Paul McCarthy
L&M Arts | Los Angeles
In 1968, Paul McCarthy built a hollow, galvanized steel structure shaped like the letter H and laid on its back. He titled it z-Dead H_ (the H standing for human), making additional versions in the years that followed—notably, Dead H Crawl, 1999, inside of which he imagined moving human bodies. In The Couch, a little-known video from 1973, we watch the artist force his body through a sofa feetfirst, only to emerge out the backside in a kind of birthing episode. And for the lifelike sculpture Dreaming, 2005, McCarthy produced a to-scale silicone model of his own pantless self reclining on a lawn