Quilting Sessions. Drawings by Paul McCarthy & Benjamin Weissman
Location: 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
In 2008, the reputable Hauser & Wirth (Zurich; London) gallery assembled a tour in which three museums – the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea in Trento, the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, and the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn – formed the eastward trajectory. The exhibition by the famous US contemporary artist Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman, an author of horror stories with an artist’s background, is comprised of works created cooperatively by the two artists in 1997–2008. The works were completed during conversations between the two men, in which they handed the drawings back and forth across the table and each made their additions. The title, “Quilting Sessions”, for which a local equivalent might be “Coffee Table Drawings”, refers to the informality of the cooperation and the connection between the subconscious and free expression that became possible thanks to improvisation and repetition.
The works are divided into chapters and are organized sequentially, based on the time when the drawing sessions took place. The beginning of the co-authorship occurred at the Mammoth Mountain ski resort in California. The figurative idiom of the artists, who spent time drawing and having pleasant conversation there, treats the ski vacations of their fellow citizens as true actions, into which are wedged violent spectacles that are typical of horror films, and from which bodily passions that speak of the dark subconscious and repressed fantasies bubble up as if from a crater. Naturally, these cannot be accommodated by the conventions assigned to human relationships, and recognizing the narrowness of these limits helps to exceed them. The cooperation continued with the giant “½ Boy” series (1997–1998), whose 60 works occupy an entire hall at Kumu.
However, the principal question related to McCarthy’s work is not his artistic mastery of drawing. Rather, the exhibition provides an opportunity to examine an author whose works continue to create problems for the art world. McCarthy’s work cannot be considered based on ideas of taste and propriety, and his drawings, depending on the topic, are expeditions into the darker areas of the body and reveal our secret hidden purposes.
The drawing style is inseparable from McCarthy’s performance and painting experiences. He appropriates the inherent characteristics of American mass culture and employs a comic book style, with crassly comical points or a photo bank characteristic of pornographic journalism. McCarthy’s visuals are derived exclusively from American junk culture, and the storytelling style has been shaped by zombie movie aesthetics, the horror genre etc. McCarthy’s anachronistic narrative provides a new contrasting cultural image to this strikingly uncomplicated visual material, which is based on a total and merciless criticism of consumer society. This is characterized by meaninglessness, rich metaphors, exuberant depictions, and salaciously obscene messages. McCarthy’s powerful and psychologically loaded presentation dislocates and furiously deconstructs archetypical images and characters; his pictorial world has vigorously broken through the conventional world of illusions. The inability of small-minded people and those interested in a glittery life to cope with the lies of their society extends McCarthy’s nihilistic work into the topic of revenge, where the exposure to general depravity has an apocalyptic effect. In McCarthy’s treatment, the masses have forfeited the humanity that has been attributed to them since the Enlightenment, which is characterized by cynicism and self-satisfaction. They are plagued by sexual paranoia and unsatisfied sexual hunger, which in the artist’s treatment is sublimated into acts of violence directed against the body and into the absurd.
Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City (Utah, USA). He acquired his art education in 1973 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, after having studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of Utah. He lives in California. He gained world-wide fame as a video and performance artist, whose work was initially influenced by the performance aesthetics of Allan Karpow. McCarthy represents the critical wing of the US counterculture generation of the 1960s, artists who focused their work on exposing the myths of US well-being and success that had been generally admired during the 1950s, and on the horrors of the Vietnam War. McCarthy is one of the few US avant-garde classics to be affected by developments in European art. His development as a painter was shaped by the activity of the Viennese actionists of the 1970s, led by Hermann Nitsch, who expanded the action painting movement, begun by Jackson Pollock, in the 1960s by painting with blood and excrement. McCarthy replaced these with ketchup, mayonnaise and chocolate cream.
Since 1982 McCarthy has taught performance, video installation and the history of performance at the University of California, where he has influenced the development of such artists as Jason Rhoades, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, and Jake and Dinos Chapman. In 1980–1990, McCarthy turned his attention to the creation of three-dimensional sculptural objects and installations. He did not gain wider recognition until “The Garden” exhibition (1992) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2001, there was a McCarthy Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Tate Liverpool, UK, followed by exhibitions in numerous other internationally significant venues.
Benjamin Weissman has published horror stories, in which the recurrent themes are sex and violence taken to grotesque limits. He has appeared at exhibitions with drawings, paintings and sculptures, and his articles on art and artists, skiing, books, theatre and film have appeared in various exhibition catalogues and art journals. Weissman teaches at the Otis Art and Design College in Los Angeles and organizes the New American Writing program at The Hammer Museum.
