Fiona Lindsay Shen reviews a display of countercultural art soon to be open at Cerritos College.
POET, ACTIVIST, and artist Peter Carr died unexpectedly in 1981, but his voice is as urgent as ever. It takes curatorial bravery to mount a major retrospective of the work of a largely unknown outsider artist whose mammoth archive of drawings, paintings, and notebooks has been, except for a 2017 exhibition in Laguna Beach, hidden from view for over four decades.
Many of the works that will be on display at Cerritos College Art Gallery from October 28 to December 13 have never been publicly exhibited. But the art of curation is, at heart, the art of care, and bringing these works to light simultaneously rescues and conserves these objects and the voice of an artist who created for his own survival and ours.
Carr, a self-taught artist, held a doctorate from the University of Southern California and was a professor of comparative literature at California State University, Long Beach. His class discussions ranged from the English revolutionary artist and poet William Blake to the ecstatic insights of Walt Whitman to the Beat poets' nonconformism. His paintings and illustrated chapbooks explored the intersections of art and literature; through his subjects, he dissected the inequalities and exploitations of the human and natural world he observed all around him.
Although Carr's work is excoriating, especially when railing against the military-industrial complex, crass materialism, and environmental desecration, it is in essence compassionate. He insists that it is only by raising awareness that ills can be healed.
A large work on cardboard -- Carr painted on anything, including his truck and fireplace -- depicts what at first glance might be naked angels hovering in ethereal orange. On closer inspection, these figures are swimmers, which makes their glowing backdrop a puzzle -- until we notice on the horizon the small outline of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. The first reactor, nicknamed "the beachball," began operation in 1968. "When a second reactor was built in 1977," PBS reports, the moniker updated to "the breasts."
Thousands of activists were mobilized by the antinuclear organization that Carr helped co-found, an Orange County branch of the Alliance for Survival. But art-making was another essential strand of his activism, into which he injected pathos and humor. In his painting, "the breasts" hover unnoticed above these cavorting naked swimmers, while their waters turn toxic cadmium. To drive home the point, in a line drawing reproduced as a poster for the Alliance for Survival, a couple drives past the reactors in a camper van, below the words: "Nuclear radiation isn't good for fishes or other ocean-going creatures."
"The visual element was something he felt obligated to do," explains the exhibition's co-curator and gallery director, James MacDevitt. "He was obsessed. It was part of his survival mechanism."
Carr's physical image survives through numerous self-portraits, blunt-skulled, his expression ranging from perplexed to sardonic. In the long tradition of artists inserting their likenesses into their work, he observes and asks the same of us. In one of his many documentations of peace rallies, he contemplates an ice cream beside a man and woman clad for the beach who may or may not notice protesters with placards demanding "No More Weapons for Somoza," referring to US intervention in Nicaragua, and "End the Arms Race, Help the USA." This plea is a perfect Carr lodestar -- by doing good, we save ourselves.
Like the dissident Dada artists whom he admired, Carr deployed art and text to wake people up. He skewered the mass media dedicated to numbing us to our condition. So many of his works depict subjects sleeping or sleepwalking through life. An oil on canvas portrays a waiting room at the Long Beach Bus Station, travelers stupefied by chair-mounted TVs. At the bottom of another large painting of vulnerable nude bodies pummeled by cannons, two talking heads share fragments of text, reassuring each other, "I always told you ... is really OK ... is really all right ... I know because I saw it on television." In his illustrated chapbook Anthem: Aliso Creek (1974), he observes, "Everyone watches on the tube as the planet slides into the galaxy bearing too-brief lives ..."
"His work was a sardonic assault on corporate culture," comments Andrew Tonkovich, Carr's former student and the dedicated custodian of his archive. In drawing after drawing, figureheads mouth platitudes that devolve hilariously into doublespeak: "A certain amount of radiation is necessary for profit." These astringencies are reminiscent of Orwellian satire as well as American neo-conceptualists like Jenny Holzer who exploited text to illuminate injustice. "AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE," runs one of Holzer's Truisms (1977 onwards) -- an aphorism Carr would have enjoyed.
"It's dark and affirming at the same time," offers Tonkovich, who has lived with this work for most of his adult life and, more than anyone, knows its moods. It is dark in its unflinching gaze and affirming because Carr gives us a way out. One section of the exhibition is dedicated to Carr's "other creatures," the animal spirits with whom we share our world and whose sentience we're mostly oblivious to. In finely inked drawings, he charts the web of life connecting fish to kelp to coyote to bear to raven to water to human.
Tonkovich suggests that Carr's idiosyncratic linear style was perfectly suited to the message: "They're like contour lines tying us all to a place, and his place was southern California." "I am a man and earth and sea and sky," Carr writes in Anthem: Aliso Creek. "I am that big tree over there." Text on an ink and watercolor painting declares, "I fancied there were other creatures there besides me." Fish evolve into bison, trees into a coyote, birds into people, a joyful creation myth that confirms our affinity. All of us are endlessly becoming something else.
In his incantatory prose poem "In the Summer We Went to the Mountains," the stream beds are despoiled, the redwoods razed, and the biosphere dying, but still "the wet and holy fog blows in from the sea," carrying the smell of redemption and hope. In his drawings, fish beget birds, and protest signs beget peace and reconciliation: "Loving you shows me humans and other creatures bringing forth the flowers of life. I am holding up a sign that I am loving you."
Carr's entire oeuvre is this sign, preserved because of the love and care of the people who surrounded him. If every exhibition has a subtext, this one would be that there were other people besides him who believed this work was worth saving. Perhaps the most important was his life companion, Jeanie Bernstein, who is credited with transforming him into a compassionate radical. She can be spotted in a few affectionate portraits, rallying for peace in Laguna Beach, but really the whole of Carr's work in its urgency and glorious fecundity is a portrait of Jeanie. After his death, she preserved all his work and entrusted it to Tonkovich, whose "joyful and quixotic quest" is "to rescue this archive from obscurity."
In our own time of heightened domestic and international tensions, environmental pressures, and renewed global spending on nuclear arms, Carr's missives from the last century are timely reminders to beware of distractions and attend to the business of empathy.