(Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photographer: Joshua White)
(Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photographer: Joshua White)
(Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photographer: Joshua White)
(Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photographer: Joshua White)
It’s Snow White and her dwarves as Disney has never shown them — demented, debauched and just plain dirty. And Disney doesn’t fare any better.
Paul McCarthy, who unleashed the big red Balloon Dog at this spring’s Art Frieze, has just taken over the Park Avenue Armory. His mammoth installation, “WS” — as in White Snow, or Snow White, reversed — fills the Ward Thompson Drill Hall with a huge (fake) forest, a model house and multichannel video projections so explicit, this art show is rated X: No one under 17 will be admitted.
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And with reason: The sight of a dwarf humping a roast chicken at the dinner table isn’t for the faint of heart. Ditto the video of the prince pleasuring himself in the woods, or a naked, spatula-wielding Snow White applying Pillsbury frosting to her nether regions.
Thompson’s troops would probably swallow their muskets.
“This is a really, really painful work,” cautioned Tom Eccles, a curator of the 67-year-old California artist’s work. “People are going to say, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of sex.’ But it’s almost a denial of sex . . . It’s about repression and how that manifests itself.”
Apparently, repression is in the eye of the beholder, because these dwarves are going all the way, and then some. It might put you permanently off roast chicken.
The most unsettling thing about this piece is that the model house you see here is an exact replica of the artist’s parents’ California home, “right down to the stains in the bathroom sink,” as Damon McCarthy, the artist’s son and collaborator, put it.
Stains are the least of it.
Crude windows have been cut into the house’s walls, the better to let you peer in to find a mess the Manson family — or a particularly piggy pack of fratboys — might have made. Amid the dirty pots, unmade beds, empty whisky bottles and one disturbingly large jar of mayonnaise is a single figure: a life-size effigy of McCarthy himself, looking for all the world like Walt Disney — naked and kneeling, a broomstick protruding from a part of him where no broomstick should ever go. (As of presstime, Disney Enterprises had yet to comment.)
As in the “Hangover” films, the videos unscrolling on the big screens in the front and back of the hall purport to tell you how things went horribly wrong. Judging from the amount of Red Bull and whiskey being tossed around, the message seems to be “Don’t drink and dine.”
More sobering is the sight of Snow White — or, at least, a lifesize, hairless naked mannequin under glass, a true case of arrested development.
And then there’s the forest in the middle of it all. Raised up so you can’t step into it, it’s a frightening place of big red poppies, ferns and foreboding trees.
Is this the American-dream-turned- nightmare? Are Disney’s family-friendly fantasies a base corruption of our hopes and dreams? And is it worth paying $15 to see what McCarthy thinks of all that?
Perhaps, and it might even be a bargain: In one of the artist’s earlier performance pieces, he puked all over a University of San Diego classroom. At least here, we don’t have to clean this up.