BERGEN.- KODE Bergen Art Museum is presenting Dead End Hole, an exhibition of new and recent works by the American artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945). The exhibition marks the artist’s first major institutional presentation in Norway and spans two sites in Bergen – Stenersensalen (KODE 2) and Tårnsalen (KODE 4).
Dead End Hole premieres the most recent instalment in McCarthy’s “DADDA, CSSC” series, DADDA, The Coach, the Skull, 4 Wall (2017/2021), a four-channel video projection in which McCarthy restages the contemporary American political landscape as a regression to the level of the id.
Four films are being projected simultaneously juxtaposing scenes from an overcrowded stagecoach, a popular subgenre of the Hollywood Western, populated by a cast of characters including Donald Trump, Nancy Reagan, and Andy Warhol. Over the course of several hours they collectively act out fantasies of violence and sexual abandon. The films are looped continuously on the four inner walls of a simple plywood structure, creating a hypnotic and overwhelming environment.
The nondescript architecture, which is a nod to the temporary buildings on a studio set, is converted into a makeshift arena where destructive and anal-sadistic impulses can be unleashed. Similarly, the narrow confines of the stagecoach allude to the feeling of being locked in a claustrophobic situation from which there is no escape. DADDA, The Coach, the Skull, 4 Wall deepens and extends McCarthy’s subversive exploration of the tropes of Hollywood and their unspoken political and psychosexual contents.
The exhibition also features a major new installation, A&E Hanging (working title) (2021), which is being shown for the first time. The work is on display in the tower of KODE 4 alongside a parallel presentation of works on paper from three recent drawing sessions, from 2019 - 2021, with actress Lilith Stangenberg, with whom McCarthy collaborated in Night Vater, his reworking of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974).
The drawings, some of which are on public display for the first time, belong to McCarthy’s ongoing project, A&E (for Adam and Eve, Adolf and Eva, Arts and Entertainment, America and Europe), which mines the same core themes—the intersections of sex and power, the return of the repressed, the father complex in politics, and the enduring allure of fascism as an ideology and an aesthetic—that animate both the original film and McCarthy’s version.
As McCarthy stated, “the film’s final action is a return to a primal exclusion as an existence in a dark psychological hole.”
Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, US) is among the most widely influential and important artists of his generation. Since the 1960s, McCarthy has worked within a broad range of artistic expressions, spanning media such as video, performance, painting, drawing, and sculpture. McCarthy’s work is often brutal and relentless in its attack on conformism, conservatism, and the contentment of society. He challenges both his own and the audience’s boundaries and invites us to view the ordinary with fresh eyes to discover how illusory and relative our conception of reality is.
McCarthy’s work has been shown in major exhibitions at renowned public institutions, including Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020); M Woods Museum, Beijing (2018); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago (2015); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005); and Tate Modern, London (2003). He has participated in many international events, including the Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004); and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2001). Works by McCarthy are held by major museums and public collections worldwide.
