ESSAY
Unraveling the Apparatus
CARTER POTTER’S FORTY-YEAR PRACTICE
“Using the bones of cinema to build the velvet coffin of painting.” — Carter Potter
In West Hollywood in the mid-1980s, leaving the bathhouse called Basic Plumbing at six in the morning, you opened a door on Highland Avenue and faced the rising sun directly. Smog filtered the morning into long-wavelength red. Inside, the bathhouse had been kept dim for hours. The eye, adapted, met the dawn at full opening. This perceptual moment, lived by thousands of gay men and about to become structurally inaccessible as the bathhouses closed under the pressure of the epidemic, is the threshold a twenty-five-year-old artist would compress and reconstruct in 1986.
The argument of the practice, traced across forty years and several media, is that the body sees what the apparatus cannot.
THE FIRST LOCKED ROOM
Basic Plumbing (1986/1989) is a wooden cubicle, eight feet by two feet by eight feet, raised on legs, vertically bisected by transparent plastic with a Crisco-smeared glory hole. A spring-loaded door slams shut on entry. A shelf holds poppers. Echo and the Bunnymen plays on a boombox. Opposite the door, beyond the plastic, a mirror. A safelight hangs between the two compartments. Outside, a low-wattage red spotlight is aimed at the door.
The aperture in the bathhouse opens onto the partner in the adjacent cubicle. In the installation, the aperture opens onto the cubicle’s other half, where the viewer meets their own reflection. The cubicle is lit twice — by the safelight inside, the darkroom instrument that permits work on the unfixed image without exposing it, and by the red spotlight outside, the dawn on Highland Avenue brought indoors. Safelight. Safe sex.
Potter had been diagnosed HIV positive in 1984, at twenty-three. He built the cubicle two years later, at twenty-five.
Basic Plumbing was selected for Against Nature: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men, curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins at LACE in January 1989. David Pagel reviewed it in Arts Magazine that summer and called it “a haunting monument to a time when anonymous sex was less like Russian roulette.” Cooper would review Potter’s next exhibition the following year in Art Issues, placing him “between the psychotic objects of Charles Ray and George Herms’ personality-fraught junk.” The work was correctly placed at the moment of its first public showing, in the most consequential queer exhibition of the period, by two of the right people.
COUCHES, BRANDS, AND THE OVER-THE-COUCH PAINTER
During his MFA years at UCLA, Potter made traditional oil-on-canvas landscape paintings. They sold immediately, out of his studio. The position the sales pointed toward was the over-the-couch painter — the artist whose work matches the buyer’s furniture. The decision was to take the language of the fear and make the work out of it: the couch as the painting’s literal substrate, the over-the-couch position deconstructed by working on the couch itself.
Bash, Potter’s MFA thesis at UCLA in June 1990, was built around a hand-forged branding iron Potter fabricated himself in the sculpture workshop. The letters FAG were cut from square bar steel at angles judged by sight, the G’s circle forged round from straight stock through successive working passes, all welded together onto a forged handle. The iron’s origin was specific. Working as a runner at deGraf/Wahrman, the computer-animation company, Potter had been outed by a receptionist who feared his visibility would cost the company an animation contract with a born-again Christian organization. After being outed, Potter forged the FAG iron. The thesis installation comprised the hide-a-bed the absent lover had left behind, branded; loveseats and cushions branded and arranged around the standing structure; the iron itself resting on the can of coals used to heat it; a Marlboro Man retrieved from inside one of the gutted couches.
Three months later, (c)ouch pain(tings) at Sue Spaid Fine Art was Potter’s first commercial gallery exhibition. The works were new — stripped loveseats and sectionals fitted with indoor-outdoor carpet and household paint poured across the couch skeletons and onto the gallery wall as part of the work. Cooper’s review named the show: the destruction-of-painting work, the slapstick rage with paint cans and stripped-bare couch frames, the “magnificently decomposed props,” “almost disorientingly original.”
BONES OF CINEMA
In May 1991, in a domestic gallery in Westlake/Echo Park, Potter set out to make a destructive painting on a new substrate: woven 35mm acetate film leader stretched across a stretcher bar, painted with oil in the expectation that the paint would chemically eat through the leader and destroy the work from within as it dried. The destruction did not occur. The film held. The paint sat on the surface without consuming it. The film-painting practice continues from this point.
The film leader is the material that comes before and after the image — the head and foot of the reel, the part the projectionist handles so the image never has to be touched. In 1991, in an apartment near Alvarado and Temple, an HIV-positive gay artist discovered that you can make a painting from it.
In the mature practice of the 1990s and 2000s the paint was gone. The leader entered the paintings as factory-painted product from Christy’s Editorial Supply in North Hollywood — monochromatic nitrocellulose lacquer applied to cellulose triacetate, a manufactured object before Potter touched it. Other material categories came from other suppliers: hazy polyester leader treated to diffuse transmitted light, used in editing rooms as diffusion filter, serves as the milky ground in many of the larger paintings; 70mm reels cancelled by a continuous scratch down the middle, unwatchable on a projector, sold for a fraction of new stock; transparent blue machine leader dyed throughout the polymer. By the early 2020s the paint had come back. Christy’s had stopped producing factory-painted leader — the cinema industry’s digital transition had eliminated the operational need — and Potter began painting it himself.
In 1992, Lane Relyea reviewed Potter’s first leader-painting exhibition at Sue Spaid in Artforum and identified the factory-painted leader as an industrial-aesthetic given rather than the artist’s painterly choice, named the wall-as-content operation in the translucent works, and placed the practice in conversation with Larry Bell and Miriam Schapiro. Jan Tumlir, writing in Frieze in 1998, described how Potter “syncopates the overlapping and underlapping of horizontal and vertical strips to create patterns of variously sized rectangles and squares — the sprocket holes punctuating the surface with a rhythmic regularity.” In 2001, at a Potter exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery in New York, a stranger pointed out the precedent. Paul Sharits’s Frozen Film Frames (1966–77) — strips of 16mm color film suspended between sheets of Plexiglas — had been doing a conceptually adjacent operation. Potter had been making leader paintings for ten years without knowing this work existed.
The practice’s most precise statement of its own method appeared not as conventional prose but as a list of verbs, published in the 1997 California Biennial catalogue at the Orange County Museum of Art. In four columns it traced the film leader’s complete lifecycle. Column one named the industry: Created. Bought. Exposed. Processed. Edited. Printed. Screened. Thrashed. Trashed. Column two: Redeemed. Stripped. Bagged. Boxed. Sold. Column three named the studio: Bought. Unspooled. Cut. Stretched. Stapled. Pondered. Loved. Taped. Wrapped. Carted. Column four named the institutional life: Hung. Shot. Crated. Shipped. Exhibited. Discussed. Placed. Viewed. Stored. Exhumed. The word Bought appears twice. The studio column includes Pondered and Loved, between Stapled and Taped.
FRANKLY
In October 1994, at Rio Hondo College Art Gallery in Whittier, Potter mounted a solo titled Frankly. Frank was his boyfriend. The show was addressed to Frank, and to Frank Stella, whose Black Paintings of 1958–60 were the work’s direct reference. Potter walked into the gallery and saw that the track lighting system on the ceiling, stripped of its can lights, held the geometry of one of Stella’s Black Paintings. He removed the can lights, painted the wall surfaces black to extend the ceiling’s geometry, laid automobile carpeting across the floor to extend it further.
Potter had seen Stella’s Getty Tomb (1959) at LACMA and had been fascinated to discover that the white stripes were not painted white — they were the raw canvas, the absence of black paint, the space the brush had not gone. He replicated this logic by a different means. He applied buff-colored masking tape across the surfaces — to the walls, to the lighting tracks, and into the seams between sections of automobile carpeting on the floor — and painted over it slightly. By 1994 the white stripes in Stella’s Black Paintings at LACMA were no longer white. Thirty-four years of light, oxidation, and climate had aged the raw canvas into a specific tan-yellow neutral. Standard masking tape happens to be exactly that color.
The tape was not removed.
POTTER’S FIELD, HAND MADE SHOOT SIGNS, AND THE BAYETA
Potter’s Field (1994), at TRI Gallery in Los Angeles, opened with ten couches filling an entire room visible through glass from outside. Every day throughout August — the dead month, the month the art world closes — Potter drove through Hollywood in his pickup truck, loaded discarded sofas himself, drove them to the gallery, added them to the accumulating mass. The accumulation became impassable. A viewer could sidle perhaps a foot into the second room along the perpendicular face of the bier, close enough to register what the photographs could not. The smell crossed the threshold. A month of Hollywood discarded furniture, fabric soaked in cigarette smoke, mildew, body odor, accumulated through August’s heat. David A. Greene reviewed it in the L.A. Reader and noted that “a once-bright red orphan from a sectional set, when arranged on its side on the floor, could take on all the formal authority of Donald Judd’s minimalist sculpture, but mellowed somehow, made more complex by its patina of stains and cigarette burns.”
In 1995, at Angles Gallery in Santa Monica, the Hand Made Shoot Sign (Reversed) series entered the practice. The source material was the production crew’s hand-lettered courtesy signage — placards affixed to telephone poles around shooting locations, written by hand in permanent marker on bright fluorescent foamcore, naming the production by cryptic one-word codes: Muscle, Caps, Cleaver. Potter lifted the signs from active productions with their attaching wires intact. In the gallery, he reversed each sign so the fluorescent face turned to the wall and the blank-white foamcore back faced the viewer. The fluorescent ink continues to fluoresce; the color is re-emitted from the hidden side and bounces off the gallery wall, producing a faint colored halo.
Potter has identified two Native American traditions as structural analogues for the practice, with appropriate care about the cultural specificity of the originating traditions. The Navajo bayeta tradition — nineteenth-century Diné weavers obtaining red yarn by unraveling captured American and Spanish cavalry uniforms and reweaving it into Diné textiles — names the operation of the leader paintings. The Plains tribes’ tradition of counting coup — touching an enemy in battle without injuring them — names the operation of the shoot signs. Both recognitions arrived after the work was already operating. Being gay is another outsider status, Potter has said.
THE GAP YEARS
The 2011–2020 period is the practice’s gap years: not a gap of production, but a gap of public reception, complicated by serious personal-life conditions.
Potter had been with Frank since 1992, a Hollywood producer. By 2011 Frank had returned to his wife. Potter met his current partner that same year. The new relationship produced a sudden and substantial reorganization of his life: cold-turkey transition from sustained sexual promiscuity to monogamy, substantial reduction in substance use, the partner’s immediate departure to France for a month two weeks after they met. Within weeks, Potter experienced a psychotic break and was placed on a 5150 — California’s seventy-two-hour involuntary psychiatric hold.
Frank died in November 2016, the week of the election. His death did not return Potter to the studio; for years, working as Frank’s assistant and then his associate producer had been what kept the practice idle. The return came in 2020, under the compounded pressure of pandemic and politics. Oozing Orange Leader (2020) was the first painting in ten years — a warm-up, twelve inches square. It has never been exhibited. It sits in the studio.
The warm-up opened onto the Elegies: roughly ten works made that year. After Frank’s production office was dismantled, Potter took the framed posters of the films Frank had produced and painted on the glass, the poster surfacing through the thinner passages. Elegy (Dummy) (2020) is one.
In 2018, paintings from the practice were rented as set dressing for Good Trouble, the Freeform television series, for an episode that dressed a fictional Los Angeles gallery whose exhibition was titled Breaking Through: 8 Artists on the Verge. The director’s vision required backlighting. Fluorescent tubes were mounted behind the paintings — works whose entire formal premise is that they operate on ambient light, never hooked to the building’s electrical system — to make them transmit chromatically on camera. The fictional gallery had eight names on its wall vinyl. Seven of the eight artists used noms de palette. Potter was the only artist of the eight who insisted on his real name. On the day of shooting, the crew documented the paintings on their phones for their personal use. The gaffers, grips, and set decorators looked at the rewoven leader and wanted them.
RESUMED TRAJECTORY
The practice’s resumed public trajectory begins with Torture Chamber at PRJCTLA in 2021 and continues across a sustained four-year sequence: FYC at Rocket, London (2022); New Leaders at Alto Beta, Altadena (2023); Couch Triptych 1990–2024 at as-is.la (2024); inclusion in HELLO, HELLO, HELLO, curated by Michelle Grabner at the Schneider Museum (2025); Macrodata Refinement at Woodbury University (2025); Ongoing Compilation at Rocket, London (2025).
The recent work uses the YYYYMMDD title format — 20220614 (Knot Painting), 20231102 (Depend® Painting) — dated like a medical record, a prescription, a lab result. 20231102 (Depend® Painting) is two meters by two meters: Depend “Fresh Protection” adult diapers for men, acrylic spray paint, encaustic, and tape on 70mm hazy polyester leader woven over aluminum strainer bars. Depend diapers for men are designed for urinary incontinence, a condition associated with aging, illness, and the long-term side effects of certain antiretroviral drugs. The bodily-residue method that began with the brand on the couch in 1990, continued through the testosterone patches in the flag series of 2001, here arrives at the urinary diaper pressed into the practice’s central substrate.
20210613 (Slasher) (2021) incorporates 35mm twist-detection leader — film-industry stock printed black on one face and white on the other, used to verify orientation and to detect transport-path errors and twists: a twist in the strip reveals itself as a flip of tone. Looped and twisted among the other films across the strainer bars, the leader does in the painting exactly what it was built to do elsewhere. It shows the twist.
In late November 2022, in five days across a single working week, Potter made three paintings — 20221122, 20221125, 20221126. Each is one meter square, with woven polyester leader across the face in a Mondrian-derived grid that reiterates the strainer bar’s architecture on the painting’s front face. The painting’s woven composition is a graphic representation of its own structural support. The four open quadrants admit the wall behind the painting through the substrate’s translucency; the wall is held inside the painting as the painting’s interior content. All three deploy fluorescent acrylic spray paint applied to the back of the 70mm hazy polyester leader, then flipped so the painted face is against the support and the hazy face is toward the viewer. The chromatic event is generated by paint hidden behind the woven membrane and transmitted through the leader’s translucent body. These paintings resist photographic documentation. The camera records the reflected component and loses the emitted component. The painting and the photograph of the painting are doing categorically different optical work. The three paintings have never been exhibited. They sit in the studio.
HIGHLAND AVENUE
The eye that opened on Highland Avenue at six in the morning in 1985 had been kept in the dim for hours. The smog-reddened sun met it at full aperture. The body received more light than it was prepared for. The image was not photographable: a camera would have either closed down on the sun and lost what the body saw, or opened to what the body saw and blown out the sun.
The next year, in Dickson Hall, Potter built a room that staged this. A safelight inside. A red spotlight outside. The eye, having adapted to the dim interior, met the door’s red wash at full opening. Two chromogenic prints from 1986 document not the room but the camera’s inability to see what the body saw — the exterior shot floods red where the body saw dim approach-light; the interior shot floods yellow-orange where the body saw further-restricted dimness. The apparatus failing in exactly the direction the body had succeeded.
Forty years of work follow that failure. The fluorescent shoot signs reversed to face the wall, the color re-emitted from the hidden side. The mirror paintings of 2022 that a camera cannot properly record. The painting under fluorescent backlighting on the Good Trouble set, the gaffers and grips photographing it on their phones and getting back something other than what they saw. The body has continued to see what the apparatus cannot.