© A. Burger/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich

Paul McCarthy, installation view of "Static (Pink)" (2004-09). Silicon. 106¾ x 64¾ x 127½ in.

September 2009 Reviews

David Hockney

Richard Artschwager

Wilhelm Sasnal

Tris Vonna-Michell

Group Show

Douglas Coupland

Jim Hodges

Paul McCarthy Cult of Personality L.A.’s Expanded L&M Arts to Open With McCarthy Show Yard The High Life The Manchester Tales: A Weekend of Performance Art Remembering Michael Jackson Venice Diary

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Hauser & Wirth is chockablock with sculptures heaped on trestles, each an orgy of dripping fiberglass and foam. George W. Bush figures fornicate with pigs swilling in troughs of art publications and symbols of decadence; bald Paula Joneses, pirates, and mawkish Hummel ornaments merrily play along. Though heads and eyes are skewered and figures flayed to reveal metal skeletons, their expressions bespeak blissful ignorance. This is work in progress; Paula Jones is dated 2005-2008, and around Mountain (2005-09) lies the ostensible evidence of its making, while other works feature fossilized drills and related paraphernalia breaking through their surfaces.

McCarthy’s pirates are easily read as a metaphor for Bush’s military colonization of the world, and McCarthy has had time to repeat the motif. Greedy encroachment and consumption mark the works here, which also relate to the art market. By telling coincidence, the current exhibition at collector François Pinault’s foundation in Venice, "Mapping the Studio," includes a gluttonous and bestial Bush sculpture, Train, Pig, Island (2007). After all, Pinault’s collection holds a mirror to the age of inflation, exaggerated prices, and art as accessory. There, McCarthy’s work could be official portraiture, an image of the status quo that has long since stopped threatening its fundament, its jovial vulgarity accommodated by the sumptuous Punta della Dogana. To be fair to the exhibition in Zürich, there is a sense of reckoning: it surveys a period coming to a close. But as such, it stagnates, despite the industrious mess. Let’s hope these petrified figures are now relegated to bit parts in an invigorated McCarthy narrative.

Upcoming Show:
Hauser & Wirth New York, Nov. 6 – December 24, hauserwirth.com

"Paul McCarthy" originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' September 2009 Table of Contents.