Art Review : Classic Strokes of Cheekiness : Three Venues Offer Works of Artist Who Tweaks Icons

As a theme for painting, the humbling brevity of human life and the fragile transience of earthly pleasures is a classic in Western art. What’s startling about Karen Carson’s paintings on the venerable subject is their use of a visual language less familiar to the delicate intricacies of 17th century Dutch still lifes or the serene gravity of religious paintings by, say, Georges de La Tour than to the raucous energy of urban street graffiti and heavy-metal rock. Carson’s 1990s paintings are high-toned meditations on mortality spoken in the low-down style of Megadeth.

Which is not to say that the Los Angeles-based artist doesn’t possess a painterly fluency of exceptional skill. In the 25-year survey exhibition of her paintings, drawings and vinyl banners wittily titled “Karen Carson: But Enough About Me,” she moves from tightly rendered, realist pencil drawings to energetic painted abstractions, then on to seemingly facile figurative drawings and paintings in her inimitable manner (sort of Postmodern Baroque). Her most recent works are vinyl banners, their life-and-death maxims spelled out with the graphic punch of decorative signage on Las Vegas slot machines.

Under the organizational guidance of Anne Ayres, director of the gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, the show is coherently presented at three venues across the city. Otis features 41 pieces, installed to suggest correspondences and divergencies among different bodies of her widely varied work, without regard to chronology.

At Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood, Carson’s 1992 installation “It’s a Small World” features 17 painted globes suspended in the front gallery as if they were a solar system gone way out of whack. Finally, under the supervision of curator Noriko Gamblin, the Santa Monica Museum of Art is showing 61 paintings, drawings and constructions, laid out in more traditional chronological format.

Unusually ambitious, the survey is just the sort of show one hopes for from the three smaller institutions that collectively have mounted it. Unlike the formal austerity of the L.A. County Museum or the Museum of Contemporary Art, venues like Otis, the Santa Monica Museum and LACE operate closer to the ground, as galleries more intimately involved with artistic production in Los Angeles. In response to leaner times, big museums continue to withdraw into safer and more timid fare; but in keeping with the iconoclastic spirit of Carson’s best work, the smaller venues lend an undeniable sense of urgency to a consideration of her career.

What does one discover from “Karen Carson: But Enough About Me”? Well, for one thing, the salutary tawdriness of her 1990s work has been fundamental to the appeal of her art from the beginning.

Three rarely shown, untitled canvas constructions from 1971-72, made right after her graduation from art school at UCLA, demonstrate an acute awareness of prominent artistic issues of the day. Carson, however, gives those issues a subtle kick in the pants.

Made of big square geometrically cut pieces of unstretched heavy cotton duck in plain black or white, the works partake of the loose, soft materials common to Post-Minimal abstraction--to Robert Morris’ and Barry Le Va’s draped felt, Eva Hesse’s string and latex, Richard Tuttle’s unstretched canvas tacked to the wall. They also invoke an eccentric, abstract narrative: Carson sewed industrial zippers into the canvas, so that opening different zippers would allow different arrangements of shapes to be formed on the wall, while gravity would pull unzipped pieces downward, bridging the gap between the wall and the floor.

Those big zippers distinguish these works from mere student imitations of Post-Minimal art. On one hand, the zippers allow Carson’s ostensibly pure geometric shapes to perform a veritable striptease on the wall, peeling back loose garments to expose the gallery’s hidden skin. On the other, they make wry fun of the much-noted masculine affiliations of Minimalism by wickedly leaving the fly open on the art.

Feminist content is critical to much of the best Post-Minimal work. I think of Carson’s as a burlesque feminism, which smartly refuses the prison of the pedestal by privileging what the culture at large regards as low. Nascent if not fully formed in the zipper pieces, her cheeky vaudeville nonetheless anticipates by far more than a decade a lively strain of more recent feminist practice, which struggles to undermine the academically rigid, institutionally proscribed forms so deeply entrenched in certain quarters.

However bracing, though, Carson’s sly, tawdry verve seems to have dissipated until the mid-1980s. The rest of the 1970s is represented in the show by Realist drawings, whose subjects range from metamorphic transformation (an animal turning into a cement mixer, for example) to domestic strife.

Tragically, several hundred drawings and paintings on paper from the period were lost in a 1985 shipping mishap, so a gap yawns wide in the show. But when it picks up around 1980, Carson is making formally adept paintings that fuse Cubist structure with Expressionist vigor.

Imagine a Diebenkorn “Ocean Park” painting under the awesome stress of an earthquake or a hurricane and you’ll have some idea of her anything-but-placid abstractions. The shifting planes and spatial warps of the early zippered canvases are an obvious antecedent, but the paintings also seem freighted by a vaguely ponderous seriousness.

Carson’s monster-mash paintings of the 1990s are certainly serious, but ponderous they’re not. “Flowers of Fate” is emblematic, an aggressive bouquet of lush blossoms as overripe as any in a still life by Ambrosius Bosschaert but with modern accouterments: electric candles and actual clocks that relentlessly tick away life’s passing hours, jagged contours as sharp as a knife blade and a corrosive palette.

These pictures also feature “central core” imagery, long ago advanced by first-generation feminist artists as an antidote to male phallic imagery. Here, it’s sexually charged. And who but Carson would signify the clitoris by attaching a tacky suburban-style starburst mirror to the crucial spot on the painting?

Clearly, in works like these, it’s less the high-minded iconographies of established artistic tradition that Carson is after than it is their healthy reinvention--and reformation--through a celebration of coarse, not-yet-refined visual languages. Her feminist inclination is bracingly intact while also liberated from pious cant.

Carson’s recent banners, executed in the style of Vegas slot-machine decor, push the same important envelope. They aren’t always fully resolved; but their implied drama of deception and lost innocence is at least as old as the galvanizing paintings of cardsharps and fortunetellers by Caravaggio--and as much in need of renovation as any human story ever told.

* LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 957-1777, March 30; Otis Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555, through April 13; Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., (310) 399-0433, through May 26.