
In both pieces Carl makes use of being overwhelmed and overcome by something as large in scale as a flood or an avalanche. Using “The Floating Homes of Vanport” as a kind of roadmap and arriving at “Spire Through Flood Plain,” I get the feeling of standing on top of the flood planes, poetically incorporating the galleries and my own privileged space to create an especially site-displacing sculpture too craggy and short to evoke the mighty phallic monuments from antiquity.
After all, it’s only the tip of what once was tall and mighty. “Spire Through Flood Plain” begs the questions: where do we stand and what are we standing on when there is constant historical amnesia and the bottom line is the only thing that matters when what 20th Century musicologist and cultural critic Theodore Adorno termed, the “always new” is the only stream that flows and the only thing we try to stand for?
Despite Carl’s sober assessment of contemporary culture, there seems to be hope in Purple Mountain Majesty. Leaning on the gallery walls “Interchangeable Body Finders” appropriates and applies the system used by the American government’s “ordained colors designating hazardous areas in the workplace. Yellow and black is a physical hazard, blue and white is a water hazard, yellow and magenta is a radioactive hazard” pointedly after the event. The danger has passed. What we are seeing comes innocuously and ineffectually after the fact.
None of the original color combinations alone seemed to apply to the false hazards in Purple Mountain Majesty: the anxiety and ecstasy of influence; drowning in the choices that a young artist who aims to make their way through a free and tenacious art market will face. Out of order and feathered with drips, in this most resonant piece, the colors in “Interchangeable Body Finders” present Carl’s ability to dig through the different levels of meaning around him and the visual application available to him to continue forward in his development; finding his own body of work buried somewhere in it all. Carl might not have produced a single vision for one kind of artistic practice this time and I’m not sure that’s what he was after. What is clear is that Purple Mountain Majesty poses Carl as an artist who is interested and enlivened by his practice by understanding and facing peril.
HALF/DOZEN GALLERY
625 NW Everett St #111