Almost over: Paul McCarthy at the Park Avenue Armory

I just got an email from the Park Avenue Armory that Paul McCarthy’s installation is over August 4^th. And not a moment too soon!

Debauchery seems so old fashioned, so last century, that McCarthy’s attempt to shove it down our throats (haha) with this massive installation seems almost quaint. There was a time when it might have been helpful to goose us (there I go again) out of our inhibitions, but we were liberated decades ago. We had the 60s, 70s, and 80s, “Satyricon,” “Last Tango,” “Eyes Wide Shut” and that Japanese film where the guy cuts off his penis—not to speak of Acconci masturbating under a platform and Mapplethorpe, whose S&M photos are now classics. With the exception of the New York Post and a few mouthpieces on the Christian Right we are, as a culture, un-shockable—and even those starched shirts are probably not really shocked, but simply using it as another weapon in their power play. In an era where Internet porn of every flavor is available 24/7, we need more debauchery like we need another film about cars blowing up.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled, c. 1973 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.  Used by permission.

Further, it’s easy to be depraved—just as it’s easier to be sloppy than scrupulous, disgusting than poetic. The irony is that McCarthy, whose work is a reaction to super-scrubbed, sexually-repressed Disney productions, is not more artful than his stimulus. Like Disney, he insists on controlling the entire experience, leaving no room for the imagination.

Compare McCarthy’s heavy-handed interpretation with Judy Fox’s Snow White (2007), whose simple representation of a adolescent girl in all of her nakedness and vulnerability is actually more disturbing.

Judy Fox, Snow White, 2007, terra cotta, casein, 8.5 x 58 x 25 inches

Not to speak of her dwarfs--here Sloth (2007), not a character you'd like to find yourself in a dark corner with:

Judy Fox, Sloth 2007 terra cotta and casein, 21 x 16 x 16.5 inches

I was thinking that the most responsive audience for McCarthy’s piece would be the seventh-grade boys who won’t be allowed in, which led me to wonder what would happen if you got a bunch of those boys, gave them an unlimited budget, and told them to be as gross as they wanted. Now that might be interesting. It might even be funny.

*****

Jerry Saltz on the McCarthy exhibition here.