A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

Man Ray, "Self-Portrait" (1924)

When I predicted the top museum shows of 2009 for ARTINFO back in January, I remember being particularly excited about this one, Alias Man Ray: The Art of ReInvention that opens at the Jewish Museum on Sunday (and runs through next March). Now that I have had a chance to preview the show, I am delighted to say that it is even better than I hoped. As well as providing a full-scale retrospective of this most interdisciplinary of artists – the first here since 1974, apparently – the show focuses on Man Ray’s tortured discomfort with his own identity and on the complex ways in which it affected his work.

Formal portrait of the Radnitzky family, 1896

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish parents in Philadelphia in 1890, the child who would become Man Ray moved with his family to Williamsburg in 1907. This show explores how for the whole of his artistic career – as a New York Dada, a Parisian surrealist, an international portrait and fashion photographer, and as a painter, sculptor, photographer, film-maker, writer, activist, and inventor of the cameraless Rayograph – he suppressed knowledge of those beginnings, and ironically created an artistic persona whose mystery and rootlessness was basic to its success.

Man Ray, "Rayograph" (1926)

The man behind the show, and behind its utterly persuasive argument, is Jewish Museum Curator Mason Klein. (Mr Klein has also edited the excellent and entertaining catalog of the show which is published in collaboration with Yale University Press and which I heartily recommend.)Yesterday I sat down with him over a cup of coffee and he outlined the five principal reasons why his show is worth the trip up to East 92nd Street:

This show addresses Man Ray’s otherness. He has remained a mysterious character and we try to provide a whole new perspective on understanding him. Man Ray sought both notoriety and oblivion; he had to remain an outsider. It’s only now, after twenty years of identity politics that we can ask, “How did being Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century matter in Man Ray’s work? What does it mean?” I don’t think he was expecting to encounter the anti-Semitism that he did. As much as artists tried to fight xenophobic tendencies, and believed that Dada could be a trans-national movement with a global language, there was such an order to the art world back then.

Man Ray, "Indestructible Object" (1923/1965)

Man Ray may well have been the first Jewish member of the European avant-garde. He was certainly the first to have been embraced by the European avant-garde. And for him to become a member of the avant-garde, he felt that he had to be seen in a different way from having Brooklyn, Russian, Jewish immigrant parents with sweatshop experience. I think that for his generation of artists, who came at the time of the waves of immigration in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, there was a need to demand some neutrality, so that you’d be allowed equal terms with other artists, and not relegated to some cultural niche. That’s why everyone changed their names.

Man Ray, "Marcel Duchamp, Solarized Portrait" (1930)

I try to play down Marcel Duchamp here. Duchamp’s influence was so pervasive that there isn’t an artist who hasn’t been influenced by him, but because he and Man Ray were such close collaborators, Man Ray has really suffered. He has been subsumed within the radiant aura of Marcel Duchamp.

Man Ray, "Gift" (c. 1958; replica of 1921 original)

Man Ray felt that his historical place had not been acknowledged. He felt that abstract expressionism – particularly as it was being commandeered critically by Clement Greenberg – was facile, if not entirely empty of subject matter. So he began to do these “natural paintings” just to show that anybody could do that kind of abstract painting automatically. He felt that he had spent decades dredging himself psychoanalytically in a way that the abstract expressionist artists had not, and that they were too market-driven and decorative.

Man Ray, "Lingerie" (1931)

The Rayographs purport to penetrate to the core, like an X-Ray. But what they really present is a flat contour of a form. They never really get to that impenetrable core. It’s a perfect procedure for Man Ray to be working in.

Paul McCarthy, "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009)

If there’s a less polite exhibit than Paul McCarthy’s White Snow in New York presently, I certainly haven’t seen it.

Pretty much throughout his entire artistic career – certainly since I first saw him perform in England in 1983 – Mr McCarthy has trained his artistic focus on the more disgusting aspects of the human condition: not just the sweating and the bleeding, and the pissing and the shitting, and the wanking and the fucking, but on the ways in which our thoughts about those activities insinuate themselves into how we consider everything else, despite the efforts that some of us might make to suppress them. His domain is the frontier between the proper and the improper, between the acknowledged and the hidden, and he is also interested in how these things inform the making of art.

His focus this time around – or perhaps “target” is a better word – is Snow White, her Seven Dwarves, and – to a lesser extent, her handsome prince. The results are inevitable.

Let’s just list a few of the elements in the wall-sized drawing Shit Pie (White Snow) which McCarthy made earlier this year, and which – like pretty much everything else in this show (and despite his broken leg) – he was still working on as it hung in Hauser & Wirth’s East 69th Street gallery before this evening’s opening.

In the top left hand corner there’s a squiggle that, given its context in this picture, I have to conclude is a drawing of a vagina, possibly crossed out. Next there’s the first of two crudely drawn Snow White heads – this one has eyes like pieces of coal in the snow, a blonde porn-star’s portrait stuck to her forehead, and a simplistic four line drawing of a vagina in place of her mouth. This has been smeared over in black oil-stick.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

Immediately below this is the second head, slightly bigger. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is once again a vagina, but this time a blacked-in penis shape has been drawn across it, giving the impression that she is fellating it. The same blonde porn-star has a slightly different portrait stuck to her hair. To the right of the two heads, and slightly below it, there is a drawing of a crouching body that might belong to either of them. We see it from the side and rear, and witness a scribbled piece of feces fall from an anus that has been partially erased on to a plate of more feces. Above this is another drawing of the same body, this time seen from a slightly different angle, and concentrating upon a distended anus that appears to disgorge semi-liquid feces. Immediately beneath this there is one of a number of drawings of a penis entering a vagina, and immediately beneath that, in an apparent last minute addition, are the words “SHIT PIE”.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

Beneath that are four pieces of collage – a torn page from a porn magazine featuring a naked young woman surrounded by a group of older men, also naked; the front cover of a Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary catalog featuring a particularly sloppy De Kooning; a section of a page from a fetish porn magazine showing four pictures of women in the act of defecation; and an ad for a transsexual phone sex line headed “TS SLUTS” and featuring a photograph of someone wearing women’s shoes and holding their engorged penis.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

Elsewhere there are a couple Disney-esque deer, one with a human vagina, the other with an erect human penis; there’s a smiling dwarf thrusting a broom handle into another dwarf’s anus; there’s a collaged photograph of a penis sticking through a hole in a wall; there are scribbled words – “Pussy” followed by a series of variants, or a list what appear to be actions from Disney’s Snow White movie, “going home … Disscovering [sic] the unknown … Going up stairs … Finding Snow White … S.W. wakes up …”.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

The whole upper left quadrant of the picture is filled with black and yellow scrawling, and seems to refer again to the similarity between untutored scribbling and the appearances of abstract expressionist painting that was hinted at by the inclusion of the de Kooning catalog cover. And by extension between all mark-making, no matter how unguarded, and all art. There’s an illustration of a Rothko glued there, and a Cindy Sherman, and a list of artists’ names from Artschwager to Yuskavage. Elsewhere there’s the rather unkind inclusion of a picture of the artist who looks more like a Disney dwarf than any other, John Baldessari.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

It is actually rather dispiriting to even describe a picture like this, but having looked at it, and the rest of this show, in detail, I found myself coming to a number of conclusions about Mr McCarthy’s work, some of which rather surprised me.

His is a bleak artistic world, undoubtedly, in which everything is a reminder of something else, and that reminder and that something else are things we might want to pretend hadn’t occured to us – a mouth is a vagina; a vagina is an anus: a fairy-tale heroine is a fellating or defecating porn-star: a nose is a penis; a broom handle is a penis; eating is defecation; making marks – and thus painting – and thus all art – is defecation. Yes, it is bleak indeed, and made more unpleasant by the fact that the sort of language that I am persevering with here is actually inappropriate. The ways in which Mr McCarthy approaches these subjects, with pages ripped from porn magazines, and cartoonish simplifications, and the angry distortions of bathroom-wall graffiti invites a far less polite vocabulary, the one that he himself uses, and which I used for emphasis at the top of this post: for vagina read “cunt”, for feces read “shit”, for fellating read “cock-sucking”. It is as unpleasant as it is obvious.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

On the other hand, I do not – or I don’t any longer – find any of this actually shocking. Perhaps a few years ago, and before pretty much every color and size of pornography became available to anyone with a computer and their Google “safe search” switched off, I might have been unsettled by some of the porn that is all over this show. Perhaps before I had seen as much of Mr McCarthy’s previous work I might have found some of his imaginings about what Snow White and the dwarves got up to upsetting, but now I can simply acknowledge that this is his chosen artistic realm, and one which he inhabits comfortably. His connections, his observations on how we might see the world are interesting, thought-provoking, even – I am willing to admit it – entertaining. But shocking? Well, for me at any rate, certainly not. No more than the surrealists are shocking. Or Freud.

This leads me to a number of other conclusions about him that might read a little more positively. He is not sick, he is not a pornographer, he is not a misogynist, nor a would-be rapist or murderer. But herein lies what I think is the most fascinating thing about this show, and about Mr McCarthy himself: because for this work to succeed, we need to believe – even if just a little bit – that at some level he is these things.

The downstairs gallery at Hauser & Wirth is actually filled with a recorded soundtrack of him at work on these pictures – huffing and puffing, banging things or dragging them around, and often conducting a grunting, mumbling, stream-of-consciousness commentary on what he’s picturing. The gallery informs us that this “a performative process” in which he speaks aloud “in a sort of trance”. Paul McCarthy, we are asked to believe, is more than an artist. He is a shamanistic everyman dredging particularly dark areas of the contemporary collective unconscious for the edification of the rest of us. He is thus either one of the most important artists working presently or an utter charlatan. And this is why this show is unmissable. Because nobody can decide for you which of these is true – you must see the work and decide for yourself.

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