"My work is more about being a clown than a shaman."
Paul McCarthy
New York Times 22 November 2009 [via Wikipedia]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/arts/design/22mccarthy.html
"We think we're liberating ourselves, when maybe we're just hurting ourselves."
David Hoyle. Onstage 2011
Maybe hurting oneself, in work involving the artists body, and by extension appearrance and identity, is not physical self - harm, but if taken too literally is social self sabotage.
I went to two parts of the three part exhibition of Paul McCarthy's work, "The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship" 16 November 2011 – 14 January 2012. I've only been aware of McCarthy's work since a piece occupied a whole space at Tate Modern a few years ago. as with with Hauser & Wirth, there were the warnings at the entrance.
I do wonder what it says about me ? Rather than "adult," initially the work seems juvenile or disingenuous. Of course no little boy has a career of decades standing or has the means to work of such complex construction and scale.
"THE KING."
The presence of the artist is there either on camera, via a full body cast, or as with any artwork, by the selection of subject. Upside down canvases show [airbrushed ?]porn, an old Playboy cartoon, the trio of Paris Hilton , Britney and ?, with their papped privates, made me wonder at what age does the expression of sexual interest inevitably become goatish. These paintings were ringed round the huge presence of "King", described as the easel the paintings were made on, with a full body cast of McCarthy [with added body hair] sat in a blonde wig. King lear in Ophelia's hair.
"CUT UP"
Downstairs were two videos, one "Flicker King" 2011, a flickering projection of Milli-seconds of print ads, so raidly passing that seconds were enough to comprehend all that was being shown.
The second video: "Cut Up" I watched all the way through. Seeming to cover the time just after the body cast had been completed, Mccarthy shows himself making decisions about how to work with it further.
I've been asked a lot recently about casting, something that conceptually seems to be easier than constructing a modelled work built up over time with observation. There is nothing like life-casting to pick up an incredible record of surface texture, but there are many stages from initial mould to the final cast, and much is dependent on the final medium used. I was certainly hit later, when viewing 'Paula Jones' by how toxic modern synthetic materials are, something they seem to declare with their dreadful smell. Silicon was used for the cast of McCarthy, and it certainly has something like the density of living flesh, but this density is too even throughout, and when I walked in midway, McCarthy seemed to enacting a self hatred as he took an electric saw to what superficially seemed either his twin or inanimate self. It was soon clear that he was trying to remove material from joints to provide more articulation. The video was of extremely high resolution, and even though the cast was too warm coloured and almost bouncy for a corpse, it was hard to avoid feeling one had entered the morgue as the saw blade hacked through a wrinkled knee and hairy leg. But the 'flesh' inside was blandly even in tone and colour, and I was left to conclude that however disrespectful of the body McCarthy may have seemed, exhibiting a video that lingered on dismemberment, I was left musing on how the reality of death had been avoided or evaded.
The naivety of the amateur, in 'not realising' that a cast could not possibly imitate the variety of muscle, sinew and fat that lies under the skin, the study of which is the staple of the life class. The awkward actions of the cutting spoke of an impatient artistic struggle to bring the leaden object to artistic life, rather than of clinical investigation, or the murderer's attempt to annihilate the evidence of the victim.
MADHOUSE JNR
Upstairs, "Madhouse Jnr's" self reflexivity, repaid the cost of dragging myself into town. Though recently constructed, it is described as a "macquette" for a much larger version exhibited in 2008.
A spinning box stands on a tripod of pairs of hydraulic pumps, so that the box is tilted on nearly every axis. This I found mesmerising in itself, the loops and loops of black electric leads leading back to a whole board of processors etc. On walking round the piece it was clear that the box was a model of a room, inside of which was a camera,which was spinning round too, the result was projected on one of the walls not covered in neo - Georgian panelling. Sometimes the camera wasn't rotated, while the room was, and vice versa , with differences in speed so that via the projection, it was either the world outside that spun, or the just the room and sometimes both to complete chaos.
I was reminded with so many pop culture references around, of Dorothy's house in the Wizard of Oz. A room in a childhood home is the definition of a starting point, but here revealed, just as Dorothy is tipped into a chaotic and alien world by the tornado WHILE STILL IN HER OWN HOME.
Off to Savile Row, where the huge . . . . . . . . . .
"She Me"
The components of human life, death, sex , work and professionalcredibility have their idealised aspects, but also their squalid realities. Morality is the way of defining the two, and proscribing one against the other. I certainly object very strongly to Gunther von Hagens plastination exhibits, feeling too morally compromised to attend his shows, as if to justify their use of actual bodies of humans and animals for what I feel are totally failed scientific or didactic purposes.
Paul McCarthy: Animatronic Designer Jon Dawe
THE TROUBLE WITH YOUTH
by Donald Kuspit
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-17-07.asp
No comments:
Post a Comment