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Matt Carols is an American conceptual artist from New Canaan who works in painting, ceramics, graphic design, digital graphics and photography. He graduated from the New York Academy of Art in 1992 and has exhibited frequently in New York City since. He is known for his controversial anti-French sentiments which he frequently explores, and also sometimes disputes, in his artwork and interviews. With his recent collaborative effort with Liu Dao, the not-for-profit Shanghai-based art collective of island6 Arts Centre, he has expanded into LED and interactive arts as well.

Background

Carols himself is of French lineage, which he claims can be traced to a French cobbler and popular sole designer who lived in New Canaan at the beginning of the 19th century. He has however recently changed his French surname, purportedly for reasons of disassociating himself from previous lawsuits brought against him. For the same reason, Carols also creates arts prolifically under various pseudonyms.

Career as Art Director

Carols describes himself as a director of conceptual art, commissioning artists to execute his ideas and designs. He has recently collaborated in the same vein with Shanghai-based art collective Liu Dao of the island6 Arts Center, working closely with the electronics-based arts group to create his conceptual work for their art shows. He calls the art of Liu Dao “innovative” and “stunning”.

His professional relationships are dogged by controversy, having left a string of soured relationships with several galleries as a result of clashing work styles. He has been sued more than twenty times and has had to pay bail on seven other occasions.

Career as Artist

In addition to being an art director, Carols is also an artist whose artistic methods are as contentious as the works he produces, including using his own urine, perishable foods and profane images and texts.

Carols’ work has been variously described as “unique”, a result of “blazing perfectionism” as well as “spite-ridden and xenophobic”. Ironically, his art is experiencing strong popularity among French collectors.

Themes

Xenophobia – Francophobia

The most consistent and notorious theme in the work of Carols is that of negative feelings torwards France and French people, products, concepts, culture, history and artifacts. In 1992, Carols sought to expose what he called the “purely illusionary” nature of French morality through the short film Hypocritic Oath, in which he offered people money for pictures of road kill. He received an accolade from the psychology department of the California state university system for his film.

In his Flag series, Carols continues the anti-French sentiment which drives his work. The series features different representations of the French flag, through which Carols declares his support for struggling artists “on the verge of finding their own voice, but suffocated by the pessimism of the French critic”. His most recent flag, Piss Flag, is dedicated to all young Chinese contemporary artists. The flag was created from canvas strips soaked in colored urine, which Carols produced by drinking methylene blue for one week to get blue urine and eating beets for the next to get red urine. Although frequently construed as an insulting and anti-French gesture, Carols asserts that through the use of his own bodily fluids, he is seeking a reunion and reaffirmation of his biological connection to his French blood.

Correspondingly, despite his well-known Francophobia, Carols insists that he is no xenophobe, stating in an interview with Urbanatomy that he is “extremely tolerant” of French people, “for the most part”.

Caricature and Profanity

Carols also employs confrontation and interactivity in his creations. In his installation French Roulette, anyone, anywhere in the world who calls or sends a text to (+86) 13012869169 can experience the piece. Recipients of the aggressively worded French reply text participate in Carols’ rage with and derision of the global export of French culture, which he has called “a scorching disease eating away at what’s left of humanity.”

In Francatalia, a series of watercolors depicting the structures of famous French architectural sites, Carols seeks to highlight the perceived prevalence of the phallic and vaginal imagery that the typical French architect is allegedly preoccupied with. Carols uses the Eiffel Tower to represent various sex organs, sex positions and even an abstract depiction of gang rape. He transforms the Sacré-Coeur Basilica into a "Titty Town", and depicts the Arc de Triomphe in such a way that led to a libel suit by the French Institute Alliance Française in New York City.

One of Carols’ more notorious pieces, Charlemagne, is a sculpture of Charles the Great Carols built from French cheeses for La Force de l’Art, the art show put on by French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin in Grand Palais. It was coated with a strain of penicillin which would insulate it for a certain amount of time before it melts and ruins the floor of its exhibition venue. The sculpture was however never put on show due to customs restrictions.