Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants
2008 - Sculpture (Sculpture)
Paul McCarthy
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area. Instead, McCarthy’s reconstruction divides the pants vertically in two black and white sections. McCarthy’s mistake speaks not only of the fallibility of memory but of a certain kind of queerness that resists any categorical—“black or white”—definition. Memory Mistake ’s use of aesthetic formalism, error, subjectivity, and social history can be seen to challenge the tropes of modernism and art history.
Known for his transgressive performance art pieces that often challenge social conventions, Paul McCarthy is undoubtedly one of the main figures in the West Coast contemporary art scene. Using different forms from pop culture as source material, McCarthy casts a critical look at American society and consumerism. With a particularly poignant sense humor, his works also investigate the intricacies of human psychology.
Colors:
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Gregory Crewdson
2005Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
© » KADIST
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© » KADIST
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Paul McCarthy
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© » KADIST
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The Sable Eye with Ryanaustin Dennis, in partnership with Canyon Cinema Wednesday, June 6, Bar 6pm, Event 7pm, with works on view through June 9 Screening of Robert Nelson, Oh Dem Watermelons , 1965, 11 minutes, 16mm and Cauleen Smith, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron), 1992, 6 minutes, 16mm...
