Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy exhibition, Haus der Kunst, Munich

I’m staying with Alexander Roth in Munich for a few weeks His apartment is just across the road from where Albert Einstein spent 10 years of his childhood and youth although I´m not sure if he was born there. The address is Aldereitestraße. This morning I ate Volkornbrot with peppercorn cheese, müsli, fresh milk from the Bavarian Alps (more probably a farm in ÜberBayern, the area where Frau Schweinimaus lives. It is Alexander´s birthday, he has gone to Garmisch-Partchenkirchen with Bettina for a walk. He has new work influenced by Paul McCarthy, really interesting except he has made the mistake of abandoning realism in favour of nothing. He had some nice gel pens. I tried them yesterday, sitting up all night with his jaxon crayons, a real joy but amateur junk compared to the neo-pastel.

Paul McCarthy has an exhibition at the Haus der Künst. The Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) was built in 1933-37 to replace the Munich Art Gallery which had burned down in 1931. Designed by architect Paul Ludwig Troost in neo-classical style, the building still serves Munich today as an art museum. Munich held a special place in the Nazi pantheon ... it was the "Hauptstadt der Bewegung" - the Capital of the Movement - the birthplace of the Nazi Party. Throughout the Nazi period, Munich remained the spiritual capital of the movement, with headquarters, buildings, museums to house the artworks approved by Adolf Hitler, and shrines to the attempted Nazi putsch in November 1923. These sites were used as the scenes of lavish annual memorial ceremonies, and swearing-in ceremonies for new SS members. Today exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst are very different from the austere, reactionary assemblages of neo-classical crap envisaged by Adolf Hitler. The sleeping pig is v funny, you want to reach out and touch it. Also pirates shagging pigs and lots of studies of pirates, porn & chocolate pirates & installations & even more porn stuck onto studies of pirates, girls with their legs spread demanding penis, even detached photographs of bodyparts, vaginas stuck on everywhere, just dismembered, detached vaginas everywhere dripping like Dali clocks. Lovejuice is spattering down on my shoulders. His ‘films’ feature McCarthy, his friends dressed as pirates or US cavalrymen doing strange things with ham or hamburger meat, ketchup, mayo, which are meant to be substitutes for real dismemberments because we all know that he´s a very kind person in real life (axemurderer). I suppose critics will frame this exhibition in terms of its ‘deconstruction of pornography, modernity, western wastefulness, the extreme take on post-modern re-usage of filmic, cultural clichés’. For me it looked a whole lot of fun, even more fun to make the films, paint the paintings.

I also think the majority of conservative Bavarian folk will be deeply offended by this exhibition. But who cares about their opinion?

The museum is right beside the English Garden and the river was very energetic yesterday. I felt like falling in and down into the deeper dark but was pulled back by my sense of vertigo or lichtschwindligkeit. In the upper air the deities but the river god pulls one, in a certain sense, or was it merely the 6 bottles of Lowenbrau I drank before visiting the exhibition?

Paul Murphy, Munich

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington  This is an unbelievably impressive exhibition maintaining the usual high standard of events at the V & A. India was overwhelmed by stronger neighbours, then by Western Imperialists, seeking a colony that fitted with their nostrums, that might be strategically advantageous. Even today the current war is based really on Indo-Pakistan relations representing the Islamification of east and west India (now Pakistan and Bangladesh) first brought about by the Moghuls. The Moghuls, a nation that originated in Persia but actual descendants of the Timurids, hence their homeland Moghulistan (Mongolistan). The Moghuls were essentially militaristic, even more militaristic than the native Rajputs, who seemed to have lived by a kind of Zealot ethic, preferring suicide to dishonour. They were clearly a very powerful presence until their influence waned and the British came to establish the Raj, but the words we have of 'Indian'
Read more

THE PAINTED VEIL and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

The Painted Veil (2006), dir John Curran, starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Diana Rigg and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), dir Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem The Painted Veil , adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera , (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera. In The Painted Veil , Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has be
Read more

Notes on the films of Sam Peckinpah

Last evening I watched Pat Garret and Billy the Kid by Sam Peckinpah.   I haven't seen such a film for a very long time, dull melancholic edge tainted with sadness and elegiac to the core.   I noticed that there were many production problems, as many as 6 editors, and Peckinpah disowned the film eventually.   I think the problem with the film, however, is Bob Dylan, not the editing.   He clearly can't act, his presence is irritating and, apart from the well-known song, hardly quoted in the film, the soundtrack is underwhelming.   There were so many laudable cameos otherwise, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards, Harry Dean Stanton, and Kris Kristoffersen who pulls it off somehow as Billy but who knows what his acting is really like.   I really wished someone would shoot Dylan just to get him out of the film, instead Pickens is shot and various other worthwhile character actors. The still centre of the film is James Coburn in this, his second film for Peckinpah.   After he shoots Billy
Read more