Paul McCarthy

It’s hard to imagine Paul McCarthy at a housewarming party, but a better artist could not have initiated the program at Hauser & Wirth’s new London space on Piccadilly. Not only did McCarthy create and film performances in these, the former offices of Midland Bank, but he built a replica of the bank’s basement in his California studio, where he filmed another series of interventions. The resulting work, Piccadilly, 2003, takes up—and takes over—the building’s three floors. On the ground floor, videos projected onto the wood-paneled walls feature the artist and his collaborators frolicking around empty teller’s booths wearing oversize Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush masks. While it may be satisfying to see an iconic face gain a few new orifices, the stately bank setting offers a sufficient critique of power: The accoutrements of authority are reduced to a chaos reminiscent of a day-care center.

Projected in the building’s clammy subterranean bowels are videos of McCarthy & Co. experimenting on the replica basement with Hershey’s Syrup and power tools. Here, architecture and its compulsion to repeat itself through models meets the work of doubling and displacement that usually occurs in dreams. While tackling icons and artifacts of American culture, McCarthy seems to embody the primary processes of the unconscious. All orifices are interchangeable, whether on the body, an object, or a wall; taboos are continually broken; causality disappears as seemingly useless activities go nowhere; and there is no such thing as death, even if someone’s leg gets hacked off in a bloody attack. The sequences, however disturbing, are mesmerizing; they neither lack nor destroy meaning but use the human body to destabilize architecture with an endlessly productive slippage where mouths start to look like elevators and wall-to-wall carpeting can double as toilet paper.