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Merlin Carpenter
Paint-It-Yourself
January 31– March 1, 2020

Dear Reena,
As you know I am not going to come for the opening of my show Paint-It-Yourself. I
could imagine this might leave you in a strange social situation so I thought I could
explain in a few sentences what it's about.
First of all this show is a bit of a reaction to the sameyness of a lot of painting. It's
almost like the whole thing turned into zombie formalism. Figurative formalism. Add
the number of older white men going around talking about "real" painting which they
are finally "allowed" to do, and you have a boring conservative atmosphere that I am
at risk of being dragged into with my own paintings. So let's clear the decks. "Youwant a painting show, well then paint-it-yourself." It doesn't matter what it looks likeanyway. Probably with my own history of readymade painting right back to the ones
that remained unpainted at "The Opening" I can get away with this kind of shit andstill call it a painting show. I'd anyway been musing about doing massively zoned outabstract paintings which led to the vague thought that this would mean showing only
blank canvases and paint.
But there is something more. Starting with my exhibition at Nousmoules in Vienna in2018 where I claimed to be "Not Doing a Show in FPÖ Austria" but actually did one, I
have been working on an idea of doing a show and not doing one at the same time.
This continued later that year when I moved Overduin & Co. from LA to Amsterdam
so that I could show there instead of in Trump's USA. But then I went straight backto LA and did a second, simultaneous, exhibition where I sat around chatting withvisitors for the show's duration.
It's a little bit hard to explain what I was driving at. I was setting up a situation inwhich multiple realities can live side by side, but not in a metaphysical way. I wanted
to find a language that was both left wing and could use irony to help me navigate
worsened political contexts. So instead of using right wing material as a left wingjoke, I would make the simplistic left gesture as a formal joke in relation to a more
rigorous hypothesis. I was serious about not doing "business as usual" in the US, but
all this really involved was changing my practice to mark this new context. And thenmaking art in the US which was more typically "Merlin" than ever.
In the LA / Amsterdam project I was thinking about how the current politicalsituations in the EU and the USA mirror each other, one still "neo-liberal", the otherbordering on far right. In my view, capitalism's crises do not cause it to break down,
but instead it uses supposedly external factors like nationalism or climate change toforce itself onward. My two simultaneous exhibitions were intended as a metaphor
for how the far right model acts as a kind of fear lever, a threat intensifier for the!

neo-liberal model. And maybe the centrists have a similar effect, by continuously recreating the far right's starting conditions. These two models madly arbitrage eachother and forge new totalities, in a ratchet effect. And through that summing-up
process what previously justified the existing order and made it seem to make senseis "cracked". It's an almost Steve Bannonesque process of seizing, flipping thetotality on its head. Every debate is changed within these freshly minted regimes.
For example the injunction we are presented with not to fight capitalism, but save
capitalism - save the EU, save the Democrats.
This picture of what might be happening was developed after, and by means of, myown "two locations at once" art idea. One gallery stands in for the other, as intherapy - to lay the dialectic out, keep its inner configuration open. For our current
show I was first considering putting the blank canvases in a gallery in one part of theworld, and the box of paint in another gallery in some other place. But then I
thought it might be more interesting if they were both in New York, as if the box had
just teleported through a secret door, to make a single, fused, half-show. And there
is still a physical distance: in late 2018 the paintings remained in the EU, and I flew
to LA, but this time the paintings are in New York, but I'm not showing up.
All the very best, good luck, have fun!!
Merlin