When I arrived at Paul McCarthy’s East LA studio surrounded by warehouses and chop shops, a freight train on the nearby Union Pacific tracks rumbled by with Amazon-branded intermodal containers stacked on flatcars, destined for cargo vessels at the Port of Long Beach. Freight trains, I thought, make good background noise for an artist who dredges up the dark pangs of the American id. Plus, McCarthy once made a sculpture of a train, of sorts. In a press release for a show at the late Robert Mnuchin’s L&M Arts, it was described thusly: “Train, Mechanical (2003–2010) is a fully automated tour-de-force that features a George Bush/pirate hybrid mounting a pig from behind, while another pig humps the same pig’s skull, finding aural penetration.”
Inside the studio, McCarthy was hunched over an editing bay, tinkering with footage, in an office space above the enormous facility that houses his sculptures and the film sets—the same sets that have served as backdrops for his violent, strange, disturbing, hilarious films. He offered to give me a tour with his 17-year-old dog, Dieter.
“Hey, boy,” McCarthy said to Dieter. “Let me just check, because he can’t hear and he can’t see, like he gets lost, he literally gets lost.”
McCarthy, the same guy who made Train, Mechanical, could not have been nicer, chiller, more kind. At various points, he scratched at his long beard and futzed with his thick-rimmed black glasses, taking a well-worn Ventura College baseball cap on and off. He looked down at the seemingly endless expanse of big sculptures and film sets spread out below us. “How old’s this place? I mean, it just fills up, it’s filling up, I mean, it’s been filling up,” he said, and paused. “But then we kind of enter it right now.”
Paul McCarthy fiercely belongs to Los Angeles, embodying much of the romantic notion of an LA artist—untethered by form, fearless of pieties, hyperaware of the projected moving image, and, of course, able to take advantage of the urban sprawl, the ample expanses of space. But McCarthy also transcends that notion, plays with the legend, and defies it. Among artists of multiple generations, among the world’s richest and most powerful art collectors, among the globe-spanning dealers who have worked with him—he’s one of the last true art gods in the City of Angels. He is one of the few who remain after so many have sadly passed: John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Chris Burden, Jason Rhoades, Bob Irwin, and Billy Al Bengston, among them.
He’s got a splashy show that opens to the public this week at The Journal Gallery’s West Hollywood space, timed to Frieze Los Angeles, sure to bring Angelenos and visiting dignitaries alike. Julia Stoschek, who’s been a fearless collector of video and ephemeral art for decades, just opened a show of her collection at the Variety Arts Theater in downtown LA, showing canonical work by McCarthy alongside his peers: Arthur Jafa, Marina Abramović, and Cyprien Gaillard.
Later this year, McCarthy will have a show of new work at the Paris outpost of Hauser & Wirth, his longtime gallery. His unabashed depiction of America’s underbelly is super popular in Europe. When the current multi-continental empire opened its second-ever location, in a former bank in London’s Piccadilly in 2003, the 33-year-old Iwan Wirth decided his British endeavors should begin with a McCarthy film, Piccadilly Circus, which depicted George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and no fewer than three Queen Elizabeths engaging in a blood-soaked orgy of sex and violence.