- 32 East 69th
Words & photos by Coco Mellors.
When talking about the artist Paul McCarthy there are a few words that seem to get bounded around time and again. One that sticks in our mind is ‘Paul McCartney’, the Beatles front man, whose name bears an uncanny similarity to the artist. But once one’s realised that we are in fact talking about the LA-based artist responsible for such notorious works as Complex Shit (the voluminous inflatable dog turd which broke free of its moorings and inflicted serious damage on a Swiss children’s home in 2008) or the Dutch commissioned monument Santa Claus, aka “Buttplug Gnome” (we feel it needs no further explanation) and not the man responsible for say, “Hey Jude”, we think there are a couple of salient sound bites that are worth noting.
The first is “phallic” - recurring imagery that litters much of McCarthy’s work. Then there’s “controversial”, “grotesquely beautiful”, “haunting”, “overrated” and “complex”, all of which illustrate not only that McCarthy is an artist who provokes, but also someone who paves the way. Which frankly, when referring to a man who inserted a Barbie doll into his anus during a live performance at UC San Diego, is hardly surprising.
But when we walked around his most recent exhibition “The Dwarves, The Forest” on a chilly night in New York last week, the reaction was anything but divided. In fact, everyone seemed to think it was pretty great. The two-floor exhibition, which consisted of several bronzes, a monumental wood-carving and fantastical landscape maquettes of spartan forests, continued his preoccupation with the story of Snow White, both the dark psychological nuances of the 19th century tale and the commercialized Disney version of the 20th century.
“What do you think?” we asked, sidling up to a dapper looking man, who was staring intently at one of the bronze pieces: a coal-black figure resembling one of the seven dwarves, but was hobbled and disfigured with gouged eyes and a nose dangling like a flaccid penis from his smiling face. “Compared to his past pieces, there’s a softness here,” said the man, who turned out to be the fine art consultant Richard Tattinger. And he’s right; the figure, whose lumpy, cracked surfaces bore violent marks of the raging effort required to create it, had the demeanor of an aging clown. “And you?” we asked the willowy model beside him. “I love everything,” she said. And then with a smile suggesting shyness and satisfaction, “but I don’t know anything about art.”
Upstairs perched a pair of fairytale landscapes executed in clay, foam, wire, plaster and gauze. Placed on studio tables and crafted to resemble trees, branches and fallen trunks, it was not until on closer inspection that it became clear to us that these wildernesses were created to resemble male and female forms, hence the titles “White Snow Dwarf Log, Male” and “White Snow Dwarf Forest, Female”. Artist Nate Lowman, probably better known as Mary-Kate Olsen’s ex-boyfriend, wandered between the tables murmuring quietly to his friend, what we assumed were probably interesting insights on the magical landscapes in front of him, but may well have been estimations on whether there was any champagne left on the table downstairs (we noticed there wasn’t).
Back downstairs, sans champagne, we wandered into a light-bathed room. At the back stood the tour de force of the exhibition—a towering sculpture crafted from warm, smooth walnut and entitled, “White Snow and Dopey Wood.” Obviously an icon of purity, it was Miss White herself, reborn in an image of sexual ecstasy – an ironic Madonna of innocence corrupted and illuminated, if you will. “It’s frighteningly beautiful,” one girl next to us whispered in hushed awe. It was true, for it is these juxtapositions – the horror and the beauty, the merriment and moroseness, the naïveté and depravity – that propel us to think of McCarthy’s work as more than merely a corruption of childhood tales but an exploration of the realm between reality and abstraction, the consumer and the divine.
‘The Dwarves, The Forests’ is on at Hauser & Wirth, New York until 17 December.
Paul McCarthy is also exhibiting in London until 14 January. For more information [click here]
