Auf der Suche nach dem Künstler Karsten
I'm tired of doing things your way your way your way
I'm tired of doing things your way your way your way
I'm tired of doing things your way your way your way
I'm tired of doing things your way your way your way
— Grant Vernon Hart, “Tired Of Doing Things”
Rolling Thunder
At two in the afternoon of February 7, 1965, a company of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam— nicknamed the Viet Cong by the United States military — staged a surprise attack on Camp Holloway, a heavily fortified American outpost near the city of Pleiku, in the province of Gia Lai. Eight servicemen were killed.
Twelve hours later, President Lyndon B. Johnson, acting on the powers granted to him by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, ordered retaliatory air strikes under the name Operation Flaming Dart, which bombed selected targets in North Vietnam. On February 13, in a significant escalation of America’s involvement in the ongoing war in Southeast Asia, Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a campaign of intense bombardment of the North.
On April 2, 1970, Nils Karsten was born in Hamburg, West Germany. When he was 16, the hardcore punk band Husker Dü performed a short, cacophonous set at 7th Street Entry, a concert venue in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Funeral services for the eight slain Americans were held on February 9, 1965, at the Saigon Airport, where the mourners included the US Ambassador to South Vietnam, Maxwell D. Taylor. In January 1982, Husker Dü released a live recording of the Minneapolis concert as its debut EP, Land Speed Record, clocking in at twelve minutes, twenty-seven seconds on one side and fourteen minutes, eight seconds on the other. A photograph from 1965 of eight flag-draped coffins in the cargo hold of a transport plane was used as the disk’s black-and-white cover art.
Decades later, Karsten included Land Speed Record in his series of large-scale album-cover prints, which he carves out of rough, grainy construction plywood with a handheld dental tool.
Songs of Innocence and Experience
Modern mass media was born in the middle of the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type. But the same historical moment also saw the birth of publications known as block books (or xylographica), in which both image and text were carved, inked, and printed on the same slab of wood.
Heavily pictorial and religious in intent — and cheaper to produce than books in moveable type, making them available to a wider swath of the public (among the more popular titles was Biblia pauperum, or The Pauper’s Bible) — these layered objects, simultaneously verbal and visual, speak to both the intuitive and analytical sides of the brain without ranking one above the other.
Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, they speak between the brain lobes, forming a perceptual corpus callosum, as it were, composed of interdependent information streams whose neural firings simultaneously encompass the either/or and the both/and.
The practice of publishing books incorporating the visual and verbal on the same intaglio surface was revived in 1788 by the progenitor of modernism, William Blake, through a method he called "Illuminated Printing.” The first work of this kind was Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789). The pictorial and textual are united seamlessly on the copper plate; it is impossible to apprehend the former without the latter and vice versa, their divergent, even oppositional, perceptual processes fused as one.
Skipping effortlessly from technique to technique and one formal approach to another, Nils Karsten has carved out portions of this interstitial mental space for his deeply Blakean sensibility, a force of vision spun from the porous hormonal membrane between childhood’s wondrous light and the disordered, musky darkness of emerging adolescence.
The violent jolt from innocence to experience is felt repeatedly throughout Karsten’s art, its waves of confusion and terror rippling with countercurrents of melancholic yearning and liberated exaltation.
Two Virgins
The kaleidoscopic scope of Karsten’s practice reflects an obliviousness of, an obstinance toward, or an exhaustion with the way things are done in an art world habituated to trademark gestures and celebrity branding. His pursuits are at once endearing and alienating, dankly erotic and beguilingly conceptual, gyrating around a storyline as fundamental as the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. There can be no innocence without sin; clarity inevitably succumbs to perplexity; rationalism slides into madness.
In the middle of the afternoon, eight men in an alien land are ambushed and killed in their own fortress (Land Speed Record, 2013); in the same alien land, a Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức sits down in the middle of the street, douses himself with gasoline, and lights a match (Rage Against the Machine, 2013); a disgruntled ex-politician guns down San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone, and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, claiming that junk food had altered his brain; his mitigated sentence sets off riots (Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, 2012) .
In a review of Heaven Has No Happy Ending, the artist’s exhibition at Marvelli Gallery in New York City (October 20 - November 26, 2005), I described his “mordantly disturbing drawings of children with facial and body hair, amputated and prosthetic limbs, and poles penetrating their naked bodies like scarecrows” as “visual metaphors for the corruption of innocence”:
In a culture that venerates childhood as a time of antiseptic enchantment even as it peddles gore-splattered video games to little boys and skimpy, skin-tight outfits to little girls, Karsten’s unapologetic truth telling delivers a substantial shock of recognition. Like the teenaged protagonists of [Harmony Korine’s 1997 film] Gummo, […] the children in Karsten’s pictures seem to have been polluted not only by the hands of adults, but also by their example.
Two of Karsten’s album-cover prints are composed of images that were censored before the records were released: Two Virgins (2007/2008) and Blind Faith (2008). For Two Virgins (its full title, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins), John Lennon and Yoko Ono faced the camera as a pair of full-frontal nudes — Adam and Eve circa 1968; outraged distributors would sell it only if it were wrapped in brown paper. Blind Faith is the 1969 self-titled recording (and the only one produced before the band broke up) by the first “supergroup” (Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech), whose cover featured a highly saturated color photo of a topless 11-year-old girl holding a silver spaceship. The image was replaced in the American release with a group portrait of the band.
The original cover’s photographer, Bob Seidemann, explained:
The spaceship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life. […] If she were too old it would be cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal point, that singular flare of radiant innocence.
Karsten’s adaptations of the two album covers cannot be read apart from their historical narrative; in this regard they are, conceptually at least, like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, an amalgam of image and text.
Two Virgins carries a surplus of historical weight: the public hysteria around the image — Lennon, arguably the era’s greatest celebrity, baring it all; the jarringly experimental nature of the music itself; the breakup of the Beatles two years later and the racist/misogynistic allegations singling out Ono as the cause; and the assassination of Lennon by a crazed fan in 1980.
The artwork featured on Blind Faith, in the US at least, never saw the light of day. The “flare of radiant innocence” invoked by Seidemann no sooner illuminates the sky than it’s snuffed out. In his revival of the image nearly forty years later, Karsten tempers the candy-colored optimism of its creation and the defeatism of its censorship, navigating the two poles with a gimlet-eyed, high-contrast realism that bristles, like his silvery graphite drawings, with “an unexpected, […] jagged-edged beauty.”
Nothing Sacred
O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonderConsider all the works Thy hand hath made.I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
— Carl Boberg, “How Great Thou Art” (Stuart K. Hine, trans.)
Pattern. Repetition. Control. Chaos. Restraint and abandon. How is it possible to line up two, three, four, or five of Karsten’s starkly dissimilar artworks, and somehow come away convinced that they are the products of a single artistic intelligence?
Could it be something as subliminal as a fascination with dead and dying media? The imagery in his intuitively indexical grids is flawlessly X-Acto’d from newspapers and magazines: birds; hands; noses; feet; pop stars; dead presidents; dogs. His nightmarish collages on powdered graphite are similarly sourced from endangered paper-and-ink, transforming photographic jam-ups into metallic animate-inanimate hybrids sprouting fingers and race cars, legs and claws, bullets and masks, while the stream-of-consciouness drawings are exemplars of what the hand can do in the teeth of digital oblivion — spontaneous, logic-defying, polystylistic. And then there are the album covers, black vinyl echoes tripping down the decades — Lou Reed; Kraftwerk; Beatles; Led Zeppelin; Pink Floyd; Clash — rendered in woodcut, the original mass medium, talismans as potent as the life-size, upside-down crucified Christ that Karsten has appropriated from the 15th century, or the skeleton he took from Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death (1523-1525, perhaps the most famous block book in Western civilization), pasting them both on enormous fields of newspapers.
But there is something more, a spiderweb of references and associations spun through the work that catch the imagination the way trees catch slanting sunlight. Andy Warhol, for one — the progenitor of appropriation who formed the Velvet Underground and designed the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, which was released on April 23,1971, the day before 200,000 people marched on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. His deadpan aesthetic and ironic distance, especially when it comes to photojournalistic horror, permeates the imagery that Karsten has chosen to replicate, often in gummy, oil-based inks that endow his prints with the gritty tabloid immediacy of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series from the mid-1960s, his most trenchant work.
Warhol’s practice of incorporating news photos into his silkscreens had the effect of freezing time, so that a 60-year-old shot of a car accident or of Jackie Kennedy would shed its temporal context and settle into an eternal now. Karsten subverts and concretizes this idea by using actual newspapers as the backing for his cutout woodblocks. But they are as specific and intentional as Warhol’s imagery, culled from archived stacks that the artist has spent years compiling, so that each selection evokes a particular mood, theme, time, or place. Similarly, the collaged grids derive from flat files brimming with cutouts, which Karsten arranges in systematic and unsystematic schemes, some clearly stated, like the 165 Ronald Reagans on a 15 x 11 grid, and others not, though the arrays of consumer goods and celebrities (both Warhol obsessions), body parts and nobodies, dolls and weaponry seem to make some kind of formal and psychological sense.
The same Weltanschauung infects the drawings and graphite collages, but shatter the rationality of the grid into a hellscape of mutants and monsters squirming across the page, polluting the self-deceptive narrative of childhood innocence with doses of reality, which in our time can be convincing only as surreality. The violence implied in the grid by knives and firearms has come overt, with those weapons now wielded by prepubescent boys and girls, along with the occasional baby — Henry Darger meets Tex Avery meets the Brothers Quay. The barely coherent bleakness of the drawings is sucked through a wormhole into the blackened particulate atmosphere of the graphite collages, which edge the teeming grotesquery further and further into the outer limits until it flares up into the hilarious.
There is something comforting about Karsten’s persistence in the quiet, meditative methods of collecting and categorizing source materials; of laying them out in rigorous grids or wall-size pictorial fields; of patiently incising away at the surface of a rough, heavy sheet of plywood, days and weeks at a time, until he has created the perfect reflection of a cultural artifact from his wonder years, edging between innocence and experience.
The works build and feed off each other, but in subtle, even barely perceptible ways. A tiny toy tank, its turret and body painted in camo, along the bottom edge of a drawing reappears as a three-dimensional object — a brown-and-beige mobile sculpture-on-wheels that exudes the vulnerable clunkiness of outsider art yet owes its existence to Karsten’s highly considered conceptual framework. The drawings and graphite collages, though created through utterly opposing means, are very much mirror images of one another, with the collages processing the helter-skelter, scribbly impulses of the drawings into an acutely refined dimension, cleaning up their act, so to speak, so that their deranged humor can bubble to the surface.
The countercurrents at play across techniques and genres underscore the paradox at the core of Karsten’s practice, which can be seen as fully embracing Warhol while, at the exact same time, fully rejecting him. For Karsten, the handmade object is not an outlier in the age of mechanical reproduction, but a sine qua non, the life-giver upon which everything depends. He doesn’t drag a squeegee over a sheet of mesh embedded with a photographic image to create his photographic images, but digs them out of unrefined, resistant sheets of wood — wood that is meant to be nailed to an exterior framework and then sealed up, too raw to be used for anything meant to be seen.
He uses the same material to create the image of the man most famously nailed to rough wooden beams. This icon falls under the rubric of what Paul Elie, in his New Yorker review of the exhibition, Andy Warhol: Revelation at the Brooklyn Museum (November 19, 2021–June 19, 2022), terms “crypto-religious — work in which the question of whether and how they are religious is central to their effect.” (Other examples cited in the article are “Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ (a crucifix immersed in urine and photographed so that the body of Christ has a yellowish tint), and Chris Ofili’s ‘The Holy Virgin Mary,’ featuring a Black Madonna encrusted with elephant dung […].”)
It’s telling that for his image of Jesus, Karsten does not simply incise the body into a sheet of wood but uses a jigsaw to liberate it from the picture plane, as if it were one of his thousands of collage cutouts. Unlike Warhol, whose religious paintings incorporate Renaissance works that are so well-known — Leonardo’s Last Supper (1495–1498) and Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1513–1514) — that they approach banality, the originator of Karsten’s Christ is anonymous, or at least not obvious to even the historically informed viewer. This changes the dynamic considerably, setting the image apart from pop culture and allowing it to accrue its own resonances, which Karsten complicates by frequently placing it upside-down in his compositions (a signal of distress when done with a flag) and by surrounding it with newspaper ads and texts, which is then overprinted with decorative patterning of one form or another.
This approach adds up to a profound ambiguity regarding the artist’s stance toward spirituality, a commonly taboo subject in contemporary art, which he has invited via the introduction of the Jesus figure into his vast repertoire of demons, schoolchildren, and rock’n’roll gods. At the same time, he sidesteps any direct assertion of spiritual intent through the oblique, even obscurantist, ways in which he presents the image. We are then left with hints and associations. Might we draw any supplemental significance from the Holbein skeleton, which is similarly jigsawed out of plywood on an enlarged scale and set against a newspaper field? Does it have any bearing that the skeleton is taken from the page of The Dance of Death titled “The Lady,” or, perhaps more pertinently, that it is beating a drum — a rock star memento mori?
After the Fall
You're going to reap just what you sow
You're going to reap just what you sow
You're going to reap just what you sow
You're going to reap just what you sow
— Lou Reed, “Perfect Day”
Is it a coincidence that fire is featured prominently on at least five of Karsten’s album covers? Or that the American flag shrouds eight coffins in Land Speed Record and barely conceals a young woman’s vagina in Amorica (the 1994 album by the Black Crowes, which, coincidentally, was censored by big box stores)? Or that the stripes on those flags rhyme with the zebra crossing in Abbey Road (the cover art that gave rise to the “Paul is dead” rumors) and with the phallic trapezoids on Autobahn and Kraftwerk, which in turn relate to the bulging jeans in Sticky Fingers, the banana in The Velvet Underground & Nico (designed by Andy Warhol), the up-cocked Hindenburg in Led Zeppelin, and John Lennon’s personal cock in Two Virgins?
Love and sex; death and birth; innocence and corruption; destruction and creation. Universal concerns may be out of step with the current cultural conversation, but they’re no less close to the bone. Nils Karsten’s art, despite its potentially perplexing multifariousness, hews closely to the common bonds, spiritual or otherwise, that bring humanity together, and the sinister forces conspiring to strain and break them. To look long and hard at his work is to experience a slow-rolling astonishment over how interconnected it all is: from John and Yoko as Adam and Eve on the edge of expulsion, to their fallen progeny, damaged children forced to grow up too fast amid dysfunction and decadence. He avoids the cardinal sin of conspicuousness through Brechtian estrangement, a sense of irony that accepts human experience as a succession of dialectics and paradoxes, a world where the code name for a bombing campaign that killed untold thousands of Vietnamese can be lifted from a Christian hymn. Karsten’s practice derives from punk and hardcore, the pandemonium of shred metal and mosh pits, and yet image after image is permeated with a tainted, shimmering classicism that simultaneously excites the eye and sets it at rest — a cool-headed mediation of a world on fire.