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reviews CARTER MULL
CArter Mull:
ethiCs of everydAy fiCtion
RivingTon AR Ms, nEw YoRk
6 sEpTEM bER – 6 oCTobER
Carter Mull once employed the term ‘analogue
Photoshop’ to pinpoint the central incongruity of his
practice: aesthetically contemporary work devised using
more than a century’s worth of photographic sleight-of-
hand. In earlier pieces, the young LA artist mingled prewar
French and Soviet photographic Conceptualism with
the ‘Pictures’ generation’s appropriative logic, shooting
landscapes cluttered with glittery material debris like so
many variations on an imminent, visual apocalypse. If
analogue culture was on the wane, then Mull was its last
archivist, catching the moment when it sank into the half-
light of obsolescence.
Ethics of Everyday Fiction, Mull’s second solo
show at Rivington Arms, foregrounds the ramifications
– for practitioner and spectator alike – of the camera’s
capacity to be indexically authentic yet deceitful. Central
to Mull’s analysis are the many historical languages
of photographic trickery, adopted in the service of
so thoroughly obfuscating his creative process as to
generate prints which, while obviously multiple, emit
faint, seemingly autonomous auras. The staggered,
semi-transparent beams of Set & Logo (all works 2007)
resemble fragments of typography and design; bereft of
their originary roles, they float in a photographic reliquary
made thick with luminous brushstrokes. Collapse (from
Paul Outerbridge) echoes Outerbridge’s seminal prewar
experimentation with colour photography, comprising
identical copies of a black-and-white collage set side by
side and subjected to different colour washes. Printed on
metallic paper that registers a slight sheen in its unwashed
passages, the piece feels both more robust and more
primeval than a finished photograph, as if the various units
of mechanical reproduction had liberated themselves
through subjectivising chromatic bursts.
Less successful are the pieces that belabour Mull’s
conceptual concerns, as with Parrot, where the camera
actually assumes a figurative role in the print. Aesthetic
influence and reproduction are rather crudely addressed
Parrot, 2007, Lightjet print, 125 x 96 cm,
in Abyss (Flowers of Disaster…), one of two leaning ‘props’ on display: a Fujiflex print of Jean Fautrier’s
edition of 3 + 2Ap. Courtesy the artist and
Rivington Arms, new York 1928 painting of the same title hangs behind a glass plate, atop which Mull has repainted the image
in clear acrylic paint. In many ways Fautrier was an apt predecessor to Mull; his painting process had
something of the photographic to it, drawing figure and light out of darkened grounds. By choosing
so overdetermined a gesture as the repainting of (visible) strokes with invisible paint, however, Mull
risks simplifying his subject.
Mull has produced floor and ceiling installations in the past, but nothing has come close to
matching the ambition of Soldiers Playing Cards, a secondhand shop’s worth of mixed-media refuse
that feels a bit like a cross-section of Rauschenberg’s studio and a bit like, well, that of a young LA
artist. Amidst the various elements – a large swathe of floor covering loaded with paint drips and
footprints; overlying sheets of Cracked Ice Acrylic and Plexiglas; hundreds of printouts of Mull’s
source material – sit two digital metronomes ticking away in a syncopated rhythm. They may offer
one answer to the installation’s sophisticated riddle, but as with the best of Mull’s work, they can
barely be heard above the noisy visuality. Tyler Coburn
Artreview 200
November_REVIEWS.indd 200 26/9/07 13:40:03
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