I've been working until late in the studio since Friday. I finally met Harry Lawson - I think he is the only one of the Royal Standard crew that I hadn't already met.
He wears a fine moustache, and when I met him he was also sporting this rather brilliant space shuttle t-shirt.
What a fine shirt.
I was going to write about the exhibition at A Foundation, which looks really interesting. It was only when I got down there today that I realised (by virtue of the sign on the front door) that A Foundation is open Tuesday - Saturday.
Yeah, it's been a real shitty day. I'm drinking wine and soda in pint glasses.
So, instead of that, I'm just going to present this documentary on Paul McCarthy.
A fair amount of the work I've been doing over the past two weeks has used the Viennese Actionists' various events and performances as source material. I feel like Paul McCarthy was the American inheritor of their disturbing and anti-value approach to art making. He feels like a 90s artist to me - even though he has been making his performance to camera stuff since the 70s. There is something very post-modern and self-reflexive about his approach to his art work as 'psychological', or 'cathartic'. But the ironic finger flex quotation marks are only in the telling of it, when I watch his films I'm genuinely filled with horror and sickly fascination.
Anyway, here is the link. I can't embed it because my computer keeps asking me to install Quicktime so I can't check if it's working. Yeah, it's been that sort of shitty day.
http://www.ubu.com/film/mccarthy_destruction.html