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.
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 is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
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...
This work is one of Koller’s many variations which he began to use from 1970 to describe the ‘cultural situations’ he created...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
Anti-Happening refers to Koller’s 1965 manifesto, ‘Anti-Happening (System of Subjective Objectivity)’...
In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape...
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...
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
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)...
The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification...