Bringing art to life: Punk rock icon, UCI professor and LA art critic shed light on Carole Caroompas at LAM
By MARRIE STONE
Last Saturday night (July 12), a powerhouse panel of women gathered at the Laguna Art Museum (LAM) to reflect on art icon Carole Caroompas. Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go On Tour closed this week (read more about the show here). But during the exhibition’s final hours, the spotlight was on Exene Cervenka, vocalist and co-founder of the legendary punk band X, who appears in Caroompas’ work. Cervenka was joined on stage by Shana Nys Dambrot (art critic and founder of 13ThingsLA) and Jenny Doh (artist, writer and UCI adjunct professor).
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Photo by Marrie Stone
(L-R) Jenny Doh, Shana Nys Dambrot and Exene Cervenka pose with Carole Carmoompas’ 2000 work “Queen of the Countryside” (in which Cervenka appears)
The exhibition and panel highlighted LAM’s commitment to feature female artists and share feminist perspectives in art. “As we move further into the 21st century, discussions about relationships – love, romance and marriage, along with the evolving values associated with them – have become more prominent and varied than ever,” wrote LAM’s Executive Director Julie Perlin Lee in the show’s catalog. “[Caroompas’] paintings, created some 20 years ago, reflect her observations of the dynamics and possibilities of relationships – both real and fantasized – as she unapologetically delves into the complexities of desire, rebellion and love.”
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
“Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go On Tour” closed this week at the Laguna Art Museum
Those complexities received top billing last weekend as the panel grappled with issues like how women can enjoy the abandonment of love and passion while also being vigilant against misogyny and seeking opportunities to rectify it. How to be both in love and independent. How physical attractiveness influences the way we experience people and their work. And how we should avoid reducing artists (or anyone) to categories, simplifying their work and thereby missing all the paradoxes that make them interesting human beings. Cervenka also talked about how (and why) Los Angeles punk artists were taken less seriously than their New York and London counterparts, and why their music never made it into the mainstream.
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Photo by Marrie Stone
(L-R) Shana Nys Dambrot, Exene Cervenka and Jenny Doh engaging in a panel discussion on art, punk and gender roles
Collage, which was Caroompas’ chosen medium, is the right vehicle to explore these conflicts. Collage offers the opportunity to juxtapose paradoxical elements. Radical feminism exists alongside sex workers; hardcore punk alongside the soft stitches of embroidered flowers; humor beside anger and Emily Bronte’s 19th century novel alongside Alley Cat’s bass player Dianne Chai.
“What makes this exhibition feel contemporary is its ‘poly-sourcing,’” said Dambrot. “[Her subjects include] pop culture, biblical history, current events, personal materials, fantasy, real life characters, literary characters. Then she mashes different mediums together. But every painting is still inside the same conversation. I feel like collage is the medium of the moment because our entire consciousness is one big collage now. Thank you, internet.”
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Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Master, Servant” (2000), acrylic on found embroidery. Note the punk rock figures Poison Ivy and Lux Interior from The Cramps alongside a 1950s pin-up figure and still images from “Wuthering Heights.”
Like Bronte – who wrote, played the piano, sketched, painted, cared for animals, maintained a household, and shot guns all before her death at age 30 – Caroompas was also multitudes. She wanted to be an archaeologist, a poet and a writer. “Then I ended up being a painter,” Caroompas said in 1987. “And the music and the language and the painting all got thrown together.”
Collage gave Caroompas a language to express every part of herself while making it impossible for audiences to reduce her work to one thing.
“Carole’s work doesn’t resolve those tensions,” Doh said. “It simply presents them and rattles us and therefore changes us.”
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Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum
“The Honeysuckle Embraces the Thorn” (1999), acrylic and found embroidery on canvas. The red wrestlers and pin-up girls surrounding the piece are as important as the central figures. Note the thorny “handcuffs” circling the lace along the border.
If the exhibition had a soundtrack, Cervenka would be one of its headliners. Punk icons appear frequently throughout Caroompas’ paintings – Poison Ivy and Lux Interior (The Cramps), Joe Strummer (The Clash) and John Doe perform alongside Cervenka (X). Their presence is so palpable, you can almost hear the work. That’s characteristic of Caroompas – a woman unwilling to be silenced and always amplifying the voices of other women.
“Carole was a radical, subversive feminist who wanted [to make her craft aggressive]. She never met a paradigm she didn’t want to overturn,” Dambrot said. “But she was also a beautiful, sexual adult woman who wanted love and joy and beauty and pleasure in her life. She often remarked she was made to feel that those two things were somehow oppositional. It was important to her, in her work, to prove those spheres of influence and ambition could coexist in a single woman’s life.”
The LA punk scene seemed living proof. Cervenka described it as a kind of counterculture utopia where musicians and fans were blind to gender and sexual preferences. “All people were equal,” she said. “It didn’t matter what we were. I never knew if people were gay or straight. Nobody cared what anybody was. There was anger and rage, but not at each other. We left all that at the door. We took care of each other. Everybody was really good about that.”
As Cervenka described it, to the extent tension existed inside the punk world, it was between the coasts. If you want to understand the darkness of Hollywood, she recommends watching the 1975 film The Day of the Locust. But the 1970s New York was harsh. If you lived in the Village or Alphabet City and had to drag your gear through rainy streets onto grimy subways to get to gigs, you looked at sunny LA with its beaches and ocean and Whisky a Go Go and thought Californians were lightweights.
“We had cars, so we had freedom,” Cervenka said. “We were fortunate to have freedom to walk down the street in the sun. So, people thought we didn’t have anything to be mad about. We weren’t taken seriously. But there was plenty to be upset about. When you’re young, that’s what you’re supposed to do. Your job is to overthrow what has been and create something new. We were frustrated that no one was letting us do that.”
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Photo by Marrie Stone
Exene Cervenka met John Doe in 1977 at a poetry workshop in Venice when she was 21. They co-founded the punk band X that year, married in 1980 and divorced in 1985.
For the most part, just as Caroompas’ work never made it into any museums until today, hardcore punk never made it onto mainstream airwaves.
“I met Dick Clark when we did American Bandstand,” Cervenka said. “He asked me why counterculture music wasn’t on the radio. I said, ‘You’re Dick Clark. If you don’t know, how would I know? You did all this. This is all your idea.’”
But her theory as to why punk remained underground is a good one. “When Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died, and the Vietnam War ended, and all those vets came home, everyone was lost. People in the early ‘70s were completely lost and they just wanted to hold onto what they had…which was classic rock. We realized we were the first generation that wasn’t going to get there. We weren’t going to have our turn.”
Saturday night, it was Cervenka’s turn. The house was full, and the lines were long as people jockeyed for photos and a chance to chat with one of their musical heroines, who will turn 70 next year.
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Photo by Marrie Stone
A full house turned out last Saturday night to meet Exene Cervenka
It was also Caroompas’ turn. She died in 2022 at the age of 76, never having shown in a museum. Though Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go On Tour arrived posthumously, the exhibition found its way to the right place. LAM is known for bringing California artists out of the shadows and into the national limelight. It doesn’t shirk from hard cultural conversations like these.
“I wish Carole could be here,” was an oft repeated refrain Saturday night. No doubt she would have enjoyed sharing a stage with Cervenka. And no doubt she would have had plenty to say.
For more information on the Laguna Art Museum and their upcoming programming, visit their website here.
