Carole Caroompas: recycled romance

Art in America, Nov, 1998 by Michael Duncan

In collages and, since the mid-1980s, in paintings that rely on collage-style juxtaposition, Carole Caroompas examines the roots and legacy of the Romantic narrative, offering witty updates on the fairy tales, legends and works of classic fiction that have shaped our notions of gender and self. A 25-year retrospective recently offered an in-depth look at her fractured fables.

The collage esthetic animates the vibrant, piquant work of L.A. artist Carole Caroompas, who was the subject last winter of a brilliantly succinct 25-year survey organized by Anne Ayres for the gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design. Caroompas is chiefly known for her work of the last 10 years: large-scale allegorical paintings that update the sexual and moral conflicts of characters from fairy tales, legend and classic fiction--figures such as Rapunzel, King Arthur, Frankenstein, Salome, Hester Prynne and Zorro. Part structuralist, part fabulist, Caroompas spins tense narrative webs around these characters, collaging images that depict their literary dilemmas with graphic images taken from anthropological photographs, advertising and pornography. The resulting visual cacophonies transcend push-button feminism, presenting a kind of roll call of types and behaviors that seem to underlie the continued struggle between the sexes.

Ayres avoided chronological placement of works in the survey, instead structuring the exhibition as itself a kind of fiber-collage reflecting the seemingly disparate elements and art-historical movements that are brought together in Caroompas's later work. The artist's penchant for patterns, which she often uses as backgrounds in the paintings, finds a precedent, for example, in the show's earliest piece, Delayed Occurrence (1972). In this process work, the vertical lines of a candy-colored grid painted on linoleum were allowed to drip down over a folded lip to form pastel pools on the floor.

Another subverted modernist grid is woven together with pipe cleaners and thread for In Between an English Orchid (1973), a glittery tinseled-paper piece festooned with feathers and fabric ornaments. This work, reflecting the contemporaneous rise of the Pattern and Decoration movement, demonstrates Caroompas's celebration of traditionally feminine, decorative styles and common household materials. Her interest in patterning is carried forward in the mock game-board grids of her '808 collages and in the grids of found cartoon images in her '908 paintings.

An early collage, Method to My Madness (1975), clues viewers into the personalized take on history that animates Caroompas's works. The artist collages her own face onto an appropriated image of Ingres's Grande Odalisque, whose titular subject lies amid a grid of decorator pillows in front of a bed that bears a swirling Op art coverlet. She is being entertained by an array of yellow canaries chirping a tune whose lyrics (on a page of sheet music in the background) commemorate Caroompas's own defiantly outsider status: "Raving, they say I'm raving.., daffy, they say I'm daffy .... "The "method" referred to in the work's title is collage itself--the magical altering of images that imbues Caroompas with the power to assume the languid, haughty pose of Ingres's model. The female artist inserts herself into art history, narcissistically--and humorously--hijacking our attention.

Caroompas works in series, often organized according to systemic structures, such as the calendar months in "Remembrance of Things Past" (1976), or the alphabet in "A Hermetic Romance from A to Z" (1980-81). Bringing together a typically wide range of cultural referents, as well as autobiographical anecdotes and dream scenarios, these series elaborate Caroompas's notion of "Romance"--what Ayres in her eloquent catalogue essay calls the artist's "special province," one populated by "desire, physicality, formalized eroticism, pomp and circumstance, the quest, the challenge, the journey of adventurous uncertainties, the imperiled and the rescued."[1]

These terms, inspired by medieval chivalric romances such as Morte d'Arthur and The Romance of the Rose, discomfit Caroompas, providing the gender stereotypes that continue to mold and confound our behavior. A set of collages based on heraldic designs, "The Dreams of the Lady of the Castle Perilous" (1978-79), casts the artist in the role of a female knight errant, whose quest is to undo our abiding notions of the Lady and the Knight, unassailable and perfect, in the throes of courtship.

Rooted in the ups and downs of her own relationships, Caroompas's various series describe a range of romantic experience, limited only by chance and the culturally determined rules of the game. The backgrounds for the "Hermetic Romance" collages, in fact, consist of imaginary game boards, ranging from a chessboard grid to a fantasy adventure set in outer space. The works' comic visual and semantic rhymes bring to mind John Baldessari's photo collages, which feature circular images taken from film-noir stills, science textbooks, comics and travel guides. Caroompas's mix of imagery indicates possible "moves" in the various "rounds" of romance.