CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/4/2015

The Passion According to Carol Rama

"Opera n 18" (1939) is reproduced from The Passion According to Carol Rama, the fascinating new release published to accompany the current touring retrospective. Artist and essayist Mai-Thu Perret writes, "A savage little old lady tries on the panoply of modern art, from Fauvism to concrete abstraction to Art Informel and Surrealism. She sits in the intersection between movements, in the cracks of history. Art movements are like fashions that a woman can put on and distort, and spit back garbled and cut-up for more than seventy years from her apartment in Turin. Always producing her very own, very particular type of jouissance. Always refusing to behave. Her work teems with orifices. The places through which a body, in its singularity, connects and conjoins with other bodies. The places through which the outside enters in, through which one is penetrated, and penetrates. The mouths, the assholes, the vulvas, the ears, the eyes, of a machine sexuality where desire is the prime mover. There are dicks, feet, snakes, bicycle tires, mad cows, shoes, syringes, dentures and shit… It can be tragic, but it's also quite hilariously funny, in a fierce and merciless way. Pain has never been the opposite of pleasure."