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:



Related works featuring themes of: » Americana, » Architecture in Art, » Color Photography, » Comic/Cartoon, » American, » Abject Art, » Body Art, » Performance Art

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
© » KADIST

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...

The Breaks
© » KADIST

Juan Capistran

2002

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...

Apartment on Cardboard
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2000

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...

Anti-Happening
© » KADIST

Julius Koller

Anti-Happening refers to Koller’s 1965 manifesto, ‘Anti-Happening (System of Subjective Objectivity)’...

White Minority
© » KADIST

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...

Its Always Fun to Live in This Country
© » KADIST

Eko Nugroho

2009

Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...

No Title (Eh What Do?)
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

The five drawings included in the 101 Collection are representative of Pettibon’s characteristic cartoonish style...

I Want to be Gentleman
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2000

Lu has developed an oeuvre that consists of characters in bizarre situations...

Untitled 3737 and Untitled 5157
© » KADIST

Todd Hido

2005

The two pieces in the Kadist Collection depict foggy landscapes, one at dawn, the other at nighttime...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Barry McGee

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

Ammo Bunker
© » KADIST

Mario Ybarra Jr.

2009

Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...

Awaiting Enacted
© » KADIST

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)...

Excerpt (Sealed) (Brown)
© » KADIST

Stephen G. Rhodes

2010

For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame...

Untitled (Joseph T. Robinson Standing at a Podium in a Room), Damaged series
© » KADIST

Lisa Oppenheim

2003

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...

Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat)
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2010

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky...

Tierra
© » KADIST

Regina José Galindo

2013

In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial...

The Pixelated Revolution
© » KADIST

Rabih Mroué

2012

The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution...

History of Chemistry I
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2004

A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...