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Paul MacCarthy: That Girl (T.G. Awake), 2012-13
Photo: Copyright © Hauser and Wirth, 2014
If any artwork has ever solicited (and problematized) the viewer's gaze in a more challenging and slightly unnerving manner than Paul MacCarthy's That Girl (T.G. Awake) then, if I'm honest, I'm not sure I want to see it.
Although not billed as the main attraction of the current Hayward exhibition on contemporary figurative sculpture, MacCarthy's hyperreal and clone-like figures - three silicone versions of the same girl sitting naked, legs apart, on glass-topped trestle tables - are nevertheless the stars of the show and, I think, deservedly so.
For whilst there might be issues of cynical exploitation and rather lazy porno-sensationalism, one ultimately comes away wanting to know more about the young woman who so courageously dared to expose herself in this manner and submit to the intensive, intimate, and extremely messy modelling process (as documented in the accompanying video T.G. Elyse (2011)).
And this desire to name and to provide a personal history or biography - to effectively bring a dead object to life - is to experience what obsessed and tormented Pygmalion. Thus, in this way, MacCarthy achieves something extraordinary; he allows us to directly share in the primal (erotic) fantasy of art and to feel what he feels, not simply see what he sees.
Notes:
The above work by Paul MacCarthy can be viewed as part of The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, an exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Hayward Gallery, London (17 June - 7 September 2014).
That Girl is Elyse Poppers; a twenty-something American actress who has effectively become a muse to MacCarthy, having appeared in two of his films - Rebel Dabble Babble (2012) and WS (2013) - as well as in the work discussed above.
The above work by Paul MacCarthy can be viewed as part of The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, an exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Hayward Gallery, London (17 June - 7 September 2014).
That Girl is Elyse Poppers; a twenty-something American actress who has effectively become a muse to MacCarthy, having appeared in two of his films - Rebel Dabble Babble (2012) and WS (2013) - as well as in the work discussed above.
On the other hand, it could just be that the artist is presenting a fact-in-the-world - the form of the body without the mind or the biochemistry that makes it a person. There is a romantic and a classical take on this.
ReplyDeleteThe romantic take has lots of finely tuned psyches constructing illusions about the soul of the model, the artist and the observer and inventing elaborate connections between them, the weaving of a nonsensical 'spiritual' discourse, the socialisation surrounding the work being the work of art rather than the thing itself - and so romanticism becomes conceptualism.
Or we can see the thing as a finely crafted thing that makes us think about reality and representation, the mythology of objectification, the nature of the subject, the invention of art and the invention of society. I tend to this more classical view of things and laugh at those who insist of projecting their romantic feelings on cold nature.
Whatever it is, it is not 'pornography' or exploitative except to the degree that the Haywards Gallery decides to 'big it up' to get the punters in. The work is not the model and the model is not the work. The illusion that we can know the model or the artist through the work is the wishfulness of the 'spiritual'. After all, there be no desire at all for the model - fortunately, today, nakedness in itself is not an erotic trigger.
It may be that the work is not pornographic, but it is nevertheless obscene in the manner defined by Baudrillard and which relates to his theory of hyperrealism.
ReplyDeleteWe have here a non-spectacle of total visibility. That Girl invites us to stare at her in a manner similar to that of a performer in a vaginal cyclorama. We come away having seen everything and nothing - except perhaps the empty objectivity of things.