Aug 3, 2013
Well the #paulmccarthy WS show was equally disturbing and ambitious. The gift shop was actually my favorite part. #paulmccarthyws #parkavenuearmory
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Well the #paulmccarthy WS show was equally disturbing and ambitious. The gift shop was actually my favorite part. #paulmccarthyws #parkavenuearmory
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High above the Armory's Drill Hall is a catwalk. From 75 feet up, it serves a myriad of technical purposes and offers a bird-eye-view of whatever lies below—here, the fantastical forest and debauched aftermath of Paul McCarthy's WS. Hope you're not afraid of heights.
This weekend at the Armory: FRIDAY, JULY 12 - Paul McCarthy: WS. 1pm – 10pm - Armory After Hours: Join us for a drink at the cash bar in the Parlor from 6pm until WS closes. SATURDAY, JULY 13 - Paul McCarthy: WS. 12pm – 7pm - Curatorial Talk, “WS in Context” at 4pm. Free with admission. SUNDAY, JULY 14 - Paul McCarthy: WS. 12pm – 7pm And remember: the exhibition contains mature content. Entrance is restricted to visitors over 17 years of age. For more information, visit: http://bit.ly/12JaUc9
TIME-LAPSE: PAUL McCARTHY'S WS It took about five weeks to install Paul McCarthy's WS in the Armory's 55,000-square-foot drill hall. To document the process, we set up a camera from various vantage points within the drill hall and took one photograph a minute, every minute, for 36 days. In just under four minutes, you can see how Paul McCarthy's largest work to-date was installed in one of NYC's largest un-columned spaces.
no photos allowed at Paul McCarthy at the Armory.
understandably, as there are scenes reminicent of Pasolini mixed with distorted Disneyan bacchanalia. my favorite was the long bunker of video chambers showing everything from snow white giving the microphone head to the prince beating off in the garden.
truth be told i snuck a few on my phone, but out of respect to the performers and the artist, i will not post them here
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#PaulMcCarthyWS with @mamacakespotter #art #NYC (at Park Avenue Armory)
Condiments: Paul McCarthy’s Signature Palette
Throughout his career, Paul McCarthy’s transgressive performances have been compared to the Viennese Actionists, a group of artists who worked collaboratively between 1960 and 1971 in Vienna and who had a collective interest in “action art.” Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Hermann Nitsch were among the main participants, and are recognizable for their provocative and often violent use of the body as site and surface, for which several of the artists shed blood and did jail time. But McCarthy has made a deliberate distinction between his work and the Viennese Actionists—namely, because he prefers ketchup to blood. It’s a difference of presenting the brutalities of reality and the brutalities of artifice.
The artist explains:
“The use of ketchup and masks grew out of my work and not out of being conscious of their work… I think I found out about the Viennese in the early 1970s. Vienna is not Los Angeles… I didn’t go through Catholicism and World War II as a teenager, I didn’t live in a European environment. People make references to Viennese art without really questioning the fact that there is a big difference between ketchup and blood… My work is more about being a clown than a shaman.”
As the purveyor of mass-produced imagery, narratives, and ultimately, cultural ideals, Hollywood has long been a site the artist has mined, employed, and critiqued. Since his first performances in the early 1970s McCarthy has used ketchup (usually Heinz), mayonnaise (usually Miracle Whip), chocolate syrup (always Hershey’s) and other condiments to reference the fake blood and excrement used in Hollywood. The recognizable brands that appear in McCarthy’s work, including the installation and performance video of WS, are resoundingly American and contextually serve as icons of consumption.
In 1974, McCarthy did a performance entitled Sauce, where the artist opens a ketchup bottle with his teeth, pours its contents into a small bowl, and applies the ketchup to his body with a sponge. The performance concludes as McCarthy mounts a table covered in a white cloth, which is painted tomato red by his actions. The Meat Cake Series, done the same year, similarly used ketchup, margarine, mayonnaise, and chocolate pudding as materials. The 1991 performance video Bossy Burger was filmed in a theatrical set that had been a fast food restaurant in the family sitcom Family Affair—an excerpt is available here. The artist, dressed as a cook, and wearing clown’s shoes and a mask of Alfred E. Neuman (of Mad Magazine), runs around slamming doors and smearing ketchup on the set, which he then mixes with flour, milk, and mayonnaise. All the while he repeats “I love my work. This is what I wanted to do. I love my lovely work”, and “Make them beautiful. Make it lovely. Make ’em beautiful. Make beautiful things. Make a beautiful restaurant.”
In a more recent installation and video from 2005, Houseboat Party, the 1966 Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is filtered through the devices of a pirate story. Again, the performers rub themselves in chocolate syrup, breaking the codes of social decorum and wreaking havoc on domestic order. This formal mechanism—the smearing of liquid foods on bodies—recalls an infantile treatment of matter, a lack of inhibition, and a violence towards social expectations of the body and its functions. Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, has described McCarthy’s use of food-based props as creating a “ritualistic tableau from which the audience is unable to maintain a comfortable distance... a marriage of the spectacle of consumer culture and the empty wasteland of apocalyptic turmoil.” His use of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and chocolate as stand-ins for blood, urine, feces, sperm, and sweat, have “become McCarthy’s signature palette, as loaded with associations and alchemical possibilities as Joseph Beuys’ felt and lard.” Images, from top to bottom: Paul McCarthy, Daddies Ketchup (2001), at New York City Hall Park, image courtesy of Public Art Fund; Günter Brus, Aktion Selbstbemalung I (1964); Cibachrome prints featured in Propo, a collection of color photographs of the soiled props used in McCarthy’s performances between 1973-83; Paul McCarthy, Sauce (1974); Houseboat Party (2005), Installation, performance, and video at McCarthy Studios, Los Angeles, Photo by Ann-Marie Rounkle.
"[Paul] McCarthy’s [WS] is decidedly not Disney’s version of the fairy tale. Composed of a massive forest-and-house set, accompanied by a seven-hour video of performances shot in and around the set — it is meant to be an apotheosis of the dark and deeply human themes he has been exploring for four decades concerning the body, social repression, consumerism, sex, death, dreams and delirium, and the power of art to deepen our understanding of life. Compared with Mr. McCarthy, even much of the contemporary art world can seem puritanical and hygienic." —Randy Kennedy, The New York Times