ART-PREVIEW:Paul McCarthy-Raw Spinoffs Continuations
Even for adults, Paul McCarthy is scary, his work throws at our face the dark side of The American Dream and Western consumer society. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive
In his solo exhibition “Raw Spinoffs Continuations” at Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York, Paul McCarthy presents works from his most important projects of the last 15 years, including: “WS”, “Caribbean Pirates”, and “Pig Island”, also on the exhibition is on presentation a new series of bronze “White Snow Dwarfs” alongside the original clay sculptures from which they were cast. These most recent works in the artist’s major ongoing project “White Snow” illustrates the roles that repetition and variation play in his oeuvre. McCarthy’s video installation “White Snow” is based on two intersecting elements: the 1937 Disney animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and the suburban home of his childhood. But like the title everything is an exploration of the dark, sexual side of the film. On an platform in the center of the Armory, Paul McCarthy had constructed a 3/4 scale facsimile of the facade of his childhood ranch house in Utah and set it, inaccessibly, in a kind of dank rain forest of plastic trees and fake flowers. The rest of the house is set up outside the forest and is approachable, with cutaway walls and windows. McCarthy’s original sculpted clay dwarves were altered and distorted variations of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs. Even in their original iterations, McCarthy’s clay figures possessed additional layers of abstraction as a result of having been sculpted and re-sculpted via the artist’s frantic and impulsive performative process. They were subsequently cast in silicone (2010 – 2012), and although those richly colored versions are not included in the exhibition, they are integral manifestations of the journey that has produced this body of work to date. The process of silicone casting abstracted the original clay sculptures further, so that a second casting in bronze have acquired a new degree of rawness and pathos. Also on view in the exhibition is the large-scale installation “Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation” (2013-16) from his “Caribbean Pirates” series. In this work a pair of disjoined clay figures wearing huge pirate hats, loom over a landscape littered with broken body casts, chairs, wooden platforms, sex toys, buckets, mugs, among other detritus, all punctuated by dollops of viscous, deep yellow polyurethane foam. Inspired by the Disneyland attraction “Pirates of the Caribbean”, the project began in 2001 as a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son. The exhibition includes “Amputation (AMP), Blue Fiberglass” (2013 -16), a blue fiberglass cast of “Amputation” never before exhibited. Combining political figures and elements drawn from pop culture, “Pig Island” (2005 – 2010), evolved ultimately becoming a surreal compilation of themes that have coursed through McCarthy’s work for decades. Originally conceptualized as an island of robotic pirates and pigs, the work is populated by pirates, pigs, likenesses of George W. Bush and Angelina Jolie, an assortment of Disney characters, and the artist himself, all carousing in a state of reckless abandon. Originally part of “Pig Island”, the sculptures “Paula Jones” and “Puppet” (both 2005-08), feature caricatures of former President George W. Bush and pot-bellied pigs engaged in sexual acts, are on presentation.
Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 511 West 18th Street, New York, Duration: 10/11/16-14/1/17, Days & Hoours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
