WS, Paul McCarthy's rather incendiary (and very NSFW) installation at the Park Avenue Armory is in its final days; the mutilated Snow Whites, giant scary forest and vast quantities of chocolate frosting will be coming down for good after Sunday, leaving the summer art hype all alone with James Turrell at the Guggenheim.
I checked out the McCarthy show yesterday, and it is a lot of things, but most of all it is a nightmarish trip through the consequences of twisted hedonism that assails you visually and sonically. The NY Times called the installation, "grand and gross, with ambushing flashes of beauty and an X rating," a "satire framed in the language of Disney, Duchamp, 1950s suburbia, 21st-century greed and Craigslist pornography" when they reviewed it in June. The sheer scale of the installation is enough to do you in; the aforementioned, exquisite forest, the three-quarter scale ranch house, the rooms stocked with replicas of dead bodies and smell faintly like vodka and stale Hershey's syrup. Then, there are the two large-scale video projections blaring a cacophony of scenes from the (very graphic) film White Snow, in which the seven (or, in this case, nine) dwarves throw a pretty wild birthday party.
There are also sectioned off rooms on each side of the main installation that delve deeper into Snow White's cautionary tale; know that in these videos you will see a lot of McCarthy, he will be very naked and what you see can't be unseen.
The show costs $15 to attend, and is restricted to visitors over the age of 17. You should go, but don't eat beforehand.
