Paul McCarthy, Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement

Paul McCarthy’s “Spinning Room” (2008).


The McCarthy Installation slash mini retrospective at the Whitney is a must see. This has been a very slow season for the art world - with sleepy shows at the Guggenheim and MoMA. Luckily McCarthy serves up enough excitement and entertainment to please any art audience. It was great to see some of his early films from the 1960s/1970s - as there are no other venues for them to be screened. They are wonderfully installed along side some performative-photographs as well as three large scale installations. TimeOut New York rightfully declares: "The Whitney connects the past and present of Paul McCarthy’s work." This fusion of the past and present showcases the evolution of the artist while providing insight into the conceptual link between his early and current work.

I went into the show a bit skeptical. The description on the wall at the beginning of the exhibition declared that architecture will be used to: "to create perceptual disorientation in the viewer through spinning mirrors, rotating walls, projections, and altered space." But on the advice of a good friend I decided to suspend my disbelief and over critical perception and enjoy the art for what it was - AND I DID! His work goes beyond spectacle and truly does alter the perception of space and viewer's relationship to space. Ken Johnson of the NY Times is right in suggesting: "Over and over Mr. McCarthy returns to the human fact that we are inescapably at the mercy of what our senses tell us about the world and what our brains manage to make of that information. We may go out of our minds, but we can never get out of our heads." Even after a week I am still struck by the sounds and sights of the installations. I am looking forward to a second visit - and, ultimately, a different experience.


Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement
Three Installations, Two Films

on view till 12 October 2008

This exhibition brings together a group of new and rarely seen works by Paul McCarthy (b. 1945), one of the most influential American artists of his generation. The show focuses on a core strand of McCarthy's work: the use of architecture to create perceptual disorientation in the viewer through spinning mirrors, rotating walls, projections, and altered space. In Bang Bang Room (1992), the space almost seems to come alive as the walls of a free-standing domestic room move slowly in and out, the doors in each wall wildly slamming open and shut. In Spinning Room (2008), first conceived in 1971, but being realized for the first time for this show, live images of viewers are rotated and projected onto double-sided screens that appear infinitely reflected on four surrounding mirrored walls, enclosing the viewer in a wildly disorienting space. In Mad House (2008), being created for this show, a room spins disconcertingly on its axis. Two recently rediscovered films by McCarthy, one made in 1966 and one in 1971, reveal the artist's interest in perceptual puzzlement from the very beginning of his career.