Is Paul McCarthy the Most Dangerous Artist in LA?
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 …
