Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy: Three Sculptures

L&M Arts, Los Angeles

Through November 6, 2010

(Reprinted from Artslant.com)

I wonder if there could be a book length treatment of the pathetic. Books on the abject, sincerity, authenticity, the uncanny, and other elusive descriptors exist, but nothing I can find on the pathetic. You would think it would be fodder for a class warrior Marxist critic who could point to moments of sympathy, pity, and sadness that arise in person of privileged position due to the actions of someone in a low state or lower class, someone overly earnest, overly awkward, someone striving when they have no chance at nobility or proper recognition outside of their own fantasies. We on the outside, with knowledge of the societal frameworks that are producing the striving person’s embarrassing display, stand over the person and simply judge, “You’re pathetic.”

My first encounter in art with the pathetic was in Crime and Punishment, when I became overwhelmed with sadness and pity for Katerina Ivanovna, wife of the alcoholic Marmeladov, when she, once proud of her aristocratic heritage, parades her children through the street, singing wildly, and begging for money. The performance is dignified for Katerina but it is the reader who knows how far she has fallen in life. Another encounter with pathetic came when aristocrats shovel high quality oysters down the throat of a young boy in Chekhov’s masterwork story Oysters. Feeding the starved child is perverse sport for the rich and, of course, the boy’s subsequent sickness becomes not only his but the reader's as well. Such is the force of our pity and the sting of Chekhov’s indictment of our privilege.

I bring up the pathetic because it used to be the first word that came to my mind when I encountered Paul McCarthy’s work, work that I’ve hated for so long and taken such pains to avoid out of mere distaste for its lack of civility and charm, that now, of course, it is unavoidable and important. Then too, with the opening of L&M's magisterial space in Venice, which features three McCarthy sculptures, Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift, 2010, Apple Tree Boy, Apple Tree Girl, 2010, and Train Mechanical, 2003-2010, there came another occasion to think about McCarthy.

I remember my first encounter with McCarthy’s work, his Painter, 1995. A man struggles to paint with large fingers and he is doing it badly. McCarthy staged the expression “Ham Fisted” and the flailing of the earnest painter was documented, down to him hitting his overworked and bloated hands with a butcher knife. Some critics consider this a parody on the idea of the “heroic painter,” the modernist dream of unlocking secrets in private, its hero closed off from the world yet saving the world. And to that end, in that way of thinking, I guess you could consider McCarthy’s proceedings in Painter funny. The flailing of the painter, pushed into awkward madness in his clumsy beliefs, reveals the gross, chaotic impulses which regulate him, impulses that have the benefit of being “true” if no other benefit, being the basis of all selfish human action.

However, I tend to see the validity of art and even the validity of painting in Painter (mostly because I believe in art and painting and the virtue of those that transact its business, and because of this belief, I am unable to see the parody). Therefore I feel a certain amount of weird sympathy for the painter, an amount of pity. His failure, his lack of talent, is pathetic. This feeling in me is productive in that I examine my relationship to the painter and put my beliefs on the line. My structures, if I have them, are tested, but ultimately affirmed. McCarthy stretches them but they don’t break.

Now I doubt McCarthy would agree with me, and the critics above would be quick to point out that it is my categories (my sense of elitist belief that I know what good painting “is”) that animates this quite false sense of sympathy and pity. They would also point out that McCarthy’s point in testing those categories of my false reading, and those feelings, is to show how underneath it all, they are arbitrary. The same would be true if I feel this sympathy and pity at McCarthy’s disgusting dinner parties, where he ends up drinking fluids out of his anus with a tube, sticking hotdogs in all sorts of inventive places, and rolling around in ketchup. The “correct” reading would be that McCarthy shows a certain American lifestyle and happiness to be barely capable of concealing its primitive impulses and that when the bubble bursts, it reveals the chaos. It “shatters boundaries” and that is what the wall labels and curatorial statements end up saying. The only thing missing is a reason to care.

Nobody is denying that civilization is achieved and not preset. We all know that the struggle for order has been a work in progress and that the order is not only a fragile state but something that could unravel at any moment. However, I think these critics are wrong to think that the power of McCarthy’s art lies in his ability to break boundaries. Instead, those feelings of repulsion mixed with sympathy and pity for his characters, that acute sense of the pathetic that is rooted in those same categories, those constructs that put one lifestyle over another and show both failure and success as being an actual noble enterprise on a sliding scale of progress, is the only reason why I can think about and get into McCarthy’s work (when forced to do so – because, with all due respect for the august artist, it’s gross). This thought is the only thing that is productive to me. Simply revealing the absurdity of existence, unraveling things so we can see that nothing really matters, to parody pursuits that people believe in, is an abhorrent lack of ambition in the face of the power of the pathetic and the power of living in the real world, where people care about things and can live, quite sincerely, in their constructs. It is simply a fart joke. It is McCarthy on the cover of ArtReview mooning the world. It’s ridiculous.

All this said, I get to the L&M show.

McCarthy at L&M, perhaps most shockingly, appears pretty tame, and two of the works, Ship and Apple, come across as almost collegial, despite their lumpen masses of rips and tears. Train Mechanical, though graphic with its portraits of W giving it to a group of pigs, comes across, at least to me, as far less disturbing than your average, sincere Disney animatron. But to say that these sculptures are tame, though a criticism, is not a proper criticism of McCarthy. “Tame” and “shocking” are neither powerful qualifiers of a work of art nor are they in anyway descriptive.

I would ask the question: Do these expensively produced objects have, even remotely,the power of one of McCarthy's sad, knifed, soiled dolls that probably cost him a couple of bucks to make? One of the masterful innovations of the work of McCarthy and Mike Kelley is that they retooled the readymade (an ordinary object placed in an art context) to be an object that carries a traumatic history. Duchamp’s cold, inhuman ordinary objects were replaced with teddies and dolls that were cared for, subsequently soiled, and therefore are stained with human interaction. These lend the objects an animistic power, and also a pathetic quality that compels sympathy, memory, and a sense of loss. McCarthy’s dolls hold this power. His big sculptures at L&M do not.

The cute German cherub faces of Ship and Apple, riven through with spikes and clotted with ashen material, are just sculptures. They have a certain amount of visual punch that takes your eyes around them, but as objects that elicit a response, they are dead on arrival. Train Mechanical, on the other hand, begs to be noticed; it takes an extravagant amount of human effort to make its point, and this definitely compels a response. Not the response, however, that you would think.

Train Mechanical is a juvenile statement on Bush and his legacy, an overly simplified metaphor for the position that we are apparently in economically and globally. The sculpture points to the reason why—Bush’s overactive swaggering loins pushing the machinery of corporate America, manipulating and shredding the people like pigs. The piece does not implicate the viewer, involving them in a series of responses that may compel self-reflection on their part in this matter, but instead offers them a whipping boy, a collective out for these times of troubles. I am just as angry with Bush as the next guy, but McCarthy’s sculpture has the depth of Hustler cartoon.

It is easy to make jokes that the left (most of the artworld) will lap up, but the sense of viewer positioning, that true ability of McCarthy to get a person involved if in no other way than getting them to leave the room (my reaction), is missing. There is nothing pathetic or noble or otherwise. That’s a tragic loss.

Book Review: Andy Warhol by Arthur Danto

Andy Warhol, Arthur Danto

Paperback published September 28, 2010

Yale Press

Arthur Danto loves Andy Warhol, and his love for Warhol drips from the pages of a multitude of essays and books (and there are many) that he has written over the course of his long and brilliant career. Danto is a straightforward and clear writer who often can convey extremely complex information in a way that makes you feel as though he has pulled you aside in a bar, just to tell you a fascinating story about a guy he once knew. This is rare in a critic, even rarer in a philosopher. It’s disappointing that Danto is primarily known for his “End of Art” theorizing because I’ve found his reviews, his book on Robert Mapplethorpe, and his collected works in general to be ripe with insight as well.

Unfortunately, you won’t find much new in his short Yale Press book simply titled Andy Warhol, but Danto has written a book with an elegiac tone that lends his subject a bit of personal reverence that we’ve long suspected Danto felt for Warhol. In order to achieve this, thankfully, Warhol becomes more human. Danto reveres but doesn’t worship. We find that Warhol was a genius but often needed help, that perhaps some of the most unglamorous facts of his life might have meant the most to his art (for instance, his unattractive appearance), that his philosophical import has almost a spiritual bearing on how we see yet he was probably unaware of his philosophy, and ultimately that his objects basically made certain questions in art religious ones though he is not a religious artist.

Andy Warhol is not an art book, per se. Edited by Mark Crispin Miller, the book is included in Yale’s Icon’s of America Series, a group of book pitched outside of the academy and art world. Warhol, in Yale’s eyes, ranks among Thomas Jefferson, Fred Astaire, Wall Street and the Empire State Building in term of his American Iconicity. The theme of the series is the theme of the book, as Danto’s maintains that Warhol is the ultimate mirror of American life, “What was so American about it (Warhol’s practice)? Andy painted S&H green stamps. He painted American currency in small denominations. He painted what Americans eat. People felt that he was one of them, even when he talked about business art being the best art.”

Danto is correct and just looking over the titles of the Icon’s series one can swiftly see Warhol's genuine love for the American ordinary -- think of his Dance Diagrams for Astaire, his printed money and art as corporation idea for Wall Street, and Empire for the Empire State Building, it is all there. If it was American and wasn’t yet art, Warhol made sure it became art straight away. But the American ordinary is only part of a larger point, that this “transfiguration of the ordinary” gave contemporary art a philosophical position that has never existed before – if two things look the same and one is art, why is one art and not the other?

Hence, religion. It is art often because we believe it to be so and accord it that power from our mechanisms and structures, our histories, our loves. We make it so and nothing guarantees it. This thought is both freeing and horrible.

This insight of Warhol and Danto is extraordinary, and not even remotely examined to the full extent of its potential in art history and contemporary criticism. On one hand, the insight can easily lend itself to cynicism. For instance, if one thing is art and the other isn’t, and it is simply belief that makes it so, then I can choose not to believe, do as I wish, and rely on the silly patrons of illusionary meaning to support any idiocy I put forth (many of the wanton, unanchored proceedings of many young artists fit in this camp). On the other hand, the insight can basically animate everything and give us a power that we perhaps never wished to have, that of having to arbitrate our own meaning and kept a firm grip on it at all times, not choosing the cynical road because that road only leads to despair. This is the sacred road, the road of Frank O’Hara’s lunchtime sandwich and John Cage’s pregnant silence, this is the sacred mystery of the ordinary.

Danto, with an earnestness that will almost make you blush, lovingly finds Warhol in the second, non-cynical camp. Danto loves thinking about (it is almost cheesy to say it) Warhol’s love of the democratic openness of soup and how it was the same for everybody and sustained everyone. To keep it Catholic, which Warhol was, he was “thankful for his daily bread.” Danto describes Warhol love for collaboration, the energy that he got from those in his circle “the crazies,” and his close attunement to the surface makeup of things as that which animated his discoveries. My favorite moment is Warhol’s quest for the unified aura of stockroom, that making Brillo boxes was not enough, that he wanted the whole feeling of the store, its embedded and glowing totality.

Perhaps Danto loves Warhol too much. For instance, I’ve often suspected that Warhol’s elusiveness, his cageyness, his famous wispy personality might have contained a trace of despair due to his knowledge of his artistic reality, that he fully created the artistic reality and nothing guaranteed it. I think it is oversimplified to think of Warhol as a fetishist and a lover without thinking about his cold gamesmanship. The Court Jester’s knowledge of the absurdity of life is never without a price. But ultimately, I am glad Danto didn’t go there. Many have and we can take this in a later day. At the moment, in this book, it is great to witness someone merely loving something as Danto loves Warhol.

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever

MOCA Pacific Design Center

Through October 17, 2010

(Reprinted from ArtSlant.com)

One of my favorite quotes, written early in the 20th century, long before the internet or wikipedia or social networking or Twitter or Youtube is this from T.S Eliot: “The vast accumulation of knowledge – or at least of information --- deposited by the 19th century have been responsible for an equally advanced ignorance.”

I always found these words particularly bitter because of what they must suggest about our present, where information has become not only instant by hyperdimensional model, but also so fluid and mobile that it can be stretched, manipulated, spun, twisted, and changed entirely, information that is basically non-informative and just data to be used, data to be placed completely at the service of desire and if you are Marxist (which I’m not) by Capitalism. The present is a world of instant gratification par excellence when it comes to information, and it is hard not to recognize a bit of Eliot’s double sided coin when it comes to the promulgation of information. I know that ignorance, the infantile, and the pathetic must have always existed, but it is hard not to see it everywhere now.

Ryan Trecartin offers this same, reality-television loving, vulgar society, but to such a stretched hyper degree, that you feel even more overwhelmed than usual. His seven part video exhibition Any Ever dynamically changes MOCA Pacific Design center spatially and in terms of video, takes the idea of the quick cutting and assemblage of brief, manic episodes to such a pulsing, raging state that his video temporarily suspends and disrupts your reason and leaves you a befuddled hive of half sensations. So many characters come and go, so many ideas offered quickly and never spoken of again, so many angles, it almost falls into a complete mess. You get the sense, however, that it isn’t a mess, and this may be the most disturbing thought of all. The worst of it is that the proceedings seem more familiar than strange.

I will try to set the scene, though it is difficult. MOCA PDC has been transformed into a series of 5 viewing rooms, each presenting a different video work. Each has a different seating arrangement, two have chairs, another a set of audience platforms and airplane seats, a third a series of beds, and the last, a group of couches. Once seated, you lock yourself into the sound of each video with a pair of headphones. In fact, just on the surface, the space feels like a bad Whitney Biennial full of artists that think that the fact that a viewer sits in a bean bag and views children doing childish things is a work of art. Trecartin, in a sense, is presenting the same, but beyond, way beyond. He presents children and adults acting like children—over saturated, and over the top children that seem to be spiraling into madness.

I admit, after watching the videos for some time, I don’t have even a remote handle on it all, but I get the sense that the characters are driven ultimately by the need for total exposure, they want nearly transcendent presence in the hypermedia world. Whether they are Trecartin’s businessmen, which he strangely calls the Koreas, or his army of tween girls, they literally beg for more saturation, a total union with wizzing information that tears any idea of a consistent, steady self and personality into thousands of exploding pieces. One young girl, pigtailed and dabbed with enough makeup to make her look like a cherry tomato, sums it up and I’ll paraphrase, “I’m waiting for the internet to declare its independence.” The suggestion is that the girl will happily move there, completely extinguishing the physical, boring reality of a self that lives in one place, that interacts with real people, for a hyper-self that doesn’t see traditional reality as any fun at all.

One thought I had in the installation was of reality television’s ability to take hours and hours of exceedingly boring footage from people’s lives and compress it into a one hour series of climaxes, dramatic upswings, fights, arguments, basically people at their craziest. In other words, actual reality does not make good television and does not sell products. In Trecartin’s world, the compression is even more extreme, each second is a sound bite of ignorant ranting, pleading for products and stardom, complaints about any sort of deglamorized existence.

I admit life, at its most vexing, resembles Trecartin’s extremes, and one thing I find dazzling about Ryan Trecartin’s ambitious, actually quite massive, installation is that even though I felt bludgeoned in the face with most of the awful, loathsome, low, pathetic, horrible, terrible moments of present day society, I somehow came out of it reflective. There is nothing quite like Trecartin’s video work, and I am not saying this is a good thing in and of itself. It’s not. New for new’s sake is not a virtue. Actually, the verdict is still out about whether or not I want to ever encounter a work by Trecartin again. I’m not sure it is good for me.

Eliot’s quote haunts this installation. Is Trecartin’s universe a warning or a wish? Does Trecartin bring forth such a manic world so we can see that it is where we are clearly headed, and thus, realize we should make the most of it? Is the hyper-self a good thing? Is this jumping pulsar of self-hood a new low of ignorance or a new height of achievement? I don’t know where Trecartin stands on these matters. I think the hyper-self is a terrible thing, a shill being that is devoid of almost everything I love in life, but I am intrigued to learn more about Trecartin’s stance. It may compel me to go back to the madness in some sort of Quixotic attempt to understand the madness, or it may simply lead to spending time cultivating virtues that counteract Trecartin’s world. Who knows which way desire will spin.

Yvonne Venegas in Art Review

Yvonne Venegas: Maria Elvia De Hank Series

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica

Closed August 28, 2010

In the October, 2010 issue of Art Review, I invite you to read my review of Yvonne Venegas: Maria Elvia De Hank Series at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. This is a link to the article online

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