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Paul Mc Carthy: Piccadilly Circus / Bunker BasementStock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionBorn 1945 in Salt Lake City and trained as a painter, McCarthy began experimenting with film in 1967 and began producing photographic work through the late 60s and early 70s. Based in Los Angeles, he is notorious for his perverted interpretations of childhood stories and vulgarity of expression. As critic Morgan Falconer wrote, "Interested in the parallels between American mass culture's pervasive infantilism and contemporary society's means of civilizing young children, through toys and educational TV shows, he attempted to blur all the boundaries between childhood innocence and adult knowledge and sexuality." Scalo is very excited to present this two volume edition of photographs spread over 320 pages, an extensive documentation of McCarthy's unrestrained performances and over-the-top installation. McCarthy has exhibited internationally since the late 70s, most recently at the: Tate Modern, London (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2000); and New Museum of Contemporary Art New York (2001), among other museums and galleries. Reviews"Using the Victorian interior of an abandoned bank on London's Piccadilly as the on-site location for this video performance, and a rudimentary re-creation of that bank's subterranean vaults in his studio outside Los Angeles for supplementary footage, McCarthy has staged a slapstick Twilight of the Gods that also doubles as the most disturbing Sadeian fantasia since Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo." (Robert Storr) A president (George W. Bush), multiple Queen Mums, and a terrorist (Osama bin Laden) are the protagonists, "With their oversized heads and giant clown shoes, they resemble strangely hybrid creatures....cartoon characters that shit, bleed, and possess real genitals." (Ralph Rugoff) In frenzied acts of self- and reciprocal mutilation, sawing and hacking away at each other's oversized foam heads, McCarthy's characters "do not appear to be thinking at all. Instead, they act instinctually, which is the political moral of McCarthy's riotous scenario; reasons of state cannot explain such destruction and debauchery but an amoral state of nature, which no mask of decorum can hide or contain, unleashes primary urges that do." (Robert Storr)" |