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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Mom
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Sadie Benning

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Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California
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Sharon Lockhart

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Forest Gathering N.2
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Gregory Crewdson

2005

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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...

Martin Creed | The Dick Institute
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Martin Creed

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Monologika - Yoyo 1.,2. (U.F.O.)
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Julius Koller

1982

The photograph Monologic – Yo-Yo 1, 2 (U...

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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...

Paper Tigers…from a whisper to a scream
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Juan Capistran

2012

The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...

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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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Sans titre (Horse Day serie)
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Mohamed Bourouissa

2017

In his photographic series Périphérique (2005–2008), Mohamed Bourouissa used the composition of classical paintings to stage the portrait of friends and young people in the banlieue s (suburbs)...

After the Archive Collections Room
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Andrew Grassie

2009

In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...

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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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Eraser
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Will Rogan

2014

Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...

Untitled (Men)
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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
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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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The Paintings of Jean Paul Langlois
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Doodood and John
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Chris Huen Sin-Kan

2013

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