The battle of the sexes continues Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour at the Laguna Art Museum
By MARRIE STONE
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She was much too fond of Heathcliff. The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from him; yet she got chided more than any of us on his account. –Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as underlined by Carole Caroompas for research purposes
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
“Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour” is on display at the Laguna Art Museum through July 13
Literature is my first love. Visual art comes in at a close second. When they’re married together – and it doesn’t happen often – the synergy feels electric.
Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour arrived at the Laguna Art Museum (LAM) last week. Caroompas entitled her 10 large-scale, mixed media works after phrases in Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic Wuthering Heights. She reinvented Heathcliff as a punk rock star, surrounding him with seduction, and thereby investigated the inherent conflicts between men and women and the tensions created by sex, power, desire and violence in America.
“Male/female relationships are a dilemma,” Caroompas once said, noting how much cultural norms and mores influence the dynamic between men and women. “It’s the oldest story in the world. But you can dress it up and tell it a different way every time.” She made a five-decade career of dissecting that dilemma. Revisiting that dilemma during our current brand of culture wars is an interesting exercise.
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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.”
“Artists make two kinds of art,” said artist and art dealer Cliff Benjamin, who manages the Caroompas estate. “One is familiar and nice and acceptable to the viewer. The other is somewhat unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It requires a learning curve. Carole was definitely in the second tier.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise Caroompas, who passed in 2022 at age 76, first considered careers in archeology, poetry, writing and music. Her work reflects all those things. Basing many of her series on popular American novels – Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Wuthering Heights – she reimagined some of literature’s iconic outsiders through the feminist gaze.
“I’m dealing with a lot of past and present Americana imagery,” Caroompas said, recounting a story of a foreign exchange student who didn’t understand her work. “You need to have a clue, otherwise it’s not going to have the same impact.”
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Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum
“Dead or Alive” (2001), acrylic on found embroidery
For those who slept through high school English or missed the many portrayals of Heathcliff on film, he’s become a cultural archetype for the brooding and vengeful antihero tortured by rage, jealousy and anger who destroys everyone around him. But he’s also a romantic figure – handsome, powerful and passionate. In other words, the perfect outsider for Caroompas’ purposes.
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Caroompas created the Heathcliff series between 1997 and 2001. Until 2012, the LA Weekly’s back pages still advertised sex workers (a practice she explored in Blue Impressions Are Left on Her Colorless Skin discussed in the caption below). Drawing from mid-century pin-up girls, beauty pageant contestants, controversial album covers and punk rock musicians, as well as sex worker advertisements, she turned the American classic on its head and asked us to consider our culture’s outsiders in a new light.
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
“Blue Impressions Are Left on Her Colorless Skin” (2001), acrylic on found embroidery. These women were sex workers advertised in the back of “LA Weekly.” Spanish phrases like “Tuyo es Corazon” are juxtaposed with “Megan – I’ll bend more than the rules.” The blue marks on their skin connote makeup, tattoos, bruises or all three.
Caroompas took an unconventional approach to painting. She began with language. “She would first write a thesis, gathering source materials and researching ideas, whether they were from films, books or images,” Benjamin said. “Then she would find the titles of the works. The imagery came from the titles.”
The late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when Caroompas came of age, was the height of conceptual work in the art world. “Conceptual thinking was mandatory,” said Benjamin. “You needed to articulate what you were thinking about and how your work fit in the world. It wasn’t acceptable to be intuitive. You had to back up what you were doing. Intelligence was valued. Fame was considered tawdry, cheap and creepy. It wasn’t until the late ‘90s or early 2000s when art became transactional.”
Still, Caroompas’ intellect was infused with humor and playfulness, even when her subject matter turned dark. Using found materials like lace, embroidery, tea towels and vintage postcards she unearthed in thrift stores, flea markets, trips abroad and elsewhere, she created a commentary on women’s role in the domestic arts. She then interspersed these objects of nostalgic comfort with still images from noir films where women were put in peril, largely at the hands of men. The longer you stare at a piece, the more you’ll see.
Look for familiar figures like Rita Hayworth, Janis Joplin and Nick Cave. Punk rock fans will find musicians from The Cramps (Poison Ivy and Lux Interior), John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X and Joe Strummer of The Clash.
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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.
“The reason she used musicians and movie stars is because she believed artists live outside of contemporary or conventional norms,” Benjamin said. “You couldn’t be a ‘normal’ mainstream person to produce art that talks about the problems and beauty of life. Seeing through the veil required you to be an outlaw. Carole thought of herself that way. She was a tough character.”
Benjamin said that when Caroompas first encountered David Bowie in 1970, it changed her life. “He changed personas, he changed outfits, he changed music. He was a chameleon. That freed Carole to understand, ‘That’s just like me. That’s just how I feel.’ Carole was never interested in changing her gender, but she wanted to be different things, experience different things. Life was about having all things be true simultaneously.
“All these musicians flickered in terms of gender fluidity on stage. It was an act of actual creation. You could visibly see creation happening in front of you on stage. It was like a flickering flame you could never catch. And a mirror was held up to her. I think everybody feels that at some point in their life.”
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Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum
“Wild is the Wind” (1998), acrylic and found embroidery on canvas. The central image is from a vintage postcard Caroompas found at a flea market.
A novel’s power lies in its ability to give us full and unfettered access to another’s mind. Novels invite us inside a character’s most intimate thoughts. We’re told their secrets. We witness their shame. We recognize in another mind all the things that make us feel alone in the world. When we think we’re the only ones with these strange thoughts, feelings and desires, we read and realize, “Ah…it’s not just me.”
Capturing the internal dilemmas of our psyche in two-dimensional artwork is a kind of magic trick. By harvesting all the riches that literature has already given us – with our understandings of Frankenstein and Heathcliff and Hester Prynn – Caroompas opened a wormhole into our own psychology. She did it with emotional suggestions. By creating juxtapositions that are in tension, layering contradictory images, evoking memories in the viewer using symbolism and archetypes, we understand something different about women and men than when we first encountered these images and characters. Like a good novel that reveals something new each time it’s re-read, a good work of art can accomplish the same.
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Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum
“Souvenir” (1999), acrylic and found embroidery on canvas
Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour will be on display at the Laguna Art Museum through July 13. For more information, museum hours and related programming, visit their website here.
