Freaks, Mutants, Flesh: “Carnival” at Jeffrey Deitch Is the Most Gloriously Trashy Group Show I’ve Seen in a Long Time

Pretty girl, pretty, pretty giiiiirrlll…Let’s lose ourselves, sell The Beach Boys a song, and then kill everyone magnetism radiates from Charles Manson’s silent, penetrating psycho stare. I can hear “Cease to Exist,” the original version of Charlie’s penned Beach Boys tune, eventually rejigged to turn down the nutto nihilist energy into “Cease to Resist,” on a loop, gazing into his hypnotic, spiral-eyed gaze. However, it appears Charlie has already traded in his long-suffering guitar (just listen to how he plunks on those strings in his recordings) for a bloody knife. Yikes. I don’t want Beatles references painted with my blood on the walls (I’m more of a Rolling Stones girl myself). Thankfully, Charlie is imprisoned—though not quite in prison yet, as he’s still sporting his hippie-dippie Spahn Ranch vest, bellbottoms, and grungy moccasins rather than his clink jumpsuit and spiffy swastika forehead carving. This Charlie, too, is trapped, only slightly more visible than his actual hiding spot from the cops—a kitchen cabinet with his scraggly hair poking out (one of my favorite Manson details I’m shoehorning into this review for kicks). Not to be outdone in sociopathic glowers is Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, who stands much more casually. He doesn’t have to be as cagey as Charlie; Richard has already been caught going by his prison scrubs, waving menacingly at passersby with his pentagram hand. Safely preserved, Ramirez dares gawkers to get close, peer into those beady, hungry shark pupils, and discover exactly why hot, desperate ladies sent this rapist-killer glamour shots, so many that the Museum of Death in Los Angeles includes an entire photobook of love pix on display.

In between Charlie and Richard lies a smaller, prone woman. Her head leans back, her mouth open, her eyes raised in pure tortured persecuted agony-bliss. Is this one of Charlie’s or Richard’s many victims?! Nope! It’s Saint Agnes, her long, hay-like hair circled around her, lying on a thin mattress, plopped onto perilously Catholic fabrics with patterns of the Crucifixion (Where do I get some as bedsheets?!). Saint Agnes, for you heathens, is the patron saint of young girls. Yes, even the Manson Family chicks and Richard Ramirez’s teenage fan girls. Like the latter, Agnes understood something about adoring unreachable men, telling her suitors, “Jesus Christ is my only spouse.” Obviously, this did not go well as it never does for saints, and poor Agnes, who couldn’t be burned (though it was attempted), got her head lopped off.

This trio of wax figures—the two killers by Henry Alvarez and an unknown Catholic devotional, scrounged from artist Joe Coleman’s Odditorium, is a transcendently tacky display, a delightfully depraved juxtaposition of piously sacred purity and fiendishly blood-thirsty profane. This triptych alone is a sublime shrine to trash. A prayerful wax museum for the criminally insane! Yet, toss in some of the surrounding artwork—Scott Ewalt’s gigantic wall-spanning banner promoting “The World’s Most Exciting Dancer,” “The Cat Girl” Lilly Christine, and his adjacent Times Square sleaze-inspired marquee sign, reading “Satana,” a tribute to Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill! filth elder Tura Satana; a photo of burlesque dancer and Coney Island Mermaid Parade monarch Bambi the Mermaid sinking to the bottom of a pool wearing a buck-toothed Nosferatu mask with a tuft of orange hair, a hot pink shimmy-shimmy dress, and silver heels, surrounded by glamorous, multicolored Showgirls backstage lightbulbs; Nadia Lee Cohen’s confined peep show cyborg; Jane Dickson’s velvety landscapes of sleazy carny booths with barkers enticing the crowds with “Freaks, Mutants, Flesh”; Danny Cortes’s itsy miniature Dante’s Inferno ride from Coney Island’s bygone Astroland; the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black girlies reborn as infants, still naked with a shock of jet black hair; a meditative Alex Grey-like portrait of the Illustrated Man, Mike Wilson, by DAZE; a sideshow banner advertising the mouse-munching “Last of the Geeks”; and perhaps the most subtle of the bunch, a coy little dress with the ass cut out (peek-a-boo!)—and you’ve got the most exquisitely trashy group show that I’ve seen in a long, long time. And thank the gaudy gods! I needed a trip to trash heaven—or hell!

Carnival at Jeffrey Deitch is a cavalcade of filth, offering thrills and chills, shock and awe, clowns and sword swallowers, and an enormous merry-go-round by Raúl de Nieves that is so encrusted with crystals that it appears like it is made out of rock candy (and is begging for a spin if it didn’t look like it would leave unsightly marks on your ass). The show is curated by Joe Coleman, otherwise known as the “Last of the Geeks” from the aforementioned banner, whose painstaking paintings crammed with an unhinged amount of teeny-weeny detail are scattered around the show. This includes one shockingly simplistic devotional miniature of Desperate Living bombshell, stripper, mob wife, author, and all-around legend Liz Renay, hung below Renay’s own tropical Gaugain-esque (without the pedo pest behavior) painting. This pairing of the Renays should inspire a righteous bout of genuflecting, at least from a very specific crowd. Carnival is a show for us—the freaks, the geeks, the perverts, the weirdos, the mentally unwell, and those of us who have fond traumatic memories (even trauma can be pleasurable) of holding ourselves precariously into janky, clearly unsafe rides at the Big Butler Fair (held at the same place where Trump was almost assassinated)!

We accept you! One of us! Gooble Gobble!

Of course, it’s way, way too facile to dredge up that old chestnut from Freaks for an exhibition celebrating carnival, but why fight it? That quote is fitting, as Coleman presents his own painted tribute to Freaks’ director Tod Browning, who glowers like a ringmaster in front of a gaggle of his characters, including a hilariously grumpy old-man baby. The exhibition also effusively gushes over one of Freaks’ stars in particular: Johnny Eck, also known as “Half Boy” or “The Most Astonishing Living Human.” Eck stands as Carnival’s patron saint and not just because he’s given his own realistic reverential sculpture by Spectral Motion (Move over, Agnes!). More than just promotional posters from Eck’s freak show appearances (“How can he live?” asks one), the exhibition also reveals Eck’s own artistic prowess and obsessions, from his homemade puppets to his beloved train, built to achieve his lifelong dream of being a conductor, as seen in nearby photographs. Though Eck’s drawings of sailor girls and beach babes are certainly thematically appropriate, my favorite of Eck’s art has to be his screen-painting of Jesus, which looks like a coveted thrift store find made by someone’s grandma rather than a tableau rendered by a sideshow performer.

Though I realize I use the comparison a lot, I don’t bring up thrift stores for nothing. There is a gratifying junkyard aspect to the mess of Carnival’s overstuffed curation, a too-muchness that matches the extremity of the art. Just walking into Jeffrey Deitch is a bit of a shock, greeted by Neptune and his Mermaid Queen, only to turn and see John Dunivant’s anatomical sword swallower, Rigoberto Torres’s Miss Cleo-esque fortune teller bust, and the nightmarish contrast of Austin Lee’s cheery tumbling clowns and Anne Imhof’s sleep paralysis demon that rivals It in sparking a serious case of coulrophobia. That junk shop aesthetic is further emphasized by the layers upon layers of cough-y dust covering Tom Duncan’s miniature Coney Island, a real grubby vibe that makes the show seem like all of the work has been dredged out of someone’s spider-web-strung attic. The only art space that I can even equate Carnival’s curation to is the Sculpture Barn at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, with its twirling Divine, ginormous scripture-scrawled hot air balloon, and creaky kinetic sculptures. Carnival has a kinetic sculpture too, but with a twist. Narcissister’s Narcissister Automata with Paxinoscope (Jump rope) features a mannequin (of course) straddling bike wheels, with the viewer prompted to crank one of the bike pedals. When doing so, the mannequin jankily bucks and humps, her head, with her soulless eyes yanked open by metal like she’s being forced to endure a reeducation program alongside A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, bounces up and down. If you can tear your eyes away from her uncanny movements (an eerie joy that was lost in the deadened robot limbs and nippleless torsos in Geumhyung Jeong’s nearby show at Canal Projects) and look past her fluffy merkin, there, wedged in her crotch, is a spinning reflected motion image of a little girl jumping rope. Thanks to a pre-cinema technology called, as the title indicates, the praxinoscope, Narcissister merges adult female eroticism and girlishness, as well as the audience’s peeper enjoyment and manipulation of both.

Now, I’ll admit, I wouldn’t say Carnival is flawless. A couple of works felt out of place, like Red Grooms’s way-too-bookish The Strand or Laura Kaplan’s nasty pantyhose stuffed with hair sculptures, although, on further reflection, Kaplan’s sculptures are so viscerally repulsive and rancid that they probably do belong in a haunt. Unsurprisingly, it was mostly the works by blue-chip darlings that wilted in comparison to Big Top excess and voyeurism-a-go-go. I zipped right by Mickalene Thomas’s massive sparkly scissoring beach bums and George Condo’s mischievous little alien, both too restrained in contrast to blood-soaked orca suits and hot blue-wigged octopi ladies encircled by iridescent arms. Kenny Scharf’s black-and-white intergalactic characters were overpowered by Karon Davis’s pop-out plaster fever dream, Sad Clown, and toothy Carnival masks from Guinea-Bissau. Hell, even typically exaggerated Peter Saul’s drippy Dali couldn’t compete with Mario Ayala’s adjacent faux tour bus rear-end canvas, presenting so many soft-filtered cackling Boomers on jet skis or retired girlfriends grinning behind their technicolor fruity drinks that it resembled an erectile dysfunction pill commercial. Rather than another ad for Cialis, this bus is sending these retirees straight to paradise: Pleasure Palms! All Ayala’s painting is missing is a loofah hanging over the edge to telegraph these seniors’ fetish preferences to those swingers at The Villages!

With over a hundred works in the exhibition, I could expend many, many more words rambling about each and every piece that tickles my trash-loving fancy. For instance, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Whitney Ward’s raunchy Plate Set, specifically the plate printed with a photo of a thonged burlesque behind. Perfect for your next family dinner! Yet, I promised myself I would try to resist effusive gushing. However, gushing is the natural response to the welcome relief that Carnival offers from the rest of the humorless, unimaginative, safe, uninspired, and uninspiring group shows that galleries inflict on New York every summer. You know the ones I mean—shows in which gallerists slam together anything that might sell and afterward, cobble together a hazy curatorial theme, usually something either jargony or vague like “liminality” or “the body.” Carnival, in defiant contrast, is an exhibition that not only feels grounded in a New York City Coney Island (Baby) summer but celebrates our sweatiest, most lurid impulses—and satisfies them.