Mickey Mouse

2010 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Paul McCarthy

location: Los Angeles, California
year born: 1945
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Salt Lake City, Utah

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey. On his shoulders he supports an enormous false head, Mickey’s familiar face grinning with glossy eyes. The artist has marked out in heavy black the background of Cinderella’s castle. Robbed of his context, the character becomes the sole focus of the image, a subject of unusual scrutiny. Under this close examination, his torso and legs begin to seem strange—too human for his extremities—and his friendly wave starts to look less like that of a childhood hero and more like that of a politician. With McCarthy’s intervention, the famous mouse is upstaged by his own artificiality.


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:



Scene I am Cuba
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Felipe Dulzaides

2006

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Absentia
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Tony Oursler

2012

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VertiGhost
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Lynn Hershman Leeson

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I Want You
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Tony Labat

2008

Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...

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Forest Gathering N.2
© » KADIST

Gregory Crewdson

2005

Forest 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...

Untitled
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Trisha Donnelly

2007

Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...

Awaiting Enacted
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Roman Ondak

2003

This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection)...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Barry McGee

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...

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Forest Gathering N.2
© » KADIST

Gregory Crewdson

2005

Forest 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...

Untitled
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Trisha Donnelly

2007

Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...

Studio Construct 51
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Barbara Kasten

2008

Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...

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Blind Spencer (Mirror)
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Douglas Gordon

2002

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L'Exposition Lunatique
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L’Exposition Lunatique October 2 – November 14, 2010 With works by: Francis Alÿs, Kennedy Browne, Jason Dodge Hans-Peter Feldmann, Christoph Keller, Julius Koller Anthony MacCall, Roman Ondák, Pratchaya Phinthong...

Nothing New
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Oded Hirsch

2012

Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...

Kimberly Young-McLear (Bronze, Plinth 3), Monuments of the Disclosed
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Ahmet Ögüt

2022

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers...

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Silencer #16 & #17
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Will Rogan

2010

MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...

Serengeti Green
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Phillip Maisel

2015

While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...

Chu’u Mayaa
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Clarissa Tossin

2017

Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...

Untitled (Men)
© » KADIST

Matt Lipps

2011

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...

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Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants
© » KADIST

Paul McCarthy

2008

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...

Mother Pig, Shushi Gallery, San Diego Performance
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Paul McCarthy

1983

McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...

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Carl Dobsky: Prophet of the West
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Freedom Farming
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Li Binyuan

2014

Freedom Farming presents how, after being given the right of farming, Li Binyuan began to re-dig his land...

Dad is Byron
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Diamond Stingily

2017

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The Result of 1000 Pieces
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Lin Yilin

1994

All his artworks utilize the use of body – the artist’s own body and that of others...