paul mccarthy life cast
at hauser & wirth
32 east 69th street
may 10, 2013 - july 26, 2013
the sight of an objectified female body has never really been strange to the art histories of civilizations. for my purposes i am generalizing to refer to "the east" (japan, etc) and to "the west" (from ancient greeks to the northern american locale in which i reside). classical statues of the female nude and old japanese prints of shy, white-faced virgins are images of female objectification that we take for granted. heaps of sprawled and sexualized bodies in our advertisements and television may trigger disgust for some, but rarely much surprise--their history is too long.
viewed from that context, paul mccarthy's life-sized silicone women (or multiples of the same woman) would not shock--especially in relation to the artist's past works, which rarely allowed the viewer to remain in passive comfort. but when i saw these synthetic women (ah, so many walk about us nowadays), i felt extreme discomfort. i had goosebumps running up and down my body as i walked by each one. i have terrible eye sight (yes, i wear up-to-date prescription contacts and glasses but i still can't see clearly) so i usually have to get very close to the work to see what others could probably see without putting their face so close. i drew near the first sleeping figure--t.g. asleep, 2012-2013--and quickly pulled back. i saw small hairs on her arms, the thin strands around her forehead wavering slightly under the gallery's a/c. my fear was that she would wake up any moment--and when she did, i would be the creep who had been watching her sleep, counting the number of moles on her neck, examining the folds around her vagina.
an observation: americans (or other "westerners") who are immune to sexualized images tend to cringe when they first hear about (and see) life-sized silicone sex dolls popular in japan. this is because they look too "real." from convincing hair fibers and twinkling eyes to detailed renderings of vaginas made for optimal pleasure, the experience with these figures blurs the line between wishful fantasy and realistic engagement with a passive victim. if the internet explicitly manifests the realization of what lacan once wrote--"there is no such thing as a sexual relationship"--interactions in the "physical" world, too, display themselves as perverse realizations of the fantastical projections of our narcissistic desires. we live through the camera, the image, the screen--every sensory experience mediated, fantasies achieve physical form.
despite the possibilities of blurring, some people still seem to prefer the presence of some indication that a fantasy is a fantasy, an image is an image--a reminder that they may break free from the dream at any point, and remove it from their "real " experience. but mccarthy's naked women are "too real," more real than many sex dolls. i felt embarrassment and shame while looking at her body, her legs spread at various angles. she may blink at any moment, and accuse me of looking upon her as an aesthetic object.
life cast's eroticism refers a great deal to art history (in my opinion) and the role of the male artist, the male gaze, in relation to the female body as object, muse, and artistic/sexual/life drive. horizontal, 2012, a likewise life-like replica of mccarthy himself, accentuates the sexualized role of female bodies in the history of art and representation: his looks like it belongs more in a morgue than in an art gallery, whereas the side-turned head of the sleeping woman secretes the concupiscence of the male hands that made her. in the four-channel video installation around the drawing table, the female hand (and body) is a passive and aesthetic object in striking contrast to the male hand, a dominant creator and lustful agent. as a hairy male hand (with grimy fingernails) traces with graphite the outlines of a cleanly manicured, white female hand on the table, the former momentary pauses and rubs against the latter. i have never seen so much lust drip from a frame with two hands and a writing utensil (i haven't watched much fetishistic porn).
a four-channel installation in another room shows the process of making the casts: photographing the model holding skin, eye, and tooth samples next to her face, heaping the rubber mold on her body, her emerging from the hardened shell. in between the "documentary" cuts, the videos also show the model just sprawled or leaning back on the work table in various poses--something like live nude paintings. the same poses and compositions in oil paintings could pass as "artistic studies" of the body, but in mccarthy's work, they become voyeuristic, intrusive, perverse, and of course, erotic.
this is the process of making art. eros is the life and artistic drive. as i watched her lay still, heaving occasional sighs and blinking her long lashes, i was reminded of a scene in the french film, renoir, 2012. sick and aging renoir finally finds his muse and inspiration to paint nudes again when a young woman suddenly appears at his door one day. at one point, he says to his son something like, "doesn't she have the most luscious ass?" old pervs make great artists, and vice versa, maybe.
mccarthy also has a large-scale video and set installation at hauser & wirth's chelsea location titled rebel dabble babble. the same female model also appears there, which made the already disturbing work more disturbing. this show is concerned more with pop psychology, the spectacle of reality television, stages, obsession with oedipal household drama, in a strange blur of 50s film, 90s tv series, and of course porn. i will probably elaborate on this show in a later post.
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