Paul McCarthy
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy
Since 2003, the year of its establishment, Fondazione Trussardi has nomadically hosted and produced special projects in Milan by international artists under the artistic direction of Massimiliano Gioni and the patronage of the fashion designer Nicola Trussardi’s young daughter, Beatrice. The venues chosen by the Fondazione Trussardi are often forgotten or long-abandoned palazzi in Milan’s city centre, as was the case for Darren Almond’s exhibition in the Palazzo della Ragione or Paola Pivi’s show in the Ex Magazzini Porta Genova. ‘We do not extend our shows into the periphery because we think the city centre needs these kind of actions: simply, it’s shrinking and empty,’ declares Gioni while walking through ‘Isola dei Porci’ (Pig Island), the recently-opened solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy, hosted at Palazzo Citterio. The choice of venue in this case could suggest a strong, indeed very political, statement by Fondazione Trussardi, perhaps a suggestion to the Mayor and the city councillors’ to plan more consistent visual arts policies for the upcoming World Expo 2015, which Milan will host.
Palazzo Citterio sits beside the Academy of Fine Arts. Closed for more than 25 years, it is now open seven days a week until the beginning of July, thanks to McCarthy’s installation. Inside, Pirate Party (2005) – a four-channel video documenting an orgy between a female and four puppet-males – together with Houseboat Party (2005) takes over three rooms of the labyrinthine building. Each of the cavernous installations shares a corner so that the soundtracks of the video performances spill over onto each other, putting the audience in the belly of the artist – pleasantly powerful, frightening and exciting.
The installation Pig Island (2003–10), which is the heart of the show, is hidden on the basement level of the building, which was never open to the public before McCarthy’s intervention. Fittingly, Pig Island has never before been shown outside out of Los Angeles. As an introduction to the main room, the work Paula Jones (2010), a realistic female body with an oversized male head, finds its home in a small room with marked concrete walls and a low ceiling. The sculpture depicts President Bill Clinton’s infamous first lover. With open legs, she lays on a white wooden slab, awaiting someone willing to take action, any action.
From the silent Paula Jones’ room, visitors suddenly emerge into the gigantic basement in which Pig Island sprawls over more than 65 metres. Several white polystyrene cubes are covered with wooden slabs, which are in turn loaded with the artist’s working materials and sculptures in progress. The piece ‘looks like a scaled-down workshop: it reproduces sculptures leaving and then returning. With Pig Island, sculpture mimes an industrial process,’ says McCarthy.
A never-ending creational podium in which visitors can access the artist’s world, Pig Island is also a satirical portrait of the US. An oversized cowboy hat, spilled cups of paint, buckets, dusty musical instruments, cat cages and athletic trophies mingle with exaggerated masks of former president George W. Bush, including a sculpture of him copulating with a pig. Our democracies, McCarthy seems to say, are places where the only real men are pigs and men dig in the trash like animals. Lies are symbolized by a phalanstery of materials, from foam to wood to plastic to half built props in which, as treasure hunters, we can find perfectly erected and concluded scenes.
Diana Marrone
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
