Carter Mull

Carter Mull’s “The Days Specific Dreams” at Taxter & Spengemann from 5/6/11 to 6/11/11
As published in Artillery Magazine.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. That might sound like a trite bit of conventional wisdom, but there’s more truth to it than we sometimes seem to acknowledge. At least, I might hazard to guess, Carter Mull thinks so. With a mix of images that focuses on the technology of media and communication, art-history, and pop-culture appropriations, his work suggests a sense of visual time travel and inspires the thought that the past is less distant than we think. His almost kaleidescopic and of-the-moment style – big colorful photos collaged together using a mix of digital and traditional photographic techniques – makes older appropriated imagery seem brand new while familiar pop subjects are contextualized historically. A rather contemporary looking Brillo box in Z is for Marylin (b) (2011), for example, suggests the degree of our precise historical distance from the Pop artists like Warhol who pioneered the use of that type of subject matter.

Granted, none of this is, undoubtedly, the first thought that his work is likely to evoke. Perhaps the opposite, actually. These things are, after all, pretty flashy with a prismatic palette that would suggest associations with amateurish quasi-psychedelic PhotoShop trickery if it weren’t pulled off with an impressive elan, scale, and technical expertise. They come off at first like nothing more than fantastic eye candy so it’s almost startling to recognize that the style is as much a means as an end. The compositions are vaguely reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s loose funky grid formats although his intent and imagery are more like Sigmar Polke’s.

The first clue, then, that these works might be up to other things is the repeated use of an unfolded front/back page of The New York Times, photographed straight on, parallel to the picture plane, and centered squarely in the middle of his compositions. Newspapers have a particular, essential, relationship to the history of pop art, of course, but here they’re used to evoke both the dailyness of the mundane, their dissolution into the digital world and, contrarily, their opposition to the daily and mundane: a reminder that the alternately sudden and gradual march of historical events can and do cause seismic shifts in the shape and structure of the world that we all have to live in. It’s hard then not to imagine these works slipping into the past one specific day at a time.

Alternately, the older images serve an opposite function. In Typist, an engraving of a loom from Diderot’s Encyclopédie (an 18th century encyclopedia) is over-laid with a rainbow hued gradient that could have come from some currently hip graphic design source: a recent iPod or American Apparel ad, for instance. Juxtaposed with the silvery reflective prints of iPhones scattered all over the gallery floor, the unavoidable message is that even antiquated technology was once newfangled too. That is, our perception of the past is based not on some rational sense of chronological time but, rather, keyed to the aesthetic of its representations. That’s something worth remembering.