Currently on display at the West End galleries of Hauser and Wirth (and in nearby St. James’s Square) is an enormous show by the Los Angeles based artist Paul McCarthy (born 1945) entitled “The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship”. Viewing these pieces recently I felt that some outstanding work was on display. 

I want to focus on the two central works of the exhibition, both of which were worked on by McCarthy over the same eight year period, each feeding into the other.

“Train, Mechanical” (2003-2009) features two gigantic anamatronic silicone figures with swivelling, expressive George W. Bush heads, both with wide open mouths and bulging eyes that directly confront onlookers when approached. In constant mechanical movement they are both continuously sodomizing a couple of pigs, who both, in addition, have a couple of piglets repeatedly entering their heads with their erect piglet phalluses.

Gouges have been formed in the bodies of all of these figures, who seem to have been created from rotting mounds of pink flesh, with rough pitted coatings of skin, absent limbs, bloated bellies and a range of possible congenital defects. Wires & boxes are visible, emerging from the back of each of the Bush “dolls” and spilling downwards in an intricate chaos underneath them, and whilst all of these figures are in motion, the machinery propelling them onwards creates creaking sounds akin to the hideous whinings of pigs.

                                                                                        

At first viewing “Train, Mechanical” seemed to me a little cartoonlike, somewhat too obviously blunt a political statement, however memorable and accurate its portrayal of the recent political landscape, and despite its genuinely visceral, disgusting power, and mordant dark acidic humour, I thought that it was perhaps a little too easy as a statement.

However, its companion piece, “Pig Island” (2003-2010), arguably the outstanding work of the exhibition, considerably expands this worldview to the point of achieving the epic. McCarthy let this piece expand and gestate within his studio over the course of eight years, so that in the end it is half “completed” work and half transplanted studio.  Here fragmented versions of the “Train, Mechanical” sculptures are placed within a sea of detritus on a series of raised platforms taking up the entirety of a large gallery room.

Jagged piles of wood are strewn across surfaces caked with brown dust, stray nails, latex gloves, dirty towels and aluminium tins of adhesive substances. These jostle with all sorts of miscellaneous items: plastic Disney figures, shaven-headed young women, emptied buckets of fried chicken, scattered portions of a drumkit, a photograph of Angelina Jolie, baseball trophies, a number of yellow polyurethane George W. Bush heads, floors littered with thousands of fragments of crumbled lumps of pink clay massed together like wormy heaps of minced flesh.

McCarthy himself has referred to the piece as a “sculpture machine” and you do sense that an endless series of forms could potentially emerge from within its folds. There is an exciting feeling of being privy to the secret chamber where bold and prolonged acts of creation have taken place, something I always felt when seeing Eduardo Paolozzi’s studio (pictured below), which I would often go and see when I was a student in Edinburgh. A "recreation" of his studio has been permanently installed in the city's Dean Gallery. It shares with "Pig Island" a similar display of unusual clutter, a predilection for severed sculpted heads and the magical feeling of being able to see what has been concealed and left "behind the scenes".

  

In all “Pig Island” can be conceived of as a disdainful comical self-portrait of the artist (without the artist's body being depicted), also as an extended metaphor for the entirety of the U.S.A., in particular forming an artistic testament to the appalling grunting brutality and violence of recent years in what was conceivably the worst American political administration since the birth of that particular nation, and yet "Pig Island" is also an extremely hopeful vision of what that nation and its citizens (and others) might be capable of achieving through acts of the imagination.

The exhibition continues until January the 14^th.