Karen Carson

Sophisticate

Then I pricked my finger on a thorn, or a thistle,

Put my finger in my mouth, and ran to my mother.

Now I lie here with my eyes on a pistol,

And there will be a morrow, and another, and another.

—Djuna Barnes, Lullaby

About a decade ago, I momentarily lost my “pluck.” I sat at my desk, moped and didn’t write; and, sitting there one day, unable to write or read or even think properly, I began making this little sign out of a sheet of yellow notepaper. It said: “The Day We Die Is Just Another Day” in a Weiss Initials font. I embellished the words with leaves and flowers and put some smiley faces in the corners. I pushpinned the sign to the wall over my desk, and after that, every time I looked up at the sign, I laughed, because the day I made that sign was “just another day”—during which I obviously had enough free time to advertise my own angst. Over the next few weeks, that laughter transmuted itself into whatever passes for acceptance and fortitude among folks who are in no danger of violence, penury, or oblivion, so I just got over it.

Having done so, it occurred to me that had I made that image seriously in the first place, as an artist might, with the implicit intention of making it public, I should have encountered its delusional anomalies from jump street. This would have necessitated decisions about the ethics of presenting oneself in the world. I saw three options: First, I could have taken the “political option,” applying my little slogan to the wall in Helvetica press-type and surrounding it with blurry, xeroxed photographs of the wretched of the earth, pretending to divert concern from myself toward the needs of all mankind, while, in fact, clothing my self-regard in raiment of irreproachable virtue. This was too egregious even for me.

Karen Carson, Thank You, 1994. Silkscreen on paper (edition of 15), 33 × 26 in. Courtesy of the artist.

So I considered the “pathetic” option of simply pushpinning that yellow sheet to the gallery wall. This strategy, I had no doubt, would elicit tugs of protective, parental sympathy from a few of my potential beholders, but if I were going to do this, I could just as easily chain a puppy to the gallery floor, sign its butt, and attach an outrageous price. Finally, I was forced to consider the final option: I might, perhaps, behave like an adult in full possession of my powers and crank it up—affirm my own sentiment and redeem it with glamour and invention. “The Day We Die Is Just Another Day!” Ta-dah! That would work! I thought, and the beholder would be freed from acknowledging the artist as a repository of pseudo-self-effacing angst. And if the image had pluck, candor, and sophistication, it might own up to its maker’s undeniable privilege and pleasure at being free enough and able enough to celebrate Neurosis in Excelsior.

To put it simply, if were I an artist in this situation, I would have made a “Karen Carson.” I would have aspired to that passionate, cosmopolitan irony of which she is the living mistress because no one knows better than Karen that we all live Jane Austen lives with Dostoyevsky aspirations, and no one reminds us of this embarrassing fact with more forgiving acuity. So it is a pleasure to write about her art because you may not have seen it. She is a walking moral confrontation, damned with a level of knowingness, wit, and self-sufficiency that doesn’t encourage “helpers,” “mommies,” or “impresarios.” In this artistic era of sincerity and cynicism, she is probably the only person in the art world who could hold her own as a witty sophisticate at the Algonquin. (Her quick cartoons of Park Avenue dowagers parading down the sidewalk, leading dog-collared angels hovering above, would be perfect Algonquin fare.)

For nearly twenty-five years, Carson has been the queen of fashionista drama queens and the font of razor-sharp bon mots (“First sex, then gender. We’re at war with these guys but we have fun fucking them.”) Upon leaving Judy Chicago’s feminist group, Carson announced that she was not bound by Judy’s chains, and whatever chains Carson might be bound by, produce inexplicable, theatrical swoons and witty works of art. From the wry, striptease minimalism of her early zipper pieces, through the gaudy smoke and mirrors of her abstract “hot flashes” in the eighties, to the impudent, in-your-face individualism of her more recent Vegas koans, Carson’s work has consistently skewered everything I have come to despise about the public discourse of art in this nation. She is the mistress of a maneuver called the “jump-shift” by screenwriters, of moving quickly from here to there with no transition. Recherché metanarratives of style, politics, religion, and identity are simply consumed by Carson’s acquisitive penchant and manifest themselves as a skeptical visual ethic—a habit of mind and heart.

Thus, at any point in Karen’s career, the temper of the time, the state of the art, and the condition of her own sensibility resolve themselves in the physicality of the moment. Everything is always there: painting and drawing, image and object, narrative and arrangement, domesticity and formal grandeur, decoration and dishabille. The hard surface of local reality asserts itself—perpetually compromised by the irrevocable ability of the human mark to make space where none exists, transforming the time we spend looking at the art into a story of its own.

Even so, I have kept my pleasure to myself, a secret vice, like the barroom you drop by on the way home from church. I have always hesitated to write about it, lest I damn it with my praise, because, as comedians say in Las Vegas, Carson is “above your pay grade.” How can one praise work for its wit and candor in a historical moment best characterized by earnestness, cynicism, and hypocrisy? So I have kept my counsel, cautioned by the knowledge that somehow, for some reason, the single most privileged, permissive, and secular subculture in the known world—that of the visual arts—has taken on the project of banishing any evidence of its privileged worldliness from the objects it purveys.

As a consequence, any piece of criticism that sets out to comment on Karen Carson’s work must also defend the work’s failure to disguise the fact that its maker is a woman of the world—a hardworking, passionate, secular female of considerable wit and erudition—and in failing to disguise who she is, Karen’s work thoughtlessly fails to disguise who we are: closet lotus-eaters, nibbling behind our hands—civil servants, bureaucrats, tradesmen, and entrepreneurs who strive to think and feel and see with some intensity in relative safety and comfort, not in drawing rooms perhaps, but rarely in mean streets or on the moor.

Our feckless namesakes tread the stage in plays by Oscar Wilde and Tom Stoppard. We suffer, but rarely, if ever, do we shoot one another, or beat one another senseless, or even detonate cubes of C-4 beneath the institutions that fund our lovely salads. Still we routinely pale at the prospect of an art that acknowledges our complicity in the silly-serious mode of bourgeois existence that we have invented for ourselves. As a consequence, at this moment, Karen Carson pretty much has the run of this tenebrous, comedic stage upon which Dorothy Parker must play Joan of Arc. She is a specialist in theatrical artifacts that refuse to transcend their domestic circumstances or make any special claim to righteousness.

Upon this stage, Karen is diva and maestro, her specialty is the extravagant intime, the operatic clock, “the tempest in the teacup”—the real tempest and the real teacup—the gorgeous tempest of raw sensibility—the delicate teacup of private life in a city with good weather. So her works protest and celebrate the privilege of doing so. And even when her heart is on her sleeve, she never fails to acknowledge that it is a very well tailored sleeve. Because, as she will tell you, it is precisely the aura of domestic comedy that privileges the sheer intensity of her work and defends it against the implication of striving to transcend this vale of tranquilizers and kale.

So Karen may show us Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, California, as a postcubist explosion of color, mirrors, hardware, and graffiti, but gritty, tacky Lincoln Boulevard is not occluded. Karen’s image is made of the same urban stuff, and with the same offhand ebullience. That is the joke and the affirmation: it is everyday magic—so plangently everyday, in fact, that even her cartoon angels seem to dwell on Lincoln Boulevard, to wing their way through the smog in a miasma of erotic anxiety. Yet, somehow, we have difficulties with the idea that a practice this intense, so heavily invested with love and invention, should claim so little for itself in the area of universal profundity. We are so accustomed to grandiose content in domestic dishabille that we are disconcerted with Karen’s inversion of this convention. It seems at once too theatrical to be so down-to-earth, but that’s our girl. She moves with the times like a streetwise couturier. Every eighteen months or so, she is out with a new line of cosmopolitan schadenfreude.

Most dangerously for her career, I suspect, Karen’s project is simply too fluid and too candid. It reminds us of our furtive, domestic pleasures: We huddle at the cozy hearth and thrill ourselves with visions of the night; we lie down in mink-lined coffins to dream of dirty sex with local bikers; and Miss Carson, like the Lutheran libertine that she is, condones such tiny indiscretions as the stuff of life and forgives us (as she forgives herself). But she never lets us off the hook—never lets us stand before her work without confronting, at some level, the complexity and complicity of the artist’s position in the late twentieth century—the scandal of pleasure that nestles at the heart of it.

So, today, a drawing by Karen Carson hangs above my desk. It is ominous, elegant, and confident in its privileged paranoia. It is less a drawing, actually, than a sinister object that contains a drawing inside it: a heavy, glossy, black, ornamental, beaux-arts frame enclosing a thick sheet of dark-green Plexiglas beneath which, when the light is right, an image flickers just on the verge of legibility. When we look closely, the image floats up out of the green mist like a memory of satanic abuse, revealing a battle (or the moment before a battle) in The Great War of Iconography—rendered as a mock-epic moment in some pop-culture Rape of the Lock.

This particular work is from a series that Karen calls her Innocence drawings. The content of these drawings is based on a narrative trope that we may best imagine in Disney animation: We are floating high in the air above the dirty, glowing grid of contemporary Los Angeles, then, losing altitude, we zoom across rooftops and along Venice Boulevard, execute a hard bank to the left and slip through the door of a tattoo parlor just as the owner is closing it behind him. Inside the darkened shop, the cartooned tattoo templates pinned to the wall begin to flutter, rattling the tissue upon which they are drawn, and then, one after another, the black images fly off the paper and swoop around the empty shop.

Some of them are bats, but there are eagles too, and dragons, knives, bombs, serpents, panthers, fighter planes, battleships, bloody hearts, and warrior maidens. Once airborne, this thick squadron of aggressive iconography curls downward and whooshes under the door into the adjoining storefront, a Hallmark card shop whose Arcadian population is, itself, just awakening into animation. Handsome shepherds and fetching milkmaids yawn and stretch. Cute puppies and cuddly lambs stagger about on sleepy legs; darling kids rub their eyes with tiny fists, arousing themselves from innocent repose.

In the drawing above my desk, a cute kid in a baseball uniform, with his cap on sideways and his bat raised in hitter’s position occupies the center of the drawing. He peers earnestly out at us through the green twilight, awaiting the first pitch, oblivious to the cloud of demons swirling all around him, threatening to engulf him; and it’s not hard to see how this image might have come into being as a defensive reflex against the never-ending image barrage of contemporary Los Angeles. Unlike my yellow drawing, however, Karen immediately carries her neurosis into the realm of redemption, demonstrating to us that however much we may decry the brutal sensory onslaught of urban life, the dangers we live with as contemporary Americans dwell largely in the realm of iconography, that it is less the wolf at our door than the image of the wolf that terrifies us—that, in fact, even the cute little kid with the baseball bat is a little bit creepy and must bear his own load of complicity in the image. In this way, Karen’s drawing presents itself to me every morning as an exercise in the acquisition of ironic tolerance that more or less defines cosmopolitanism, which, in the United States, is the name we give to getting over our small-town utopian longings.

Herein, I would suggest, lies the abiding virtue of Karen Carson’s shameless veracity. Empowered by it, or driven by it, Karen can reveal what half the artists in America are striving to conceal with their plangent altruism: that eternal, annoying American bleat of embattled innocence. Because she is honest, we can always hear it, squealing in the subcortex of Carson’s endeavor, making itself heard amidst all the learned allusions, the knowing ironies, and the social graces. To silence it, for Karen, would constitute willful deceit. So as F. Scott Fitzgerald does with the character of Gatsby, Karen owns up to the primal whine. Then puts it in its place—inviting us to respond to that obscene little baseball player with an embarrassing tug of self-serving identification, even as we loathe ourselves for doing so.

Finally, it is Karen’s great gift to keep that offended longing so clearly at the heart of things while transforming it so consistently into forgiving artifacts. In the process, she has evolved an artistic and intellectual position that is as remote from the small-town gee-whiz of her childhood as it is from the pat cynicism of the world she presently inhabits. You could describe her manner as another kind of innocence, I suppose, and it is similar, in many of its aspects, to the accepting pop innocence of Warhol, but it is not quite that. Carson loves the daily, textured world too much and with too much enthusiasm. It is closer, I would suggest, to the benign worldliness of those children in Henry James, who also love the world without approving it, whose uninflected gaze, bereft of expectations, sees everything, knows everything, and owns up to everything without remorse. What Maisie knew, I suspect, Karen Carson knows as well.