It would be quite impossible to cover all the changes and events and encounters and art from the past months in one entry, so I will not even be trying, but rather focus on something concise and focused. And since 2013 has only just started and the art-world is just waking up from the Christmas hibernation (there is a lot to look forward to this year!), it seems only reasonable to talk about what preceded the holidays.

And by this I don’t just mean Miami! This is naturally the first thing that comes to mind for someone with a healthy interest in art, but while so many art-world enthusiasts and professionals were busy socialising, detoxing in the morning and partying hard in the evening on the Florida coast, London was desperately trying to not loose it’s contemporary art coolness. Take, for instance, the Turner Prize award ceremony which took place 0n Dec 4th: everyone who has international art power was at that point already in Miami, which meant that the event was much cosier, but at the same time much more pretentious: a lot of trying to seem like Larry Gagosian or Nicolas Serota… In any case, it was one of those rare times when someone I was hoping would win actually won, so congratulations to Elizabeth Price! Well deserved!

And while the Turner ceremony is one of those top of the tops events for the UK contemporary art scene, there is always a contrast. Like all other artsy cities, London has a great many artists who have to be creative in ways of showing their work and being seen and heard of. Several weeks before Christmas I was invited to see a show of work by Xavier White and Maia Spall, two artists who have united forces to put up a show right in the living room of Xavier’s house in South-East London. Spall’s abstract canvases were paired with White’s glass assemblages – the Verrelic Spires Spectacle installation – to create a dialog between paint, flat surface and colour and the lightness and transparency of glass. Being a strange pairing at first sight, soon enough the opposition between the two techniques and approaches of these two artist distils the experience and invites one into the dialog.

With the exhibition taking place in an actual living room and because the lack of space, one might get an overwhelming feeling from the amount of work that is present in one room. It feels more like a salon rather than an exhibition with thought-through curatorial idea, but there is a justifiable reason behind this: I think this is overcome by the need to actually show the work, i.e. have it on the walls/in the space so that it is visible to anyone visiting the show.

White’s house in Blackheath has been a sight for pop-up exhibitions since 2009. And the point I am trying to make here is that on the opposite side from London’s media-stalked top-level art scene there is a world that many art-tourists who come to the city don’t know of and don’t care for. But one must remember that initiative is what drives not just the art-world but everything today and the success story of the YBAs famously started with a show Hirst himself put together (as did countless other artists’ careers). Therefore, shows of this kind are an essential link in the art-chain.

Shifting Shapes runs through January 14th, 2013

Weekend public viewing 10 – 4pm ,26 Vanbrugh Park, S.E.3 7AF

http://www.artlyst.com/events/shifting-shapes-at-xavier-whites-gallery

Spencer Tunick, a New York born photographer, is definitely one of those artists who are not afraid of THE NUDE. Not even if there are tens, hundreds, and sometimes – thousands of them. For him the naked body stops being an erotic subject as soon as there is more than one of them (sort of like getting lost in the crowd) – they then form a kind of matter that can be used as any other material – paint, color, brush – to create art-works. For his projects he undresses hundreds of people. His most massive one is probably the installation on Zocalo square in Mexico City which he did in 2007…

What I love about his works is that he really turns a naked body into something that we don’t usually think of it as. It becomes just another means of artistic expression, completely rid of the usual predispositions, judgments, prejudices… You somehow step away from seeing that as being tens of bodies and perceive it as one unified layer. Tunick’s approach also incredibly transforms the exterior/interior  space where the installation is taking place and challenges our understanding of it. And yes, maybe the parallel with the masses and crowds can be made, but those are also often said to be shapeless, and Tunick’s bodies on the contrary form sensible patterns and do not in any way lack form.

More work/info on Tunick here: artnet, artist’s website

Mexico City 4 (Zócalo, MUCA/UNAM) 2007

Netherlands 13 (Dream Amsterdam Foundation) 2007

Düsseldorf 4 (Museum Kunst Palast) 2006

NewcastleGateshead 5 (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art) 2005

Ireland 2 (Dublin) 2008

Maui 2 (Little Beach) 2009

Salford 1 (Peel Park) 2010

Burgundy 5 (Greenpeace France) 2009

Sydney 1, 2010

Today kinetic sculpture, which still is an independent medium, has evolved into mechanic sculpture. One of the most recent famous examples is Michael Landy’s credit card eating machine that became a huge audience magnet at the 2011 Frieze Fair in London. A huge mechanical who-knows-what made of weird materials and found objects bolted and connected together in an intricate mechanism that created an abstract drawing for anyone who agreed to literally ‘pay with their credit card’ – i.e. have your visa/master card/maestro ‘eaten up’ by the beast leaving a small pile of crushed plastic on the floor.

Mechanics is not novice for English artist Tim Lewis. He creates bizarre creatures-robots-sculptures that move, flap their wings, and walk around. When I saw his work in Flowers Gallery London this past weekend I felt like a little child who feels the need to disassemble the toy in order to see what’s inside and figure out how it works. I literally stood in front of one of the pieces for quite some time just asking myself the question: “How does it do that?”.

Other works are less mysterious in their construction but no less challenging in their interpretation. Lewis continuously comes back to birds – or at least something that resembles them. Many of his pieces seem to have bird-like features in them, be it feathers, their shape, wings… Interestingly, in an interview with Dazed Digital, when asked about the significance of these creatures in his work, Lewis replied: “I don’t like birds and I’m not interested in birds but yet everything seems to come out as birds. Perhaps it’s just the shape of them, the mattness of the feathers, the strangeness of them. Perhaps it is something I’m subconsciously attracted to for some reason. Interestingly, they’re never birds in flight, they’re always walking, or hanging from something or have wheels.”

Tim Lewis filled the space of Flowers with strange creatures and uncanny objects like a huge metal kiwi-bird driving around the floor of the gallery, a pair of horse legs with a chest of bones and a skull on top walking in the corner, an ostrich-like creature pulling a carriage and others. He says that for him the idea of mechanical fabrication and its substitution for nature is what makes this explorations interesting. This got me thinking of the Automata, Hoffmann’s Sandmann, and Descartes. For Descartes the mind was always separate from the body: the body as a mechanism, mind as condition of being. The defying quality of a human is the ability to reason, but at the same time there is no proof that people around us are not automata, i.e. that they too have this ability. We automatically assume them to, but we have no proof, i.e. it is unexplainable, incomprehensible, uncanny. This idea is developed in The Sandmann, an incredibly strange tale by german 18th century writer E.T.A. Hoffmann where one of the characters turns out to be an incredibly realistic mechanical creation.

It seems to me that Lewis’s work relates to the ideas described above. His works might not aspire to look/be raalistic and we can see that they are mechanically constructed. He does this deliberately, as he also deliberately covers apart of one of the birds with actual feathers and makes it look realistic. He is as if asking us to imagine how it would look like if the whole body was covered. Quite different. Quite real. What if?

Sadly, photography does not transfer the whole experience that comes with observing the works because they are all moving, walking, turning and this cannot possibly be represented in pictures. To build your own opinion about them it’s best to see them in person, in Flowers East, 82 Kingsland Road, London until 14 April.

Probably one of the first things that strikes me when I look at pieces such as Nina’s is the difference in the way a photographer’s eye sees and processes the world around us. Not that this happened to me for the first time… But somehow when I encounter works that capture angles that an average passer-by is unlikely to notice, I find myself astonished over and over again. Probably because every time this happens I promise myself that I will be more attentive and creative when ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’. But again and again I fail and revert to seeing in a conventional, fast-pace way so many of us are used to today.

How many times have I walked past Barbican, the British Museum, Serpentine Gallery or the Southbank? Not only walked past, but also walked into these spaces… But I have never looked at them even remotely close to the way Nina does – through an eye of someone who in interested in the personality of these buildings, in their outer being. Maybe because I was always eager to see what’s inside them – a new show at Serpentine or a new item on display at the British Museum, – that I never paid a lot of attention to their architecture. This, honestly, is quite shameful for someone coming from a family half of the members of which are architects…

So when I saw Nina’s works I was astonished with how different her view on the world is! She moved to London with her parents 20 years ago as a little girl, but although she grew up in Britain I could still see the influence that the architecture in then still Soviet Ukraine had on her. Though generally I tend to regard any influence of such sort as negative, in this case it turned out to be the opposite! Soviet art and architecture were indeed through and through soaked with social realism, but Nina’s works are so far away from it! Instead, it’s the constructivism of 1920s and 1930s, the Kharkiv and the Moscow schools with lines echoing Vasiliy Ermilov, El Lissitzky,and Vladimir Tatlin.

The works presented in the show are black and white, which only intensifies the beauty of lines and angles. In some cases, it is even hard to make out the buildings in Nina’s representations – a recognizable structure turns into an abstract composition, sufficient in itself for aesthetic contemplation. The building becomes secondary for the experience, while at the same time remaining the primary source for the image.

Architecture isn’t the only subject-matter that interests Nina. She also works with fashion, performance/theatre, makes portraits. But the architecture series stands separately and seems to comprise a radically different body of work than all others, both color-wise and image construction-wise.

I found getting lost in space and seeing new angles to building I’ve found so familiar very interesting. So if you are in London  - go see the show and then maybe drop by the landmarks represented in Nina’s photographs to see if you recognize them, or do this first and then compare your impressions with that of the artist. And in case you have never seen these buildings and are miles away from the capital of England – then simply enjoy the beautiful lines and the image construction that these works present the viewer with.

www.ninasologubenko.com

8th March – 30th April 2012

Everyman Cinema

203 Haverstock Hill
, London NW3 4QG

The exhibition will show two series of photographs: 
Series 1 in March and Series 2 in April.

“The old magic fear of cameras is thus reincarnated in the world of digital natives. But in this environment, cameras do not take away your soul (digital natives replaced this with iPhones) but drain away your life. They actively make you disappear, shrink, and render you naked, in desperate need of orthodontic surgery. In fact, it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools of representation; they are at present tools of disappearance. The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality.”

Ed Ruscha, SPAM, Detail, 1961. From the series Product Still Lifes, 1961/1999

Anyway, not only did I find the article interesting, but I also thought that my friends, many of whom are involved in art and social sciences, might find it interesting, too. So, ironically enough, I decided to ‘share’ this article on my Facebook profile. But as soon as I pressed the ‘share’ button, Facebook protested saying that “You are trying to post content that is marked as harmful or spam”. Weird, since e-flux is a respectable publication with a world-reknown name and carefully monitored content written by well-known intellectuals, artists, curators and theorists. Also weird, because the article is in a way dismantling the whole ‘niceness’ of web-sites such as Facebook directly saying that such services are stripping us off our authenticity… In any case, Facebook offered me to fill out a form in case I thought that this content was marked as harmful by mistake, where I clearly stated my reasons for believing so and that the whole issue might have occurred because the title of the article has the word spam in it….

So far I haven’t heard back. Wonder if this really was a misunderstanding or if this article is really ‘harmful’ enough to be posted….

Francis Bacon, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963, oil on canvas, Christie's London £21.3M

Contemporary art evening auctions are a very important event in the artworld: all of the biggest collectors, buyers, dealers and socialites are eager to show themselves and maybe even snatch a work of two. These sales can be seen as a certain blueprint for the artist and the prestige that his or her works has: first of all, if your work is presented at an evening auction this means that you already have quite a status and are considered to have made it into contemporary art history, and second – the bigger the price that your works goes for, the bigger the chance that more of your pieces will be in next evening auctions and more buyers and collectors will be eager to get their hands on them, which inevitably means bigger prices not only on the secondary market, but in the primary one, too.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1992, oil on canvas, Christie's London £9,87M

This week the sales of the two leading auction houses – Christie’s and Sotheby’s – made £80 and £50M respectfully, with Portrait of Henrietta Moraes by Francis Bacon alone selling for over £21M at Christies, and works by Richter bringing around £13M at Sotheby’s.

Gerhard Richter, EIS, 1981, oil on canvas, Sotheby's London £4.3M

Works by Gerhard Richter made top prices at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales. This, along with the results that his pieces showed in previous evening auction seasons make him officially one of the most sought-after living artists of today. He became an absolute “winner” of last week: at Sotheby’s three of his pieces - Abstraktes Bild, EIS, and Abstrakt - sold for £4.85, £4.3 and  £4.07 millions respectfully (the initial estimates for all these works were much lower) and became the three most expensive lots of the evening, while at Christie’s his work Abstraktes Bild sold for a little less than £10M. The total amount made from only these four works is around £25 million!

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1992, oil on canvas. Sotheby's London £4.85M

No doubt, the recent added attention to his works and persona caused by the big retrospective on show first at Tate Modern London and now traveling to Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin played a role in these figures, but even without this Richter is one of the most interesting and acclaimed contemporary artist and therefore the results of the sale come as no surprise.

Gerhard Richter, Kerze, 1982, oil on canvas, Christie's London £10,5M

The German painter, born in 1932, is one of the most critically acclaimed living artists today with works ranging in medium from complete abstractions to photographic realism, glass sculptures to color charts. His first show was in the early 60s and he worked with artists like Polke and Karl Otto Götz. Recently, before the big Gerhard Richter: Panorama show at Tate his works were also exhibited in solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery (both in 2009), with North American retrospectives in 1998 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and in 2002 at the Museum of Modern Art. He has frequently shown at Documenta and Venice Biennale and holds numerous international art prizes. All of the above, obviously, explains and fosters his huge success at auction where the current record price for his work was set in October 2011 at Christie’s London contemporary art evening sale, where his Kerze (Candle) sold for £10.5M.

*this and all the following figures include buyer’s premium

____

A couple of days ago, I came across a photograph by Magnus Muhr that uses dead flies not just as a subject-matter, but also as, ehem… material. Running a race, tanning on the beach, riding a horse –  these little creatures take our place in usually human-performed activities.

Dead flies would usually be regarded as gross. But in the case of Muhr they become in a way even adorable! The Swedish photographer uses their tiny corpses to create characters for his doodles and at some point you don’t even regard them as dead flies but rather as funny little cartoon characters (it is important to try not to revert to seeing them as dead flies as this may again lead to a repulsive reaction).

Why does Muhr choose this subject? Is he trying to rid flies of their disgusting image? Or by putting them in positions usually occupied by humans saying that today we are the same, – buzzing around, spreading disease and being one with the crowd?

Muhr isn’t the only one to use flies in his art. Damien Hirst has often used this ‘material’ in his artworks, not only dead, but alive, too. His Cancer Chronicles, 2002, is a series of 13 monumental canvases (148.6 x 113.7 x 15.2cm.) all covered with dead flies captured in an amber-like resin. Each was sold separately, with Cancer Chronicles Malaria selling at Christies for GBP 288,000. On another occasion Hirst used maggots, which later turned into flies, to ‘participate” in his work Let’s Eat Outdoors Today (1990-1991). 

The work consists of two adjoining glass containers, one displaying a common plastic garden set with a table and four chairs, the other containing a steel barbecue with a tray full of maggots, hatching into flies. The same principal was explored in A Thousand Years (1990), where a calf’s head was placed in one transparent box and maggots in another, with the latter turning into flies and destroying the head’s meat and tissue and leaving nothing but a scull in the end…

And again, – what meaning can we see in these works? Why flies? Is it just another of Hirst’s scandalous/provocative ideas? In one interview, Hirst once said about the work: ‘I wanted the piece to be an outside that everyone recognised like anyone’s back yard but I wanted the piece to be frightening in a way like it threatened the inside of your body.’ Familiar/uncanny, – these are probably the best ways to describe the piece considering what Hirst wanted it to be. And it does live up to them, since with the great familiarity of the scene the idea of flies and maggots being everywhere on everyday object and most importantly – food – can be quite traumatic. Precisely because “it can happen to you” and “you can’t be 100% safe”.

Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years

Before Hirst and Muhr even came up with the idea of using these tiny insects in their art Ilya Kabakov, a russian-born American artist, made ‘a fly’ one of the central reoccurring motifs in his work since 1960s. His 1992 installation Life of Flies showed a set of rooms where different aspects of the Soviet society and its members were represented through flies. Flies are also linked to garbage which is another important element in Kabakov’s work often associated by him with his Soviet homeland. Art critic and theorist Boris Groys wrote a critical response to this installation that sheds a lot of light on the ideas behind it as well as the work itself, and can be found here.

Kabakov not only uses bodies of flies, he draws them, too. Little flies on canvases and little flies on books that are supposed to be encyclopedias or albums – an inherent part of a museum – can all be found in this display of sarcasm and sadness at the same time.

Obviously, there are many more artworks with depictions of this creature. And the key word here is depiction since until the liberation of materials and techniques in XX century, until Duchamp and the Surrealists made it possible to use any thinkable and unthinkable objects/mediums/substances in art production, the idea of using a ‘fly’ or anything as something else wouldn’t even come to an artist’s mind. Today, however, it is quite acceptable and as in Hirst’s pieces, for example, flies even become in control of executing the work. A big step for such a small insect….

* Boris Groys. 1992, We Shall Be Flies. (A critical response to Ilya Kabakov’s installation, The Life of Flies)

Sotheby’s public galleries at New Bond street in London have quite a collection on display. But one work that caught my eye was a previously unknown to me work by Wassily Kandinsky. Lot 8, Der Bär, 1907, is a small gouache on paper from the times when he was traveling around Europe between 1906 and 1908. Being a long devoted fan of what came to be known as German Expressionism (although Kandinsky himself was not German and was born in the Russian Empire and spent his youth in Odessa, now Ukraine) I immediately fell in love with this work. If only i could actually buy it…..

DER BÄR, Wassily Kandinsky, gouache on paper laid down on board, 29.5 by 49.2cm, 1907. Image courtesy of Sotheby's

In this little painting we see the infamous founder of Der Blaue Reiter showing his connection to his motherland, a rustic scene – a peasant fighting a bear, a man plowing the filed in the background, the clothes and the setting – all of this speaks of rural Russia of late 1800s-early 1900s. Done in a typical Kandinsky manner, seeming even slightly child-like, the work leaves an incredible impression of naiveté and maturity and the same time. At the time when Kandinsky made this paining he was already in his 40s and living abroad for more than 10 years. Maybe Der Bär really is a way of going back to his youth both in the case of subject-matter and mode of representation?

In any case, this work will soon become property of some private collector or museum or dealer – and we probably won’t see it again for a while. Which is a pity, because it is sometimes such less-known pieces that can speak more about the artist than any of the well-known masterpieces. They seem more intimate and revealing.

Der Bär is estimated at 500,000-700,000 GBP, we will see how it actually does on February 8th.

CAUTION: explicit language

Deconstructed bodies, perversion, abuse, politics and sarcasm, blood, sperm…. The list is far from complete. I know this must be a very gruesome way to start an article: with a sentence that could potentially stop anyone from the further reading of it. But if that first sentence didn’t put you off – just let me warn you, there’s more to come. The reaction of disgust and repulsiveness is usually the first thing that happens to the viewer when he or she sees a Paul McCarthy piece: they simply turn away in aversion. Well, what can I say, McCarthy does love himself some grossness. But, believe me, it is far from being the only thing he is interested in.

The artist.

Born in 1945 in Utah, McCarthy is among the pioneers of performance, video-art and happenings (he collaborated with and was influenced by Allan Kaprow, an artists who coined the term). And in the case of McCarthy – from the very start of his career all of these involved quite explicit imagery. From his own naked body smeared in different liquids, to dolls engaging in an orgy, or a mechanical man having a sexual intercourse with a tree trunk, to giant sculptures of dwarfs holding phallic symbols, – all these find a place in McCarthy’s work. In a forward to an interview with the artist in BOMB Magazine, Benjamin Weissman writes: “Paul managed to remain an artist of true perversion, dedicated to fucking with viewer sensibility and at the same time achieving a broad mainstream appeal. A rare accomplishment.”[1] True indeed.

Paul McCarthy, image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Paul McCarthy graduated with a BFA in painting from the University of Utah and, because he was very interested in making videos, went on to study film and video at the university of Southern California. Talking about that period of time in Paul McCarthy: Destruction of a Body, a video-interview with Jörg & Ralf Raino Jung, he describes it as a hard time for someone interested in video: the school was so Hollywood-oriented and focused on film industry, that they didn’t even have equipment to offer for those who wanted to make videos and not films[2]. But that didn’t stop McCarthy.

Using borrowed equipment he starts making videos featuring himself engaging in weird (from the point of view of an average person) activities: he uses his own body as a paintbrush (Black and White tapes, 1972, Sauce, 1974), a reference to abstract expressionist reign in American art in 1950-60s. It is, after all, “action-painting” – just not with a paintbrush as Pollock did it.

Tomato head (Green), fiberglass, urethane, rubber, metal, plastic, fabric and painted metal base, 1994-

His art and interest do not stop on video. His body of work incorporates sculpture, installations, happenings, – all of which set to explore identity and change, society and its effect on a single person. Comments of consumerism, politics and capitalism are all over his pieces, and the question of abuse – be it family abuse, political abuse or social issues – is central to many of his pieces. A signature element to his works is their explicitness; he loves violence, nakedness and bodily fluids. But all of this revolting imagery, just like Benjamin Weissman remarked, didn’t stop McCarthy from being commercially successful, critically acclaimed and loved by the audience: his CV boasts exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2008), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2006), a retrospective at Tate Modern (London, 2003), and many more solo and group shows through out his career. To add to that, he is represented by Houser & Wirth, one of the most successful commercial galleries working in London, New York and Zürich. Recently, in November 2011, his work Tomato Head (Green) (1994) sold at Christie’s New York for a total of $4,562,500 (£2,828,750/€3,285,000). This is a pretty impressive sum and taking into account that the bidding started with $500,000 shows that if the collectors and buyers are willing to go this far to acquire his work – he is definitely making his way into the cannon.

The art.

It is hard to classify McCarthy as an artists working in a specific filed. As I already mentioned before, he works with different media, incorporating elements of each into the other and transgressing the boundaries between ‘pure’ techniques. In this part we will be talking mostly about his videos, simply because to my mind they bring together elements from all the other media that he is working with, as well as are a place were many of his other pieces have their beginning in. For example, in his video Piccadilly Circus (2002), shot in a space of an old bank on Piccadilly, London, which later became one of Hauser & Wirth’s spaces, contains strong references to painting (smeared food pieces over a white sheet seen on the floor), sculpture (all the characters are wearing masks, an element that very often appears in his sculpture-like installation pieces), happening (all the actions are spontaneous). In the video piece itself, McCarthy dressed his actors up in oversized foam rubber heads of the Queen, George Bush, Ben Laden and others. All of these engage in an orgy of food and paint, cut each other’s masks with a huge knife and appear to perform some kind of weird ritualistic dance. Funny thing – what distinguished the characters are only their costumes and head wear: they all seem to have very similar, if not the same, faces. In this piece we find several reoccurring elements characteristic of McCarthy’s work: food as a substitute to bodily fluids, masking and taking on different identities, controversy as too the subject and the characters engaged, abuse. All of these come up in his pieces in a different period of time and having appeared – stick around creating certain continuity, a narrative connecting the pieces.

The line of abuse goes through many of McCarthy’s works, be it child abuse, sexual abuse or even political or social. For example Heidi (1992) and Family Tyranny (1987) explore the theme of child abuse, and in the case of Heidi – the hidden possibility of sexual harassment (a blond little girl in a remote house the Alps together with her grandpa, ketchup, chocolate, a hint to torture….). Most people will probably say that this is referring to McCarthy’s own experience as a child, but according to the artists himself he has no personal recollection of abuse during his early days. At the same time a piece like Piccadilly Circus (which is closely looked at in one of my previous entries), in which McCarthy places an orgy-like activity engaging some of the most controversial figures in contemporary politics into a space of a bank, figures that better than anyone else represent capitalism and its repercussions as well as are very strong political symbols in themselves, shows that McCarthy’s pieces are not only about exposing and shocking, they also serve as a very strong commentary on society and politics, done, at the same time, in a very sarcastic way.

Another narrative connecting most of his works is the use of explicit images and food. Of course, it might have been shocking in the 70s, when his video Sauce (1974) showed naked McCarthy crawling on what seems to appear as a table, covered in ketchup, his body entirely naked and exposed to the camera. And although today no one can surprise us with a naked body, this video still gives the viewer a feeling of uneasiness and repulsiveness. Frankly speaking – it grosses you out. The use of such substances as chocolate, mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise, which is a reoccurring motif in his works taking its beginning from his earliest pieces and refers to shit, blood and sperm respectively, has become one of his signature elements and has since been taken up by many artists of post-McCarthy generations. ‘Bodily fluids’, unlike in real life, are not hidden in McCarthy’s work. On the contrary, they are everywhere, smeared, mixed all over the set, on the camera, on the costumes.

Speaking of costumes – McCarthy is interested in adopting different identities, by either dressing up and wearing masks, or acting out different roles. In his earliest performances/videos McCarthy uses his own persona as an actor for the films without completely covering it. For example in Ma Bell (1971), the viewer can’t see the artist’s face but only hears him acting out a mad person, with the camera shot showing the artist’s hands and the action performed (pouring gasoline, four and cotton onto the page of a telephone-book). In another video from a bit later – Rocky (1976), the frame shows McCarthy wearing a mask and boxer gloves (obviously referring to the movie with the same title) and beating himself up with the blows getting harder and harder as the movie progresses and ketchup being smudged all over his body to imitate blood. McCarthy then gradually goes into concealing his body completely, like in the Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994) where the artist (is it really him?) is wearing a costume of the Disney cartoon character, or in Painter (1995) where McCarthy is wearing exaggerate make-up and clothes and sarcastically acting out an abstract expressionist artist while in a weird environment filled with giant tubes of paint. McCarthy slowly goes from revealing to concealing himself, and later – completely disappears from his pieces: in the 90s he start making Hollywood like parody movies, with very low budget and a very strong comment on the whole entertainment industry that Hollywood has created. Among these are Saloon (1995), his look on the tradition of Western movies, or Houseboat Party (2005), a sneak peak into a world of rich and famous where there’s been too many drinks and drugs, something went wrong, someone got killed and swim-suit clad models are dividing the body. Body parts and blood everywhere, with pop music as a soundtrack to the pleasant act of butchering. Classic McCarthy.

Complicated Pile, 2007 Inflatable sculpture, image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Now, as I said earlier, although most works discussed above are video-pieces/ performances, it would be a mistake to think of McCarthy as strictly a video artist. It is true, though, that video seems to be a kind of a hub from which every other of his pieces evolve from. For example, his fascination with costumes and inflated dolls, which we see in Pinocchio, later finds its way into a series of inflated sculptures resembling cartoon characters (with sexual references, of course). His Air Pressure installation from 2009 in Utrecht featured, among others, a dwarf holding a ‘butt-plug’, a pig with its front legs bent to reveal its behind, and a pile of shit. All of the above were of giant size, inflated and shiny: an obvious pop-art/Jeff Koons/ consumer society gimmick.

Installation view, 'Pig Island', Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy, 2010, image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

He also recently became interested in using mechanics and silicone in his works. His sculptures can now move (like The Train, currently on show at Hauser & Wirth London) and the body parts seen in his installations are even more gnarly. With the use of mechanics he can bring the ‘action’ from the video (even though it might be a monotonous one) into 3-dimentionality and put it into a gallery space: The Garden (1992) is precisely such an installation where among the trees one finds a mechanical man, erm…, having a sexual intercourse with a tree while a younger looking man is lying, presumably dead, on the ground next to him. All creates a feeling of something being wrong, of some horrible event that too place before the viewer’s arrival, very similar to the feeling created in pieces like The Houseboat Party. On the other hand, if this scene is suggesting some environmental comment it is still doing it in a very McCarthy-like way.

Painter, 1995 Colour video with sound, still. Image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Paul McCarthy’s pieces are impossible to miss. Some like them, some don’t, some find them amusing and most – turn away. But what does it mean to make such art today? Is anyone really shocked by anything? Apparently – yes, and most of McCarthy’s pieces do prove that. Be it video, sculpture, installation or anything else – he finds a way to touch the viewer’s gross side. But is it because he is so ‘badass’ or because we actually recognize a part of ourselves in what we see that we react in such a way?

The pieces we discussed, and this is by far not a full list of his works and a very personal selection, do show what McCarthy’s main goals and means are. It is, though, highly recommended to dig deeper and look out for more, and not only in the case of McCarthy. Because behind any appearance, as gnarly or as pretty it might seem, there can be something else. And it takes guts (literally) to discover it.

My first experience with London’s borough of Mayfair was very awkward. I was looking for the White Cube Gallery (25 Mason’s yard) to see the Chapman Brothers show. I decided to take a stroll from Bond street underground station all the way down to Westminster, and my way happened to lie through Mayfair, an area that is roughly framed by Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Park Lane and Regent Street. I almost got lost, and not because I can’t read maps – on the contrary my sense of direction is surprisingly good! – but because I was distracted by all the shops and vitrines and ART! It felt like someone took all the possible brands, then a good number of key art galleries and then Sotheby’s and Christie’s headquarters and put them all together into a little part of London. It is an ultimate place for high-end shopping and luxury, a place where you spend money. And this is not surprising, since the area itself takes its name from an actual fair, which took place here throughout the 17^th century. It traditionally was a place where the wealthy both lived and spent their time, and even the British version of the Monopoly set has Mayfair as the district with the highest prices on real estate.

The fact that the area is attractive for someone with a wallet explains the fact why it is so full of commercial galleries: they too want to sell. Their customer is someone who can afford to buy art, and according to a recent article in The Art Newspaper, in the time of crisis when any investment is a risk, even such an usually regarded as unreliable commodity as art seems to be better than any stock. That is why the location choice is far from random.

Some of the world’s leading names in the contemporary art gallery business, such as Haunch of Venison, Hauser and Wirth, Gimpel Fils, Gagosian, Stephen Friedman, Alan Cristea gallery and countless others have found home in Mayfair. And despite the fact that these are commercial spaces, which first and foremost look to sell pieces, it doesn’t mean that they do not put on well-curated shows and don’t welcome the public. Well, it might seem like they don’t, because a commercial gallery space has a tendency to look very hostile from the outside, especially for someone who is not used to their atmosphere. They have big windows through which you can see the room with the works which is usually either empty or has a couple of visitors looking at the pieces. Also, there is the receptionist/intern who by one look at you will be able to tell if you mean business or not (usually they know it beforehand because anyone meaning business has a special appointment booked or is recognized). The idea of walking into a space where you are the only visitor and where you feel like you are constantly being watched might be – no definitely is – intimidating. And it will take some getting used to.

But it is definitely worth it, because not only are the shows free, but also these commercial spaces, especially giants like the ones mentioned above, usually have very interesting art on display. And it is precisely because these galleries represent some of the key contemporary artists that it is very useful to keep them on your radar, even if you are not looking to buy or start a collection and are simply interested in enjoying the artwork.

Another good thing about commercial spaces is that they do not attract random tourists for whom going to a museum or a gallery is a tourist habit (I’ve been there!!!), and not a pleasure, and who, according to statistics, spend an average of five seconds in front of a work. And if you’re lucky and you’re taking your art-stroll on a day of a show opening, you can even wonder into the gallery (the openings are usually open to the public) and enjoy a free glass of wine while contemplating whatever’s on display!

So check what’s on, make your pick, check the opening hours, – and off you go!

Useful resources: artslant.com, newexhibitions.com, timeout.com, mayfair-london.co.uk