“Not just our labor, not just our leisure—something else is being commodified here: our sociability, our common and ordinary life together, what you might even call our communism. Sure, it’s not a utopian version of communism. It is a very banal and everyday one, it’s our love of sharing our thoughts and feelings with each other and having connections to other people. But still, most people seem rather alarmed that their desire to share and be with each other, to reach out to friends, to pass on cat pictures, even their desire to have ferocious arguments with strangers, is making someone else very, very rich.” McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, 2019.

Merlin Carpenter explores forms of negativity through an iconoclastic, disillusioned, and irony-tinged approach. His exhibitions stand as negations of themselves – they are postponed, relocated, multiplied, or even delegated. From his artistic practice to his theoretical writings, steeped in Marxist and materialist philosophy, he lays bare the links between the economy of artistic production and capitalist ideology. Art, especially painting, finds itself confronted by its own contradictions: despite its pretensions to critique, it remains tethered to its market essence and the dominant financial system. Operating within both commercial and alternative spaces, Carpenter scrutinizes the speculative commodification of art and the flows of information and economic value that govern its circulation. While contemporary anxiety is often soothed with antidepressants and comforting illusions, Carpenter deliberately chooses the path of solitary failure and refusal, a radical gesture aimed perhaps at fostering conditions of lucid discouragement, or even a shared revolt. It is in writing, however, that he has found a privileged space to explore areas free from value, beyond the reach of capitalist logics, and open to new critical possibilities.

The heat of capital

In 2021, Carpenter presents his exhibition Steam Engine, curated by Tobias Kaspar, at Longtang, a Zurich-based venue. Entering the space, one encounters a room thick with steam and metallic sound textures, paired with panoramic paintings of locomotive wheels. Bold, rough black strokes define the structure of these machines – icons of the industrial revolution and metaphors for Fordist capitalism. These crude lines overlay colorful checkered patterns of plastic tablecloths mounted on frames. The speed suggested by the steam engine wheels is slowed by the heaviness of these strokes, yet the symbol of progress is definitively undermined by the ironic contrast with the retrograde connotations of the “Wachstücher” patterned tablecloths. This vernacular motif, emblematic of Italian trattorias and traditional German breweries, was notably used by his fellow Cosima von Bonin, who also contributed to the hedonistic mythos of the Cologne art scene of the 1980s and ’90s. These tablecloth patterns evoke scenes of rural life and a nostalgic yearning for a still and conservative past. The track Stress II by London-based producer Acolytes intensifies the sense of disjointed time, with its stretched and jagged frequencies endlessly looping in distorted echoes, repeating in a relentless cycle.

In a separate room away from the fog, two posters hang. One advertises Carpenter’s 2020 Paris exhibition Circuits at Palette Terre, featuring the Art Deco-styled tagline: “La vision obscurcie est la vision dégagée” (“Obscured vision is clear vision”). The second is titled The Far Right in the Art World as of April 2019, a diagram originally published in the Art of Darkness issue of Arts of the Working Class. These words, which conclude the exhibition at Longtang and which the artist will expand upon in a text published afterward, provide insight into the tenuous links between the ideological drifts of public opinion and the art world, as well as the hierarchies of perception associated with it. The steam both obstructs our vision and creates an effect of revelation, forcing viewers to move closer to the paintings to see how they engage with modernist, technocratic, and conservative traditions, all at once obsolete and enduring. The brash sounds gradually fade and decay, dissolving into a spectrum of broken, ever-regenerating frequencies. No revolution seems possible in this claustrophobic loop.

The drawings and paintings in Carpenter’s Circuits series, shown in 2020 at dépendance in Brussels and Palette Terre in Paris, depict broken electrical circuits. Their black lines on white background schematize the abstract chains of the global financial system, as if flattening them were the only way to represent it. ​​After generating these circuit images in large quantities, Carpenter transforms them into something else: the cogwheels of steam engines, which give a new, thermodynamic shape to the energy of value. Though corrupted from the beginning, the system emerges stronger from its own damage, its ideology thriving on sabotage: the more it destroys, the more it progresses. Carpenter’s chaotic fusion of locomotives, smoke, and sound becomes an allegory for a disintegrating system in full delirium, that, though on the brink of a breakdown, continues to insist it still has energy to burn. We are faced with a megalomaniacal spectacle seemingly beyond redemption, compelled to consume even its own means of survival – right down to the very wood of the old locomotive’s wagons – in order to keep moving forward. There is almost a metallic aftertaste that recalls the misogynistic rhetoric of futurism, with its glorification of progress and war, famously described by Marinetti as “the only hygiene of the world”. The movement of the locomotive wheels is nothing but an illusion, a mirage conjured by smoke. But it doesn’t matter – White, dominant-class fascism spreads like a virulent cancer.

The fog’s obscuring effects and the hypnotic reverberations could lead to a physical experience of desubjectivation. It could echo Georges Bataille’s headless man and his meditation practice, which for him was a painful trial seeking to dissolve its mind. His retreat from both the social world and his individuality became a way to resist the war machine of negativity that defined World War II. This mental withdrawal resonates in a way with the trance state Carpenter values for its revolutionary potential. In his book The Outside Can’t Go Outside, he positions trance outside the realm of value. He frames it as a metaphor for what exists beyond capitalist realism, yet in a state that can only subsist virtually. Brian Massumi explains that capitalism is a vast exterior that captures interiorities. Carpenter, for his part, describes it as “a line of control within”. Since capitalism is boundless, can our actions occur outside of it? Pushing the question further: can the inside go beyond the outside? To capitalist, monetized surplus-value, Massumi opposes a non-capitalist, purely qualitative form of “surplus-value of life”. This makes us want to believe that in Carpenter’s exhibitions, or perhaps even more so in his writings and his concern for trance, there lie remnants of bare activity stemming from this great exterior. One can imagine a micro-activity stirring on an imperceptible scale within the steam. By changing the air’s density, the steam alters sound perception, heightening reverberations or dampening high frequencies. The particles suspended in the air may be to the waves what Carpenter’s texts are to his readers: micro-movements carrying transformation, traces of emerging ferment, of passionate activity. However, Carpenter insists that if such movements exist, they do so solely in their virtuality, with no direct relation to assimilated forms of opposition to capital such as alternative value systems, forms of care, or non-capitalist enclaves. 

There was no official statement at the exhibition, only the steam, which could be read as a press release, and the announcement of a forthcoming text, written by the artist months later. A deliberate choice, meant to leave the field open. This retroactivity is common for Carpenter, allowing him to incorporate political episodes but also to self-revise, in what he calls an “endless theoretical discussion”. According to McKenzie Wark, the hacker class is made up of those who define themselves in opposition to their detractors, much as Marx and Hegel by embracing communism. Wark urges us to invent new term combinations that break free from our capitalist paradigm, to forge fresh conceptual matrices that can reprogram our perceptions. Carpenter’s approach seems close to this, using language to better shape a self-generating and experimental theory.

The “value” of refusal

One should expect Carpenter to take a disconcerting approach with commercial galleries, urging them to make efforts that acknowledge the political stakes in which they are entangled. His 2018 exhibition De Streepschilderijen at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles, offers a case in point. Carpenter required the gallery to rent an exhibition space far from the US, in Amsterdam, while keeping the Los Angeles gallery open as a salon for discussions and self-promotion. Between two screens, a television displayed footage of the Amsterdam exhibition, which Carpenter filled with paintings. Large canvases repeating a single motif – black and white lines stripes crowded the outdated rose-pink walls, making the entrance almost impassable. This is how he staged a blatant parody of the uniformity of classic – institutional formalism. By deterritorializing his works, Carpenter positions himself not only against the rise of the far-right but also against the incestuous ties between white imperialism and the art world. However, in promoting himself, he paradoxically cancels his own boycott while simultaneously reaffirming it. This act of sabotage transforms into an absurd performance. A strategy of failure, as seen in his boycott against the rise of the far-right with Not Doing a Show in FPÖ Austria at Nousmoules in Vienna (2018) – once again nullifying his refusal by allowing the exhibition to proceed after all.

For his 2020 exhibition Paint-It-Yourself at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, Carpenter seemingly delegated the creation of the work to the audience, not preventing them from paint the white canvases displayed in the gallery. Ironically, the audience finds itself both exploited and complicit, working without remuneration, while Carpenter and the gallery reap the financial benefits, even though no money has been made yet. The work, which outwardly appears to offer free participation, is ultimately commodified. In doing so, Carpenter brings the dynamics of appropriation and free labor into the physical space, echoing their global normalization on social media. As he stated in his letter to the gallery, “Instead of using right-wing material as a left-wing joke, I would make the simplistic left gesture as a formal joke in relation to a more rigorous hypothesis.”Carpenter’s absolute rejection of any compromise lends him a heroic air, which simultaneously flips into cynical anti-heroism, as a risky way of life that embraces failure to avoid any form of reification. He seeks to expose the mechanisms of an ideological machine that, far from being subverted, is reinforced in the very negation of its own discourse. His attitude can in some ways align with that of Bonny Poon when she staged what she called the ‘nightmare of the gallerist’ in her exhibition Off The Wall at City Galerie Wien in 2022. There, Bonny Poon parodied the hierarchies that structure the transactional relationships of the art market, reducing the exhibition to a raw confrontation of messy obstacles, walls where she tag titles – Artist/Dealer/User/Lover/Pet – and a painting titled Anatomy of a Deal. Over the past few years, a growing interest in the conditions of production has been shaping the young art scene. We think of Eva Barto’s exhibitions, in which she created ‘communication vessels’ between public and private institutions, highlighting economic negotiations. This awareness and positioning is further marked by the rise of militant collectives such as Wages For Wages Against (founded in Switzerland), Art en grève and La Buse (in France) founded by Eva Barto, all with the urgent goal of regulating artistic labor. A massive work in progress.