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

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Absentia
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Tony Oursler

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Nuevo Dragon City
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Sergio De La Torre

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Blindseye Arranger (Max)
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Brian Bress

2013

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Forest Gathering N.2
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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...

8 Ball Surfboard
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Alexis Smith

1995

In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...

White Minority
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Juan Capistran

2005

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...

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Forest Gathering N.2
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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...

Never Leave Home Without It
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Aaron Young

2007

The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...

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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...

Marlene Garcia-Esperat (Silver, Plinth 5), 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...

Re/cover no. 6, 8, and 9
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Phan Quang

2013

Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam...

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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

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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...

There are veins in these lands, I
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Rodney McMillian

2013

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...

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Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants
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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

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Dad is Byron
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Diamond Stingily

2017

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The Paintings of Jean Paul Langlois
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The paintings of Jean Paul Langlois blend memories of 1970s sci-fi and Westerns of his youth, while also exploring the artist’s connection to his own native and non-native roots...