Paul McCarthy at Schinkel Pavillon

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McCarthy the great desublimator, and of late the great literalizer. Literalization is a form of desublimation. And we watch him objectify someone, literally turn someone into an object, Elyse Poppers or himself. Unusual for McCarthy it is clean, clinical and calculated. It feels awful. This process, usually huge on billboards and bus stations showing half-naked young things, should entail all the fun of commodities, should replace the desire with an object that can be purchased, replace that desire. Instead here is cruel, useless and wasted. The world has little use for naked old man on table. Watch the procession of Poppers' body become not hers, the literal object consumable.

Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy at Marlborough Monaco



The Battleship Bilbao Billboard project was refreshing, a simple attack at the level of image/brand shaking the behemoth that the endless arrows of well-scripted criticism, aiming at Guggenheim’s museum as franchise model, couldn’t. Brand image was where the reality lay. But in the exhibitions since it seems its a collaboration 25 years in the making to go back to making work in the coincidence-valorized-as-auratic-material art making narratives of Jason Rhoades, McCarthy’s student and Bouchet contemporary. Rhoades who in his own time couldn’t get McCarthy himself off his back as a reference. Influence comes full circle in just not enough time to forget totally, and the funny-fresh irreverence of Rhodes symbolist networks lives in McCarthy/Bouchet’s titillation of their own brand strategies; Ivory Snow becoming Bilboa sunscreen and Battleship films - even with its own a-hole prepackaged. Though for now not nearly wildly inventive or all encompassing as Rhoades magisterial ability to tie it all together as if it somehow made sense, and not just a bunch of art scrap in a room.