Bang Bang Room

Photograph: Courtesy Whitney Museums of American Art

A note to the media: There will be no ketchup or chocolate syrup involved in Paul McCarthy’s latest show at the Whitney. It will be devoid of condiments of all kinds. Also, there will be no Santa butt plugs, mechanical pigs or tree-humping animatronic figures. The artist will not wear a bulbous clown nose, portray a psychotic father or introduce any items into orifices, real or simulated. The only violence will be metaphorical and oblique, and the only human bodies will be the viewers’ own, reflected in various mirrors. While McCarthy’s sculptures and videos have often made for salacious copy, this exhibition is clearly trying for something deeper. “Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement Three Installations, Two Films,” curated by Chrissie Iles, is intended to spotlight a more subtle current running through the Los Angeles artist’s work. Though not a retrospective, the show plays thematic connect-the-dots with several pieces from McCarthy’s long career. Three kinetic architectural installations—one first envisioned in 1971 and finally produced this year, one built in 1992 and one completely new—will be shown together with two recently rediscovered experimental movies dating back to the artist’s student days. McCarthy is also adding site-specific wall drawings, and organizing a related program featuring films by Francis Picabia, Yves Klein and Walt Disney, among others. For him, bringing together past and present like this has revealed its own symmetries. “In a way,” he says, “it’s like finding yourself in the same place you started.”

That place is a frightening one. Though nothing in the show is quite so visceral as McCarthy’s familiar messy spectacles of degradation and imperiled masculinity, there’s an implied sense of panic in all the pieces. Walls spin, doors slam, lights flash, mirrors and video projections deform boxlike spaces. In the two films, constantly moving camera work creates a vertiginous instability. “It’s a thread that keeps coming back,” says McCarthy about this dizzying quality, “a kind of unconscious physical response.” He believes such a line runs through everything he’s done. “In my performative work—the ‘abject’ pieces or whatever—this stuff comes into it all the time,” he explains. “There’s always been architecture, always a figure trapped on the inside. Or a figure going in and out of a room, spinning, wandering—this sort of disoriented perception.”

For both artist and curator, the Whitney exhibition is not meant to show “another side” of McCarthy, as much as to highlight neglected aspects that have always been present. “Paul’s got an extraordinary mind,” says Iles. “The way he thinks is very layered. But his work has been misunderstood. People read it superficially.” Part of that may be due to the unusual chronology of his career and his belated art-world recognition. McCarthy, 63, is all too rarely connected to Postminimalist artists of his own generation. Without market or museum acknowledgment, the first 20 years of his development tend to fall off the map. “In the ’70s, I was popping up on the underground-art radar a little bit,” he says, “but I don’t think I sold a single piece till the ’90s.” When he did finally attract notice, he was often lumped in with much younger Los Angeles “bad-boy” artists like Mike Kelley.

In organizing the show as a “sort of archeology,” Iles says she’s hoping to also demonstrate the links between McCarthy’s oeuvre and that of his actual contemporaries. Among other things, this exhibition is about the artist’s influences: The films of Stan Brakhage (encountered while he was a painting student at the University of Utah), the writings of Allan Kaprow and Gustav Metzger, and Bruce Nauman’s videos and installations all have had a role in McCarthy’s thoughts about space and time. His efforts from the ’70s blurred the distinction between mediums, but were always marked by a strong physicality: He painted with his body, creating huge black canvases that he’d set on fire. He built quasi-Minimalist sculpture. “I was kind of all over the place,” he recalls. “But at that time, it all seemed connected: I was just being an artist.”

To McCarthy, the kinetic rooms he’s built for the Whitney echo both the Minimalist cube and the interior of the human skull. They follow a direct line from his earliest work, and resonate with his latest. For the artist himself, puzzling through how he got from there to here is all part of the process and the fascination. “I’m interested in art as a network where people influence each other,” he says. “I’m into unraveling that kind of mystery, those kinds of threads.”

“Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement Three Installations, Two Films” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Oct 12