Hardcover | 28 x 2.5 x 40 cm | 176 pp

L&M Arts/Hauser & Wirth | 2008 | 9780979094293

Paul McCarthy (b. 1945) is a groundbreaking, internationally renowned American contemporary artist. Working primarily in sculpture, performance, film, and installation, he is known for creating visceral, provocative, and often unsettling works that satirise American consumerism, cultural myths, and media.

This superb two-volume set presents large-format images of Paul McCarthy’s sculptures, along with critical and experimental texts and original artist’s writings and was published on the occasion of ‘Paul McCarthy: Three Sculptures,’ a 2010 exhibition at L&M Arts, Los Angeles.

Train, Mechanical (2003-2010) is a fully automated tour-de-force that features a George Bush/pirate hybrid mounting a pig from behind. The work finds visual precedent in earlier sculptures with the same cast of characters and related configurations, such as Train, Mechanical, Pig Island (2007), Mountain (2009) and Static (2004-2009). All of these works stem from Pig Island; this perpetual work in progress, inspired by the Disney ride Pirates of the Caribbean, emphasises process as sculpture. Many sculptures were spawned from this fertile environment full of political satire, cultural commentary, and playful experimentation with various modes of art production. In Train, Mechanical, McCarthy has also found inspiration from an ongoing fascination with carnival rides and mechanised mannequins, first seen in his seminal work The Garden (1991-1992). Train, Mechanical takes this early interest to new heights. Here, one experiences fully articulated body parts, right down to the male figure’s pursed lips and the pigs heaving chest – all in the service of a mesmerising tableau that redefines sculptural form.

Also included are works from McCarthy’s Hummel series, writ large and executed on a monumental scale. The mid-century Germanic kitsch figurines of the same name inspired the Hummels depicting rosy-cheeked children in idyllic repose. In McCarthy’s world, however, this Aryan innocence becomes a target for parody, and ultimately, defilement and disfigurement. Their deformed innocence suggests the conditioning of children, from Hitler youth to contemporary, TV-addled teen consumers. Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift (2010) derives from a saccharine nautical scene, and is reworked as an eight ton, black-bronze carnival at sea. The figures of children are decomposed; their lyrical voices halted by pipes ripping through their youthful vocal cords. It appears adorable and obscene all at once. In Apple Tree Boy Apple Tree Girl (2010), a miniature Adam and Eve find themselves reborn as an eighteen foot überkinder; they remain only a suggestion of their former selves, almost sweetly deformed and just to the point of abstraction. These darling figures teeter between portraits of childlike purity and a Garden of Eden gone terribly wrong.

One of the texts, an essay by Diedrich Diederichsen, underscores how McCarthy ‘is concerned with specific confrontations and specific transgressions,’ an approach that runs through both Hummel and Three Sculptures. In Hummel, Diederichsen expresses how McCarthy creates ‘sarcastic monuments’ that communicate the repression held within the kitsch figurines on which the artist modelled his works.

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums—from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.