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11 years, 5 months ago
PAUL MCCARTHY – THE X-RATED SHOW
Filled under: Front Page, Visual arts
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'Biography' presents a wide selection of works from Elmgreen & Dragset's complex universe, including sculpture, performance and interactive installations. Works from the late 1990s onwards will be shown together with recent projects, ...
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There’s a lot that can be said about Paul McCarthy’s WS installation, which opened this week at the Park Avenue Armory in upper Manhattan.  One could note the full spectrum of sexual atrocities committed on-screen during his numerous filmic works, or the bizarre references to Walt Disney and his fantastic empire of entertainment, or even to the prosthetic noses he seems to put on all his characters of late.  No matter the line of discussion, McCarthy’s show, presented by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and Armory artistic director Alex Poots, is a dizzying and difficult immersion into McCarthy’s powerful body of work.
photo artobserved.com

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Immediately noticeable upon entering the Armory’s cavernous drill hall is the installation’s sheer scale.  Running the full city block that the armory occupies, the room has been transformed into a full hollywood soundstage, complete with a burgeoning, mysterious forest where the 7 dwarves Los Angeles bungalow/cottage is buried away, a series of enclosed, filth-strewn set pieces where sculptures depicting the deceased bodies of several characters lie (in one, Walt Paul lies over a bucket of apples, run through with a broomstick), and bookended by 8 enormous video panels, each playing a single channel from the epic 7 hour film the installation is built around.
Paul McCarthy, WS (2013), via Park Avenue Armory photo artobserved.com

Paul McCarthy, WS (2013), via Park Avenue Armory
photo artobserved.com

The crown jewel of McCarthy’s almost ubiquitous presence in New York this spring,  White Snow takes the classic Grimm’s fairy tale and its subsequent “Disney-fied” iterations as its inspiration, and translates it into sprawling multi-channel filmic work and installation that mixes deep psychological horror with cultural tropes, fantasy with perversion, and American cinematic history with deeper explorations of legend and humanity.  At the center is McCarthy, inserting himself into the piece as “Walt Paul,” the debauched lord of the installation, and who is ultimately destroyed by his own creations.
photo artobserved.com

photo artobserved.com

White Snow eventually splits into three separate females, two of which are complicit in the death of the third, and Walt Paul’s dual identity (McCarthy/Disney) as creator makes the piece fluctuate in stability between a wholly contained narrative and its relation to the artist and his body of work.  Moments of domestic delicacy between WS and WP are paralleled with moments of frenetic sexual energy, a dualistic relationship between creator and created, subject and object that brings bizarre new dialogues into the piece, and make the broader work all the more powerful.
photo artobserved.com

photo artobserved.com

The room is almost constantly engulfed in giddy shrieks, cackling and howls, often breaking in unexpectedly.  Characters take turns defiling each other and rolling in their own filth, eventually killing White Snow and Walt Paul during the climactic party scene, goaded on by the unbounded Id of the dwarves.
photo artobserved.com

photo artobserved.com

These character developments drive a gradual process of individuation, slowly bringing more human elements to each aspect of the initially alienating scenes presented to the viewer in the main room of the piece. As multiple narratives and layers begin emerging from the work, McCarthy’s characters become locked in a complicit dance of mutual destruction, creator and created playing out their dynamic through the debasement and confrontation with the deeper recesses of the human psyche.
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