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| Paul McCarthy -
Brain Box Dream Box 19 June - 24 October 2004 New building / level 2: room 1 - 8 Paul McCarthy (USA, 1945) has been widely recognized since the 1990s for his large-format video installations and sculptures. Many of his works draw on the vocabulary of contemporary popular culture. The genres he works with refer both to television and advertising and to the phenomena of Hollywood and Disney. In addition to this, McCarthy appropriates modern myths, introducing new critical content into existing forms. His interest lies in the deeper psychological strata of a culture which is caught in the standardized interplay of family, education and the media world, a culture which not infrequently loses sight of its own values and hence its focus. McCarthy's artistic method, which involves breaking taboos in precisely choreographed scenarios, is as challenging as it is intelligent and humorous. It was only with the awakening interest in a younger generation of West Coast artists that the work of this Los Angeles based artist began to be properly recognized by a wider public. In fact McCarthy has by now had a crucial influence on the artistic climate of the city for almost thirty years both as an artist and as a professor at UCLA. No doubt it was the ephemeral nature of the performances, videos and drawings he was creating in the 1970s and 80s that kept McCarthy's work for many years only really known to a small group of artists. Paul McCarthy comes from a generation of artists who have responded
to the Minimalism and Concept Art of the 1960s by developing an
approach that seeks to reinstate the connection between artistic
activity and social reality. Like his colleagues Dan Graham and
Bruce Nauman - just slightly older than him - McCarthy
uses his work to explore the relationship between the individual
and society at large. But for McCarthy, artist-led spatial perception
is not only a model for an open (Graham) or an existentially oppressive
(Nauman) interface between the individual and society. In McCarthy's
work blatant role-plays recharge familiar situations with new contents,
both challenging and deconstructing them. |
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