WS, Paul McCarthy’s multimedia installation at the Armory, fills the Drill Hall with spectral howls and lighting, thick-limbed artificial trees, a ravaged suburban house, and a three-screen seven-hour movie that’s projected simultaneously at each end of the space. The film is a dark, dirty retelling of the Snow White story. The house, a recreation of the artist’s childhood home in suburban Utah, is actually the stage set where it was filmed. That filming has left it wrecked, with soiled rugs, spoiled foods, overturned furniture, and naked, mutilated corpses. The whole experience might be shocking but instead it’s tedious; so over-the-top that it has little emotional punch. The most powerful view is from the Mezzanine, from where all the systems sustaining the fantasy (scaffolding, lights, wiring, security) can be seen. I visited on a beautiful summer afternoon, and after surveying the installation and watching the film for about ten minutes, waiting for the narrative to take hold, I was itching to step back outside. The Times hyped the show with a review that compared McCarthy to Jonathan Swift and Heironymous Bosch. I liked the review on Culturebot better, Paul McCarthy’s ‘WS’ is BS.
WS takes aim at the aesthetic and moral emptiness of middle class Americans, living in the suburbs and vulnerable to Disneyesque fantasies. It’s an easy critique for city-dwelling art world types, and one everyone is familiar with. But the show left me wondering why it’s so hard to be clear-eyed about the suburban house. When we see this loaded architectural form in the media it’s either sanitized (like the spreads in Living and Dwell) or trashed (like in WS). McCarthy vision of middle America is clear, but lacks the ravishing precision of David Lynch’s, which narrows in on common sounds, sights and juxtapositions – a poetics of the everyday– to expose latent strangeness and violence. WS adds little to our understanding of suburban life or the Snow White story. In fact its super-sized scale only highlights the emptiness of the artwork itself. It’s this installation, really, that has issues.
WS, by Paul McCarthy, Park Avenue Armory, 2013. Photograph by James Ewing.