Carter Mull
Rivington Arms, New York, USA
There is a shallow part of me that wants to – or, let’s say, does – love Carter Mull’s photographs in ‘Ethics of Everyday Fiction’. Products of Photoshop, art as tooling around with levels and filters, they are Wired magazine mixed with techno cover art with all the slickness of fashion photography. Amidst fields of abstraction one can glean traces of recognizable imagery: spectral jukebox neon; a sheet of glimmering star stickers; digitally-altered drips and splatters. Mull tweaks contrast to a point where dark areas disappear into a void-like space, in which bright spots seem to float, other images hovering over these new spaces.
These photographs are the best work in ‘Ethics of Everyday Fiction’. A couple of sculptural pieces, with images printed on glass plates, propped up against a wall are too eager to underline the relationship between the disembodied digital images and corporeal material; a floor piece, Soldiers Playing Cards (2007), is sprawling where the prints are self-contained, only reframing the possibility of a serious abstract/appropriation art based in digital techniques that the prints stated with a succinct playfulness. Some of the images in the floor piece are too heavy-handed in their ironic quoting of Photoshop filters; Mull’s work is already implicitly ironic, as his appropriation of kitschy genre tropes assumes a type of distance, but such ham-fisted self-referentiality is simply glib.
Mull’s moves are often too blatantly art-historical: scanned drips, painterly marks, and faux-film-scratches too obviously invoke Polke and Richter, as well as a host of young artists mining that art-historical vein. Formally, Mull takes some good chances that pay off well, but remains a little too fashionable, familiar, and beholden to Mac mechanics, whilst failing to convincingly transform or elucidate these impulses. Like Rob Pruitt and Greg Bogin, Mull is capable of making perfect beautiful things that you don’t feel guilty about loving, though he is undermined by a hip cleverness. Like too many young New York artists, Mull makes bifurcated sexy/smart objects, as if a seductive slickness and pat art-historical references might appeal to both collectors and critics, each on different terms – cynicism masquerading as an integration of intellect and eye. If there’s such a thing as going deeper to be more shallow, Mull could do it. I’d like to see that.
Elwyn Palmerton
